Mais oui! 

Norwich voted to stay in, as well. Perhaps they should also hold a referendum?

The whole thing is absolutely disgusting. People who voted "Yes" to leaving are either too foolheartedly nationalist and self-centered to see the grander overall picture or plain just don't care. They're not the ones who'll having to be dealing with the end result, my generation (18-30) will

I voted to leave. Because unlike your generation (18-30) mine (38-50) has seen from the beginning how membership in the EU has adversely affected Britain, and how it was likely to continue to do so. Do you imagine that someone in their forties or fifties somehow has no future to be concerned about? Do you imagine that British farmers and fishermen whose livelihoods are endangered by ridiculous EU directives, or those on low incomes, or no incomes, competing in a dwindling job market with thousands of economic migrants from the EU are motivated solely by "nationalism"? I've heard a lot of this kind of stuff from the Remain supporters recently, sour grapes because the majority saw things differently and voted accordingly. And I can't help thinking their "overall picture" is missing a few pieces.

So the two million (so far) petitioners to Parliament will have no effect?

I too voted leave and I have to say that I completely agree with everything tingramretro is saying above. I don't normally talk politics here on the CCF, despite being a very political person in real life, because...you know, I come here for the comics. But since this thread is about something I feel very passionately about, here's what I think...

I have been a firm believer that the UK should leave the EU since at least the late '90s, when the prospect of some kind of referendum was first vaguely floated. And nothing that has happened in the intervening years has changed my opinion to vote leave. Quite the opposite! Last Thursday we saw democracy in action and thank God we live in a country where ordinary people can still vote and effect massive change like this.

I'm a left-wing socialist through and through. I think conservatism is a ideological dead end and liberalism is pretty much as unrealistic as it's possible to get, as political ideologies go. Contrary to what the media might have you believe, a vote to leave is not a right-wing vote, as evidenced by the vast swaths of the Labour heartland who voted to leave on Thursday. Hell, almost the entirety of Wales voted to leave. A whole Labour-centric country! What this referendum saw was a resurgence in the old school, patriotic love of country that, prior to the Tony Blair and New Labour years, was the backbone of the worker's party. Personally, I don't see how you can have socialist leanings and not vote to leave.

Also, it's nonsense to suggest, as some on the remain side have done, that voting leave is somehow a vote in support of Nigel Farage (who wasn't even part of the official leave campaign, by the way). He's an outspoken UPKIP figurehead (and an idiot, by the way), but the vast majority of ordinary people who voted leave are not UKIPers...look at the numbers who voted leave, verses how many people voted UKIP in last year's election. Certainly, I'm not a UKIP supporter. It's a little bit more serious, a little bit more nuanced and a little bit more intellectual than, "Oooh, I don't like them dirty Johnny foreigners!"

I like democracy, small government, a society that looks after its weak and vulnerable, and a country that has the ability to decide it's own fate, without being beholden to the EU superstate. What I've seen in my lifetime is a gradual erosion of sovereignty, crippling conditions and restrictions placed on our farmers and fishermen, anywhere between 20% and 70% (depending on which way you want to skew the figures) of our laws and legislation being dictated to us by officials in Brussels that we didn't elect, huge amounts of the UK's money plowed into the EU to prop up the likes of Italy, Greece, Portugal, Czech Republic etc, and a political class here at home that has repeatedly ignored huge sections of the electorate. None of that sits well with me.

There's been plenty of scaremongering from the sore-losers on the remain side and there will be a lot more, but I think that this is a fantastic opportunity for the UK to move forward on our own terms now. There will be teething troubles along the way, of course, but I firmly believe that we can make it work for us.

Already we've seen just how quickly the EU wants to facilitate us leaving, because uncertainty hurts them as well and they need to make sure that the wheels of commerce and trade stay well greased for their own stability. The UK is the EU's biggest trading partner and already we've seen Germany's Angela Merkel playing diplomat and saying that "there's no need [for the EU] to be nasty" in the Brexit negotiations. The EU needs us and they need us badly. It's in the EU's interests to make this work as well.

What we in the UK need to do now is figure out how to move forward, address the colossal divisions in our society that the referendum has highlighted and ensure that we all make the best of it.

Ting, I've respected your opinion on topics on multiple different occassions, so let's just agree to disagree here. I live in America and obviously I have very little understanding of how, when, or why this is even going to effect me, if at all. I think it has more to do with my own personal feelings of constantly having things so grossly out of my own reach or control because I had things "decided for me" by others who thought they knew better than I did

And I'll be the first to admit that I have a very "let the world burn" level anarchistic approach to politics thats tempered with my own new-age flower child system of beliefs