It’s been exactly two years since we triggered Article 50 – and what an utter mess it’s been since

Today marks two years since the prime minister triggered Article 50 to formally initiate the UK’s departure from the European Union. But a lot has changed in that time and we now know a whole lot more about Brexit.

For starters, we now know any form of Brexit will leave the UK poorer. By the government’s own estimates, the prime minister’s deal would leave our economy 3.9 per cent smaller than it would have been by 2030, while a report by the Centre for European Reform put the cost of Brexit at £25bn annually – or £500m a week and £71.43m daily. Imagine what our hospitals and schools could do with over £70m more per day.

In the year from Article 50 being triggered alone, the six departments most involved with the Brexit process spent £400m, with the Institute for Government estimating this would jump to at least £900 million for the year just gone.

And that’s not to mention all the fiascos along the way. One of the most bizarre of these was the work of transport minister Chris Grayling. Grayling signed a £13.8m contract for ferry services with a company called Seaborne Freight – who it then turned out had no ferries. Axing the contract resulted in government having to fork out a further £33m of taxpayers’ money to settle a claim with Eurotunnel after the firm took legal action over the process to award ferry contracts to cope with a no-deal Brexit.

This is money that could have been used to inject some much-needed cash into our ailing public services.

Our NHS, which has long been starved of the funding it needs, cannot take more cuts after a decade of austerity. Yet that is what is being forced upon it by Brexit, with the British Medical Association publishing a report yesterday saying that the grant for local authorities to provide public health services has been cut in real terms by over £550m since 2016. Already severe staff shortages have also been exacerbated by the exodus of EU nationals since the referendum.

And while this crisis continues to deepen, our political life has descended into farce.

The prime minister has lost control. A failed gamble to strengthen her mandate through a general election returned a minority government, setting us on a path to the mess we’re in now. Since then, Theresa May has burned through two Brexit secretaries (she’s now on her third), has overseen a whopping total of thirty-nine resignations (including four Cabinet ministers – forty if we count her own) and has suffered twenty defeats in the Commons – losing both meaningful votes on her deal by historic margins of 230 and 149.

Even without these recent problems, the sands of public opinion already started shifting almost the moment Article 50 was triggered. Since then, there has been a growing desire among the public to stay in the EU rather than leave, with 53 per cent wanting this outcome in August 2018, which is now at around 55 per cent – the trend has been going in one direction only – more and more people want to stay in the EU.

And despite the government’s frequent attempts to drown this voice out, it has only got louder, and more passionate. A petition to revoke Article 50 started last week has now reached 6 million signatures, while last Saturday saw over a million people from across the country line the streets of London calling for a public vote on Brexit. Under such circumstances, it would be wrong, and frankly undemocratic to push through Brexit without checking that this is still the “will of the people”.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel however. The indicative votes which took place on Wednesday – the result of parliament wrestling control away from our incompetent government – are the beginning of a process to find a solution.

Margaret Beckett’s plan for a confirmatory public vote achieved the most votes in parliament – and though it was up for votes alongside alternative versions of Brexit other than Theresa May’s deal, the Kyle-Wilson-Beckett proposal is actually a solution to our impasse, not an option for Brexit in itself. It states clearly that any deal, whether the prime minister’s or another, needs to be put back to the people for the final say before Brexit is enacted.

MPs must accept this is a necessary compromise for the future of the country. It is the future of ordinary people, not that of MPs, which is at stake, and after three years of being locked out of the process, it is time for our MPs to put Brexit back to the people.

Eloise Todd is CEO of Best for Britain, an anti-Brexit campaign fighting for a Final Say