Leading academic slams Brexit as 'nonsense and nothing more than a Tory party policy'

The idea that Brexit is an anti-elite project is a nonsense. It's exactly analogous to the Trump case.

It's completely fake anti-elite politics. Brexit is essentially a Conservative Party policy supported by Conservative voters and some others. That's the reality.

It's extraordinary to continue this nonsensical attack on Parliament, on the judiciary, on the BBC. 

A certain section of the British political class is suffering from terrible delusions of grandeur to the extent that they have come up with an utterly irresponsible programme of pretending to want to come out of the common market and wanting to send aircraft carriers and frigates to the South China Sea.

I mean it's delusional stuff. We've got to understand what our real place in the world is. If one was serious about leaving the EU, which I don't think the Brexiteers actually are, if they're living in a fantasy world, today now, we'd be inundated with government advisers as to what to do.

There's none of it there, except in the most rudimentary form. So there is no serious planning for Brexit, it seems to me.

The state has lost the capacity to think it through, and the Conservative Brexiteers have proved themselves utterly unable to understand what they've actually set out to do, whether it's in relation to Ireland or trade. 

And that's the great tragedy of British politics.