The Best Brexit Is Still No Brexit

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May this week stopped trying to get her fellow Tories to back her plan for quitting the European Union, and asked the opposition Labour Party to come to her aid. Could this be that most elusive of Brexit developments: progress?

Not exactly. For many reasons — politics, self-interest, the fundamentally incoherent task at hand — May and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn are unlikely to hash out a workable agreement about how Britain should exit the EU. If they fail, May says she'll let Parliament settle the matter by voting on various options, through a yet-to-be-determined process.

It's hard to imagine a breakthrough there, as well. Lawmakers have spent recent days rejecting just about every theoretical variant of Brexit. May's plan has been voted down three times since January. Even the least-unpopular alternatives — such as adding a permanent customs union to the political declaration attached to May's withdrawal agreement — would require a steady cross-party alliance, which on current trends looks implausible.

And the underlying problems haven't gone away. Although the public voted for Brexit in the abstract, all specific versions of it find little support. That's because they all would, to varying degrees, reduce growth, harm businesses, diminish Britain's standing in the world, and quite possibly impinge on its sovereignty by binding it to EU rules it will no longer have a say over. As ever in this misadventure, the choices are between bad and worse.

Even so, what should happen now isn't in doubt: The government should seek a long extension of the Article 50 process that underpins Brexit, and plan for a second referendum — with Remain as an option on the ballot, alongside whatever deal May or her successor manages to devise. Britain's citizens deserve a chance to decide whether the Brexit on offer bears any resemblance to what they thought they were voting for in 2016, and should be given the opportunity to think again.

Granted, further delay and indecision will be costly. The chaos of the past few years in British politics has already done great harm. Investment has declined for four straight quarters. Confidence is plummeting. Manufacturers have been stockpiling at a record rate, incurring needless expense and limiting future growth. By several estimates, Brexit has already reduced GDP by at least 2 percent. Meanwhile, other public business has all but come to a halt.

Perhaps new cross-party deliberations could fashion a proposal acceptable to the House of Commons and the EU, and deliver some sort of Brexit sooner rather than later. But that wouldn't be the end of it: With or without May's withdrawal agreement, Brexit will be a prolonged process, involving years of further negotiation, debate, lawyering, rule-writing, bean-counting, politicking, infighting and generalized tedium. It will be costly, complicated and socially corrosive.

Avoiding Brexit altogether is still the best way forward, even if it means further delay and the costs that go with it. The right result is possible even now, if Britain's politicians finally start putting the country's interests first.

Editorials are written by the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board.

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