Can the UK still choose to revoke Article 50 and stop Brexit?

This is the question the UK Government does not want answered and has been spending vast amounts of public money trying to block.

But a small group of cross-party politicians believe the answer is vital to the future of the UK and, while other MPs have been squabbling and plotting over the Brexit process, they have been quietly arguing their case in Scotland’s court system.

Next week, despite the best efforts of the government’s top lawyers, their legal challenge will finally reach Europe’s highest court.

The government is adamant it will not revoke Article 50 regardless of the outcome, but the petitioners believe if the answer to their question is yes, MPs could use it as a way out of the “chaos of Brexit”.

The case was raised in Scotland’s highest court, the Court of Session, earlier this year and the request to take it to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) was initially denied after the government argued it was a “hypothetical” and “academic” question.

However, this decision was later overturned by Scotland’s top judges.

The Government has since tried to appeal this decision twice, with the most recent application rejected by the UK Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Many have criticised the government for trying to delay the case in a bid to stop a decision being issued ahead of the parliamentary vote on Brexit, while others have questioned why officials have spent so much money contesting it.

Whatever your position on leaving the EU, it is clear that the government’s handling of this case is questionable.

It has spent vast sums of money (the cost of the Supreme Court bid alone is estimated at as much as £100,000) challenging a case which simply provides an answer to a legal question.

What the government or parliament does with the answer is up to them.

A government confident in its position and the deal it was able to negotiate for the UK could simply have allowed it to happen, knowing it would not make a difference to the path it was on.

It is telling that, instead, it has racked up huge legal bills, and even called into question the rules of Scotland’s highest court.

If the answer from the European judges is that Article 50 can be revoked, it will be interesting to see what its impact will be on the history books.