Sitrep: we’ve given up any hope of turning on the television and seeing a politician – any politician – telling the truth.
Boris Johnson is lying about negotiating a new deal with the EU. Jeremy Corbyn is lying about pretty much everything (in so far as he even knows what he wants the truth to be, let alone what it actually is). Jo Swinson is lying about wanting to meaningfully work with other parties to stop Brexit. Nicola Sturgeon is lying about wanting to stop a no-deal Brexit – she just wants to stop Brexit full stop.
(Unfortunately, this also means she’s lying about having any real intention of holding a second independence referendum before 2021. If she did, she wouldn’t have all her MPs and MSPs frantically running around parliaments and courtrooms trying to destroy her own democratic mandate for it, which would leave her needing to secure a fresh one 20 months from now. And assuming she’d have any more idea how to put it into practice than she has with the ones she’s already got.)
The government is lying about the fact that it doesn’t have confidence in itself, and the opposition is lying about the fact that it does. Everyone now says they want an election, but somehow it isn’t happening because nobody wants it yet, and nobody can agree when they DO want it, and they’re all lying about why.
And absolutely everyone is lying about the fact that whatever they’re trying to do right now has any chance of solving the present shambles. Johnson is just stalling to run the clock down until no-deal, although he swears blind that he isn’t, and the opposition just wants to drag the whole agony out for several more months with not the slightest clue what they’d actually do then.
Grimly, the closest thing that British voters currently have to an honest man is Nigel Farage, who is at least clear about what he wants and what he’s prepared to do to get it. Which is ironic, as he’s only anywhere near getting it because he’s spent his entire political career lying through his teeth about it.
We don’t mind telling you, folks, it’s been pretty hard to get up in the mornings.
When we’ve managed it, though, we’ve spent the last couple of days unsuccessfully trying to find out the answer to a question.
Because let’s imagine that the opposition bill to “block” no-deal Brexit passes later today, as it almost certainly will, and that the government’s second attempt to dissolve Parliament and call an election fails on Monday (as is also almost certain). Johnson would then be obliged to ask the EU for yet another Brexit extension at the meeting of the European Council in mid-October.
But what if he didn’t? What if he resigned as Prime Minister (but stayed leader of the Conservative Party)? Who would become PM? There’s no deputy and therefore no automatic process, and we know that Parliament can’t agree on an alternative or we’d already have one. The Tories and probably the Lib Dems aren’t going to put Corbyn in and Corbyn isn’t going to step aside.
There appears to be no mechanism in the UK’s infamously unwritten constitution to deal with this scenario. We’ve seen numerous other people ask the question and fail to come up with an authoritative answer.
(Plenty of people who don’t actually know anything about anything are willing to say what they IMAGINE would happen, but none of it has any sort of basis in fact or law.)
There would be no PM but the government wouldn’t actually have fallen. There’d have been no confidence vote and no vote to bypass the Fixed Term Parliaments Act and hold an election. The UK would be speeding fast towards the no-deal cliff with no-one driving the bus at all.
Or what if Johnson stayed in office but simply refused to do anything? Or what if he trundled along nonchalantly until mid-October and then just didn’t obey Parliament’s instruction? What if he exchanged pleasantries about cricket and the weather with the EU but didn’t actually ask for an extension? He did, after all, tell the nation yesterday that he’d “rather be dead in a ditch” than do so.
At that point there’d only be two weeks left until the deadline – not nearly enough time for an election. The opposition would have to do something it’s been utterly unable to do until now: agree on who to get to take over.
And what if they did? That person would carry no authority whatsoever. To become PM they’d have had to agree to call an election more or less immediately after securing the extension – currently the official position of all the opposition parties – and that means the EU would be dealing with someone whose word was a meaningless irrelevance and would cast them into renewed prolonged uncertainty.
There’s not a chance in hell that the opposition alliance – including the SNP, Labour, Lib Dems and rebel Tories – would be able to make any pact stick in such an election. They don’t want even remotely the same things. Tory rebels don’t want a Labour government for the next five years, under Jeremy Corbyn or anyone else. Nor does Jo Swinson, who’s more Tory than most of the Tory rebels (and indeed much of the Tory government). The Unionist parties won’t give the SNP another indyref, and the SNP would rightly be crucified by their own supporters if they did a deal without one.
(Although, regretfully, we’ve arrived at a stage where we can’t with any confidence rule out the SNP, now apparently a single-issue stop-Brexit party, doing it anyway.)
And of course, no matter what the parties might agree to do, the voters are another matter entirely. God alone knows what Labour voters in the great swathe of Leave-voting seats in the north of England would make of it all. Not a single poll has ever suggested that those areas have changed their minds since 2016.
In those circumstances, the hard-Brexiteers currently in control of the Conservative Party would have been backed into a corner and would have little choice – even if they wanted one – but to campaign on a no-deal platform or be slaughtered by the Brexit Party. Either way the no-dealers would very likely win against an opposition impossibly divided among itself.
(Can you imagine Jo Swinson standing down in her East Dunbartonshire seat to give the SNP a free run? Of course not. But if she and the other three Lib Dem MPs in Scotland didn’t stand aside, what would the SNP be getting out of any pact? Can you see Swinson promising them a second indyref? Hardly.)
The closest thing the opposition has to a strategy is a wildly improbable Hail Mary shot whereby the Brexit vote is more divided than the Remain vote and they somehow get a government into power that can enact a second EU referendum without granting a second Scottish one, kicking independence down the road until at least 2025.
(Because let’s say Jeremy Corbyn was being truthful when he said he wouldn’t block one, which is a pretty big “if” to start with. At the very BEST he’s going to be running a weak multi-party coalition which would need the votes of the Lib Dems and at least some Tories to pass indyref2 legislation. There isn’t a snowball’s chance of that.)
They need a whole series of miracles to come off one after another, and even then all they’d get would be another referendum – one which nobody knows the options in, and which would in any event be a farce in which nobody on either side would be able to believe that the result would be honoured.
Wings called all this, of course. We pointed out two and a half years ago that Theresa May was absolutely out of her mind to call a needless snap general election, and we accurately predicted the chaos that would follow.
And we’re calling it now. No good can come of anything that’s likely to happen this week. There’s now only one sane course of action, a bad choice that’s less bad than any of the others – pass the Withdrawal Agreement.
It respects the result of the referendum, but in a way that keeps most of the benefits of EU membership indefinitely (because the Irish Question has no imminent solution, and the backstop which basically keeps us in the single market and the customs union will persist forever). It avoids most of the catastrophic consequences of no deal. It retains the Scottish Government’s mandate for a new indyref. And it would probably destroy the Tories AND the Brexit Party.
(Because most of the Tory vote would be furious, but their rebels could justify it as the least-worst option and as giving them time to recover, and the Brexit Party would be furious but would have to maintain their fury for two and a half years while having nothing to actually campaign for because we’d already be out of the EU. What would their platform be? “Vote for us, we’ll make everything much worse out of pure spite”?)
(As for whether the government could in fact survive until 2022, it would of course be enormously weak for the rest of its term, but protected by the FTPA. We’re not sure the electorate would thank any party that triggered a vote of no confidence and a general election that would throw everything back up in the air just when total disaster had been averted and the worst political mess in British history had finally been – albeit imperfectly – solved. A period of enforced consensus politics might be just what the doctor ordered.)
But that isn’t going to happen.
It’s not going to happen because every MP in the House Of Commons is lying to you, readers. Every last one of them, without exception, and Scotland and the UK are both going to suffer dreadfully for their mendacious, reckless, self-centred incompetence.
We don’t know what we do about that.
