The logic of Brexit's present journey through spring and summer is obvious. But the continuing rage against the 'Brexit saboteurs' and the calls for various mini-Churchill substitutes for Teresa May as Prime Minister, in the Tory Party, in the newspapers and on-line, makes it worth spelling out just what the real possibilities in the next six months are.
The obstacle, which has meant that no Brexit 'deal' with the EU can get any sort of majority among the parties in Parliament, along with the failure of every possible arrangement of the MPs, might only be dissolved in one of four ways. Those four options are familiar but, not surprisingly, two of them also begin to expose the real nature of Britain's democracy.
First (and the worst) is that the chance there will be a long reflection among MPs who will then 'compromise' sufficiently so that a clear majority on Brexit emerges. Some MPs already believe the notion that Easter holidays and the evolution into a languid summer will chill hot-headedness and allow MPs to compromise and vote for PM May's 'deal. Others believe that the Labour Party will make a deal (as amended) with May's Tory supporters.
The second possibility would be the expansion of the plot marked 'the removal of Prime Minister May.' Her departure would pave the way for the unification of the Tories and their little helpers, the DUP. Thirdly, more time must mean that a trend towards a new referendum becomes more likely because the pressure from the public is increasingly leaning that way. And the fourth, the most unlikely and, apparently' the most irrelevant move, according to the mainstream media, the Labour Party's call for for a General Election would succeed and a Labour government would carry out its programme for Brexit.
Going through these ideas using simple logic, there is no reason why extending 2 years by another 7 months would substantially change MPs opinions. The big majority of MPs have worked and thought, both long and hard, as to what their interests are and where they lie, in the past, today and tomorrow.
Equally, the removal of May as leader of the Tory Party does not effect the number of votes in Parliament. Getting rid of May would look like something serious was being done. It would re-scramble the Cabinet. It would also dump any deal that the Labour Party might have foolishly agreed with May. But the numbers are still remorseless. It was not just May's original deal that has been shot down. A Labour influenced deal would entirely regroup the Tories and the DUP against it. A new Tory PM's main purpose would be the destruction of Labour's leadership as his or her's priority - even before Brexit.
The only two remaining routes to break the Brexit block in Parliament, a new referendum or a General Election, are different. Both measures change the face of Parliament. One alters it by the decision of the people's vote and the other, more substantially and cogently, by altering the MPs who are currently in Parliament. And it is the examination of these two potentially successful approaches to remove the Brexit block which lays bare something of Britain's hidden democracy.
Both such initiatives would shake up the now rigid numbers in Parliament. In the case of a new referendum, it would not change MPs but pressurise them, depending on the result. The consequence would be to re-align Parliament on the Brexit issue, according to the size of the vote in the country. The Brexit block would thereby be 'solved.' Hurrah.
But of course it wouldn't. Which now opens up the question of what is British 'democracy'?
It has been decades, three quarters of a century, since the British Parliament has really been able to decide on any major issues of wealth and power in Britain. For British MPs to determine deep questions for the country is extremely rare. The centres of great wealth decide issues of power in the UK. Indeed, the 'free' market', and its autonomy from democratic decision making, is the utterly ludicrous definition of a society in the West, and is offered as a principle of the Western, including the British, democratic system! The acceptance, indeed promotion, of a 'free' market is just one of the extraordinary contradictions the confronts genuine democratic decision making. And yet it is lauded as democracy's finest hour. Membership of the EU internationally reinforces, but does not create, the virtually total independence of Britain's wealth from Britain's democracy.
Why then has Britain and its people been mobilised primarily, and so passionately, around Brexit? Yes, Britain's large scale rulers loath Brexit and savour the reinforcement of the EU. So Brexit has symbolically been represented to the people as the reason for failure of that ruling class to maintain the living standards, the welfare and the social structure that makes life bearable for many. And yes; right wing political forces, from the right of the Tory Party outwards, nail the EU as the cause and centre of the failure of Britain - deliberately. First because a layer of revanchist capital in Britain smells low tax and big money. Second because the single minded focus on the EU, on Brexit, helps distort the reality of a City of London-led social and economic system that is breaking up its past, at least for the population that has to live with it. To that degree Brexit is a simple but gigantic diversion.
It should be understood that the effect of another referendum on Brexit will simply reinforce this diversion from real democracy. Deciding that the decisive issue is membership of the EU is, equally, the avoidance of the real, main source of Britain's malaise. More worryingly, the serious division of Britain's working class will remain and possibly deepen as the decision of the poorest sectors of society are rejected. The final 'success' of the EU option would, under current conditions, strengthen the poisonous class-collaboration in society so desired by ex Blairites etc. Because the Brexit 'solution' has, partially successfully, defined the resistance of the failure of the British economic and political system from the point of view of a large movement of people, a roll-back of of the 2016 referendum would be taken as a defeat by a large section of the British working class. In the narrow and deliberate context created for the British people, one that covers up the real necessities of democracy to change the system that they are forced to live in, a new referendum will simply deepen the fog and make change harder.
That is why the only effective way to remove the Brexit block in Parliament is a General Election. Why? Because the possible success of a Labour government opens the potential of winning, in practise, a different platform, a new 'common sense' over the Brexit block. If and when millions vote for a new government with a broad reform program, Brexit can find its proper place as one aspect of the need for change; a need for change primarily centred in British institutions with their global reach, which the EU reinforces, but does not define or create.
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