FEARS over the millennium bug of 21 years ago all seem very quaint now we’re facing the real Bday of Brexit.

As the “clanging chimes of doom”, to borrow from Bob Geldof, hit midnight at Hogmanay, we’re all going to wish we could be partying “like it was 1999” and not the year of Desolation, Isolation (and) Marginalisation – DIM, to use the type of pithy acronym beloved by bungling Boris.

Back in the day, the UK was a totally different place. In the run up to the new millennium, computer experts and the media were obsessed with the Y2K bug and the concern that when the date changed to “01.01.2000”, computers around the world would grind to a halt, the markets would crash, and general chaos would ensue. It was a big deal, so much so that Sir Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones made a rather good movie based around it.

Of course, if you were there, and assuming you weren’t absolutely plastered as you welcomed in the new dawn of the noughties and the next thousand years of humankind, you would have realised quite quickly that all was well with the world and no major digital incident had occurred with the first bongs.

READ MORE: Wee Ginger Dug: British rule began in triumphalism, but it won't end that way

Afterwards, everyone waxed lyrical about what a fuss we’d all made about really not very much at all, while those working in the industry got the hump about the actual behind-the-scenes hard work involved in making sure we had a smooth transition into 2000.

Those were the halcyon days when people actually prepared for some dramatic eventuality. Westminster Government was amoral but it was not incompetent. Indeed, it was competent enough to organise and sustain illegal wars. Now, in the era of Johnson, Gove and co, preparation is for sissies. It’s much more fun to fly by the seat of your expensively tailored pants and say whatever the hell you feel like saying safe in the knowledge that you are never actually held to account for your wrecking, careless ways. They are dysfunctional and totally useless, propped up by a creaking Whitehall machine denuded of any semblance of ability and integrity.

Now, in 2021, how I wish it was just computers that were under threat and not our entire livelihoods. Although in the last 21 years, our lives have become inextricably linked to the digital world that a bug of that magnitude would utterly and devastatingly impact every single aspect of our lives. I do long for a team of bespectacled academics and IT consultants, feverishly working on saving our skins from Brexit and making sure the nuts and bolts are all in place for a smooth transition from the bosom of Brussels and then an open door for Scotland when we can return to the European family of nations. But it is not so. We’re on our own and we’ve never had it so bad.

If you’d said 21 years ago that we’d be locked down to protect ourselves from a global virus which had mutated in Britain to a new version of the original strain, that countries around Europe and the world had banned us from crossing their borders to prevent infection, and travel was limited across the UK, we’d have said it all sounds like a very bad episode of Doctor Who. Pakistan has now closed its borders in health and safety grounds to the UK – one in the irony to those keyboard racists who keep telling me to go home.

If you’d said to us that on top of that international crisis we were about to wrench ourselves from a home market of 450 million people, end free movement and wave goodbye to stability and a community of nations on an equal footing, then you’d have probably laughed and said that sounds like a poor plot from Yes Prime Minister.

READ MORE: Why new US charges take us no closer to truth behind Lockerbie tragedy

And yet here we are – no sci-fi, no comedy. Instead, in this series of “Made in Westminster”, we have an array of unsavoury characters, social distancing (or not) in the corridors of power, spending their time slagging off a world-leading children’s charity for helping the UK’s destitute because they’ve callously and deliberately abandoned them in the name of austerity.

If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. We are now governed by a shower of charlatans. Listening to the great bungler’s press briefing on Monday, ordinary people would have their heads in their hands while traders’ fingers reach for the sell button.

As for “The Only Way Is Labour”, their main character can’t see the wood for the trees and is dribbling some nonsense again about saving Scotland while ignoring Brexit and those clanging chimes of doom.

In 1999, we were worried about computers imploding and reverting to 1900 to make sense of their digital world. Now it seems we’ve gone back in time anyway, to children in poverty, destitute families, a reliance on charity and an elite and wealthy class who couldn’t give a monkey’s for the little people.

Time for the UK to rid ourselves of the Boris Bug and his party’s callous destruction of democracy, decency and our reputation on a global stage.

Time for Scotland to get out, whoever is in power at Number 10. Time to seize the Scottish day.

Those who counsel more delay risk missing the tide at flood.