The government had a plan! It was to remain in the **** EU!
I don’t think they’d even got that far.
I think Cameron hoped we’d have a nice quiet referendum where no-one really gave a shit, Remain would win by a country mile, then he could appease the hard-right/UKIP defectors within his party, tell them all was well with the world and get back to screwing the NHS.
I don’t think even he thought that it would take on an unholy life of it’s own with his supposed mate Boris openly fighting him.
It’s the worst possible outcome of all of it. A very finely balanced Leave/Remain, both major parties in complete meltdown, catastrophic economic fallout already (apart from the big investors who’ve done very well out of trading currency thank you very much) and now they’re all just walking off as though nothing had happened.
Seriously, none of them have even the faintest **** clue what to do to resolve this!
Cameron should have stayed in power, offered a month or so of “reflection”, of analysis, settling down (and waiting for Farage to bugger off thinking he’d achieved his goal) and then said that the referendum was non-binding and he’d be ignoring it.
That would trigger it’s own power struggle within the Tory party but at least we’d not be left with the complete total shitpile of uncertainty we have now. 52% of the country would be pissed off about it but they were already so pissed off with the Government that they ignored every single bit of advice coming from every single expert around and voted against it – it (mostly) wasn’t a protest vote against the EU, it was a protest vote against the Government.
The problem is with Cameron that he’s spent so long lying to everyone that on the one occasion he told the truth, no-one listened.