THERE are discarded mattresses lying abandoned on paths over wasteground which would provide a better opposition to the Conservatives than the Labour party. They’d certainly offer greater protection. An abandoned mattress on a path is a much greater obstacle to the progress of the Tories than anything Labour can muster, but it is rank, saggy, uncomfortable, covered in stains which speak of a suspicious past, lacking in support, and it doesn’t take much to knock the stuffing out of it. So it’s not that much unlike the Labour party after all then.

Labour’s great victory this week, if we believe them, was to get Theresa May to agree to a meaningful vote in the week of January 14. The legal deadline for the meaningful vote expires on January 21, so Labour’s great victory has at best managed to get Theresa May to hold the vote a couple of days before the clock ticks out on her. Whoop, and indeed, dee-doo.

The week of January 21 was always going to be Theresa May’s preferred timetable, and Labour have let her run down the clock exactly as she wanted to.

Another month has been wasted. We have one of the worst governments in living memory, a government whose sole asset is that they’re facing one of the worst official oppositions in living memory. We have a Prime Minister who can say with a straight face that she doesn’t want another referendum because it would damage the integrity of British politics without the slightest hint of realisation of the utter galactofarce of her statement. She’s delaying a vote on her Brexit deal until January, when even the nasty wee craiturs inhabiting the abandoned mattress know that nothing is going to change between now and then.

Theresa May is the political version of the mythical oozlum bird, flying round and round in ever decreasing circles until it disappears up its own rear end, all the while crowing: “My deal or no deal! I’ve been very clear!” And still Labour isn’t hammering the Conservatives in the polls.

Labour is as confused and magical in its thinking as the Conservatives, and like the Conservatives it routinely insults the intelligence of the general public. Members of the Shadow Cabinet are still able to go on the telly box or the radio and make pinky promises that after a snap General Election Labour would be able to negotiate a much better deal than Theresa’s despite the EU ruling out any other deals.

But Labour insists that not only are they able to do the impossible, but they’ll also negotiate a full trade deal which would retain all the advantages of membership of the single market and the customs union. All before March 30. It’s a laughable proposition.

Corbyn spent Monday doing a hokey cokey about a vote of no confidence. First he said he’d introduce a no-confidence motion, then he said he wouldn’t, then he said he would again. Corbyn doesn’t want a proper binding no-confidence vote until he can be certain of winning it. What he really wants to avoid is forcing the vote and losing it, because then the resolution passed at the Labour party conference would mean that he’d have to focus on the next option, having a second referendum. And he really doesn’t want another referendum because Jeremy is as much a fan of Brexit as most of the Tory party.

A vote of no confidence in Theresa May wouldn’t bring down the government. It’s purely symbolic and has no meaningful effect. That’s why Corbyn tabled the motion. It’s an exercise in futility and as such is a metaphor for the Labour party.

According to convention, if the Prime Minister loses a vote of no confidence in the Commons, she should tender her resignation. But then if she respected convention we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. If this government respected convention then Cabinet ministers would have resigned after the government was held in contempt of parliament last week. Convention also says that the government should make time for a motion of no confidence put forward by the leader of the Opposition, but there’s nothing to force them to do so, certainly not for the meaningless motion proposed by Jeremy Corbyn.

So the Tories have done the predictable thing and have signalled that they won’t grant time for Jeremy’s motion until after the Christmas break. That means that the pressure has been turned back on the leader of the Opposition. Will he up the ante and turn his motion into a full-blown motion of no confidence in the Government, which could be held this week, or will his bluff be called. Then he’d risk losing and the chances of an early General Election would be much slimmer, forcing the Labour leader to focus on pressing for a referendum. But Jeremy doesn’t want the public to have a say any more than Theresa does. That would mean having to come up with a coherent and believable policy on Brexit that doesn’t insult the intelligence of the voter. It would expose the divisions which run through the Labour party.

Instead of putting pressure on Theresa May, all that Jeremy Corbyn managed to do was to weaken his own position. The Tories are in disarray, they’re presenting a target as large as David Davis’s ego, and Labour still can’t score a point off them.

All this is a perfect illustration of why a written constitution is required. Under the UK’s famously unwritten constitution, the hard-and-fast laws and rules binding the government to act in a particular way in most democracies are replaced by a series of conventions and precedents.

A brazen enough government can ignore these and create new precedents of its own. If it were possible to polish the brass necks of this government, the reflected light could stand in for the Blackpool Illuminations. This isn’t a Tory coup d’etat, it’s just a cowp.

Please, Nicola. Save us from this mess. We’re not sure how much more of this we can take. We need a Scottish ballot on a nicely symbolic date that will bring out the voters in their droves to vote for Scottish independence. How about calling

the independence referendum for March 29, 2019?