Paul Routledge: Brexit takes us across the border into a nightmare

I have seen the future, and it doesn’t work.

On show, in all its road-chaos glory, on the southern border of the European Union between Hungary and Serbia.

Stationary lorries double-parked for more than three miles, while armed guards faff about doing nothing.

This is the shape of things to come, when EU and non-EU neighbours are on bad terms.

The E75 motorway linking these two countries is a giant lorry park.

My bus from Subotica in northern Serbia to Szeged in southern Hungary was held up for two hours. That’s nothing. Delays can last seven hours at peak holiday times.

Passengers were herded through a grim transit shed for passport checks, while officials ransacked our luggage.

This scene could be commonplace if a no deal Brexit becomes reality (AFP/Getty Images)

Paul Routledge: Public services don't profit from being privatised

Maybe they were looking for seditious literature. I only had the London Review of Books.

No water, no food, a toilet charging €1 but closed.

Drivers immobilised by the border go-slow that must have been ordered by Budapest’s hard-line ­government stood around in the chilly wind, swapping horror stories.

They were from Germany and every nation in the Balkans and beyond, caught in a stand-off between an EU state and a non-EU.

There was a migrants crisis here, but that’s mostly in the past after Hungary’s ­authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán put up a Trump-style fence.

I have seen the shape of things to come, when EU and non-EU neighbours are on bad terms (AFP/Getty Images)

Paul Routledge: 'Labour must put national interest first and help Theresa May' 

What I saw there two days ago is the spectre haunting Dover and all the Channel ports. Brexit means balls-up for the truckers, wrecking a way of life built up over 40 years of free trade.

So, thank you toff-twerp Jacob Rees-Mogg, monomaniac Sir Bill Carcrash, barmy Sir Peter Bonehead and all the other swivel-eyed Brexiteers who have brought us to this pass.

They should get off their high horses and talk to the truckers of the E75 autoput. Or better still, listen.

My first words above reference those of famous American journalist Lincoln Steffens, who wrote in 1919 after a starry-eyed visit to the young Soviet Union: “I have seen the future, and it works.”