IT’S the party conference season, and watching British politics in full flow is like watching a reality TV show featuring some half-cut and deeply egoistic people having an argument about who is in love with whom when none of them are capable of loving anyone except themselves.

The only real difference is that the reality TV “stars” have much nicer teeth and have invested more in skin treatments, but watching them in full flow is every bit as pointless and divorced from the real world as a British party conference.

The LibDems had their conference a week or so ago, but no-one really noticed, nor indeed cared. You can write a deeply geeky blog article about some arcane points of Scots phonetics, spelling, and grammar and it will get more comments, shares, and retweets than when you write about the LibDem party conference. This is because it’s considerably more relevant to the future of Scotland than anything that the LibDems come out with, and unlike the LibDems it’s not hypocritical at all.

The LibDem solution to their hypocritical policy of wanting a second referendum on Brexit because people were lied to but not wanting a second referendum on Scottish independence because the LibDems were amongst those doing the lying is to insist that their second EU referendum won’t be a second referendum at all. It will be a first referendum on the facts of Brexit that is being delivered as opposed to the Brexit that was promised. In the exact same way, the second Scottish independence referendum will be a referendum on the facts of the Union that was delivered as opposed to the Union that Scotland was promised, but you won’t get the LibDems to admit that. Hypocritical as it is, the LibDems are the only UK party which actually has a coherent policy on Brexit.

The Labour conference started on Monday, the Tories don’t have their conference until later in the month, so Labour is leading the way.

This is possibly the only context in which that sentence has any meaning outside of an alternate universe in which the party is halfway competent.

Labour’s conference does appear as though it is coming to us from an alternate universe, one in which Labour actually won the General Election instead of coming second. Labour’s expectations were so low that not getting gubbed by as much as everyone expected them to get gubbed is hailed as a victory. This alternate universe is also, quite coincidentally, an alternate universe in which Brexit is a far distant event which is happening to other people.

Brexit is the most important issue facing the country since the Second World War. It’s an issue which threatens untold damage to the economy, and has the potential to leave the UK more politically isolated than a Scottish Tory who doesn’t like Ruth Davidson. The Tories are using Brexit to rip up human rights legislation, workers rights, and to neuter what’s left of the power of parliament to hold the Government to account, and in their party conference the Labour leadership has decided that they’d prefer not to talk about it at all.

The conference got off to its traditional start – blaming other parties for things that Labour did when it was in office. The highlight of first day was John McDonnell’s plan to abolish the disaster that is PFI schemes, which are costing the NHS and schools millions of pounds a year and have led to many health authorities in England being on the verge of bankruptcy. Railing against the evils of this vile capitalist scheme to impoverish the public sector, John naturally forgot to mention that they’d been a Labour idea and had largely been implemented by a Labour government. That’s Labour for you, only virtuous when in opposition.

The Labour conference has already featured a delegate from Scotland making an impassioned speech about equal pay for women in Glasgow cooncil, and how the scandal of women council workers taking home less than their male counterparts illustrates why Glasgow needs a Labour council and Scotland needs a Labour government. It’s just a terrible shame that the delegate neglected to mention that Glasgow had a Labour council until May last year, and that it was the Labour council which created the problem and then fought tooth and nail when the women protested and sought justice. Labour’s biggest problem in Scotland is the party’s unshakeable belief that the electorate have the attention span of a goldfish, or indeed the attention span of a Labour conference delegate from Scotland.

But the biggest issue at the Labour conference is the issue that’s not officially there. Brexit isn’t being debated at the Labour conference because the party doesn’t want to draw attention to a hypocrisy that even the LibDems would baulk at. The Labour Party only managed to avoid a total malkying at the General Election because it attracted the votes of people opposed to Brexit, particularly young people, but Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are as enthusiastic about Brexit as Liam Fox, Michael Gove, and those young voters’ grandparents in Essex. Labour has decided to solve this conundrum by pretending that Brexit doesn’t exist.

This conveniently avoids the need to expose the party’s divisions and lack of any Brexit plans, and means Labour can continue its existing policy of a Schrodinger’s cat Brexit, in which the party is simultaneously in favour of Brexit while being opposed to it.

We’ve been debating Brexit for months, protested Keir Starmer, Labour’s shadow secretary of state for exiting the EU as he stared at Channel 4’s Jon Snow with wide-staring eyes like a rabbit in the path of an on-coming EU registered lorry. We don’t need to debate it at conference, he insisted. Everyone loves our Brexit position, even if they don’t know what it is, he asserted with all the plausibility of David Mundell telling the SNP government that Scotland is being fully consulted on the Brexit process. Just a few hours earlier he’d told the assembled delegates that the Tory position on Brexit was one of “constructive ambiguity”. This is to be contrasted with the Labour position, which is to keep the ambiguity and to do without the constructiveness.

There’s no need for Labour to consult its membership on Brexit, they’d only say things that the leadership doesn’t want to hear. This means that Labour members ought to realise by now what Scotland feels like in the UK. No wonder the Tories are getting away with destroying the country, Labour’s scarcely fit to be an opposition, never mind an alternative party of government.