Muddling our way through Brexit...

BREXIT is making me irritable, tired and a little bit scared.

I don’t think anybody quite knows what they’re doing. And there’s a chance it could lead to an economic crash, or even the end of the United Kingdom.

I know that the doommongers have been proved wrong so far. George Osborne, the former Chancellor, suggested during the referendum that the economy would immediately fall off a cliff if we voted to leave. That just wasn’t true. And I’m not predicting it will all go wrong once Brexit actually takes place, probably in 2019.

The truth is I just don’t know. But neither does anyone else.

This was bought home when David Davis, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, gave evidence to a House of Commons inquiry last week.

Sitting in front of MPs - and TV cameras - he casually revealed that the Government has not done an assessment of the effects of leaving the EU without a trade deal.

Perhaps this doesn’t matter. After all, the Government is going to work flat out to get us a trade deal, isn’t it?

Asked if quitting without a deal was the worst possible outcome, Mr Davis said: “No. No. There are ways of making it much worse than that.”

That didn’t sound very reassuring to me. Nor did Mr Davis’ assertion that he would know a good trade deal when he saw it, as he told MPs: “You don’t need a piece of paper with numbers on it”.

It seems the plan is to muddle our way through and assume it will all turn out fine in the end, In some ways that’s very British and perhaps we should be pleased, but is it really the way to handle a complex process which will transform our relationship with our neighbours?

For one indication of how high the stakes are, consider the warning from manufacturing giant Nissan, a carmaker which employs 7,000 people in the UK, It told MPs that leaving the EU without a trade deal could cost it £500 million a year - and it would have to think hard about what happens to its British factory if that happened.

But it’s not just the economy that looks precarious.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon wants another referendum on independence. Scots voted to stay in the UK last time, in 2014, but who’s to say the same will happen again?

All this uncertainty doesn’t seem to be doing Prime Minister Theresa May any harm. Polls suggest that the Conservatives are still far ahead of Labour, which looks on course to suffer a calamitous general election defeat.

I suspect that the more insecure we feel, the more we’re likely as a nation to cling on to Mrs May, despite her faults, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.