This is why it should not have been a simple majority public vote. Either leave it for the politicians which or make it a two thirds majority (so if a civil war breaks out the side that lost the vote has to defeat 2x people).
Unfortunately, that all only makes sense if we were given the vote in order to make the decision to leave the EU or not.
But that wasn't why. It was to stem the haemorrhaging of MPs and voters to UKIP for the 2015 GE. As such, the calculation was that anything other than a straight fight wouldn't resolve the question.
I see no reason to disagree with that calculation. I mean, say it was a 2/3rds vote and we got the result we did. How likely would it be that Farage et al would just say "Fair cop" and move on?
The truth is it was a high risk punt, same as with the Scottish referendum and AV vote, to kill any constitutional questions for a generation. If it had succeeded as the other two had done, we would likely have Tory hegemony for at least another decade. And Cameron could have argued (quite reasonably) that he was the most democratic PM in our history.
And the way I see, it the calculation was based on the idea that the British people are generally pretty conservative (with a lowercase c). This worked well for AV (I mean who votes to retain FPTP?), reasonably well for Scotland and spectacularly well for Brexit. The only problem was that, it turns out, we're too conservative: we didn't want the status quo, we wanted the Edwardian era back.
2/3 majority wouldn't have made a difference, the referendum wasn't on leaving, it was on staying, the option supporting the motion on the ballot got less than half the votes so it was agreed by parliament we should leave, which seems reasonable and it's shocking govt made such a mess of it.
