Tim Bale looks back at the 2016 Brexit vote and considers why David Cameron decided to call the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union – and why he went on to lose it.
Political scientists like to talk about critical junctures
– inflection points at which an event occurs or a decision is made
that, at least in hindsight, effectively ‘locks in’ a particular outcome
or at the very least rules out other possibilities. U-turn or no
u-turn, Kwasi Kwarteng’s announcement of the government’s ‘Growth Plan’ on 23 September looks, for good or ill (probably ill), like being one of these.
But perhaps the biggest critical juncture in Britain’s recent political, economic, and diplomatic history was David Cameron’s promise,
made public in January 2013, to hold an in/out referendum on the UK’s
membership of the European Union if the Conservatives were returned at
the next general election. It may not
have rendered the country’s departure from the EU inevitable. But it
did put an end to any lingering hopes Cameron may still have had that
his party would, as he’d once put it, ‘stop banging on about Europe.’
The Conservative Party’s preoccupation with Europe had done much over
the years to ensure that, in spite of the successes achieved over the
years by British diplomacy in Brussels, the country’s voters,
particularly if they were readers of Tory-supporting newspapers, rarely,
if ever, heard anything positive about the EU – something that was
always going to make it difficult to sell the advantages of membership
if and when they were offered the chance to register a verdict on it.
Yet before Cameron announced his intention to call a referendum,
‘Europe’ was just one issue among many facing the country. After he
stepped away from the podium at Bloomberg’s London HQ on 23 January 2013, however, it was pretty much guaranteed to become, for the Tories at least, almost all-consuming.
A politician as crafty as Cameron – even one criticised by his
admirers as more of a game-playing tactician than a serious-minded
strategist – must have known that was a distinct risk. Why, then, did he
choose to poke the hornet’s nest? And why, having done so, did Leave
win and Remain lose? Those are the two questions I try to answer in a newly released slim volume which relies on recently published first-hand accounts by those involved and draws on the work of myriad social scientists.
Whatever David Cameron tried to argue in his memoirs – one of those
first-hand accounts I dig into in detail – an in/out referendum on the
UK’s membership of the European Union was not an historical
inevitability.
Cameron chose to commit to a vote, not because the country’s
population was clamouring for one but because a significant minority of
his own MPs, many of them frustrated by the constraints of coalition,
were demanding that he do so – some because they feared that UKIP would
cost them their seat (or the seats of too many of their colleagues) at
the next election, some because they wanted out of the European Union
and were more than happy to leverage that fear to their advantage.
Naturally, Cameron was aware he was running a risk – after all, his
best friend in politics, Chancellor George Osborne, told him so again
and again. But he thought he would win the vote, not least because he
believed – mistakenly it turned out – that he could (a) negotiate a
decent deal with the EU and, just as importantly, (b) rely on the
personal loyalty of influential colleagues (not least Michael Gove and
Boris Johnson) to trump their Euroscepticism (and, some would say, their
opportunism).
David Cameron lost the referendum for a whole host of reasons. For
one thing, the deal he negotiated was too complex and too much of a
contrast with what he had earlier promised to extract from Brussels to
persuade most Eurosceptics to back it. For another, he underestimated
how much of a role immigration would play in the debate and how willing
Conservatives in the Leave campaign would be to tap into the concerns of
‘identity conservatives’ on the issue.
Cameron also underestimated the extent to which the Leave campaign
would prove able to mobilise its supporters to turn out and vote, even
people who didn’t normally bother. Conversely, he overestimated the
willingness of the Eurosceptic Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn,
to help the Remain campaign win over traditional Labour voters. He also
overestimated the extent to which voters would be swayed by the economic
arguments against withdrawal, either because the economy wasn’t
delivering for them anyway or because they believed they were
sufficiently comfortably-off to weather the potential downsides of
leaving the EU....
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