[stevekemp]

People keep bringing up the "advisory" nature of the referendum, but that's because referendums are not legally binding in the UK.

There was a vote. The public made their decision. Having carried out the vote it would have been political suicide to have ignored the result.

I think the result was wrong, and I think there should have been a defined threshold of 60% or similar, but those things aside the results were always going to be followed and honoured so long as the 50% threshold was exceeded.

The only way that the result could have been ignored would have been if the reply had been "we'll spend five years coming up with a plan, and let you vote on that" then hoping people forgot.

The whole vote was pointless, the possibilities of leaving so large and a single binary question captured none of the available options. Then the Tories locked in the most brutal exit they could and we were screwed.

But "advisory" was not even the top 50 things in the list of everything that went wrong.