Is The UK Government Imploding?

In the strict sense of what a government is supposed to be, it already has. The show of cabinet unity for the Florence spectacular was carefully stage managed, but according to reports, rumour and briefings, there is still a war going on between hard ideological Brexiteers and those who want to put economic interests and political reality at the centre of policy. If there was nothing much going on, this would be fine. Perhaps.

But we are now engaged in a process unique in British history, which is already affecting almost every aspect of national life in a negative way, without having yet revealed a single tangible advantage of the course chosen. There are piling up a bewildering volume of treaties and commercial relationships which have to be renewed even to keep the lights on and the food shelves stocked. The status of the citizenship of every Brit is uncertain, as are their rights and future prospects, while not a single opportunity for advancement has yet been revealed by an increasingly frantic Brexit faction. Latest opinion polls show a re-run of the Brexit referendum would reverse it. In other words there is no longer a majority in favour of this suicidal adventure.

May struggled to get the draft of her speech, which might have offered something to break the deadlock with Brussels in its original form, past her cabinet and the watered down version, of which a gleeful Boris is claiming to be the author, while conciliatory in tone, failed once again to offer the detail of how all the unbridgeable contradictions of our negotiating posture are going to be resolved. So once again the EU is perplexed and wondering what the next round, due to start tomorrow, will bring.

What Britain now needs above all is a government united enough to govern. Without it disaster beckons.