Ed Miliband has said Rupert Murdoch was forced by Parliament to drop his bid to take control of BSkyB, as Gordon Brown made a rare appearance in the Commons.
The Labour leader was speaking during a debate that had been scheduled before News International decided to drop the bid.
The motion read: "This House believes that it is in the public interest for Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation to withdraw their bid for BSkyB."
Miliband said: "It is unusual, to put it mildly, for a motion in this House to succeed before the debate on it begins."
He added: "It may have been announced before this debate, but it would not have happened without it."
Miliband said News Corp's decision was "not the decision they wanted to make".
"The will of Parliament was clear, the will of the public is clear, and now Britain's most powerful media owner has had to bend to that will," he said.
He told MPs that the move was a "victory for Parliament" and proved it was not, as has often been said, "timid, irrelevant and out of touch".
He said: "The country wanted this, it wanted its voice to be heard, and today it has been."
Speaking for the government Sir George Young, the leader of the House, agreed it was a good day for Parliament and praised the "the tenacity of backbenches".
But as he spoke Labour MPs shouted "where's Cameron", noting that the prime minister had chosen not to attend the debate.
Sir George said there were "parallels" between the phone hacking scandal and the MPs expenses scandal.
He told MPs the right way forward was to "move away from self regulation to independent regulation without impeding the ability of the media to fulfill its democratic role".
The motion had been signed by MPs from all sides of the House.
Gordon Brown returns to Commons
But any spirit of cross-party unity was broken when Gordon Brown rose to speak.
The former prime minister was loudly heckled by Conservative MPs when he defended his record in government and denied Labour had been too close to Murdoch.
He cited as examples such as when his government had referred BSkyB's decision to buy a stake in ITV to the Competition Commission.
"The relationship between News International and the Labour administration I led was from start to finish neither cosy nor comfortable," he said.
"The relationship with them was always difficult because Labour opposed their self-interested agenda for the future."
In a 32-minute speech the former prime minister attacked News International and said "private tears" were "bought and sold" by its newspapers for commercial gain.
News International, he said, had gone from the "gutter to the sewers".
But Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi intervened on Brown to ask him why he had held a "slumber party" for Elizabeth Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks at Chequers, the prime minister's country residence, if News International hated Labour so much.
Brown was making his only second speech in the Commons since the general election.
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