I have recently been watching YouTube videos about flat Earthism, or rather, videos refuting it. Staggeringly, the number of people who seem to genuinely believe that the Earth is a flat disk in space rather than a globe seems to be growing, particularly in America. The arguments such people are making are becoming so bizarre and far fetched that it’s enough to make me start to suspect that it’s all a giant hoax: everyone knows the Earth is spherical, but people are claiming otherwise in an attempt too stand out and get attention, or to appear to be breaking away from mainstream thought. The problem for them is, now they’ve started heading down that path there’s no turning back, as the moment they admit that it was all a big game and that they know full well that the Earth is a sphere, they would lose all credibility and become the laughing stocks of the internet.

It seems to me that that makes it the perfect analogy for Brexit. Brexiteers know full well how stupid it was to leave the EU; the carnage it is wringing in the UK economy is now becoming clearer by the week. Yet they are now so far down the path everyone else warned against taking that they can’t admit they were wrong. It’s a problem especially for the tory party: desperate to retain whatever credibility they have left, they are trying to maintain the delusion that Brexit will somehow be good for the UK economy, against all evidence or logic. The moment they admit what they must, as intelligent people capable of reading the newspapers, realise to be the truth, their careers as politicians would be over.

Thus in both we see the same absurdity; the same urgency to cling to ideas which everyone else knows is Idiocy. I know these examples – UK politics and nutcases on YouTube – are quite disparate, but it seems to me that both boil down to the same urgent, desperate need to maintain a narrative that everyone else can see is utter gibberish. In both cases, as reality becomes clearer and clearer to the rest of us, their arguments against it become more and more ridiculous. I thus think it’s fair to say one is just as absurd and moronic as the other.

At least the tories haven’t started to talk nonsense about global floods, aliens or reptiles….yet!