There's nothing undemocratic about revoking Article 50 – reconsidering Brexit is the only way out of this mess

The prime minister has at last acknowledged that she had no majority for her deal. Her options will have narrowed to two: no deal or revoke – and now she will have to choose

Imagine a different world. It’s 2015 and the Conservative Party has just won the general election and is thinking about how to deliver its manifesto commitment to hold a referendum. It needs to put the question of our membership of the EU to the people. But it wants to do it in a way which is democratically sustainable. What does it do?

It decides to do this; to hold a statutory inquiry under the 2005 Inquiries Act. It appoints a panel of independent members. They are to listen to the evidence and get to the truth. If we leave the EU what relationship would we want with it? What advantages and disadvantages would that relationship bring compared with remaining? And might that relationship have majority support in the country – because there would be no point in holding a referendum if the answer was predetermined?

They are given six months to hear evidence from pollsters and trade experts and economists and even EU lawyers, then a further two months to produce a report. Then, if the report so recommended, a referendum and, dependent upon the outcome, the speedy negotiation of a withdrawal agreement and our prompt departure from the EU on the terms that delivered that relationship.

Who among us, if we could roll back the clock, would not now choose to do that instead?

But here’s the thing: we can.

On Sunday, the prime minister at last acknowledged that she had no majority in parliament for her deal. Unless the EU gives her an extension, her options will have narrowed to two: no deal or revoke. And she – or MPs, should she give them the decision – will have to choose.

No deal will cause profound damage to our economic and social infrastructure. Moreover, it lacks any democratic mandate at all. It was simply not a feature of the referendum debate.

If May gets an extension her withdrawal agreement might be back on the table, but that does little more than park the contradictions between the visions – deregulating and nativist – of life outside the EU to which “leave” gave a mandate. It stores up problems rather than resolving them; the withdrawal agreement was supposed to be the easy bit.

A referendum offers a binary “take it or leave it” choice, but it is between two unresolved unknowns. The confirmatory public vote motions specified neither what the people might be asked to approve nor what would happen if they did not. And the difficulties involved in crafting that choice should not be underestimated: if it were between the two most popular options, no deal and remain, then moderate Brexiteers might feel obliged to campaign for the latter. If it were between a customs union and no deal what would this mean to the majority of the population that now support remain? And there are no two choices that do not raise difficulties of a similar magnitude. And then a horrific and divisive referendum campaign on that flawed choice.

A Norway-plus style Brexit delivers neither for those whose who seek a profoundly different relationship with the EU nor those who cannot understand how the national interest is served by us relinquishing influence over the structures to which the UK will be subject.

But when forced to make a way out of no way, isn’t revoke the worst option of all? Is it not the ultimate triumph of remote elites ignoring the wishes of the 52 per cent; just acting like the referendum never happened?

That’s a powerful point – but it’s not without answer. And the answer is, it depends on what happens next. We’ve all done a lot of talking, mostly across one another, about what Brexit means and it’s driving us further and further apart. But there hasn’t been much listening. There hasn’t been any real attempt to find a model of Brexit that has a genuine democratic mandate. Don’t we need some of that?

If the EU was to agree to a long extension we could yet embark upon the inquiry without revoking Article 50. But if it does not, why should we not revoke and then reconsider? Why should we not recreate in 2019 the world we should have had in 2015, the world where we did all of this properly?

European law, I believe, permits it. All that restrains us is a dogmatic attachment to a series of highly unsatisfactory alternatives.

Revoking is not democratically the worst choice – it is the best.