They have only one argument left. Back in the spring of 2016, the Brexiteers were promising sunshine and riches, untrammelled sovereignty and £350m a week: all the ice-cream of EU membership and none of the spinach. We would head out into the world and recover our destiny as a global trading nation, with more money in our pockets and independence in our hearts. You don’t hear much of that kind of talk these days, not when Airbus warns it could pull out of the UK – taking its 125,000 direct and indirect jobs with it – Sony relocates its European HQ from London to Amsterdam, and the carmaker Bentley says baldly: “It’s Brexit that’s the killer.” Instead the pro-leave case now boils down to one argument: it may be rough – “We won’t be able to get certain foods like bananas or tomatoes,” in the words of one senior Brexiteer, confident our Blitz spirit will get us through the coming storm – but we have to do it. We have no choice. It is the will of the people, and that will must be done.

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Theresa May is the most dogged exponent of this view. A remainer in 2016, she cannot bring herself to make a positive case for Brexit. Instead, she repeats over and over that we are compelled to leave because that is what the British people voted for. Any deviation would be a betrayal. We are a man taking off his socks, bracing himself to walk barefoot across hot coals – for no better reason than he promised he would.

Those whose ears are attuned to the echoes of the last century will recoil somewhat from this language of the “will of the people” and “betrayal”: such rhetoric has an unhappy history. But putting the language aside, is the logic of the argument sound? Are the leavers right that Brexit is compulsory because of the 2016 vote?

Some pro-Europeans like to escape the question by insisting that the referendum was only “advisory” and that the 52% figure is illusory, in that only 37% of the electorate actually voted to leave. I don’t have much patience for that reasoning. The referendum was not viewed at the time as a glorified consultation exercise, and the rules are the rules: 50% plus one of those who turned out was enough to win.

On its face, then, the popular will from 2016 is clear: we voted to leave. What’s standing in the way – threatening to betray the will of the people, as May would see it – is parliament. Note arch-Brexiteer Suella Braverman telling Question Time on Thursday that we are in this mess thanks to a bunch of “self-appointed MPs” bent on stopping our exit.

That phrase passed without a murmur of dissent, and yet it’s absurd. MPs are not self-appointed. They were elected in June 2017 in a general election that itself expressed the “will of the people”, producing a hung parliament deadlocked on the issue of Brexit. True, the two main party manifestos promised to honour the 2016 vote. But all the same, voters chose to return hundreds of pro-remain MPs, from Ken Clarke to David Lammy, who did not pretend their views had changed, regardless of their official party platforms. The result was enough pro-remain MPs to form a blocking majority against Brexit. Braverman would have been more honest had she said that we are in this mess because the people’s will has demanded two contradictory things on two separate occasions – and admitted that, of the two, it’s the MPs chosen in 2017 who have the fresher mandate.

But let’s say you decide that 2016 trumps 2017, that the referendum somehow represents the purer democratic choice. You still have a problem. Because it’s not obvious that either of the Brexits currently on offer – May’s deal or a no-deal crash-out – truly represents the will of the people, as expressed in the referendum. After all, neither of those Brexits were on the ballot paper. The question asked only if people wanted to leave the European Union. It made no mention of the single market or customs union. There might have been a different answer if it had.

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That gap between actual Brexit and the Brexit voted on in 2016 becomes wider if you factor in not just the wording of the question, but the campaign. Leavers did not warn that their option would entail a £39bn divorce settlement or losing our say on EU rules that would still apply to us. Nor did they advise stockpiling essential food and medicine or gird us to take the “hit” of massive job losses, as they do now. Again, there might have been a different result if they had. Either way, the notion that a 52% vote for a hypothetical, pain-free Brexit translates into an unbreakable mandate for an actually existing Brexit is shaky at best.

May likes to speak of the inviolability of referendum verdicts as if it is a timeless, universal principle. Indeed, in a speech earlier this month she had planned to say that no referendum in UK history had ever been challenged, citing the 1997 decision to establish a Welsh assembly as an example where a narrow outcome was respected on all sides. The trouble is, it wasn’t. The Conservatives opposed the legislation that would have enacted the Welsh result. Among those “self-appointed MPs” all too willing to betray the will of the people on that occasion was May herself, along with Brexiteers John Redwood, Liam Fox, Bill Cash and the rest of the gang. It seems referendums are not so sacred after all.

Ah, but surely May, Redwood and friends are allowed to change their minds? In the words of that great sage David Davis: “If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy.” A democratic decision is not etched in stone, fixed for evermore. It is dynamic, with voters and indeed their elected representatives allowed to change their minds in the light of changed facts.

We know that May, for one, believes in that principle. If the will of the people were truly inviolable, she would have felt compelled to honour the people’s 2015 instruction to govern for five years with a Tory majority. Instead, she had no qualms about disobeying that instruction – betraying it, even – and calling a snap election just two years later, one that would see the people issue a new instruction, directing the Tories to rule with no majority.

Perhaps conscious of the weakness of their logic, the will-of-the-people crowd have one last, emotional card to play. Think of it as their very own Project Fear. Betraying the referendum, they say, will empower the far right. But, as the Labour MP Jess Phillips likes to put it, since when did we give the far right a “veto over British democracy”? If we had let them have the casting vote, homosexuality would still be illegal in this country, there would be no black people, and we’d never have gone to war in 1939.

What’s more, most of today’s Brexiteers would have shuddered if you’d have suggested a decade ago that Britain’s foreign policy should be determined on the basis of what might best prevent jihadism winning new, radicalised recruits. They’d have called it appeasement. So why do they think Britain’s European policy should now be determined on the basis of what might prevent “Tommy Robinson” winning recruits radicalised by a supposed Brexit betrayal?

The key point is that a sovereign nation, one truly in control of its destiny, is not bound by such restraints. Not by foreign powers, nor even by the decisions of its own recent past. To think again is not a betrayal of democracy. It is an assertion of it.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist