A second referendum is the only way out of this Brexit mess

It pains me to say it, but Justine Greening is right. We need a second referendum. Britain under the Tories has boxed itself into a corner over its relationship with Europe and it needs desperately to find a way out.

Brits like to imagine themselves as free spirits – buccaneers and mavericks – capable of anything if they just put their minds to it. The downside is that nobody quite knows what anything means. The result is government by dither and fudge.

The 2016 referendum was supposed to have been about restoring the sovereignty of Parliament. But it turned out that it was the people, fired up as they were by months of angry and ill-informed rhetoric, who were the masters now. A popular vote, legally defined as advisory, was immediately hailed by Leave as the Will of the People – this despite the fact that only 72 per cent of voters turned out and of those just over half put their X against the box marked Leave.

But what if the people change their mind? In 2011, voters rejected changes to the voting system put forward by the Liberal Democrats. Does this mean that there cannot be changes in future? Are we doomed to keep first-past-the-until Gabriel blows his trumpet? The Scots in 2014 rejected independence from the rest of the UK. But no one imagines that there will not be another poll in the next ten years or so, just as there will be in Northern Ireland on the question of Irish unity. The assumption is, and has to be, that the nation’s direction of travel is never settled, but in a state of flux, depending on the national mood or the particular circumstances of the time. The idea that a referendum, once the result is known, is the last word on a given subject is absurd. It makes us prisoners of the past.

As the economist John Maynard Keynes is famously reported to have said,  “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”

Those in the Leave camp who argue that voters on June 23, 2016 voted “categorically” against Britain’s remaining in the Single Market and Customs Union and in favour of a “hard” Brexit must know that they are seriously over-egging the pudding. Most Britons had little idea what Leave would mean, other, they supposed, than caravans of Poles making their way to Stansted. Only a minority cast their vote as they did in order to demonstrate their detestation of the appointed European Court of Justice or the imposition of regulations governing trade, or blue-flag beaches, by the unelected Brussels Commission.

Judges in the UK are, after all, appointed, up to and including those of the Supreme Court. Countless domestic quangoes are unelected, with responsibility for issues far closer to home than those handed down by the Commission. Our railways are largely run by foreign companies, most of them answerable to foreign governments. The same is true of energy and water. We may not like the buggers but no one, other than Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, is calling for a revolution.

The truth is that a majority of Leave voters had one thing in mind when they went to the polling booths in 2016. They wanted a sharp reduction in the number of mainly East European migrant workers and their families living in England and an assurance that immigration in future would be a matter for the UK Government. Michael Gove and others like him worked hard to present this as a strongly-held endorsement of economic sovereignty and a globalised Britain. But it meant no such thing.

If I am wrong on this, if in fact those who voted Leave did so primarily so that they could no longer be told what to do by the Commission, the Court and the European Parliament, and out of a willingness, nay, a determination, to give up our seat on the European Council, then surely, having listened to the Brexit debate over the last two years and having seen the future as set out for them by the two major parties, they would be only too happy to dispel any remaining doubts.

But if, on the other hand, they think they were sold a pup and that continued membership of a reformed European Union would better serve their interests, then a second referendum, or at the very least a general election tightly focused on Europe, would give them the opportunity to express their view.

It is a conclusion I have come to only after watching with mounting disbelief the Government’s cack-handed attempts to square the circles of Brexit. We have reached a dead-end. If we don’t do something soon, the next 20 years could be bleak for ourselves and our children.

Not that it will be easy. It could be that a second vote will produce a result nearly identical to the first, leaving us in the sorry position of having to accept either the humiliation of the May Plan, or whatever is left of it after the 27 come up with a response, or else the catastrophe of No Deal. Rather like now, in fact. Britain would be accepted back not as the prodigal son, but as a naughty child, in need of discipline. It could also be the case that the EU itself is destined to implode five years from now, leaving us to hang separately rather than hanging together. In that event, we’ll all be in trouble, whether in or out of the collective.

But I prefer to believe that Europe will overcome its present difficulties and that, in the longer run, the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will thrive as a member state in a way not possible in inglorious isolation.

Global Britain is a slogan. The EU is a reality. It’s time to think again.