We now have a new phenomenon. Trotskyist tactics from the far right. The very same blind faith in a cause. The very same tactics of infiltration. The very same aggressive personal attacks on anyone who disagrees with them. There is a very small group of people who believe that they have the right to rule us all because they have a vision of a low tax extreme free market economy. If they present those views honestly and clearly to the public they will lose any election they fight really badly. So they have targeted previously moderate centre right parties and simply taken them over and converted them to their cause.
In the States any half way reasonable Republican who wanted to do politics by negotiation, compromise and moderate policies has been rooted out by the Tea Party. They have landed their country with a President who has so utterly lost touch with reality that he wants to nuke a hurricane yet party members who would have once shuddered with embarrassment now turn a blind eye so long as he keeps cutting taxes and keeps providing them with cheap gasoline. As the consequences of the lies and the delusions have begun to be increasingly obvious a once popular Republican Party is gradually being hollowed out and destroyed.
Now the UK Conservative Party is trying the same tactics and risking the same fate. It has become the property of a far right faction and a whole series of people who previously defined what that party was and what it stood for are out in the cold. It has reached such a pitch that Nicholas Soames has been kicked out as a pinky lefto who isn't on side with the project. Over 20 Conservative MPs have now been purged by the Trotskyists of the right. Another 10 or so have chosen to jump ship before they were pushed.
There are now two Conservative Parties with one of them aiming to further purge the dissidents and make the Party truer to blind pursuit of one cause and another one that doesn't yet realise it is going to have to start again with a new grouping. This split isn't good news for the country. There are plenty of decent people in the Conservative party who genuinely care about the future of this country and had much to contribute to it. I might, or to be more accurate, I certainly do disagree with much of their philosophy. Yet it is a point of view that ought to be out there competing for popular votes. It is possible to debate intelligently with people who hold such views, learn something from talking to them and sometimes succeed in getting them to learn something in return and to act on it. The same just isn't true of the fanatics who are driving forward Conservative Party policy at the moment. They are beyond listening and debating because they are certain that they know the one truth and they won't stop at anything until they have reached their goal.
Which means that anyone who expects them to obey the rule of law simply doesn't understand the way they think. Parliament last week passed a very clever bill with support from many different parts of the House. Most people assume that Parliament passes laws and citizens obey those rules. The current occupant of 10 Downing Street doesn't think that way. He has stated clearly that he will not do what Parliament is requiring him to do. He won't resign. He won't compromise.
So don't hold your breath on waiting for him to ask for an extension to the Brexit deadline. Also don't expend any energy looking for the fine detail of his proposals for the Irish backstop. They won't ever emerge. What he intends to do instead is to confuse, to lie and to double down on blaming other people. Whilst he crashes us out and concentrates on creating the legend that all the chaos is someone else's fault. He is a master of holding two contradictory ideas in his own head at the same time and he intends to try and bamboozle the British people into sharing those ideas. So he says he will obey the rule of law. At the very moment when he is assuring us that he will never obey the law. What that means is that he intends to do what he wants and try and fool the public that it is somehow legal and he is bravely facing down pesky "Parliamentarians" who are standing in his way. Get ready for dirty tricks and a no deal crash out.
He will have some very nasty supporters trying to help him to find a clever way to ignore a law that they find inconvenient. It is unlikely that he will be brought down simply by Parliament passing a law that he doesn't want to obey. It is going to take even more brave Conservatives abandoning his faction. It is going to take Parliament passing a No Confidence motion to start to end his rule. Then it is going to require an alternative government to be formed that can command a majority. After that it is going to take a crushing election defeat.
That makes the next few weeks critical for the survival of Parliamentary decision making in this country. If Parliament loses the battle then it will be powerless to ever resist the most extreme contempt for its decisions by any future Prime Minister. If it wins we will have invigorated Parliamentary decision making for decades. It is that visceral.
The only way Parliamentary democracy can win is if all those who oppose the coup can form a government of national unity for a very short period of time to vote down the current government. That national alliance then needs to put no deal, no Brexit and the best available deal to the public in a single transferrable vote on the same day as an election is held also under single transferable vote. Either that or we need intelligent deals done between progressives across the country and that could prove much harder to achieve than a quick law to get rid of first past the post that allows every progressive to stand and the voters to decide which one gets their support. Or indeed whether they wish to enter a dark time and give themselves over to the tender mercies of a known liar and cheat with megalomaniac ambitions and Trotskyist tactics.
The Trotskyists of the right are trying to get their way regardless of democracy. The only realistic way to beat them is to increase democracy and give the people a choice about whether they want to lose it or defend it.