AFTER a couple of weeks away from Brexit, it’s back to the purgatory of the EU departure lounge. Another meeting tomorrow between Michel Barnier and David Davis – don't wait up. The Scottish Parliament returns to measure its resolve to refuse legislative consent to the EU Withdrawal Bill. Tony Blair is back calling for another EU referendum.

Lord Adonis promises to “sabotage” Brexit, provoking howls of outrage from Brexiteers. Jeremy Corbyn continues to move imperceptibly towards a coherent position on the single market. There is no escape from it. I'm as eager to move on as I'm sure you are, but the reason Brexit is like Biblical purgatory is because the outcome – up or down – is of such existential importance that we simply can't ignore it.

Sure, Brexit consumes the energies of our political classes, such as they are, and deprives other important issues of the oxygen of publicity. They may be sweeping the beggars off the streets of Windsor to prepare for the royal wedding; the NHS may be cancelling thousands of operations (in England at least) and schools may be in a state of collapse because no-one wants to be a teacher any more, but these issues take place in the shadow of the greatest decision the British establishment has faced since Suez. Brexit just affects everything

As readers of this column probably know, I tend to see Brexit as an attempted right-wing coup – a peaceful one without any tanks, but a bid to reshape Britain in a resolutely free-market direction without doing so by an open democratic process. I don't mean that Brexit was some conscious conspiracy, any more than the financial crash of 2007-9 was a deliberate act by the political right to shake things up. But the banking crash was deftly exploited by capital to alter the terms of trade in the British workplace: to drive down wages, impose public spending cuts, increase the wealth of asset holders and generally create a climate of anxiety, which encouraged workers to accept hire-and-fire, zero-hours working conditions.

Similarly Brexit, which was a kind of political crash, presents an opportunity to further impose deregulation by altering the terms of trade between Britain and the rest of the world. This could be seen most clearly in the ruminations last week of the International Trade Secretary, Liam Fox, about Britain joining the Trans Pacific Partnership, TPP – a corporate-dominated initiative similar to the defunct Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP, only worse.

TPP corrals developing countries like Mexico, Peru and Vietnam and legally binds them to the corporate interests of, initially, Australia and Japan. Membership would mean a bonfire of regulations, and force British workers to compete with Southeast Asians. TPP is not for us, and even Donald Trump has rejected it. But even if it was a viable free trade organisation it would be barmy for Britain to look here for an alternative to the EU. The hint is in the name: Pacific.

The idea that Britain should abandon the successful trading partnership on our doorstep and start looking for one with free-market tiger economies on the other side of the planet could only have emerged from the imaginations of Thatcherite nostalgics. Anyway, Japan has just struck a trade deal with ... yes, the European Union. The obvious way to get the best deal out of TPP, therefore, might be to remain in the European Single Market (ESM).

The idiocy of leaving the ESM should have been abundantly clear when it came to resolving the problem of Ireland. The crisis last year over the Irish border forced the British establishment, probably for the first time, to seriously examine exactly what leaving the EU means. Surprisingly, it means that we can't continue to trade with EU members (like Ireland) without restoring all manner of tariffs and regulatory barriers that we have spent the last four decades dismantling via the EU. It was a pivotal moment because the broader British ruling class, which has been ambivalent about Brexit on the whole, began to realise it had been sold a pup.

Why should we abandon the most successful free trade bloc in the world only to seek less satisfactory deals with other bloc with whom we trade very much less? More pertinently, why leave the single market only to have to seek “realignment” with it in order to maintain our existing trading links – that “friction-free” trade deal that the Brexiteers used to talk about. No, you certainly wouldn't start from here.

Through a chaotic processes, this dysfunctional Tory Government arrived at a sort of compromise in December: Britain would remain in “full alignment” with the regulations of the EU Customs Union and effectively the single market. This supposedly only applies to the extent necessary to maintain the Belfast Agreement and avoid a border in Ireland, but everyone and his dog knows that this is really a statement defining Britain's future relations with Europe. Brexit means single market minus.

The good news is that Britain is on its way, slowly, chaotically and erratically, back into Europe. The Chancellor, Philip Hammond, admitted as much last week when he refused to rule out membership of the Customs Union. We won’t be in the European Union, because we will have left that in March 2019, along with the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy. But Britain will remain in the closest possible alignment with the single market.

Yes, it will mean free movement, but not as we know it now. There will be a new concept of “controlled migration” under which EU migrants are only allowed to remain in the UK for three months, unless they can support themselves or find a job. (Psst: don't tell Brexit voters, but that is already the situation in the EU – free movement is not as free as most people think.)

Of course, not everyone agrees that the Tory Government has bottled it on hard Brexit. Tony Blair believes we need another referendum to make sure. That is of course a possibility, and would certainly be justified if there is a dramatic shift in UK public opinion. But as Nicola Sturgeon used to say, it would not be right to hold a repeat referendum just for the sake of it. That would look like betrayal, and I suspect that the Leave vote might be even bigger in Brexyref2. Opinion has shifted only marginally in the direction of Remain despite the chaos of the last six months.

So, we start the year with some relatively good news as we stagger about in the EU purgatorium. Brexit doesn't mean Brexit after all. It means something rather similar to what we have now, only on worse terms than we have now. Actually, leaving the Common Agricultural Policy could have some benefits – though farmers in Scotland will lose their subsidies after five years – and Britain will effectively be in the same relationship to the EU as Norway and Switzerland. They seem to do OK. If I'm right, and I sincerely hope I am, we can sleep fairly securely in our beds, as the Brexiteers continue to dream their squalid dreams of sweatshop Britain.