Express & Star

Express & Star comment: Criticism of PM'S tactics so ironic

Well, that seems to have stirred up our MPs, doesn’t it?

Published
A person wearing a Boris Johnson head digs a grave at the foot of a tombstone outside Downing Street

What a shame that for the past three years they have failed to be as animated in support of upholding the result of the referendum.

Had they been “outraged” by the failure to deliver on the vote on time, and thumped the table and called it a “dark day for democracy”, then we would today be through the other side of Brexit day and finding our way in our post-Brexit journey.

How ironic it is the reason Remain MPs are so upset is Boris Johnson’s “anti-democratic” measure has outmanoeuvred them as they try to find ever more ways of sabotaging Brexit because they think they know better than the voters who voted for it.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader whose MPs were all elected on a manifesto to deliver on the referendum result, says he will do whatever it takes to stop a no-deal Brexit, and is putting together an alliance to that end with other opposition leaders.

But it is based on a falsehood. The other opposition leaders don’t just want to stop a no-deal Brexit. They are quite open in saying that they want to stop Brexit full stop.

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The MPs who are currently so outraged have somewhat lessened the impact of that outrage through being outraged so often, and at so little provocation. Once you have expended your stocks of hyperbole, there is nowhere left to go. Outrage has become the norm, the default.

Scrape away the hysteria and we can see Johnson has not suspended Parliament over the Brexit departure date.

He has though reset the Parliamentary timetable, which has left fewer days in which MPs opposed to no-deal, and opposed to Brexit itself, can mobilise and enact their inventive ways of stopping it.

Nevertheless, with a complicit Speaker the likes of Yvette Cooper have been able to rip up Commons convention to fast-track Brexit blocking moves within hours.

On Brexit, the Commons is deadlocked and has not functioned as a decision-making body.

Johnson has altered the rules of the game.

Brexit opponents have made clear they are prepared to do whatever it takes to stop it.

He has now made clear he will do whatever it takes to deliver it. Two can play at Stop At Nothing. Reap what you sow.

Outside of Westminster the public is so bored with Brexit they are almost past caring.