Last week, under a process unique in a thousand years of parliamentary history, MPs had the opportunity to discover “the will of parliament”. Today it will be repeated. Instead of voting to decide between mutually exclusive proposals on Brexit, MPs had a series of indicative votes.
It was supposed to break the deadlock by allowing MPs to say not only what they wanted, but what they would be prepared to accept when it comes to Brexit. Most rational people had long since realised that the prime minister’s deal would not get a majority. So the idea was that indicative votes actually gave MPs the opportunity to secure a majority for something, but only if they honestly voted for all the proposals that they could accept, instead of only voting for the one or two proposals that they most wanted.
I found the experience refreshing. Normally I am clear beforehand about which single proposal in a binary choice I am going to vote for. With the indicative votes I had the chance to vote for lots of things. I didn’t have to rank them in order, I just had to say whether I could live with them. Anything I really could not accept, I could vote against. During the course of the debate I found myself changing my decision. I had originally decided to vote against the European Economic Area with a customs union proposal. It respects the referendum technically by leaving the EU, and it delivers the benefits of a customs union, but the membership of the single market means we would not have control over money, borders and laws in a way that most people who voted to leave would find unacceptable. But my colleague Lucy Powell MP made an excellent speech that made me realise that even though I did not favour it, I could live with it. So I changed my decision and did not vote against. I treated the indicative process as a mechanism to deliver an outcome that most of us could live with.
Looking at the way many other MPs actually voted, that now seems almost touchingly naive. What I did not expect was that some people would vote against positions they actually supported in order to game the system and try to get their number one choice to the top of the list. I, of course, knew Anna Soubry’s top option was to have a second referendum. She does not want to leave the EU and wants to reverse the result of the referendum so of course I expected her to vote to have a second referendum on any deal and to revoke article 50. That is fair and proper. What I had not expected was that she would vote against the Clarke/Benn amendment on a customs union. She and many of her colleagues in the Independent Group are on the record as supporting a customs union, indeed they were signatories to the customs union amendments to the trade bill and the customs bill. They did not even abstain. They voted against something they had always previously supported. The public may wonder if some old scores were being settled or whether tribal loyalties were preventing some MPs from voting for options they might have favoured if only they had been put forward by a different source.
On the whole I believe Labour MPs came out of the process with great credit. They entered into the spirit of the indicative process and were prepared to vote in favour of more options than any other political party or group. Personally I emerged as less amenable than most of my Labour colleagues (only voting in favour of three options and abstaining on two). But on average Labour MPs were willing to vote for four or five options out of the eight available.
The most astonishing fact of the indicative vote process however, is how difficult Conservatives found it to vote in favour of anything at all. On the Guardian spreadsheet the Conservative MPs can be easily identified by the sea of red “againsts” next to their names. On average Conservatives voted against six or seven options out of the eight available, with very few abstentions. Some, such as Mel Stride and Charles Walker, could not find it in themselves even to abstain on a single option, but voted against all eight.
Surely the public had a right to expect better? This was supposed to be a process in which MPs placed the interest of the country first. Where they said yes to all the things they could accept in a spirit of reasonable compromise. For some MPs it appears to have turned into a high-stakes exercise in games theory. We did not find out “the will of parliament” – what we found instead was the wilfulness of MPs.
If parliament is to find a path through the Brexit mess today, then MPs need to stop playing the system, pay no attention to the names or parties of the proposer and seconders and ask themselves honestly “Could I bear to put up with this sort of deal?” Then and only then might we reclaim the right to call ourselves representatives of the will of the people.
• Barry Gardiner is shadow secretary of state for international trade, energy and climate change. He is Labour MP for Brent North
