The UK has followed Ireland, France and the Netherlands in rejecting the EU in a referendum. As in those countries, the result was unexpected, the government unprepared and the situation unresolved by the outcome.
Overall, 51.9% voted to leave the EU and 48.1% voted to remain. But in hardly a single community was that the actual result. In most communities two thirds voted one way and one third the other in a ballot which ripped Britain limb from limb. As was said with grim humour when Wales defeated Northern Ireland 1-0 in the European football championship on Saturday, ‘this is the second time in three days that Wales has knocked Northern Ireland out of Europe’.
The reasons for the vote were many and varied and the result cannot be said to represent the settled will of the UK’s citizens. The vote was highest in the areas where income is lowest, and lowest among people whose educational achievement is high. The old and tired sought to restore a more glorious past, the young and energetic to help build a European future. Gibraltar voted by over 95% to stay; Scotland, Northern Ireland and London also declared decisively their desire to remain. Rather than a reasoned rejection of EU membership it was a cry of anguish against inequality, against the ravages of the globalisation of markets, against the all-too-apparently uncaring nature of the governing elite. The people were asked ‘Ça va?’. A majority replied – à la révolution française – ‘Ça ira!’
Retribution followed fast and mercilessly. Currency and stock markets quickly de-valued the UK. The governing elites in the UK and the EU had a weekend writhing in pain. The prime minister who campaigned to stay in knifed his opponents in the gut by declining to invoke Article 50, knowing that intellectually they are unable to justify their arguments even to themselves. The leaders of the campaign to leave retreated rapidly from their promises to the people that they would halt immigration and spend more on health provision. The 48% who voted to stay launched a petition which has gathered over a million signatures every day since the vote. Scotland – without whose agreement Article 50 cannot legally be invoked by the UK – said that while England and Wales may leave, it intends to remain. Even in London a campaign for an independent city-state has sprung up.
In Brussels the presidents of the three main institutions declared Cameron’s renegotiated terms null and void and shouted collectively the equivalent of Oliver Cromwell’s appeal to England’s Rump Parliament in 1652: “You have been sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!” The UK Commissioner – a decent but diffident man – took them at their word. Council President Donald Tusk issued his normal invitation to heads of state and government to attend the European Council with an agenda which reserved Day Two for discussion among 27 rather than 28 member states. The foreign ministers of the six founding countries met the following day and issued a statement in similar terms. For them, the UK was deemed already to have invoked Article 50. Only Angela Merkel took a more considered line and said that the request to leave need not be immediate and there was no reason for negotiations on a withdrawal to be nasty.
Hasty initial reactions have poured fuel on the fires which now rage in London and Brussels. Britain’s Conservative Party seems incapable of governing the country and will almost certainly dissolve parliament. Its Labour Party immediately indulged in bitter recriminations against its leader Jeremy Corbyn, who voted against remaining in the EU in the UK’s 1975 referendum and campaigned half-heartedly at best to persuade Labour’s voters in northern England to back Cameron. The door-slamming of the federalist fathers in the six founding states is unlikely to meet with assent in Budapest, Warsaw or Copenhagen, so the European Council will have a fissiparous flavour.
Only time will tell how this pans out. The UK needs 12-16 weeks to order its affairs. If the EU respects the rule of law it will abide by the letter of Article 50. In return, the UK may never invoke that treaty article.
* Sir Graham Watson was a MEP from 1994 to 2014. He led the EP's Liberal Democratic Group from 2002 to 2009 and presided the ALDE Party from 2011 to 2015. He is now a Member of the European Economic and Social Committee.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Have resignations led to a rethink?
High Fell leaflet watch (2)
No, Leave didn't win the Brexit referendum because of Northern working class voters
Two new Makerfield by-election polls gives Burnham 5 and 12 point leads
Meg Thomas
David Garlick
Paul Fox
Andrew Tampion
9 Comments
The dust has not settled on the Brexit vote, there remains huge uncertainty. You are right, I believe, in saying that hasty reactions have made things worse. Tim Farron has been hasty, in my opinion, by committing the Lib Dems to fight the next (general?) election on a platform of rejoining the EU. I might point out that we don’t know when the next election will be, we don’t know what shape the EU will be in or whether a better alternative has emerged.
As it stands at the time of writing, the UK is a member of the EU. As much as I dislike it, parliament is sovereign, not the electorate. Whilst I believe that parliament has a moral obligation to heed the result of the referendum, that course of action, triggering Article 50, hasn’t been taken and we do not know who the Prime Minister will be or the team they will have around them.
I suggest that we use the present time to think more creatively about the problems that confront us and possible solutions. I am certainly keen to explore whether the UK as a confederation of states is a feasible model, which may well allow Scotland, Northern Ireland and London to remain within the EU whilst England and Wales leave.
Given the result of the referendum, I think that the status quo (as it was prior to the vote) is unlikely to be viable option.
“Rather than a reasoned rejection of EU membership it was a cry of anguish against inequality, against the ravages of the globalisation of markets, against the all-too-apparently uncaring nature of the governing elite.”
I think we can all agree, that the push for an EU referendum was clearly not a cry of anguish from London.?
O.K. Let’s take this EEA solution, favoured by liberals, head on.?
The vote map on the BBC Friday morning, showed that the cry of anguish was coming from the English regions and Wales. The people of those regions want their issues heard and dealt with. To satiate their cry of anguish, this EU result needs to address three things :
1. Sovereignty. Pulling sovereignty and democracy back to the UK, where they can hire and fire politicians who don’t work in their interests was vital to this exercise.
2. Immigration. For those crying in anguish, immigration is a Numbers to Resources issue. School places,.. GP services,.. Housing,.. General infrastructure, cannot be managed and distributed with any coherence, if we can’t control the ‘how many for’ side of the equation.
3. Money. £19 billion from an annual UK budget of £750 billion, does not look to be a lot. The issue is the abandonment of ‘the anguished’, in favour of shovelling money, resources and attention into an EU ‘conduit’, which in turn shovelled cash and resources, into the economies of recent Baltic entrants of the EU. Yes,..!.. about half of our money was returned in an envelope marked ‘EU Funding’, but for the anguished, the question is why are UK resources being shovelled into the poor of Eastern Europe, at the expense of the poor in England and Wales?
From the outside, EEA looks to be a cynical ploy. Its guise and subterfuge, is to give the impression that we have exited the EU, when in fact it simply lengthens the leg chain, to give the illusion of freedom from EU dictate.
Selling EEA to a London centric audience, is a breeze. But can advocates of EEA, explain to the anguished of England and Wales how EEA will address the three concerns I have outlined above, because if you can’t, you are wasting their time and worse, in that your EEA is a cynical sneer at their anguish.?
All the members of EEA and EFTA are also members of the Schengen free travel area or are currently under legal obligation to join. All precedent is then that membership of the EFTA involves accepting Schengen. The UK had an opt out on Schengen with its EU membership but the leave vote throws all that out the window. It will be a darkly humorous irony if the leave vote leads to the rUK having to agree to join Schengen to get into EEA/EFTA.
There needs to be a general election once the terms of our severance have been agreed between the UK and EU negotiators. That would be a time for voters to make a direct choice between the pro and anti brexit candidates. The winners can then legitimately claim to have a mandate rather than half-baked Farage inspired and tabloid-led train wreck we’re now now standing in.
“The reasons for the vote were many and varied and the result cannot be said to represent the settled will of the UK’s citizens. ”
Graham – You will find that the choice on the ballot paper was between remaining in the EU and leaving the EU. Quite straight forward.
The result was a majority of over a million to leave the EU.
Owen Smith, in his resignation from The Shadow Cabinet, has talked about Corbyn leading Labour to a formal split. If we are to see a premature General Election, its still unclear which Parties will be contesting it, let alone what alliances might emerge. Its still all to play for.
Committed long term LD member and voter here.
— “In most communities two thirds voted one way and one third the other in a ballot which ripped Britain limb from limb”
The ONE time this country gets a truly proportional representation vote, and you are suggesting it was “too proportional”, i.e. that we should somehow count votes differently because the result didn’t represent our communities in the right way?
— “The reasons for the vote were many and varied and the result cannot be said to represent the settled will of the UK’s citizens.”
The above is fatuous, the article itself is divisive in nature and I don’t stand by the message or the narrative that is being created in any way whatsoever.
Our party needs to learn from the mistakes of the past, namely making pledges it cannot fulfill unless it has an electoral majority in Parliament.
Labour voters flocked to our party just before 2010 election, they weren’t genuine recruits to the many noble and honest causes of our party, but a way to give the political system a huge kick.
The same is happening now, but we seem more fixated on chasing numbers of voters rather than stepping back and looking at the long term future and values of the party, namely supporting democracy and Liberal values.
It’s like we have a desire to get kicked around from pillar to post.
It’s painful to watch my party stoop to this level.
I can see the argument that we shouldn’t abandon our long term commitment to EU membership but We have had a referendum so surely we can offer some hope to the poorest and weakest in our society who think their children will have a worse life than they do. We must work with economists to find an alternative to austerity, we must manage the free movement of people by certain rules like advertising jobs in the home country first and then in all other EU countries and that people can only come to this country if they have a job, and we must be clear about sovereignty. Personally I would like a federal Europe but I realise that’s not popular even amongst Lib Dems so we must tell people about the veto and work towards greater accountability and stop the waste of money on two centres.
We can’t just ignore the referendum result and tell people they made a mistake. They have bought the myth of stand alone Britain being better than the status quo, just like the Tory right wing and city magnates wanted and they have been misled but we cannot turn our backs on the will of the people.
Sue Sutherland wrote:
“but we cannot turn our backs on the will of the people.”
What if the will of the people (expressed through a referendum outcome) was capital punishment? Would we still be obligated to accept it?
I can remember in the late 1970s a “Sun” headline that read: “Hanging. The people want it, says Maggie.” That was Thatcher’s off-the-cuff call for a referendum on bringing back the death penalty. Supporters of judicial killing have long paraded widespread public support (over 90% in some opinion polls) as their strongest argument. Newspapers like the “Sun” used to characterise opponents of the death penalty as trendy lefties and bleeding-heart liberals who were out-of-touch with and contemptuous of ordinary people. The neo-Hegelian right of the day saw liberal attitudes to criminal justice as a moral failing and a weakening of the social order. Terms like “national apostasy” were used. Parliament abolished the death penalty in 1965 and has never reintroduced it, despite those opinion polls and the often hysterical newspaper headlines. Who was right? Parliament or the mob?
The will of the people is a mercurial beast. Dictators throughout history have claimed to embody it. In the case of Brexit, it is an irrational frenzy conjured up by clever and mendacious propagandists over many years, and it is now being paraded as a superior source of law to Parliament.