In what must be the most dramatic twenty-four hours of political life any of us have experienced or are ever likely to encounter again, Britain has voted to the leave the European Union, the Prime Minister has announced his resignation and the country has embarked on a period of instability and uncertainty whose length and outcome none of us can know. The morning after, what do we now think of the fateful decision we have taken?
No one can quibble with the clarity of the result. The turnout was 72%, far higher than in any national election or referendum in the last quarter of a century. The Leave campaign secured 17.4 million votes; Remain only 16.1 million. In defeat, David Cameron called it a ‘giant democratic exercise’ of which we could all be proud. He insisted that the will of the people must be respected, a view endorsed by all other political leaders whose advice had been so unceremoniously chucked aside. No one was talking any more of the House of Commons defying a referendum result that in strict constitutional terms is simply advisory.
Instead, because the Prime Minister’s passionately expressed conviction that Britain should remain in the EU was so decisively rejected, he concluded that ‘fresh leadership’ was now needed to lead the country in the new direction it had decided upon. So he is to resign by October.
But it was not just his advice that was spurned. Voters cocked a snook at the entire political establishment, most notably the leadership of the Labour Party and of the trade unions. It was in Labour’s heartlands in the north of England and south Wales that the rejection of the EU was most strongly expressed. Pressure is now on Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, to resign too.
Why did voters repudiate the advice of the leaders of all the main political parties and the entire establishment? The most straightforward answer would be that they found the arguments of those proposing Brexit, especially on immigration, more persuasive than the claims of Remainers, particularly with regard to the economy. And it may be as simple that. But there could be a more fundamental reason that has much less to do with the pros and cons of British membership of the EU and is much more about what could be summarised as a revolt of the masses against the establishment and the elite.
What lies behind this view is the observation that poll after poll in recent years has registered the fact that most British people aren’t much exercised by the issue of Europe. It has rarely figured among the top concerns of voters. On this evidence one might therefore have expected the turnout in a referendum on EU membership to be pretty low. Yet it wasn’t. Indeed Iain Duncan Smith, one of the advocates of leaving the EU, noted early on during the evening of the count that he had never seen so many people living on council estates turning out to vote.
So on this account, voters seized the opportunity of the referendum to register a broader dissatisfaction with the status quo, with the fact that incomes and living standards have failed to rise in recent years, that all the benefits of the current set-up appear to be flowing to the fat cats in London and that the political parties seemed to offer voters at general elections merely a change of management and personnel rather than a change of direction that might offer them a better future.
Those who think this is really what was going on in the polling booths last Thursday regard it as profoundly irresponsible of David Cameron to have called the referendum in the first place. Far from it being a ‘giant democratic exercise’ in which the British people could give their considered view about the issue on the ballot paper, he made Britain’s membership of the EU (in which he believed so strongly) a hostage to popular disillusionment with something else. On this view the result was always going to be, as the veteran europhile Tory MP Ken Clarke is reported as saying, ‘predictably catastrophic’.
Whether voters really were giving their considered view about British membership of the European or whether they were really trying to say something else we shall, of course, never know. But the result will have profound consequences for years to come. Those who campaigned for it say it will open up a period of opportunity, freedom and hope. Those who campaigned against Brexit fear awful consequences. But whichever turns out to be true, we already know there are some very serious issues that will now need to be dealt with.
In the first place, the result has exposed deep divisions in the country. Some are geographic. In England only London voted resoundingly to Remain and although some other cities also backed Remain, the English regions were solidly for Leave. Most of Wales also voted to leave, but every Scottish voting area backed Remain and northern Ireland did so by 56% to 44%.
Some of these divisions throw up acute constitutional issues. Scotland’s emphatic wish to remain in the EU while the UK has voted to leave seems certain to open up again the issue of Scottish independence: another referendum on the matter seems like only a matter of time. Equally, the UK decision to leave the EU raises the question of how the border between Northern Ireland outside the EU and the republic of Ireland inside it will now be handled. And Sinn Fein has already called for a referendum on the issue of Irish unity as a way of dealing with it.
Division too is now exposed between the generations. Around 70% of 18 to 24-year-olds backed Remain; older voters wanted to leave.
The new government will also have to work out how to extricate Britain from forty years entanglement with Brussels and how to create a new relationship with our former EU partners and with the rest of the world. The issue of trade alone will prove headache enough, not least because Britain has not had any of its own trade negotiators for forty years.
And there is the effect on the EU itself of Britain’s decision. Eurosceptics across Europe are hailing the referendum result as an example to be followed. The outcome of Britain’s decision may be not just Britain’s departure but the break-up of the entire outfit. That is Nigel Farage’s hope and expectation.
Those who wanted a different result will no doubt be looking at all this with horror. Those who advocated it will see a great opportunity. But most people, those who were zealots for neither side, will simply have woken up to an utterly new world. In the cold light of day, what should we make of the momentous decision Britain took on 23 June and why we took it?
Let us know your views.
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