My opinion as someone who wished to remain in the EU despite its (many) problems is that those who voted to leave based on a wish to preserve sovereignty, freedom and democracy were woefully misinformed and perhaps even deliberately led astray by demagogues and fascists.

But then again they might say the same about my wish to remain part of the union.

I value effective regulation, worker protections, considerations of civil liberties and democracy and I made a choice to vote remain in the EU knowing full well that it is far from perfect.

I trust the EU to act in my interests a hell of a lot more than my own country's shit-show of career-politician Eton schoolboys, unelected Lords and sycophantic royalists embodying the very notion of hereditary privilege.

Leavers seemed to fall into one of two camps, one was primarily concerned with high levels of immigration, the other talked about freedom from EU bureaucracy.

The agitators mostly seemed to come from the second group but were happy enough to stoke the fears of the first.

Neither group appeared to have any coherent arguments to me.

Those on the right in the UK see the EU as a fundamentally a socialist enterprise as the EU has views on workers rights and human rights.

Those on the (far) left in the UK see the EU as a fundamentally a capitalist enterprise as it is about free trade and ensuring supplies of cheap labour to keep wages depressed.

Quite the opposite actually.

The UK is a mixed economy, we have both Capitalism and Socialism and we like it - our safety-net welfare state and the NHS save lives everyday.

EU membership is a shield for former soviet satellite states to join the West and escape Russian influence.

The main leave "argument" was £350,000,000 was being given to the EU and could save the beloved NHS - this turned out to be a downright lie.

Many of the other popular arguments were equally false and fearmongery about out of control EUrocrats legislating on the curvature of bannanas and attacks on the British sausage and that farmers would be better off outside the common market - all very jingoistic.

It has emerged that there was a lot of carefully crafted individually targeted Facebook adverts that played on voters fears derived from personal data held outside the UK (and outside UK data laws), sadly these went undocumented so we may never know the extent of the falsehoods or their level of influence.

The UK electoral commission has expressed concern over this type of campaigning as no-one knows what is being promised or how much was spent on it.

There has been an effort to try to document these dark ads for the recent election where they seem to have been much less effective.

Many Brits feel conned as the referendum was pitched as being only advisory but is now being taken as iron-clad and a 4% majority of those who offered an opinion is very little mandate to enact such major constitutional change.

As the realities for science funding, farming subsidies have kicked polls are reporting many Brexiters have changed their tune. Goldman Sax's relocation to Europe is a bellweather for the realities for the financial industry which is close enough to Tory hearts that one hopes they'll snap out of their dreams of Empire and Commonwealth.

Hopefully the staggering level of incompetence so far demonstrated by David Davis' negotiating team will be the rope that hangs them and we'll get a second real referendum.

The alternative Red White and Blue Hard Brexit promised by Teresa May is not good for anyone in the UK unless they are shorting the pound.

I agree with a lot of what you said. But it's simply not true that "Many Brits feel conned". The majority still wants to leave EU. That's why both Labour and Conservative MPs are pro brexit. Only LibDems are pro-remain, and they only got a handful of seats in the last general election. The brexiteers won, unfortunately. The only question now is how bad it will be.

> The majority still wants to leave EU. That's why both Labour and Conservative MPs are pro brexit.

This is not really accurate.

Firstly, the majority that initially voted to leave was 37% of the population. As far as I am aware that number has slightly decreased in terms of supporters, but even if the opposite were true it is still less than half of the population that actively support leaving.

Secondly, these MP's are only 'pro-Brexit' insofar as they know it has to happen regardless of their own beliefs and coming out against it now would be political suicide. No matter what you think here, in this last General Election people did not vote for parties based on their Brexit stance. They voted based on whether they wanted 5 more years of Tory rule. Tht issue was a far higher priority than Brexit.

You're quite correct. The proper phrase "The majority of people that could be bothered to vote still wants to leave the EU".

You have to remember we have FPTP voting, not STV or any other form of PR.

I'd have voted LibDem but you only get one vote and my main concern was "try to halt NHS privatisation" leaving me to vote against the Tories and so for whoever has most chance of winning against them.

There's no scope in General Elections for any nuance in voting.

LibDems openly supported this line, "vote against the Tory party".

Meanwhile in Scotland it seems SNP lost votes not because of their governance, per se, but because people were using it as a proxy for voting against a further Scottish referendum.

True. If the Brits really wanted to undo the referendum, they should have voted en-masse for the LibDems. They didn't. Worse: the Tories remain the largest party despite their losses. Clearly a lot of Brits still support the hard-line Brexit of Theresa May.

It is impossible to conclude this given Brexit was far from the only issue - ending austerity and saving the NHS were big priorities too.

This doesn't work so well under the UK's First Past The Post system.

If you wanted to get the Tories out then feeling one was throwing away a vote for the Lib-Dems in a seat were they are too far behind is one argument for proportional representation.

Also the Lib-Dems lost a lot of trust with the coalition with the Tories, many left the Lib Dems as they felt betrayed by this.

True, proportional representation would have given a far more accurate representation, and the Tories didn't get as many votes as their number of seats suggests, but still, they got enough votes to remain the largest party. That's far more support for May's mad rampage than I expected.

The main reason for brexit that I have sussed out is that it makes the Tories more powerful because they'll be the same sized fish but in a much smaller pond. So on a relative level their power increases and as long as the country doesn't collapse to such a degree that this undoes the advantages they come out ahead.

That last assumption may end up not to hold water in the longer term.

Basically the UK doesn't want the EU government forcing freedom on them.

Homegrown oppression over foreign freedom.