The Brexit can has been kicked down the road again…
The “meaningful vote” has left us with a meaningless Government, a determined but enfeebled PM and a powerless opposition.
May’s deal is dead. No deal is dead too. Parliament has contrived itself into a triangulated gridlock. The Government is incapable of resolving this.
While the Fixed-Term Parliament Act protects Ministers and MPs to carry-on, fear of losing seats means they won’t vote to act nobly by calling an election.
This Brexit mess was predictable. And predicted. The origins lie not only in the “cake and eat” contradictions of Theresa May’s redlines – eg demanding to be out of the rules which ensure no hard Irish border whilst demanding no hard border. They also lie in cowardly politicians and our predominantly right-wing, foreigner-loathing press. Both have used the EU as a convenient all-purpose bogeyman for their relentlessly negative straight-banana scare stories.
Cowardly politicians like to build their support base on the backs of hatred towards underclasses who have no voice and can’t defend themselves and/or the fear and loathing of refugees, foreigners and foreign institutions which can’t vote them out of office. The EU has always been the perfect target for the lazy and spineless in search of effortless popularity.
Given all of this, I was astounded how many people voted Remain in 2016.
But, how do we get the country out of this chaos? There’re no easy or painless answers waiting to be plucked from low-hanging branches.
No proposed resolution will be popular with everyone. But the most rational in these circumstances would be to take this Tory-created chaos away from Parliament and back to the people for a final decision.
I wouldn’t have started from here. This project was unwise. Of course I respected the outcome of the 2016 referendum and was content to give the Government the time and space needed to prove whether they could make a success of Brexit, as they said they could. I was sceptical. And now we can see what has become of their promises, their assurances it would be easy and of their planning.
It’s time for the rest of us to “take back control”, remove the Conservatives from the equation and to attempt to restore some order from this chaos. A chaos in which the Government has made the UK the laughingstock of the planet.
We need calm and rational people to lead the debate from now on. That means the Government must stand aside. They’ve presided over a monumental failure. They have no right to cling on to power.