Stephen Castle writes from London, for the New York Times:
British lawmakers forced Johnson’s hand by voting by 328 to 301 to take control of Parliament away from the government and vote on legislation as soon as Wednesday that would block the prime minister from making good on his threat of a no-deal Brexit.
That prompted an angry response from the prime minister.
“I don’t want an election, the public don’t want an election, but if the House votes for this bill tomorrow, the public will have to choose who goes to Brussels on Oct. 17 to sort this out and take this country forward,” Mr. Johnson said, referring to the next European Union summit.
Comment from a Times reader. I agree 100%: easy to argue that representative democracy has run its course. Do members of the United States Congress think they can solve problems? They should not think so, because they cannot. (Affordable healthcare, mass shootings, climate change, broken immigration system, trillion dollar deficits, corrupting influence of money in politics, withdrawing the US from international treaties). For all the so-called checks and balances built into the American democracy machinery: in 2016 it produced as President of the United States an incompetent, criminal, immoral monster called Trump. And now there is no opposition from the Republicans (the Trump party) for his monstrous policies. Time for a benevolent dictator instead?
