T HERE ARE few quick wins in politics at the moment, but a plan to crack down on domestic abuse should surely have been one of them. Measures to beef up the country’s laws against abusive partners won cross-party support when Theresa May’s government proposed them in the summer of 2017. A public consultation ended the following May. But then eight more months went by. The government at last published its draft bill this week, a year and a half after it was first mooted.

As Brexit has dominated, the rest of the government’s agenda has withered. Uncontroversial proposals like the domestic-abuse plan have moved slowly. Bigger reforms, to the National Health Service, for instance, have been delayed. Others seem to have been shelved altogether. A promised green paper on how to care for Britain’s increasingly numerous oldies, originally due last autumn, is still absent. The forthcoming spending review, which allocates cash to departments, has no date. And much of the legislation that has made it through has been fairly piddling. One law introduced a price cap on energy bills, a policy pinched from Labour. Another imposed stiffer punishments on people who shine lasers at aeroplanes.

It is a far cry from the programme that Mrs May laid out on becoming prime minister in 2016, when she promised to deal with the “burning injustices” of British society. Instead, she has spent most of her time putting out Brexit-related fires. Although the government has introduced 46 bills since 2017—about par for an administration—only 28 have been unrelated to Brexit. Subtracting bills on Northern Ireland (which is without its assembly and thus dependent on Westminster) and those required for the basic functioning of government, only 17 new bits of legislation have been introduced. The government is all but grinding to a halt.

One reason is a lack of capacity. The burden of preparing to leave the EU is badly hindering the civil service, points out Emily Andrews of the Institute for Government, a think-tank. Manpower is being shifted to cope. Bureaucrats from the Department for International Development (who are at least used to dealing with unstable banana republics) are being redeployed to other departments to help with Brexit planning. Even before the referendum, the proportion of big government projects in danger of over-running was rising (see chart). As a result, some policies are being deferred. John Manzoni, the chief executive of the civil service, put this situation in fluent bureaucratese on January 22nd, calling it “the beginning of a process of prioritisation”. Some blame the prime minister for worsening the situation. Other ministers’ aides complain of a lack of strategy in Downing Street, which they accuse of being unable to explain its priorities. Mrs May has carried on her habit from the Home Office of relying on inquiries and consultations. What once seemed like conscientious lawmaking increasingly looks like a figleaf for indecision. Last year a widely briefed plan to cut university tuition fees resulted instead in yet another review (since delayed). One senior Conservative MP describes Mrs May’s method of government as “valiant pugilism”. Rapid decision-taking and parliamentary dealmaking are things to which she is particularly ill-suited. “It’s a fantastic skill, her ability to do nothing,” says one of her former cabinet ministers, almost admiringly. Mrs May’s allies say the government is simply constipated. Civil servants were optimistically told to gear up to unleash a host of policies in anticipation of a successful vote for the government’s Brexit deal in December. “Departments were told to hold on to stuff,” says one adviser. “They are still holding it.” Brexit blocks up the “grid”, the Downing Street media planner that dictates when policies are announced. A host of reforms are ready to go, once the legislative laxative of passing a Brexit deal has taken effect, argue some aides.

They may be waiting a long time. A basic problem lies at the heart of the government’s agenda: it does not have the votes. Since 2017 the Tories have lacked a majority in the House of Commons. This makes Brexit, described by civil servants as the government’s trickiest peacetime task, even harder. “We would not be having the issue with Brexit if we had [an] 80-seat majority,” says one government adviser.

This has knock-on effects. Ministers are confined to the parliamentary estate, lest they miss a crucial vote, and so spend less time on the day job. Political instability saps ministerial ambition: why bother with tricky negotiations with Downing Street or the Treasury if the current occupants might not even be there in six months’ time? Even innocuous reforms run the risk of getting bogged down in proxy battles in the Brexit wars.

Yet Mrs May’s programme suffers from a more profound flaw. “There is a belief [in Downing Street] that there ought to be a bold agenda,” says one ministerial aide. “I worry that they don’t know what it is.” After more than two years in power, Mrs May and her team have failed to spell out a plan to fix those burning injustices.

The prime minister’s allies point out that she has found more money for the NHS, overseen a plan for its overhaul (albeit one drawn up by the NHS itself rather than the government) and enacted some small but successful measures, such as mandatory reporting of the gender pay gap for big companies. But on the big problems facing Britain—weak productivity growth, inadequate housing, crumbling social care and a grim long-term fiscal outlook, to name a few—Mrs May seems to be out of ideas.

Her domestic agenda has undoubtedly been hampered by Brexit, an overworked civil service and miserable parliamentary arithmetic. But the bigger problem is that such an agenda barely exists at all.