A barmy week at Westminster
What a week! Just when you thought that events at Westminster couldn’t get any more chaotic and confused, we descend to a new and unchartered level, deep in the bowels of constitutional uncertainty.
As your elected representative at Westminster, I was sent home in the early hours of Tuesday morning at the end of a day of high drama as the Conservative government followed through with its intention of suspending democracy.
This hard Brexit Conservative cult that now runs the UK simply does not want any further parliamentary scrutiny as they try and find a way that would allow them to take the UK out of the European Union without a negotiated deal.
I pledge to you, as your MP, that I will do everything possible to stop them, and I will work with others across the house to ensure that they do not achieve that ambition.
We now know from the ruling in the Scottish courts that this‘prorogation’is unlawful, and I should be at Westminster working on your behalf.
From the time of writing this column anything could have happened, but we now need to be back in parliament, and I hope by the time you’re reading this that I am back at work raising the issues and concerns of the people of Perthshire.
We did manage to ensure an important and critical piece of legislation before the Tories suspended parliament, and that was a law that would require the UK to secure an extension to Article 50 for six months, stopping the threat of an imminent no deal.
What the government craves is an early general election to pursue a no deal agenda.
While I cannot wait for an early general election, we will not give the Tories any opportunity to slip out of the legislation that has now passed to stop their no deal.
We simply cannot trust this prime minister and we remain concerned that if allowing him an election date he would simply change it.
Once we are certain that they can no longer do that, we will have our election.
The one sure way to take no deal off the table is to ensure that Johnson is unable to serve anything on it and I will be asking to be returned to parliament to stop him.
In Perthshire the contests will be between the SNP and theTories.
It is worth noting that every single Scottish Tory MPs voted to oppose the legislation that would stop a no deal and every single one of them have backed Johnson to the hilt.
I will leave you to make your own conclusions as to what you might therefore need to do to ensure that Perthshire’s desire to remain in the European Union is voiced in the next parliament.