No-deal Brexit will cost the UK billions – if the government can’t find a solution, the people should be heard

One of the few things that most people on both sides of the Brexit debate can agree on is that, in the short term, to leave the European Union without an agreement on the terms of leaving would damage the economy.

There is a genuine debate about the long-term advantages and disadvantages of leaving, a debate in which the views of The Independent are clear. There is a discussion about the scale of the damage that leaving without a deal would cause. But no one, bar perhaps a few of Brexit’s most extreme advocates, deny that even on optimistic assumptions there will be costs. Those costs will be carried initially by the business community, but ultimately by the people of the UK.

Philip Hammond has suggested that the costs might be up to £90bn, depending on the reaction by the various EU countries. Separately, the chancellor has suggested that businesses will have to be compensated to the tune of £22bn, as we have reported.

These are big numbers, even in public finance terms, and Mr Hammond’s calculations need to be taken seriously. He has experienced directly how hard it has been to cut the fiscal deficit to a sustainable level. Airily dismissing the odds of a no-deal Brexit as “vanishingly small”, as Boris Johnson has done, may make for entertaining politics. The harsh truth is that whatever the odds, the costs would be very high.

Fortunately, it would be very hard to get a no-deal Brexit through parliament. To most people, it is almost unthinkable that such a step could be taken by a minority government without parliamentary approval. Yet there have been suggestions that the new Tory prime minister might seek to do so – by suspending, or proroguing, parliament. Gina Miller, the fund manager who successfully took the government to court to force it to put the decision to parliament, is now seeking to go back to court to prevent the government behaving in this way.

It would be an extraordinary device, and in constitutional terms a disgraceful one. Would the Queen, the ultimate protector of the UK’s unwritten constitution, agree to such a request? Would it be right for the prime minister of the day to even ask her? Even that most fervent (and in his own terms, successful) Brexiteer, Nigel Farage, thinks it would not wash.

This is a constitutional issue, but it is also one of common sense that tells us that to go for a no-deal Brexit without the support of parliament would be both outrageous and absurd. It is a sad and disturbing comment on the state of UK politics that such a bizarre notion should be contemplated at all.

So parliament has to support the agreement to leave, presumably with some modest amendments, or come up with an alternative course of action. Our own views are clear: that whatever agreement it reaches should be put to the people of the country in the form of a Final Say referendum. But if the government of the day fails to do that, then there is an alternative way of seeking popular support. There has to be a general election. This is not necessarily to advocate such an outcome. It is simply to note that if this particular parliament cannot reach agreement on the most important decision in a generation, then the people have to elect another one.