TURNS out Game of Thrones was right after all.

Winter has come. Snow, ice and strikes. Welcome to Christmas 2022. Don’t bother sending any Christmas cards or try to catch a train to visit the in-laws. There’s every possibility that neither the cards nor you will make it.

It’s the winter of discontent. The sequel. In 1979 the bin men and the undertakers did for James Callaghan’s government. Will the RMT and the posties do for Rishi Sunak?

Frankly, we can only hope so. Because the UK badly needs a reset. Our transport system, our NHS, our postal service are all failing (these strikes are not only about pay), our rivers are full of sewage (in England and Wales in particular, but it’s happening in Scotland too). The UK faces the highest energy bills in the world. Northern Ireland doesn’t have a functioning government. The increasing need for emergency parcels from food banks nationwide should be a national scandal.

Crisis, what crisis? Just look around.

The zombie Government we have in Westminster is, it should be clear by now, not in any way fit to face the challenges we face. Many of those challenges, after all, are the result of the policies it has enacted over the last decade, from austerity to Brexit.

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If the Tories had any shame they would have resigned en masse after the debacle that was Liz Truss’s truncated premiership. But on they trudge, trying to score petty political points on the strikes and making speeches about immigration, attacking the European Court of Human Rights and engaging in voter suppression at a cost of £180 million over the next decade. Culture wars and union baiting. It’s all they’re good for. Can we really take two more years of this?

There is no sense that Rishi Sunak has any new ideas to bring to the table. The last few years have seen the Tories veer from chaotic to catastrophic. It is a party in dire need of reinvention. The truth is the Conservatives have been putting their needs ahead of the electorate for years now.

The Labour government in 1979 was a minority administration in a constant firefight to keep power. Despite its healthy majority, you could say the same of this current Tory administration. A Government that is just getting through the day for the most part, as the Prime Minister tries to placate the more egregious colleagues on the right of the party. He’s not as desperate to seek approving headlines via spurious policy announcements as Boris Johnson was, but he’s not against the idea. In office but not in power, as a former Chancellor of Exchequer said of one of Sunak’s predecessors.

The best thing that could happen to Britain is a General Election. In the spring. Let’s not wait until 2024. A chance to reboot. We need it desperately.

If the polls are to be believed that would result in a Labour government. We can debate the merits of that outcome, but it can’t be worse than the one we have.

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A fresh start could at the very least bring some of the ongoing debates to a head. In Northern Ireland the prospect of a Labour government might concentrate the minds of the DUP. In Scotland, if the election is indeed seen as a de facto poll on independence, then we might have a clearer notion of the will of the people rather than the ongoing indyref-or-not debate that dominates politics here.

Or maybe not. An election isn’t a panacea. There will be no miracles here. We will still be facing a cost of living crisis, huge energy bills, recession, the sharpest drop in living standards on record, the poisoning of political debate by social media extremists.

But the alternative is we drift along with a Government that is not really interested in fixing things because that requires effort and clear thinking and it seems incapable of offering either of these attributes. This Government is in the winter of its life. The rest of us need spring to come.