The problem with Brexit is we didn't Brexit hard enough

[Middlelanehogger]

The EU itself was just the start.

But there are still more institutions which still influence our laws and make it impossible to actually achieve "taking back control".

If anything, we've left the trading bloc (which had economic benefits) but stayed in many of the legal institutions (which retain control over us).

So which body do we leave next - the ECHR? The ECJ? Keenly awaiting responses 😘

The 'morons' you refer to would be most of the people in the UK. Perhaps your GP, your neighbours, even family and friends.
Most of the people in the UK didn't vote for Brexit (and I know for certain that my GP didn't nor my friends!)
Of those who voted a small majority voted leave but it's wasn't the majority of people in the UK, many people didn't vote, and some weren't eligible for a variety of reasons.

Everyone had the opportunity to vote and turnout was relatively high. In terms of a representation of the voting intentions, it actually reflected the votes cast more accurately than most elections due to our shit electoral system.
In fact, I reckon we'd never have had the referendum if we had a better electoral system. It really only happened because David Cameron was trying to face down the UKIP infiltrators in the Tory party.

@Dreamstate the old 'they're all as bad as each other' argument really doesn't hold water with this current government. If you think they're no worse, you haven't been paying attention.

It's easy to feel lost after leaving a controlling relationship but things usually get better with time. 😂

And how can you say with certainty that other governments haven't been as corrupt or even more so than this one..they just hid it better. You can't really

They voted to leave the EU.

What they didn't vote for was HOW that should look.

The Vote Leave campaign very cleverly dodged this in order to appeal to as many people as possible. They deliberately framed it so Brexit looked like something different to every single leave voter.

And that's where the problems started. No one could agree on whether the result meant leaving the common market, the customer union or hard brexit. That's why it went round and round in circles in parliament.

There was and still isn't popular support for any individual form of Brexit.

People who voted for Leave did not vote for the Brexit we got. They voted for the Brexit they thought in their heads.

It was a vote AGAINST the status quo not a vote FOR the form of Brexit we have had.

Ultimately what happened was the hard right of the Tory Party highjacked this in various ways.

'Taking back control' ultimately wasn't about the UK taking back control - it was about the Tory Party and Elites taking back power from the people which the EU helped to protect. The ECHR story here is more of that.

We had a referendum that established we didn't want to remain in the EU but that vote DID NOT establish what we wanted instead.

This is an important distinction for CURRENT and FUTURE politics.

Anyone passionately advocating in either direction knows very little about EU membership, IMHO. EU membership is actually a mixed bag, and staying in the EU would have presented unique issues not faced had we not left. I think there are many hardline Brexiteers and remainders who don’t have a particularly strong knowledge of the other side of the argument. I appreciate the arguments in favour of remaining from studying the EU in my master’s degree, but equally appreciate the arguments in favour of leaving.
From what I’ve seen of the discussions of Brexit on Mumsnet, there tends to be a lack of fundamental understanding of EU law within a lot of the discussions. There is an awful lot of tribalism going on, and a lot of more-remainer-than-thou attitudes in a remainer echo chamber which fuels the toxicity.
The Tories may have been in power when Brexit was enacted but new rules and negotiations will inevitably take place once successive governments take hold, so the UK-EU relationship will evolve over time.

I see there are not 52% agreeing with the OP.

That's all true. It's pretty hard to see how the wishes of leavers (and for that matter remainers) about the type of Brexit we wanted could be enacted though since they are so divergent. This is one of the big problems with referenda when we have a representative democracy. In fact, contrary to some revisionist historians, we were not given an option on joining what was then the EEC, because we elected a Tory government and they had a mandate to sign us up, which they did.
The 1975 referendum was leave/remain, just like the 2016 one - but of course remain won.

Typical non-reply of a leave voter who is pretending they didn't vote leave, whilst defending the idiocy of their own actions by proxy. I gave up asking leavers for reasons a long time ago because their reasons just cemented in my mind the kinds of people they were, I certainly wasn't expecting any answers from you, or anything other than continued drivel tbh.

Please can we stop this level of hatred?

This!

It isn't very clear what the voting options mean though.

But not one single person in the country, not one, voted to leave the Single Market or the Customs Union

Where was this communicated to voters? Do you mean the Leave campaign explicitly outlined that we would not leave the SM and CU

One of top reasons for vote was immigration did they still define Brexit as including FOM in pamphlets / press etc

I’m not saying definitely not the case I just can’t recall the specifics being raised

Leave campaign was focussed on a couple of things which got the attention but maybe it was there too, are there any examples?

Just because I won't be nasty about people who did or be spewing some level of hatred about the vote, doesn't make me someone who is pretending.

I voted remain and that's a fact. If you refuse to believe me, well its pretty sad that you can't.

And there we have it, now even remain voters start being nasty to other remain votes.

But not one single person in the country, not one, voted to leave the Single Market or the Customs Union
Of course this is true in the sense that those options were not on the ballot. However, it would be madness to imagine that there were not significant numbers who voted leave in the hope of also leaving those arrangements, as well as significant numbers of leave voters who expected us to remain in the SM and CU.

I wonder whose fault it was that no safety measures where put in place?

I also see people like you trying to argue that we should not return to CU/SM

I’m not sure that’s the case, nor see who this is aimed at. Personally I would have liked to see it as an issue to vote on at the GE. Unfortunately it’s been ruled out.

I don’t recall it as an explicit part of the Leave campaign though, happy to be proved wrong with examples

There’s been a fair bit of research into why people voted for Brexit, if you look it up you’ll see voters felt strongly about a couple of topics

Excellent points. It's also a little ironic that we joined the (then) EEC by being signed up by a Tory government without a referendum on joining (OK a little esoteric, but nonetheless true), all this mudslinging tends to ignore any inconvenient truths.

Someone seems to have gone report mad on this thread. I take it supporters of the greatest act of national self harm this century have thin skins.

I reported the personal attacks. MN doesn't allow personal attacks - it's in the rules.

As of this month 56% of those polled thought Britain was wrong to leave the EU compared to only 31% who thought it was the right decision.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/987347/brexit-opinion-poll/

Give it a few years and you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who will admit to having voted Leave.