Like other hon. Members, I am a little surprised at the level of attendance at this afternoon’s debate. I can never tell with these things whether it is a lack of empathy across the House for the sentiments behind the petition or whether it is just that the Attorney General is bigger box office than this discussion, but we are where we are.
The way I see it is this: I do not think that in a free, open and democratic society we can say that people do not have the right to change their minds. Of course they do. A group of people voting in a referendum one day in history cannot forever bind people for the future. Any of us would be on very thin ice if we were to get into a situation of saying, “You can never have a second referendum on this question.” On the other hand, we have to accept that with big questions of governance and constitutional politics, we cannot go changing our mind every day, or every month, or even every year.
Therefore, we have to ask ourselves in what circumstances it is legitimate to consider a second referendum, a so-called people’s vote. There are three tests that need to be applied before the legitimacy test is passed. First, it must be demonstrated that the information on which people made their original decision is in some way compromised, either because it was wrong or because it is now obsolete and has been superseded by further developments. With regard to the Brexit referendum, I do not think anyone can argue other than that the information on which people based their decision was fatally flawed.
In response to the statement by the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer), I am not one of those who blame the electorate; I do not say that people were stupid or did not understand the question. I say they that were deliberately misled by people. I say that they were given information that was false, and deliberately so. In many ways the mendacity in that campaign was on an industrial scale. That is why people were conned in many ways into making the decision they did in June 2016.
Now we have an awful lot more information about what is at stake and what the consequences are, so we move on to the second test: have a significant number of people changed their minds on the question? By “significant”, I mean enough to produce a different result, were the question put again. Again, that test is met. It is consistently clear from opinion polls over three or four months—the latest one only today—that a large number of people have changed their mind on the question, sufficient to produce a different result were the question put again. The Prime Minister and the Government are fond of saying that 17.4 million people voted to leave the EU, the biggest number in our history that have ever voted for anything. That is true, but here is the inconvenient truth: at least 2 million of them have now changed their minds. I think it is disrespectful to those people not at least to consider whether the circumstances are such that they should be consulted again.
The third test is that the Parliament or legislature charged with discharging the mandate from the referendum is either unwilling to do so, or incapable of doing so. We are not at that point yet, but I am fairly certain, and I have no reason to change my view from the speeches so far today, that next Tuesday evening Parliament will reject the withdrawal agreement that has been put before it by the Government. In those circumstances, we will be entering a period of unknown chaos, where the Parliament may well be incapable of making any decision. That political gridlock or stasis can perhaps only be resolved by putting the question back to the people who started the process in the first place—all the citizens of the country. I say therefore that a people’s vote should not be regarded as an alternative way of agreeing the withdrawal deal. It is going to happen, if it does, as a consequence of the failure of the Parliament and the Government to prepare a withdrawal deal.
I speak for the Scottish National party, the third party in the United Kingdom Parliament, so it would be remiss of me not to try to give some sort of perspective from north of the border. Scotland, as colleagues know, took a different view from the rest of Britain.