Firstly, our congratulations to the UK government (pictured below) on its setting last night of a new world record in incompetence.
We can’t see it being beaten in a long time. But Jesus, what now?
Well, let’s see what we know.
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1. THERESA MAY IS STILL THE PRIME MINISTER
God save us all. The punditariat is already alive with talk of how she must surely resign now, and that “grey men” will knock on her door in the dead of night and usher her away to a safe padded room, to be replaced by [NOBODY KNOWS].
May vowed mere days ago that she could not tolerate continuing as PM past her preferred Brexit extension date of June 30, just like she said she wouldn’t call a general election in 2017, and just like she wouldn’t pull the first meaningful vote in Parliament last December, and just like she said, over 100 times, that the UK would definitely leave the EU – no ifs, no buts, no maybes – on March 29.
Alert readers may have noticed that the UK has not left the EU.
The Prime Minister has none of the senses of shame, dignity or decency which have traditionally been the cement holding the UK’s non-existent constitution together. Like many MPs did after the expenses scandal, she’s realised that if you just keep brazening things out, no matter how outrageous, there’s really very little anyone can do about it.
She will not leave 10 Downing Street unless absolutely forced to, and the botched Tory leadership coup of last year makes that almost impossible to achieve. So as things stand we’re doomed to another six months of her battering away trying to get her dead-duck deal through the Commons, followed by a return in October to where we were yesterday.
2. THE EU IS SPINELESS
It’s obvious to even really hungover amoeba living in trenches in the deepest depths of the Pacific Ocean that the UK is utterly incapable of solving this mess. The EU already gave us one deadline to get the deal passed (last October), then when we missed that it gave us another deadline (March 29), then when we missed that it gave us another deadline (April 12), and now we’ve missed that it’s… given us another deadline.
The humane thing to do would be to put the UK out of its misery and pull the plug now, but instead the EU appears to think it’d be better (or possibly just hilarious) to put us through a humiliating and idiotic round of EU elections – another thing Theresa May previously said was unthinkable but hasn’t resigned over – and imagine that THAT will somehow fix everything.
Evidently they really enjoy having Nigel Farage and his pals in Brussels and Strasbourg and can’t bear to let them go just yet, because it seems highly likely that an EU election would see furious Leave voters return lots of pro-Brexit MEPs with instructions to cause as much havoc as possible.
3. JEREMY CORBYN STILL WANTS BREXIT
Despite the most stupendously inept clown show of a UK government in the entirety of recorded history, Labour still can’t get ahead in the polls and Corbyn’s personal ratings as a potential Prime Minister are at a jawdropping low of 20%, one vote in five in a two-horse race and fully 27 points behind “Oh god anyone else at all we’d take Lee from Blue at this point please just not this guy”.
Corbyn knows that with ratings like that his ONLY hope of ever forming a government is after the most catastrophic Brexit possible, one that annihilates the Tories but that he can avoid any share of responsibility for. (Quite aside from the fact that he himself wants out of the EU and always has.)
Now, what Corbyn personally wants is slightly moot, in so far as his MPs are now just openly ignoring the party whip in their dozens and scores, but the very fact that he can’t get his ducks in a row pretty much guarantees that there’ll continue to be no majority in Parliament for anything for the next six months even if Labour WANTED to work with the Tories to get a deal through, which they don’t.
A different leader might make Labour an officially Remain party (or at least an official pro-“People’s Vote” one), but Corbyn won’t and there’s absolutely zero prospect of him being overthrown, so forget that idea too.
4. THERE WILL BE NO SECOND EU REFERENDUM
Seriously, sober up. You honestly think May is going to go through all this horror for all this time and then cave at the end, giving up the thing she’s nailed herself to for the last three years? You think if the Tories DID manage to – somehow – get rid of her it’d be to replace her with someone prepared to countenance a second vote? Who do you think that would be?
5. ARTICLE 50 WILL NOT BE REVOKED
See (4).
6. THERE WILL BE NO GENERAL ELECTION
Ah, but what if the PM wasn’t a Tory at all? Well, there isn’t a hope in hell of that (see the YouGov graphic above), but another general election would be an apocalyptic catastrophe for everybody and neither of the major parties actually wants one.
Scores of Labour MPs in overwhelmingly-Leave seats in the north of England would be in peril. Tory moderates would face a similar fate either at the hands of selection committees or the electorate, and the last shredded rags holding the party together would be torn asunder.
As it stands there’s no majority in Parliament to overturn the Fixed Term Parliaments Act for a second time in two years – enraging voters who already hold politicians in utter contempt even further and risking all manner of horrific consequences – and even the most suicidal Tory turkey isn’t going to vote for this particular Christmas.
But again, what if we’re wrong because nothing makes any sense any more and it happens anyway? The best hope for Remainers is that the splitting of the UKIP vote between the zombie corpse of the original party and Farage’s new Brexit Party would prevent it making any significant electoral headway in itself, but the way the UK’s broken electoral system works all but guarantees that a new election would simply put us right back where we are now, because the country is split down the middle and there’s no way either of the major parties would stand on a platform of explicitly rejecting the result of the 2016 referendum, either directly or via a second referendum.
(Remember, even today Labour is still insisting that it just wants a magically better Brexit, not to avoid it. If they thought there was any electoral mileage in reversing it, they’d have been there long before now.)
7. THE SNP HAS NO IDEA WHAT IT’S DOING
To be brutally frank, readers, it’s this site’s opinion that the SNP’s current position on Brexit – in favour of a second vote – is an accidental one that Nicola Sturgeon got bounced into on the Andrew Marr show and hasn’t been able to find a face-saving way to back out of.
On top of that it’s pretty plain to us by now that it hasn’t got a clue how to move forward on independence either. We’ve noted previously that the legal grey area over whether Holyrood has the power to hold a referendum without Westminster approval should have been resolved years ago – being set in motion, with full justification and no significant downsides, the day Theresa May said “now is not the time”.
Had that happened it would have been settled one way or the other by now, and either outcome would have offered the SNP a big political gain – either the power to hold referendums whenever it liked, or undeniable proof that Scotland was a colonial vassal of the UK and devolution a sham, and that the only way to take control of our own destinies was to do it properly.
Instead, the gaping hole in strategy over BOTH of the big constitutional issues of the day – a policy amounting to sitting on its backside and waiting to react to events controlled elsewhere – has led the party into a great big sticky swamp that it has no easy way to escape unless the UK government throws it a lifebelt by crashing out of the EU in flames.
Its own membership and a lot of its MPs and MSPs would be beside themselves with anger if the SNP somehow saved England from itself and averted a hard or no-deal Brexit, destroying its own 2016 electoral mandate in the process and setting the cause of independence back for a decade at an absolute minimum.
Yet it’s perilously close to doing just that. It backed the Nick Boles proposal for a “Common Market 2.0” super-soft Brexit which was only narrowly defeated by a few hardline Labour rebels earlier this month, and if Change UK (the new name for The Independent Group) could be persuaded to support it – and we can’t fathom why they didn’t last time, since as far as we can tell it’s what they actually want – then it could be brought back to Parliament and passed.
The SNP’s mandate and argument for a second independence referendum, and the vote of the Scottish Parliament to hold one, would become null and void. The party would suffer a crushing double blow to its vote – both from fundamentalists for ineptly blowing the greatest chance at independence we’re likely to see in our lifetimes, and from the third of SNP voters who voted Leave, deserted the party in 2017 as a result and would stay away for good this time.
Any chance of a pro-indy majority at Holyrood in 2021 (which is already on a knife-edge) would completely evaporate. We all might as well just pack up and go home.
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So that’s where we’re at: idiots to the left, idiots to the right, idiots in the middle, idiots everywhere. For what it’s worth, our view is still that the UK is ultimately heading for a no-deal Brexit – the insoluble problems of the last three years aren’t going to suddenly become soluble if we make it three-and-a-half. The Irish border won’t just go away.
The only alternative that seems even remotely plausible is the Boles plan – a Brexit In Name Only (BINO) that in some ways is the worst of all possible worlds (throwing away many significant benefits of EU membership while getting nothing positive in return and, from our own perspective, destroying any real prospect of independence).
BINO would technically uphold both the result of the referendum and the Tory and Labour manifestos of 2017, and therefore at least theoretically prevent both of them completely imploding. But it would mean retaining freedom of movement – just about the only thing both parties have agreed is totally unacceptable in their recent joint negotiations – so it still seems a bit of a long shot.
So it looks like we’re all in for six more months of pointless misery. If we get any sunshine, we advise you to get outside as much as possible and just pretend none of this is happening.
Those of us who HAVE to watch the news because it’s our job, meanwhile, will keep ourselves busy looking around for buildings tall enough to jump off of.
