The whole thing was avoidable. If leading politicians after the Brexit vote took the sensible approach that what followed should have been a national debate/consultation as to what Brexit meant we could have spent these last two years really discussing issues like the single market, the customs union and freedom of movement. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to not create an environment in which debate about what kind of future relationship we wanted wasn't considered toxic.
Sadly what happened is Nigel Farage broke wind and Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn have spend 2 years falling over themselves over who could be seen to agree with him more. Didn't have to be like this, it really didn't.
I think this ignores a lot of what happened around Brexit.
From the start it now
should have been evident that the only Brexit we could implement was one which didn't violate the GFA in Northern Ireland, which is a soft Brexit and remaining in the CU/SM. That was something any rational politician should've been able to realise within five minutes, and it's not something that required any widespread consultation.
For me this ignores a lot of what happened before the vote: freedom of movement was made central to the vote, and so people were made to think this was something that could happen
irrespective of what path we took. We fecked it long before the vote, and even pro-EU politicians had arguably been fecking it for years by fawning to the public with harsh rhetoric on immigration while not planning to actually do anything about it.
Any consultation post-Brexit would've had people demanding that the central tenants of Brexit were made, i.e. that freedom of movement from the EU was now in our hands. The problem was that the only vision of Brexit under which that could be implemented was the softest one.