• WHO’S lost patience with all the wrangling over Brexit? Who wants it all just to stop and go away? Now!

The uncomfortable truth is that there’s only one way it’s all going to stop any time soon, and that’s by stopping the whole Brexit project: stay in Europe and reform it from the inside. Otherwise we face bickering and wrangling, and time and money diverted from more constructive causes for years to come. We can’t avoid it.

Amid all the trouble over the backstop, people have largely lost sight of the critically important point that almost no detail, indeed only the barest outline of our future relationship with the EU, has yet been settled.

Nearly all the effort over the past nearly-three years has been devoted to the immediate issue of our mutual obligations on withdrawal. That’s why people are talking about this being a blindfold Brexit: we may know where we’re leaving from, but we’ve no idea where we’re going.

This reflects the fact that the political declaration which Mrs May has agreed with Brussels on what happens after we’ve left is for the most part vague and aspirational. The wrangling over trade in goods and services, over energy, data protection, aviation, haulage, security, foreign policy, immigration, rights, agriculture and fisheries has yet to begin in earnest.

Once the UK’s outside the EU, all of these new compacts will need to be agreed unanimously by all the EU member states. You need only think fishing rights, or Gibraltar, to see we can’t be talking here about just one or two years, but more like five or 10.

And then remember that a future UK administration could cast aside any previous progress in talks if it wanted to pursue something radically different. This could draw things out still longer, souring our relationship with our closest allies in an increasingly perilous world.

Anyone who wants Brexit settled fast needs to recognise that the only way to do it is to stay in the EU – and have a good shot at reforming the relationship from inside. If you are determined to press ahead with getting out, be under no illusions: it’s going to be a long haul.

And, with Parliament still in utter disarray, the only way for the country to decide democratically which to go for is by a People’s Vote.

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