Government wins confidence vote by 325 to 306.

The government survived the "No confidence" vote in the House of Commons by 325 votes to 306.

Mrs May will be making a statement from Downing Street at around 2200 GMT.

The PM won the vote by a margin of 19, including 10 votes from the DUP.

Yes, it is a big of a turnaround from the government losing a vote by the largest majority in history and then being confirmed in office 24 hours later. Some people on social media are asking on social media how on earth more than a hundred MPs could vote so differently on consecutive days.

Actually this is not a difficult question to answer at all.

Try for a moment to imagine yourself in the place of a Conservative or DUP member of parliament who does not like the proposed Withdrawal Agreement but who also does not like
  • the IRA "armed struggle" (in which more than one or two of the people murdered were Conservative and DUP members of parliament,) 
  • Anti-Semitism 
  • Economic policies analogous to those of the present government of Venezuela 
  • Attempts to dismantle Britain's defences
If you really can't see why such a person might think it in Britain's interests to vote the way the Commons did yesterday and today then you didn't try very hard to put yourself in their place.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

Image
I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more