May Must Hold Her Line

There can hardly be a political appointment of less significance than vice-chair of the Tory party, but two of them have today resigned over May’s plan for  Brexit. It should be the Prime Minister’s aim to rid her administration, even down to such obscure levels, of hard Brexiteers who cannot support a sensible economy driven Brexit. May’s plan, which is in parts unworkable, nevertheless signals for the first time that the government has an idea what it wants and forms a jumping off point for negotiations based upon realism rather than fantasy and puts the welfare and prosperity of the people above achieving a state of ideological ecstasy.

One can only hope at this late stage in a process which for two years has gone round in circles, that negotiation will lead to compromise which is acceptable to Europe and the majority in Parliament and  the country. Whether you call it a sensible Brexit, a soft hard Brexit or a hard soft Brexit is up to you.

There are two big lessons in this idiotic Brexit saga. It was wrong to call a referendum in the first place, when nobody had worked out what Brexit meant and, having made that mistake, it was madness not to specify that a two thirds majority was required in order to effect change. As it is the country is split almost evenly between two opposing camps which are fracturing the whole fabric of our normally benign society and its long history of coherent governance. England is more divided now than it has been at any time since the Reformation. Moreover a hard Brexit, which costs jobs, savings and homes will threaten the Union itself. This is a very dangerous moment in which vice-chairs of one political party have no meaningful part to play, either one way or the other.