Meaningful Vote Four? Bercow says no

The Commons speaker may have finally ended the Meaningful Vote franchise, the least enjoyable multi-part series in cultural history

It has been Brexit: Groundhog Day for so long now, it is not merely that the Brexit: Groundhog Day comparisons have started to feel like Groundhog Day, it’s that comparisons of the comparisons have started to feel like Groundhog Day.

Where we are now is like watching Groundhog Day on a TV placed between two mirrors. It is like Groundhog Day like Groundhog Day like Groundhog Day like Groundhog Day, stretching over the horizon of time and space in an infinite universe where Brexit is all there ever is or was or can be everywhere and forever.

The movie Groundhog Day does have a happy ending, but to get there you have to spend upwards of a thousand years inventing, every single day, miserably innovative ways to end your own life. And that rather feels like the stage of Brexit in which we find ourselves.

After not so super Saturday came meaningless Monday. At the weekend, in a special sitting of parliament of the kind that is traditionally reserved for starting world wars, the House of Commons failed to have a meaningful vote on Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal, after the terms of the vote were amended into something else entirely.

On Monday afternoon, at 3.30pm, the government tried to make the House of Commons have that vote again. But Speaker John Bercow was having none of it.

“Today’s motion is in substance the same as Saturday’s motion and the house has decided the matter,” he said. “It will not be debated today.”

Have you read this one before? Yes you have. In March of this year, on a Monday afternoon, at 3.30pm, Theresa May wanted to have another vote on her Brexit deal, having already lost three of them. The speaker, John Bercow, told her it wouldn’t be happening.

And, in true Groundhog Day fashion, he has now done so again.

There is one way, of course, you can bring the same vote again – you have to prorogue parliament, have a Queen’s Speech, and start a new session. But No 10 rather burnt through that particular lifeline in the Supreme Court a few weeks ago.

No one makes predictions these days, but it is possible that with this latest intervention, Speaker Bercow has brought to an end the Meaningful Vote franchise. No one is quite sure if there were three, four or five editions of it, but there is certainly no disagreement that all have been equally terrible.

Naturally, the glib Brexit symmetries are there. Sir Desmond Swayne rose to tell the speaker that “it is quite right” that the House of Commons should not vote again on the same question, and for the very same reason there should be no second referendum.

Real centre-of-the-forehead genius, that, from an MP who, a few weeks ago, wrote a lengthy blog post on his own website about how it’s absolutely fine for white people to black up, and that he had recently blacked up to attend a fancy dress party as James Brown. So crucial was Sir Desmond’s contribution to the public debate on racism, and indeed so crucial to public debate is Sir Desmond’s own blog, that nobody detected the fact it had been written for almost an entire week.

It is also, perhaps, fair to suggest there is a slight difference between the government trying again to win a vote it lost not 48 hours before, and the public having a second referendum getting on for four years from the first.

For the House of Commons to vote again on an issue, Speaker Bercow explained, the “substance or the circumstances” need to have changed.

A second referendum does not come without peril, but it is reasonable to assume it would no longer be a vote on whether Turkey is joining the EU, and whether Brexit would lead directly to an extra £350m a week for the NHS.

We are stuck in what has come to feel like a Brexit word cloud. Bills can’t be voted on without being amended to death.

No agreement can be approved by the House of Commons without attempts to attach new bits to it, like a customs union, for example, all of which would require approval from the European Union, which is every bit as exasperated by Brexit as we are.

The proof of the deadlock is overwhelming. A general election can’t solve it either. A referendum would. It is starting to feel like it is a matter of time before that is the one proposal on which the House of Commons will agree.