When the then Prime Minister David Cameron took a political gamble and put UK membership in the European Union (EU) up for a country-wide referendum in 2016, he fully expected the country to support remaining part of the EU. The move was a political ploy to satisfy the grass-roots campaign to separate England from the EU. Concerns included complaints about England losing its sovereignty to EU rules and regulations examples of which included requirements for the UK to accept migrants/undocumented refugees, EU fishing restrictions over UK’s own territorial waters, and restrictions on British agricultural practices. Many felt decisions on UK domestic issues were starting to be made in Brussels instead of London and many saw the UK losing its identity and rights as a culture and a people.
Neither David Cameron nor anyone in his government thought there was the slightest possibility that rational minded Britons would actually vote to leave the EU. After all, there were huge economic benefits for the UK to be able to sell its goods and services to the one European market. This also is the reason many corporations looked to base their headquarters in London as a hub for managing the EU operations. Bolstered by strong voting and polling results, David Cameron took what he thought was a measured risk and he allowed a date to be set for the referendum. Leading up to the vote, the political parties and their media machines threw their full support behind the “Stay” vote. After all the benefits of staying is clear. The television news broadcast showed poll after poll that the stay vote was the foregone conclusion despite the grassroots “Leave” campaign lead by UKIP and spunky Nigel Farage. The stay supporters and the media painted potential leave voters as morons and on the fringe of society. A vote to leave, they argued would be a huge step backwards into the dark ages once more and a turn towards isolationism and decline.
Results of the Brexit referendum on 23 June 2016.
Expert after expert on television had warned the people of UK that a leave vote would mean immediate economic hardship caused by the vote with predictions of stock market crashes and societal upheaval the likes of which no one has ever seen. Therefore, imagine the surprise when the next morning it was announced that the majority of the British people had voted to leave. It must be further surprising that in the year and a half since the vote, the economy of the UK has actually done quite well even compared to the EU as a whole. Of course few in the UK media or the new Prime Minister Theresa May would point that out.
What the political establishment failed to understand is that people don’t view a globalized economy as necessarily a good thing nor is having domestic rules made for you by people that your country never voted for. While the large corporations got richer and larger through free trade, that money was not necessarily improving the lives of ordinary Britons. The globalist agenda being pushed by the government and corporations was to increase market access and make it easier to trade across the euro-zone. The fact that the common perception was the UK was losing its sovereignty and its identity as a people and a culture also matter little to the globalists who only cared about the single market.
However despite the vote, the government in the UK is dragging its feet on leaving the EU pointing to complex negotiations and the need to preserve market access. This again is ignoring the whole reason why the people voted to leave in the first place. The UK is a huge market as well for European manufacturer of cars and other goods. It seems rather disingenuous to say that leaving will result in losing market access since the EU has a vested interested in keeping UK access open for their businesses. That is kinda how trade works.
