For US viewers, it's kind of like if the Republican party held a national referendum that said "repeal and replace Obamacare in two years", and the vote passed.

Then then they're on the hook to do the actual replacement part and realize that there never was a replacement but they have this hard deadline to get it done.

The fact that the vote was held at all is total madness. They were trying to call a bluff and it blew up in their face. The whole "post fact era" thing only works up until you the point where you need to actually implement policy.

Yeah, to me the initial referendum, because of the complete lack of information on what the actual deal would be, is about as useful as an opinion poll for actually informing the future of the UK re the EU.

(US user)

There was a lot of information about what the deal would be. It would involve not sending millions of pounds to the EU, better healthcare, total control over immigration, etc...

Sure some of it was lies, but lies are a form of information. They had a bus and everything.

The anti-Brexit side was seemingly more vague, saying that it would be bad without really giving people anything to be excited about.

You misunderstand I'm talking about the actual policy remain is easy there's no negotiations to go through so the government's actions are known. Leave though involves 2 (or more if the UK pushes back the date somehow) of negotiation with the EU so it's impossible to know what was actually going to come out of it.

On top of that there's a whole spectrum of brexits people could have been voting for so even the government doesn't know what people actually want out of a leave vote!

To me it seems like that a revote would have to deal with the literal fear mongering the stay side has been pushing out. My personal favorite is the food shortages, while every other country outside of the EU manages to import food, apparently if you try to leave, you wont' be able to find the food you want on the shelves any more!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/02/brexit...

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/brexit-food-shortages-stockp...

https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/foodanddrink/brexit-foo...

The EU would not blockade Britain, as many of these articles seem to imply (how else would you just run out of something simply because you have to import it from a 'foreign' country now?). Britain would have to pay any tariffs the EU imposes to others of course, but it would also be in their best interest to not set them so high that people in Britain stop buying their products at all. Any 'shortages' would be brought about by shear mismanagement.

The issue with the food is about the regulations on their import into the UK, having been in the EU for so long most of those rules are just the EU rules or really old out of date rules that were superseded by the EU food regulations. If there's a no deal Brexit all those EU rules go away and boom suddenly there's a big question about what food is legal to import.