The Government Must Fall So That Politics Can Un-Fuck Itself

Dominic Raab! Esther McVey! Errr… Mike Truck! Jedrick Phlogon-Rand! Steven Twombly! Anne-Marie Trevelyan! Todd Bonzalez!

With a slew of ministerial resignations, and calls for a Tory leadership challenge, the government, as far as anyone can tell, is collapsing.

The Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, started things off, resigning over a Brexit deal that he would have been responsible for implementing.

He was, let's face it, right to do it. Dominic Raab may never have been right about anything else in his life – just last week, he was telling an event on Brexit and the tech industry that, effectively, he had only just learned Britain was an island – but he was right about this.

For years now, Theresa May has been claiming that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” For the longest time, this seemed like complete nonsense – surely “no deal” was actually the worst possible deal – just a deal where we left the EU on World Trade Organisation terms and everything went to shit? But, such is the magic of Theresa May: by effectively reversing her position and suggesting that her terrible deal is the only way to go, she's somehow managed to prove that she had been right all along.

Failing Northern Ireland somehow declaring independence from the UK and the six counties returning to the Republic, May's Brexit deal would effectively lock us into Brexit hell forever. No-one is going to be able to square this circle of placing a border somewhere, but nowhere between Northern Ireland and anywhere else, and so the EU will never allow us to exit the backstop. And yet… there will always be the hope that we might.

And so British politics would be stuck in its current, interminable stand-off between Hard Brexiters, FBPE Remainers, and Lexiters. We would be trapped eternally in limbo between three inadequate utopias: British Empire 2.0; Making Everything Like It Was In Around 2001 Again, and; Maybe If We Shot Everyone Who Constantly Tweets At Jeremy Corbyn To Do More To Stop Brexit Out Of A Big Cannon All Our Problems Would Solve Themselves.

As climate change mounts and the economy fails, every political decision would keep on having to be read through the prism of a possible future “real” Brexit. In such a situation, the idea of simply exiting the customs union unilaterally and voiding the withdrawal bill would start to seem more and more appealing. And who’s likely to benefit the most from this? Well, whichever political faction seems most willing to act in flagrant disregard of international law. That sounds to me like the far-right.

It seems, therefore, pretty damn important that May's Brexit deal fails, and the government collapses. With the endless decrepitude of the May government out of the way, the UK could try to get back to being a functioning polity again.

But then… what if it doesn’t? Someone once said that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism, and I’ve started to feel the same way about Theresa May’s Premiership. Just look at her press conference today. How many times has she done this now? – keep everyone waiting for half an hour thinking there’s going to be a big announcement… and there’s nothing, she just re-iterates the same nonsense she’s been spouting before, and everything carries on as usual.

If you invited Theresa May to a house party, she’d spend the whole time crouched in the corner not saying anything to anyone, but then, when it came time for everyone else to go… she just wouldn’t leave. She’d still be there when you went to sleep, she’d still be there when you woke up. When you left to get some eggs from the shop, she’d still be there, and she’d have the locks changed while you were gone. It’s her house now. She’s still never said a word.

Could May still manage to get her deal through parliament? This seems unlikely, given how (a) her majority is wafer-thin as it is, (b) the DUP, who comprise part of that majority, are planning on voting against the bill, (c) the SNP, Lib Dems and Labour are all (mostly) united against it. But you know, the Labour right are involved here, and maybe their love of customs unions and hatred of Corbyn will trump good sense? Will their fear of a no-deal see them backing May's bad deal?

Some, perhaps, but to say that this would see May's plan carried might be a bit far-fetched. Less unlikely, however, is the thought that May might lose the vote, but then remain in power anyway. The Tories in 2018 exist primarily to do two things: constantly fuck everything up, and stop Jeremy Corbyn from ever being in a position to correct their mistakes. Could May leverage the fear of a Labour government to win a no-confidence vote? There have been calls today for new leadership from Jacob Rees-Mogg. But there’s no clear candidate that could unite the Tories. Might the slightly less chillingly right-wing faction of the Conservative party continue to prop May's corpse up, to prevent someone worse getting in?

I think the main reason why I’m skeptical that today will bring about Theresa May’s demise that, let’s face it: the collapse of her government, and the replacement of this parliament by one led by a party which is not the Tories, is just so obviously what needs to happen for this country to start functioning politically again. This alone feels like a reason to suspect that it won’t. If UK politics has an Iron Law nowadays, it's that the worst thing always happens. Three more years of May? Several more decades of Brexit hell? Jesus I hope that’s not as plausible as the voice of anxiety in my head makes it sound.

@HealthUntoDeath