Brexit is breaking politics – and our MPs are going on holiday

So far from “taking back control”, the votes in the Commons on key aspects of the Brexit legislation in the past few days prove that parliament cannot control Brexit. The House of Commons is hopelessly divided, which is nothing new, but now to the extent where it contradicts itself in its lawmaking, which is both novel and dangerous. Yesterday evening, the Commons signally failed the national interest. The proposal was that, if there is no trade deal with the EU by next January – in effect the last possible moment – then the UK will not simply revert to WTO rules but would be required to remain in “a” customs union. That would have constituted a necessary and vital insurance policy in a world where the most calamitous of events could easily overtake a paralysed parliament. For the moment at least, there is now no barrier to Britain crashing out of the EU next March.

These events are so momentous that they are wildly unsuited to politics as usual. The normal methods of amendment and parliamentary divisions cannot function where there is no Commons majority for anything. So much does the European question cut across party lines that it has broken normal disciplines. The Tories are openly at war with one another. As MPs ready themselves for a long – and to the public unfathomable – summer holiday, they leave behind a vast mess of uncertainty and contradictory voting. The voters, who, after all, pay their wages and support their still generous living allowances and expense accounts, will wonder how such a dereliction of duty can be countenanced by a group of people who take every opportunity to complain about the burdens of “public service”. It might be better if the MPs had all agreed to lock themselves in the chamber of the House of Commons until they’d actually settled what the country should do. That, after all, is what their job is. If it would help we could keep the bars open.

As things stand, there is no prospect of any agreement before the party conference season in the autumn, at which point the Conservatives will revert to their favourite hobby of leadership speculation, with all the delays and distractions that inevitably ensue. Theresa May and Dominic Raab will have to go to the European Commission over the summer and to the crucial EU summit in October with a Brexit white paper which plainly lacks the support even of their own party, let alone the Commons or the country as a whole. Tragedy turns to farce.

The various votes on new customs and trading arrangements, on the VAT regime, the economic “border” between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, and on a reciprocal arrangement between the EU and the UK to collect each other’s import tariffs have all created so many contradictions as to render any laws meaningless. If it were not so painfully ironic, the UK would have sought clarification of its own Brexit laws from the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Variously, the bills contradict one another; they contradict the Brexit white paper; and, most grave of all, solemn assurances offered to the European Union in the divorce agreement and elsewhere. Of these the most blatant is the amendment that outlaws the agreed “backstop” to prevent a hard border in Ireland – the preservation of Northern Ireland inside the EU customs union and single market.

Nor is this the end of the matter. In the autumn, the Remain rebels, if supported by the bulk of the opposition parties, could take the Leave rebels' amendments back out of the legislation at some point, or else vote it down in its final stages. At which point a vote of confidence in the government will be called. That vote the government might well win, though it could also depend on how disgruntled the Democratic Unionist Party feels by that stage. So the Commons will, as it did during the Maastricht Treaty ratification 25 years ago, endorse a prime minister leading a zombie government with no settled policy. This time, however, the consequences are far more serious.

If the government loses the confidence vote in the autumn, then a general election is practically inevitable, unless a minority Corbyn government is formed and survives. That might not be so outlandish if Labour are so ahead in the polls that the Conservatives refuse to bring them down – under the Fixed Term Parliament Act, Labour would have to vote against itself to force an early election, and even then would only get one through Tory abstentions. Thus, even if things are chaotic now, they could easily get far worse. It is deeply damaging to the national interest, to jobs, investment and incomes.

So this has done nothing to restore the prestige of the political classes, further undermined by the latest findings of the Electoral Commission. Vote Leave, may it be recalled, was supposed to be the “respectable” Leave campaign, as opposed to the “Bad Boys of Brexit” in Leave.EU, dominated as it was by Nigel Farage. Instead, we find that it too has been fined and referred to the police. It is only fair to add that the Remain campaign has suffered similar criticism; and that the government spent many millions of pounds on a leaflet for every home that, in effect if not in law, breached any rules of fairness. The 2016 referendum, in other words, looks like an increasingly unsafe structure on which to rest such a democratic decision.

The only really effective legislation that has been passed by parliament is the European Union (Withdrawal) Act, which gave effect to the Article 50 notice to the EU. It stands as a political cliff edge – 29 March 2019 as the “crash out”. Terrifyingly, it is the only point of certainty the country has. We might ask our rulers how it has come to this. But we can't. They’re going on holiday.