This defeat is the end of the Brexit PM. Bring on the general election
Force-feed them back their words. Theresa May’s deal was “even worse” than staying in the EU, declared Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary who resigned to oppose a deal he helped negotiate. This is a man
who once publicly confessed he didn’t understand Britain’s reliance on the Dover-Calais crossing.
The deal would turn Britain into a “vassal state”, declared Boris Johnson, a man who had penned a column backing remain days before endorsing leave; it was “about as bad as it could possibly be”.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man who believes women who seek abortions after being raped are committing a “second wrong”, upped the ante on absurd hyperbole, denouncing the deal as “the greatest vassalage since King John”, which would turn Britain into a “slave state”.
And yet they all loyally trooped through the division lobbies to vote, in their own words, for vassalage, slavery and a worse deal than EU membership. Why?
It’s for the same reason that Britain is currently in an international tailspin: because the perceived partisan interests of the Tories – less of a political party, more of an ancient Indian curse – trump the future of the country.
The House of Commons has just rejected the withdrawal deal for the third time, after MPs had already spurned it with, respectively, the biggest and fourth-biggest parliamentary defeats in the history of British democracy. In our era of bitter polarisation, despite bullying, bluster and blackmail, May achieved the unthinkable: uniting leavers and remainers alike in parliament
and the public against her deal.
Her deal is a trap – one that threatens workers’ rights, imposes legal restraints on public services and economic policies, and fails to protect either British or European citizens. It is a political blank cheque for whichever rightwing zealot succeeds her to unleash their dystopian designs.
But one thing is clear, and it is the first sensible thing May has uttered in her calamitous premiership. “I fear we are reaching the end of the process in this House,” she declared after her loss. In practice, this must mean a general election beckons. Those poor suckers on the Conservative benches are marching straight back into an electoral contest. Will there even be time for the captain to abandon ship?
May must hope that it will be the election she craved in 2017, in which the battle lines are over Brexit, and nothing else. This must not be allowed. After David Cameron showed himself to be the worst prime minister since the 18th century, and May responded with “Hold my beer,” she spoke eloquently – passionately, even – of the “burning injustices” that had led to Brexit.
But we cannot have an election contest simply about the customs union and access to the single market. It must also be about stagnating wages, the lack of secure jobs, surging child poverty, public services in turmoil and the housing crisis. This prime minister didn’t snuff out the burning injustices after all: she manically doused them with petrol.
Brexit is just one morbid symptom of a diseased, disintegrating social order. A coming election is the chance to remove the main source of Britain’s worst crisis since the war – which is Tory rule – but, more importantly, to repair the profoundly unequal, insecure society that has fuelled our turmoil.
The Tories rely on the politics of divide and rule to flourish: the unemployed versus the low paid, private-sector workers against public-sector workers, immigrants versus those born here, young versus old, and now – of course – remainers versus leavers. Labour’s task now is to unite Britons, however they voted in the referendum, and remind them that the division that really matters is between the majority, who have endured a lost decade, and those few who hoard wealth and power.
Out of May’s calamity, then, the hope of a new Britain emerges.
• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist