UK Parliament to Pass "No Crash Out" Legislation Today

This morning Niqnaq re-posts Politico's "London Playbook" for an hour-by-hour breakdown of what will be today's historic happenings. Yesterday, if you managed somehow to miss it, Boris Johnson lost control of parliament. Today, the rebellious parliament plans on passing "No Crash Out" legislation, legislation which will instruct Johnson to seek another postponement in Brexit.

Johnson responded with a call for new elections. The conflict today will be over if and when those are elections to be held. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn wants to make sure the "No Crash Out" bill is passed before supporting Johnson's snap elections. If "No Crash Out" goes through, we should see Labour voting for new elections.

Yves Smith, per usual, is unusually pessimistic: "Even though Boris Johnson may wind up being the shortest-lived Prime Minister evah, the press coverage on Parliament’s efforts to stop a no-deal Brexit is generally out over its skis."

Smith's strength, as well as her weakness, is that she generally cannot imagine the defeat of the neoliberal world order. So, in the case of Brexit, she sees Labour performing poorly in a general election; and, assuming that Johnson fails to get his vote for snap elections through parliament, Boris will continue to occupy Number 10 as a rotting zombie, a prime minister of smashed party unable to govern.

The great failing of Smith's take on things is that she doesn't mention Johnson's purge of 21 anti-crash out Tory MPs. Craig Murray believes that Johnson has "radically changed" the Conservative Party, the ramifications of which will be felt for generations.

Murray is not nearly as pessimistic as Smith regarding Labour's chances. I tend to dismiss blank anti-Labour predictions because the last general election, June 2017, it was the same. We were told that Labour was headed for a historic rout. But what actually happened was that Theresa May lost her Conservative Party majority and she had to cobble together a coalition with the votes of the Ulster Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

Don't count Labour out.