Thanks for playing, Theresa May. We have some lovely parting gifts for you. From the Washington Post:

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.

Zen!

Fat chance.

Drinkers watch a television screen in the Red Lion public house on Whitehall, as it shows Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May speaking in the Houses of Parliament in London on January 15, 2019, after MPs vote against the government’s Brexit deal. TOLGA AKMEN Getty Images

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.

And, as always, Ireland's in the mix there somewhere.

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.

Gladstone's bill, it should be noted, lost 341-311, a squeaker compared to the very bad beat May got on Tuesday.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has introduced a motion of no-confidence in Prime Minister Theresa May. Ian Forsyth Getty Images

There's no question that May has made a horrible mess of the issue and, having done so, pitched that horrible mess as a choice between the horrible mess and the abyss. And now, having been handed an historic clobbering, May said she won't resign. And the UK is now lurching toward a March deadline with nobody truly at the wheel.

And, yes, Ireland's in the middle of that, too, via the Irish Times:

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.

A no-deal Brexit likely would mean the reinstatement of a "hard" border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the removal of which was one of the true triumphs of the peace process based in the Good Friday Agreement. As Fintan O'Toole wrote in The Irish Times:

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.

The Brexit vote was an act of wish-fulfillment. It certainly wasn't all that well-moored in reality. Its major opponents badly underestimated the power of wish-fulfillment in politics. Now, they have an ungodly fiasco on their hands. Americans should be able to identify with that.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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