Summary: It’s going to get worse.

In 1974 the first power sharing government in the North of Ireland collapsed as a result of a coup d’etat against it by loyalist paramilitaries who had taken control of public utilities, including electricity. On the eve of its resignation, John Hume, a minister at the time, mused that the executive should refuse to surrender. “I’ll sit here,” he said in his government office, “until there is shit flowing up Royal Avenue [in central Belfast] and then the people will realise what these [paramilitaries] are about and then we will see who wins”. Hume’s biographer, Barry White, noted that he believed it was useful to show who were the builders and who were the destroyers.

The collapse of that Northern Ireland executive led to decades more bloodshed until a comparable deal was finally reached, for the “slow learners” of Northern Ireland politics in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

The spiritual heirs to the paramilitaries who destroyed that prospect of peace in the North of Ireland are now in power in the UK. The Brexit mob smashed the political economy created by the UK’s membership of the EU simply because they could. As Dominic Cummings rambling interview with Laura Kuenssberg showed, neither he nor anyone else in the Brexit elite had any sense of what they should build instead. But neither were they bothered about that. Like the Loyalist paramilitaries of 1974 their political philosophy is not much more evolved than that of the teenage vandal.

Johnson and his repellent coterie did discern however that Brexit offered them a path to political power. This, in turn would provide opportunities aplenty for pillage. In addition they could undermine democratic norms and erode rule of law to lessen the risk that they would ever be held accountable for their greed and incompetence.

Today, as in 1974, the British Labour party is proving useless in opposing the wreckers. They seem more terrified of upsetting the xenophobes than explicitly calling out the Big Lie that provides the animating philosophy of the country’s far-Right.

How this will win them power is not clear. The Tory policy of Brexit has put a sword of Damocles over the fishing and farming industries. Supermarket shelves are already emptying as Brexit buckles British supply chains. By the time the shit begins to flow in the streets, those who once voted for the whole show will wonder why Labour stayed silent rather than tell them the hard truth.

For centuries, the British Establishment plundered half the world with its empire, using racism to justify its many depredations. Now that same racism and xenophobia has given it a chance to convince enough of their subjects to slip the bonds that have, until now, restrained them from barefaced plunder of their own country. It is almost karmic.

In the end the English will have to rejoin Europe. The political and economic logic of the world already makes that plain to anyone who has ever taken the time to locate Calais in a school atlas. The sooner the slow learners of British politics realise that, the fewer young lives will be blighted by the pusillanimous surrender of government to the wrecking fools currently cosplaying the role of Fascist Italy from their Whitehall offices.