Brits, some patiently fuming in cars while their kids are playing on a grid-locked motorway, are blaming the French while the French, some seething in their bureaucratic port booths, are blaming the Brits. And so the battle of Dover continues.

Oh dear! How sad! Never mind! There can really be only one cause for this lamentable state looking at the facts (particularly the point that brits can no longer wave their passports at the French to enter the ‘continent’ as they once could but must have it now stamped). Brexit. That is a fact. The ‘philosophy’ of Brexit is supposed to be based on facts too. However, it is actually a religious cult based on faith: faith that unites Putin supporters in a barbarous war against mythical Ukrainians Nazis; faith that ties climate-change deniers against supposed eco-warriors; faith that hitches anti-pandemic acolytes against medical facts; faith that links Trump groupies in their rejection of what the vote statistics stated; faith that bonds Brexit supporters against those who chose to remain in the world’s largest economic-political-cultural union.

An individual faith is an internal deeply felt personal belief based on devotion to a cause. It is not based on facts which may often easily disprove it. A person holding a faith feels defined as a human being with a significant place in the world largely because of it. To abandon it may be tantamount to denying one’s innermost belief in oneself. It may even lead to serious psychological problems or in extreme cases to self-annihilation.

Facts, on the other hand, are mainly based on external scientific reality, not on internal intuition. There will unfortunately be false facts or facts themselves can naturally change. Most spectacularly, for example, the latest pictures of Outer Space from the James Webb telescope are radically changing known facts about our universe.

It is usually pointless to discuss facts with a faith person with a view to persuading them to drop or at least modify it. That person will say their faith is not to be discussed scientifically or factually and that no matter how many statistical proofs refute it they will never relinquish their faith.  

This is the wretched fact. I do not doubt that faith can be double-edged: for every Bin Laden there will be a Mother Theresa. Faith can be a great comforter – unfortunately facts can equally be great discomforters.

At this moment a faith is being severely tried all the way from the English coast to a palace in Westminster. I wonder how many brits escaping abroad from the vagaries of their island weather voted to leave the EU? How many belonged to that infamous red wall? How many split their families with their beliefs? How many are still waiting at their front porches for the brexitian benefits to roll in? How many still have no doubt about the justness of their 2016 voting choice?

I am glad I am not going abroad on holiday fast this year…at least not outside the EU. I just have no time or patience for airport and motorway queues. But then I have to admit I’m quite lucky where my little house is placed.

However, that the premiership of an island nation might be left either in the hands of a former Lib-Dem and Remainer or a multimillionaire ex-banker remains a horrifying thought to me.