Gordon Brown says MPs must this week vote to put Brexit on hold for up to 12 months.

The former Labour PM tells the Sunday Mirror that would allow a nationwide series of citizens assemblies to find out what people really want from Brexit.

Mr Brown said: “We must do what we should have been doing for the last two and half years.

“That’s hold public hearings to find solutions where Parliament has failed.”

On Wednesday Labour’s Yvette Cooper and Tory Sir Oliver Letwin will table plans to postpone Article 50 due to take us out of the EU on March 29th.

Mr Brown writes that this will be Parliament’s “High Noon.”

It is likely to pass, and means Britain will ask for a delay on March 13th unless Theresa May gets a deal through Parliament before that.

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Cabinet ministers Amber Rudd, David Gauke and Greg Clark have threatened to vote for it which means they will either resign or be sacked.

A Whitehall source said: “They’ve backed themselves into their own cul-de-sac.”

Mr Brown says the extra time should be used by the Government or Commons committees to take evidence around the country.

That would form the basis of an EU renegotiation or a second referendum on whether to reverse the 2016 decision.

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Mr Brown added: “I spent years negotiating with the EU so I’m confident they would accept.

“And if it’s established the situation has changed the British people should have the right to the final say.”

Citizens assemblies have been successfully used in the US, Canada, Australia and Scandanavia.

Gordon Brown: We must step back from the brink...then really listen to the voice of Britain

After a week that has seen the biggest political party breakaways in four decades and now a weekend where Cabinet ministers are in open revolt, the debate on Wednesday is Parliamentary High Noon

If we are not to crash catastrophically out of Europe next month with risk to our food supply, our manufacturing trade, our imports of medicines and industry’s critical flow of components.

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According to a Hope Not Hate poll, only two per cent of British people approve of the way MPs have dealt with Brexit.

So Wednesday, February 27th is now the time for Parliament to start putting things right - and find the way to reunite a divided country.

Big issues of principle can often come down to small, even obscure, matters of detail.

In the next few days Brexit will be fought out over a little-known clause of the European Union treaty - Article 50 - and whether Britain will ask the European Union to extend the negotiating period on our future.

Extending the negotiating timeline will prevent us hurtling over a cliff edge on March 29th without any interim trade agreements with most of the countries to whom we sell most of our goods.

An extension will avoid the end of March chaos and delays that could turn miles of southern Britain’s motorways into a lorry park and even threaten a state of emergency and risk what government sources have said may turn into martial law.

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And given anyway that it is impossible for MPs to seriously debate and pass the six Acts of Parliament and the 600 statutory instruments we need to agree before Brexit, extending the negotiating period is also now the only sensible game in town.

It can be done. We now know that the mechanics of a delay is being mapped out in Whitehall.

Of course, Theresa May had hoped to use the threat of postponement to bring her hard Brexiteers into line by reframing the current choice - between her deal and the even-worse no deal option - to a decision between her deal and no departure in March at all.

But, in fact, extending Article 50 would allow us to reflect on, reconsider and renegotiate Mrs May’s botched terms that no one - not even her own supporters - can find it within themselves to support.

Anxious, like me, to prevent a deal that would weaken the UK abroad and put the very existence of the UK at risk, former Prime Minister John Major is indicating that he also supports the extension of Article 50.

Of course after two years of bungled negotiations and now a parliamentary stalemate, the public could be forgiven for just wanting it all to end. So fed up with the Brexit process many just want things done and dusted regardless of the consequences.

But, whatever happens, it certainly WON’T be all over by March 30th. All we would have agreed by that point is the terms of withdrawal.

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We are only at the end of the beginning - Act One of our Euro drama. Still to come are Act Two - agreeing the new trading relationship with Europe and then Act Three - new trading relationships with the rest of the world.

Even if we depart on March 29th, years of negotiations on the Norway, Swiss, Canada and WTO options lie ahead of us.

The sad truth is that the chaos that people now fear on March 29th is not us paying a short-term price for seeing through difficult but final decisions on Europe.

Chaos arises because, after two years of seemingly-interminable debate, almost everything of significance to our future trading relationships has yet to be resolved and both Cabinet and Parliament have proved utterly incapable of agreeing any conclusion.

Would it not be better to do what is far more sensible: instead of lurching from one failed short term fix to another, find out where we really want to end up and then work out how we get there?

And so when Parliament decides between Mrs May’s proposal and extending Article 50, the real choice is between years of endless re-runs of the same old shouting matches within the same closed circle of Westminster, or, alternatively, using that time to listen to the voices of the British people and what Britain is really saying on immigration, sovereignty, the state of our manufacturing and the options for our future.

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It is a choice for MPs between months more talking to - or over - each other or actually listening to the people of our country. Surely it makes sense to simply stop and think and avoid being rushed over that cliff.

So over the next few days we the British public should vigorously press our MPs to vote for an extension of Article 50 not just to stop crashing out on March 29th with no deal - and certainly not as a delaying tactic - but for a positive purpose: for region-by-region public hearings on the Brexit options.

A nationwide consultation is needed not just to end the Parliamentary deadlock but to halt and repair the breakdown of trust between the British people and their politicians that has been so dramatically exposed this week.

55 per cent of the general public are of the opinion that our political system is broken.

Hardly anyone now believes that Parliament and government can get it right by themselves.

(Image: EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock )

And it is difficult to see how the toxic, deadlocked European dispute can be properly resolved without a broader and more inclusive engagement by the British people.

And as the polls confirm, British people don’t only want to express their anger and frustration: they now want a say in the process, whether through a second referendum or by other means.

When asked: ‘Thinking about the Brexit negotiations, would you support or oppose involving the general public in discussions and decisions’, a majority of those expressing an opinion agreed.

In a separate poll, 39 per cent supported the idea of a Citizens’ Assembly, consultative hearings in every part of the country where the British people would examine the different options and would, in my view, find greater agreement than has been possible in a Westminster hothouse.

When government fails so badly, Parliament must step in but Parliament itself needs greatly strengthened by consulting, listening and understanding the hopes and fears and wisdom of people and their communities.

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Decades from now a new generation of historians will look back with stunned disbelief at the chaos that has unfolded in Britain over the past two and a half years.

We have three days until Wednesday to draw back from the brink.