A POPULAR American writer has dared to lift the lid on what he says are the catastrophic consequences of Brexit, which have turned Britain into an “Orwellian society”, where nobody can talk about the subject.

Brexit always contained a lot of doublethink. One might go as far as saying Brexit was such an irrational act it could not have been imagined without doublethink and a few ‘alternative facts’.

In a 1940 essay, George Orwell made a number of what I think were some astute observations about the qualities of the English ruling class. He saw them as patriotic but “impenetrably stupid”. / “What is to be expected of them is not treachery or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.”

'For at the same time as attempting to relegate Brexit to distant memory, the government is also claiming all kinds of benefits from “having left the EU”.'