First Car Crash interview of GE2017 ...
Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes have called out the interview by Labour's Dawn Butler on Radio 4's PM programme this afternoon as the first car-crash interview of the 2017 General Election campaign.
Struggling to explain what exactly Labour would do to correct the "rigged system" she accused Theresa May of trying to rig democracy by calling an election.
Had she been one of the thirteen MPs who voted against calling the election this rather strange comment would still have been daft but might at least have been consistent.
But, thanks to the Fixed Term Parliament Act, the PM no longer has the power to call an election without the agreement of parliament.
It now takes a two-thirds majority in the House of Commons to call an early election, which Theresa May obtained yesterday by 522 votes to 13. Obviously the Conservatives do not have anything like two thirds of MPs and the election could not have been called without the support of large numbers of opposition MPs - the vast majority of Labour and Lib/Dem MPs did in fact support it.
Down Butler voted for that motion and is therefore herself one of the 522 people who called this election. So how on earth could she expect to be taken seriously when she said that
“This election is Theresa May trying to rig democracy in our country”
That was Dawn Butler's first big clanger. She then went on to accuse Costs Coffee of not paying tax.
Later she had to apologise for this gaffe, saying that unlike one of it's rivals Costa Coffee does pay its' taxes to the UK exchequer.
How many more Labour gaffes will we see in this election? I suspect it will be a long list ...
Struggling to explain what exactly Labour would do to correct the "rigged system" she accused Theresa May of trying to rig democracy by calling an election.
Had she been one of the thirteen MPs who voted against calling the election this rather strange comment would still have been daft but might at least have been consistent.
But, thanks to the Fixed Term Parliament Act, the PM no longer has the power to call an election without the agreement of parliament.
It now takes a two-thirds majority in the House of Commons to call an early election, which Theresa May obtained yesterday by 522 votes to 13. Obviously the Conservatives do not have anything like two thirds of MPs and the election could not have been called without the support of large numbers of opposition MPs - the vast majority of Labour and Lib/Dem MPs did in fact support it.
Down Butler voted for that motion and is therefore herself one of the 522 people who called this election. So how on earth could she expect to be taken seriously when she said that
“This election is Theresa May trying to rig democracy in our country”
That was Dawn Butler's first big clanger. She then went on to accuse Costs Coffee of not paying tax.
Later she had to apologise for this gaffe, saying that unlike one of it's rivals Costa Coffee does pay its' taxes to the UK exchequer.
How many more Labour gaffes will we see in this election? I suspect it will be a long list ...
Comments
just wondering, right an election is when people can vote for whom they want to sit in the houses of parliament.
So I am a bit lost as to why, calling for a vote for people to democratically elect people to sit in paliament, is rigging democracy?
It's nearly as bonkers as Martin Kettle accusing Theresa May of acting like President Erdogan of Turkey because she put forward a motion in the House of Commons proposing to hold an election.
An election for the more important of the two Houses of Parliament - though personally I would prefer to see two elected houses.