I no longer see any issue with rerunning the referendum.

There was the valid argument that one cannot simply have another referendum because one doesn't like the result of the previous one.

I think we've now gone beyond that point now. Tories and typical Tory voters are now struggling to defend the last three years of utter chaos and incompetence we've seen in government since Article 50 was triggered. The argument from the Tories, as ever, is that Corbyn would be worse. That's it - effectively "we're the devil you know". They've demonised Corbyn, aided and abetted by their allies in the right wing media and after successfully forcing out May, they've gifted us Johnson and his minority government of selected Brexiteer cronies. They were going to get Brexit done "do or die" by yesterday... but as we know, this is someone who has absolutely no trouble at all with lying to and misleading the idiots who elect him and his ilk time and time again.

After three years of this, many people have changed their minds and to me it's feasible that they should be asked again - or given more specific options to vote on - i.e. a deal, no deal, or remain.

The problem with the Brexit referendum, is that it was simply a stunt by Cameron, which backfired. If it had ever been a serious consideration - all of the preparation would have gone on before the referendum was called and there would have at least have been a vague "template" of a plan in place.

Few of those voting to leave realised what "leaving" would entail. Many voting to leave may have had a "Norway style" setup in their minds, others may have seen a "clean break" as feasible at the time. The point being that there was no single category for leave voters - but it has been the very vocal, right wing, nationalist groups who have owned the leave campaign from the start.

Taking into account how people were mislead, how there was little to no planning, how it has been three years of uncertainty and misery for many - I think it's reasonable to consider another referendum.

Though I'm certainly no fan of the Liberal Democrats, I also think it's perfectly legitimate to campaign for a general election as the party to revoke Article 50 if elected - however they will not get into power. They will steal a few votes from the Tories and probably quite a few more from Labour and SNP as well and simply help to keep the Tories cemented in power.

You are correct in that many people have changed their minds, and changed their minds both ways: some leavers now want to remain and some remainers now want to leave. My concern with re-running the referendum is bipartite.

Firstly, a lot of leavers who voted will see a second referendum as a slight to democracy and an indication that their vote was worthless and ignored. This is not only the case, it points to a more serious issue that the UK gov actually had no control over the situation in the first place and had to answer to both the EU and its own Parliament before moving E2-E4. So yes, it looks like there was no proper planning and it was just a ruse from Cameron to get more popularity. The referendum was a sham but it opened a huge can of worms and now those worms can't be put back.

Secondly, seeing as the elapsed time since 2016 allowed some people to change their minds and a lot of information about the false campaigns to ooze saplike out of the woodwork, one could argue that there's little to stop such a situation happening again after another referendum [depending on the result]: more false campaigning, more reconsiderations, more revelations, and then we go round in circles ad nauseam infinitum.

A second referendum with the three options of deal, no deal or remain is good in theory, however, that all depends on how a 'deal' is sold to the public. A 'deal' can mean anything Boris wants it to mean and I doubt that we would really see the true ramifications of such a deal until it is passed [or in the words of the some of the far left publications, "when leave means remain"].

As well as the lack of a plan before the referendum, the government has suffered from an overwhelming lack of will to leave the EU in any meaningful sense, and that lack of will has prevented any realistic plans being put forward, let alone agreed on.

It's true that the "leave" campaign was owned by very vocal, right wing, nationalist groups, but that does not mean that leave voters fitted into any of these groups.

When the EU was created in 1992-3, the UK's membership was pushed through parliament (by the Tories, fwiw) against some vocal opposition, and among other things a new political party was set up with the sole purpose of pushing for a referendum. IIRC the beef was that some of the power that had been lent to the government by the people (until the next election) was being given away (permanently) and this kind of decision should require a referendum.

They didn't get one, but the idea of a referendum on (aspects of?) the EU hung around in British politics for years afterwards. New Labour narrowly avoided having one about the Lisbon treaty. All the time, there was a feeling among some that we were losing control over some aspects of decision-making, because the EU government (even the elected parts) is further removed from the electorate than the UK government (which is, itself, often accused of being out of touch). Perhaps Cameron had forgotten all this, or thought the plebs had.

My impression is that the Leave campaign had also forgotten it, preferring instead to focus on a fairly unpleasant us-v-them narrative. At least some of those who voted leave held their noses while doing so.

Belgium went 589 days without a government and with a stalemated parliament in 2010/11 and were fine.

While the propaganda can and will resume on the run up to any new theoretical referendum - people on the whole are now better informed at least and have had three years to mull over the previous lot of propaganda - much of it utter lies, to form a clearer assessment of just exactly how it will affect them.

Regardless of how you look at it, allowing the population to vote again, now that they have a better understanding of what is on the table, the impacts it may have on them, is a better alternative than just continuing to rush blindly ahead.

My point is that if I had voted to "leave" back in 2016 and the current "leave" format is not really the leave I had envisaged at the time, then it's only fair that there be a vote on the final options.

You can argue that some would feel betrayed, but equally many more could also feel equally betrayed by not getting the form of "leave" they expected back in 2016 when they cast their vote.

Few who voted leave really expected parliament to take control of the process as they did, nor anything in the form of May's withdrawal agreement - nor did many consider or foresee the Irish border issue.
The same could be said of a general election, in that something is 'sold' to the public. In my opinion a general election is a good enough reason to re-evaluate the referendum result and re-run the referendum, particularly if a different party, or a coalition, take power. If the Tories win it with a majority, that could certainly be viewed as a vote for the status quo and no re-run (ignoring the problems of the first past the post system for now).

It was clear to many, including Brexiteer Tories in particular, that the May government were dragging their feet for years, running down the clock and hoping beyond hope to steer things into Britain staying in a customs union and single market - if not just remaining altogether. That government never managed to come up with a convincing plan to do that, someone/something to blame for it if it happened, etc.

That was my precise point.

There are some similarities between Goldsmith's "Referendum Party" and the current UKIP and Brexit Party situation. Maastricht was obviously the very reason for that party's existence and UKIP surged in the years following the Lisbon Treaty. The Referendum Party, UKIP, Brexit Party (and Leave.EU campaign group) were/are all backed by wealthy businessmen, entrepreneurs, etc - all with vested interests.

What they have in common is that they disrupted general elections and usually cost one of the two major parties votes.
The leave campaigns on the whole went for false promises (who can forget the Boris bus?) and resorted to appeals to xenophobia and prejudice.

But it was actually "Vote Leave" - and a Tory MP, rather than Leave.EU, which resorted to statements and posters about (specifically) Turkish and more specifically Turkish criminals, being able to freely enter the UK, once Turkey joined, supposedly within 5 years...

As a Leaver there are a few things I feel I need to point out about the discussion so far:

a) No Remainer is going to be persuaded to change their mind by a Leaver telling them they didn't understand what they were voting for. I understood very well and telling me I didn't is just going to annoy me. Only Remainers believe that and it's pure prejudice and arrogance.

b) If you wouldn't accept it why should the other side - if remain had won the referendum would they have accepted another referendum 3 years later. Really?

c) Complaining about Leave propaganda just appears to be extreme hypocrisy to a Leaver, the Remain propaganda was disgusting, or am I the only person who remembers Cameron standing in front of a sign saying merely voting to leave would cost every family in the country £4500 or Clegg on stage saying that the idea the EU wanted it's own army was "a dangerous fantasy".

d) Remainers whining about the "red bus" is also not persuasive - I am perfectly well aware of the difference between net and gross and was completely aware that the Leave campaign was using the gross figure simply because it was larger - that doesn't make it a "lie". If someone asks me how much my rates are I don't sit down with a calculator and start with "well, I get £x back in subsidized use of the sports center and £x back in library services and £x back ...."

I would second that. I voted leave and I don't think today that I was deceived about what I was voting for. What I did not understand at the time was the extent to which Remainers dominated both parliament and the courts and how, in effect, that made the referendum pointless and its result undeliverable. Yes, of course Boris lied. All politicians lie, and Cameron and Osborne told some real whoppers during that campaign. Voters have learned over the years how to filter out that kind of noise. I don't think I was influenced by Boris's bus or by those photographs of huge crowds of Turkish migrants.

What did influence me rather strongly was the disgusting treatment of Greece, the mother of European democracy, by the EU. I was also angry that we had been promised a "Common Market" and had been given a European Union instead. Who voted for that? Did we understand what we were getting into when we voted in Wilson's referendum? And if we didn't, why is the result of that referendum accepted as valid while the result of 2016 was not?

If my comments have come across as one sided - yours definitely have. You have no idea how another referendum may go. After seeing three years of fiasco, many could vote - with a bigger majority than before, to leave.

If Remain had "won", there wouldn't be the need for another referendum, as the result would have been "no change".

No one is "complaining" here. I would go further and say that remain propaganda, was what amounted to patronising scaremongering, it was very condescending and ultimately it cost them the referendum.

It was in fact a lie, misleading propaganda / weasel words at best, because it conveniently ignored the rebate and the then Foreign Secretary falsely added the claim that the figure would be, in it's entirety, spent on the NHS instead.

It's also a lie because the rebated is deducted before the "£350 million" is sent. That shaves off about £100 million...

If you then take off roughly another £100 million or so to account for EU spending here, the initial figure is more than halved.

What you have left, is going to fill that void caused by the removal of EU funding... i .e things such as farming subsidies which the Tories have pledged to maintain post Brexit.

So what you're left with is nothing at all of this supposedly freed up "EU money" - going the NHS and a lie printed on the side of a bus.

That's exactly my position. I too voted to be in the Common Market in the first referendum and to leave the European Union in the second. When we joined a trading zone, no-one told us about a program of "ever-closer union".

Democracy only comes close to working when people have common goals and only disagree about the means. When their goals are incompatible one ends up with the situation one has in the USA or Northern Ireland — culture wars or stalemate. This is one of the problems of a European state: if Alabama and California can't understand each other, what chance for Germany and Greece, the Netherlands and Hungary? Scottish politicians call for independence, and we give them a referendum; Catalan ones do the same and the Spaniards give them long jail terms. How can people with two such disparate cultures share a parliament?

I'm with you on that - but it's a frying pan/fire scenario. Lots of different entities/individuals with their own specific agendas wanted Britain out of the EU - it was never really about what the people wanted and still isn't. The referendum merely facilitated that. There are those who stand to gain from this, just as those who stood to gain by staying in - essentially a war of different business interests.

While Remain's tactics weren't particularly good, it did not enlist the likes of Robert Mercer's Cambridge Analytica and it did not have the backing of Trump and his billionaire friends in the US - incidentally also friends of Farage and Johnson.

//edit: Not to mention AggregateIQ (the latter of which Vote Leave paid nearly £4 million to).

Remain also lacked the backing of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (via The Sun).

So while I'm not suggesting that all leave backers were duped, I am suggesting that many were and the current mess is the result.

Under the right circumstances, with the right plan and the right kind of governance, I would not be opposed to an exit from the EU, but this is an exit from one lot of "devils" straight into the hands of another lot. For me Maastricht was giving that inch and Lisbon was the EU taking a mile.

But unlike the wealthy millionaires and billionaires who financed the leave campaigns - I have to work for a living, so have to be realistic about things.

No, it enlisted Obama instead and he gave the British people a snooty lecture about how he was going to put us on the naughty step if we voted leave. That alone must have been worth a huge number of votes to the leave campaign! I mean who did this bloody foreigner think he was?? How could the Remainers have so miscalculated?

Incidentally, was I the only person to notice that he said "the back of the queue", which is a British usage? If he had been speaking spontaneously, he would surely have said "line", not "queue". Obviously his good friend David had told him what to say.

That one certainly helped the leave campaign tremendously. It showed just how out of touch Cameron was as a prime minister.

But at the moment we have the opposite scenario of the current US president telling us what a "swell guy" Boris is and how "fantastic" Brexit will be, etc...

Yeah but who's listening to him? Trump's a joke this side of the Atlantic. At least Obama was popular over here before his Brexit debacle.

“And yes – once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly £350 million per week. It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a lot of that money went on the NHS”. Boris Johnson (Foreign Secretary)

I simply don't see how it's a lie, weasel words is a bit strong too, misleading . . . arguably. Where does he say we could or should spend the entire £350 million on the NHS? That certainly wasn't what was said on the side of the bus that Remainers are so outraged about.

But the whole point of a political debate is to allow both sides to point out where they think their opponents are incorrect/misleading/lying. The remain side had (with the exception of a couple of newspapers) every media outlet in the country and the entire establishment apparatus helping them make their case. It's not like they didn't have the opportunity to disagree.

But you've just made the point that, it's highly likely that none really listened to Obama, or as many did as would have listen to any given random mouthpiece and so it backfired...

But getting back to the original point - asking a foreign leader to say a few words, is not quite the same thing as pumping millions into a psy ops company based in the US and Canada...