Christopher Clayton (Letters, 15 January) asks whether the MPs who I suggest (Letters, 14 January) should now vote on Brexit according to conscience include those who at election time pledged that they would respect the referendum result. The answer is yes.
Parliament could have legislated in 2015 to make a majority leave vote operate as an article 50 notice. It did not do so, both because the actual object of the referendum was to resolve infighting in the Conservative party and because it was obvious that a simple binary in/out question could not possibly address the complexities of leaving.
This is why it is the obligation of MPs, in deciding how to vote now, to take into account not only the referendum result (including the outturn in their own constituency, any election pledge they may have made in relation to it, the closeness of the result nationally, and possibly too the mendacity, illegality and grandstanding which characterised the national campaign) but all that is now known – as it could not possibly have been known in 2016 – of the consequences of leaving.
This is what MPs are for in a representative democracy. They are not mandated delegates. We do not expect them to forgo their judgment and their conscience in return for a parliamentary seat. We know that some, perhaps many, of them renege for unattractive reasons on election pledges or manifestos. But this is a uniquely different situation, in which an obligation to consider the options we now face, to think afresh and to vote accordingly, is not a career move but a constitutional duty.
Stephen Sedley
Oxford
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