Dear UK: How To Fight A Prorogue

Having lived through a prorogue, this is what I learned

When Parliament is prorogued, Parliament becomes the streets

Parliament is like a bad toilet. The handle is janky, you have to flush twice, the seat has been loose for years. It’s not an object you love, but shut it down for a day and you’ll suddenly miss it terribly. This is where the UK finds itself.

I’ve been there.

The Sri Lankan Parliament was prorogued on October 27th, 2018. We had to protest in the streets until it came back in November and even then there were running battles inside Parliament. We won, but this led to ongoing instability that left us open to terrorist attack the next year. A non-consensual prorogue is not a good think and I hope the UK has better luck than we did.

But please don’t tell me Sri Lanka is just the third world and there’s no connection. We’re all the third world now, aren’t we?

Here are some lessons we learned.

The first is, as the UK found out, there’s not much you can do to stop a prorogue (essentially a Parliamentary timeout). You just need a head of state to approve it and any court case will take longer than the delay. The other thing is that proroguing with protest definitely promotes rogue.