(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Theresa May’s Brexit policy has been a wreck for months, and this week’s events have surely exhausted even her capacity to think otherwise. Amid the chaos at Westminster, the final collapse of her attempted compromise nonetheless offers hope – because it provides a kind of clarity.

Three years of trying have proved that the U.K. Parliament cannot find its way to a workable middle ground. The country cannot enjoy special status or accommodations as a half-member of the European Union. That means its dilemma is starker than many have wished to think: Britain needs to choose between remaining in the EU, or simply leaving it.

Now that this choice is clear, it should be put back to the country in a second referendum.

This week May offered yet another version of the Brexit deal that Parliament had already rejected three times. Her reasoning was hard to discern. The Tories most intent on quitting the union saw her further small concessions to Remainer positions as dishonest and unacceptable. The Conservative party duly exploded in protest, another senior Cabinet member quit in disgust, and others stepped up their maneuvering to be the next prime minister.

Was this latest May plan therefore an attempt to bring the pro-EU faction of Labour MPs to her side? Hardly. Weeks of talks with Labour had just ended in failure. The opposition party has shown it is devoted to inflicting maximum political cost on the government.

Then yesterday, the country’s voters took part in elections to the European Parliament. And although the results won’t be known until Sunday night, polls before voting began suggested that May’s Conservatives will be all but wiped out, while a new party dedicated to Brexit sends a large bloc of new members to the assembly. On every front, a more definitive repudiation of May’s leadership would be difficult to conceive.

To be sure, she was not wrong in the first place to seek compromise. But she dithered early on, was gravely weakened by a calamitous general election (one she never should have called), and consented to terms – including the notorious Northern Irish “backstop” – that made compromise in the House of Commons all but impossible. It hasn’t helped that both main parties are split on Europe, with leaders more interested in seizing political advantage than in advancing the country’s interests.

At this point, the best way to break the deadlock, maybe the only way, is to put the issue back to the electorate. Granted, there’d be no guarantee that Britain would vote Remain. It would be a gamble, and the stakes could hardly be greater. But the case for Remain is easier to grasp than before, now that the search for a feasible compromise has failed, and voters better understand the enormous disruption that Leave would entail.

The claim that a new vote would be anti-democratic – that the country made its choice in 2016 – is absurd. Aside from greater clarity over the hazards of Brexit, something else has changed: The country has learned more than it ever wanted to know about the capacity of its politicians to manage a process as complex as divorcing from Europe. After three years of political paralysis, a new referendum to revisit the fundamental question is the least the country deserves.

--Editors: Clive Crook, Mary Duenwald

To contact the senior editor responsible for Bloomberg Opinion’s editorials: David Shipley at davidshipley@bloomberg.net, .

Editorials are written by the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board.

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