The voting lobbies will be busy this week as decisions on various options are made

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It’s all getting a bit complicated and time is nearly up. So, where are we at? A couple of weeks after Theresa May’s deal was crushed by MPs, the prime minister brings Brexit back to parliament this week with a simple motion on the government’s next steps.

The amendments are what you need to watch. They come in three varieties: the first, tabled by Labour’s Yvette Cooper, aims to avoid no deal by allowing MPs to vote for an article 50 extension if the withdrawal agreement is not passed by 26 February.

The problem with this is not just whether it gets a majority, but whether it works: without some degree of certainty on what version of Brexit the UK actually wants, the EU might not be willing to grant an extension to article 50.

Dominic Grieve’s amendment aims to create at least a level of certainty by calling for six weekly votes on various ways out of the current Brexit impasse, potentially allowing a parliamentary majority to coalesce around one option.

And the third amendment of note, from Conservative Graham Brady, backs the prime minister’s deal but demands “alternative arrangements” to the backstop – loathed by large numbers of Brexit hardliners, who want it torn out of the withdrawal agreement – to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

Although Brady’s is the approach May has told MPs she favours (and the government will whip behind it), it raises further problems in that both Ireland and the EU have always insisted the agreement and backstop – shaped, remember, by the UK – cannot be renegotiated, and the Brexiters will vote against it.

The European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, told May the EU27 would revisit the backstop only if May opted for a permanent customs union. Sabine Weyand, the EU’s deputy chief negotiator, said negotiations were now over and for May to come back asking for changes would be like the UK “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”.

Meanwhile, the British Chambers of Commerce warned of a mass exodus by UK companies in the event of a no deal; Airbus said it would pull out of the UK altogether; the chief execs of Sainsbury’s, Asda, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose warned of significant disruption to food supplies; and a survey showed Brexit was making Britons meaner, angrier and more disunited.

What next?

In a nutshell, nobody knows. Whatever happens to the amendments this week (and we don’t yet know which ones the Speaker, John Bercow, will select), the government is expected to bring the withdrawal agreement back to the Commons on 13 February. Its fate is unknowable. Some feel it is now inevitable that Brexit will have to be delayed beyond 29 March; others that the longer this drags on, the more likely Brexit hardliners are to cave in and vote for May’s deal as the only sure way of securing any kind of Brexit at all. Weyand reckons the risk of no deal is now “very high”.

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In a fine essay in the Observer, the Economist’s Jeremy Cliffe says Britons have not grasped the EU’s essential motivations: safety, prosperity and a quiet life:

History is dense, present, complicated and inescapable on the mainland in a way that it is not in Britain. Memories of flight, destruction and oppression – the 3am rap at the door, the rumble of military trucks on cobbles, the squelch of carts laden with possessions on muddy tracks – live on in continental families in a way that they do in comparatively few British ones. Voltaire’s Candide, written amid the destruction of the Seven Years War, preaches the stoical satisfaction of a peaceful plot of land providing for its owners’ needs under the maxim: “We must cultivate our garden.” In the shadow of horror and cataclysm, the modest goal of a happily cultivated garden is the height of decency and civilisation. More than grand rhetoric about continental unity or geopolitics or European culture, this is the real objective of the EU – and what holds it together. It is also the thing that Brits most struggle to understand.

And Nick Cohen argued that Brexiters never really had an exit plan – so no wonder they avoided the issue:

How could the Brexit campaign inspire nationalist passions, how could Fox, Lawson, Johnson, Farage and Banks inspire even themselves, if they were to say that the only rational way to leave the EU was to carry on paying money, accepting freedom of movement and receiving laws that Britain had no say in making, while an orderly retreat was organised? Who would vote for that? What would be the point of leaving at all? Better to take the road to Narnia and promise everything while committing to nothing. Writing in 2015, Dominic Cummings admitted that the campaign would offer no exit plan: hard Brexit, soft Brexit or any Brexit in between. “There is much to be gained from swerving the whole issue,” he said. Opponents of the EU “have been divided for years”. In any case, the “sheer complexity” of leaving would involve “endless questions of detail that cannot be answered”.

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Yes, this is actually where we are: