Part of the problem, it seems to me, with Brexit and the referendum is that it all exposes, rather cruelly, some of the myths about democracy and the role of government.
On paper, it sounds simple enough -- the people express a choice and, since we're a democracy, the government should deliver us our choice, rather as we choose our order on Amazon and they should deliver it. Though, of course, Amazon give us the option to cancel the order or return it for a full refund, which isn't on offer here.
However, people are already complaining (not that they ever really stopped, of course) that they won't be getting "what I voted for." Strictly speaking, that's completely wrong, of course -- people voted to leave the European Union and, as a matter of both UK and EU law, that's exactly what will happen on March 29 unless someone pulls the plug on the process first.
That, though, might be dismissed as a legalistic argument that ignores the fact people thought they were voting for something very different from what will actually be delivered -- a problem which is easily remedied if the goods we ordered on Amazon don't live up to our expectations but is far more intractable in the present circumstances. People mean, of course, that they thought they were voting for all the things Vote Leave promised them, or that they thought that Vote Leave had promised, or for whatever they associated with slogans like "Take Back Control."
In the normal course of democratic events, if we think our Members of Parliament or local Councils aren't delivering what they promised, or what we want, or if we've changed our minds about what we want, we can seek to remedy that come the next elections. However, that doesn't apply here, and the disappointed supporters of Brexit are complaining that, while Theresa May wants to deliver what they ordered (the UK no longer a member of the EU) it's most certainly not what they wanted or what they thought they were ordering (Britain to retain all the advantages of EU membership but with none of the disadvantages).
The fact of the matter is, of course, that politics isn't like ordering something from Amazon. It's more a matter of assenting to a set of policies and a plan of action that we hope will achieve a particular set of outcomes. We can't generally tell our MPs to "make this happen," when "this" is something like "reduce unemployment" or "reduce hospital waiting times" or "make housing more affordable" or whatever. They can tell us that, if elected, they'll do something that they claim will have the outcomes we desire, and they can then go ahead and try to implement the measures they propose, and we can then see what the outcome looks like, but that's as far as it goes.
The fact of the matter, or it seems to me, is that the powers of government to make things happen are massively constrained by reality, and much of government is a matter of trying to respond to events over which you have little or no control in ways you hope will turn out well but have no real way of knowing what they'll do.
Much of the point of economic forecasting is, to my mind, not that you use it to predict the future, as you might consult a spirit medium or cast the I Ching, but that you try to learn more about the way things actually do work from the ways in which the forecast turns out to be wrong, and I think the same is true of government -- the world is a massively chaotic system, full of actors not under government's control, and much of the time the best government can do is make limited changes, while hoping for the best, and refrain from doing anything massively harmful (invading Russia, getting into a land war in Asia, leaving the EU....).
So, to cut a long story short, the referendum was as much about giving the people the opportunity to decide Britain's future as is children's writing letters to Santa about persuading him to give them what they want for Christmas. It works fine so long as the kids ask for something that's available and within their parents' budget for Christmas gifts but if they ask for a real live unicorn, they're in for a big disappointment.
What we're starting to hear now are the yells of protest about the unicorn's failure to arrive as ordered, along with desperate attempts by politicians who profited by promoting "unicorns for all" to blame this non-arrival on mutinous elves or the wrong sort of snow or anything other than the fact they've been promising things that are, in their very nature, undeliverable.