Brexit’s deniers playing with fire

THE next eight months before Brexit will seem like an eternity if the lavishly funded, tightly choreographed campaign to prevent it keeps up this level of outraged hysteria.

Remember — if you’re tempted to pay it any attention — you’re being played.

What you’re seeing on TV and social media are not dispassionate, concerned voices arriving independently at the same terrifying conclusions about Brexit’s “risks”. It is an orchestrated plot, backed by millions of pounds . . . a script written the day Remain lost the referendum.

The plan was always to reverse defeat by throwing up endless obstacles, by concocting myriad excuses to de-legitimise a vote they would never have questioned had they won . . .  and by relaunching Project Fear to terrify the country about the consequences.

Like minds among MPs and the media would amplify each other’s panic in a feedback loop reaching a deafening howl. And they are succeeding. A year ago they seemed resigned to Brexit’s inevitability, but focused on one so soft as to be indistinguishable from Remain.

Now, boosted by Government ineptitude, they dream of going one better: a second referendum, its three options cynically designed to skew the result towards staying in, exactly as we are.

For two years they lied that they “respect the referendum result”. In truth they hope to annul it before it has even been carried out. And THEIR victory, in the unlikely event it occurred, would of course be final and beyond reproach.

It should all be laughable. But No10 is turbo-charging their hopes with the new Project Fear, a barrage of dubious warnings of chaos, recession and wartime shortages in the event of no-deal.

The Sun long ago urged the Government to plan seriously for this scenario. But No10 is also using it to intimidate Leave voters into swallowing Theresa May’s wildly unpopular Chequers offer.

This not only does the dirty work of the second referendum mob. It paints Britain into a corner with Brussels — with Chequers seemingly our only option and the Government petrified of Angela Merkel finally rejecting it. The Sun always said Brexit could be rocky. Far worse would be to reverse it.

Remainers say Leavers shouldn’t want “Brexit chaos on their conscience”. Would it trouble theirs to overturn the biggest UK democratic mandate ever, before its instruction had been fulfilled?

To negate the sworn pledges of the Government and Opposition, and Commons votes carried by huge majorities? What about the destruction of trust in democracy? The inevitable breakdown of law and order? Would riots bother them? Or our great nation being humiliated before the world, scaring itself into surrender and begging Brussels’ forgiveness?