We had no less than 17 votes in the House of Commons yesterday. Whilst I do not keep records I can not recall ever having had that many votes in a single day before. 7 of the votes were deferred divisions included 6 on Statutory Instruments which had been debated in Committee and one was on the Canada EU Trade agreement. the other ten were all votes on the Brexit Bill. The government defeated all the amendments which were put forward by the opponents to the Bill. Considering the government only has a majority of 12 the smallest majority last night was 39. On every single vote last night the government secured a vote higher than 325 ( ie half the total size of the House of Commons which is 650). On the crucial final vote on the Third Reading the majority was 372. The Bill now passes to the House of Lords. I hope they reflect on the fact that we have now had a referendum where a majority of voters voted to leave the EU by a margin of over one million votes and now after five long days of debate and dozens of votes the House of commons has approved the Bill to give Notice of our intention to leave the EU. It would be bizarre in the extreme if the House of Lords now tried to stand in the way of the will of the people and the will of the elected House of Commons.
6 thoughts on “One step closer”
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David Nuttall 
Only 17 votes in one day. That’s odd, as, for quite a few years now, there have in the region of 4,000 legislations “passed” by parliament every year. Who is formulating, discussing and voting on these?
I would like to see the evidence for that. I can only guess it must include all the Eu rules which have simply been imposed on us by virtue of our EU membership. Plus of course lots of small legislative changes are not controversial and are passed without a vote. David
Hopefully they will pass the bill through without any amendments so that the PM can finally trigger Article 50 during the next EU meeting. Well done David, with all your hard work in getting this done. I never thought I’d see the day the Commons would vote for us to leave the EU. A very good day indeed.
Dear Mr Nuttall
Please clarify for our benefit. The very last sentence of your Blog posted Feb 9 2017 I see the very last word has been changed from “Lords” to “Commons” as I personally would have expected. Typo was it ?
Regards
Of course, I realised straight away it had been posted that it should say Commons so I immediately changed it.
Our Thanks
Regards