Fine. We’re out. So now what?

Brexit was sold as a revolution and delivered as a slow puncture. We were promised sovereignty, prosperity, sunlit uplands - we got customs paperwork, labour shortages, and the geopolitical relevance of a pub quiz team.

If Brexit is ever going to mean more than a flag-waving bonfire of competence (read: catastrophic mismanagement in Union Jack wrapping), it needs dragging out of the fantasy swamp and into the realm of adult governance. That means rebuilding trade ties with Europe - not rejoining, just cooperating like we haven’t lost our collective minds. Align on food standards, fix the Northern Ireland mess, and stop treating Brussels like Voldemort with better infrastructure.

End the performative nationalism. No more “enemy of the people” judges or pretending migrants are the root of every problem from rent to rainfall. Create legal routes for essential workers. Train British ones. Stop using immigration as a blunt weapon to keep the tabloids warm at night. Build something — literally. Infrastructure, green energy, tech, manufacturing. Use Brexit’s so-called freedom to design a future-proof economy, not just put on a Poundland tribute act to an era nobody under 50 asked for.

And here comes Starmer. The grown-up in the room, yes - but one too nervous to call the fire a fire. He’s patching things up with Europe quietly, fixing the worst of the trade damage, rejoining Horizon, scrapping Rwanda. Great. But it’s all happening behind a curtain, as if admitting Brexit’s a disaster would somehow summon Farage from the underworld like Beetlejuice in a union flag tie.

He won’t mention the 4% GDP hole. Won’t even whisper “single market.” There’s no grand vision — just a careful shuffle back toward sanity, hoping no one notices. It’s technocratic triage - managing the symptoms while refusing to acknowledge the diagnosis. Better than Tory mayhem, sure. But it’s still politics paralysed by fear of the Daily Mail’s front page.

So if you’re expecting vision - forget it. Starmer’s plan is to do just enough to look competent while tiptoeing around the gaping Brexit-shaped crater beneath his desk.

If we want to make Brexit even remotely functional, we need honesty, investment, and a government with more courage than a focus group. Otherwise, we’ll keep staggering around pretending this wasn’t the biggest own goal in post-war British politics - and clapping for the managers tidying up after it.

And while Labour fumbles toward reality, the other end of the political gene pool offers us Reform UK - the final punchline in this evolutionary joke.

Amazing, isn’t it? After millions of years of human brain development - from fish to apes to tool-wielding Homo sapiens capable of mapping the cosmos - we’ve arrived at the pinnacle of neurological achievement: people who think Reform UK is a serious answer to complex 21st-century problems.

You'd think somewhere between inventing fire and sequencing the genome, we’d have evolved a basic resistance to being hypnotised by a bloke in a pub shouting “Common sense!” while waving a pint and a Union Flag. But here we are proof that natural selection occasionally clocks off early and lets Facebook do the parenting.

Honestly, if the brain really is the most complex object in the known universe, Reform voters are nature’s way of saying: don’t get cocky.