The prime minister has survived a vote of no confidence. Her fate now rests on how flexible she is prepared to be
It is said that the past is a foreign country. But after the Brexit referendum, it is the present, not the past, where we do things differently. No government in British history has taken such a Commons beating as Theresa May suffered on Tuesday. Yet, 24 hours later, the selfsame MPs who had thrown out her UK-EU Brexit deal by 432 votes to 202 now handed her premiership a fresh lifeline. The 118 Conservative MPs who voted her policy down on Tuesday backed her on Wednesday, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to do.
By voting by 325 to 306 that they still had confidence in May’s government, the House of Commons turned the ordinary meaning of words on their head. But this wasn’t a vote of confidence in any normal sense. It was a suboptimal tribal choice between a government led by May and one led by Jeremy Corbyn. It was a knockabout partisan diversion from the main national issue, which now resumes. The loss leaves Corbyn with fewer defences against Labour’s second-vote campaigners. But the victory also finds May still wedded to her defeated Brexit policy, and settled in for another year in Downing Street.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2SWTQ43
