Apparently article fifty was drafted simply to placate the British, the British government needed a way to convince the British eurosceptics that there was always the option to leave, as previous to article fifty, there was no real leave option. Took Greenland three years to negotiate leaving, and that only involved fish.
Its become like a dictatorship now anyway, we won, you lost, its the will of the people, don’t care what you want, we’re leaving and that’s that. Biggest mistake was not having a minimum percentage, something like sixty forty. The referendum would then have been regarded as advisory, the UK would have had a bit of leverage with the rest of the EU and could possibly gone back and had a proper chat about immigration. Wouldn’t have stopped people like Farage but wouldn’t have caused all this turmoil.
Broadly I agree, in fact I thought that there should have been a higher threshold until I read some evidence that suggested the result might have been people who wanted the status quo feeling that they did not need to vote and, bizarrely, increasing the chance of a Brexit vote. Perhaps the threshold should have been 50% of the electorate, not 50% of the vote. A two part vote - EU/No EU and EEA/No EEA would have provided the clarity that we desperately need at the moment.
The irony, of course, is that the referendum was supposed to be advisory but somewhere along the lines that was forgotten.
The (further) irony regarding immigration is, of course, that had we limited access to the A8 nations - like just about every other European nation - we might not have had the xenophobia fuelled Brexit vote.