After dramatically losing his majority, being hamstrung by parliament and sacking several of his party’s prominent MPs things are looking “very bleak” for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Alex Salmond tells RT.
Johnson’s plans appear to be unravelling fast after MPs voted to take control of parliament in a bid to avoid a no-deal exit from the European Union on Tuesday night.
The former First Minister of Scotland explained that Johnson’s plan appeared to be provoke opposition parties into a general election, however that started to fall asunder when Labour smelled a rat and refused to go along with the election gambit on Johnson’s terms.
The Jeremy Corbyn-led party is expected to abstain in Wednesday’s vote on an early general election, denying Johnson the two-thirds majority he needs under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act.
“You don’t just have to accept whatever the prime minister says,” Salmond explained.
“In a situation where he’s lost control of parliament the opposition can cotton on to the fact that it’s an amendable motion and thrust something unpalatable down the prime minister’s throat.”
Whatever that unpalatable thing may be an election now looks increasingly likely but Salmond highlighted some difficulties Johnson will face in pitching it to the public as a ‘Parliament v The People’ fight.
“Firstly there are four nations in the UK and two of them voted to stay within the European Union. So Northern Ireland and Scotland are serious problems in that calculation,” he explained.
The second problem the prime minister faces is that anti-Brexit or soft Brexit MPs can legitimately argue that a no-deal Brexit was never mentioned during the 2016 referendum campaign.
“Nobody back in 2016 in the referendum voted for a no deal brexit, a crash out Brexit, nobody voted to make themselves poorer and nobody voted to lose hundreds of thousands of jobs. So it’s not plain sailing for Boris Johnson,” he said.
The Scot also noted that the Scottish Nationalist Party appears best placed to make gains in the likely election and elements within the party are arguing that it should fight the campaign with an independence manifesto to “rally the maximum mandate to face whatever comes from the next UK government.”
