Brexit blather is back in the news again. To listen to politicians and media talking heads, you’d think it’s all rather complicated and ‘beyond the ken of mere mortals’. In reality, however, ‘Brexit’ is quite simple: for the last two and a half years, the British establishment is trying to make Brexit go away.

Don’t believe me? Explain why, then, that of the 650 UK Members of Parliament, about 70% come from constituencies where the majority of people voted for Brexit while among all Members of Parliament, about 70% have made it clear that they favor remaining in the EU.

In addition, the Conservative government which approved the referendum in 2015 was lead by David Cameron, who has always been against leaving the EU. His successor, Theresa May, who negotiated the pseudo-Brexit deal that would effectively keep the UK in the EU, and which was voted down yesterday by a massive majority in Parliament, is also against Brexit.

So the obvious reason why the last 2.5 years of British politics has been an utter farce, and why the British people find themselves in this current mess, is that while a majority of British citizens voted to leave the EU,a large majority of their MPs on both sides of the aisle (and the British ‘establishment’ itself) do not want to leave the EU and are determined to make sure it never happens. To claim otherwise would be to suggest that British politicians were as clueless about the nature of the UK’s relationship with the EU as British public. But that’s not the full story.

The decision that Brexit would not happen was taken immediately after the ‘yes’ vote in the referendum in 2016, and that fact was evident to anyone with eyes to see. The politiking of the last 2.5 years had little to do with Brexit and everything to do with internal UK political power games, i.e. British political party mandarins and individual politicians feathering their own nests with an eye on their future positions within the British political system, which they are sure will remain an integral part of the EU. The Conservative strategy so far has been to hold on to power by attempting to convince their voter base (who want Brexit) that Theresa May’s ‘deal’ is actually Brexit, when it clearly isn’t at all. The EU has been on exactly the same page as Theresa May all along.

At the same time, the main opposition Labour party has correctly seen ‘Brexit’ as their best chance to force both a no-confidence vote in May’s government and another snap general election to take power themselves. The no-confidence vote happened this evening and, as expected, the Conservatives survived given their slim majority in Parliament and the support of Northern Ireland’s ‘more British than the Queen’ Democratic Unionist Party (which has its own agenda to prevent the breakup of the United Kingdom and the reunification of Ireland. Basically, when Conservative politicians are asked if they have confidence in themselves, they’ll always answer ‘yes’.

It should be remembered that the only motivation for then Conservative Party leader David Cameron to ‘green light’ the Brexit referendum was these same internal political power considerations. At the time, the Conservative party was concerned that the ‘far-right’ UKIP party – which had been leading a decades-long campaign for the UK to leave the EU – would steal most of the country’s traditional Conservative voters (the majority of whom wanted to leave the EU) and effectively replace the Conservative party. That is why Cameron, even though he was an ardent ‘Remainer’, assented to the referendum. At the time, the bi-partisan British political establishment was convinced that – when it came down to it – the majority of voters would vote to remain in the EU. When a majority voted for Brexit, they were more than a little shocked.

But an important question that has been mostly overlooked throughout the Brexit face is, what, exactly, galvanized so many British people to vote to leave the EU definitively?