5 weeks… but what now? September 10, 2019
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
It’s amazing how Boris Johnson can’t even keep his stories straight. He doesn’t want an election? Actually last night…“he wanted to head to the polls next month to break the political deadlock, as he accused opposition parties of making “outrageous excuses” to delay”.
So:
But Labour and other opposition MPs refused to back the bid, which needed a two-thirds majority in the Commons, while the risk of a no-deal remained.
MPs voted 293 to 46, short of the 434 needed – marking the new PM’s sixth Commons defeat.
And:
Mr Johnson has now lost more votes in a single week than Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown suffered in their entire periods in office.
There were extraordinary scenes of chaos and anger in the House of Commons overnight as opposition MPs staged a protest against the suspension of parliament for five weeks – a prorogation that the Speaker of the House said represented “an act of executive fiat”.
But what happens next?
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
It was good to see Black Rod show up last night, or early this morning, GMT. But she did look a bit rattled amid all the brouhaha.
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This is the first coup in which no one has died and where the instigators are the ones who seem to be trying to force a vote.
Meanwhile the revolutionaries of labour , the lib dems etc want to oppose the coup by forcing the govt to continue.
Is this coup nonsense now over. Do people with any feet on the ground believe ordinary voters regarded this as a coup?
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I think most people would accept that the term coup as applied to this is in relation to an attempt to shut down a democratically elected chamber in order for a government to pursue its agenda. I doubt it’s meant as a literal usage and there’s a strong argument that it shouldn’t be applied, but I think there’s a fair point that this is a part usurpation of democracy. As regards forcing a vote – well, that’s one way of looking at it, another is that the government is attempting to hold an election against the terms of the constitutional order and the members of the democratically elected chamber. I don’t think that oppositions are somehow disqualified from pushing back against that. I also think they have a right to attempt to hold a government accountable by keeping the representative aspects of it in place rather than seeing a democratic chamber shut.
re ‘first coup in which no one died’… Zimbabwe 2017, off the top of my head.
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