This piece raises the question that I can't understand:
^The Fixed Term Parliaments Act is a Tory law, enacted in 2011 by David Cameron’s government with the sole and express purpose of preventing governments from doing exactly what Theresa May intends to do in the Commons later today – cynically using temporary polling advantage to extend their term in office.
It stipulates that a two-thirds majority of MPs must vote for any motion to dissolve Parliament and call an early election, which is 433 votes. That’s over 100 more than the Tories can currently command if every one of their MPs obeys the party whip.
In other words, it cannot be achieved – by design – without the support of the main party of opposition, which in this case is Labour. Jeremy Corbyn currently languishes around 20 points behind in the polls and most projections predict a Tory majority of over 100 seats, compared to the current one of 17.
So why on Earth would the Labour leader go along with it?
An opposition voting against an election seems instinctively foolish, of course. At the most basic ideological level the opposition should always want a chance to unseat the government. But it should also not wish to make its own position worse and give that government an extra two years in power unnecessarily.
Corbyn currently has three years to turn public opinion round – three years in which the Tories are likely to find themselves in a godawful swamp of Brexit negotiations and all manner of other difficulties. If he loses an election now, Labour would then be a minimum of FIVE years away from power. It would not be difficult, therefore, to sell resistance to the election as both a pragmatic and a principled stance.
(General pundit opinion appears to be that refusing to dissolve Parliament would meet with great mockery from the right-wing press. Exactly how would that be different from every other day?)
There is no national emergency requiring the Tories to take this action. No major policy has been blocked. They have a perfectly serviceable working majority. Public opinion is not clamouring for another election.
The SNP, we gather, plan to abstain. So it’s entirely up to Labour whether the vote passes or not. Corbyn could absolutely legitimately stand up and say “No, you are the government the people elected in 2015 to rule for exactly five years – accept the will of the electorate, work with what you’ve got and get on with the day job.”
Should Labour refuse to support today’s motion, the Tories would still have a second avenue available – they could call for a vote of no confidence in themselves, which would put them in the humiliating position of having to stand up in the Commons and argue that they were too terrible a government to be allowed to continue, and that the law they themselves passed just six years ago was incompetent and reckless.
Even on the assumption that the Tories would eventually win that vote (which requires 50%+1 rather than a two-thirds majority) and got their election, Labour would have succeeded in embarrassing them and making them look shambolic and farcical, which at the very least has to count as a tactical victory.
At best, meanwhile, delaying the process could actually cause the Tories to lose their majority altogether as a result of the ongoing police inquiry into possible 2015 electoral fraud by dozens of their MPs, which is due to deliver a verdict very soon.
Oppositions – whose sworn duty to the sovereign and the nation is to make life as difficult for the government as possible – are rarely presented with such an open goal as this. If Labour can’t even take the chance to exert pressure on a government that’s clearly uncomfortable in its current position, they really are literally useless.
If they meekly go along with the Tories’s cynical ploy – the sole purpose of which is to destroy them – they will fully deserve to be propelled through the trapdoor to eternity.^
This weather is getting me down. Is it May or March?
