There isn’t much that’s funny about Brexit. At least, not funny ha-ha. But there is one aspect of it that is at least curious: that this act of national foot-shooting has resulted in quite so many people putting the blame for it on the two main political parties – even though only one of them has been in power since 2010.

Scroll through the comments or tweets on any story about Brexit and the online rage from remainers splits evenly. “I’ll never vote Labour again if they facilitate Brexit in any form” is a fairly representative comment, as is the idea that “supporting Labour means Brexit catastrophe”. When I tweeted an observation on this, I was told: “Both parties own this mess”, that “there are those of us who will never vote Tory, but also never vote Labour because they have enabled the whole thing”, and that the “main parties” were uncaring about voters thoughts on the EU.

Going through it step-by-by step, affixing blame shouldn’t be particularly controversial. The blame for even holding a Brexit referendum lies squarely at the feet of David Cameron. European council president Donald Tusk revealed on Monday that the former PM had only included the promise to hold a referendum in his party’s 2015 manifesto in a desperate attempt to soothe the internal dynamics that had already threatened to split the Tories once before.

Cameron, like everyone else that year, didn’t expect to win a majority, Tusk said. He believed that the coalition with the Liberal Democrats would extend to a second term, and that promised referendum would be the first thing to fall to coalition negotiations. Unfortunately, Ed Miliband ate a bacon sandwich weirdly, and the rest is history.

Unless we’re willing to pin the blame for all of that on the Labour PR staff who recommended such an unphotogenic breakfast, so far we’re one-for-one on the Tories being at fault.

But even once Cameron pratfalled into promising a vote he never wanted to hold, the Conservatives could still have avoided disaster. With a working majority in parliament and a five-year term guaranteed by the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, the government had room to do things properly.

It’s generally a bad idea to hold referendums when the government of the day doesn’t support the change proposition, because of the exact problems we’ve seen over the past two years. But if you must do so, the trick is to be very, very clear about what the vote entails.

That means model legislation in place before the election, charting exactly the process from A to B; it means a neutral arbiter, such as a citizens’ assembly, to keep campaigning reality-based; and it means committing to follow those promises through to completion on the other side, whatever the outcome. It also means someone in the British government actually noticing that Northern Ireland has a pretty shaky constitutional settlement , which maybe should be addressed before the vote.

We did not get those things. We got disaster. Worse, once Cameron had quit, throwing the already murky mandate of the leave victory (leave how?) into even greater confusion, the Conservative party didn’t pull itself together and commit to rescuing the country from the brink of chaos.

Again, it’s not entirely clear how Labour deserves any of the blame for that. The party, in opposition for the whole period, didn’t write the ballot paper, couldn’t have stopped article 50 from being triggered, and had no power to end the fight within the Conservatives. Perhaps Labour could have helped by doing much worse in the 2017 election, and handing Theresa May a majority large enough that she could simply ignore Jacob Rees-Mogg and the ERG, but that seems an odd demand to make of a political party.

And now, the Conservative party is careering towards leaving the EU with no deal – a disaster on top of a disaster. Labour remain in opposition, without the votes to call a general election, let alone force a highly contentious second referendum or to straight-up cancel Brexit. So the weight of anger directed against a player with a relatively small role in this saga is odd.

It’s true that the party could team up with the rump of the Conservative party and pass Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, shooting off the country’s other foot to prevent the Tory right pulling the trigger on the gun held to the nation’s head instead. But when you can’t even get people you pay to agree with you to vote for you, it seems a bit off to try and attribute the real blame for your failures on your political opponents.

Look: other parties exist. Labour is owed no one’s votes, and disliking the party or its leader doesn’t make you a Tory. But let’s make sure that blame falls where blame is due. Only one party got us into this mess, and it’s not the one with a rose in its logo.