Thread by @DrPhillipLee

On #Brexit, these #EUelections2019 show that, if a political party stands in the middle of the road, it gets squashed. That‘s what I predicted when I resigned from Government last year. And it’s what has happened to @Conservatives and @UKLabour

So what next? If the purpose of government is to follow the will of the people (at any cost), the only politically viable Brexit is a hard one (WTO etc). But neither major political party will get a Westminster majority by delivering Hard Brexit without explicit public consent

And forget any soft Brexit. It’s not politically viable (for the record, I’ve always held that it’s the worst of both worlds) and anyone thinking we get further concessions from the @EU_Commission by playing hardball is living in cuckoo land. The WA is it, take it or leave it

But hard Brexit has a democratic problem: only about a third of voters supported it at this election. Over 12 million 2016 Brexit voters didn’t. Vote Leave didn’t campaign for No Deal in 2016, so to claim 17.4m now want “to just get out” is wrong and democratically illegitimate

So the question is: how to get the public consent to govern in a democracy? As things stand, hard Brexit won’t reunify a divided country or win elections. It has neither public consent nor a Parliamentary majority. The only way now is to give the British people a #FinalSay