THE UK Government has rejected calls to change tack on Brexit after more than five million people signed a petition demanding Parliament revokes Article 50.
Brexit minister Lord Callanan acknowledged at question time that the number of people signing the petition to stay in the EU was "impressive".
But he told peers that the UK had government by the ballot box and Parliament, not by internet opinion polls.
The Revoke Article 50 petition has proved the most popular petition to ever have been submitted on the UK Parliament's website.
Lord Callanan said the Government would respond to it but it remained policy not to revoke the Article 50 notice.
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Labour's Baroness Quin dubbed the Government's response "rather dismissive" and insisted that a petition pushing towards six million signatures could not be dismissed as coming from an "out of touch elite".
Lady Quin said it represented an "impressive swathe of opinion from right across the country". The UK must not leave the EU without a deal and any deal should be put to the public.
Lord Callanan said: "Of course we respect everybody who signed the petition. It's an impressive number of people."
But he said that under Labour 750,000 people marched against the Iraq war and "we know the result of that".
The minister added: "At the end of the day we have government in this country by ballot box and Act of Parliament."
To opposition jeers, Tory former Cabinet minister Lord Tebbit asked how many of the signatories were "British subjects and how many are foreigners".
Lord Callanan said some doubt had been cast on some of the signatures on social media.
"But I don't doubt the vast majority were British citizens," he added.
LibDem Lord Roberts of Llandudno said that while the revoke petition had brought in nearly six million signatures, the one to leave the EU had brought in 570,000.
Roberts urged ministers to respond to the "recent will" of the people.
But Lord Callanan told him: "We don't have government in this country by online internet poll. We have government by the ballot box and by this Parliament."
Tory former Cabinet minister Lord Lilley warned: "It would be an enormous betrayal of trust and undermine confidence in our Parliament and system if we were to ignore the result and simply revoke Article 50."
Callanan said the Government needed to respect the result of the referendum and the vote of 17.4 million people in favour of leaving the EU, which was "bigger than the five million who have signed the petition".
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