Johnson to make fresh general election bid

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UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson

London,  UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson will on Tuesday try for a fourth time to secure an early general election, after MPs rejected his plan.

MPs will begin to debate and vote on a bill for the election on Tuesday lunchtime, the BBC reported.

Usually a bill is debated over the course of several days, but according to Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the House of Commons, the legislation would be “extremely short, simple, and limited in scope”.

The bill has to pass through the House of Commons and the House of Lords before it can come into effect.

Tuesday’s vote comes after the Commons backed the government’s election motion by 299 to 70 on Monday – well short of the two-thirds of all MPs whose support are needed under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.

All Conservative MPs backed the motion, but the vast majority of Labour MPs abstained, along with the Scottish Nationalist Party and Democratic Unionist Party. All but one MP from the Liberal Democrats voted against it.

The legislation the Prime Minister will propose on Tuesday requires a lower threshold for approval than the motion he tabled on Monday.

The push for an election comes as the government said it would abandon its attempt to pass its Brexit bill, for the time being.

Monday’s vote came after Johnson officially accepted the European Union’s (EU) offer of an extension to the Brexit deadline to January 31, 2020.

This means the UK will not now leave the EU on Thursday.