So I've been watching (and shaking my head) at this whole Brexit fiasco with both some personal interest (UK and thus current EU citizen) and more general interest in that the Leave vote was basically a protest vote against immigration that seemed to basically get out of hand.

We can peg a lot of the blame for this on David Cameron who initiated a referendum (I assume he thought would never pass) without any plan to move forward nor any clarity on whether the Commons needed to vote on Article 50 (so add a few months of uncertainty while that got litigated).

May of course isn't short on blame either with her ridiculous snap election that weakened her position.

So now we go to the negotiating stances of each party, most of which was obvious beforehand and it just makes the whole Leave campaign even more ill-conceived.

For one, UK voters seem to primarily limit EU immigration, particularly from the poorer Eastern European states (Poland tends to get singled out here). While the EU (or EC or EEC or whatever it was at the time you want to talk about) was a collection of rich states, you didn't have a lot of problems that became problems once you had member states with a vast disparity in per-capita GDP. The net effect was a lot of poorer EU citizens did go to the UK to essentially go on welfare because it was more than they could reasonably earn (if they could even get jobs) in their home countries. And that situation is untenable.

The EU however is committed to freedom of movement as a core principle so this was difficult to negotiate but I'm actually sure over time a solution could've been found to ameliorate anti-immigration sentient to some degree.

See while the UK was in the EU they always had the threat of leaving as a negotiating tactic. The problem with pulling the trigger is you can no longer hang that threat over their heads.

Anyway, the UK at the same time wants to limit immigration but retain freedom of movement and not hand over wads of money to the EU. Oh and let's have free trade while we're at it.

If that sounds familiar it's exactly like the current (in the EU) situation except for limiting immigration.

It's clear that the EU could never and would never agree to that. Nor would the UK get the Switzerland/Norway EFTA treatment either since the EU wants to discourage anyone else taking the UK's lead.

So now the EU doesn't want any discussions on trade and other issues until the UK agrees to a "divorce settlement". The problems with this tactic are that the UK handing over huge sums of cash to the EU was second to immigration as a reason for people to vote Leave and, more importantly, how can you agree on a price for something and then go on to negotiate what you've bought?

It doesn't make any sense. Like, would you buy a car for me when we first negotiate a binding agreement for you to pay me $50,000 and then we negotiate what you get for that?

The EU actually needs the money from the UK to balance their own budget so the EU has got a lot to lose here.

From the outside looking in however, it really looks like the UK's best option at this point is a "hard exit" since any deal at this point will probably be worse than staying in the EU would've been.

I do wonder if it's possible for the UK and EU to back down and have a do-over on Article 50. I suspect it is possible but probably politically untenable in the UK.

What a mess.