Questions on Brexit answered - BBC News

The referendum that saw the UK vote to leave the EU has left confused waters in its frothy wake.
Here is a look at some of the current key questions surrounding the decision.

When is the UK leaving?

  The referendum result did not automatically mean that the UK would leave the EU. In fact, the result of the vote is not even legally binding.
For the UK to leave the EU, it has to formally invoke an agreement called Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. No country has ever left the EU, so Article 50 is untested.
Once Article 50 has been invoked in a letter or a speech, the formal process of withdrawing from the EU can begin, at which point the UK has two years to negotiate its withdrawal with the other member states. Extricating the UK from the EU will be extremely complex, and the process could drag on for longer than that.

In his statement on the morning after the referendum, UK Prime Minister David Cameron - who backed Remain - said he would resign in October and leave it to his successor to decide when to trigger Article 50.
Leave campaigners say they want informal discussions with the EU first, but the foreign ministers of France and Germany have called for Article 50 to be triggered as soon as possible to avoid prolonging a period of uncertainty.
There have been questions whether the process can be stopped. A petition to call a second referendum gathered millions of signatures in days, but a second vote is unlikely.
The Liberal Democrats, a party who were a partner in a coalition government before last May but currently have only eight MPs out of 650 seats, have said they will oppose Brexit in the next general election.
But as the BBC's legal expert Clive Colman says it "seems impossible to see a legal challenge stopping the great democratic juggernaut now chuntering towards the EU's departure gate".

Who is in charge?

 The battle to fill the vacancy at the top of British politics has been breathtakingly fast-moving.
David Cameron announced his resignation at breakfast time on the morning after the vote, before most people in the UK had even arrived at work. He will stay in place until October, so for now he is still in charge.
The race to replace him as Conservative Party leader and UK prime minister started straight away.
There are five candidates, but the big surprise came on the day nominations closed. The former London mayor Boris Johnson - long-since tipped to be UK prime minister - pulled out at the last minute, during the speech that was meant to kick-start his campaign.
His Leave campaign colleague, Michael Gove, had announced that very morning that he would run for the leadership. He later said it was because Mr Johnson was "not capable of leading the party and the country in the way that I would have hoped".

UK newspapers compared the fallout between Mr Gove and Mr Johnson to Shakespearean plays and Game of Thrones.
The new favourite to lead is Theresa May, who has been home secretary since 2010. She backed Remain but says the referendum result must be honoured. "Brexit means Brexit," she has said.

What is happening to the opposition?

The vote to leave did not only jolt the Conservative party. It sent the opposition Labour party into a tailspin too.
Waves of Labour's shadow cabinet resigned following the referendum. One after another they quit, leaving party leader Jeremy Corbyn facing an open insurrection.
Many Labour MPs believe Mr Corbyn failed to mobilise Labour voters to support the Remain campaign and would fail to win if a snap general election was called.
But even when MPs voted 172-40 to declare no confidence in him, Mr Corbyn did not resign. He said it would be a betrayal of the party's grassroots members, whose support he still has.
In even rowdier scenes than usual at Westminster's House of Commons, Mr Cameron told him: "For heavens sake, man, go!"
Mr Corbyn is expected to face a formal leadership challenge very soon.
The upheaval in both parties is unprecedented in recent UK political history. "A country renowned for its political and legal stability is descending into chaos," wrote the New York Times.

Could Brexit break up the UK?

Unlike England and Wales, Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU, and Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says it is "democratically unacceptable" for the country to be taken out of the union against its will.
A second independence referendum for the country is now "highly likely", she says, and recent polls suggest roughly 60% of Scots are now in favour of leaving the UK in order to remain in the EU.
One constitutional expert has suggested Scotland could go further under its law and effectively veto Brexit, although others have dismissed this idea as extreme.
Ms Sturgeon visited Brussels for a series of talks with senior EU officials in the week after the referendum, but the Spanish prime minister and French president both said they were opposed to Scotland negotiating EU membership outside the UK.
Northern Ireland also voted in favour of remaining, and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, of the Sinn Fein party, has called for a referendum on reuniting it with the Republic of Ireland, which is outside the UK and remains in the EU.
But the Westminster-based Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers has ruled that out, saying there was no legal framework for a vote to be called. Ms Villiers is a Conservative Party MP and campaigned for a Leave vote.
There is uncertainty over whether a so-called "hard border" would have to be put in place between the North and the South if the North exits the EU.

Is the Leave campaign abandoning its pledges?

Within hours of the results, the Leave campaign was being accused of rowing back on several of its key campaign pledges.
Among them, the bold claim that the UK would take back £350m donated to the EU every week and spend it on the NHS. The pledge was widely criticised during the campaign by many who pointed out that £350m is the UK's gross contribution, and that it receives vast sums of money back from the EU.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated during the campaign that of the £360m the UK sent to the EU weekly in 2014, the net contribution was just £109m.
Key Leave campaigners including Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Ian Duncan Smith have since distanced themselves from the £350m promise, with Mr Duncan Smith claiming it was a "possibility" rather than a pledge.
Other key campaign pledges have been called into question. Leave promised to "take back control of Britain's borders" and reduce immigration, but several key Leave campaigners have since suggested that the UK may need to accept freedom of movement in order to have access to the single market.
"A lot of things were said in advance of this referendum that we might want to think about again," said Leave campaigner and former Conservative minister Liam Fox.

Is the UK economy falling apart?

Not quite, but things have been eventful.
Markets are not fans of uncertainty and the Leave vote was a big shock, with polls were suggesting the vote would go the other way.
The UK's FTSE 100 index plummeted on the morning after the referendum. It has since rallied, but as the uncertainty continues the market is likely to continue to vary.
Credit agencies have cut their ratings for the UK and for the EU as a whole.
The value of the pound against the dollar dropped to a 31-year low, meaning UK holidaymakers were buying substantially less cash for their travel wallets than they might have expected before hand.
The low value of the pound will adversely affect imports too, and because global oil prices are decided in dollars, prices at UK petrol pumps are likely to go up.
The Bank of England says the growth will be slower than expected next year and stimulus measures may be required.
It will take longer to tell whether house prices will be affected and how the manufacturing and financial service industries will respond.

Has the Leave campaign encouraged racism?

There are no official statistics, but there has been a significant number of reports on social media of racist abuse linked to the Leave win. Some high-profile incidents have been verified by police.
In Hammersmith, west London, on Sunday, suspected racist graffiti was painted on the front entrance of the Polish Social and Cultural Association.
And in Cambridgeshire, police are investigating laminated cards that were posted through letterboxes and left outside a school, which read: "Leave the EU/No more Polish vermin" in both English and Polish.
There has been a stream of reports on social media of people hurling abuse at others they assume to be immigrants. The Leave campaign has faced accusations that it encouraged hostility towards immigrants.