You are quoting someone who lived 250 years ago in a time when not many people actually had the vote and when MPs rode to the House of Commons on horseback wearing a sword.

Times change and nowadays people vote for an MP not because he's a good bloke and an original thinker but because he's a member of a particular party and is therefore expected to vote in accordance with the party manifesto

That's of course true, but it's true whether we do a deal now or later. The point I was making was whether the EU would be more, or less, inclined to offer favourable terms if we left without a deal and caused everyone problems as a consequence.

Right now our leverage on that is that we can ensure there is a peaceful, ordered transition. Later we don't have that but would have a legacy of causing headaches and a mess of paperwork and costs

You are quoting someone who lived 250 years ago in a time when not many people actually had the vote and when MPs rode to the House of Commons on horseback wearing a sword.

Times change and nowadays people vote for an MP not because he's a good bloke and an original thinker but because he's a member of a particular party and is therefore expected to vote in accordance with the party manifesto

I don't know how many times I need to say this but we don't elect delegates we elect representatives.

MPs are not party delegates. They don't have to endorse the line held by the majority of their members. That's the attitude adopted by the Labour party and it's as wrong for them as it is for the Tories and should it ever become accepted it would be the end of Parliamentary democracy as we know it. We might then just as well send voting machines to the House of Commons and leave all the decision making to party conferences.

For the smooth running of Government most MPs will, most of the time, follow the directions given to them by their party, via the whips. The important thing though to realise is that they do so not by law, but by convention. The choice of whether to obey the whip is their's, and their's alone, to make.

At all times their duty is to obey their conscience when deciding what is in the best interests of ALL their constituents, and not just those who voted for them, and the country as a whole. If that sometimes brings them into conflict with official party policy then so be it. I would rather live under a system in which we are governed by people free to express themselves at all times, than risk a situation in which the party machine can be usurped to produce a form of neo-dictatorship.

The party system only exists to allow people with sufficiently similar views to come together to form a government. It does not over-ride the duties and rights of any individual MP.

Parliament's job is to give us what they believe we need and not to give us what we want and, even more importantly, what just some of us want. If they can see that events have moved sufficiently far from the situation that existed in 2016 that a new look is now appropriate, then that's not only their right but also their duty to act. That some don't like it, because it doesn't suit their personal opinion, is a given, but that doesn't mean that they are acting incorrectly.