That judgment was one that only the people could legitimately make. They may be told by "experts" that they got it wrong and that they "don't understand" - but they alone had the day-to-day experience over decades of seeing their jobs disappear, of feeling that they were no longer running their own country because all the decisions that mattered were made in Brussels, of seeing their streets and neighbourhoods, schools and health clinics taken over by immigrants from Eastern Europe.
It is not as though the facts do not support their concerns. Over the period of EU membership, Britain's manufacturing industry was decimated and Britain's trade was in perennial deficit - so much for the supposed economic benefits of EU membership - and that is to say nothing of the large taxpayer-funded annual subscription paid into EU coffers.
These outcomes came as no surprise to commentators such as myself who warned when Britain joined what was then the Common Market in 1973 that membership would require Britain to give up access to efficiently produced food and raw materials from the Commonwealth, and that the preferential treatment of British manufactures in the markets of those same countries would be lost; instead, Britain would have to face up to direct competition from German manufacturing in their own home market - with consequent damage to British living standards, trade and manufacturing.
Remainers choose to ignore these realities. Both they and the EU, having seen the referendum decision go against them, prefer to focus on the quite separate issue of the difficulties posed in the way of withdrawal; they both have an interest in making those difficulties as intractable as possible.
The EU has been determined to show other members who are unhappy (such as Greece, Spain and even Italy) with the way that the European Union has operated under German leadership that withdrawal is not an easy option.
And the EU has been encouraged to take a hardline by Remainers who believe that the Brexit decision can be reversed if the exit process is made difficult enough. Neither seem to understand that the more that difficulties are placed in the way of withdrawal, the more the British people will see the need to get out of an entanglement that threatens to throttle them.
A second referendum - favoured by many Remainers in the hope of getting a different result - would treat the first referendum as a kind of examination which the British people had failed, and must therefore take again, reinforcing the Leavers' sense that, from the outset, their voices were not being heard. Little wonder that they see a second referendum as elitist and destroying faith in democracy.
The dilemma now facing the British Parliament is that a new prime minister or government would leave the Brexit situation exactly where it is now - that is, unresolved.
Theresa May's deal, perhaps somewhat re-jigged, still looks the best available outcome; she is to be congratulated on sticking to the referendum decision. But whatever the outcome, Jacinda Ardern seems to have obtained from Theresa May an assurance that a post-Brexit Britain will be open for business - and trade.
