Abstract
On 23 January 2013, in the London offices of Bloomberg, David Cameron announced that, if re-elected in the general election, he would negotiate a ‘new settlement’ for Britain inside the European Union before holding a referendum on EU membership. The political momentum for such a vote had been building within the Prime Minister’s party for some time. In October 2011, 81 Conservatives had defied a three-line whip to vote in favour of a referendum on EU membership. This followed the creation of nascent campaign group the People’s Pledge—openly backed by 86 sitting MPs, including those backbenchers who had forced the vote in the House of Commons—as well as a string of polling figures revealing support for a referendum. This parliamentary pressure was persistent and cumulative. In October 2012 the government suffered a Commons defeat over EU policy. In May 2014, even after Cameron had promised a referendum, more than 100 Conservative MPs backed an amendment regretting the absence of a referendum bill from the Queen’s Speech.
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Notes
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P. Cowley and M. Stuart, ‘The Cambusters: The Conservative European Union Referendum Rebellion of October 2011’, Political Quarterly, 83 (2012): 402–6.
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Shipman, All Out War, p. 175. For a comprehensive analysis of the immediate polling implications of the renegotiation, see H. Clarke et al., Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union. Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 25–27.
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Shipman, All Out War, p. 143. The political gossip website Guido Fawkes kept a running tally of MPs’ referendum positions—at the final count, they counted 140 Conservative MPs who had publicly supported the Leave campaign: https://order-order.com/2016/02/16/introducing-guidos-mp-referendum-list.
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For an entertaining first-hand account of this dispute from the Leave.EU perspective, see A. Banks, The Bad Boys of Brexit. Biteback, 2016; key Vote Leave figures heavily involved in this dispute, such as Dominic Cummings and Douglas Carswell, endorse Tim Shipman’s account.
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Evans and Tilley, The New Politics of Class.
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Ibid.
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HM Treasury, ‘HM Treasury Analysis: The Long-Term Economic Impact of EU Membership and the Alternatives’, 18 April 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hm-treasury-analysis-the-long-term-economic-impact-of-eu-membership-and-the-alternatives.
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Centre for Economic Performance, Brexit 2016: Policy Analysis from the Centre for Economic Performance, 2017, http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/brexit08_book.pdf; S. Dhingra, ‘EU Referendum: One Year on – UK Economic Policy’. The UK in a Changing Europe, 28 June 2017, http://ukandeu.ac.uk/eu-referendum-one-year-on-uk-economic-policy.
- 45.
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J. Cruddas, ‘What We Can Learn from Labour’s Crushing Election Defeat’, LabourList, 23 May 2016, http://labourlist.org/2016/05/labours-future-what-we-can-learn-from-the-election-loss.
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D. Curtis, ‘The Demographics Dividing Britain’, YouGov, 25 April 2017, https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/04/25/demographics-dividing-britain.
- 48.
In April 2017, YouGov polling indicated that for every ten years older a voter was, the likelihood of them voting Conservative grew by eight percentage points. Ibid.
- 49.
Evans and Menon, Brexit and British Politics, pp. 90–116.
- 50.
C. Hanretty, ‘Areal Interpolation and the UK’s Referendum on EU Membership’, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 27(4) (2017): 466–83.
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Ibid.
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Glynn, J., Menon, A. (2018). Brexit. In: The British General Election of 2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95936-8_2
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