We meet hours after she has given an unflappable account of herself to the Today programme and 5 Live, the day after defying her party’s three-line whip and voting against the bill to trigger article 50. As soon as I said I would vote against article 50, someone rang my office and said: ‘You know Tulip should be careful, because you know what happened to Jo Cox when she didn’t back the Leave side.’”Siddiq felt compelled to vote against article 50, she explains, because her constituents had voted 75% to remain. To have voted for article 50 would therefore have been an unconscionable betrayal of democracy. Nor could she have signed the amendment tabled last week by Heidi Alexander, calling for the article 50 bill to be thrown out on the grounds that the government has failed to “safeguard British interests in the single market”. Amazingly, parliament has no maternity leave policy for MPs, so Siddiq went back to work nine weeks after an emergency caesarean.

Source: The Guardian February 04, 2017 06:56 UTC