Having been defeated 3 times in the Commons in his attempts to call a General Election, Boris Johnson is now going for a 4th attempt.

This time he is tabling an amendment to the Fixed Term Parliament Act for a General Election on 12^th December.

The Government has also tabled a complex business motion to limit the time available to debate the Bill and the amendments that can be made to it. All in order to rush it through with the minimum of scrutiny. Sound familiar?

The current EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill will be lost, unless specifically carried over to the new Parliament, and the work done to ensure there was time to analyse and debate it fully will have been wasted.

The hard-won 3-month Brexit “Flextension” will also be largely wasted.

If Parliament votes for an early General Election, there will be a 5-week campaign period leading up to the General Election.

The new Parliament will then be summoned by proclamation of the Queen in Council. Boris Johnson has promised that this will happen before 23^rd December. So there’ll be no problem there, will there?

Not forgetting that successful candidates in the General Election do not become MPs until the new Parliament has been summoned and they are sworn in as MPs.

There will need to be another Queen’s Speech (with its associated debate), the election of a new Speaker and the reconstitution of the various select committees.

Normally, and admittedly you can hardly call these times ‘normal’, Parliament would be in recess from about 20^th December until around 7^th January.

So it is quite conceivable that under these circumstances, the 3-month extension would only provide 3 weeks of Parliamentary time before the UK is up against the next deadline.

So instead of focusing on the greatest crisis the UK has faced since 1939 (or even on all that urgent fix-the-country business which was the excuse for proroguing Parliament and for the farcical last Queen’s Speech that HM had to deliver), vast amounts of time will be taken up with an election campaign.

A classic example of tribal party politics versus the national unity the country needs at least as much as it did in 1940.

____________________________________________________

We value your support, apart from the sheer time and effort involved, much of what we do costs money that we can only afford to spend with the financial support of people like you.

Many people have contributed not once but multiple times and we know that there are practical limits on what people can do. Whether you can make a contribution (please click on the image above) or not please spread the word among your contacts and on the social media.

Our aim is to help people see what’s going on, understand what they are, or aren’t, being told, and decide what is best for our country: what is in the national interest, protecting fundamental citizenship rights and ensuring Parliament and not the executive is sovereign.

There is still a long way to go and there are no guarantees about what the outcome will be. The only thing that is certain is that if we stop trying we will lose.

To help protect our fundamental rights, and support Parliament in safeguarding them, please support us so we can maintain our campaign and make your voice heard.

Please share this article as widely as you can, thank you very much for your support.

You can follow us via our blog, on Twitter @PeoplesChalleng and our Facebook page.

Published by Grahame Pigney on behalf of The People’s Challenge Ltd.