"In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-3630668...
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.
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.
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.
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?
This would smooth out the issue of sampling the decision at one exact point.
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.
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.
So no plan. Genius.
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...
There was no single, set-in-stone outcome on either side.
I voted to stay in, but the remain campaign was far from honest.
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 apparent to me that the remain camp did keep fighting Brexit tooth & nail much like Farage might have, so I guess we have symmetry.