indicative vote

So the hapless UK House of Commons, having been unable to find a Brexit plan, or anti-Brexit plan, that a majority of MPs will support, decided in the teeth of the government to hold an "indicative vote," that is, a sense of the House that didn't bind them to anything. And instead of voting on a series of proposals, whose order of consideration might affect the outcome, they took the possibly unprecedented step of voting on all of them at once. Eight varied proposals appeared on the voting paper, and MPs could vote for as many of them as they approved of.

And they all lost. All of them. This only proves what we already knew: that there is no path through this thicket that a majority of MPs support. That means one of two things will happen.

One is that, no matter how many times the House passes a resolution against a no-deal hard Brexit, it will happen, just two weeks later than originally expected, because that's the default course they're on now, and will stay on unless they choose another one, and as we've seen they can't agree on another one.

The other is that somebody - remotely the UK government, possibly the EU, more likely the House - changes their mind. Theresa May's plan seems to be to keep submitting her exit plan over and over until deadline pressure forces the MPs to recognize that it's this or a no-deal hard exit. The problem is that the MPs most susceptible to government pressure in general are also the ones who are least bothered by, and in some cases welcome, the idea of hard Brexit.

But since the indicative vote is intended to be the beginning of discussion, maybe the wise old heads like Letwin and Clarke will come up with some meeting of the minds.

Here's something to think about, though. Here's a list of how everybody voted. I had wondered - did anybody vote against all the proposals? Turns out that 28 MPs - all but two of them Tories - did.

And I thought: what if you couldn't do that? If enough people vote against everything, then of course anything will lose. But surely you have to be in favor of something, even if it's revocation (which was one of the options). What if those 28 were disallowed on the grounds that nihilism isn't an acceptable option?

Subtract 28 from the no votes, and two of them win. Ken Clarke's permanent customs union, which came closest at 264-272, would win at 264-244. So would Margaret Beckett's request for a confirmatory vote, which would squeak through at 268-267. (A number of other MPs abstained on some items and voted no on all the rest; subtracting them doesn't change any additional outcomes.) Nor are these two strictly contradictory, and I wonder if negotiations could start from there.