Are you ready?
Well if you’re reading this in the UK then you really should assume the Brexit position.
You know the drill.
Bend down, head between your knees and kiss your aspirations goodbye.
Last night the Muppet Show at Westminster played the Amendment game.
After the votes had been counted the message to the EU and indeed the wider world was that negotiating a deal with the Brits was rather meaningless.
Prime Minister Theresa May will now travel to Brussels and ask them to amend a treaty she had previously told the Commons was as good as it gets.
If nothing changes now then the UK will leave the European Union without a deal at the end of March.
As I was writing this an NUJ colleague form Derry messaged me.
We are of the same mind that unless something changes we are both looking at a hard border between us.
The terms I have used for this shambles is “Slow Moving Suez Crisis” and I will keep to that.
Since the referendum vote in 2016, this was never going to end well.
The only thing to be decided was what bad outcome would end up being chosen by the Muppets at Westminster.
May’s deal reduced the UK to the status of a “rule taker” of Brussels.
On that the Brexiteers are correct.
However, their delusional belief in the sunlit uplands of WTO trading is bonkers.
Despite an amendment ruling out a No Deal scenario being passed in the Commons last night, that is now a likely outcome.
Currently, the law in the UK is that if there is no withdrawal agreement with the EU then the UK will leave on the 29th of March and trade under WTO rules.
That is the cliff edge.
In the aftermath of the votes last night the English media told their readers what they wanted to hear.
However, the folk who read the Financial Times are too important to be fed feel-good pish.
Many of their important readers are currently making plans to move businesses out of the Square Mile and relocating in laces like Frankfurt and Dublin.
For the avoidance of doubt, a No Deal scenario will hit the UK economy like a tsunami.
Meanwhile, we in the Republic will be the collateral damage of this madness currently gripping Middle England.
In Brussels, there is already in play a kind of Marshall Plan for the 26 counties should a No Deal crash out occur.
Of course, across the artificial line, our neighbours and cousins in Narne Arne are still handcuffed to Westminster.
I wrote this for Bella Caledonia in February 2016 about the consequences of a Brexit vote in the upcoming Brexit referendum.
Of course, Scotland had an opportunity in 2014 to avoid this shambles.
However, the good folk of Fair Caledonia were told that to vote for independence would risk their membership of the European Union.
At this point, I half expect to see Peter Capaldi walking across Parliament Green busily barking Scottish expletives into his phone at some hapless government minister.
The entire fiasco definitely has a Malcom Tucker feel to it.
I knew in 2016 that if the UK voted to leave the European Union then the issue would come down to our little island.
Of course, there was little mention of Britain’s border in Ireland during the Brexit referendum.
Now the Westminster tribe are fixated on “the backstop”.
This insurance policy now covers the whole if the UK because the British government, requiring DUP support, could not agree to a regulatory frontier in the Irish Sea.
There are no good outcomes in this as the UK is becoming the Sevco of Europe with every passing day.
This a perfect storm of a clusterfuck.
Brace yourselves…
