One sentence in one article I read this last week caused me to sit up and reflect more, I think, than any other: “Carmakers are threatened more by the end of the combustion engine than by Brexit.” Just a throw-away line in a story by Phillip Inman in the Observer on the current state of play in the politics of Brexit, but still…

It’s extraordinary that we are now talking in throw-away terms about:

1. leaving the political and economic union which has defined us for the past 40 years without, it seems, anything like a plan for the future; and
2. the death of the internal combustion engine which has been so central to our lives for a century.

It’s extraordinary how much radical change we can take in our stride without really blinking. And I didn’t even mention the $12 trillion of money spent on quantitive easing since 2008 (whatever happened to “you can’t just print money because inflation will sky rocket”) and Donald Trump…