The whole thing was a bit of a mess. A good analogy I heard was you have a bunch of people in a room with one TV and have a vote whether to change the channel and 50% vote yes because they are fed up with the current one. But no one has specified which channel to change it to. After the vote they check out all the channels and find they are even worse than the first but can't change back because that would be "betraying the will of the people" or whatever nonsense.

The referendum should have been two part. 1 want to leave or not? 2 how about this specific option (channel) or shall we forget the it all?