Brexit: this mother of parliaments has lost control of its children

This is your gentle reminder that in five weeks the economy will go into full cardiac arrest. It will be the worst economic disaster in modern British history. The country will seize up in the short term and decay in the long term. Jobs and lives will be destroyed overnight. Everything about this disaster is predictable and predicted, avoidable but still not avoided. Nothing—literally nothing—is happening to prevent this historic catastrophe. Repeat: five weeks.

I confess that I was wrong about something important on Brexit. I assumed that if we were going to hurtle off the cliff-edge, it would be apparent from the start of the year and both parliament and the public would rise up to stop it. I assumed that if the government had the intention of leaving without a deal, it would display the basic decency and courage to at least confirm it. But as the now Independent Group MP Sarah Wollaston remarked on Wednesday, unashamedly running down the clock amounts to the same thing. The government is playing chess, badly—and using ordinary British citizens as its chess pieces.

I still do not believe we are going to leave without a deal. But I never believed that five weeks from our scheduled departure date, we would still be fully ignorant about the nature of our departure or whether we would leave at all. This is not how countries behave. It is not how democracies treat their citizens.

Meanwhile the bad news accumulates and accelerates. Honda is the latest harbinger of impending misery, confirming the closure of its Swindon plant with the loss of 3,500 jobs. Honda in Swindon bears much of the symbolic weight that Nissan does in Sunderland, and that company, too, is withdrawing investment. Britain’s car industry, the modern jewel in the crown of our manufacturing heritage, is imploding before our eyes, and our leaders simply avert their gaze.

The legal and political situation of Brexit is unchanged from November, when the UK and EU concluded the withdrawal agreement. There is no parliamentary majority for the agreement in its current form, and the only move that could even hope to enable a majority—amending or replacing the Northern Ireland “backstop”—will render it unacceptable to the EU. Nothing has happened in the last three months to change any of these basic facts.

The government has settled on a merry-go-round of endless talks producing identikit statements. Wednesday’s joint missive from Theresa May and Jean-Claude Juncker offered more of the same meaningless fiddling. The backstop would be temporary, but we don’t know the means to guarantee it—tick. Alternative arrangements could replace it in the future, but we don’t know how or when—tick. Perhaps we could add something to the political declaration, but we don’t know what—tick. The EU’s red line that the UK cannot terminate the backstop unilaterally or fix an end-date remains intact, and so does the UK’s red line that it requires either or both. Once again: we have no time for this. It is not so much rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic as negotiating the colour of the new paint after the ship has sunk.

While the government pretends to advance something or anything, even its apparently sensible ministers are sitting on their hands. The Chancellor Philip Hammond, whose anonymity over the last three years of impending economic crisis will form his political epitaph, could offer nothing but tired and long-shattered delusions on the Today programme on Thursday. He declared that the Article 50 deadline was spurring Brussels to make substantive movement on the renegotiations. This was an error or a lie, and in either case grotesque political cowardice. The EU knows that any meaningful concession would effectively throw Ireland under the bus in order to save the UK from itself. Brussels will not sacrifice the political stability of a current member to preserve the neo-imperial delusions of a departing one. The real deadline is ours, and has long since passed. Parliament could vote to approve the deal tomorrow and would still not be able to ratify the necessary legislation before 29th March. Everyone knows we have no more cards to play and must request an extension, but Hammond is too respectable to confront such vulgar truths.

And so what of parliament? It has waved a white flag. Last Thursday MPs voted against a motion which simply asked it to confirm that it still agreed with itself. But of course parliament did not agree with itself two weeks ago, does not today, and will not tomorrow. It does not and cannot agree with anything. Parliament has no idea what it wants, beyond a series of legally contradictory outcomes all at the same time. It opposes any concrete measure which asks it to take responsibility for its own decisions or spells out what it thinks people actually voted for in a referendum which, three years on, has faded into revisionist mythology. This mother of parliaments has lost control of its children.

Of course the main event this week has seen a group of MPs leave their parties over concerns about those parties’ direction and leadership. Regardless of the wisdom of such a move or its timing, and notwithstanding the bravery, in particular, of the Tory defectors, it remains unclear how their decision will help stop or soften Brexit in any way. Indeed, the new Independent Group could help cement the false notion that the anti-Brexit movement belongs to a centrist niche, deflating the Remain campaign in both the Conservative and Labour parties. The key proponents of soft Brexit or a second referendum may not serve their cause by breaking away and unifying (or hardening) the parties they leave behind. All moderate politicians must now focus on the best way to prevent social and economic cataclysm in five weeks’ time. It must be their only task, and anything else is a distraction.

The story of these last few strange, arid weeks is one of surrender. We are approaching the precipice, nobody knows what to do, and people who should know better are determined to look away and pretend it isn’t happening. Blocked and gripped by civil war and the struggle for their own senses, our leaders are reaching for the comforting folklore of the referendum and giving up on reality. I used to think the prime minister wasn’t ruthless or nihilistic enough to pull the plug on the British people. I was wrong. Even now, May refuses to put the country before her party or herself. History will take care of her. But now that the first line of defence has been run down, it is time to seek back-up. We need the people we elected to serve and defend us. We need our MPs, of all parties and all descriptions. Parliament must now screw its courage to the sticking-place, or it will screw us all.