Brexit isn’t really this site’s remit, which is why we’ve been relatively quiet in recent weeks as the UK’s shambolic exit from the EU hogs all the news and Scottish politics has been relegated to a largely-dormant backwater in the press.

Yes supporters don’t speak with one voice on the EU, and while we’re in favour of it we’ve long said that the indy movement can’t really move on until the fog clears and we know for sure what Brexit’s going to look like. Deciding whether to be part of the EU should be a decision for an independent Scotland to make, not a precondition.

But dear lord, this is such a mess it needs to be examined.

The campaign for a second EU referendum has always had a massive problem in that nobody in it can agree on what they want or what should happen.

Should it be a straight re-run of the 2016 vote? Or a “People’s Vote” (surely the most cretinous term to infect British politics in living memory – who voted last time, badgers?) on rejecting the deal without being clear about what the alternative plan is? Does anyone really believe the EU is prepared to grant the UK another couple of years to flap around the negotiating room like a headless chicken hoping for an impossible unicorn to solve a fundamentally unsolvable problem?

(You simply CANNOT avoid a hard border in Ireland AND take control of immigration AND keep trading terms the same in all parts of the UK without creating a border in the sea. Even small backwards children worked that one out some time ago. The UK wants to have its cake AND eat it AND sell it tariff-free to Belgium all at once, and when the EU patiently explains for the 5,000th time that that can’t happen for about 100 incredibly obvious reasons, the UK stamps its feet and pouts and cries.)

The most currently fashionable option – and it’s so manifestly idiotic we can scarcely bear to type this – is to hold a three-option referendum between what the Prime Minister has recently taken to robotically reciting as the available choices – her deal, no deal or no Brexit.

So YouGov put that to voters, and the result was a wholly-predictable trainwreck which would tear the country apart. The results, which the pollster is oddly reluctant to spell out directly, were a dog’s dinner vomited up onto a pig’s breakfast:

May’s deal: 27%

No deal: 27%

No Brexit (ie Remain): 46%

In other words, the “winner” was Remain, but the combined votes for Leave actually beat it by 54 to 46 – a BIGGER margin, even after the last two and a half years of mindboggling incompetence and unbroken capitulation from the UK’s negotiating team, than Leave won the actual referendum by.

So if such a referendum were to be held and the UK decided to withdraw Article 50 and stay in the EU as a result, it would be doing so despite a majority of voters having once again voted to leave, and more resoundingly than the first time – a scenario which we’d like to imagine even the most ardent Remainer can see the absolute insanity of.

A three-way referendum is clearly a lunatic idea which can never happen, and anyone advocating it can be safely dismissed as a dangerous imbecile likely to trigger a literal civil war. (So, y’know, it probably WILL happen.) But what are the alternatives?

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1. A two-option referendum between May’s deal and Remain

In effect this is a re-run of the 2016 vote but with everyone being clear this time on what a Leave vote really means. Sounds good, but it’s a complete non-starter because May’s deal has no discernible hope of getting through Parliament. Indeed, today’s papers are suggesting that it’ll be defeated so humiliatingly next week that the Prime Minister is considering calling off the vote altogether.

In any event, YouGov’s poll indicates that the outcome of such a vote would be a 50/50 dead heat, which would leave us no further forward.

Of course, if Remain DID win (let’s say 51-49), that would pretty much solve everything, right up until the riots started. Which is just one of the many reasons that there’s zero chance of such a referendum ever getting through Parliament.

2. A two-option referendum between May’s deal and no deal

This would have the benefit of almost certainly producing a large majority for the PM’s deal, and delivering a clear route map for what happens next. But again, it would be unable to get through Parliament and it certainly wouldn’t satisfy Remainers, so it’s no help to us. It’d simply be a giant waste of everyone’s time.

3. The government falls and a general election is triggered

Well, what then? If polls are even roughly accurate a new election would produce much the same situation we’re in now – a lame-duck Tory administration without the votes to push the PM’s deal through because half of its own MPs would vote against it.

And even if Labour were able to cobble together some sort of coalition, so what? They have, if anything, an even less clear idea of what they want than the Tories. It is, to say the VERY least, difficult to imagine Jeremy Corbyn thundering over to Brussels and extricating concessions that Theresa May couldn’t.

(That’s if they were willing to reopen negotiations at all, which is a long shot. The EU has the UK over a barrel and has just about run out of patience. They don’t want a no-deal Brexit, but ultimately it’d be a far bigger headache for the UK than the EU and the latter would just shrug its shoulders regretfully and watch the UK burn, pour encourager les autres.)

And of course, all that assumes there WOULD be a general election. A failed vote of no confidence would be just about the worst of all possible worlds, but is an eminently possible outcome – feuding Tories would be forced together out of the mortal horror of having to choose a new leader to fight the election, and the DUP might blink when faced with the possibility of bringing about a Labour-SNP administration, their worst nightmare.

4. Labour coalition followed by a second Leave-Remain vote

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that the election happened. Now we’re really clutching at straws. Labour would have no mandate for a second referendum, as they wouldn’t have campaigned on it. Corbyn has been repeatedly clear that Brexit should go ahead, just better, because if he was in charge then [inaudible mumble].

And say they overcame the polls, and Corbyn’s disastrous personal ratings, and somehow got into Downing Street with a leg-up from the SNP. The Nats would – we must assume, because it would be domestic suicide if they didn’t – make a second Scottish independence vote a non-negotiable condition of their support.

You’d then be looking at a second EU referendum poised on a knife-edge, quite possibly decided by a heavy Remain vote from a Scotland that voted to leave the UK a few months later (also leaving the government with no majority). That’s a can of worms the size of Mars right there. Rather you than us.

5. Labour majority followed by a second Leave-Remain vote

Ah, the unicorn. If you think there’s even the tiniest atom of a chance of a Labour majority in a 2019 general election, please get in touch as we have a bridge we’d like to sell you.

But see above – Labour would have no mandate for such a vote, Corbyn doesn’t WANT to have that vote (or he’d be campaigning for it now), and there’s no guarantee it would result in a Remain win anyway.

Regardless of their actual opinion on any given subject, the public doesn’t like having their votes disrespected. Parties which force the electorate back to the ballot box ahead of schedule are usually punished for it.

A third general election in five years and a second EU referendum in three years would sorely test voters’ patience and risk a backlash, another Leave vote, and the country back to square one. The EU would be so almightily pissed off with us it’d probably just declare flat-out war.

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So which of those booby prizes is coming out of the tombola? Our money (and it’s a very SMALL amount of money, because who knows what fresh hell might dawn tomorrow?) is still on none of them – May’s deal will be defeated, there’ll be some more inept flapping and stumbling, and the UK will crash out of the EU with no deal, whether there is or isn’t a general election in the meantime.

(If there is, the Brexit might be in May rather than in March.)

That would be a disaster on an unprecedented peacetime scale, but the reality is that so far as the majority of the principal political players are concerned, all the possible alternatives are worse. Rather like the First World War – which basically happened despite none of the participants really wanting it to – Brexit now has a momentum which is almost impossible to stop.

And there’s this: none of the people with power actually want to stop it anyway.

As for Scotland, all it can do now is glance with increasing urgency at the emergency exit as the cliff edge looms ever closer.