This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

I have a nightmare. It goes like this. The Government abandons futile negotiations with an arrogant European Union and declares: ‘Very well, we are going it alone!’ Many cheer at this demonstration of Churchillian toughness.

And then the day comes for our departure, and there is chaos, beca

use all the warnings come true – that without the Single Market almost all of our links with EU countries have no legal basis, and an impossible barrier of bureaucracy grounds planes, traps lorries and closes the Channel Tunnel.

The problem with this nightmare is that it is impossible to be sure that it will not happen at the end of March next year. Nobody really knows. What if it does happen? I will come to that.

Before anyone accuses me of spreading Remainer propaganda, I would like to point out that I have been urging a British departure from the EU since I visited Norway in June 2003. As I wrote here then: ‘Norway is prosperous, happy and free. Its countryside is neat and well husbanded, its towns and cities orderly and comfortable… it runs its ow n affairs, trading cheerfully with the EU.

‘Its fisheries and farms have not been wrecked or bankrupted, as ours have, by “Common” policies that suit France, Germany or Spain. Its supreme court is in Oslo, not Luxembourg, where ours is. Its monarchy is not menaced by a European president and its flag doesn’t have to fly alongside the EU’s yellow stars.’

Until then I had been vaguely hostile to the EU, but not actively in favour of quitting it.

After Norway, I wanted to leave, though most of those now noisily flourishing Union Jacks and demanding exit at all costs were either silent, bored, or actively in favour of staying. I still don’t know what’s come over them.

About the same time, I read the superb book, The Great Deception, by Christopher Booker and Richard North, by far the best account of the long story of shame and dishonesty which is Britain’s involvement in the EU. Both men, like me, want us to leave. I began to notice, after reading it, the pitiful level of knowledge of the subject in our political class, and in our media.

And that disastrous ignorance is still obvious in almost everything anyone says about it from either side. I doubt most people know the difference between the Single Market and the Customs Union. Well, Christopher Booker and Richard North do, and they, like me, are deeply worried that we may be about to walk blithely into national danger. We are in a small but growing group of Leavers who are urging that we follow the Norway option while there is still time.

This might mean postponing the day of our departure, but in general it would be extremely simple. We would stay in the Single Market, so avoiding the threatened chaos at our borders, but leave the Customs Union, so allowing us to trade freely around the world.

WE would get back control of our farms and fishing grounds, dump the Luxembourg court, shake off three-quarters of EU interference in our laws, and significantly reduce our payments to the EU. We could also exploit a loophole allowing us much greater control of immigration than we have now.

Perfect? No. But perhaps best of all, it requires no lengthy negotiation. We stay in the European Economic Area (we already belong to it) and seek to return to the European Free Trade Association. The arrangement can be lifted off the shelf and will work. No crises, no lorries parked for miles on the M20.

Yet so many Leavers are against this. I don’t really see why.

For years people have said they were quite happy with a European free trade area (which is what many think they voted for back in 1975) – they just didn’t want the political interference.

The Norway option gives us exactly that arrangement.

Do they really think that 40 years of close and intricate integration with the EU can simply be pulled out by the roots overnight? Do they think Britain is so big, so rich and so brilliant at exporting that it can suddenly launch itself out into the world without a backward glance, like a superpower?

What if our brave exit in March goes wrong ? What if the nightmare is real? I can, alas, see it now. The tottering Government, the closed factories and the queues at the shops, the snap Election.

And the new Prime Minister taking a rusty ferry to Ostend and then on to Brussels, there to beg to be allowed back, as smiling Eurocrats explain that, yes, we are welcome to return, but only if we abandon our own currency, our own legal system and become at last what they have always wanted us to be – truly, fully, horribly European.

Wouldn’t the Norway option be better than even the chance of that happening?

***

Stupid people keep saying that supporters of railway renationalisation can’t remember what British Rail was like. Oh, yes I can.

And if BR had been given the money poured into the pockets of the privatised rail pirates, it would now be running far, far better services than we currently have.

On Friday, I was late for work because it had been windy the night before – and this on a line where privatised operators have had the benefit of more than £1 billion in modernisation. Parts of this have already cost three times what was planned, everything is years behind time and will probably never be finished. Nationalised BR completed a similar scheme only eight weeks late and within £15 million of its predicted budget.

***

I am going to keep saying this. Most of the supposed Islamist terror attacks in Europe (and many of the non-Islamist massacres elsewhere) involve people who have been taking either marijuana, steroids or so-called ‘antidepressants’.

The inquest into the Westminster outrage shows clearly that the killer Khalid Masood, a violent criminal, took steroids and suffered from the terrifying ‘roid rage’, which apologists for these dangerous drugs claim is a myth.

Other mass killers who took steroids include the very non-Muslim Anders Breivik.

I didn't expect or even want to like the new BBC series Killing Eve, starring Jodie Comer, pictured, as a distractingly beautiful embodiment of pure evil.

The trailers put me off. But the programme itself is an unexpected joy, looking and sounding witty, refusing to treat viewers as idiots, and, actually, a lot better than the overrated Bodyguard.

***

The PM has started to be nice about social housing, or council housing as we used to call it. She says: ‘I want to see social housing that is so good people are proud to call it their home… Our friends and neighbours who live in social housing are not second-rate citizens.’

Good, though anyone who recalls the council housing of the 1960s and 1970s (I was myself briefly a council tenant in the 1970s) would say that most council house residents were house-proud and often very pleased to have a secure well-maintained place to live.

I am sick of people saying the great sell-off of council homes was a good thing. It flooded the housing market with taxpayers’ money and sent prices spinning upwards forever. It broke up communities. And it began the expensive, wasteful disaster of housing benefit which, the last time I looked, cost more than the RAF every year.

I don’t know if we can ever put this right again, but admitting we made a mistake by breaking up the old council estates would be good.

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