Bernard Ingham: How will this mutinous crew naviage our troubled times?

Does anybody know what they are doing? Well, at least Theresa May is moving to pull the plug on the EU, otherwise known in the trade as invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.

But that does not mean that the crew of HMS UK will row together to secure the best deal from Brussels. Far from it. It will set off a new round of vicious infighting between the Brexiteers and the Remainers that will do nothing for our negotiators trying to secure a good deal for the people in line with their expressed will – Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, makes my point by threatening a second independence referendum two-and-a-half years after the SNP lost the 2014 vote.

Behind the sound and fury lies the abject poverty of British politics today. I doubt whether it has been in a more parlous state this side of the 1930s when palsy in the face of crippling unemployment and the rise of fascism did our nation a disservice.

The trouble is that no party knows what it really stands for.

You may say that the Greens are crystal clear. They want to save the planet from what, for all Prince Charles’ certainty over global warming, is a very dubious proposition. But that’s it.

They do not seem to care about the cost to the consumer through subsidies for such useless technologies as wind and solar power and the biomass (wood) that Drax burns damagingly at public expense.

The Scottish Nationalists are besotted with independence from their hated sugar daddy south of the border in order to exchange it for subservience to the EU. But that’s it. It identifies them as rank hypocrites whose economic ignorance is already wrecking their economy just as surely as Jeremy Corbyn would the UK’s if given half the chance.

Along with the Greens, they, the 
Welsh Nationalists and Sinn Fein would love to see Corbyn at work with his wrecking ball, while the Liberal Democrats would willingly work to 
finish off Britain as an independent nation. And that’s it.

Which brings me to the Labour Party. Nothing since he was elected 18 months ago has advertised Corbyn’s utter emptiness than his response to Chancellor Philip Hammond’s first Budget. It was a litany of the ills of a society that the Left have been laying at the door of the Tories since Keir Hardie was a lad.

It owed nothing to reality as he paraded food parcels and rough sleepers along with confirmation that he has not had an original thought since the third form.

The Labour Party is manifestly in despair. The sensible majority in Parliament know they will do well to escape with their seats at the next election so long as Corbyn and his comic of a shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, hang on. Yet they have adopted Stanley Baldwin’s 1930s’ policy of wait-and-see what turns up for fear of the de-selection zeal of the Momentum mob of Trots behind Corbyn.

Labour resembles more a gibbering wreck than an alternative government.

This leaves the Conservatives, who don’t know what they are doing, either, as Chancellor Hamnond demonstrated with his taxing budget.

They are ideologically insecure under Mrs May who came to office on perhaps a classic social democratic platform, including workers on boards. Labour MPs who know their unions think that is asking for trouble.

Hammond seems not to have grasped the point that when it comes to tax you level down instead of levelling up by clobbering the self-employed and those seeking probate after the death of a loved one.

So, wherever you look, British 
politics is in a state of flux as we move to extricate ourselves from the EU. Labour is finding it difficult to survive a relatively prosperous society. Under Mrs May, the Tories have forgotten that the best way to a voter’s heart is to run a sound economy that leaves his money to fructify in his pockets.

And prominent Conservatives are 
as scarce on the ground as Labour 
leaders in trying to recover some sure connection for their party with the ordinary voter.

I am wary of all intellectuals. They have crushes on ideas and are invariably financially incontinent. But if the political ship up the creek is not to go down like a stone we need some deep thinking, a recovered sense of direction and a sure “feel” for the public mood.