The question posed to each voter in the EU referendum was clear. And it was a question, I imagine, that I answered differently from the vast majority of those who read the Guardian. I said at the time, publicly, that our place was at the heart of a reformed European Union that was answerable to its citizens. But that wasn’t on the cards, and so I had to make a decision.

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Believing that we should be able to throw out of office the people who make the rules, and knowing from my membership of the European scrutiny committee in the House of Commons that we couldn’t, I exercised my own vote in favour of leave. I hated the campaign that leave ran. I disliked most of the people who ran it. What they said was divisive, xenophobic and untrue. But I persuaded myself that the sovereignty of the parliament in which I sat was more important than the tactics of a bunch of people I declined to have anything to do with. And then we got the result that we did.

What no one who put their cross in the leave box voted for, however, was the form that Brexit should take. It wasn’t on the ballot paper and no one knew, if that were to be the result, how matters would play out.

Frankly, I didn’t think leave stood much of a chance. But I also thought that if there were a vote to leave the EU, the outward-looking, internationalist face of modern multicultural Britain would win through: that although we would leave the EU, we would remain in the single market to which the manifesto of every major political party at the last election committed us – a market on which our prosperity as a nation, and our ability to raise the taxes to pay for public services, is founded.

Hard Brexit, with all the damage it will do, has seemingly become the received wisdom

That, of course, was before the lurch to the right made possible by the absence of any centrist opposition to this government. And the latest feature of the current direction of travel is the government’s desire not to seek the view of the House of Commons as to where its Brexit negotiations should end up. Hard Brexit, with all the damage it will do, has seemingly become the received wisdom, without any mandate at all from the British people, and seemingly without any challenge – at least until this week.

There is a supreme irony in all of this: a government principally led by remainers taking the result of the referendum as carte blanche not only to take Britain out of the EU, but to do so on whatever terms they like without reference to those elected to represent the views of the British people. Principled opposition is coming from only a few, such as Ed Miliband and Anna Soubry, who are prepared to point out that although the government may have a mandate for Brexit, it has no mandate at all for what it should look like.

The campaign to give parliament the right to determine our future relationship with the EU is not about reversing the referendum result. Nor is it about subverting the will of the British people, or having a second bite of the cherry. It’s about the sovereignty that I and others cherish, a sovereignty that resides principally in the House of Commons and in its ability, when given the opportunity, to inform and direct the government of the day.

Not giving parliament the chance, before article 50 is invoked, to say where it thinks these negotiations should end up is, at its core, undemocratic, unconstitutional and likely to exacerbate the divisions in our society to which the referendum gave rise. It also ignores the views of nearly half the people who voted in the referendum, who were perfectly content with our place in the EU.

Ignoring them, even though they were (just) in the minority, is not merely divisive but plain wrong.

The government says, of course, that it can’t give a running commentary on its negotiations with the EU and the governments of its member states. Nobody is asking for that. We are asking for MPs to have the right to have a say in directing a government with no mandate as to the form that Brexit should take. That’s it.

But even if we were asking more than that, as soon as the British government starts negotiating, not only will its position immediately leak but it will be discussed, at length, in the 27 parliaments of every other EU member. Though not ours, apparently.

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We’ll be kept informed by periodic government statements, but we won’t get to debate anything. That’s not what I voted for; it’s not what I believe the vast majority of my constituents voted for; and it’s not consistent with the way in which democratic societies should work.

Tomorrow, therefore, I will vote with the opposition to try to wrest back control over the form our future relations with the EU should take from a government that has no mandate at all to decide that question on its own.

There is still time for the government to change its position and accept that this is not only a good idea but the only thing consistent with what the referendum really decided: that the majority of British people want their own parliament to make the rules by which they are governed. They don’t want tyranny from their own government any more than they want it from the EU. It is to be hoped that someone in No 10 is listening.

• The photograph and caption on this article were changed on 4 November 2016.