Causes and consequences of the UK leaving the European Union

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  • Created by: lenoch
  • Created on: 18-04-17 14:02

In polls since 2004 there has been short term fluctuations of support but generally the EU has been favourable however there has never necessarily been overwhelming support, although the sovereign debt crisis in 2009 was a turning point; the level of support still managed to return to a static level in 2015. There are several determiners for EU support; the conception of community regarding British national identity and immigration, a cost/benefit analysis of EU membership and cues from the elite, politicians and the media. From the start of 2016 onwards, there had been a lot more movement in terms of EU support and towards the end of the campaign the dominating position was all within the margin of error with both remain and leave not being ahead by much in the polls therefore it was suspected that the result would be close. Historical precedent stated that in the vast majority of referendums there is a movement back towards the status quo as seen in the Scottish independence referendum and the Quebec referendum in the 1990s.

The campaign to remain in the EU concentrated heavily on the economy, as taken from the Scottish referendum campaign since it was known the economic argument had been effective then. This approach won the favour of big businesses, including an abundance of businesses leaders including former CEOs of large supermarket chains such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s and M&S as well as Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft. Other remain endorsers included businesses such as BMW, Shell, BT and Fujitsu. As well as businesses, this campaign attracted the support of international organisations such as the G-20 major economies, IMF, WTO and the World Bank. Despite this abundance of support, the campaign had failed to appeal to the general public. The leave campaign, on the other hand, never set out to win the economic argument they were only looking to neutralise it and they managed this to some extent as in a poll where the public were asked if they believed if they personally would be better or worse off in leaving the EU, a vast majority said it would make no difference. People bought into the remain campaigns economic argument to an extent however not overwhelmingly so, there was this idea that Britain as a whole would be worse off if we were to leave the EU but the leave campaign had successfully neutralised this idea to the point where the public believed they personally would not be effected.

In creating this neutrality, the leave campaign gained themselves a free hit and this became the issue of taking back sovereignty. Although polls suggested that support between leave and remain continued to be fairly neutral so it was thought that the outcome would come down to turnout, there was a general consensus that older people don’t like the EU and are more likely to vote as 64% of over 65s wanted to leave and younger people do like the EU and are less likely to vote as 71% of…

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