The party's over

Brexit will not happen.

The figures revealed in relation to Philip Hammond's Autumn statement have surely killed it.

Philip Hammond may well be the next Prime Minister. On Wednesday he demonstrated a degree of political acumen that eludes lightweight Theresa May. The most secure ground a politician can make their stand on is ground where the figures speak for themselves, ground you can quietly and unassumingly occupy while people draw their own conclusions, ground that presents a bed of hot coals to all other rivals. Hammond is now on that ground. Everyone else is carrying the can.

And these figures indicate that Brexit is a fiscal apocalypse almost without precedent. The people of Britain are going to be hit badly where it hurts most, their pockets, and now they know it. Fox, Johnson and the other Brexiteers are nowhere to be found as this finally dawns on people. Indeed, Farage is leaving the country for pastures new in Trump's America, by all accounts.

Public opinion has to shift significantly to rule Brexit out. The Overton Window that describes the range of opinions considered acceptable shifts with the impulses it receives from its extremes, with the principles expressed at the extremes, but needs the rack and pinion of secure centre ground to move upon. Let me be clear, I am no centrist, but I understand that people are drawn from left to right and right to left across the compromises of the centre ground.

And for all that they are yesterday's men, the interventions of, for example, Blair and Major, in the Brexit debate, as the full weight of Hammond's Autumn statement sinks in, reinforce this central position in British politics after a period during which the political scaffold it provided had collapsed (at Westminster at least) and will lubricate the shift in public opinion away from Brexit in response to Hammond's statement. That will make Brexit impossible.

And when Brexit proves impossible, May's position will prove untenable. Hammond's is the safest pair of hands left on the tory front bench.

In standing by progressive values as if alone on the world stage after the onslaught of Brexit and Trump, Merkel has had her "finest hour," but now she will find she is joined by other voices. I predict that Le Pen, AfD, and the other crypto-fascist chimeras that have been emboldened by recent events will be routed in the round of elections coming up next year, as Brexit shimmers and fades like the mirage it always was, and the people of Britain emerge from the collective hallucination with which tory factions conjured in their struggles for power and position earlier this year.

What does this mean for Scottish Independence? It will come, but it will no longer be as a lifeboat that allows us to quit a sinking ship. And in many ways that is as it should be. Scots deserve more than a lifeboat as a ship of state, even though the effort of building it is greater, and Brexit has distracted us from this task. The time has come to revert to route one and persevere with the case for Independence on the basis of circumstances that have not materially changed since September 2014. We should never treat a disaster like Brexit, which would cause so much misery for so many, as though it was an opportunity.

And should I be proven wrong, and we still have to take to the lifeboats? The effort I advocate is still worth it for in the long term we will require an ark with room for everyone.