The EU vote was an enormous gamble that certain politicians chose to take with our future: David Cameron held the referendum, which he fully expected to win, not to give us a say, but to try to silence his Euro-sceptic backbenchers once and for all, a foolish tactic that disastrously backfired. Boris Johnson supported the leave side to further his own ambition to be prime minister, but you don't have to take my word for that: senior Tories such as Anna Soubry and Alan Duncan will tell you exactly the same thing.
Because Cameron anticipated a victory, no plans were made about what to do if the 'leave' side won; so confident was he that government departments were specifically instructed not to make any contingency plans, which to me seems the height of irresponsibility. Having engineered this vote, Messrs Cameron, Farage and Johnson all stepped away from leadership roles. To put it another way, having started the fire, they all simply ran away leaving others to deal with the consequences.
Those who are happy with the result keep on telling those who voted to stay in to get over it. Just like they did? We have had 41 years of constant whingeing and complaining by them about the EEC/EC/EU since the first referendum in 1975. They did not 'get over it' then, so why should anyone else now?
The first referendum did not close down the debate; I strongly doubt that the second one will either.
I believe that Cameron's referendum will go down in history as the Tory Party's equivalent of Blair's involvement of Britain in the invasion of Iraq. They are both disasters, although the referendum (so far) has, of course, proven less fatal. They are both moments of hubris for Blair and Cameron - and highly painful for others. The only people to gain from this stupid referendum are the Right and the extreme Right, who have been much encouraged by the way the Brexit politicians played "The Migrant Card", which so many dumb racists seemed to think meant immediate forced repatriation of minorities. The day after the referendum, for instance, Channel 4 interviewed people in Barnsley who were convinced that all Muslims were about to be deported.If the invasion of Iraq was a geo-political and military disaster, the EC referendum looks as if it will become a major domestic political and social disaster.
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