Tactical voting

The Observer leads with a story about MPs resisting May's threat of a general election. Well might they! Many will be deselected or wiped out by a pissed off electorate. There are the usual paradoxes and self-interest disguised as principled thinking:

Antoinette Sandbach, a Tory MP who backs another referendum being held on any deal agreed by parliament, said she would vote against calling an election....many Tories would vote down an election, adding that other parties such as the newly-formed Change UK group would also oppose it.

“It is not a great look for an MP to avoid their electorate,” said one former cabinet minister. Another MP against an election said: “We would be honour-bound to vote for it.”

Commentators are up for reform.No surprises really,--so desperate are some Remainers that they have already advocated, Parliamentary coup,  GNU or revocation. N Acherson starts with a little preliminary virtue-signalling:

most MPs are well-meaning men and – especially – women. Yvette Cooper, wise Joanna Cherry, Anna Soubry the maenad with blazing eyes [blimey-- he's in love]: they and their sisters have been the stars of these awful weeks. Best of all, none of them did that “womanly” number of trying to mediate between gnashing, stomping males. They gnashed too, and with a furious clarity.

the machine has broken down. This is because it wasn’t built to take the strain of minority governments...the Anglo-British non-constitution is archaic. Incredibly, nobody knows what the law of state is. [now he notices!]...the Westminster power machine is still heavily authoritarian. In parliament, it has operated through the massive majorities created by “first past the post” voting. This conceals the fact that “parliamentary sovereignty”, in the narrow local sense that the Commons could order a government about, has mostly dwindled to myth.... the union is genuinely in trouble. It’s not only that Brexit is wrenching Scotland out of Europe against its will (62% Remain)....the 1998 devolution settlement only remained stable – only made sense – in the context of British and Scottish EU membership....British governance is becoming more authoritarian, less spontaneous, more blindly provincial in its indifference to the real world outside. In the darkness under the Palace of Westminster, there lies a gigantic, swelling fatberg of undemocracy.