THERE are between six and eight weeks left for the UK to come up with a serious proposal on Brexit which is acceptable to the EU, in order for the various EU states to have enough time to sign the deal off before Brexit Day in March 2019.

Brexit Day, March 29, is now less than 200 days away. Right now, we’re at that part of the movie Armageddon when NASA has discovered the asteroid that’s headed for earth – but before anyone has had the bright idea of asking Bruce Willis to sacrifice himself to save the world alongside a crew of photogenic action heroes with square jaws.

Unfortunately this is UK politics we’re talking about, and the nearest thing anyone has got to a photogenic action hero with a square jaw is a choice between Boris Johnson, Theresa May, Jacob Rees Mogg, or Jeremy Corbyn. Not so much action heroes with square jaws as the four horsemen of the Acrapolypse. None of them want to save us, every single one of them is actively seeking a direct impact from the asteroid. There’s not a square jaw amongst them, although plenty of square heads.

Jacob, the bastard offspring of a Dickensian villain and Hyacinth Bucket, actively seeks this direct hit from the Brexit asteroid because in the post-acrapolyptic wasteland he’ll be able to privatise everything, cut all taxes on rich people, abolish public services, and turn the country into his wet dream of a Jane Austin dystopia where the wealthy are vile to the poor but are terribly polite about it, because that makes random cruelty just fine.

Theresa has no beliefs, or indeed personality, of her own, but wants Brexit because it’s the only way she can keep her job. Boris wants whatever he thinks is going to get him Theresa’s job, and if that means turning the UK into a bastion of far right populism, he’s quite happy to do so to keep his name in the papers. Fascism is fine with Boris as long as he’s the supreme leader. And Jeremy wants it because he fantasises that in the post-acrapolyptic wasteland he’ll be able to abolish capitalism and set up a peasant weaving collective where people can say what they like about Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism. It’s the worst action movie ever.

We learned this week that here are some 80 or more Conservative MPs who are prepared to vote down Theresa May’s Brexit plan because they think it gives away too much to the EU. That means that there is no majority for the Chequers Deal in Parliament, but there isn’t any majority for any other deal either. That’s if any other deal existed, which it doesn’t. The Brextremists’ grouping had planned to produce a proposal of their own, but it’s been mired in in-fighting and jockeying for positions – so very much like the rest of the Conservative party then.

According to reports over the weekend, the Brextremists decided at the last minute not to publish their proposals because it was feared that people might laugh at them. That’s quite an admission, since everything Brexit related that’s come out of the UK Government so far has been a tragicomedy. Based on reports circulating on social media, the plan included sending a flotilla to the Falklands, and setting up a UK Star Wars missile shield, presumably to protect us from EU directives from space. It also included proposals to slash taxes and public services. It would be the current austerity on steroids, but with added xenophobia and space cadets. Since it’s an excess of space cadets in British politics which have got us all into the current mess, it’s understandable why the European Research Group didn’t choose to publish its paper.

The Brextremists might not have a proposal that people won’t laugh at, that they’re not too embarrassed to tell anyone about, but at least they have something approaching a plan. It’s an evil plan, but it’s still a plan. The Labour Party is also opposed to Theresa May’s Chequer’s deal, but it doesn’t have any proposals of its own to replace it, other than the vacuous claim that it wants a Brexit for jobs, which is rather like saying that you are in favour of chaining people’s legs to boulders in order to improve their mobility. But whatever plan they do have, you can be sure that it will still involve one lot of Labour MPs attacking another lot of Labour MPs over anti-Semitism, racism, deselections, or what someone said on social media. You can always rely on the Labour Party to concentrate their fire on the real enemies of the working class, and that’s other parts of the Labour Party.

The EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier still believes that a deal can be struck, but time is running out and there is still a shortage of realism on the UK side. There is still no credible proposal for the Irish border, and there are elements of the Chequers deal that the EU cannot accept. Meanwhile party conference season is approaching. The Chequers deal might not survive to see October, and Theresa May could very well find herself facing a leadership challenge as a result.

British politics and the British state are, frankly, an utter disgrace. Meanwhile, the bulk of the Scottish media seeks more ‘SNP Bad’ stories to amuse itself with while ignoring the mendacious self-inflicted catastrophe of British politics for fear of stirring up support for independence. Under these circumstances, complaining about the SNP’s handling of the Scottish NHS, as the Conservatives and Labour preside over the epic destructiveness of Brexit – while self-indulgently consuming themselves with internal disputes – is like complaining to a decorator about your dissatisfaction with your new wallpaper as an asteroid hurtles towards your house at 50,000 miles per hour.

We don’t have a hero to rescue us. Scotland doesn’t need a new Bruce Willis or otherwise. We have hundreds of thousands of them in the shape of the Scottish grassroots independence movement. That’s how we’ll save Scotland from Brexit. We’ll dae it oursels.