Right now the lead is held by Leave by 400,000 votes and a 51/49 percentage.  

What appears to be happening is the Undecideds are breaking for Leave in close areas and for the majority opinion in others.  ?

Also I'm thinking - without any hard evidence - this is as much a rejection of Austerity as the EU.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Everybody is calling it for Leave.  BBC saying by 4 points.  

Pound is down 11.5% as of this time stamp.  

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

As the polls closed last night, Ladbrokes was offering 4-1 on an out vote, with its betting suggesting that a remain verdict was a 90% certainty.

But with much more money bet on remain than leave, the bookies are likely to turn a large profit.

In a candid statement, Ladbrokes' head of political betting Matthew Shaddick said: "The truth is that bookies do not offer markets on political events to help people forecast the results. We do it to turn a profit (or at least not lose too much) and in that respect, this vote worked out very well for us.

"Nobody at Ladbrokes' HQ will be criticising the predictive powers of our odds, they'll be looking at the money we made."

For overall exports, UK of course, but for the shops with IE Euro HQ, where does that tend to go?

Who here thinks the government will actually follow through on Brexit?  Things could stall in the course of inter-governmental negotiations, of course, during which enthusiasm for Brexit might wane.  But those negotiations might never get started.

The European ruling classes will blame foreigners for it because the alternative would be that its their fault. Barbed wire manufacturers will prosper.

I suspect they'll copy and paste the TIPP in the new trade agreement with the UK. Passing this will become a matter of live and death.

This is a good opportunity to bury all sins in a recession that is not your fault. It's bailout time.

Like everyone else, he is saying there is no need to activate section 50 any time soon.  The EU may beg to differ.  The last thing the world needs now is a prolonged period of uncertainty. He repeats all the shibboleths about Britain providing leadership to the world. I can't see many outside England paying much attention.

It is the end of "Great Britain".

Index of Frank's Diaries

Boris parachutes into Westminster, Union Jack streaming above him, victory in hand and either calls a new referendum or declares the old one null and void because circumstances have changed.

* i.e. pander shamelessly.

EU leaders call for UK to leave as soon as possible:

The EU's top leaders have said they expect the UK to act on its momentous vote to leave the union "as soon as possible, however painful that process may be" and that there will be "no renegotiation".

And this was absolutely to be predicted:

Scotland Seeks Independence Again After U.K. 'Brexit' Vote:

Scotland's government began moves Friday to hold a new referendum on independence from the U.K. after the "Brexit" vote, saying it faced being taken out of the European Union against its will.

WaPo | The British are frantically Googling what the E.U. is, hours after voting to leave it

The whole world is reeling after a milestone referendum in Britain to leave the European Union. And although leaders of the campaign to exit Europe are crowing over their victory, it seems many Britons may not even know what they had actually voted for.

Awakening to a stock market plunge and a precipitous decline in the value of the pound that Britain hasn't seen in more than 30 years, voters now face a series of economic shocks that analysts say will only worsen before they improve. The consequences of the leave vote will be felt worldwide, even here in the United States, and some British voters say they now regret casting a ballot in favor of Brexit.

An internal strategy document from the German ministry of finance stressed that no special favorable treatment must be given to the UK when it comes to market access to avoid copycats.

I think we'll end up with something between a Norway and Switzerland kind of deal with immigration of course being the most contentious issue.

The Exit Soundtrack: you want out..?

A pyrrhic victory? Boris Johnson wakes up to the costs of Brexit - Guardian

He has everything he ever wanted. It's just that somehow, as he fought his way through booing crowds on his Islington doorstep before holding an uncharacteristically subdued press conference on Friday morning, it didn't really look that way.

One group of Tory remainers watching the speech on TV jeered out loud when a rather pale Johnson said leaving Europe needn't mean pulling up the drawbridge; that this epic victory for Nigel Farage could somehow "take the wind out of the sails" of anyone playing politics with immigration. Too late for all that now, one said.

The scariest possibility, however, is that he actually meant it. That like most of Westminster, Johnson always imagined we'd grudgingly vote to stay in the end. That he too missed the anger bubbling beneath the surface, and is now as shocked as anyone else by the enormity of has happened.

Was it the rain? If young people wanted to stay in by 75% why didn't that come through? Was it the false sense of security in late polls? Demographics? Or are the millenials really as pathetic as people denigrate them to be?

If you're young and angry about the EU referendum, you're right to be - Guardian

The coming years will see, I imagine, perhaps your first experience of how politics - that cocky and inscrutable performance that plays out through your screens - can breach the disconnect and impinge on concrete aspects of your own life. Yes, as a demographic, we have lost, but at the same time we have made a powerful statement It's a lesson that I feel my own generation learned too late, the result of which has been apathy, a lack of political engagement, and the feeling that there is no point participating in a system that does not have our interests at heart.

The rather patronising English joke used to be that whenever the Irish question was about to be solved, the Irish would change the question. And now, when the Irish question seemed indeed to have been solved, at least for a generation, it is the English who have changed the question.

Recklessly, casually, with barely a thought, English nationalists have planted a bomb under the settlement that brought peace to Northern Ireland and close cordiality to relations between Britain and Ireland. To do this seriously and soberly would have been bad. To do it so carelessly, with nothing more than a pat on the head and a reassurance that everything will be all right, is frankly insulting.

Just five years ago, when Queen Elizabeth became the first reigning British monarch to visit southern Ireland in a century, there was a massive sense of relief. It was not just relief that the visit went off peacefully and well. It was much deeper than that: it was relief from centuries of both British condescension and Irish Anglophobia. A long story - often nasty, sometimes merely tediously wasteful - was over. There was a dignified, decent, democratic settlement that allowed the natural warmth of a neighbourly relationship to come fully to the surface.

...within hours of the result on Friday morning, the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, had distanced himself from the claim that £350m of EU contributions could instead be spent on the NHS, while the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan said free movement could result in similar levels of immigration after Brexit.

Hannan said: "Frankly, if people watching think that they have voted and there is now going to be zero immigration from the EU, they are going to be disappointed."

Will there even be a Brexit?

Leave campaign rows back on key immigration and NHS pledges | Politics | The Guardian

Meanwhile, Liam Fox cast doubt on the necessity of triggering the article 50 clause of the Lisbon treaty that sets out the legal process for a country's EU withdrawal.

"I think that it doesn't make any sense to trigger article 50 without having a period of reflection first, for the cabinet to determine exactly what it is that we're going to be seeking and in what timescale.

LOL. I didn't expect buyers' remorse to be this quick.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

I have been very impressed with the reportage from John Harris during the campaign. He's been painting a compelling picture of the Britain that doesn't vote in general elections; the precariat, the victims of IDS welfare changes, the excluded, the disenfranchised and disillusioned. Because they don't vote, as far as Westminster is concerned they don't matter. But they aren't a sullen lumpen mass of apathy, their resentments are every bit as real as ours. They have aspirations, but they are not ours. They  want jobs. they want homes.

All the bullshit about "affordable" homes passes them by, because no home is affordable on benefits or minimum wage flexible hours.

And for 30 years, the tabloids have told them to blame the EU. So they do.

Guardian - John Harris - If you've got money, you vote in ... if you haven't got money, you vote out'

"If you've got money, you vote in," she said, with a bracing certainty. "If you haven't got money, you vote out." We were in Collyhurst, the hard-pressed neighbourhood on the northern edge of Manchester city centre last Wednesday, and I had yet to find a remain voter. The woman I was talking to spoke of the lack of a local park, or playground, and her sense that all the good stuff went to the regenerated wonderland of big city Manchester, 10 minutes down the road.

Only an hour earlier, I had been in Manchester at a graduate recruitment fair, where nine out of 10 of our interviewees were supporting remain, and some voices spoke about leave voters with a cold superiority. "In the end, this is the 21st century," said one twentysomething. "Get with it." Not for the first time, the atmosphere around the referendum had the sulphurous whiff not just of inequality, but a kind of misshapen class war.

And now here we are, with that terrifying decision to leave. Most things in the political foreground are finished, aren't they? Cameron and Osborne. The Labour party as we know it, now revealed once again as a walking ghost, whose writ no longer reaches its supposed heartlands. Scotland - which at the time of writing had voted to stay in the EU by 62% to 38% - is already independent in most essential political and cultural terms, and will presumably soon be decisively on its way.

1. The geography reflects the economic crisis of the 1970s, not the 2010s. It became clear early on in the night that Leave had extraordinary levels of support in the North East, taking 70% of the votes in Hartlepool and 61% in Sunderland. It subsequently emerged that Wales had voted for Leave overall, especially strongly in the South around areas such as Newport. It is easy to focus on the recent history of Tory-led austerity when analysing this [...]

But consider the longer history of these regions as well. They are well-recognised as Labour's historic heartlands, sitting on coalfields and/or around ship-building cities. Indeed, outside of London and Scotland, they were amongst the only blobs of Labour red on the 2015 electoral map [...] Thatcherism gutted them with pit-closures and monetarism, but generated no private sector jobs to fill the space. The entrepreneurial investment that neoliberals always believe is just around the corner never materialised ....

2. Handouts don't produce gratitude. By the same token, it seems unlikely that those in these regions (or Cornwall or other economically peripheral spaces) would feel `grateful' to the EU for subsidies. Knowing that your business, farm, family or region is dependent on the beneficence of wealthy liberals is unlikely to be a recipe for satisfaction (see James Meek's recent essay in the London Review of Books on Europhobic farmers who receive vast subsidies from the EU). More bizarrely, it has since emerged that regions with the closest economic ties to the EU in general (and not just of the subsidised variety) were most likely to vote Leave ....

3. Brexit was not fuelled by a vision of the future .... many Leavers believed that withdrawing from the EU wouldn't really change things one way or the other, but they still wanted to do it [...]

Thatcher and Reagan rode to power by promising a brighter future, which never quite materialised other than for a minority with access to elite education and capital assets. The contemporary populist promise to make Britain or American `great again' is not made in the same way. It is not a pledge or a policy platform; it's not to be measured in terms of results. When made by the likes of Boris Johnson, it's not even clear if it's meant seriously or not. It's more an offer of a collective real-time halucination, that can be indulged in like a video game ....

4. We now live in the age of data, not facts .... The attempt to reduce politics to a utilitarian science (most often, to neo-classical economics) eventually backfires, once the science in question then starts to become politicised. `Evidence-based policy' is now far too long in the tooth to be treated entirely credulously, and people tacitly understand that it often involves a lot of `policy-based evidence'. When the Remain camp appealed to their `facts', forecasts, and models, they hoped that these would be judged as outside of the fray of politics. More absurdly, they seemed to imagine that the opinions of bodies such as the IMF might be viewed as `independent'. Unfortunately, economics has been such a crucial prop for political authority over the past 35 years that it is now anything but outside of the fray of politics ....

5. The least `enslaved' nation in the EU just threw off its `shackles'. If the EU worked well for any nation in Europe, it was the UK. Thanks to the scepticism and paranoia of Gordon Brown, Britain dodged the catastrophic error of the single currency. As a result, it has been relatively free to pursue the fiscal policies that it deems socially and politically desirable. The fact that it has consistently chosen neoliberal ones is not really the fault of the EU, the stability and growth pact notwithstanding. But in contrast to southern European members of the EU, Britain is scarcely constrained at all. Instead, it has benefited from economic stability, a clear international regulatory framework and a sense of cultural fraternity with other member states. One could even argue that, being in the EU but outside of the Eurozone, Britain has had the best deal of any member state during the 21st century.