Until the Tories and nationalists that pushed Brexit face consequences, you can still argue the public has their head in the sand.

I'm not British but I follow your politics and with the quality of Labour candidates you guys dredge up it's no wonder people keep voting Tory.

It's a first past the post system. Which results in a two party duopoly and voting for anyone else can actively harm your interests.

So we don't actually have a choice, our politics are as rigged as American politics. A small cabal pick the two PM choices, and we have to pick between bad or worse.

The same forces that drove Tories to the extreme right also spent decades dividing Labour between itself.

The first-past-the-post electoral system has no defense against well-funded interests essentially buying all the candidates.

One could wonder if the substandard electoral system exists purely because of this flaw (or feature for the few powerful).

France has a completely different political structure and electoral system, and yet we've broadly seen the same phenomenon of the right wing's center of gravity always moving righter (is that even a word ?) and the left wing digging and splintering its way into irrelevance. The difference being that the electoral system produced a centrist rather than a populist (but in both cases Macron and BoJo are a pure product of their respective countries' establishment).

I don't think different systems differ so much as far as being rigged goes, it's just the rigging that changes. In the end, power is always in the process of cooptation.

France is essentially first-past-the-post with a single runoff for presidential (who is a very powerful executive like US model + he can dissolve parliament).

The dynamics are same prior to runoff because the plurality electoral system gives no representation to the majority that didn't vote for the winner (almost a given since there will be >2 candidates).

You'd need proportional representation and/or an electoral system like Borda,RCV,Star or instant runoff to significantly proof against spoiler mechanics that the wealthy can exploit.

Again, none of these measures guarantees against money corrupting electoral processes, just makes it more costly and unsure that any given corruptive effort pays off.

Also BoJo is no centrist. He's spearheaded Brexit (some allege his buddies made bank by arbitraging currency futures pre/post vote), and he's been coordinating with Farage for a long time.

I can't fathom why you'd think I was alluding to BoJo as the centrist in the story.

Thats the way I parsed the sentence that mentioned Macron and BoJo.

I think you're focusing on racism to the exclusion of all else.

Britain has sold off vast swathes of housing stock and is privatising ever more healthcare delivery. Zero-hour contracts are a thing nowadays. Industries that most countries run as a public service have been privatised.

Collectivism has been replaced with neoliberalism. Our country has swung miles to the right both socially and fiscally. But yes, you can be out and brown.

Don't you see the whole problem is personality politics. If more voters understood the economic consequences of Brexit it would have died a death.

There are people in Cornish fishing villages decimated by Brexit who would vote the same again. Don't underestimate the British island fortress mentality.

There are idiots everywhere, but that does not mean the general public are blind to the consequences of Brexit. Heck, your hypothetical Cornish fisherman could be fully aware of the consequences but still think it was worth it for any number of other reasons (as a sizeable minority of the population obviously still do).