Oh God. Would you look at the absolute state of this, readers?
Let’s make like everybody’s mental health and break that down.
So firstly, Labour have taken the lead in the polls for the first time in nearly a year, not because they’ve had a sudden surge of support over their Brexit policy – since nobody has a clue what that actually is – but because the Tories have leaked a bunch of voters to UKIP, which doesn’t meaningfully exist any more.
In our Panelbase poll a couple of months ago, 85% of the English public were unable even to correctly identify the party’s current leader – its SIXTH in the last 20 months, with more than half unwilling to even hazard a guess and 1% plumping for a person we’d made up.
It’s highly doubtful whether the shambolic remains of the party are in any position – either financially or organisationally – to actually contest a general election were there to be one any time soon, although any chance of that appears in any case to have been destroyed by the “rebel” Labour MPs who saved the government from what would have been a catastrophic defeat over a customs union backstop last night.
However, even if UKIP could scare up some candidates and deposits, any election would see their supporters faced with the same prospect they were in 2015 – vote UKIP and probably let Labour win a whole clutch of seats, letting Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street but almost certainly reliant on the anti-Brexit SNP and/or Lib Dems.
That, it ought to go without saying, is a UKIP voter’s worst nightmare, in all sorts of ways. So in reality, having registered their objections with the pollsters, most UKIP supporters would probably grudgingly vote Tory again, leaving them the largest party but still incredibly weak and clinging to the DUP for even a chance of a majority.
Would Theresa May resign? She didn’t resign after last year’s disastrous result, and the thing that’s currently stopping the Tories from overthrowing her – the absence of a popular or even remotely competent alternative – wouldn’t have changed either, so it’s entirely possible she’d still be Prime Minister and still looking at the same shambles.
(And if she didn’t, her successor would be no better off. Indeed, they’d lack a personal mandate from the electorate so would arguably be even more of a lame duck.)
But what if UKIP voters stuck to their guns, Labour therefore became the largest party and were somehow able to form a government without conceding either a second EU referendum to the Lib Dems or a second indyref to the SNP in return for their support?
Well, that doesn’t get us anywhere either, because Jeremy Corbyn would face all the same impossibilities in reaching a Brexit deal that Theresa May does now. The Irish question is totally unresolved and the party’s “six tests” for any deal are by common consensus completely unachievable. The result would again be the UK crashing out of the EU with no deal, which pretty much every serious analysis regards as the worst possible outcome.
So what if there WERE to be a second EU referendum, or what idiots insist on calling a “People’s Vote” as if it was badgers or something who voted the last time?
Even if we imagine that it were possible to get a second referendum bill through Parliament – which, let’s remember, is about to go on holiday for several weeks – and arranged before next March, which it almost certainly isn’t, most polling suggests that the result would be pretty much identical to the last time, which would just put us back to square one.
(Results from our most recent polls of English and Scottish voters respectively.)
Bizarrely, one proposed solution to this is to make the new referendum a three-option vote with the Leave options split into two – a plan of spectacular insanity which would very likely lead to NONE of the options having the support of a majority of voters.
Imagine if the result, say, was this highly-plausible outcome:
REMAIN: 47%
LEAVE WITH DEAL: 20%
LEAVE WITHOUT DEAL: 33%
How on Earth would anyone make sense of that? “Remain” would technically have won the vote, but 53% of voters would have wanted to Leave against 47% Remainers. How could the UK possibly remain in the EU with Leave voters plainly being the majority? But what else could be done? You can’t treat the option that came second as the winner, that’s just too insane even for Boris Johnson.
The proposal is that it be a sort of Single Transferable Vote referendum with second preferences, but the Times poll suggests over 40% of people wouldn’t fill in a second preference, so the mandate for any result would likely be appallingly small.
(This whole notional option is of course also dependent on there actually BEING a deal to offer people, which we appear to be no closer to in reality than we were two years ago. And anyway, the EU is highly likely to just tell us to take a flying leap into a combine harvester if we YET AGAIN try to negotiate a deal with it which we’re then going to try to have a vote on rather than signing.)
So any government proposing a three-option vote would be immediately and rightly sectioned by concerned psychiatrists. A straightforward repeat Remain/Leave vote would almost definitely not get through Parliament, would be democratically toxic if it did, and would probably deliver the same result as the first one.
(And the horror it would unleash if it didn’t doesn’t bear thinking about.)
A general election would waste months and solve absolutely nothing, because none of the people who could possibly be Prime Minister at the end of it have any more clue about what to do than the complete idiot who’s in charge now. Both of the main current party leaders are pledged to deliver Brexit but neither of them knows what it looks like.
This is the point in the article at which readers normally look to Wings to identify the calm, common-sense answer, but we’ve got nothing, folks. Right now it’s impossible to foresee anything other than a few more months of utterly inept bumbling chaos from squawking cretins followed by a no-deal Brexit, a hard border in Ireland, the whole of Kent turning into a lorry park and food riots outside empty shops across the land.
(Remember what happened last winter after just two days of partial moderate snow?)
The rest of the world is about to quietly put the United Kingdom into quarantine, board up the Channel Tunnel and paint a giant plague sign over the entrance, shaking its head sorrowfully all the while and talking about us in the past tense.
Still, be grateful – if we were independent the cost of stamps might have gone up.
