Well that was a bit of a shock.
I've made no secret that I strongly supported the remain side, and I still believe that the UK will be worse off in both the short and the long term by not being in the EU, and I had hoped that this referendum would never happen. In fact, I voted specifically and tactically Labour in the last election, my reason being an attempt to prevent an EU referendum which I feared would result in this decision. I realize that sounds elitist or suchlike, but my personal opinion is that such complex decisions should not be made by a referendum, and whatever the result, the process itself creates division and bad feeling in the country. We now have the odd situation that we are leaving the EU, in spite of the vast majority of our own UK democratically elected politicians wanting to stay in, and all major political parties bar one were supporting to stay in, whilst the only two world leaders who though it was a good idea to leave were Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
However, the democratic process has spoken and now we have the result. We will now leave the EU. What will replace it or follow remains to be seen. Once this process was set in motion, we now have to abide by it.
My fear is that in about a year or two when our currency and stock markets and GDP are still down on where they should have been, we will still be told it's a temporary effect and everything will be much better in a few years.
My congratulations to those who supported leave - I didn't expect you to win and I guess I misjudged the impact of emotion and sloganeering over detailed fact gathering and analysis.
Although I have pointed out several times that supporting the leave side does not mean you are racist, I've been shocked by talking to some of the people who manned stalls on the remain side over the last few weeks, who told me that anecdotally, they were getting a lot more openly racist comments than they had ever seen in any past political campaign. I think this is sad for the country and the world, even though I hope it is still a minority who are truly doing it for this reason.
I do take some hope from the data posted above and reported about voting by age group - I believe younger generations, as they grow older and take control, will rethink some of these things.
The Prime Minister has just announced on the radio that he is resigning within 3 months. For those who were looking to the new open and democratic way of doing things and taking back control, you will now most likely get PM Boris elected by the conservative party with no election and no chance to vote on it. That's UK democracy for you.
Looking on the bright side, with Boris Johnson and Donald Trump as world leaders, it will make plenty of material for satirical comedy shows for many years to come.