This evening Theresa May will win the no-confidence vote against her and the hard Brexiteers will have been put firmly in their place. I’d bet on it.In fact, I have bet on it. After coming back from a walk at Stanwick Lakes this morning (an unsuccessful search for a male Hen Harrier that has been around for a few days!) I looked at the odds on TM the PM winning the vote. At that time she was already 1/2, and a few minutes later she was 1/3. The odds have tumbled through 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/7 and 1/8 – which represents a one in nine chance of defeat. Well, the odds for political contests have not been very reliable in recent years but I think we can be pretty sure, though not certain, that she will get through.
The question then, is does she scrape through or get a moderate vote of confidence from her own MPs? Or is it? I’m not sure – I think that the PM will stick at the job even if she gets by by a single vote out of a sense of duty and a realisation that a leadership contest is not even in her party’s interest, let alone the country’s.
So, it was a foolish manoeuvre from a bunch of silly Conservatives, mostly silly men.
So this vote changes nothing except to reduce further the standing of the UK in the eyes of the world, the standing of politicians in the eyes of voters, and of Conservative Brexiteers in the eyes of their Conservative Remain colleagues.
Not, then, a very meaningful vote.
But I might be wrong – we’ll see very soon.
Who exactly is going to get a majority on this issue after Theresa May ? There’s no way any of the hard brexiteers can swing it. I am fed up with the utter rubbish of ‘the country is behind Brexit, it must happen’. Why do people go on with this rubbish ? the country is split right down the middle and the referendum stretched first past the post democracy way beyond its limits. What saddens me is that I’ll probably – due to age & wealth – be no more than i9nconvenienced by Brexit but many people who votes for it will be left jobless, destitute and at the mercy of a Government set hard on persecuting the poor – and even moreso the younger people who are mostly facing the prospect of living with the stupidity of their elders – and definitely not betters – for most of their lives.
The only positive is the prospect of a disintegrating Conservative party.
I agree wholeheartedly with all that you are saying Roderick and from a similar position. What we really need is another peoples vote BUT despite the fact that many of the pro Brexit arguments have been debunked or shown to be utter lies and of course they broke electoral law financially I remain unconvinced that the vote would change much. Its been like turkeys voting for Christmas. The only positive thing to come out of this is that there ought to be a vast majority of people especially the young and ordinary working folk who should and hopefully never will trust the bloody Tories again. Cameron was awful and May is even worse but then I’ve never been a Tory voter.
Another can kicked down another road.
If MPs allow Brexit to be forced through by time pressure (May’s strategy) this will be a terrible failure of our democracy. Jeremy Corbyn needs to get his act together and get behind another referendum. You can only wait for so long without risking messing up the chances of a new vote.