Brace yourselves...

... Here comes No Deal Brexit. In hindsight it was inevitable: a ruling party hijacked by extremists both within its own ranks (the European Research Group, or Jacob Rees-Mogg and his plucky band of right-wing disaster capitalists) and without (the DUP, which serves to prop it up in government as we saw by the way in which the government survived a vote of no confidence immediately after May lost the vote on her deal). All, of course, aided by an opposition led by a man who is unable to hide the fact that at heart he's secretly a Brexiter too.

Most of today's politicans are pygmies, incapable of putting the country before their own narrow party interests. People are literally going to die after 29th March as a direct result of our crashing out of the EU, but they don't care because they stoked the fires of nationalism and populism in the run up to the June 2016 referendum and now they're in thrall to the flames, unable - or unwilling more like - to put them out despite the fact Brexit is clearly an act of self-harm unparalleled in this country's history.

It's another abject example of humanity's failure to understand that you can never appease extremists enough. The seeds of this particular example go back to the 1990s and the Tory Party's shift to the right, and in some ways Labour's own shift to the right too, which mirrored the Democratic Party in the US, which in turn forced the Republicans to the right.

This is the problem with outdated electoral systems like in the UK and US. Only two parties can ever win, and so after trying unsuccessfully to crash the system using new vehicles, extremists periodically reverse themselves into the two major parties and then use their particular talents for intolerance, dislike of facts and tactics of reducing everything to emotive, simplistic slogans to undermine those parties from within.

Britain has been in decline since the crash of 2008, and the two-party system has perpetuated that. It's also proven that 40 years after the emergence of Thatcher and Reagan, we've normalised right-wing politics as the new "centre". By all rights, I should be a Labour supporter, but the party's failure to address the electoral system during its 13 years in power coupled with Corbyn's clear reluctance to embrace the issue means I will never vote for them, just as I won't vote Tory. Regarding Corbyn, his brand of politics will never attract more than 40% of the vote, and he needs a system that could deliver him unfettered power on that minority vote; problem is, it's more of a one-and-a-half party system these days, with Labour only electable in living memory when it embraced right-wing thinking. But Corbyn doesn't see that, of course.

But this is all now academic. I have to accept the fact I live in a country - and indeed continent and world - that is becoming increasingly intolerant by the day. Never mind the abuses in Palestine, that's no excuse for the rise of anti-semitism, with Jews once again a convenient target for the extremists to point out to deflect attention from the real issues (never mind their own shortcomings). Racism, bigotry and all the other horrible tendencies of human behaviour are on the rise, and if it wasn't for my love of family and friends I'd probably smile bitterly at the thought of the much greater reckoning waiting for us all as we fiddle as the planet starts to burn.

I'd love to say I told you so, but given I and my family will be swept up in all that is to come, why would I? You'd only string me up for having the audacity to have kept my eyes open these past 10-20 years while you stuck your blinkers on and blindly told yourself it was all okay really.