The post you are reporting:
Paul refers to this article by Dominic Lawson.
Debating points are all very well, but they don’t necessarily become truer — or even true at all — by being endlessly repeated. For example, it is forever being said by those opposed to Brexit: “The ‘leave’ campaign argued for a restoration of full parliamentary sovereignty. Now parliament is doing just that by ‘taking back control’ of Brexit. Ha!” But the argument of the leave campaign was for a restoration of accountability to British voters and away from a supranational authority: a fully sovereign parliament simply meant one not superseded by the European Court of Justice. Moreover, when agreeing to pass the referendum bill — by no fewer than 554 votes to 53 — parliament directly handed that decision to the people. The people (by a majority of more than a million) duly made their decision. Honouring that, parliament then agreed to invoke article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which meant that on March 29, 2019, the UK would cease to be a member of the European Union. Subsequently, in the 2017 general election, both Labour and Conservative campaigned — and won 82.4% of votes cast — on manifestos pledging to honour the referendum result.
It is true the referendum gave no instruction (nor could have done) on the precise terms on which Britain would leave, or indeed on how the relationship with the EU would operate thereafter. Only one thing was absolutely clear: we would leave. So the effort of many in parliament now to revoke article 50 is nothing less than the use (or rather abuse) of parliamentary sovereignty as a weapon against the people who elected it: MPs are to “take back control” from those who give parliament its sole claim to legitimacy, or indeed, moral authority. As Robert Tombs, the author of that magisterial tome The English and Their History, observes: “The House of Commons seems to be trying to turn itself into another House of Lords. The upper house’s legitimacy is (or was) based on the superior status of its members . . . The Lords claimed the right to veto the will of the plebs because the elite knew better. That came to an end in 1911, after a bitter conflict between ‘the peers and the people’.”
As Tombs argues, it is a rash House of Commons that attempts a similar battle: in the crisis that would follow “if the whole system broke down . . . I doubt very much that the ultimate focus of people’s loyalty is the membership of the House of Commons”. In other words, those who claim to be upholding the authority of parliament are running the grave risk of destroying it, with consequences that can only be imagined.
As that distinguished Cambridge professor also pointed out, if parliament took effective charge of the negotiations with the EU (but without actually sitting at the negotiating table), it would be arrogating to itself decision-making that had never before been seized from a British government. Given that it is only the executive branch that has the responsibility of governing, of giving orders — of making sure things actually work — parliament would be claiming the role Stanley Baldwin (in words written by his cousin Rudyard Kipling) attributed to the press in the 1930s: “Power without responsibility.”