So a country called Greece which had been a part of the EU had a severe financial collapse a year or two (2009ish?) after the period when (2007-2008) the US had

So a country called Greece which had been a part of the EU had a severe financial collapse a year or two (2009ish?) after the period when (2007-2008) the US had a subprime mortgage collapse that triggered the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the period that we sometimes call the Great Recession now. This led to a great lack of faith in the value of the EU because it creates some notion from the richer countries, "ew, why do we have to bail them out?" And that perception in turn caused by 2016 a lot of political pressure on the leadership of the UK to seriously consider exiting the EU, as they've always kind of held Europe at arm's length, e.g. by not embracing the Euro. So this prime minister named David Cameron thought he would squash the whole "let's leave the EU" dissent by revealing it to be a minority position by some clever politicking: he would call a referendum and they would get only 15% of the vote and he could dust his hands and say "well we had this vote and you were wrong and let's stop holding untenable positions here." The problem was that rather than 15% of the vote, Leave carried 52% of the vote. Legally it was not a binding vote, the Parliament is still allowed to do whatever they want. But the Conservative Party that Cameron had led was sincere about "we're going to do whatever the public decides." Due to the complete reversal of his expectations, Cameron resigned as PM and was replaced by May. May is in a tricky situation because if she holds a second referendum, "really, truly, are we going to leave the EU?" then it looks like her party is just going to keep asking the question until they get the answer they want -- and that is not really democracy. If they just say "eff it we give up, we're not doing this Brexit thing" then they are reneging their earlier promise. With that said there is now a widespread belief that if they did re-ask the question the majority would say "hell no, remain in the EU, we didn't mobilize with enough urgency because we didn't understand what the country was signing up for in that last vote." If a different party were in power, probably they would have done so by now. But because there is this direct line from Cameron to May, May has been very firm on her belief that they need to go through with Brexit one way or the other. Because May was so obstinate on this point, there have most recently (Dec 2018, Jan 2019) been some votes of no confidence trying to upset the government and have a new government that might be able to do the actually-popular thing. Those have failed.