“The nation has a breakdown”. This was a headline on Radio 4’s PM this week. It was said in that usual Radio 4 tone of jocular irony. All rather fascinating and quite amusing. No, it isn’t.

We all respond to stress in different ways. Since Monday afternoon, when I should have been trying to earn some money, I have been gripped by a migraine and the latest episode in the slow-motion national car crash, the one that was meant to end with a vote. But it didn’t. There was a deadline, and then there wasn’t. I’d been counting down the hours, desperate to know what would happen next. In real life, if you don’t meet deadlines you don’t work again or your business fails. In parliamentary politics, we now know, they’re just movable goalposts in a deadly game.

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I’ve tried to keep off the news, but between the meant-to-be-soothing pieces of music, snippets broke through. Absolutely no redrawing of the withdrawal agreement whatsoever. Forty-eight letters. Lame-duck prime minister. No plan B. And the clock. The clock ticking like a bomb.

Many of us are already dealing with the fallout of that vote that was meant to set us free. Homes that can’t be sold. Contracts put on hold. Lives on hold, as we don’t dare to make plans. Several people close to me have been told that they may well lose their jobs. I don’t know whether to believe Standard & Poor’s, which says that a million jobs will be lost in the case of a no-deal Brexit, or the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which says that a million workers will have their jobs or wages cut, or the Bank of England, which says that unemployment could rise to 7.5%.

The figures vary, but the message is clear. If we crash out of the EU without a deal, hundreds of thousands of people in this country will lose their jobs, their livelihoods and perhaps their homes.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a Brexit-supporting journalist on a TV news show. He told me that he had never trusted any of the politicians to make a success of Brexit, but he had voted to leave to “shake things up”. I asked him if he was willing to lose his job for the revolution he longed for. There was a pause. “I think,” he said, “many people are prepared to make a few sacrifices for this.”

He’s in his early twenties. I doubt he’s ever lost a job. I didn’t tell him what it was like when I lost mine. How I lost eight pounds in three days. How I didn’t stop shaking for two weeks. How I ended up so exhausted by the search for work that I ended up sleeping in friends’ spare rooms as I put my flat on Airbnb. I didn’t tell him that losing my job felt like the worst thing that had ever happened to me. And I’ve had cancer twice.

They call it project fear, these buccaneering ideologues who are happy to risk your future and mine. They think it’s a point of theological debate, like whether the communion wafer turns into human flesh. It doesn’t matter how many economists, trade unionists, thinktanks and rating agencies look at the models and do the maths. They are like Donald Trump on climate change. La, la, la, I can’t hear you.

So what the hell do we do, as we watch our politicians run down the clock? We can write to our MPs, but mine is Diane Abbott, a member of an opposition frontbench which has clearly decided to oppose everything until it’s too late. They are still talking about a second referendum being “an option” that might, at a later stage, be “on the table”. Wake up, guys! The table is collapsing and the house is on fire. For Corbyn’s Labour, as for ERG Tories, it’s all about ideology. Bring on the revolution! You can’t, they will say, make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

We are the eggs, folks. There are 66 million of us whose jobs, homes and futures are at stake. They lie in the hands of ideologues and revolutionaries, who can’t be bothered to engage with the boring realities of life, global trading and the law. “Boris Johnson couldn’t run a whelk stall,” said Ken Clarke of our former foreign secretary. The same, unfortunately, seems to be true of most of the politicians bickering as Britain burns. They got us in this mess, but they don’t seem to have the slightest clue how to get us out of it.

However we voted, we didn’t vote for this. We didn’t vote for hundreds of thousands of people to lose their jobs, medicines to be rationed and dead bodies to pile up. We didn’t vote for May’s crummy “deal”, which will just lead to years of more uncertainty as the real negotiations start. But we are in a war now, and compromises have to be made to end a war. We will have to go with the compromise that does the least harm.

We cannot crash out. Our politicians cannot let us crash out. But just saying “we don’t want ‘no deal’ ” won’t stop it. Our politicians will have to get behind a solution that can be passed into law. If that’s a second referendum, great, but if they want that they have to make it happen. And not just pretend they would have liked it to happen but, alas, it was too late.

MPs, we elected you to represent our interests and keep us safe from harm. If you allow this catastrophe to happen, you will go down in history as traitors to the people you were elected to serve. If you can’t be bothered to think of our jobs, then please think of yours.

• Christina Patterson is the author of The Art of Not Falling Apart