I’m beginning to think that Outism – the compulsion to back Brexit – can almost be categorised as a mental disorder or illness. It is certainly a profound delusion. I’m not saying that just because I disagree with it, and I’m not trying to be funny. Online, I’m starting to come across the most ludicrous comments from those who support Brexit. This morning, for instance, I came across one guy commenting on the bbc Question Time Facebook page who seemed to think that  Brexit was an extension of World War Two, and to  remain in the EU was somehow letting Germany win. The comments were so ludicrous you had to wonder whether they were really genuine and not some kind of spoof. Yet if they were made in earnest you have to wonder what sort of deranged mind could produce such thoughts; whoever it was, they clearly had a very tenuous grip on reality. I think I encountered people with the same delusion last Saturday.  They aren’t just ill informed; I think it is more profound than a lack of education or  knowledge. This is a genuine delusion verging on the obsessive;  their grip on reality is so loose that  it begins to  recall a form of psychosis. How else can you explain the belief that the EU is equivalent to  Nazi Germany or the conviction that every expert and sign of a coming disaster is  wrong, and the uk will flourish outside the eu? Patriotic optimism is one thing, blind obsession quite another.