Boris Johnson will do anything for Brexit. Even destroy his own party.
This past week, in the most brutal internal act in its modern history, the British Conservative Party threw out 21 of its own lawmakers.
Old, respected, moderate Conservative members of Parliament were summarily ejected from the party — by text message — after they defied Prime Minister Boris Johnson and voted this week to stop Britain from leaving the European Union without a replacement trade deal in place to prevent economic chaos. Johnson’s new regime isn’t concerned with niceties like preventing economic chaos, though; it views politics not as a debate over ideas and policies, but as a form of trench warfare.
The Tory Party — one of the most successful and long-lasting political parties in the Western world — has turned itself into a hard-right organization operated with missionary zeal. That approach led Johnson to eradicate his own majority by expelling perceived apostates. By Wednesday, he was helpless to stop the passage of legislation preventing a no-deal Brexit and couldn’t even call an early election that might help him change the parliamentary math. In discarding everything but the most hardcore dogma, the Tories are slowly dismantling their own government.
What the week made clear is that the Conservative Party — like the Republican Party under President Trump — has mutated into the most extreme possible version of itself, one that regularly evokes the revolutionary notion of “the people” to justify outright nationalist policies. The political atmosphere on both sides of the Atlantic is so similar that it’s like one of those British films that’s been adapted in Hollywood for an American audience: The right wing in each country is following the same basic trend, the same dynamic, translated into local flavors.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/boris-johnson-will-do-anything-for-brexit-even-destroy-his-own-party/2019/09/05/6a64d96e-cff1-11e9-87fa-8501a456c003_story.html
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