Brexit

Brexit is the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, the most consequential constitutional change in modern British politics. In the referendum of 23 June 2016, on a turnout of 72 per cent, 51.9 per cent voted to leave the EU and 48.1 per cent to remain. After three and a half years of negotiation and parliamentary deadlock that brought down two prime ministers, the UK formally left the EU on 31 January 2020 and exited the single market and customs union at the end of the transition period on 31 December 2020.¹

The argument over Brexit divided opinion within conservatism as much as between conservatives and their opponents. For Leave campaigners the central issue was sovereignty — the location of ultimate lawmaking authority — and the democratic accountability of those who govern. For many on the Remain side, including some conservatives, the costs to trade and the risks to the Union of the United Kingdom outweighed the constitutional gains. The result is best understood by setting the strongest form of each case beside the other.

Key Takeaways

• Brexit is the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union, mandated by the referendum of 23 June 2016 in which 51.9 per cent voted to leave, and completed on 31 January 2020 after a protracted parliamentary struggle.
• The conservative case for Leave rested chiefly on sovereignty and democratic self-government: the claim that laws binding Britain should be made by an accountable Parliament at Westminster rather than by European institutions, with control of immigration as a leading practical concern.
• The principal objections were economic, predicting costs to trade and investment, and Unionist, warning that withdrawal would strain the bonds between the nations of the United Kingdom, especially over the Irish border.

History And Context

British unease with the supranational direction of European integration long predates 2016. Margaret Thatcher’s speech to the College of Europe at Bruges on 20 September 1988 gave the sceptical position its classic statement. Defending cooperation among sovereign states while rejecting federal centralisation, she warned that Britain had “not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”² The Bruges speech helped crystallise a current of Thatcherism hostile to deeper political union and inspired the founding of Eurosceptic organisations within and beyond the Conservative Party.

Successive treaties — Maastricht (1992), Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon (2007) — extended the EU’s competences and majority voting, sharpening the objection that powers were transferring to Brussels without adequate democratic sanction. The eastward enlargement of 2004 brought large-scale migration from new member states under the principle of free movement, making immigration policy a focus of public concern. David Cameron’s renegotiation of Britain’s membership terms in early 2016 was judged insufficient by sceptics, and he put the question to a referendum, expecting to win it.

The Conservative Position

The conservative case for Leave was made most fully by writers who grounded it in democratic self-government rather than economics. Daniel Hannan, a Member of the European Parliament and co-founder of Vote Leave, set out the argument in Why Vote Leave (2016): the EU’s lawmaking ran through an unelected Commission and a remote court, eroding the accountability that ties rulers to ruled, and only the restoration of Westminster’s authority could restore that link.³ On this view Brexit was less a rejection of Europe than a reassertion of the principle that those who make the law must answer to those who live under it.

The philosopher Roger Scruton supplied the deeper cultural argument. Britain’s common-law tradition and parliamentary settlement, he held, differed in kind from the codified and administrative cultures of the Continent, and political loyalty is sustained by attachment to a particular national home rather than to abstract transnational institutions. Scruton coined the term oikophobia — repudiation of one’s own inheritance and home — to describe the disposition he saw in a Europhile elite, contrasting it with the territorial loyalty he argued the nation-state alone can command.⁴ His position connected the Leave argument to a wider conservative nationalism that prizes the bounded, self-governing community as the only durable home of democratic consent.

Differing Positions

The opposing case was not confined to the left. Many conservatives, including most of the Cameron government, judged that the economic costs of leaving the single market — to trade, investment and the City of London — outweighed the constitutional benefits, and that Britain exercised real influence inside the EU that it would forfeit outside it. They argued that sovereignty pooled is not sovereignty lost, and that interdependence is the condition of a modern economy.

A distinct objection came from defenders of the Union. Withdrawal reopened the question of the Irish border, since the Good Friday settlement assumed an open frontier between an EU member (the Republic) and a UK region (Northern Ireland); the resulting Northern Ireland Protocol became the most intractable problem of the negotiations. A clear majority in Scotland had voted Remain, strengthening the case for a second independence referendum. Critics held that a project undertaken in the name of restoring the British state risked weakening the bonds that hold it together.

References

1. “Results and turnout at the EU referendum,” Electoral Commission, 23 June 2016; HM Government, “The UK has left the EU,” 31 January 2020.
2. Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to the College of Europe (‘The Bruges Speech’),” 20 September 1988, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, document 107332.
3. Daniel Hannan, Why Vote Leave (London: Head of Zeus, 2016).
4. Roger Scruton, England and the Need for Nations (London: Civitas, 2004).