The post-Thatcher/Blair consensus under Cameron and Osborne consisted of an obsession with the national debt and deficit in the aftermath of the entirely predictable 2008 crash, and the imposition of endless "austerity" while still allowing the rich to feather their cushy nests.
Both major parties turned in on each other. Labour's still working through that, the Tories have temporarily patched themselves up with the biggest, most nationally self-destructive, most pointless adventure this country's ever embarked on.
Imagine the continued lack of vision and direction if the Brexit vote had gone to Remain.
Now, to cover up the fact that none of our large-party politicians have any idea about a positive course for the future of the UK, Brexit or no Brexit, they've invented a major crisis that's going to overshadow everything else for the foreseeable future. It's a very useful distraction.
Meanwhile, barely remarked upon, awful inhumane legislation is being enacted almost daily - the third-child "rape clause" for receipt of tax credits, cuts in payments to bereaved families, to name just two recent examples - and this before the bonfire of rights after the passage of the Great Repeal Bill that will enable the government to cherrypick and reshape the country's constitution in whatever way it wants with scant if any parliamentary scrutiny. And the government will have a great excuse for any continued austerity measures it wants to enact - get used to being told "we all have to tighten our belts" in the National Cause while the rich figure out ways to capitalize on the situation and grow even richer and it's all the fault of that horrible EU and furriners at home and abroad.
I'm lucky. I live in Scotland. I've no idea how things will pan out here, whether we'll leave the UK, rejoin the EU, whatever. But we at least have a little hope and some options and potentially some say in what will happen, and some politicians who are representing an alternative approach.
At a UK level, unless you're a Brexit supporter, you are now utterly disenfranchised. What you think and want doesn't matter, and you're wrong and an un-British traitor to think and want it, as May and her cronies and the Brexit fans will not hesitate to remind you in no uncertain terms as they parrot "the will of the people".
We'll have to wait and see whether people will continue to put up with all this.
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