As Britain displays every symptom of an advanced stage of madness, the key symptom being total paralysis, here’s what.
Assuming Theresa May’s deal does not pass in the next week, Brexit should be suspended sine die, a diplomatic ‘revocation’ of Article 50 that all sides except the diehard right should agree to now if only to gain a breather.
This should go hand in hand with a General Election. Only a new government and parliament has a chance of renegotiating anew with the EU. The task is somehow to start again. Sounds awful? What else have you got?
A general election throws all the cards up in the air, which is what is needed. May would go, Corbyn might well go. Maybe Duncan Smith and Jacob Rees-Mogg would go. Who can tell? If the Tories are terrified of a GE, you can be sure that’s what the country needs.
On no account should there be another referendum, a People’s Vote, or any plebiscite called by any other name you care to call it. Have done with referendums forever from here on, until and unless their use is carefully prescribed in carefully considered law. They are nothing to do with the British way of government.
It is not that it is hard to discover the ‘will of the people’: there is no such thing as ‘the will of the people’. And even if there were, no entity known as ‘the people’ can run a country.
If we have not learned that at least, everything has indeed been in vain.
Meanwhile, we seem to be looking at a fair chunk of the rest of our lives. A sort of Twenty First Century Thirty Years War.
We live and learn or are nothing.
