If you weren’t scared by the prospect of a no-deal Brexit before, you sure as hell should be now

This isn’t ‘Project Fear’, it’s harsh reality – and even Dominic Raab has had to admit that

I’m going to kick you in the teeth with a pair of steel toe-capped Doc Martens. Then I’ll go to work on you with a pair of knuckle dusters. But don’t you worry your sweet little head. It’ll be alright.

Some of the scare stories you’ll have read about the damage I’m going to do to you, they’re overdone. No, no, no, they’re “ridiculous”. You might end up with three months in hospital, a ruptured spleen and a requirement for extensive plastic surgery, but you won’t die!

That basically encapsulates the government’s position on a no-deal Brexit that we were told was all but unthinkable when the Conservative Party embarked upon this lunatic project. Recall the words of Stumbledore Liam Fox, now in charge of magicking up trade tie-ups that businesses say won’t benefit anyone, and certainly not them. He declared that securing a deal would be “the easiest thing in human history” during the Leave campaign’s electoral rule-breaking lie-a-thon.

His colleague, the Brexit secretary Dominic Raab, who looks a bit like Harry Potter when he was getting adolescent in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, or the slightly unhinged chairman of a sixth form debating club, vomited the “it’ll be OK” line before the government released the papers showing that no, it really won’t be.

And yes, we are being governed by a caucus of fanatics, ideologues and unprincipled power-mad crazies (I see you, Boris Johnson) that Osama bin Laden might happily have palled around with in another life.

So Raab claimed that there won’t be much impact on individuals, and you’ll still be able to enjoy a BLT sandwich if it all goes wrong because, of course, the EU will want to sell us food (even though it will be more expensive).

Presumably the Brexit secretary is planning for a massive bank of refrigerators to be installed in that enormous Kent lorry park he’s going to have to set up to cope with the inevitable customs backlog to keep it from rotting.

That wasn’t in the 24 notices that were, finally, published today. What there was represented a sorry catalogue of stupidity and self-harm, the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since, well… nope. Having wracked my brains, I’m afraid I’ve drawn a blank. No government in Fox’s human history has been this stupid in peacetime. The interesting bits were, of course, buried deep within the pile of papers. They always are.

As an appetiser, let’s get started with an effective credit card tax of £166m. That will come because UK will lose access to Europe’s banking and payment systems (it will also slow things down). Banks will, naturally, pass the cost on to you and me because that’s what banks do. They’re not charities.

Then there are the 300,000 or so British pensioners living overseas who may lose part of their pensions, not to mention reciprocal health care. We can strike bilateral deals with EU nations, says Raab.

You may remember that, according to his predecessor David Davies, we were supposed to have struck a bunch of bilateral trade deals by now and be sitting pretty at the centre of a massive free trade zone stretching to the moon.

It’s interesting to note that what is being presented isn’t really “no deal” at all. It’s, “no deal, but we’ll try really hard to do some deals so the knuckle dusters don’t hurt too much, cross our hearts and hope to die, we’ll stick some needles in your eyes”.

The Brexiteers seem to think none of us have read that “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” quote. Want more? You know all that stuff about Brussels bureaucrats and how awful they are? Well get set for a bonanza of British bureaucracy that previously didn’t exist. Currently importers, retailers and the like, face no impediments to bringing goods in from Europe.

If no deal becomes a reality, they will need to clear more fences than are put up at Cheltenham ahead of the autumn and winter National Hunt racing season. They’ll need to submit registrations, ensure contracts meet international terms, consider how they will submit import declarations. They’ll have to hire customs brokers and probably warehouse space too.

Sorry, but this will affect individuals, because it will bugger up the economy. This isn’t “Project Fear”. It’s harsh reality in cold black and white. Time and again the government admits that it will accept EU regulations to let stuff like medicines in. It hopes the EU will do the same with ours.

Don’t count on that. Why should it?

It is Britain, or more correctly, it is Britain’s Conservative government that is proposing to create this dog’s dinner. There is no good reason why the EU should chow down. Having characterised it as being run by a bunch of crooks, charlatans and chancers, why do Mr Raab & co expect it to turn into a sweetie pie just because they desperately need it to?

The identity of the real crooks, charlatans and chancers is becoming increasingly obvious. They reside not in Brussels, but in Britain. These documents just hammer that point home, before we even get to the great, yawning gaps; the stuff that simply hasn’t been addressed and that the government doesn’t have a clue what to do about (hey there, you residents near the Irish border).

I could fill six separate columns with them. This wretched, wretched Tory government will doubtless try and pin the blame on Europe if this nightmare comes to pass (Raab says he’s really jolly confident that it won’t).

They may also try and pass some of the blame off on to the electorate they lied to (it’s why Theresa May keeps talking about the will of the people which she interprets to suit her) and appear to have contempt for.

But it won’t wash. Promises were made. It was all supposed to be so very easy.

Finally the pigeons are coming home to roost.

If there is one consolation from all this, if Fox is right and punters should put their money on no deal despite the slim odds they’ll get from their local bookie, it might just torpedo the Conservative Party’s reputation for competence for good and see it booted out of power for a generation or more.

Every cloud has a silver lining.