If the government can pause for thought on universal credit, why not on Brexit?

Britain should revoke and reflect. The frantic rush gives no time to consider the fundamental contradictions in the political declaration

The government has made an entirely sensible decision to suspend the contested and controversial universal credit scheme until it can be made to work. So, does this offer a way out of the Brexit imbroglio?

Anyone who has spent time with Conservative MPs over the holidays meets an almost furious determination to reject Theresa May’s deal. She went back on the attack yesterday, not with a defence of her deal but an ad hominem onslaught on Jeremy Corbyn.

Many Labour MPs and supporters think Corbyn’s pusillanimity on Brexit since July 2016 has done Labour no favours and the opinion polls since the party conference season – which mainly show a small Tory lead – confirm this.

No one should be surprised. Corbyn is a child of 1970s anti-capitalist leftism which believes in socialism in one country. Its high moment was the 1983 election when Corbyn was first elected. He has voted against every EU treaty since.

His hostility is not based on a tawdry dislike of Europeans working in Britain, which Damian Collins MP believes is the key reason why Brexit won. Collins’ select committee has examined the Facebook messaging during the 2016 campaign, highlighting a ruthless focus on xenophobic themes.

Corbyn’s closest advisors are apologists for President Putin and the Kremlin world-view. For Putin, any weakening of the EU and its break-up back to closed-border nationalist states is a major foreign policy goal.

But Labour MPs are fed up with Theresa May’s vulgar and highly personalised attacks on the leader of the opposition. She has helped consolidate Corbyn’s position and ensured few, if any, Labour MPs other than predictable anti-EU mavericks will vote for her deal.

Together there are 308 opposition MPs – Labour, SNP, Lib Dems, Welsh and a Green. It only needs a handful of the 117 Tory MPs who voted to oust her to join them and her deal is sunk.

It is not clear if she has read in detail the political declaration which outlines the areas to be negotiated if her deal were to go through. Paragraph four, for example, has the EU upholding its four indivisible freedoms of movement of capital, goods, services and people. A sentence later the UK insists it will bring in laws to stop the free movement of people.

There are many other similar contradictory assertions. The political declaration is not a deal, not even a wish list. These contradictions cannot be negotiated away. The Swiss have spent 26 years trying to negotiate a final deal with the EU and are still blocked.

So even on her own terms, no one can sensibly vote for a “Breternity” of tetchy squabbles with the EU that will spill over and poison domestic politics in Britain.

All focus is on a second referendum. But might the idea of pressing the pause button – as with universal credit – work? Revoke and reflect seems a sensible pragmatic British compromise. It is probably the only way to make plausible the proposal put forward by the Tory MP Caroline Spelman and Labour’s Jack Dromey MP to guarantee that the UK does not crash out with a no deal in March.

If Brexit has to happen it cannot be on today’s terms. The nation needs more time.

Denis MacShane is a former UK minister of Europe and author of Brexit: How Britain Will Leave Europe