Brexit has hit peak confusion. A new vote is the solution

There are two news stories that, if you read them side by side, would force you to conclude that the majority of British people had thrown caution to the wind: and not just caution, but wisdom, reason, self-interest – everything, in short, gone bananas. The first is the revelation of Theresa May’s 300-point preparation paper for a no-deal scenario. Processed food will be stockpiled, also medicines. Britain imports £22bn worth of food and drink each year, 97% of which is from the EU. The task of trying to keep this supply chain greased, without a deal in place for frictionless trade, is headspinningly complicated. What will happen to jobs, to distribution networks, to the motorways around the entry points, to the borders? How long before we’re surviving on Spam and Um Bongo? Let’s not think about medicines just yet. It’s possible we’ll all lose so much weight that we’ll stop having type 2 diabetes.

Meanwhile, 51% of Britons polled by Opinium Research think “no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal”. Only 20% disagree. So what does that mean, exactly? Has one person in two thought seriously about what stockpiling feels like, in real life, and decided it’s a price worth paying? But worth paying for what? What exactly is that “bad deal” to which unspecified tinned food is preferable?

Yet the verdicts returned in polls are nevertheless deemed to be in some way sacrosanct and inviolable. You might be tempted to say, “I don’t believe this poll because I don’t believe respondents have thought hard enough about what the question means.” You would be accused of underestimating the electorate, whose passion for sovereignty is more powerful than baser motives such as having enough to eat. You might also be tempted to say, “This poll is peculiarly contradictory, remainers seem to want ‘strength’ over ‘weakness’ as much as leavers.” But it’s not done to require a poll to make sense, all you can do is bow to the insights it provides.

And yet it brings none. The relevant critique is not that people are failing to think ahead, or that sometimes democracy is too complicated for an opinion poll to mean much. Those things might be true, but they always have been: like the old aphorism about blaming gravity for a plane crash (yes, that’s the root cause: but gravity is always with us, and planes don’t always crash). We need to ask why polls are returning wild results on this occasion.

As the House of Commons enters another bout of ever more arcane debate, governed by procedural niceties that baffle the public at large, Brexit has reached peak confusion. The Chequers deal, so long in its conception, has unravelled at record speed. The customs bill designed by May has been rerouted by amendments from hard Brexiteers. The question of what the EU will and won’t eventually accept is meanwhile being left to the adjudication of chancers. Bernard Jenkin made the absurd charge on the Today programme this morning that the Europeans were “bullying” us. How can that be? Until we can tell them what we want, all they can do is watch.

As fudge, evasion and obscure parliamentary maneouvres confuse rather than clarify, people are being asked in polls to choose not between concrete options but between a series of postures: would you rather be strong or weak? Would you rather be in control or a vassal; a rule-maker or a rule-taker? The terminology slides across the political spectrum with gay abandon. One minute, you’re “in control” if you agree with Boris Johnson that the Chequers deal would be a betrayal of Brexit. The next, you’re a “rule-maker” if you side with Peter Mandelson.

Take any of these statements at face value, and the answers to the pollsters’ questions are obvious: I would rather be strong; I would rather be in control; I would rather not be a vassal, whatever that means in this context. But everyone knows the questions are too abstract, so there’s a certain amount of guessing as to what they are supposed to signify. You cannot infer much from the responses of people who are themselves inferring. It’s all riddles and guesses and long looks, all of us caught in an elaborate Elizabethan courtship process where no one knows the rules.

Meanwhile, back in reality, where real decisions have to be made about real propositions, the big resignation speech – arriving, characteristically tardily, from David Davis – has been overshadowed by Justine Greening’s stunning move, breaking cover to become the first Tory remainer to call for a second referendum. It recalls the prescient analysis of David Lammy, who told me: “As the rubber hits the road over the coming weeks, largely because the EU will respond to our deal, and as Theresa May runs out of road, as the divisions in her party, and in the Labour party, and in the country, become more and more magnified, the only way out of that is a fundamental democratic process. It is either an election, or a representative vote in parliament, or it is a second referendum on the deal. It’s inevitable that one of those three things has to happen.”

It’s hard to say what’s been the greatest shock of the Brexit process, its technical complexity or the starkness of its choices. The two are linked, of course: if we’d been able to decide earlier between a soft, rule-taker-not-rule-maker Brexit and a hard, stockpile-food-and-close-the-ports Brexit, we’d have had two years to consider details and we would have needed every minute. Without that luxury, the task is absurd, like learning a language in a week. One thing has crystallised though: MPs cannot borrow any more legitimacy from mutable and often illegible polls. If they want to know what people think, they have to ask them at a ballot box, where it counts.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist