More of the same for 2018?

WHAT’S happening now is off the scale. I can’t remember a time in British politics when different wings of the Tory party wanted to destroy each other more than they wanted to destroy the left. I can’t remember this level of viciousness in the briefing and whispering campaigns politicians conduct against each other.

It’s as if every minor issue has become framed around the existential issues.

The first one is obvious: Brexit. Two generations of lawyers, bankers, accountants and corporate managers had become so moulded to the Lisbon Treaty, the European court of justice and the commission that even now, 18 months after the referendum, some are struggling to get beyond the denial stage.

The second existential issue is the one where most right-wing papers print headlines like: “The possibility of a Marxist in No.10”.

Combining the Government’s defeat on the Brexit process with the fear of a radical left government in 2018 goes to the heart of the British elite’s internal civil war.

Brexit was supposed to make the rich popular again.

It was the great rhetorical wheeze that would reunite the Boris Johnsons and the Rees-Moggs with the plebs amid a bonfire of regulations and a sick-inducing spasm of British nationalist joy.

It well and truly lost its cool in 2017 – and the repercussions are echoing across public life.

Oppose the Government and you’re a traitor. Support Labour and you’re a Marxist traitor.

Defend progressive values and you’re a luvvie – formerly slang for people in theatre, transformed by the tabloids into slang for people who care about knowledge, reasoned argument and restraint. Here is to 2018 and I can’t see much changing from 2017.