The way my British friends told me, nobody really took the brexit vote seriously and treated it like a Lord Buckethead, Boaty McBoat Face joke.

At least until the mic dropped and the consequences of their joke vote became clear.

They confirmed they wanted Brexit in the last elections. They had no excuses when Boris was elected. If that is what people want, that is what people deserve.

Some of that comes from the political deadlock that came out of the referendum result. Once the process got hard, there was a feeling of "just make this pain stop!" and the result was the 2019 election.

I do recall some conversations (with Leave voters, no less!) where it was felt the government shouldn't have wasted our time asking us. It's not the public's job to understand the details of international relations, yet it was foisted on the people. In spite of that, the government got it's answer, so just do it!

That's more a consequence of our terrible electoral system combined with the most incompetent / most poisonous opposition leader ever.

From the outside it looks as if Brexit is at most slightly unpopular, so it's not unimaginable to believe that in fluctuation we might occasionally find it to be the marginally popular position.

Euro elections had Farage beating Lib Dems, 2017 had Tory win too.

Fear of Corbyn was a factor, but so was the “get on with it” sentiment

> Who is the greater fool, the fool or the fool who follows him?

Obi-Wan Kenobi

For a lot of people it was a protest vote. They knew Cameron wanted them to vote one way so they did the opposite, it was a vote against the status quo.

For other people they genuinely believed the scapegoating the UK media had done for 20 years+

For others, a minority, they thought that this was a way of pushing the EU to reform some of its more silly practices (like moving parliament around for no reason)

The EU would strongly prefer to stop this silly moving practice but France vetos against it.

Moving parliament is a political compromise, not unlike the 1790 compromise in the US

There were people on the TV the next morning all "I didn't think my vote would count" or "I just wanted to tell the government to stuff it".

Yet the pro-brexit party is still in power, so it seems the majority still wants brexit or at least isn't willing to put their money where their mouth is.

Give it time. Much like the average smoker, the regret doesn’t really kick in until you’re well up shit creek without a paddle.

At the point of the 2019 election stopping Brexit wasn't really on the table - no major party was against it. Labour had a vague message that was not anti-Brexit. Lib Dems may have technically been anti-Brexit but have no trust (is "no Brexit" the same as "no tuition fees"?) and have fewer seats than even the SNP (oh and their leader lost her seat).

The public were basically given no choice in 2019

I took it seriously. In my social group, the bigger problem I saw was delusional Lexiteers. They're due to get literally nothing they said wanted out of Brexit.

I hope one day we can rejoin, and it doesn't break the UK into pieces, but right now I can't see the Union surviving.

Yes! I encountered these "Lexit" guys too and couldn't believe what I was hearing when they were telling me about how they voted Brexit and why, it just seemed incredibly naive.

Whoever his PR people are did a bang-up job on Social Media /SEO by making him say he likes painting little buses as a hobby. This displaced the previous top results for the search term "Boris Bus" (i.e. the bus with the 350 million GBP lie). It was very "Black Mirror".

I don't know if that ever worked but searching for "Boris Bus" right now on DDG or Google yields mostly results and images of the infamous campaign bus.

The campaign was specifically timed at a crucial point in time when Johnson was jockeying to be the Prime Minister (June 2019). Search engines have a recency bias, and that story made it to all British news sites.

I'm still waiting for him to fill the much promised ditch.

Bit difficult when they control the press.