What a mess we are in. Perhaps we should have seen it coming. The Scottish independence referendum created gaping wounds which have been slow to heal, and Brexit is moving to another level, with a toxic mix of Brexiters who are too relaxed about no deal, and Remainers who are too relaxed about the subjugation of a democratic exercise.

I voted Remain, in part, because I feared this. I feared that a small but influential smattering of my fellow Remainers would not accept the result. And I feared that a small but influential smattering of nationalist Brexiters would pursue a Brexit which would have worked for the British Empire but won’t for UK plc.

After last week’s debilitating performances in the House of Commons, the received wisdom is that the fault for all of this lies squarely with one side; indeed, with one man, Boris Johnson. Johnson’s charge sheet is indeed extensive, and his looseness with language has a long history. His comparison of Muslim women wearing the Niqab to letter boxes and bank robbers was enabling language which one could easily imagine being transferred to the street. Equating the EU’s drive towards further political integration to the empire-building of Hitler and Napoleon was, as well as offensive to those who live with the memory of Hitler’s consequences, not the way to win friends and influence the other side in an impending negotiation.

And, last week, when an emotional Paula Sherriff, citing Jo Cox, said that Johnson’s chosen language of surrender, betrayal and traitor features in the abuse and death threats directed at Remain MPs, Johnson replied “I have never heard such humbug in all my life”. I watched this live, and gulped. It was a dismal, dismissive way to reply to a question of that substance and tone.

Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister. What he says and how he says it matter a great deal. He must hold himself to a higher standard, ensuring that the consequences which his words have are positive and not negative; that they heal wounds rather than reopening them.

Although leaks from the 1922 Committee meeting of backbench MPs indicated that he showed some contrition, his fellow MPs and the country as a whole would have benefited immeasurably from him doing so in public. It would have cost him very little to say sorry to Paula Sherriff, to say that he made a mistake, to say that he adopted the wrong tone in that answer. That he chose not to has made us all a little poorer.

However I must say - and I say this in particular to my fellow Remainers - you are throwing stone after stone after stone through the windows of your glass houses. For your charge sheet is also long; as extensive as that of your Leave opponents.

Because for every Leave MP we find speaking at a rally calling Remainers traitors, we have David Lammy MP comparing the Conservative European Research Group to Hitler, a man who killed six million Jews. And for every Leave MP we have calling Hilary Benn’s Brexit-delaying legislation the Surrender Act, we have Ed Davey MP calling Boris Johnson a dictator, which in the lexicon of most normal people would place him in a bracket with Stalin, Pol Pot, Mugabe or Castro. And for every Brexit-supporting newspaper calling Remain MPs saboteurs, we have Remain-supporting newspapers accusing the Government of a coup, which we are presumably to believe is on par with the Sudanese Army’s removal of Omar al-Bashir earlier this year.

Can we see ourselves? Can we see how emaciating this is? Can David Lammy see that, unlike Hitler, MPs in the ERG are not genocidal? Can Ed Davey see that, unlike Hugo Chavez, Boris Johnson is not jailing journalists and choosing his own political opponents? If they cannot, then they belong in a dark corner of the internet, not in our Parliament.

This propensity to lose all ability to be reasonable and rational is infecting more of my fellow Remainers than I had thought possible. I have always enjoyed watching Jess Phillips on television. She’s so raw, so real, so relevant in today’s politics. But last week, referring to the "humbug" remark of which I wrote earlier, Phillips said very directly that Johnson referred to Jo Cox’s murder as humbug. He did not; this was a quite deliberate and improper insinuation, ironically during Phillips’ own Urgent Question about the consequences of language in politics. Again, I watched this exchange live, and felt myself deflating. Phillips instantly went from being part of the solution to being part of the problem.

The Speaker, John Bercow, was reasonable and even-handed in his remarks last week, when he said that fault lay on both sides. He was right. But the trouble with many of my fellow Remainers is that they simply don’t agree. They carry with them a moral superiority which guides them into the unshakeable belief that we are right and they are wrong. That it’s okay for us to call Johnson a dictator but it’s not okay for him to accuse us of betrayal, because we’re the good guys and he’s the bad guy. The ultimate irony is that, in the final analysis, this moral superiority played a key role in the disconnection between the political classes and the people, and the subsequent loss of the 2016 referendum.

We now must hit the reset button. In my view, this is more about the deliberate attribution of inaccurate thoughts or actions to opponents than it is about language itself. The language itself is primarily spin. For instance, claiming that the Benn Act is a "surrender" is deliberately emotive, but little different to claiming that a "hard" Brexit is a "cliff edge", also deliberately emotive terms designed to make you think the other option must be better.

Instead, at least as a first step, I would like to see the deliberate and false attribution cease. When Boris Johnson claims that everyone who fails to support leaving the EU come-what-may on 31st October all want to Remain, that is as deliberate and false an attribution to them as Jess Phillips’ "humbug" attribution is to him.

Neither side can pat themselves on the back today. Neither side should be going to bed sleeping soundly in the belief that they can hold their heads high. I could count on my hands the number of MPs who I could honestly say have the right to do that.

It sounds hard; even unachievable. But it really is not. All they have to do is act normally. Like the rest of us.

Andy Maciver is director of Message Matters.