Brexitwatch. Parliament: We demand to be irrelevant!

When Theresa May had to hastily cobble together a White Paper to pretend she had some kind of ‘plan’ for Brexit, even she had to admit that while the UK has been in the EU, Parliament has remained ‘sovereign’, contradicting one of the major lies of the Leave campaign.

But now MPs are busily voting that after Brexit, they should no longer be sovereign. Do they want a say on workers’ rights? No, thank you. Animal rights, then? Certainly not!

And remember the 58 Brexit impact studies that Parliament is supposedly forcing the government to publish? Shouldn't MPs make sure they have a look at them before pushing Brexit through? Oh, no need for that, old chap.

Winston Churchill once remarked that the House of Commons would not be a truly representative body if it did not have its proportion of fools. Well, now the fools are in the majority. More than three hundred of them have been found to vote themselves into irrelevance.

You can understand why. I suspect most MPs realise Brexit will be a disaster, but if we complain to them, they will have the perfect excuse: ‘You voted for it!’ So why speak out and go through all the heartache of being abused by the extreme right and the newspapers they control? Better to just nod it through.

The trouble is: if our MPs keep voting that they should be irrelevant, that is what they will become. And the ‘people’ are likely to start asking what is the point of Parliament.