I am one of life’s optimists; my glass is always half-full, every cloud has a silver lining, it’s an ill wind…and so on, ad nauseam. As a looker on the bright side I’ve been disappointed by how negative paintings of Britain’s post-Brexit future have been. Even the daily announcements from The Express, about how much richer we’re going to be when we leave the EU, are based on things like papers from Economists for Free-Trade (formerly Economists for Brexit, and against literally everything else), which boast impressive GDP growth, but also gloomily mention that UK agriculture and manufacturing are going to be wiped out.

Is that the British way? Is that patriotism? Is that what we want to tell our grandchildren when they pause from gnawing on their rats bones and, eyes wide and twinkling with faith in us, ask, “What did you do in Brexit, granddad?”

No. No it’s ruddy well not!

Let us then be optimistic. We’ll start by throwing out all of the economics (which is nothing more than guess-work hidden under A-level maths) and politics (which is just economics without the maths) and, instead, look at the longer term.

We tend to think of evolution as a continuous process, happening all of the time, but at a rate too slow to be perceptible within a human life-time. However, some time ago, Stephen Gould – or possibly Elliott Gould – proposed an evolutionary theory called ‘punctuated equilibrium’, which suggests that evolution might do not much for ages, and then suddenly happen a lot when circumstances change.

Think of it like this; thousands of years ago lived a herd of things-that-would-eventually-become-giraffes. They didn’t have big long necks, just regular necks, and they ate the leaves off of trees. In times when there were lots of leaves a proto-giraffe with a slightly longer neck wouldn’t have a big advantage. Sure, they could eat leaves that were a bit higher up, but they’d also have low self-esteem, from people/giraffes-to-be making fun of their freaky neck, so wouldn’t be any more likely to breed.

Then, when times are hard and there aren’t so many leaves, suddenly Geoffrey’s freak neck is the thing to have, and the lady antegiraffes are all like, “Hey, Geoffrey, come over here and get me some leaves, and afterwards we can do hot sexing and have baby long-necked freaks.”

It’s basically the story of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, but with more prehistoric giraffe sex.

How does this relate to Brexit, I hear you ask (not unreasonably, it must be said)? Well, we currently live in a society where scarcity is, paradoxically, rare. With the invention of pizza delivery and Ocado (relatively recently, in evolutionary terms) it no longer matters how lazy or unfit we are, we can still survive and procreate.

Brexit is going to change all of that. By reintroducing scarcity into our lives, along with the long-missed daily threat of violence, we will be breeding a future British population that is stronger, fitter, more cunning and significantly rarer.

Not only that, but because the aims of Brexit are to keep the foreigners out and those of us already here too poor to leave, we will be massively increasing the level of interbreeding – almost to European-royal-family levels. This will make beneficial mutations quicker to establish, as we fight each other tooth and claw for the last cat with a bit of meat on its bones.

Obviously evolution is still a slow process, and it’s too much to hope that our children or grandchildren will be 12ft tall, bulletproof and able to breathe fire, but with only the modest level of optimism that Economists for Free-Trade use in their GDP forecasts, it’s easy to envisage our great-grandchildren being well on their way to those goals.

Then they – the next step in human evolution, Homo Brexitus – will fall upon a world weakened by 70 years of sloth and laughing at us, and claim it as their own. Although they will be a different species to us, and will view us as little more than lardy chimpanzees, they will still carry our genetics and the history we have taught them, and they will take these to all four corners of the world, driving Homo Sapiens to extinction before them. And that is how Brexit will be the making of the New British Empire.

Also, jam exports are likely to rise slightly.