It is now more than four years since the former Conservative Party leader first thought it might be a good idea to adopt a populist and short sighted anti-EU strategy.

By promising a referendum on whether or not Britain should stay in the union, he opened the floodgates on a tidal wave of anger and discontent emanating from millions of older voters on lower incomes who felt they had been left behind by economic reforms and the ever increasing intervention in British affairs by the European Parliament.

It was no secret the UK was, after Germany, the largest net contributor to the EU's coffers and that, compared to countries like Poland and Greece, it did not get all that much back in return.

Still smarting from the fall-out from the GFC, which had plunged much of Europe into recession and led to significant job losses across the UK's working class heartland, these largely blue collar voters seized the opportunity to vent their anger on the elites who had grown wealthy at the "ordinary" persons' expense.

The similarity in sentiment between the Brexit "yes" voters and the working class Americans who put Trump into the White House was much commented on at the time.

Cameron's real sin was he and his government were so out of touch with this tide of discontent they never considered the possibility the "leave" camp could win a referendum in the unlikely event he had to honour his promise to hold one.

Backed into a corner where he had no choice but to put the question to the people, neither Cameron nor Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn were able to adequately debunk the fake news, misinformation, outrageous cant and straight out lies that were peddled by the pro-Brexiteers.

Voters were told it would be relatively simple to untie the Gordian knot and that the UK's economy would be better off by billions of pounds a year.

Subsequent events would indicate that many of those who did vote to leave may have bought a pig in a poke; the information on which they based their decision was dodgy at best.

This has led to the bizarre situation where the world's oldest, and arguably most revered, parliamentary democracy has been either unable or unwilling to carry out the electorate's bidding despite having had had more than 36 months to do so.

It is, as Boris Johnson, Britain's third Prime Minister since the vote, has said, absolutely bizarre that the leader of the opposition is doing everything he can to stop the nation from going to an election on the one hand while, on the other, trying to dictate the terms under which a Brexit could take place.

All of this is unfolding at the same time the clock is counting down to October 31, the latest deadline for departure.

Given that nothing anybody has tried to date seems to be working there is a case to be made for introducing a game changer that would reset the debate and give the voters a voice. This could take the form of a plebiscite to allow a now significantly wiser public to indicate whether or not they would support a second referendum or if they just want the politicians to get on with the job they have to do.

While, as was the case with Australia's same sex marriage plebiscite, such a process is not binding in the same way as a referendum would be, it could deliver a clear message UK parliamentarians would ignore at their peril.