This is What a Zombie Looks Like

UPDATE: From The Guardian's live stream:

Corbyn accused May of heading a “zombie government” and said any previous government would have resigned if it had lost as badly as May’s did last night. He said:

"Last week they lost a vote on the finance bill, that’s what’s called supply. Yesterday they lost by the biggest margin ever, that’s what’s regarded as confidence. By any convention of this house, by any precedence, loss of both confidence and supply should mean they do the right thing and resign …

"This government cannot govern and cannot command the support of parliament on the most important issue facing our country. Every previous prime minister in this situation would have resigned and called an election and it is the duty of this house to lead where the government has failed."

**** 

Under normal circumstances, a British prime minister would be expected to resign after losing a vote on a flagship policy. But the Brexit process has so unsettled political conventions that Mrs. May could survive to make revisions and pitch her deal again.

In December, Mrs. May survived a leadership challenge in her own Conservative Party and, under its rules, is safe from another until the end of the year.

“We have been in extraordinary circumstances,” said Nikki da Costa, a former director of legal affairs at 10 Downing Street. “Things that in normal times would not be considered survivable have become normalized. What the government would be looking for is a pathway through this.”

Ms. Da Costa predicted: “We will be doing this again in a couple of weeks’ time.”

Philip Cowley, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said he was struggling to identify a comparable defeat in the history of British politics.

“When you ask me for a historical benchmark, I can’t find any example,” Mr. Cowley said.

"May and Brexit Face Uncertain Future After Crushing Vote in Parliament," Stephen Castle and Ellen Barry

Despite sustaining a historical defeat on the principal policy of her government, prime minister Theresa May is poised to win a vote of confidence today. So cockeyed, the mainstream press is struggling to explain this to its readers. Castle and Barry emphasize a "Brexit changes everything" explanation, whereas the main Reuters story simply blows past the incongruity of losing by an unprecedented margin on your key initiative only to be voted up the next day by the same body that just rejected you by focusing on May's promise to consult with the opposition to hatch a Plan B.

What's really going on is that the Tories are doing whatever it takes to avoid elections that might bring a legitimate anti-war social democrat to power. It's a bizarre form of putsch where the putschists are already in power; the putsch is systemic and the victim is the voting public.

So the charade will begin anew. The problem is that for May to maintain the loyalty after the confidence vote of hard-line Tories and the Ulster DUP will require the prime minister to scrap the Irish backstop, and that's a non-starter for the EU because the EU has said it will not abandon Ireland.

A possible way out -- assuming the aforementioned unfolds: May triumphs today in the confidence vote and then concocts a Plan B that goes nowhere in Brussels -- is a suspension of Article 50 and the March 29 divorce date to allow for another referendum. It's a way forward that the mainstream supports, and I have no doubt that Remain would win this time. People are exhausted with the zombie and just want to be done with it.

Unfortunately it looks like the only thing that the British political system can deliver at this point is impasse.

Expect more of the same in the next couple of months. Yves Smith concludes in a post, "Brexit: Chaos," this morning:

May is very wedded to delivering Brexit. And she still seems to think someone will blink if she persists. The only thing that might change this dynamic is if the UK gets an extension and the idea of an Article 50 revocation gets traction in a big way in the coming months. But what is that path by which that occurs? Businesspeople, who you’d expect to have been making a forceful public case for the costs of Brexit, have been almost entirely missing in action. So perhaps I am suffering from a lack of imagination, but despite the high drama of yesterday's vote, nothing fundamental has yet changed.