Is anyone listening to the Brexit warnings from business?

Inside Business: Vauxhall closures should sound the alarm – but it may be too late to stop Johnson's runaway train causing catastrophe

Home of the Astra no longer? Vauxhall's owner has an alternative in mind if no-deal Brexit bites (PA)

Who’s going to be the first to tell Vauxhall’s 1,000 workers at Ellesmere Port that if they’d just be willing to show a bit more cheery optimism and believe hard enough, the threat of Brexit closure now hanging over their workplace will be magically lifted?

Certainly not Boris Johnson, who’s been trading in that sort of stuff to excitable reviews from certain parts of the media, which is delighting in the show put on by the PT Barnum of British politics and doesn’t much care about the consequences so long as the entertainment continues.

The no-deal PM was in Scotland amid the furore created by the Financial Times publishing an interview with the boss of Vauxhall’s owner PSA, Carlos Tavares, in which he said the company had an alternative lined up to produce the Astra if the no-deal Brexit hammer comes down and makes the Cheshire plant unprofitable.

Johnson was there to hold talks with Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, and Ruth Davison, the Scottish Tory leader, while studiously avoiding the Scottish public. Boris juice goes down about as favourably as a mass outbreak of winter vomiting in the land of Irn Bru.

“Boris Johnson and his team need to come to Ellesmere Port and tell this talented workforce directly that they will not send them to the dole queue,” said Steve Turner, Unite’s assistant general secretary.

He will know that in reality there’s no way Johnson’s people would let him face a horde of angry car workers, even were he something other than the coward his ducking the Scottish public once again shows him to be.

It’s notable that Tavare explicitly used the B word and linked it to the plant’s possible closure, which is something firms have been reluctant to do in the past.

The BBC may yet trot out one of the usual suspects to claim that the axe hanging over Ellesmere Port isn’t really to do with Brexit because the car industry has "global problems", like they did when Honda unveiled plans to shut up shop in Swindon.

You’ll be aware that when an industry has global problems the first places to get hit are those where profitability is marginal or the trading environment is deteriorating, like it will if Johnson is allowed to impose the economic sanctions he has planned for these islands.

Trouble is we’ve moved on from that sort of debate. We’ve moved on from anything resembling rationality, which is why Tavares warning may have come too late.

We now have Brexiteers like Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, saying they always said no deal was possible, even when they didn’t. Far from Germany's car industry begging for a deal, as they said it would, they're trashing ours. But who cares it’ll be great, if we just show enough optimism and eat enough tripe, or leeks, or whatever's left on Tesco's shelves.

Against that, rational arguments seem almost as redundant as the Vauxhall car workers may soon be.

It speaks volumes that the government described a CBI no-deal document as “a constructive contribution” not because of the meat of what it said (brace yourself it’ll be awful) but because one of its conclusions was that Europe is no more prepared for no deal than we are. That’s open to debate but it fits Johnson’s narrative so that, and the get ready warning it contained, was picked up on.

It givens me no pleasure to say it, but Unite, with its equivocation over Brexit which has helped inform that of Jeremy Corbyn, has helped Johnson and his pals to get away with their no-deal gaslighting.

It has helped to provide them with the space they’ve needed to sail off into the extremist hinterlands. It's so much easier to do that if the main party opposition is weak and no one knows what it stands for.

The workers of Ellesmere Port look set to pay the price. They will not be alone.