Here’s one narrative on what the culture in the UK is like: since the 1980s the UK has been run a bit like a city state with three inconvenient countries and one really inconvenient province welded onto it, it’s a very centralised system both politically and economically with London and the financial services industry dominating. After the transition to a service economy we literally left a lot of the country to ‘managed decline’ which is a euphemism for leaving a place to rot and saying ‘if you don’t like it leave and get a job in London’. Nobody’s saying coal mining for example didn’t have to end, but these single industry communities were left with nothing in the way of support or retraining at a time the state was being ideologically shrunk as much as possible due to the perceived failures of the post war political norms.

Under Blair some of this started to improve but then 2008 happened and everything went to shit and never really got better in much of the UK outside it’s more prosperous areas. Blairism died mostly because of the 2008 crash and the disaster that was the Iraq War which Blair strongly advocated, after that the Conservatives focused on an austere policy platform with an internal faction increasingly blaming the EU for the fact things weren’t improving as it was a convenient consequence-free scapegoat. The most controversial point of contention was the high numbers of EU migrant workers who were seen as driving down wages which among other fears was capitalised on by the populist party UKIP. Because of our insane FPTP electoral system UKIP had three seats at its peak but was legitimately threatening to collapse the ruling conservatives vote at the 2015 election as a spoiler and having just won the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 David Cameron decided to take another gamble and offer an in-out EU referendum to see off the UKIP threat to his party for good. He did not win this gamble.

I don’t need to tell anyone what happened next, a very effective campaign featuring a lot of psychological targeting through social media was run, lots of people in left-behind areas were presented an opportunity to stick it to the government by taking away something they supported, and we left the EU by the slimmest of margins. Brexit was an internal political crisis that got out of hand, largely because Cameron wasn’t as clever as he thought he was. If you don’t believe me go and look at the data, the most Brexity areas were typically the most deprived and this is no coincidence. Also our age pyramid is pretty fucked (the housing crisis is making this worse), the young people did protest and did oppose it, Parliament tied itself in knots due to the amount of opposition. At the end of the day though the older demographic was always going to swing it strongly.

The reason our politics has been so mad since Brexit is that the Brexiteers in Parliament were never meant to catch the car they were chasing and have no idea what to do now they’ve won. I doubt we’ll ever willingly join the Eurozone (the memories of Black Wednesday run deep enough joining the ERM in preparation would be deeply unpopular plus the symbolic loss of the unique coins) but other than that Brexit is dying as a relevant political force.

TL;DR Brexit was an internal Tory (Conservative) problem that got way, way out of hand and exploited by grifters like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. Also everyone go and read Orwell’s England your England, it’s a bit out of date obviously but a lot still rings true.