Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to both our witnesses. Dr. Morden and Dr. Thomas, it's nice to have you here.
I wanted to start by asking about this recent Brexit debate in Westminster Hall. It seems to me that one of the problems arising in the House itself at this point, as the issue is debated and re-debated, is that for reasons that have to do with what's on the agenda and which changing coalition of members—factions, I could almost call them—is in favour of or against different proposals, or the rules on reconsidering an issue that the House has debated before, the debate in the House is being constrained in ways that are perhaps not productive. It would be a very interesting exercise to go through it, from a game theory point of view, as to how the debate has evolved in the Commons.
This raises the issue that there's no longer really a venue in the House itself—or what one might think of as a plenary session—where we're debating the big-picture issue of Brexit itself, as opposed to this or that way out of the current fix the country is in. The fix itself changing on a nearly day-to-day basis. Is that actually what happened in this debate on the e-petitions, that in fact it was possible to go back and reconsider the big-picture issues? That's number one.
Number two is, has this also been a venue for the numerous backbenchers—there are so many of them in the U.K.—who are not in a position to get up and have debates in the Commons itself, to speak and to give those individuals a chance to address Brexit issues?