GORDON Brown has called for Britain’s Brexit deadline to be extended by a year, as he warned the country is now “more divided” than at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax.

The former PM said MPs should force the Government to extend Article 50 and then give the public the final say on a renegotiated Brexit deal.

Speaking in Edinburgh, Brown condemned the “paralysed and immobilised” Parliament in Westminster and said there is rising anger from the public who want to be involved in the decision-making process.

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Brown warned: “It is the lethal combination of a deadlocked Parliament, an ever-more divided country, and the mounting distrust between Parliament and people that makes me fear for our cohesion.

“The UK’s deadlock has led to the degradation of our public discourse. It is so toxic that accusations from both sides of betrayal and even treason are now a stock in trade of our public square – claims of bad faith from which it will take years to recover.

“Britain is already more divided than during the three-day week of the 1970s or during the miners’ strike of the 1980s. We are more divided than over the poll tax, whose troubles came to a head in the early 1990s.”