Agree in part - too many politicos ( everywhere, not just the UK ) blame everything on someone else, never themselves or their party colleagues.
You've only got to listen to the Tories
still going on about what they inherited from Brown and Darling after the 2008 Crash.
And agree with you 101% - the EU is a
very easy target but, in my opinion, quite rightly so because, again in my opinion, has outgrown the purpose it was meant to serve, which was to permit Free Trade between its members. Not everyone wants to be part of a
Project designed to produce a homogenous, centrally controlled Socialist Republic.
Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown never asked for, so were implicitly never given a mandate to drag the UK deeper and deeper into the
Project without offering the UK the chance to say YES or NO
, and if BREXIT goes wrong it is those four who should be pilloried - not last year's spivs and chancers like Johnstone, Gove and the others.
Here, in 2005 the Government, to their credit, had a referendum to ratify the new EU Constitution. The result was a 55% vote to reject it, ( more than voted BREXIT ) with both the Extreme Right and Extreme Left, and lots of inbetweens, calling for a NO vote. In the end, the Government ignored the result ( they asked the citizens and residents their opinon but then ignored them ) and just pressed on with its support for the new Constitution and obviously didn't risk a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon as the Irish did.
Read all about it -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_European_Constitution_referendum,_2005
I have been anti-EU ( not pro-BREXIT, because as Tusk says, both sides will lose ) ever since. And is why I'll say again, the EU is now an even more deeply flawed but richer gravy train for too many European Politicians and their hangers-on because not enough of we ' little people ' were ever allowed to vote on whether what the EU has turned out to be is what we wanted it to be.