As the realities of Brexit become clearer and clearer, the debates around it, especially online, seem to be becoming more and more heated. It is now obvious that Brexit is an absurd impossibility, and that even holding the referendum last year was a tragic mistake; yet that hasn’t stopped those who voted for it and support it sticking to their guns. Rather than admitting they were wrong, the worrying thing is they are becoming less and less rational. Online I’m seeing outists lashing out and becoming angrier and angrier, their arguments losing any sort of coherence. For example, last week I came across one trying to tell us that the Irish border issue was actually very simple to resolve, but the ‘powers that be’ were exaggerating it to stop Brexit.

As it becomes clear that they were fooled into voting for something they didn’t understand, and wouldn’t have voted for had they understood, what worries me is that such people will become desperate not to be portrayed as idiots. Fury will rise. The level of discourse will regress to the level of an infant school playground, with insults being hurled and people refusing to admit obvious, inarguable facts. We are already seeing this happening, not only with Brexit but across the Atlantic with Trump supporters. In both cases it’s becoming absurd: people have started to deny things they must surely know to be correct, simply in order not to be proved wrong. It’s becoming more and more extreme, and going all the way to the top, with figures such as David Davies starting to flagrantly deny reality. While in a way it’s quite funny, and the good old Parrot Sketch springs to mind, culturally speaking I think this is very, very worrying. After all, isn’t this how fascism started in the thirties?