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The Brexit Power Ranking: All the Laws Lost Thanks to Parliament’s Shutdown

Boris Johnson might be a terrible prime minister but you can’t call him boring haha *cries into hands*.
Boris Johnson
Photo by SAO Struck / Alamy Stock Photo

Well, it’s been a pretty wild one, hasn’t it? This week has made those days of boring Brexit monotony seem like a distant memory. Instead, it’s all the drama of a Parliament shutdown, with MPs holding bits of paper reading “silenced” and the speaker of the house quitting, all featuring someone called Black Rod (??).

And then, even when you thought it couldn’t get any better, there was the news that the proroguing of parliament might not even be legal and Boris Johnson may have misled the Queen really takes it up another notch. We're living through unprecedented times, but who could have foreseen that a man renowned for misleading the public could mislead someone else??? Absolutely. Wild.

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All the while this is going on, Europe watches on, losing more and more faith in us as a nation and becomes less willing to negotiate any further on a Brexit deal. From the outside, it almost seems funny. Until you realise people might actually die because of medicine shortages and an economic crash.

Let the show go on!

1. THE LAW

Has the law lost or won here? This week, the Scottish appeals court found that Johnson’s proroguing of Parliament was unlawful. The government will appeal this decision in the Supreme Court on Tuesday. If that appeal fails and the ruling stands, we’ll go ahead and take that as a win.

Before a definitive decision gets made, however, we can celebrate one thing: the farrago has already caused one of the worst headlines a Prime Minister could hope for: Boris Johnson lied to the Queen. And now Johnson is having to go on TV and say that the suggestion that he's a big fat liar who lied to Her Majesty the Queen are "absolutely not" true, which is a pretty bad look!

2. POLITICIANS GETTING ROWDY IN THE EMPTY CHAMBER

This week saw a large amount of “your dad energy” in Parliament. After the Scottish court ruling, MPs started turning up to the chamber to protest the decision. They wanted to make it very clear that they, the good MPs that they are, had turned up because they believed Parliament should be sitting. And what better way to make a political point than through a badly lit selfie?

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Felt cute, might delete later xxx

3. THE WEIRD PROROGUING CEREMONY

Honestly, what the fuck?

4. ALL THE GOOD LAWS WE LOST BECAUSE OF THE PARLIAMENT SHUTDOWN

It’s all fun and games until you realising the country is literally crumbling beneath the sweaty palms of Boris Johnson. This week, 13 bills that were set to be passed have now been forgotten unless Parliament wishes to carry them over when the session restarts. However, all progress on these bills is lost and they must start the process of going through government again (AKA this long process).

Some bills that now must start from scratch are: a law that would increase the prison sentence for animal cruelty from six months to five years in England and Wales, a domestic abuse bill with cross-party support that would have introduced a new definition allowing for more people to come forward, a law to include an optional question on the census on LGBTQ identity, plus numerous Brexit-related laws that were considered important for October 31st, especially in the case of a no-deal Brexit.

5. THE QUEEN

Sorry babe, you got played.