Here’s another call for Boris Johnson’s resignation, from Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party. This is from its leader at Westminster, Liz Saville Roberts.
The supreme court has delivered a damming and unanimous verdict. Boris Johnson has broken the law for undermining the basic principles of democracy. The prime minister has shown himself to be no better than a tin-pot dictator, shutting down democracy to avoid scrutiny.
There is no question, the prime minister must resign immediately and a crash out Brexit stopped once and for all.
In his short time in office Boris Johnson has proven himself to be a deeply dangerous and anti-democratic leader, with no respect for the rule of law. It would be a complete affront to civilised society if the prime minister did not resign after this historic ruling.
Just read some of the judgement, I think Johnson will try and stay put. Essentially the judges have said they haven’t even tried to assess his motives in asking for the prorogation. Their ruling is just that nothing presented to them justfied it being 5 weeks given the normal queen’s speech prorogation is around 3. They specifically put aside questions of motivation as they say that they would only have been relevant if that standard had been reached, but it wasn’t.
They also say they have no idea what was said to the queen, and weren’t judging anything to do with that either.
I think in time Gina Miller might get that statue. This decision is a clear win for democracy in the UK. Don’t think she cares though listening to her today. She knows she fought and won on the right side.
“We are going to take advantage of all the freedoms that Brexit can give, whether that is new tax allowances for investment, or speeding up public procurement contracts, or creating free ports and new enterprise zones, or devising better regulation for the sectors in which the UK leads the world,” he will say.
“We want a market that is open to the world, with the most competitive tax rates and the best skilled workforce in the hemisphere.”
Mr Johnson wants Britain to be able to “diverge” from EU rules that cover issues such as workers’ rights, environmental protection and consumer safety, often claiming the UK should have more stringent regulations.
(It’s from an FT article “Johnson seeks to woo US business with low-tax vision” I got linked to from twitter, but any link I post is paywalled)
Just reading the judgement. It was obvious already, I guess, but Johnson’s inner circle must be an utter clown show.
The only thing they submitted as a reason for the prorogation being until the 14th was a memo saying any earlier would be “extremely pressured”. No explanation of why this was.
However, among the few items of nonsense were the minutes of a cabinet meeting, which made it clear that they thought the act about reporting on the NI Executive (the mechanism the ‘rebels’ had used to try and keep parliament open) meant that parliament had to sit on the 9th of Sep and then no later than the 14th of October. Amazingly enough the prorogation they chose was from the Sep 9th until Oct 14th.
So they handed in almost nothing relevant, yet still included something which gave the game away.
