Theresa May: “The world knows what this house does not want. Today we need to send an emphatic message about what we do want.”
Jeremy Corbyn: “It will not be any comfort to say: ‘I told you so’ when the lorries are backing up on the M20, when cancer patients can’t get medicines and when prices are rising in the shops. So tonight we have the opportunity to take ‘no deal’ off the table.”
Keir Starmer, shadow Brexit secretary: “It’s one thing for backbenchers to lay an amendment at odds with the prime minister’s deal. It’s quite another for the prime minister to support it – unless of course she’d already got an indication from the EU that they could and would negotiate the necessary changes. But she hasn’t.”
Nick Boles, Tory MP who co-sponsored a defeated amendment seeking to avoid no deal: “I am seriously committed to making a success of Brexit, but there are two parts to that sentence – there’s Brexit and there’s success. And Brexit on 29 March with no deal will not be a success. It will be a disaster. It will sour the British people against the operation of their government for a generation, and I cannot have that on my conscience.”
Tory Dominic Grieve, who’s amendment was also defeated: “One has to keep in mind and respect the decision of the referendum, but that does not mean that you simply say that you’re going to drag the country out on terms that nobody seems to very much support towards a future which on the face of it looks pretty bad. And that is an abdication of our responsibility.”
Conservative MP Graham Brady: “By voting for amendment N we can send the prime minister back to Brussels to negotiate and we can do so having strengthened her hand, able to say that she has a real mandate from this house and to ask for real change.”
Veteran Conservative Oliver Letwin: “I have actually got to the point where I am past caring what the deal is we have – I will vote for it to get a smooth exit … If those [no deal] risks materialise, our party will not be forgiven for many years to come. It will be the first time when we have consciously taken a risk on behalf of our nation, and if terrible things have happened to real people in our nation because of that risk, we will not be able to argue it was someone else’s fault.”
Labour’s Stella Creasy: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results… Citizens’ assemblies are not about replacing MPs and not about cancelling or giving up on parliament. They’re about stopping the games that we have seen being played in this place – the horse-trading, the unicorn hunting, that have meant that we are in this gridlock.”