The ayes to the right, 202.
The no's to the left, 432.
In the past few days Theresa May has made
history but not for good reasons.
She suffered the biggest defeat of any
modern government in parliament.
There was a majority of 230 votes against her Brexit plan.
Britain's in a real pickle now when it comes to Brexit.
There are now only about 10 weeks left until March the 29th
which is when the country is due to fall out of the EU,
deal or no deal, and at the moment there is no deal.
The prime minister thought that she had negotiated a good
withdrawal agreement with the EU but it has to go through
parliament before it can be legitimized and parliament has
indicated very clearly that it's having none of this.
Theresa May herself said we're now
in unchartered territory and that's about right.
Britain's got a reputation for being
a sensible, moderate kind of place.
We've had an unbroken democracy here for a very
long time and yet now we find ourselves in this
real crisis and the reason for that is that we've got
a long history here of representative democracy in which
people elect MPs who take decisions on their behalf.
But the Brexit referendum of 2016 injected a rarer
kind of direct democracy in which the people gave
a specific instruction to the government and what's
happening now is that those two different kinds
of democracy are kind of jamming up against each other.
You've got the instruction of the people in
the referendum that says that Leave has to happen but
then you've got their elected representatives, who they
elected only in 2017, saying that actually the terms of
the withdrawal are not acceptable to their constituents.
And the trouble is that both of these views have legitimacy
and how you resolve these competing types of democracy
is not at all clear, that's why Britain is in such a mess.
Many people thought after the referendum in 2016 that
because it was such a close result it might be possible
to find some kind of compromise to go for a so-called
soft Brexit but it hasn't worked that way at all.
If anything, since the referendum, the two groups,
the Remain group and the Leave group,
have actually grown further apart.
Part of this is the fault of Theresa May.
After the referendum, she could have reached out to other
parties, she could have reached out to Remainers to try
to forge a kind of compromise but she didn't do that.
Instead, from the very beginning,
she went for a hard form of Brexit.
She drew it up in secret with a few advisers.
And given the very split nature of her party
and of parliament and of the country, this has actually
been exactly the wrong approach and that's
what's resulted in this unprecedented defeat.
The most important thing for Britain to do now is stop the
clock and extend the two year Article 50 negotiating period.
After doing that she can try and negotiate with
other parties in parliament and she's indicated that
she wants to try to do that but the Labor opposition
so far said that it's unwilling to negotiate with
her until she takes the option of no deal
off the table and she doesn't seem keen to do that.
It seems now that possibly the only way
to resolve this crisis could be to put the question
back to the people and to have a second vote.
What we have at the moment is this absurd situation
where their elected representatives think that the deal
is a bad one but some of them feel they ought to vote
for it anyway on the basis that it may be what voters want.
But we can't know that for sure.
People voted narrowly to leave but the Brexit
deal that's now on the table is really quite
different to what they were offered in 2016.
Now, voters might want this anyway, they might decide that
these trade offs are worth it, but they might not.
And the only way to find out is to ask them.