Well I've been away from the forum for a couple of days so this is really my first opportunity to share my thoughts on there about the verdict.
To say I'm disappointed would be an understatement. To my mind this will go down as one of the biggest examples national self-harm in history.
The media cries with shouts of "Britain has decided" but this is a rather simplistic analysis of the situation. The result reveals a heavily divided society in which around half of it voted to leave and the other half voted to remain. The margin of majority (less than four percentage points) is incredibly slight. The Ashcroft poll revealed the day after the vote sheds some light of the key faultlines of this divided society for anyone that is interested in informed and factual analysis rather than baseless speculation.
The will of the majority, however, it is. On a personal level I struggle with this - not the verdict itself, which I respect (calls for parliament to ignore the result, second referendums, and so on are pointless given the decision has been made), but what it means for my own identity and what it means for the politics of this country. If this slight majority verdict is a reflection on what it means to be British - insular, isolated, xenophobic, lacking vision and prosperity - then this calls into question my own identity of something that I was hitherto proud to call myself.
Many of Vote Leave's key campaign promises are quickly unravelling. £350m per week extra for the NHS: a lie. Control over immigration: a lie. Reduced levels of migration: a lie. No economic impact: a lie. Control over our destiny: a lie. The fact key advocates of Leave now distance themselves from these statements demonstrates their wilful and malicious intent to mislead the British public. Much of the referendum campaign was about a mistrust in our politics - unfortunately undeliverable promises which will never be realized will only increase this sense of mistrust. Indeed, Boris's 'manifesto' in the Telegraph today for our post-Brexit relationship with the EU (i.e. access to the single market, free movement of people - looks like the Norway model) might be better summarized simply as "membership of the European Union", albeit without the ability to shape the laws and policy which will inevitably continue to affect us - which does beg two questions. How does this represent Take Back Control? And what was the whole point of this sorry affair? Unless there were some sort of personal gains for the political elite ... hmmm.
The fact the media has been almost exclusively focused on the fallout in Westminster confirms for me this referendum was nothing about the EU, and everything about our domestic politics. When the referendum was first called I posted on here that it was evidence of a crisis in political leadership and would decrease the quality of our democracy as it would allow political leaders to simply absolve themselves of the responsibility for the negative consequences of a decision made by the masses. I stand by this assertion, and the stunning lack of leadership being displayed in Westminster at present illustrates this nicely. The fact key leavers are now freely and openly admitting their wilful deceit of the British public and not facing stronger scrutiny confirms that this has not been an exercise in democracy, but in absolving our political elite of accountability.
