Brexit Was an Act of Wish-Fulfillment Totally Unmoored From Reality. Sound Familiar?

Prime Minister Theresa May was defeated in a landslide vote on Tuesday in Parliament, where lawmakers rejected her Brexit deal by a vote of 432 to 202 - a pure humiliation for a British leader who has spent the past two years negotiating her failed withdrawal agreement with Brussels. May stood almost alone, as many in her own party abandoned their leader and left Britain’s future relationship with the European Union unclear.

Jeremy Corbyn, the opposition Labour Party leader, called the loss historic - and unrivaled since the 1920s. He said her process of “delay and denial” had lead to failure. He then introduced a motion of no-confidence, to be debated on Wednesday. During the evening debate, as the members in the chamber hooted and jeered, the speaker gaveled the members to quiet, complaining of the “noisy and unseemly atmosphere."

“The House must calm itself. Zen!” John Bercow shouted.

The rising Labour Party star David Lammy recalled how he had confronted his constituents who sympathized with the violence carried out by rioters in London in 2011. Now he said felt the same duty to confront his neighbors over Brexit.

“Why? Because we have a duty to tell our constituents the truth, even when they passionately disagree,” Lammy said. “Brexit is a con, a trick, a swindle, a fraud.” In an emotional speech, Geoffrey Cox, a Conservative lawmaker and the Attorney General, urged the chamber to back May’s deal to avoid legal uncertainties. “You are not children in the playground, you are legislators - we are playing with people's lives," Cox said.

Historians scoured the past for comparisons for the scale of defeat.Scholars had to go as far back as the 19th century to find a comparable party split and parliamentary defeat - to Prime Minister William Gladstone’s support for Irish home rule in 1886, which cut the Liberal Party in two.

Her supporters say May will not resign, despite the crushing defeat. They suggest instead that May might return to Brussels, to seek new concessions over the controversial provisions about the Irish border - or even attempt to reopen talks. It is also possible that she might seek negotiations among all parties in Parliament to see what kind of deal, if any, they could agree upon.

And nation states with ambitions to remain part of the international community cannot simply jettison their commitments like so much unwanted ballast. One of those commitments is the Belfast Agreement. To adopt a term from medical insurance, Northern Ireland is a pre-existing condition of the British state. It is just as much British history as Agincourt and Dunkirk are – and, right now, much more so. And it exerts a gravitational pull that cannot be escaped. Karl Marx said that we make our own history but we do not do so in circumstances of our own choosing. The basic problem of Brexit is that it embraces the first part of this dictum while ignoring the second. The circumstances in which the history of these islands is being made include both 45 years of common membership of Europe and 30 years of the Troubles. Those years cannot be wished away.