Bill Jamieson: 2019 will be the year of disintegration - across Britain, Europe and the wider world

Unusual map of the United Kingdom, map from cracked plaster

2018? Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish will be the summation of most. We yearn for a year of change.

But most predict that little is likely to change for the foreseeable future – more Brexit hassles and convulsions, Theresa May exhortations, Conservative Party splits, breathless punditry from College Green – and yet more John Bercow. Has there ever been such a hapless government where the Speaker has made things even worse? Can we really, honestly, take much more?

So this morning we can look out to good news... and bad. The bad news is that Brexit and its interminable, unresolved divisions is set to dominate news bulletins well into 2019. The good news is that we are likely to see the onset of a Great Disintegration - across the UK, the EU and the wider world.

Whether the catalyst at home is a referendum or general election matters less than that a catalysis is at hand. The old order, if such it can be called, cannot hold. The year 2019 will go down as one of momentous convulsion. Old alignments collapse and give way to the new.

Disorderly it will certainly be. From a historical perspective it may be perceived as swift and sudden. But living through it as events unfold through 2019 and beyond, we are more likely to find them anything but swift and the pace frustrating.

The Great Disintegration is set to take several forms. The most pressing and immediate is a break-up or splintering of the UK Conservative Party after all the divisions of the past two and half years.

Now forecasts of a Conservative Party rupturing have been multiple and few have come true. It has been one of the UK’s most enduring institutions, with an astonishing capacity for adaptation. Its core attitudes can often seem utterly outdated. But in outlook, idea and leadership it can suddenly skip decades and cast itself anew. This is the party that survived the Corn Law ruptures and the convulsions of the Joseph Chamberlain Liberal-Unionist ascendancy.

But the divisions over Europe did not begin in 2016. This is an issue that has split the party for more than 40 years. Such is the gulf now, between the likes of Anna Soubry and her Remain supporters on the one hand and Jacob Rees-Mogg and the Brexiteers on the other that it is hard to see how they can fight on the same side in a general election.

No less problematic for the party is the weariness – if not open contempt - now evident among its grass roots supporters. Many have now joined that smouldering cauldron labelled (for now) ‘None of the Above’. This could well see a fracturing of the party and the emergence of a new Centre Right grouping that could capture hundreds of constituency associations.

Stormy divisions are just as likely to erupt within Labour as the party struggles to find a coherent policy over Brexit that can unite Leavers and Remainers. Adopting a soft ‘Norway minus’ model retaining open borders and Single Market membership could see supporters in its traditional heartlands deserting in droves.

Amidst this, politics in Scotland has come to seem a model of calm and moderation. Holyrood has not descended into vituperative argument. Yet not even the monolithic, highly disciplined SNP is immune from schism.