Kelly’s Eye

British politics is currently undergoing an earthquake. What emerges from it is still unclear. That the fundamental new dividing line will be between Leave and Remain has been indisputable for a long time. What is now apparent is that the potential biggest victims of this seismic realignment will be the Conservative and Labour parties.

There’s a slight echo in the current situation of what happened after the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.

On that occasion, its two leading participants, the Ulster Unionist Party and the Social Democratic & Labour Party were sidelined by the more unequivocal opposites in the province’s divide: the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein.

We might still be far away from the Brexit Party and Liberal Democrats doing the same thing (though these days, who knows?).

But in Westminster’s case, the neutering of democracy which lies at the heart of the entire European Union project has slow-dripped its poison deep enough into the veins of our two major parties to prove potentially fatal to both.

Both are hopelessly compromised by those within their ranks who stood on manifesto commitments to take the UK out of the EU with no intention of respecting those pledges once safely re-elected.

And leading members of both parties are now conniving to block the electorate any further say until they feel sure they have locked us in the EU indefinitely.

If they succeed in that aim, the voters’ verdict might not even become fully apparent until the next election but one (how depressing does that sound?), given the fragmented nature of the opinion polls at present and the vagaries of the first-past-the-post voting system.

But if they do succeed in that aim they should enjoy their moment while they can.

For ultimately, it will merely further polarise the Leave-Remain split and render the old labels of Labour and Conservative increasingly irrelevant.