So, we now have a Prime Minister who has been found by the highest court in the land to have done something unlawful but doesn’t care. He demonstrated that this week as Parliament reconvened after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Tuesday. His entire performance at the despatch box was that of a petulant arrogant child complaining that he wasn’t being allowed to do as he wanted. The day after Lady Hale had delivered the UNANIMOUS decision of 11 Justices sitting in the highest court in the land that his move to prorogue Parliament was unlawful null and void, Johnson and his cohorts were slagging off the judicial process of Great Britain. The Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox threw a hissy fit at the despatch box, Michael Gove tried to claim that many other senior lawyers and officials in the government gave the advice that the plan to prorogue Parliament was the course of action to take. Sorry Michael, that doesn’t matter. There is no VAR coming to overturn the decision. The Supreme Court IS the VAR, their ruling is final.
What really got me though was Johnson’s total and complete inability to admit he got it wrong and that his brilliant plan to railroad through his ‘do-or-die’ Brexit without any Parliamentary scrutiny has been found out. Not once has he apologised for advising the Queen to take an action that has been declared to be unlawful. Not once. Although he immediately said his government would comply with the ruling and Parliament would be reconvened, he also said straight away that he disagreed with the decision. That’s not how a court of appeal works. And worse still, the government and Brexiteers going after these 11 justices undermines their ability to act as a check on the executive branch of government. It is their job to interpret the law and pull a wayward executive back into line. That’s what this whole situation was about. It was not about the UK exiting the EU, it was about whether the government’s advice to the Queen to prorogue Parliament for a significant amount of time in the lead-up to Brexit was lawful. They found it not to be. If I may take a leaf out of the Brexiteer book of taking the moral high ground in an arguement, you lost, move on!
But that wasn’t the end of it from Boris. He then completely dismissed an MP’s legitimate concerns over the fact that she had received death threats towards herself and her family as ‘humbug’, ignored calls for him to moderate his language surrounding the Benn Bill and Brexit in general and claimed the best way to honour Jo Cox, an MP who was murdered for her anti-Brexit views and campaigning for those views by a man who yelled ‘Britain First!’ as he did, was to get Brexit done. I’ve been worried about the language used particularly by the Brexiteers for some time. It is far too antagonistic and war-like. Johnson constantly refered to the Benn Bill as the ‘Surrender Bill’ or the ‘Capitulation Bill’ This isn’t a war, it is a political disagreement. References to battles and people talking about how we survived World War II and the Blitz and how we are just so wonderful, it needs to stop because it allows the extremists to come out of the woodwork and normalises such extreme positions to the point where a man, who did suffer from psychiatric problems, felt he would be justified in committing murder.
The man currently occupying No. 10 Downing Street has shown himself for who he truly is this week. A man utterly driven by his personal betterment, seemingly immune to the worries and concerns of others. A liar and someone willing to tap into outright bigotry to garner support. He is not fit to be Prime Minister. He needs to be shown the door and thrown through it.
Eat, Sleep, Blog, Repeat 