May and Corbyn are meeting over tea and biscuits when they should be trading blows in a general election

Brexit has brought paralysis to parliament and smothered political debate. We are used to scoffing at single-issue parties, but we have become a single-issue country. It is damaging and bewildering all at once.

Some have argued that a general election wouldn’t solve a thing. Polls have shown the two main parties are neck and neck, the argument goes, and another election will only lead to more parliamentary deadlock. We’d be back to where we are now with no progress on Brexit whatsoever.

But that seems too timid. If there is one thing the 2017 snap election taught us it’s that sharp swings can happen when people are asked to vote about the issues that actually affect their daily lives.

Right now, our political life is dominated by a Conservative Party barely able to make it through each day, and now pleading for help from the opposition. Why should they blunder on unchallenged, regardless of the “special circumstances” provided by Brexit?

It is hard to imagine another scenario in which multiple government defeats and open Cabinet revolt would have raised so few calls to send the people back to the ballot box.

The trouble is that Brexit has so shattered political normality that May has been able to convince people that an election would be a chaotic waste of time (and she should know). We have been sold the fear that it would only bring in another hung parliament; sold a fear that far-right parties might find new bases of support; but most of all sold a fear that a Corbyn-led Labour government is somehow a worse option that the dysfunctional cabal in place right now.

Of course, any government would try to avoid calling an election that it might well lose. Theresa May has learned that lesson better than most. But rarely has the political and economic landscape of this country seemed more in need of a revolution.

Labour’s goal under Corbyn is to wrestle Britain back from the neoliberal model that gave us the decline of post-industrial Britain and the global financial crisis; to redistribute wealth to the regions, reduce the power of the financial sector and boost workers’ rights.

Whatever you think of the likely success of those policies, they are at least a genuinely different approach, an alternative offer to people whose frustration with Westminster might otherwise tempt them to drift towards the far-right peddlers of twisted solutions to our predicament. It should be encouraging that the latest polls show burgeoning support for Labour.

Brexit has served to mask the last decade or so of discredited Tory austerity that has devastated the most vulnerable parts of the public sector. Their time in office has seen the consistent humiliation of disabled people while the poorest in society have been forced into a horrifying benefits regime.

Theresa May’s reign was supposed to be different. But even if you believed her bluster about governing for the “just about managing” (when have the Tories ever catered to that demographic?) their energies have been so exhausted by Brexit that any domestic programme has been taken off the agenda – and to what end?

May’s disastrous red lines have left us in a place where eight days before we are due to leave the EU we are careering towards no deal, bereft of any concrete idea of how to stop ourselves.

If this isn’t a government that needs to test its mandate with the people of Britain, then it’s hard to know how poor a government would need to be. A general election would allow the electorate to shout from the rooftops that there is more to our lives than the internecine struggles in the Tory party and the slapstick tumble towards Brexit.

During the 2017 snap election, against a hostile press, Labour gained 20 points on the back of hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic activists taking the message out on to the streets. Since then, Corbyn has struggled to attract voters from across the divide and failed to land blows on the Tories even while they tear each other apart over Brexit – but the ground game remains Labour’s secret weapon.

There is little reason to suggest it couldn’t make a similar impact if an election was called tomorrow.

For the Tories, losing to Corbyn is their worst nightmare. Like Thatcher changed the landscape of British politics, the Labour leader’s plan is every bit as ambitious. His hope is to create new institutions and social practices that become so embedded in society that the Tories will end up having to follow the electorate leftwards.

Just as Blair aped Thatcher’s agenda to widen Labour’s support, Corbynites hope the next Tory leader will be forced to play the game on their turf.

The fear of Corbyn’s agenda might be overblown – much of Labour’s programme isn’t more radical than 1970s social democracy – but the terror the Tories feel about an election loss is warranted. If executed as planned it would mean a reconfiguration of political and economic power in favour of the less well off – and if you’re a Tory MP why would you want that?

It’s no wonder then that, while she can, the prime minister prefers to meet the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition in the tea room rather than on the hustings.