On June 23, 2016 the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union with 52 percent of “Leave” votes against 48 percent for “Remain”. It was a political storm few had predicted. Ten years on, our Revisited show explores the social and political impact of the decision. How did Brexit reshape the country and has it helped improve people’s lives? What has been the impact on the economy and on sectors like farming?
They can’t really define it, because the UK is only one party in a negotiation that defined the outcome. The EU also has a say in that outcome.
If they put hard constraints on it, then it’d be easy for the EU side to demand unreasonable concessions that the UK would have to accept in order to achieve the referendum-imposed requirements. Or, hell, even just block Brexit by refusing the mandated form of relationship entirely.
I guess technically they could have had a referendum that mandated that there be no form of future EU-UK relationship at all, rather than the TCA, and the British government could guarantee that outcome…but that’d probably be a bad move, and I think that very few people in the UK would want that.