The direction of conversation in the latest trade talks is designed to deepen the UK’s dependence on other economic systems while isolating us from our EU neighbours.

The government is currently working out the finer details of an airline rescue package. In practice, this likely means throwing billions of pounds at the industry in the form of loans and tax breaks. Ministers are hoping that this bailout will ensure that the UK still has a functioning airline sector after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides.

With the Tory landslide, Brexit is bound to finally happen. Therefore what matters is making it as good, or as least bad as possible. 

The argument is finally settled; it will be pretty pointless to recriminate, completely pointless to try to pretend we can still Remain in the EU and (for the foreseeable future) both dangerous and pointless to fantasise about rejoining it. We need to get used to the UK ‘going its own way’ for a long time to come.

This winter, now finally ending, has seen disturbing early signs of the Earth’s climate starting perhaps to go out of control. The fierce cold snap in the UK occurred because the Arctic’s normal weather came down here; meanwhile, the Arctic was off-the-scale warm.

It’s time we faced up to reality: humanity is almost certainly going to have to learn to live in a world that has been radically damaged and transformed by human-triggered climate change. We are – virtually all of us, either softly or (less often) explicitly – in climate denial. The greenhouse gases we have polluted the atmosphere with have already set us down a path of serious and possibly irreversible environmental disruption, and the prospect of technocratic rescue is as unlikely as it is worrying on its own terms.