The frustratingly even balance of opinion on Brexit is driving us all mad. There are loads of Brexiters around. There are loads of Remainers around. The demographic differences between them have been talked about a lot - but the link between geography, class, age and political orientation and your opinion on the EU isn't all that strong. So there are plenty of Labour Leavers and Tory Remainers and fairly few places where there are solid blocks of support for either view.
This is playing havoc with our parliamentary system. To win a majority in the House of Commons you need to be ahead of opposition in over half the seats. Having lots of support spread everywhere is no good at all. UKIP demonstrated this rather spectacularly in 2015 - but the Greens and Lib Dems have similar tales to tell.
The upshot of this is to make it difficult to know who to vote for if your main focus is Brexit. You might suppose that voting Tory was the best anti-EU option - but I imagine most Brexiters would rather have Kate Hoey than Dominic Grieve. And as it happens Ms Hoey represents one of the leavest places going.
We are now getting some very perverse results. Remain was clearly the most popular option among voters in the EU elections, but the Brexit Party topped the poll. In Brecon it appears that Brexit was still popular but the Lib Dems took the seat. This latter was attributed to an arrangement between the remain supporting parties and the Brexit Party splitting the leave vote.
So not surprisingly there is now a lot of talk of deals and alliances. The talk is loudest on the Brexit side because the Brexit Party could plausibly take enough votes from the Tories to deprive them of a majority and to hand the government to an anti-Brexit coalition. But the details of a possible Remain Alliance are getting discussed a lot too.
This is all fascinating stuff if you like that kind of thing. It's a bit like the biggest game of Freecell ever. I happen to be keen on those kinds of games and this is all right up my street. But I think nonetheless that this is all a big distraction. The real battle isn't over the way you carve up the support to maximise your power. It's about winning people over to your idea. If Brexit can only be stopped by deploying a cunning plan, how much longer can it really be delayed by? And if the Brexit Party has been set up to fight for what it believes in, how come it is compromising with another party on its very first election?
The other problem with pacts and deals is of course that voters don't come with a barcode. Few people identify that closely with a particular party or idea and are quite likely to vote in ways and for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with the calculations of party strategists. The plain fact is that if you want to beat Brexit the best way to do it is to convince people who currently support it that it isn't a very good idea. It's harder work but it's the only way. Brexiters have an even tougher job. They not only need to get Brexit delivered, they need to prevent Britain simply drifting back into the EU one step at a time. I have no idea whether having a dedicated Brexit Party is the best way to do it or not. But I am pretty sure that whatever the optimum approach is it is one heck of a long term project.
Ultimately politics is about putting together a programme that works and getting support for it. Brexit is not something that can be taken out and treated as a seperate thing. If you have a vision for the future of the UK outside the EU, you need to win people over to that vision and then translate it into a set of policies and structures that all work together. It's hard work, but it is the only way to do it. The 1983 Labour Party manifesto was a pretty good stab at this. The SNP's plan for independence for Scotland was an even better model.
The next general election is going to be unpredictable and probably rather exciting. But it isn't ulitmately going to be that important. The future will be determined by who wins the argument.
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