This week has been a busy and confusing one in Westminster.

So it's worth asking how on Earth we got here, and what on Earth we do next. It seems to me that it's high time to seriously consider a second referendum, and here's why.

No-one anticipated the concessions that would be required to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, or the difficulty of withdrawing Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the single market and the EU customs union. How did that happen?

You can see the answer in a chart published by the Financial Times this week, based on data from Ipsos Mori.

Essentially, it shows that when UK citizens were asked to vote in the referendum, they did not have strong feelings about the EU or understand what it meant to leave the Union.

Remember how everyone joked about how many people googled "What is the EU?" after the referendum? This poll is basically a comprehensive, data driven version of that.

Ipsos Mori's long-running issues index asks people each month what their most important issue is.

It shows that leading up to the referendum, fewer than 6 per cent of UK citizens identified Europe as the most important on their list of political priorities.

When then-prime minister David Cameron announced in 2016 that he would hold a referendum, interest in the EU began to rise. By the time the referendum was held, the number of people who identified Europe as an important political issue was almost 30 per cent.

It's been climbing ever since, and that figure now sits at just over 50 per cent. Of course, when viewed alone, these numbers are not surprising. It seems obvious that the level of public interest in an issue would increase as that issue moved to the forefront of national political life.

EU up, immigration down

But what isn't to be expected is this: as interest in Brexit as risen, the population's interest in immigration has decreased by a similar margin.

Around the time of the referendum, 40 per cent of people identified immigration as high on their list of priorities. Today, only 5 per cent of UK citizens feel strongly about immigration.

This is not because these swathes of people have suddenly stopped caring about this issue, they've simply changed how they categorise it. The voters who identified immigration as their top issue in 2016 are now the voters who identified Brexit as their top issue in 2018.

So there's pretty clear evidence that Brexit is being used as a proxy for voters' feelings about immigration policy.

This matters because it demonstrates that a large section of the electorate likely voted to leave because of the way this was framed in terms of its immigration implications. It shows that the "yes" vote was not driven by opinions of the relationship with Europe at all, but driven by increasingly divisive opinions about nationalism, border control and immigration.

If a second referendum were held today, it's possible that the public would think twice about what it actually means for the country. ( Reuters: Simon Dawson )

The English don't want eggs

So now that the Government is trying to figure out the details of the single market, the Irish border, the customs union, and the EU trade laws, no-one knows which side they're on. No-one has an answer to these questions because, in the minds of the electorate, these questions were never really what was being asked.

It's as though the British population are being asked if they would like their eggs fried, scrambled or poached. But they don't know, because they didn't want eggs — they wanted a change of immigration policy.

This data is probably the strongest argument we've seen thus far for a second referendum. It shows that the public knew very little — indeed cared very little — about the EU prior to 2016. Once it had been presented as a referendum on immigration policy, the electorate began to care, but in a very one-dimensional fashion.

This data provides an argument that people did not actually understand what they were voting for.

If a second referendum were to held today, it's possible that the public would think twice about assenting to something involving 585 pages of international trade law and two and a half years of unstable politics and a spooked market.

It's possible that they would reassess based on what Brexit actually means, not simply what it represents.

Time for a second referendum?

This suspicion is confirmed by another poll released earlier this month. When asked what they expected the outcome would be if UK citizens were asked again whether they wanted to leave the EU, 47 per pent of people said the thought the country would vote Remain, 29 per cent said they thought the Leave vote would win and 23 per cent didn't know.

Overall, data collected in the past two years indicates that the Remain camp would win if a second referendum were held today.

A team of Labour MPs have called on their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, to fight for a second referendum. A groundswell of public support for the idea has gathered, culminating in a widespread campaign for a "people's vote". It seems there is significant support across the country for a do-over.

Many Tory MPs, including Prime Minister Theresa May, have strongly resisted this possibility because they see it as their job to "deliver the Brexit the people voted for".

They continually insist that because the referendum turned up an absolutely majority, it must be obeyed.

But if this data is correct, it suggests a second referendum is the only way to clarify the electorate's intentions for the country.

This could be achieved by allowing a second vote on Brexit and then allowing immigration policy to be contested at the general election on its own terms.

If things had gone smoother at any juncture, it might be sensible to defend sticking to the outcome of the referendum with every dying breath.

But the cacophony of mixed messages from the Parliament, the Government, the Prime Minister and the people are no coincidence.

They are telling us something very important: that if the country had been presented Brexit in realistic terms and not as a proxy for something else, they may never have agreed to it at all.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley is a journalist covering law, gender and politics, and a legal researcher specialising in constitutional law.