"Really a Right Wing Coup"

Chaos descended on parliament in the early hours of the morning as it was prorogued. Craig Murray writes this morning that what's happening in Westminster is "Really a Right Wing Coup":

Nothing in the Fixed Term Parliaments Act alters the constitutional position that the Prime Minister must be able to command a majority in the House of Commons.

It was unconstitutional of Elizabeth Saxe Coburg Gotha to appoint Boris Johnson as Prime Minister when it was absolutely plain at the outset he had no majority in the House of Commons. This is not hindsight, I said so at the time. Now it has been proven that he has no majority in the House as he has been defeated six times out of six on major votes on the most important issues of the day. he has never won an important vote on anything as Prime Minister. Whether or not these are characterised as “confidence issues” is irrelevant. The man Johnson has never had a Commons majority. I can think of nothing more unconstitutional – and I think it can absolutely be characterised as a coup – than for the Queen to appoint a Prime Minister who has no majority support in the Commons, and then prorogue Parliament precisely because the executive has no majority. This is not even a government which has lost its majority – it has never had one and ought never to have been appointed.

Rather than prorogue Parliament, the Queen should have obliged Boris Johnson to resign and asked the Leader of the Opposition to see whether he could form an administration that could command a majority. That would be the constitutionally correct course of action. The monarch is not neutral in this and is acting unconstitutionally, abusing her power.

Let me put it this way. Does anybody seriously contend that Jeremy Corbyn would be appointed Prime Minister by the Queen in a situation where he had no parliamentary majority, and would remain in No. 10 despite losing 6 successive Commons votes and never winning one, and that the Queen would prorogue Parliament for him to get round the fact that he had no majority? Of course not. It is unthinkable. We are witnessing a right wing coup specifically in favour of Boris Johnson.

Now it is being whispered that Johnson might be open to a modified backstop in Northern Ireland, which makes no sense since the main selling point of his campaign to be prime minister was his opposition to the Irish backstop.

Now that a snap election won't take place until after Halloween, crash out or no, the Tories look to be headed for a shellacking.

What is happening here is that the paradigm that has reigned in Western capitals since 1979 has lost its legitimacy. A super-majority of citizens in countries where neoliberal/neoconservative government has held sway for the last four decades have had enough. We are at that point where the ruling elite will resort to a soft coup.

Can the dialectic of history be held at bay by a tiny elite, even if that elite appears to have a monopoly of power?  I don't think so. But the dialectic, though it cannot be stopped in its tracks, can be co-opted, misdirected, subverted.