Pass the bottle George. By Jan Needle

The good old days -my father and Pop Meadows heading
for France. WW2 not so far away....

Off to France in two days time, if our English football charmers have left any of it to go to. And while I’m there the referendum will take place, in which a large proportion of the fighting English will express their contempt for people of another race (any other race), happy in the knowledge that they’re superior.

Fair enough, it’s what we have to get used to as we grow up and learn world history, but this one is something of an eye-opener anyway. Firstly, the idea that referendums are more democratic than democracy. Which, taken to its logical conclusion, means that hanging should be brought back if enough people push for a vote, and that’s only for starters. Nigel Farridge, the man of French extraction who pronounces his surname like a Frenchman and has a German wife, will be on the loose. The five most stupid men in the Cabinet (and boy, that’s saying something) will be in control. With a bit of luck, the western world will be led by Johnson and Trump. Good eh?

‘Referendums are democratic’ was the weird non-truth seized on by another
Eton dimwit to justify caving in to the howling mob who were threatening to tear his Tory party into pieces. He really seemed to think that whichever side won, he would have satisfied the zombies. Well, as the old Scottish joke has it (whichever side does win), ‘he damn well kens the noo!’

Now I – like everybody else – have no real idea what will happen if we leave the EEC, or, indeed, after the blood-letting, if we stay. But everyone with half an eye knows now that the process (the democratic process, god spare the mark) has been a bloodbath.

Most depressing for me is what it has shown us about politics in this fair land of ours. The level of uncaring, shameless dishonesty it has displayed has horrified me, depressed me, made me damn nearly despair. Let’s take the most visible example. That bus with a bare-faced lie emblazoned on it about how much our membership costs. Even the men who put it up there have been forced by journalists to admit it isn’t true. Their counter argument? ‘Bits of it aren’t too many million miles from the truth – so let’s keep it anyway! Politics is truth. Would we deliberately lie to you? Never!’

'A deranged relative pouring petrol over an
already smouldering fire' - Tristram Hunt

It’s deceitful, dangerous and destructive propaganda. And it speaks to the ignorant and prejudiced. God help the Mother of Parliaments.

Then take the newspapers. The Mail, the Express, the Telegraph, the Sun. All owned by multi-millionaires who pay little or no tax in the country they’re so anxious to ‘save from the faceless men of Brussels who make our laws!’ (Which is in itself an absurd untruth.)

The Express tells us we can’t eat bent bananas, a calumny so bonkers when they made it some months ago that even Boris struggled to keep a straight face when he repeated it on prime-time television three weeks ago.

The Sun and the Mail tell us that we’re being swamped with immigrants , and there isn’t any actual room for any more, despite the fact that Japan has about double our population in a group of islands not that much bigger. They also insist that seventy two million Turks are waiting with their bags packed to pop across and steal our jobs, despite  the fact that fewer than two million Turks have actually got passports. The poor old BBC, who have been so browbeaten by the Government and Rupert Murdoch (not that he has a commercial interest, oh dear no) that every sentence they report in support of staying has to be immediately refuted by someone, anyone, who disagrees.

Everybody’s lying, everybody’s backsliding, and the creepy-crawlies coming from the woodwork are genuinely astonishing. I never thought I was capable of feeling sympathy for David Cameron, but now I do, however sure I am his wounds are self-inflicted. Men like IDS (who brought in ATOS and the bedroom tax and now claims Mr Cameron is 'bullying and frightening defenceless poor people.' Yes – that IDS!), men like little Govey whose wife is Sarah Vane, men like the prison supremo who decided prisoners could not have books to read and that To Kill a Mockingbird should be banned (Chris Grayling was it? One can hardly bear to call the name to mind). They’re on the telly now, and – God help us all – they’re smiling. They think that their side might win, and they’ll be free to take over the asylum.

If they don’t win, I wonder what will happen to them. Nothing, probably, because if Dave wanted to punish them, he’d get scragged by John Public, one imagines. Whichever way the vote goes, sensation seekers, I fear old England’s done.

I’m due back from France a few days after the result. I can’t imagine what I’m going to find. Perhaps our English football thugs will have teamed up with their natural allies, Mr Putin’s barmy army. Is it just me, or are we on the brink of moral chaos?