With the announcement of the results of the European Elections on Sunday evening and Monday morning, the UK has once again come to a peak of debate regarding the issue still haunting every element of the country's politics – Brexit.

The mainstream Conservative and Labour parties performed extremely poorly, with some of the lowest results recorded in modern history. This has widely been perceived as a punishment for the parties' respective policies on Brexit.

In the case of the Conservatives, a majority of whose traditional supporters are in favour of Brexit, voters were put off by Prime Minister Theresa May's failure to implement Brexit. The party, therefore, haemorrhaged votes in particular to the newly-formed Brexit Party, which has been critical of May's deal and advocates leaving the European Union (EU) with no deal.

On the other hand, the Labour Party, a majority of whose voters support the UK remaining in the EU, lost significant support to other parties in the centre-ground and on the left of British politics, particularly the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party. These pro-Remain parties, among others, unequivocally stated their support for the holding of a second referendum on Brexit, and for the UK to remain within the EU.

This approach is in stark contrast to Labour, who have deliberately appeared vague on their Brexit policy, on the one hand insisting that there is a version of Brexit they would support, but on the other hand regularly advocating a second referendum on any other deal the current government might propose.

In the same week as the vote, Theresa May announced her decision to resign from her position as leader of the Conservatives and, therefore, Prime Minister later this summer. This has set off a leadership race within the party with a very broad spectrum of contenders. 

While the identity of the eventual victor is currently unclear (while Boris Johnson is the favourite, the favourite has tended not to win in previous contents), it seems very likely that whoever the next Conservative leader is, they will be open to proposing a no-deal Brexit.

Several have already committed themselves to this by saying that they guarantee the UK will leave the EU on October 31 (the current Article 50 extension deadline) with or without a deal. Given that the EU has stated multiple times that it will not engage in a renegotiation of May's deal, and almost none of these leadership hopefuls will support said deal, this is basically a tacit endorsement of no-deal.

Another reason this is likely is because, if the Conservative Party wants to win back the votes it has lost to the Brexit Party in these most recent elections, it will likely need to support a no-deal Brexit as this is what the Brexit Party proposes. It is highly likely therefore, that the Conservatives will shortly tack to this position on Brexit.

At the same time, Labour is under more pressure than ever to support a second referendum on Brexit, and to campaign for a vote to remain in the EU in such a referendum. This is for similar reasons to the Conservatives' likely change in policy. Labour will be aware that the only way to win back the votes it has lost to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens over this issue is to, finally, unequivocally support such a vote.

This will not be an easy process, as the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn appears to be opposed to a second referendum, even though many others in his shadow cabinet openly support one. It seems likely that by the party's conference later this year, however, sufficient pressure will be placed on the leadership by a host of different interest groups to change the policy.

This will put the UK's two mainstream parties in line with the extremes on either end of the Brexit debate: on the one hand, leaving the EU without a deal; on the other hand, holding a second referendum to remain in the EU.

The talk of compromises and a “soft” Brexit will be long gone. In a way, this should not be surprising. May's deal is widely regarded as dead-in-the-water at this point, and the EU is clear that this is the only deal available. The logical conclusion of this is that, if the deal cannot receive enough support among British MPs (which appears the case), then the only options left are leaving with no deal or remaining in the EU.

At the outset of the Brexit process, such a binary choice was certainly not foreseen. It was assumed that both sides would reach an agreement in their mutual interest. Indeed, it was unthinkable that years of negotiations between the UK and EU, and considerable money spent on this process, would all be entirely pointless.

We are now long past understanding, however, that this process was always going to be much more complicated than that and, in the coming weeks, it will become clearer and clearer that the only two options left are this Brexit binary of extremes.