And things have gone from bad to worse. The more evidence stacks up that Brexit has been a disaster the more leave voters either deny Brexit is at fault or claim it was all about sovereignty anyway.
For me, Brexit was mostly about trade because I knew at the industrial level the UK would be in trouble without easy access to European suppliers and expertise. We don't have enough world-class businesses or engineers to become a leading exporter of anything. And we do need to trade to pay for the imports we need.
What I hadn't appreciated is how far up the food chain our incompetence had crept. I realise now it goes to the very top of the so-called establishment. Andrew Neil is the latest media heavyweight to reveal himself as an opinionated half-wit, especially where Brexit is concerned.
On 18 November he declared Brexit was dead and although he claimed to be neutral on the topic, I'm not the only one to think his disappointment shone through and he is in fact, a secret leave voter. Professor Chris Grey thinks so too.
Last week he wrote, again in The Mail: Britain is paralysed by a toxic brew of political incompetence and impotence. No wonder millions are now asking... why can't this Government get ANYTHING done?
He attacks virtually everything, from the NHS to the police, transport, immigration (too high) and house building all get a mention in a litany of failures with the government criticised for mismanagement.
He says, "When you look at those now holding office, many conclude that the Tory gene pool has been seriously depleted — that the Government is composed of ministers struggling to cope, never mind making their writ run. And the Civil Service has clocked this.
"They see a government exhausted and without direction, an administration on its last legs simply serving out its time. So they’re in no mood to help.
"Indeed, the Whitehall Blob is already turning its mind to a Labour leader in No 10, someone it thinks will be more congenial to its way of thinking than the present occupant. Far from helping the Tory Government get things done, it seems more interested in conspiring to get rid of troublesome ministers by coordinating grievance procedures against alleged bullying.
"It’s a grim prospect for the Government. The perception that nothing works is only likely to spread this winter and the ability of the powers-that-be to change that perception is hampered by their own inadequacies and the indifference (perhaps even hostility) of the permanent bureaucracy."
Brexit is mentioned but only concerning broken pledges and missed targets. Nowhere is the act of leaving the EU and its appalling consequences for British industry, trade, and vital tax revenues analysed or blamed in any way. It's all down to the "Whitehall Blob" - his favourite scapegoat. He is like the ancient prophets blaming a vengeful god for a volcanic eruption.
You would need to be deaf and blind not to have noticed Brexit's impact on government time alone if nothing else. How many millions of civil servant man-hours have been wasted on Brexit over the last six years?
But the worst of it is that just two months ago, and just a week before the catastrophic Truss/Kwarteng mini-budget and not long after the Queen's funeral, Neil was writing this:
"Contrary to the miserabilist musings of much of the establishment commentariat and its social media echo chambers, whose default position is always to run Britain down, the condition of the country is actually rather good."
Admittedly, his article was mostly about the monarchy, but what is he doing now if not running down the country with his "miserabilist musings?" Has he only just noticed the political incompetence? After all it's been on display since early 2016.
What kind of short-sighted idiot could not only hold such diametrically opposite views but actually write them down and have them published - just weeks apart - in the same national newspaper? It took the mini-budget and a market melt-down to demonstrate to Neil that we are indeed led by people who, "clearly don’t know how to fix things. Instead of solutions and improvements, people see too many politicians who manage to combine incompetence and impotence in equal measure — so that, far from anything getting better, things invariably get worse."
Another is Allister Heath in The Telegraph. he delivered a broadside a few days ago and had another go yesterday: Britain is fast descending into chaos, and the Tories are powerless to stop it
Again, Brexit puts in a single appearance as though it's something quite separate from the 'chaos' instead of the cause of it, like someone clutching a Ming vase as the house is falling down. Heath says:
"[The government] watches meekly as Brexit, this Government’s flagship policy, is openly trashed by an exuberant Bank of England freed of any accountability."
To him, the blame is on the Bank of England. These are men who were not simply innocent bystanders but at the epicenter of Brexit, either reporting on it or advocating it. They can't yet admit that all the warnings they were given in 2016 have come true. I doubt some of them ever will, after all, it would destroy their reputations - what little they have left.
They are exactly the same as the politicians they criticise, they can't see their own incompetence and that's the problem. You might say it's Britain's problem.
