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In a democracy you can't cover up the cracks of dissenting voices indefinitely. While new labour were in power there was a decade where those eurosceptic voices were all but silenced. so when the tories got back in with a coalition the eurosceptic voices suddenly became very loud and powerful. Again, if May had not completely fluffed her GE, things would have gone super smooth,but they didn't.

I don't believe Cameron had any choice but to hold a referendum. The simple fact is that 50% of the population have always been against being in the EU. Europe has always been a big issue in the UK, right from the very day we joined.

Tony Blair signed us up to deeper integration with the EU without any vote, that angered a lot of people and it was never forgiven. That set everything on course for where we are now. Prior to that John Major had tried to effectively join the Euro (again without a vote) by aligning the pound with the euro. That experiment lasted all of 3 days, and the "elite" lost staggering amounts of money in those 3 days, again, something that would never be forgotten

The stories have always been negative regarding europe, never positive. Bureaucracy, food mountains, immigration. The positives were always just taken for granted with no fanfare. This has always been the problem. When it came to the referendum, all remain could say was ... well, its the status quo ... isn't life great in the EU where as the leave side could repeat all the negatives built up over 40 years .... and people forget good news, they never forget bad news. So any time a negative story was repeated, those that lived through it thought ... oh yeah ... i remember that ... that was all the EU's fault.

Anyway, long story short. The UK has always been a nation that stood on it's own feet, we were successful that way, it's in our nature. We are naturally untrusting of others, and through the generations that's been a very sensible outlook. Since the war, europe has tried to be peaceful ... and all credit for that, but world powers are always a threat, and the nature of threats change. I personally don't think that going it alone is necessarily a sensible strategy, but then, we don't know what our future holds, the only thing we know is that nothing is ever certain.

So what does all that mean? In the long term we have no idea what will befall us. Making judgements today for how things might be in 50 years is completely pointless. Remaining, leaving with a deal, leaving without a deal, are all very short views. Nothing is set in concrete. In the big scheme of things it's a blip. It may seem like it's a big issue, but whichever route we end up travelling, it is but a small bump in the road, and I wish people would get a grip and admit it.