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Britain is heading for a massive financial crash at precisely the moment we're supposed to split from the European Union. This is both good news and bad.

Suppliers and finance companies are folding, for the third year in a row pre-Christmas sales have slumped and now banks are leaving the high street . The coal mine's canaries are singing loudly and off-key like the rugby back row after a three-day stag do, but this is not Project Fear. This is Project Fact.

The BAD NEWS is that whether you're Leave or Remain it's on course to hit us at just the point everyone would rather it didn't. The GOOD NEWS is that it might be enough to reverse Brexit.

The 2008 banking crisis actually began a year earlier, when banks first froze their sub-prime mortgage debts and admitted they were over-exposed. At the end of 2007 there was a run on the Northern Rock building society so big that, had it inspired a Jimmy Stewart Christmas movie, it would have been called It's A Bloody Frightening Life.

Unlike the Christmas movie the boss didn't have £3billion in honeymoon funds to tide everyone over, so the Government stepped in. Northern Rock was nationalised 6 months later, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, 3 Iceland banks went under, Greece and Spain became financial sinkholes and we waved goodbye to Woolworths, Thresher, MFI and Comet.

Then, the 20 leading nations of the world agreed a £3.7TRILLION stimulus package. We underwrote our own debts, printed money, and while millions of people worldwide lost their jobs and there were spikes in the suicide rate, most survived.

And here's the problem: we can't afford to do it again.

But a crash is in the post. Four months ago, sub-prime lender Car Finance Company announced it was accepting no new business and would close within two years. A record 2.7m new cars were sold in Britain last year, the 5th year of rising sales, but most of us can't afford one. Instead we take out leasing deals for a few hundred a month, then at the end of the deal hand the depreciated asset back and take out another.

The same thing happens with interest-free credit card deals. Thousands of customers have bad credit histories, defaulted, or switched to another interest-free deal at the end. We don't pay back enough interest to make it worth the lender's while, and the exposure of banks to this sort of debt is huge.

British households borrowed £31.6bn last year, on cars alone. Debt has gone up as more feel the squeeze, whether it's frozen wages, housing benefit reforms, Universal Credit delays or redundancies. Our total household debt today is £1.6TN - that's more than a third of what the entire G20 found to save the world economy in 2009.

This would be fixable if the finance companies were more sensible than last time. But 2 weeks ago the Mirror reported that 8.4m Brits had their credit limits raised by an average of £1,481 by their lenders. Six million people hadn't asked for it, 2m were already struggling to pay, and the only reason for lenders to do it is to create more debt for everyone in the hope people will pay more interest.

That all adds up, in the near future, to credit lenders saying "oh shit". They'll run to the banks, who'll say "oh bugger". And they'll turn to governments, who'll say "we're broke".

(Image: Getty)

In December 2015 high street sales were record-breakingly bad. In 2016 stores cut prices 70% a week BEFORE Christmas, and still sold less. This year, analysts said in November that December looked even worse.

Lloyds Pharmacies, Thomas Cook, RBS and Nat West are all closing branches because so few people use them. We shop so much online that Amazon had UK sales of £7bn last year while Topshop reportedly managed just £896m.

That's almost 8 times LESS spent in one of our most common high street stores, whose parent company pays 3 times MORE UK corporation tax than Amazon. We all hate tax avoidance, but we don't hate it enough to shop somewhere else. When you combine that with with rising healthcare costs and fewer migrants who put in more than they take out, you'll get tax rises at the same time our credit runs out.

Just 3 days ago a wholesaler you've probably never heard of, Palmer & Harvey, went into administration with the loss of 2,500 jobs. It supplies 90,000 shops with tobacco, food and drinks and claims to be Britain's 5th biggest private firm. If 2008 is anything to go by it's just the first of many, and if you add job losses to tax hikes and toxic debt you have REAL trouble in, ooh, about a year from now.

Which is precisely when we're supposed to cut ourselves free from the protection of the EU to sail the stormy seas of international finance without financial passporting rights or, as yet, one solitary trade deal.

Now for the good news.

If you're a Leaver, the good news is this is NOT down to Brexit. In November the New York Federal Reserve warned sub-prime car loans were "a concern" and if America has the same problem as us then it can't be blamed on Donald Trump, either. That will not, however, stop anyone doing just that, so Brexit monkeys and Trumpkins might as well get used to being blamed for the Even Greater Depression.

If that bubble bursts, lenders will go bust, over-exposed banks will collapse, and car manufacturers will suffer. The British car industry accounts for 12% of our exports, £71.6bn in turnover and 1m jobs. In the US the motor industry provides 10% of all jobs, and the first reports of cuts began in July.

To add to the fun, some of the sub-prime car-leasing debts are linked to pension funds, which is exactly where sub-prime mortgage debts were invested in 2008. A problem with these means companies worldwide have to move money out of their business to meet pension commitments, which means job losses and restructuring just about everywhere.

And if you're a Remainer, the good news is that this will ALL be blamed on Brexit.

(Image: Reuters)

Tax hikes? Brexit. Unemployment? Brexit. Empty high streets? Brexit. The fact that entirely-unrelated-to-Brexit-migrants-don't-want-to-go-to-countries-that-are-struggling-and-the-tax-take-will-go-down-and-make-it-all-worse? Well, I think you'll find someone will blame that on Brexit too.

So by the time we're within screaming distance of our planned leaving date of March 2019 public opinion, which is already moving very slightly towards Remain, will have thrown itself flat on the floor like Michael Caine at the end of The Italian Job and be racking its brains for a great idea.

It won't be Jeremy Corbyn who comes up with one - he's a Leaver, after all, and not great with maths. If Theresa survives that long she might feel she's burned so much public support she has nothing left to lose by ignoring a referendum, and my personal hope is that Boris - a man who changes his opinions roughly as often as his socks - will bluster that none of this was known when we put pen to paper.

And don't sit there saying this is an impossible change in a year. This time last year, the Lib Dems announced they were "back in the big time" and the government went to court to argue, in all seriousness, that Parliament shouldn't vote on things.

The year before that, Nigel Farage was walking around saying we had to leave the EU so that Parliament COULD vote more often and Leicester City was top of the Premier League.

For heaven's sake, two months ago David Davis said we'd never pay the EU a "made-up" £40bn Brexit bill and now we're told that's just our latest offer; things change, especially when you let clowns drive the bus.

It's indisputable that the financial tectonics are showing all the signs of an impending earthquake. It's likely it will hit in the next 12 to 24 months. And it's very UNLIKELY that the world will agree a solution with Trump, the EU will agree a solution with the UK, or the world's billionaires will bail us out

The good news is that you are now aware of all of the above, and have 12 months in which to clear your debts, fix your mortgage rate, and hoard tinned goods. The chances are we'll be offered a second referendum on the terms of the Brexit deal, with an option to remain, and the REALLY good news is that both Leave and Remain can vote for patriotic self-preservation.

There are storm clouds on the horizon, but the silver lining is a bolt of lightning that's going to shut Nigel Farage up for good. Like I said, good news and bad - but enjoy Christmas. It might be the last good one for a while.