YEP Says: Hold tight '“ it's going to be a long, long, bumpy ride

Quite what the Brexit vote means, hand on heart, none of us can really tell; speculation and counter-speculation, claim and counter-claim persist and there’s no denying that whichever way you voted, the future of our nation is now mired in fog. For good or for bad (and that depends on your point of view), a decision has been made – but that was never going to be the end it. And how events will unfold in the next few days, weeks or months are impossible to predict. Alas we are in for a bumpy ride.

We see that already. Promises made by Brexit campaigners, most notably on the NHS, are unravelling; young people feel betrayed by older generations; Business Secretary Sajid Javid is trying to claim that the economic fallout will not be as serious as portrayed by the Chancellor; George Osborne is doing another of his Gordon Brown-like disappearing acts; there has been no meeting of the Cabinet; Scotland is moving towards a second vote on independence; the UK’s sole EU commissioner has resigned and Mr Cameron faces the humiliation of being excluded from the second day of this week’s EU summit.

If this is a precursor to the governance of the UK until October, this country’s standing in the world will be even more diminished.

We have a lame duck government, aided and abetted by a dysfunctional main opposition party, at a time when Britain needs the strongest of leadership to determine not only the future of trade as it extricates itself from the European Union but start addressing the breakdown in trust between Parliament and the rest of the country.

As an aside, Jeremy Corbyn has proved singularly incapable of listening to reason, and the haemorrhaging of his party’s vote in the EU referendum left him bereft of credibility before Leeds’s own universally respected Hilary Benn, was sacked as Shadow Foreign Secretary after daring to speak the truth.

The nation needs a credible, strong opposition party now more than ever.

Yet as the events of yesterday unfolded, to suggest such a thing might be in reach is further away than ever.

Hold on tight,for this rollercoaster isn’t coming to a halt any time soon.