John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS
“U.K. government formally suspends Parliament for 5 weeks
“PM Boris Johnson again fails in bid to call election ahead of Oct. 31 deadline”
British House of Commons Speaker, John Bercow, nominally a Conservative but a man who has done real service to his nation working against a Conservative government, has done a rather heroic deed now in tendering his resignation.
One of the gains Boris Johnson apparently hoped for from a snap election was the right to pick a new, friendlier Speaker.
But Bercow's resignation means the current "Remainer-oriented," or at least “anti-No-Conditions-Leave” Parliament, will do that.
Boris just can't seem to win.
In that, as in so many things, he does resemble Trump, Trump with an Eton accent and an aging schoolboy face.
I think it important to keep in mind too that Boris, desperately hurtling that nation towards immense consequences, is not even elected. He holds office courtesy of a majority vote in a 160-thousand-member Conservative Party, something like 90 thousand people – that’s out of a national population of about 67 million.
You could not have a much less democratic situation. It is a serious fault in the rules of Parliamentary government.
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Response to a comment about Parliament ignoring a democratic referendum decision about BREXIT:
That's very simplistic.
The effort has been made to arrange leaving the EU, as per the referendum result, to the point of exhausting everyone involved, in Britain and in Europe.
Theresa May utterly failed while succeeding in boring everyone to tears or numb paralysis.
Now, Johnson is failing.
If something just cannot be done, then it's a little silly to speak of the people's will being thwarted.
It's the realpolitik world we're talking about here, not some slogans from a political pamphlet, politics often having been called “the art of the possible.”
And, indeed, if the referendum were repeated today, it likely would go the other way, given all the now-demonstrated risks and immense difficulties.
The entire spectacle has been close to ridiculous. Just humiliating, for a Britain which likes to think of itself still as “Great.”
Right from the start, with David Cameron running off to meetings in Europe with his shirt sleeves rolled up, waving his arms and telling the British people he would sure support remaining under the changes he had negotiated with the EU, we see ridiculous activity.
The title of Most Incompetent Prime Minister Ever surely goes uncontested to David Cameron, who unthinkingly brought this all on for some expected narrow political gain.
Such matters are far too complex and consequential to be decided by a "yes" or "no" from the nation's pubs.
A forty-year economic and social and political relationship, involving hundreds of millions of people and countless billions of dollars, voted down just like that. People didn’t even know what they were voting for, except, for many, they were getting a say in a time of rising anti-immigrant feelings.
