THE good news is it’s looking increasingly likely there will be some kind of resolution to this Brexit nightmare in the next couple of weeks. The bad news is all that will be resolved is the need for the argument to go on – either for a few months or a couple of years.

Theresa May will try third time lucky with her deal, and it will probably be rejected again, though no-one should be stupid enough to predict anything in this chaotic Parliament, which resembles more a kindergarten class than a functioning legislature. The adults in the EU will suck their teeth and shake their heads and try to give Theresa May more time.

What is glaringly obvious, whatever happens, is that the British political system has been tested to destruction by these events. This week’s shenanigans, when supporters of a People’s Vote voted against a referendum, and the Brexit Secretary voted against a delay on Article 50 only minutes after arguing for one at the Despatch Box, were watched with blank incomprehension by politicians in Europe. They live in a different parliamentary universe, where co-operation and coalition reign and Members of Parliament just don’t behave like this.

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Westminster’s winner-takes-all pseudo-democracy can’t deal with the kind of complex issues the modern world increasingly presents.

The absurdity of the last three years is that anyone and their dog can see what should have happened by now. There is an off-the-peg solution to the Brexit conundrum, which has wide cross-party support and could be implemented tomorrow. It honours the referendum and it achieves the Prime Minister’s stated objective of ensuring friction-free trade. It removes the problem of a hard border in Northern Ireland, and has been tried and tested over decades.

This solution is now called Common Market 2.0, or EEA, or Norway plus, and involves the UK remaining in the single market and customs union for the time being.

The European Economic Area was created to deal with precisely our situation. Back in the 1990s, Norway was unable to decide whether or not to join the EU. Voters didn’t want to lose sovereignty by joining the political institutions of the Union, but they saw the obvious sense in being part of the biggest free trading bloc on the planet: the Single Market. OK, said the EU – stick with that common market for now.

Critics say that a withdrawal agreement would still be required and they’re right. But since there would be no Irish backstop, this would be a mere formality. And unlike the backstop, countries in the EEA are free to leave the arrangement, under Article 127, after a year’s notice.

Sensible Conservatives, like Oliver Letwin, and Labour MPs like Stephen Kinnock support this, as did Nicola Sturgeon. And the truth is, so does the vast majority of the Labour Party, privately. Jeremy Corbyn’s own solution – a permanent customs union plus regulatory alignment with the single market – is Common Market 2.0 in all but name.

This doesn’t rule out the option of the UK rejoining the EU in future by a referendum. Last week’s crushing Commons vote against a referendum is not the end of the road for the People’s Vote, but it is hard now to imagine one happening in this Parliament. Jeremy Corbyn will avoid a repeat referendum if he possibly can, and the People’s Vote campaign helped him out last week by advising MPs, incomprehensibly, to abstain on the only referendum amendment. It would have been defeated even if Labour had voted.

A no-deal Brexit, which is still the default, would cause such a rift with Europe that future reconciliation would be off the agenda for decades.

So why has it proved impossible to to grasp the obvious solution? How can a Parliament that supports a soft Brexit by an overwhelming majority fail to deliver it? Good sense has been crushed on the rocks of an antiquated two-party system that relates to the arcane controversies of the 19th century, when our parliamentary ground rules were laid down.

Under the first-past-the-post system, we elect dictators every five years. The executive, between elections, exercises the residual powers of an absolutist monarchy. It expects to get its way and relegates Parliament to the role of cheerleader.

In European legislatures, elected under proportional representation, the diversity of voter opinions are properly reflected. There is a multiplicity of parties, and an expectation of coalition. It is very rare for any party to win an absolution majority in the Bundestag or the Storting. Politics becomes an exercise in compromise.

Sometimes this looks bad, as in Italy where there has been a history of unstable coalitions and a failure of leadership. It also means that far-right parties, like the Norwegian Progress Party or the Alternative fur Deutschland, are represented in parliament and sometimes in government. But no-one can possibly argue that our antiquated, hit-or-bust system is any better.

MPs have not been able to wrest control from a broken-backed and discredited May government because they lack the skill and will to co-operate and compromise.

Labour has devoted its energies to finding ways of wrong-footing the PM – one minute saying that the Irish backstop is an abomination to democracy, as Jeremy Corbyn described it in the debates last year, and the next saying that “of course”, they supported a backstop all along. It is all tactics and no strategy – except to try to engineer a General Election, which ironically Labour don’t actually want because they know they would lose.

Labour and the Tories regard it as a sign of weakness to seek a consensus, yet there is no solution to the Brexit conundrum without one. Theresa May has squandered her authority trying to hold together a Conservative party that is irrevocably divided between the hard, anti-immigrant right, and what in Germany would be called Christian Democrats.

The parties are broken, but the logic of an adversarial chamber prevents politicians even talking to each other across party boundaries.

The wiring is all wrong in Westminster, as confirmed by last week’s senseless and demeaning voting arrangements. You can’t resolve Brexit by means of idiotic amendments, which don’t mean what they say, and contrived motions devised to delay and confuse.

One of the basic rules of parliamentary procedure is that motions which are substantially the same may not be put to the house more than once a year. Yet this week Theresa May will put essentially the same motion on her deal for the third time.

Of course, there is no time to change our constitution before Brexit day. And we are cursed by political leaders, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May, who are incapable of mustering the vision and imagination to see past the structural limits of Parliament.

We are all to blame for that.

If we treat politicians as if they are crooks and cretins, that’s what we’ll get.

But there are MPs in Parliament who do understand what needs to happen. We can only hope that they get their act together before Britain plunges headlong into a no-deal nightmare that only a handful of Brexitremists actually want.