By Graham Vanbergen: There is no doubt about the damage now being done by Brexit on just about everything. It has had a negative effect on the economy so widely that now it is being felt in areas such as public health and education. It has fully divided society into finger-pointing tribal camps and driven a wedge through families, communities and the nations that make up our country.

Brexit is an ideology, not an economic plan or indeed even a political plan. There was no plan and that’s the point of its inherent failure. For ‘Leavers’ it meant anything from a toolbox of wishes and wants to a fantasy economy that would never possible.

A very good example of this Brexit failure was that Suella Braverman viewed it as a new opportunity to cut immigration whereas Liz Truss, saw it as a chance to increase it. And as neither had a workable plan, they both failed on the same battlefield.

The list of the same battles continues. For some Brexiteers it was about becoming Singapore-on-Thames; for others, it was about state aid, sovereignty, ‘taking back control’ and some just wanted to kick the system because it was failing them anyway.

The consequence is that just about everyone feels betrayed by everyone who disagrees with them. As a patient on the surgeon’s slab, Brexit is neither alive nor dead. It breathes but can’t do anything. There’s no surgical way of fixing the Brexit patient because we can’t see the illness within.  Whichever way you look at Brexit – it’s a no-win situation.

For the Tories themselves though, it is worse. It is the ghost of Thatcher or Churchill to some, and an era of greatness long gone for others, but in reality Brexit is just a vacuous apparition hovering over them all, probably forever.

The real tragedy is what the Tory party have really done. They dragged us all into an internal fight they had been having for four decades. It was all very well to have burnt their own house down but now we are looking at the smouldering wreck of our economy and of our divided nation-state along with their insidious attack of the institutions that upheld civil society.

Yes, of course, we’ve had a global pandemic and that madman from Russia trashing the relative calm of our world order – but the stability of the United Kingdom itself has not been rocked by these two global events. That was done by Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and soon to join the PMs graveyard – Sunak.

We are all paying the bill for this Tory bonfire. A fall of GDP by 4 per cent, according to the OBR, as a direct result of Brexit will drive the economy into a perma-recession. Inflation is boosted by it and so are interest rates. And if some believe that not to be the case, it was on display as a result of the economic extremism of Truss and Kwarteng and their version Brexit.

The consequence is that Moody’s, the ratings agency, has changed the UK’s economic outlook going forward – and places some doubt in how likely the UK is to pay back its debts — from “stable” to “negative”.

What they promised was that Brexit Britain would become some sort of beacon of prosperity that demonstrated our resilience and bravery to make a break from the confines of an unelected political bureaucracy. Instead, we’ve become a global punchline for the opposite. Britain has been mocked the world over.

Our credibility as a nation meant something around the world. I’ve travelled across some far-flung places from East Africa, the Middle East to the Far East. Even in some of the most obscure places I have seen the Union Jack proudly displayed on just about everything you can think of – from T-shirts, cushions and tattoos to brollies, hats and furniture. Like it or not, the iconography of the flag of Britain represented all manner of things; inventiveness, skill, courage and much more. Britain has much to be proud of when reeling off just half a dozen names like Nelson, Faraday, Darwin, Dickens, Turin and Bowie to name but a handful. Somehow we’ve lost it all – now just the butt of jokes. It will take much work from serious people to get back the respect we had.

On the international stage, The Tory party have promoted our amazing country as some sort of comedy of errors – the pinnacle of which was reached with Boris Johnson and the political collapse that unravelled. This dreadful soap-opera of failure was reported in every major newspaper across the world.

Cowardly politicians, many dragged into this mire, some unwittingly, still refuse to put the country first though. The dreadful reality is that not even the money markets believe we will pay our way if we vary from their path. It meant, there was no taking back control in a world dominated by partnerships and relationships. Isolationism doesn’t work in the 21st century.

The hard-right politicians that lied non-stop about their cult-like ideology had failure stamped all over it. And now we can’t reverse out of it. We can’t reverse out of Brexit, out of the mismanagement, out of the economic failures. because there’s a cost that we all have to pay, irrespective of what happens next. Even the most optimistic of economic forecasts are dire.

We can only hope that more sensible people arrive with honourable intentions to get this country back on track. That will be impossible with this Conservative Party. And the sooner they are consigned to the history books, the better.