Whitey Grandad

And being outside the EU would have prevented it? (Or are you saying that it's alright for Brexiteers to quote falsehoods?)

It was a LOAN. Get your facts right. Yet more Brexit lies.

And more from Sathnam Sanghera in The Times this morning: 'Andrea Leadsom exaggerating her achievements is just part of City life' I laughed when Michael Deacon, of The Daily Telegraph, tweeted that he had “a soft spot for Andrea Leadsom” because he had been “deeply moved by her speech about winning the Wimbledon Ladies’ Singles in 1975”. My colleague Matt Chorley tweeted that “Leadsom will be unfazed by today’s onslaught . . . She faced far worse at the Battle of El Alamein”, while others elsewhere claimed that Mrs Leadsom had fielded for the England cricket team and had played the saxophone solo on Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street. But, if I’m honest, I don’t think the energy minister deserves all the opprobrium coming her way. Why? Because biographical self-aggrandisement is just part of City life.

And our democracy is not based on referendums. Parliament is sovereign.

'Man up'? What the hell do you mean by that? If you don't think this whole affair is an unholy mess then perhaps you should 'grow up'. Or 'wise up'. Or 'wake up and smell the coffee'. Or 'get real'. You get my drift.

It could never be as bad as the unholy mess that we have now and will have for a lot more than five years.

They should choose the best man for the job, whoever she is.

Just a guess? Surely you should be more certain than that before taking such an irresponsible gamble.

If it's Leadsom then we really will be deep in the doggy-dos.

But expect to be reminded at every opportunity and on every occasion that we would be better off inside the EU. Do not underestimate the anger, real anger that is out there.

If he was wrong about that what else was he wrong about? I am certainly not wrong about this being unfinished business.

What do those countries have to do with Britain?

You do have it wrong. Nobody won or lost, everybody lost. Real democracy would give a result that almost everybody could live with even if they didn't like the result of the vote, because they knew there would be another opportunity to have a say some time within the next few years. This vote was unique in that those who voted to leave were voting for a negative. Normally in a public vote you would be asked what you want and not what you don't want. Now we know that a (modest) majority said that they didn't want the EU but nobody has said what they do want and I suspect that those who voted to leave did so for a wide variety of reasons, too much immigration, vague notions of sovereignty, don't like being poor and so on. This total lack of any idea as to what kind of future we might have outside the EU is eveidenced by the headlong desertions of those who led the campaign to Leave. Where do you get the idea that the UK will 'will go it's own way and thrive'? I'm willing to bet that you won't be doing any of the immense work and investment that this would need without any guarantee of success.

Those seagulls are impeccable judges of character.

Even if the cost of leaving is so prohibitively high that it will take decades to recover, if we ever do?

I said nothing of the sort, don't try and twist my words. Where did I say that they shouldn't have a say in anything? We should all be grateful for the disproportionate contribution to the costs of society that is made by the 'high earners'.

Wait until Sunday

All very true but the have-nots don't appreciate that the high earners are paying the taxes that support their public services.

Very difficult to compare economies historically because of the fluctuations in exchange rates but I found this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison_statistics_of_the_ten_largest_economies_by_GDP_(PPP) I seem to remember that we were vying for fourth with Italy of all countries for quite a time. As far as growth is concerned we have done comparatively very well since the start of the Single Market, in fact Britain has thrived. That will no longer be the case.

We've had 40 years of the Eurosceptics harping on about how bad the EU is and now they want us to forget about it and move on. We keep hearing that this was supposed to be a democratic decision yet it wasn't a general election and should not be treated as such. If it had been then a result this close would have resulted in a re-run soon after. Real democracy would mean regular votes in order to gauge the will of the people. This was one giant opinion poll and the voters treated it as such. I have heard from lots who admitted that they didn't have the information to make an informed choice and didn't really know what they were voting for.

I exxpect they felt much the same on the Titanic.

There aren't many people happy about anything at the moment. You might be unhappy if he were PM but that doesn't mean that you'd be happy that he isn't.

And anybody but a Leave.

He did it because his wife told him to.