The Brexit Party and Change UK will flounder beyond May. Why? Because politics is about more than Brexit A favourite game among the politically engaged on Twitter is to keep track of how many of the guests on […]

A favourite game among the politically engaged on Twitter is to keep track of how many of the guests on the nation’s political TV programmes are Remainers or Leavers. The joy of the pastime is that whether you backed or opposed Brexit, you can produce a figure that confirms that the national broadcasters are biased against you.

The trick? If you count based on the positions of the politicians in question in 2016, you will invariably get a figure that skews towards Remainers. If you count based on the positions they hold in 2019, then you will end up with a figure that produces a surfeit of Leavers.

To take the last two weeks of political programming as an example: if what matters is the public positions taken in the referendum, then pro-Europeans triumph, with just a quarter of the bums on seats occupied by politicians who campaigned for a Leave vote in 2016.

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If what matters is whether those politicians support or oppose Brexit in 2019, then the figure goes the other way, with a quarter of the MPs on the nation’s TV screens backing an overturning of the referendum result.

An equal representation of where the country at large is ought to divide almost equally between Remainers and Leavers, so the one thing that you cannot say is that this week’s programmes – or any week’s – are really delivering.

Brexit is far from the only political issue

The reason for the representation problem is that while Brexit is the dominant issue of the age – the one taking up most of the time and energy of civil servants and ministers, the thing that dominates the news – it isn’t the only dominant issue. In the past fortnight alone, the SNP has called for another referendum on Scotland’s membership of the United Kingdom, the Labour party has proposed the abolition of standardised tests for primary school children, and the Green party has thrown its weight behind the ongoing protests against climate change.

Every single one of the SNP’s MPs – the third largest bloc in Parliament – are pro-Remain, so any televised discussion about independence by definition will have to include a Remainer. The only Green MP, Caroline Lucas, is a Remainer.

Just seven sitting Labour MPs openly backed a Leave vote in 2016, and none of them are frontbenchers – so any debate involving the official Opposition will be dominated by former Remainers. But it is Labour’s official position to back Brexit, which means that any debate involving the official Opposition will also shut out those politicians who still want to re-open the Brexit question.

The source of the representation problem is that politics is about a lot more than just Brexit. And this is exactly the problem facing the various parties trying to use the issue to trigger a wider transformation of British politics. First up, there’s the imaginatively named Brexit party, Nigel Farage’s new vehicle now that his old party, Ukip, has become an explicitly far-right party. If the polls are correct, they are on course to finish first in the European elections.

The success of the party is such that some Conservatives are talking up the need to emulate Farage’s new party in order to revive and rescue their old one. Nick Timothy, the architect of the disastrous 2017 general election result, now has a gig offering advice for present-day politicians, and thinks that the way forward is for the Tory party to become a party committed solely to Brexit. He’s by no means alone.

‘Change UK unifies around a belief that politics is broken, but is divided over who broke it, and when’

One-issue parties don’t win general elections

But the difficulties in emulating the Brexit Party outside a European election are obvious if you think about it for longer than five minutes.

Voters – not just in the United Kingdom but across the European Union – treat elections to the European Parliament as second-order affairs, opportunities to vote for anti-system parties if they bother to vote at all.

Farage has been widely praised for his wide and diverse range of candidates, from people who have served in the Armed Forces to people who supported those engaged in armed insurrection against it. The present-day jobs of its members range from working in conservation to those who have claimed that manmade climate change isn’t happening at all.

That doesn’t matter so much when they are fighting an election to a parliament they can all agree they don’t want to be part of. But it will come to matter a great deal when they are candidates in a general election and their positions on climate change, the economy and foreign policy are no longer a distant concern but a real issue. In a general election, the upper limit of their ambition will be 20 per cent, a spoiler rather than a serious prospect to win and hold power.

But that is rather better than the prospects of Change UK, the party formerly known as the Independent Group. They want to be more than a party that opposes Brexit, but believe their route to success lies in using the referendum question to reconfigure how people vote. But their problem is that they are fundamentally a party that can unify around a belief that politics is broken – but is divided over who broke it, and when. They can’t even seem to establish themselves as the unchallenged home of Remainers.

Their problem is the same as the one faced by the BBC when it tries to balance its panels: that ultimately politics is more complicated than just Remain or Leave, and that while Brexit is an important issue, it isn’t on its own enough to sustain and feed political divisions.

Stephen Bush is political editor at the New Statesman. Twitter: @stephenkb