The course of Brexit was set in the hours and days after the 2016 referendum. / It was at 6:22 a.m. on June 24, 2016 — 59 minutes before the official tally was unveiled — that the European Council sent its first “lines to take” to the national governments that make up the EU.

The development of Brexit from a fringe movement into a dominant political project coincided chronologically not only with a long period of patient and sustained campaigning and lobbying, and with a lucky sequence of favourable shifts of circumstance and forces, but also with the internal development of one key external force, the politics and ideology of the Putin regime.

It's been five years since the UK voted to leave the EU. The vote appalled those who saw it as economic self-sabotage. But those in favor of leaving were not swayed by economic arguments — and likely still aren't today.

In January 2020, as Britain was about to exit the EU, a post appeared on the London School of Economics (LSE) blog musing about the mechanism and conditions that might apply if Britain ever wanted to re-join.

Get Brexit Done’ has unravelled in a spectacular fashion; a significant knock to the economy, removal of rights and freedoms, more red tape for business and – the most heart-breaking of all – trouble has returned to Northern Ireland. The obvious answer to this foreseeable problem is for the UK to be part of the single market and customs union.

In March last year, Dominic Cummings, former Campaign Director of Vote Leave, warned that after Brexit happens “we’ll be coming for the ECHR… and we’ll win that by more than 52-48…” For anyone who has paid attention to the public debate over the Human Rights Act (HRA) and European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in the past decade, those were chilling words.

Shahmir Sanni co-founded BeLeave, an offshoot of the Vote Leave campaign, during the EU Referendum. He turned whistleblower last year when he exposed its law-breaking. Here he reveals how two of the contenders to replace Theresa May cannot absolve themselves of responsibility.

Even in 2016 – before Turkey’s latest turn towards authoritarianism – the chances of the country joining the EU before 2030 were remote. Yet this did not prevent Vote Leave from claiming during the UK’s EU referendum campaign that Turkey was poised to join.

The UK’s Electoral Commission has published the results of a near nine-month-long investigation into Brexit referendum spending and has found that the official Vote Leave campaign broke the law by breaching election campaign spending limits.

The EU referendum was won based on a corrupt campaign, but the courts can't void the result because the referendum only advisory, according to the barrister who took the government to court.