What Happened to the UK's 'Revolutionary Summer of 2016'?

This felt like it was going to be a summer to remember. The components were stacked up like a pre-written history dissertation from the year 2045. The promise of political upheaval, sporting triumph and the death of neoliberalism. The far right and the further left. All that, thrown together in the sweaty pits of a summer statistically likely to be hotter than the one before.

I thought this was going to be the summer where we set our cities on fire beneath a scorching sun, the summer we played frisbee in the nuclear fallout, battled pensioners with blow-torches eating Fruit Pastille lollies on the rubble of Parliament. I thought we were going to be leaving the EU and winning the Euros, news of riots rippling through pub gardens and hot nights out carried through into early bemused mornings in a shifting city. It wasn't an excited, "this is going to be the best summer ever" feeling, but it was at least a sense that the world was going to feel like a very different place come the end of August.

The EU referendum was the perfect prologue. We were told plenty of times before the vote that this was "the most important decision in a generation", so it was natural to anticipate it in some capacity. I'd go as far to say, in fact, that I was excited about the EU referendum and almost more excited about a vote for Brexit. Maybe that sounds sadistic, but the prospect of living through something that substantial was appealing in a lot of ways.

For a fleeting moment, it felt like the world was changing. On waking on the 24th of June, we knew we were out of the EU, and within a few more hours David Cameron had resigned. Over the coming week, more bodies fell. Gove turned on Boris, everyone turned on Corbyn, and the people marched on Downing Street. The wheels were in motion at an alarming rate. Britain felt like contested space; London bitter and betrayed by the forgotten and ignored satellite towns and provinces who had risen up to spite them. It was inter-generational class warfare and it was going to get ugly.

Then the wheels just sort of stopped.

I actually first sensed that we weren't getting the doomsday we were promised on the morning of the referendum result. I travelled to Romford, supposedly the most Eurosceptic part of the UK, for a short reaction piece, and immediately noticed that every Brexit devotee I spoke to seemed altogether nonplussed that we were leaving the EU – no more trusting or invested in Britain's future than they were the day before. The morning was completely uneventful – boring, almost – simply trudging around a small market town listening to people shrug. Far from banners and celebrations, the mood in this Brexit stronghold was past-caring.

I noticed a similar trend among my peers. Almost exclusively Remain, they represent the sort of hip, millennial influencers you likely saw on Channel 4 News saying stuff like, "I think Brexit is, like, really racist" in the foyer of a student union somewhere. In the days preceding the referendum, pretty much every single one of them had posted a 2,000-word thesis on why it was so crucially important to vote Remain. You know, the sort of polemics that started with, "So I've been trying to avoid posting one of these, but tomorrow could well be one of the most important days in our lifetime…"

Only, once the vote came through, bar an initial wave of "WTF", this collective passion seemed to dissipate. Whether Brexit proved too intangible a foe, or defending the status quo was too flawed a proposition in the first place, the "voices of our generation" went silent.

In the following weeks, the cloak of silence spread further as the major villains of the EU debacle just sort of disappeared. Farage resigned. Gove's attempt to out-run Boris turned out to be an act of mutually assured destruction – until Boris was quietly reintroduced as foreign secretary two weeks later. George Osborne actually disappeared, like in a literal sense; he ceased to be visually perceptible at all – until he recently resurfaced in Vietnam, firing blanks into the bush. Andrea Leadsom sort of surfaced and then submerged again, like a brief glitch in the matrix, and as for Iain Duncan Smith, I like to think he's still in a room in a hotel somewhere, sipping tea and making Powerpoints, blissfully unaware Leadsom has stepped down.

Then, of course, there was The Great Labour Coup of 2016. Oh, the pictures they will paint. Massive, terrifying tableaus of Corbyn strapped topless to the nose of a Virgin train. Of Owen Smith, a Beano character made flesh, attempting to wrestle the allegorical horns of the Labour membership into submission. Of Angela Eagle, arms outstretched screaming vainly into the abyss of an empty press conference.

In reality, the coup proved to be nothing but slow and baffling mutually-assured destructions on both sides of the table. The eventual leadership battle we are now enduring, between Saving Labour and Keep Corbyn, has been the height of echo-chamber politics. Owen "Campaign Video Only Has 79 Views" Smith versus Jeremy "Can Fill a Theatre In Brighton" Corbyn, all while the actual working class voters Labour has been haemorrhaging for the past decade dribble further and further into complete disinterest. The party has been buried into irrelevance by careerist Blarites proclaiming that someone as remarkably unremarkable as Owen Smith would win a landslide, and social-media savvy millennials convinced Corbyn can win based on how many Instagram likes he gets. It's just another "seismic shift" that turned out to be little more than a stomach rumble.

Even Theresa May, one of the most imminently-evil seeming politicians in decades, has been completely non-present. Bar the brief tussle between Boris and Gove – and Leadsom's bizarre "talk to me when you've got kids, love" moment – the Tory leadership race was basically just watching May slowly but surely walk right up and accept the job. Since then, what? She's gone on holiday, and despite the fact we've just been handed a new Prime Minister we never asked for – a Prime Minister who literally wants to scrap the Human Rights Act – nobody seems to give a shit.

This hasn't just been a political phenomenon, though. We were also convinced – convinced – that we were heading for major football success this time around. What with a team packing four or five decent strikers, parallels between the wonder-boys of 1966 were drawn. Even when we scraped a victory against Wales it still felt like this was our turn. Then, as everything else did in the post-Brexit universe, all the lights went out. I sat in a pub, drinking cold continental lagers, as England's football team fell to pieces like cheap denim. It wasn't even a thrashing. Not really. Just a silent, glum, grey, inevitable death.

Perhaps Andy Murray winning Wimbledon was something to celebrate, but again, within minutes of his victory, he'd shouted out David Cameron and the air was full with a familiar resigned booing. Even the Olympics, which admittedly have been a colossal success, was somewhat lost on the time difference; the entire nation has basically slept through our most successful games in 108 years, instead learning of our success in one-minute Facebook videos the next day.

This vague deflation has been everywhere. Is there a single song that has been released in the last five months that you could call the "sound of the summer"? There's been no "Trap Queen" or "Good Times", not even a "Get Lucky". Nightclubs up and down the country closed their doors for good, but instead of responding with illegal warehouse raves we've signed online petitions and gone back to watching Stranger Things. At Glastonbury it rained and Coldplay headlined again. Day by day, week by week, an unsettling, despondent silence has reigned.

An important caveat here would be to add that this sense of the "crisis that never came" is in reference to Britain. In America or France, for example, the changing world will have felt all too vivid, all too real. Equally, it's important to add that I'm not wishing brutality or terror of any kind on the coutry, or hoping for chaos, but it seems strange – almost unnatural – that such an era-defining period of British history has felt so uneventful.

The UK's summer of 2016 has been a strangely unknowable stretch of time. At once unending and drawn out, but at the same time three months of blink-and-you'll-miss-it nothingness. A period supposedly full of scandal, turmoil, debate and division that's barely registered beyond a vacant shrug. Somewhere between Corbyn and Smith, between Leadsom and May, between Hodgson and Allardyce, between Leave and Remain, the great British summertime turned into white noise – best ignored in the hope it would go away. This was the summer when the world was supposed to burn; instead, my ice cream barely melted.

Interestingly enough, 200 years ago exactly, the summer of 1816 was also referred to as the "Year Without Summer". That time it was due to the massive eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year prior, which caused abnormal shifts in the climate, ultimately leading to a drawn-out darkness that smothered crops. In short, one cataclysmic event took place, but after the initial explosion came the lengthy period of thick, ashen dust-settling. In air that stifling, the summer simply never took place. Sounds familiar.

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