>>711102Britain is made up of a bunch of smaller countries within it: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. England is the biggest and has the most people, so they tend to decide how things get done in the UK's government. As it happens, a majority of people in England voted to leave the EU, and even though Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland voted a majority to remain, England's votes outweighed them all and as a result the vote to leave passed by a fairly narrow margin.
This made a lot of people angry. A lot of those angry people were in government, who now were faced with having to draw up a plan to leave the EU, which many of them did not even want to do. There were several attempts to reverse the vote, and when that failed, to delay carrying it out.
At the heart of all this chaos was a new political party that had started up only recently, called United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP for short. This party was basically formed to campaign for Brexit, and once Brexit was achieved it didn't really have a reason to exist anymore and people stopped supporting it. The conservative party (called "tories") sort of picked up the mantle of Brexit despite not being particularly for it before, and this caused a lot of members within the tories to defect away from the party, which caused tremendous chaos in Britain's political scene, as the old balance of power became disrupted and new alliances were formed around support for or opposition to Brexit.
A result of this chaos is that nobody was really putting together a plan for how to carry out Brexit. This is a problem because of the borders the UK shares with EU countries, which previously were open and allowed non-UK citizens to enter freely, but now would have to be closed and monitored for contraband. This is a problem when many French people work in London, and also in Ireland, where the Northern Irish border with the rest of Ireland has a long history of violence and unrest.
