Now is probably the worst time to have a weak opposition. It is vitally important that parliament has a cross section of MPs willing to scrutinise and question each and every part of Brexit, and continue to hold the government accountable.
Just as an aside, it is very debateable to say we have weak opposition
in Parliament now.
Since the last election, the Tory Government has been beaten three times (admittedly one of those was a bit of a nonsense) and has had to publicly back down at least twice on major issues because it knew that they wouldn't get them past the Commons. They were on course to have as hard a time of it as Major did, and it may well have been as bad as the mid-70s because of Brexit and the current makeup of the House. Of course this is almost certainly down to lack of control that Corbyn has over his MPs, combined with the tiny majority that May has inherited from Cameron. What it has resulted in is that the quality of Parliamentary debate - and the quality of Parliamentary decision making with regards to approving Government policy - is probably better now than it has been at any point for the past forty years. MPs of all parties (and all factions within those parties) are emboldened to speak their minds, identify their own issues and take them up -
which is what should happen.
If you make the parties stronger - on either side of the aisle - then we lose all that. They will retreat into triangulating the same tiny political space, having the same orthodoxies, serving the same masters and enforcing the same message discipline on MPs (which of course extends to selecting people who can be relied upon to follow those orders).
