May is absolutely finished as a political force. She is not in charge of her own party and not in charge of the country. She is utterly incapable of understanding what she is being told by her neighbours in Europe and badly delusional about she is being told by those further afield.
She has been told by 100 of her own MPs that they don’t want her as PM. She has been told by a majority of 230 MPs that they reject the deal that has consumed almost all the energy of her government over the last two and a half years. Only the fear of a General Election defeat of catastrophic proportions and a formal split in two different Conservatives parties has kept her in power.
This chaos and incompetence is mainly the product of an attempt to square a circle and achieve something that logically can never be achieved. Outside of membership of the EU there can never be a way of keeping cheap and convenient access for British goods and services to EU markets unless the UK agrees to follow all the rules without making them. Very few people in the UK would tolerate that kind of secondary role. No one in the EU can agree to anything else without destroying the EU.
Incredibly around 100 Conservative MPs appear to think that the way out of this mess is to go for a hard Brexit and leave the EU without a deal. Good luck to them with facing the backlash if they get their wish. Right wing fantasy politics is, I suspect, all very good fun if you like that sort of thing, but sooner or later it runs into harsh realities. Customs checks, lorry queues, lost car factory jobs, miserable holidays financed out of low value pounds and £16 million spent on a ferry company that doesn’t exist is a national humiliation. It isn’t making this country great again.
Equally incredibly I keep getting tweets from left wing enthusiasts for Brexit. Apparently getting out of the EU is going to destroy our subjugation to the neo-liberal elite and set us free to nationalise and subsidise the commanding heights of the UK economy. What they are actually going to get is the full exposure of the UK economy to the forces of the global economy and a consequential driving down of wages and conditions. That is why Rees Mogg and the like are such enthusiastic supporters of all this. The World Trade Organisation isn’t exactly a democratic body. A TTIP style trade agreement with Donald Trump isn’t exactly the socialist paradise. Oh, and nationalisation is entirely possible under EU rules whereas subsidising UK industry is completely outside any WTO trade deal rules.
Faced with this world of fantasy politics, chaos and incompetence the Labour Party is offering to take over as the new government so that they can themselves try and square exactly the same circle. It has taken Mrs May two years to discover the harsh reality that the only deal she can get from the EU is one which is massively worse than we already had as a member of it. Mr Corbyn is telling his supporters he can do massively better in a few short weeks.
Or at least that is the best guess of what he is saying. We know he wants an election. We know he wants a better deal. Exactly what that better deal is and how he gets it is utterly unclear. The electors are being told to vote for him and he’ll pull off something somehow. He has many fine policies that would be a genuine improvement on Conservative government but when he talks about what he says is the central issue of the day he is silent about what he intends to do. He continues to try and appear to be a Leaver to older voters in traditional working class communities and a Remainer to younger voters in the cities and communities that do a lot of business abroad. For someone whose main asset is a reputation for principled politics that is not exactly impressive.
How much better placed would the country be if the Labour party had spent the last two years explaining a principled policy of remaining in the EU? Is it really better politics to chase after votes in quite such a squalidly obvious way and to damage the country’s interests and the interests of working class communities? What exactly does the 48% of the country who wanted to remain two years ago or the 56% who want to do so now gain from voting Labour at the next election? Is it really fair on them to ask them to come out and vote for a party that is promising to take us out of the EU on great new terms and will fail to do so for exactly the same reasons that May did?
There isn’t an easy way out of the EU. Messy difficult international organisations are necessary in a global world. Trying to fight your main trading partners is never a great strategy. Nor is trying to pander to the worst sentiments of people in neglected communities who think they can go back to a world of large factories, powerful trade unions and no blacks.
When you are in a hole and going nowhere it is usually a good idea to stop digging. When the nation is in a huge one with no obvious way out the same policy is the only way forward. Call the whole damaging Brexit thing off.
By all means let’s have an election. But let’s have a referendum at the same time and see what people want now they know the score. No deal, May’s deal or Remain. Put it to the people on a single transferrable vote basis and lets give the nation a chance to vote itself out of this mess.
P.S. Just a small point. Would the nation be in such a horrible situation if MPs were elected via the single transferrable vote system and people could vote for what they believed in? The DUP got less votes than the Greens at the last election and their 10 MPs have been voting to keep this incompetent PM in power whilst our one MP has been offering clear, realistic and responsible leadership.