So the basic reason why British voters may be about to “do it” to their neighbours and sever an uneasy 43-year relationship with the 28-nation European Union (EU) of 500 million citizens is because they are fed up and can show it. Like a ballot proposition in California or one of Switzerland’s frequent referendums (Swiss recently rejected a basic minimum income for all adults), 23 June gives frustrated voters a chance to kick the government, more broadly to kick political elites who are judged to have let them down.
The history
How could that happen in a country whose most charismatic modern leader, Margaret Thatcher, endorsed the view of most respectable politicians with memories of inter-war fascism, calling referendums “a device for dictators and demagogues”? No referendums on Mrs. Thatcher’s watch.
But the referendum virus had already infected Britain’s constitutional software. Back in 1975, a divided Labour government had deployed one to legitimize Britain’s recent entry into what was then the “Common Market” of just nine nations. After a token “renegotiation”, prime minister Harold Wilson’s position prevailed by a convincing margin of 2 to 1 and Britain remained part of the club.
common market referendum
At the time Conservative British politicians deplored Wilson’s shortsighted act of domestic party management as dangerous and divisive. Forty years on and for similar reasons of party expediency ahead of Britain’s 2015 general election, the Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, embraced a near-identical strategy. Harried by his irreconcilable Eurosceptic right wing, he finally promised the In/Out referendum on Europe for which they had long clamoured. He even deployed Wilson’s transparent “renegotiation” device, pledging to work out a new relationship for the UK and its European partners within the union.
It was a gamble in every sense. Cameron almost certainly assumed that the pro-EU Liberal Democrats, his coalition partners in governing Britain since Labour lost office in 2010, would still be around to veto such a move in a renewed coalition. But the seismic shift towards nationalism and populism helped decimate the piously internationalist Lib Dems. To his own surprise on 6 May 2015 Cameron found himself with a small overall majority in Britain’s House of Commons.
Restored to Downing St, Cameron could have spun out the timetable he had devised until 2017, as originally indicated. But he seems to have sensed, probably rightly, that the political mood was moving against him. Europe’s tide of war refugees and economic migrants from Africa and the Middle East were stoking economic tensions arising from seven years of recession and austerity budgets. German chancellor Angela Merkel’s generosity (all German families acquired refugee stories in the collapse of 1945) took the main burden of escapees from Syria with decidedly mixed political dividends. But wary Britons felt they had already seen this movie.