Of course, and that would have been absolutely fine. Democracy is to be able to campaign for what you believe in.

But equally, politically, and democratically, it is not tenable to call a referendum (which is something quite rare in the UK) and then to ignore the result. So the reality is that the government and Parliament had to abide by the result even if the referendum was legally not binding.

Now people are of course free to campaign for the UK to join the EU.

"Now people are of course free to campaign for the UK to join the EU."

Or to campaign to leave the UK - which I suspect is a more achievable and sensible option. I'd doubt if the EU would want the UK back anyway.

Sure we would. It's like a tooth-gap - and there's also the issue of lacking a respected military in times that are getting a lot more... interesting.

But it feels like the UK needs to do some domestic cleanup before that has a chance of happening. Seems like the UK media and political landscape has gone completely off the rails.

Or just individually leave the UK. I find the thing kind of depressing. It's not even as if the leave voters seem happy. It seems more of a my life's crap - lets destroy this EU membership thing - oh my life's still crap. Apart from Boris - at least he got to be PM and seems fairly cheerful. Perhaps the lies on a bus were worth it.

With hindsight I think there should have been two parts. 'Do you want to leave?' and then having looked into the details "ok here's the deal - you still want to go ahead?" I don't think many people were really voting for the present mess.

Bit like buying a house - you want it? Ok, well do a survey... it has a bit of dry rot - you still want it or shall we look at other options?

My preferred way for a referendum to work would be to have everybody be able to change vote at any time for any reason for a year, and the referendum only ends if the vote is on the same side for a continuous year.

This would smooth out the issue of sampling the decision at one exact point.

The difference is that the referendum was stacked against leave in every conceivable way. For example, the remain campaign had £6m more to work with. On top of this the government spent £9m on pro remain leaflets and social media advertising.

Add onto this the fact that the government wheeled out every 'expert' it could find to constantly cry about how bad brexit would be - most of them were lying (Mark Carney, George Osbourne in particular told lies of the most astounding nature - for example that brexit would cause more damage to the economy than WW2? Think about that for a minute.).

If anything the establishment was stacked against brexit.

I already wrote a lengthy reply to one of your other comments. I don't have the time or energy to write a detailed rebuttal to this one, and I'm beginning to wonder whether you're arguing in good faith.

But on your WW2 point, I did think about it for a minute.

Britain fought WW2 for 6 years, 1939 – 1945. Brexit has no known endpoint. Imagine that even 10% of the trade impacts we've seen since the end of the transition period on 1 January persist. Then you can quite easily calculate how many years it will take to damage the economy more than WW2. Off the top of my head, I don't know if that's 6 years, or 60 years, or 600 years. But there's certainly some finite number that will do it.

It's also worth considering that the UK economy in 2021 is larger than it was during WW2, so a small percentage impact in the present day would be a bigger absolute value than the same percentage applied to the past economy.

Those statistics were later revised by the Bank of England, after the damage was done obviously, so I guess you're wrong.

Actually, the referendum was stacked against Remain, as Leave covered every single possible variation of not being in the EU, and at no point had to define anything except being "Not Remain"

I don't think that's a stacked decision. There's no way to specify exactly what each of two options will entail. (If you don't believe me, take a look at a California ballot pamphlet.) Of course Leave was gonna be more uncertain - but normally such uncertainty plays against you in referendums, where the status quo tends to win. If Remain didn't pin Leave down, then that's the fault of their campaigning, not the setup.

Playing on this uncertainty was a conscious decision by the pro remain Conservative government of the time. People would ask 'what will happen after we vote brexit?' the natural reply: 'nobody knows' - well why not?

It was clearly reckless to hold a vote on something without a plan on how it was actually to be implemented or even what it might look like; and there were calls for the government to do some investigation here and publish a report or some such document - the decision not to do so was in order to sow that uncertainty.

Even Dominic Cummings said at one point there was a strong case for a second referendum to decide what form Brexit should take (note NOT a re-run of the first referendum).

Not just Dominic Cummings[0] but also Jacob Rees-Mogg[1].

I think it would have been democratically unconscionable to not have had "No Brexit" as an option on a second referendum, but that would have required a relatively complicated ranked voting system, and arguably it would have made more sense for the first referendum to have been set up that way instead.

I suppose the alternative would have been for Remainers to boycott the hypothetical second referendum, and hope that the number of votes for the different Brexit options summed to substantially less than the number of votes for Brexit in the initial referendum.

[0] https://www.markpack.org.uk/150719/dominic-cummings-second-r...

[1] https://metro.co.uk/video/jacob-rees-mogg-suggests-holding-s...

Yes that was more or less an explicit choice from Cameron IIRC - if we come up with a plan for what happens afterwards, that plan may reassure people that Brexit can work out OK, and play to the other side.

So no plan. Genius.

And the different versions of remain? Remain but keep British exceptionalism? Remain but go all in? Remain but work towards a superstate?

There was no single, set-in-stone outcome on either side.

I voted to stay in, but the remain campaign was far from honest.

I'm Scottish, so I know exactly how "Project Fear" works!

Farage could continue campaigning if he wishes, but its not up to him.

It's also apparent to me that the remain camp did keep fighting Brexit tooth & nail much like Farage might have, so I guess we have symmetry.