WE’VE got to stop now. Not only are we a nation riven by hate – by Remainers hating Leavers, and Leavers hating Remainers – but the world looks upon us as hateful, as a small-minded, bitter, little reactionary and dangerous archipelago. The poison of Brexit has killed the body politic of Britain and our hate is eating the carcass – we are a corpse on the ground being devoured by rats, and soon there will be nothing left but a stain of mutually destructive loathing.

We can stop it, though. Yesterday, the European Court of Justice confirmed that the UK can cancel or halt Brexit unilaterally. Theresa May knows she’s beat – she cancelled tonight’s vote on her Brexit deal in the face of overwhelming defeat. The PM’s deal won’t pass, No Deal won’t pass, and Europe will not renegotiate, so the only way to draw the toxin from the wound is to revisit the patient.

Halting this miserable, suicidal process, and allowing the people a final say through a second referendum is the only route out of national disaster – the only way to find a new path that isn’t paved with hate.

Events over the weekend encapsulated just how nasty and hateful things have become. Heidi Nordby Lunde, a leading Norwegian politician, said the idea of allowing Britain into a Norway-style deal with the EU was like having an “abusive partner spiking the drinks and inviting them to a Christmas party”. It just isn’t in Norway’s interests to have a country like Britain in a similar deal. “I think you would mess it all up for us, the way you have messed it all up for yourselves,” she said.

That’s how we are seen – as the petty little villain no-one wants to be in the same room with – and it should shame every one of us whether we are Leavers or Remainers.

It’s little wonder that others see us in such a disparaging light. Just look at our discourse. Tory MP Priti Patel suggested reports that there could be food shortages in Ireland in the event of a no-deal Brexit should have been used as leverage against Dublin during negotiations over the backstop.

Think on her words: a British politician is using food to threaten Ireland, a nation which was ravaged by a famine that killed one million people, and is widely seen as exacerbated by the British government. She is either too ignorant or too cruel to hold any form of elected office. Yet her voice holds sway – because this is what discourse has become.

Ms Patel may confirm that the Tories remain the Nasty Party, but Britain has become the nasty nation. People in Scotland shouldn’t nod complacently and think that this is an English problem – the infection of hate runs rampant here as well. Just look at the most extreme fringes of both ultra-Unionism and ultra-nationalism – where conspiracy and hatred fester and render the well of debate undrinkable.

Our nastiness comes with a great dollop of hypocrisy as well. Those who behave the worst, pose as the best. It was a sickening sight to watch Tory MPs recently visit food banks and pose for pictures when it was the party’s own Dickensian policies which drove the poorest into ever greater poverty.

The young are not free from the nasty contagion either. We often put our hope in the young, that they will change things for the better. Don’t hold your breath. Latest studies show that those under 45 are much less keen on policies like raising taxes to fund the NHS than older folk. So in a rather brutal and crude narrative, we have the older generation voting for national calamity, and the younger generation adopting an “I’m alright Jack” swagger.

The worst elements of our society now command adulation. Far-right poster boy Tommy Robinson led thousands of hardliners in a “Brexit Betrayal” march in London over the weekend. One demonstrator carried an effigy of Theresa May describing her as a traitor, while another held a model of a scaffold and a hangman’s noose. Mr Robinson, former leader of the English Defence League, described it as a “beautiful day”.

UKIP leader Gerard Batten, who recently appointed Mr Robinson as an advisor , made reference to the English civil war, saying: “In 1642 the King put himself in opposition to parliament. Parliament won and the King lost his head.”

Many more people took part in a counter-demonstration on Sunday opposing Tommy Robinson and his ilk. The Green Party’s Caroline Lucas said the message to Theresa May was “we don’t want your vision of a mean-minded little Britain, with our borders closed and our horizons narrowed”.

This is what we’ve become – hatred everywhere, hatred on the streets, hatred in debate, hatred eating us from the inside out. It makes one wonder, though, if we were ever a nation of decency. No truly decent society could split and sunder and curdle so quickly as we have if we had goodness at our core. Surely, some rot was in the heart of this nation for a long time for us to crumble so quickly. Has the masked just slipped dramatically in the last two years revealing the truly ugly face of Britain?

Cast a fleeting thought back to the imperial past – with its racism and colonisation and trampling of others – and you may see that we have always been a nation of us and them. Now the dreadful irony is that we see fellow Britons as both the “us” and the “them” - where once we kept our fear and loathing for those overseas, today we direct it at ourselves as well as those from foreign lands.

To the world, we are both a diminished nation and a uniquely UK-style of troll – nasty, British and short, you could say. At this time of year – a time meant to celebrate decency and the goodness in humanity – perhaps we need to stop and look at the dark path we have chosen to walk down, and think before we take another step. The mechanisms are there to turn the national boat around before it hits the iceberg, we just need to clear our minds and vision of hate so we can reach the levers and take the right and proper course of action.