Despite its spon­sor­ship by a twice-disgraced and unelected politi­cian, despite the fact that it was trans­par­ently lob­bied for by com­pa­nies rep­re­sent­ing the record labels, despite it car­ry­ing dis­pro­por­tion­ate pun­ish­ments for file-sharers, despite it seek­ing to under­mine the work of con­tent cre­ators, despite a promise to oppose it from the Lib Dems, still the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill passed through the Houses of Parliament.

In the end it became not even a mat­ter of the con­tent of the bill itself, but of its inclu­sion of in the out­go­ing government’s “wash-up” process that would allow it to be passed with­out proper scrutiny by the House. Surely a bill with so many far-reaching impli­ca­tions should be treated to the proper debate it deserves? But no.

Organ­i­sa­tions such as the Open Rights Group and 38degrees have cam­paigned long and hard. 20,000 peo­ple wrote to their MPs ask­ing them to demand that the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill get proper scrutiny, and hun­dreds made phone calls. There were protests in the streets in West­min­ster. 38degrees asked for £10,000 to pay for adver­tis­ing, so that “on the day of the vote they’ll see our oppo­si­tion over their corn­flakes, on their way into work and over tea in Par­lia­ment”. They raised more than dou­ble that fig­ure in two days.

How many MPs turned up to the sec­ond hear­ing last night to vote on whether this cru­cial piece of leg­is­la­tion is allowed to pro­ceed? About thirty. Tonight, for the third hear­ing? Maybe forty. Uses of #debill on Twit­ter were run­ning above 1 a sec­ond; we were hav­ing much more of a debate than the House was.

Some good argu­ments were put for­ward by those that did see fit to turn up, rais­ing hopes that the assem­bled MPs might realise how flawed the bill really is. Tom Wat­son deserves par­tic­u­lar credit, but even John Red­wood expressed his reser­va­tions about push­ing the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill through.

But in the end, that’s what it came down to. Maybe ten of the 50 clauses in the bill received any kind of debate what­so­ever, the rest were blazed through in five min­utes by a com­bi­na­tion of John Bercow and some doubt­less super-strength cof­fee. Some things went our way — par­tic­u­larly the loss of the con­tro­ver­sial ‘orphan works’ clause, clause 43.

The House went off to vote on whether to accept the bill on its third read­ing, and though the major­ity of those actu­ally present at the debate seemed in oppo­si­tion to it, the final tally stood at 189 Ayes, 47 Nays. 189?! Where did they come from? Oh, right, the bar.

Just as we expected and feared, the gov­ern­ment waited until the wash-up to put this bill before Par­lia­ment so that it would receive as lit­tle debate and as few amend­ments as pos­si­ble before being pushed through by a horde of MPs who didn’t even care enough to sit in on the debate.

We failed.

But what more could we have done? I don’t recall as great a pub­lic demon­stra­tion of oppo­si­tion to a sin­gle bill since fox-hunting, and yet still we have had vir­tu­ally no impact on its progress. Must we sim­ply accept that, hav­ing voted for our MPs in an elec­tion, we can have no real effect on them for the next five years; these peo­ple who sup­pos­edly rep­re­sent our views? Do they just set­tle in for five years of rep­re­sent­ing the views of the party Whips instead?

Well that’s that, I guess. Leave your tor­rent client at the door, and grab as much of Wik­ileaks and Rapid­share as you can before the gov­ern­ment realises it now has the power to block them. Wel­come to Man­del­son and Murdoch’s Dig­i­tal Economy.