THE Queen's predictable decision to agree to prorogue Parliament for five weeks at Boris Johnson's request shows how empty are bids to defeat this right-wing coup through “constitutional” means.

If Labour was outmanoeuvred by the Lib Dems and Scottish National Party on Tuesday to drop immediate plans to try to bring down the government and instead engage in parliamentary games to defeat a “no-deal” Brexit, it now looks to have been outmanoeuvred too by the Prime Minister, whose unscrupulous pitch to shut down Parliament entirely throws down the gauntlet to the labour movement.

Labour's initial reactions appear to follow the same defeatist constitutionalism that led to Tuesday’s retreat. Jeremy Corbyn writing to Her Majesty for an urgent meeting might have been necessary as a matter of form. But no-one should have imagined for a moment that it would halt the Tories in their tracks.

Shami Chakrabarti says: “We will work across parties to defeat this strategy in Parliament. And I hope it doesn’t come to it, but if down the road it ends up in the courts, I have little doubt that the courts will step up to protect our Parliament and parliamentary democracy.”

Unfortunately, this approach plays straight into Johnson’s hands.

A Labour Party whose socialist leadership since 2015 has rejuvenated British democracy, reintroduced the mass party and the mass rally to our politics and whose leaders are well aware of the crucial importance of grassroots, extraparliamentary activity as the driver of political change should be responding to Johnson’s coup with a call to arms, not appeals to parliamentary procedure and certainly not to the unelected judiciary.

The Prime Minister’s calculations are easy to read. Parliament has spent three years wrangling over Brexit and has failed to agree a way forward. Despite repeated bids by the Labour leadership to force a general election, such is institutional fear of a truly radical Labour government that the votes could never be found in the Commons for one. 

Public patience is running out with self-righteous MPs whose numerous “indicative votes” showed they don’t have any solution to the deadlock but whose terror of the ballot box means they prefer constitutional fixes to a no-confidence vote that would return decisions on who runs this country to the public.

As one Telegraph columnist admirer of Johnson wrote yesterday, those who live by obscure parliamentary procedures should expect to die by them. The left has failed to frame the challenge to Johnson’s unelected government as one of the people’s right to elect a new one and deliver change. It has appealed to the constitutional processes of a state fundamentally hostile to the labour movement and to the Labour Party’s socialist leadership. 

By calmly playing the Queen, Johnson has proved that the Establishment will always have the best of games played on its terms. And he clearly intends to use this showdown to win a general election.

That is not the immediate purpose of the proroguing, of course. Johnson, like Theresa May before him, is still avoiding the issue Corbyn has been highlighting for nearly a year: when the government cannot command the confidence of Parliament, it’s time for a general election. He is not dissolving Parliament so that an election can be held: in that case, the left would welcome the opportunity to unseat him.

Instead, he talks of Britain’s right to have a new government with a new agenda for the country post-Brexit. But that government would not be a new government at all, but his current one. It would have no more mandate to govern than it does now. And, like now, it would rest on a majority of one, many of whom oppose Johnson’s approach to Brexit.

This is clearly untenable in the long term. Johnson’s hope is that Labour will continue on its current trajectory. Having suspended Parliament and delivered Brexit, he will make his election pitch as the man who carried out the people’s decision when Labour and Parliament tried to frustrate it. If Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party falls in with that claim, he has a good chance of winning such an election.

In the meantime, proroguing Parliament has other advantages. It suspends parliamentary business – not just for MPs but all parliamentary committees and questions. Ministers in that period cannot be held to account. 

Anyone who believes that this threat should be taken lightly ought to glance across the Channel. In France, Emmanuel Macron was similarly faced with the ruling class's inability to rule in the old way. Several successive French governments, from Chirac’s to Hollande’s, had tried and failed to significantly privatise France’s public services and to seriously undermine the workers’ rights won by decades of trade union struggle. 

Macron’s solution was simply to issue decrees demolishing trade union rights without allowing National Assembly discussion. At the same time a state of emergency justified on grounds of terrorist attacks was kept in place for two years and then most of its draconian measures incorporated into permanent law in 2017. Popular resistance to the government in the form of the “yellow vests” protests has been met with savage and overwhelming force.

The fact that the British left underestimates its own potential does not mean the ruling class does. Parliament’s refusal to concede an election despite the government’s inability to pass legislation stems from real fear of what a Corbyn-led government could achieve. Johnson is an opportunist who hopes to win a snap election posing as the champion of “the people” against a Parliament that is obstructing their will. 

But he is also an Establishment insider who will want to deploy every weapon available to smash the socialist revival in the Labour Party and cut off any possibility of socialist change. The government cannot rule by consent any more. It will be inclined to look to other mechanisms of control.

The left’s response cannot be to appeal to judges to protect a Parliament that Johnson rightly gambles is held in popular contempt. It must be to mobilise resistance to an attack on the rights we have and to demand more democracy, not less. 

It must be to mobilise street resistance and, as a socialist mayor in north-east England has it, to march on Parliament. Rather than writing to the Queen, Corbyn should be asked to address the demonstration against proroguing called by the People’s Assembly for Tuesday night. 

Labour still has a chance to drop the nonsense of talks with the Lib Dems about legislative routes and national governments and put itself at the head of a popular insurgency. 

To say that we oppose the dictatorial proroguing of Parliament by a hard-right Tory PM, not because we want Parliament to keep sitting but because we demand immediate elections. 

To say that we will fight that election on the basis of winning a Corbyn-led government that will deliver real change, not on the basis of letting the sterile EU debate drag on. 

To say that we will fight for the rights of the people, not the rights of an ancient and unfit for purpose “constitution” that a dyed-in-the-wool Tory such as Speaker John Bercow claims is being outraged.

There is an audience for such a challenge. But Labour must detach itself from two-faced liberal and Establishment “allies” and start speaking for its own if it wants to be heard.