Comment by nextaccountic

It was put to vote for stupid reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_o...

> The referendum was originally conceived by David Cameron as a means to defeat the anti-EU faction within his own party by having it fail.

After that, another issue is that the leave campaign was heavily based on lies and misleading the British voters.

Couple that with a extreme form of policy lock-in / hysteresis: you need just to form a small margin in a majority at a single point of time. After that point of time, the popular opinion doesn't matter anymore because getting back to EU isn't as easy as leaving. So the misinformation campaign need to work just once. By the time voters realize what happened, it's too late.

This situation is a critical failure of democracy. Not just direct democracy, representative democracy can't work in a post-truth world either.