A cowardly charade by Remainer MPS
Labour’s opposition to an election was a shameless act of cowardice and hypocrisy. No one is quite sure what Labour wants to do about Brexit, but Jeremy Corbyn has said he is ready for a national contest numerous times. When the Government put a Bill to the Commons to trigger an election last night, however, he ran away from the opportunity.
Mr Corbyn is frit, as Margaret Thatcher once said; “a chlorinated chicken” as Boris Johnson joked. He’s not entirely in charge, either.
We all know that deep down, Mr Corbyn hates Brussels. It’s a tenet of the Bennite faith that the EU is a capitalist club and Britain can’t build socialism until it’s out. But he leads a party dominated by metropolitan liberals who rather like the club (which is not so much capitalist as protectionist), and those Remainers fear that an election will give Boris Johnson a pro-leave majority. Thus they’ve instructed Mr Corbyn to hold the line and buy them time. They have turned the most Left-wing Labour leader in recent history into a defender of the status quo.
The longer this charade in parliament continues, the more morally compromised MPS become. The pitiful attempt, for example, to label the PM a racist for a column he wrote that actually defended wearers of the burka earned a round of applause from woke members of the House, but to the outside world this looks like what it is: political performance art. As were Left-wing tears at Sir Nicholas Soames’ speech announcing his retirement – tears from the same people who until recently regarded him as a dinosaur. What it all amounts to is the establishment digging in, trying to hold back an election until the moment it thinks most favourable – again, contrary to everything Remainers have said before.
How can they look their constituents in the face? Haven’t they also insisted for the last few years that the Brexit issue should be put back to the people? “But not before a no-deal Brexit is taken off the table,” they say, fully in the knowledge that this might kill the Brexit negotiations and risks leading to a flawed withdrawal deal of the kind the Commons voted down three times already.
In effect, the executive has been taken hostage by a Commons that no longer reflects popular opinion and is stacked against Brexit. The Prime Minister has to find some way of breaking free from its grasp.