A decent elite would not have gambled away the future of the country just to get rid of a couple of party rivals (2016) or to keep a schizophrenic party together (2019). In both cases, machinations were set in motion in a completely careless way, with an outrageously cavalier attitude, and now the country as a whole is falling apart - regardless of whether we get back to pre-2016 state or we become Singapore-on-Thames, 20m people will forever feel angry and disenfranchised. No party intrigue is worth that price.
(It is incredibly funny and sad at the same time, that the guy who started it all was elected on a platform of fixing the "Broken Society" that Britain, in his words, had become. Good job, Dave - you really broke it for good now.)
If I had to model an elite failure it is this: people on both sides began to pretend a "hard" Brexit was an unthinkable catastrophe, this after an even sillier period when people talked as if Britain got to choose between soft and hard Brexits as a kind of policy choice.
In truth such things could only ever have been the outcome of a negotiation (or failure of negotiation) with the rest of the EU. The government should, from the get-go, have said "we will try to negotiate a deal, but we will also prepare for a hard exit".
This would have both prepared the country in the case of an outcome like this, and reduced the chances of it too by strengthening May's position when negotiating the terms of an exit -- thus making the final deal more acceptable to Parliament.
"Too little democracy indicates a failure of the elite."
Pick one.
This nuance you're overlooking is why false dichotomies like yours and GP's are considered fallacies.
That is a model example of a false dichotomy.
2016: Incompetent elite's create a problem.
2019: Incompetent elites make it worse.
Deeper problem is part of the neoliberal revolution was popular will was to be neutered, the political process was to be neutered. So that they couldn't interfere with the the free market or oppose the power of the rentier class.
So now you have voters, politicians, and the media that see politics and policy as a game that doesn't matter. Two generations of this and people wonder why there is no competence. Big wonder!
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v14/n19/wynne-godley/maastricht-and-al...
The Maastricht treaty took away fiscal and central banking tools that governments could use and replaced them with... nothing.
That just proves my point here.
Federal Social Insurance programs, Social security, Unemployment, food stamps, and other transfer payments. These substitute for states inability to print their own money. and set exchange rates or control the flow of capital.
The Banking system is backstopped by the Federal Reserve not individual states. See Texas and California during the S&L crisis.
And the lack of tribal attitudes. Europeans think Greeks need to pay back all the money their government borrowed from French and German Banks. No one in the US really feels that way about Puerto Ricans.
As an aside, the states actually do have de facto currency issuing power as a function of their sovereignty and taxing authority. It's rarely exercised, but it has been done. For example when California failed to pass a budget a decade ago, it started paying with IOUs that it also accepted as payment for state tax liabilities[1]. They even strong-armed banks into accepting the IOUs as deposits. The total sum was nearly $3 billion. So the states can print money.
I think China in the last 15 years has taken the opposite tack, demanding regional governments run large deficits and loaning them the money. Which works because, Chinese leadership can give two shits about the books.
The wording of the referendum, the non-specificity of it, was an additional failure.
Then Cameron failed in that the referendum passed. This was the opposite of shutting up that wing of his party. He should have campaigned for Remain, instead of just doing nothing. (Shooting down some of the Leave lies would have been useful, too.) The referendum passing is a failure of leadership.
Cameron, apparently tired of failing, bailed at this point, and Theresa May became Prime Minister.
May's first failure was regarding the referendum as binding, when it wasn't.
May got the best deal she could out of Europe. Parliament failed to ratify that deal. That is the success of Parliament, rather than a failure - they saw a bad idea, and they chose not to do it.
But May's failure is her determination to press on with a hard Brexit, even though that is also a bad idea. She seems totally unwilling to stand up and say, "No, this is a bad idea, and we're not going to do it" - and pay the political price for doing so. She acts as though Corbyn becoming PM would be a greater disaster than a hard Brexit.
In fairness, nobody else is willing to stand up and call a halt to this travesty, either. That's a failure of leadership.
So, yes, the 2016 vote was a maelstrom of fail. It wasn't just one event, it was a whole series of them. Events since then have also been a series of failures. The only exception was a moment of sanity by Parliament, in failing to ratify the negotiated deal.
There may be one more moment of sanity to come. If I understand correctly (and I may well not, I'm not in the UK), Parliament gets to vote on a hard Brexit, too. If they reject that, nothing remains but to revoke the invocation of Article 50. Doing so would be the opposite of a failure.
2019: failure to ratify vote indicates failure of elite
pick one