It was inevitable from the very beginning and like the elephant in the room it has been there all along. It takes the resignation of Jo Johnson, a thoughtful, diligent and well respected minister, unlike his mercurial brother, to say it and resign from a government which has completely lost control of the nation’s agenda. We face a choice of chaos or the greatest surrender of sovereignty in our history, because of a complete failure of an entire political class to understand what Brexit actually means.
To keep the United Kingdom intact as a single market of four nations with frictionless borders with the EU, from which we withdraw but trade freely across open borders without being subject to their rules and contributions and courts is impossible. It is not about wording. It is about reality.
It is either a hard Brexit, where we walk away from everything and take our chances, which everybody now accepts will lead to a period of economic and legal chaos that will leave us very much worse off for a generation and the certain break up of the United Kingdom. Or a surrender of political oversight by resigning our membership of the EU system of governance, including its councils, courts and parliament, but leaving the economic structure, including free movement, in place, so that we look forward to a new era of doing as we are told. In 2016, in that ill judged referendum, absolutely nobody voted for either. That is why, now all the facts and costs are about to become clear, it is an essential exercise in legitimate democracy that the people have the chance to vote again.
From Downing Street, increasingly showing aspects of a bunker rather than a seat of power, the mantra comes ‘there will never be’ another referendum. But it is now a fact that even if May gets the EU to agree some muddle which she presents to the Commons as an agreement, it will be voted down. So what happens then?
Make no mistake. This country is now in a political crisis. A major political crisis. Because events are spinning out of control.