Zombie Duck Government...

The current absurdities going on in parliament at the moment are the result of David Cameron.  Not just David Cameron’s referendum … but also the result of the absurd piece of legislation that is the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011.  Worried that his coalition government could collapse at any time Dave decided to rig the system by which general elections were previously called.

He agreed with Nick to take the Prime Minister’s prerogative to call an election away from the government and give it back to parliament ...

...but only if 2/3s of MPs agreed that an election needed to be called.  100 per cent undemocratic.

Previous to this governments could be caused to fall by the Prime Minister declaring any particular motion a “confidence vote” and then declaring that because it had been lost by as much as 1 vote the government was untenable.  Or the PM could just go the Queen and ask for an election and she'd give him one…

However, all this was too democratic for Dave as 50 per cent plus one sounded too much like democracy.  So while MPs are elected by a simple majority and the referendum was won by a simple majority (2 per cent – although 1 vote would theoretically have done) we are now left with the peculiarity that Parliament cannot be dissolved unless two thirds of MPs agree.  This is clearly undemocratic… 

More than that it undermines the constitution entirely.   As the constitution previously worked the Prime Minister was simply the person who could retain the most authority in the house.  As such the Queen made him the head of the executive and gave him the job of appointing other ministers and drafting legislation. 

However, due to the Fixed Term Parliament Act we now have a Prime Minister who is not able to control the legislative agenda in parliament and cannot call a General Election even if he can get a simple majority of MPs to agree with it.

The result is that the Speaker John Bercow is now the most important person not the Prime Minister.  The rotten Fixed Term Parliament Act creates a situation where we have not just a Lame Duck government that can't do much or a Dead Duck Government that can’t pass legislation at all but... 

... Well, actually what we have now is a Zombie Duck Government where the Prime Minister no longer even sets the legislative agenda in the House but Parliament takes over the running of business, votes to take over the order paper, votes to tell the Prime Minister what to do in international negotiations and has cut the Prime Minister so far out of the business of government that he is proroguing them to stop them legislating against him.

At the moment whether or not Jeremy Corbyn is in Downing Street is little more than a question of salary.  We actually have a situation where there are two competing governments within parliament.  Indeed, one might almost argue that we have a situation where Her Majesty’s Opposition is acting as a Government without being in government.  The only things they actually lack are administrative control of the government, government salaries and cars.  This is clearly not how the constitution was ever meant to work.

The Fixed Term Parliaments Act was always nonsense anyway since it only takes 50 per cent plus 1 MPs to vote for legislation to overturn the fact that it takes two thirds of them to throw out the government.  Thus the government can still be thrown out by 50 per cent plus 1 MPs …it just takes longer.

But the Tories don’t really do democracy so there Boris is - hoist with Dave’s petard