Essay: What factors resulted in the UK’s vote to leave the EU? (inc media analysis)

In her September 2017 Florence speech, Theresa May stated that ‘the United Kingdom has never totally felt at home being in the European Union’ and that as a result of ‘history’ and ‘geography’, the EU has ‘never felt to us an integral part of our national story in the way it does to so many elsewhere in Europe’ (GOV, 2017). Here, May taps into a well-established narrative concerning the incompatibility of British and European identity. This disjuncture of identity forms the basis of this essay, whereby Britain’s unique hostility towards the European Project became the gateway to vote Leave in 2016. However, this gateway was paved with a multitude of other factors, most notably British ‘exceptionalism’, the media and the arguments of vote Leave. It was the cumulative impact of these factors that resulted in the UK’s vote to leave the EU.
However, and as this essay will demonstrate, the vote to leave was not inevitable. The outcome of the referendum was both structural and contingent, whereby structural factors made the UK’s vote to leave possible and contingent factors made this vote probable. This essay will present the case that structural and long-term factors – primarily that of identity – allowed for Euroscepticism to be embedded within British culture, and that the media built upon this sentiment to set the stage for a successful Leave campaign. This will be done through exploration of British and European identities, and chronological analysis of Britain’s relationship with the EU (from its reasons in entering back in 1973 and the media’s Euroscepticism thereafter, to the 2016 campaign itself), thus proving that the synergy of long-term and short-term factors is integral to understanding Britain’s vote to leave. After all, the Leave campaign’s ability to draw upon a long-established, structural and media-based Euroscepticism, and the Remain camp’s inability to draw upon a comparable long-established pro-European feeling, meant that the Remain campaign were inevitably starting on the back foot. This was, not least, because as May notes Britain has never felt entirely at ‘home’ in Europe – and it is this insecurity of identity, which underpins Britain’s decision to vote to leave the European Union.
The incompatibility of British and European Identity
Like any state-building project, in order for the political union of Europe to succeed, a ‘European Identity’ had to be carefully crafted and exported transnationally, as a means of ensuring a perpetual want to maintain the ‘imagined community’ of the European Union. Paolo Bellucci, David Sanders and Fabio Serricchio present this identity as having intersecting political and social aspects based on principles such as the pooling of sovereignty, freedom of movement and trade, the standardization of rights and European integration (Belluci et al, 2017). Their research concludes that such a European identity is political as it is linked to ‘an attachment to a salient supranational community’ – namely the EU (Bellucci et al. 2017: 63). It is social, they argue, because certain sections of society feel more European due to their cosmopolitanism and social capital. This is what enables ‘people with the resources necessary to understand, evaluate and develop feelings of attachment to a supranational community’ (Bellucci et al. 2017: 77). Those who cannot identify as European are those whom Goodwin and Heath consider to be ‘left behind’ (Goodwin & Heath, 2016).
However, the ‘left behind’ narrative – although going some way towards explaining why those on the periphery of globalization may have voted leave – can be said to focus too much on the individual level, neglecting Britain’s long-standing ‘semi-detached’ relationship with Europe (Copsey & Haughton, 2014). The isolation of those ‘left behind’ by Europe, is mirrored by Britain’s own structural – political, cultural and even geographical – isolation from the European project, born of a long and tempestuous relationship with the EU. After all, this was not a great love affair, but a volatile marriage – perhaps even an ‘arranged’ one, if we are to adopt the language of Boris Johnson  (The Telegraph, 2016) that looks set to end in divorce. This was a relationship built on distrust and hostility, with years of compromise and to and fro leading to a process of ‘otherness’, as opposed to a process of unity between British and European identities.
Dario Castiglione explores the difficulties facing the notion of a European identity by calling upon Weber’s definition of the state – namely a ‘human community that [successfully] claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within a given territory’ (Weber 2013: 76). Castiglione explains that an individual’s attachment to Europe is never entirely complete due to the fact that, as a European, one lives in a vast ‘community of strangers’ (Castiglione 2009: 29). Reconciling British and European identity, therefore, had a very fundamental stumbling block because, ‘as a historical construct’ the emergence of a European political identity is ‘bound up with historical contingencies and with the way in which competing narratives and ideologies shape the self-perceptions of members of the community,’ (Castiglione, 2009: 29). This has taken on a very unique form within Britain, whereby – as May explains – Europe is not seen as part of our ‘national story’ (Gov, 2017).  Indeed, by 2013, Britain ranked at the bottom of a citizenship survey conducted by the European Commission. When asked ‘do you feel you are a citizen of the EU?’ (a ‘supranational community’ which Bellucci et al. see as a form of identity), only 42% answered ‘yes’ (Belluci et al. 2017: 63). The lack of traditional state infrastructure at the hands of the European Union has meant that it has been difficult to cultivate a consolidated European identity – especially so, when Britain has become to perceive being ‘European’ as a rival identity.
Despite growing Euroscepticism in both France and Germany (nations who understand the significance of a united Europe after the horrors of war), both nations seem to have overcome this identity barrier. National and European identities have been able to co-exist precisely because Europe has become, and always has been, part of their ‘national story’.  As the Heinrich Böll Foundation note, this is because of the ‘commonality of experience, past and present, [that] is at the very core of the European project’ (Heinrich Böll, 2014). The Second World War, for example, prompted the need for a united Europe based on collective memory and a desire for peace. Britain’s entry, in contrast, was based on economic and identity-based factors – as will be explained in the next section. Thus, Britain has never felt truly at home in Europe, with it being a ‘place to which Britons go rather than belong,’ (Copsey and Haughton, 81, 2014).  There has long been a metaphysical distance, therefore, between Britain and Europe, whereby – unlike nations such as France and Germany – Britishness has never fitted comfortably alongside or within a European identity.
In her exploration of British identity, Christina Julios cites political theorist Sir Bernard Crick in which he defines being British as an ‘overarching political and legal concept; it signifies allegiance to the laws, government and broad moral and political concepts – like tolerance and freedom of expression – that hold the United Kingdom together,’ (Crick in Julios, Introduction 2008). One may argue that, in stressing the importance of the notion of ‘freedom’ and of self-governance, many Britons see Europe as being a threat to national – and Parliamentary – sovereignty. As Thomas Sampson notes, ‘when leave voters are asked to explain their vote, national sovereignty and immigration are the most frequently cited reasons’ (LSE, 2016). From this, one can identity a disjuncture between the principles that constitute being British (including, for example, Parliamentary sovereignty) and the EU (and its principle of the pooling of sovereignty).
One aspect omitted by Crick in his definition of Britishness, is its historical component. Indeed, this is what ethnosymbolists such as Anthony D. Smith would identify as being a key principle underpinning national identity – the construction of a ‘glorious past’ and of myths which strengthen ‘Britishness’. As Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon notes, Europe was seen as obscuring the possibility of returning to Britain’s ‘golden age’, an age ‘defined by British imperialism, even if present-day Eurosceptics do not call the Empire by its name’(Grob-Fitzibbon 2016: 468). This is important in the sense that European identity is often delineated as conflicting with our historic understanding of Britain and British exceptionalism within the international community. Indeed, this ‘exceptionalism’ is a fundamental part of British history – and thus ‘national story’. As the next three sections will demonstrate, it is the threat to British identity that firstly, made the UK’s relationship with the EU a hostile one from the very beginning and secondly, helped fuel both the Eurosceptic campaigns of the media and of politicians.
Britain in Europe – an exceptional relationship
Britain’s exceptionalism comes in manifold forms – the most obvious of which being that it held a referendum to remain or leave the European Union in the first place. To understand Britain’s long-standing reticence, one need only consider its interactions with the ‘European Project’ during the 20th century, with its unwillingness to join the Coal and Steel Community in 1952 and its unsuccessful attempts to join the EEC in 1963 and 1967. Even after joining in 1973, neither public nor the ruling elite were entirely convinced by membership, which – teamed with Wilson’s need to settle the European question within his own party – prompted the referendum in 1975 on renegotiated terms. As Oliver notes, ‘the history [of Britain and Europe] is a well-documented one of aloofness, vetoes and opt-outs’ (Oliver 2015: 78). Britain’s relationship with the EU has been described as ‘semi-detached’, so much so that Sara Hobolt claims that ‘In many ways… the outcome of the UK’s referendum on EU membership was not surprising… British public has consistently been the most Eurosceptic electorate in the EU ever since the UK joined in 1973,’ (Hobolt 2016: 2) –so, why then, taking into account the apparent suspicion and apprehension towards the European project, did the UK decide to join in the first place?
Issues of identity not only played a part in our vote to leave the European Union, but also in our drive to join the EEC back in the 1970s. After all, identity is relational, malleable, and subject to many contingent factors and, as such, national identities may face moments of insecurity and even crisis. This occurred to Britain, according to Ward, during the 1970s as a result of the loss of imperial power and its perceived loss of purpose and authority on the global stage. This was a time where British identity was ‘no longer seen as innate, static and permanent. Indeed, it was seen as under threat’ (Ward 2004: 1). The answer, was to re-evaluate Britain’s place in the world – and to join the EEC.
Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon also notes that the government’s decision to pursue European membership had been determined by the government’s handling of the end of Empire. They were prompted to address Europe as a result of the changing public perceptions of Britain’s place in the world, and the nation’s attempt to define what it means to be ‘British’ and ‘European’ in a world where Britain held increasingly less power. Enoch Powell, for example, had ‘begun to argue that post-imperial Britain was just as much a new nation as the post-colonial states that the empire’s collapse had created,’ (Grob-Fitzgibbon, 2016: 378).  He believed that Britain had to forge a new post-imperial national identity before consideration of joining the EEC. Both sides of the debate in the 1970s used imperialist arguments to support their perspective, with Powell and the Daily Express using Britain’s imperial self-identity as a reason against membership, and Edward Heath seeing European identity as complementing Britain’s past. In his first speech after Britain joined the EEC, Heath proclaimed that ‘we have all come to recognize our common European heritage, our mutual interests and our European destiny’(CVCE, 2017). However, it is important to acknowledge that membership was not sought merely on the grounds of an identity crisis. After all, British entry in 1973 came at an economically difficult time – especially due to the rise in food prices – and as such, the country voted to join as an attempt to reverse these. Membership was not solely based on a belief in the European project, but rather a result of identifying economic potential within European markets, and as an opportunity to recover a sense of authority on the global stage. This interpretation of EEC as a cure-all for Britain’s troubles meant that incredibly high expectations were set from the very beginning of Britain’s involvement with Europe.
The first test of the success of this approach, came during the 1975 referendum. Fitzgibbon-Grob argues that during the campaign, ‘many Britons began to suspect that it was the decline of empire in combination with entry into the EEC that had thwarted Britain’s place in the world’ (Fitzgibbon-Grob 2016: 6).  Just some six months before the referendum, Britain looked set to leave the EEC, with public opinion only shifting as a result of external factors (such as the increase in food prices). After the referendum result, however, anti-European sentiment returned – only some 50% of the public believing membership to be a ‘good thing’ by January 1976, with this figure dropping to 35% by January 1977 (Grob-Fitzgibbon 2016: 401). Responsibility to guide the country in the years after the referendum fell to Margaret Thatcher, who presented European integration as the ‘next stage of British expansion’(Grob-Fitzgibbon 2016: 403). However, the fall of Thatcher, the controversy caused by the Maastricht treaty, and Britain’s crashing out of the ERM after only two years, simply fueled the interpretation that the European project served to undermine British interests.
This was an argument that, during the late 1980s, the British media became more and more receptive to and then began to propagate. Europe was no longer the answer to solving Britain’s identity crisis, but merely seemed to be perpetuating it, and – by 2016 – those at the heart of the Leave campaign made certain to highlight this, especially through the medium of the print press. This is where we begin to see the importance of structural factors in laying the basis for Euroscepticism to rise within Britain, whereby the media were able to draw upon long-standing issues of identity to foreground the need to leave the European Union.
The long-term role of the print media
Britain has never been fully convinced of its place within Europe, with the public’s relationship with the EEC and later the EU being one of indifference verging on hostility. One must therefore examine the way in which ordinary Britons came to understand Europe and how this Eurosceptic sentiment became Euro-cynical. Much of the responsibility can be placed in the hands of the British media, and in particular the press who have long influenced political opinion and set the political agenda with regards to Britain’s relationship with Europe. Bellucci et al. hypothesize that in order to create a strong European identity, citizens must actively engage with the ‘social and political sphere’, namely through the media and by acquiring knowledge of ‘European peoples and institutions’ (Belluci et al. 2012: 76). The lack of a serious ‘European-level’ press has meant that the public never came to understand events through a European lens, resulting in the suppression of the flow of information from Europe to the British public. Tim Oliver gives the lack of awareness of developments to the European constitution as an example of this (Oliver, 2015). The British press itself, underwent a transformation from pro to anti-European. Daddow analyses the conversion ‘from general support for membership manifest during the time of the 1975 membership referendum, [to] a combination of dissatisfaction with the EU Project and a questioning attitude towards membership itself has come to characterise the default media setting’ (Daddow 2012: 5). The attainment of this ‘default media setting’ can be linked to the symbiosis of Thatcherite Eurosceptisim and the rise of the Murdoch Press.
Baimbridge charts this transition, stating that “during the [1975] campaign, virtually all the mainstream national British press supported the Yes Campaign,’ with only the Morning Star supporting the ‘no’ campaign. Baimbirdge also explores the Daily Express’s relationship with Europe (who, although officially supported the ‘yes’ campaign), he sees as being in line with its ‘empire-first conception of Britain’s world role and concomitant criticism of Britain’s membership bids in the 1960s’ (Baimbridge in Daddow 2012: 6). However, what was, prior and during the 1975 referendum, a sentiment that bubbled beneath the surface, soon became the media’s ‘norm’. This anti-European equilibrium, Daddow postulates, became consolidated by the 1990s, where we begin to see the full extent of the “Murdoch Effect” which built upon the Eurosceptic groundwork laid out by Margaret Thatcher. This refers to the ‘vigorously anti-European agenda of the Murdoch Empire’ (Daddow, 2012: 10) alongside other bastions of the press such as the Telegraph Group and the Harmsworth Group. Such groups, according to Baimbridge, became faithful Eurosceptics partly due to economic reasons, partly due to ideational reasons and partly because of editors’ support of Margaret Thatcher until her political demise (Daddow, 2012). As a result, the sceptic discourse continued to follow thereafter.
Put simply, the 1980s and 1990s saw an increasing number of British people consuming actively anti-EU (as opposed to pro or neutral) information. This is mirrored by data from the Eurobarometer in 1999, whereby 57% of Britons felt ‘not very attached’ or ‘not at all attached’ to Europe – a trend that can be traced back to the 1970s (Eurobarometer, 2016).  Increased Euroscepticism across the British press prompted long-standing anti-EU papers (such as The Express) to further the extremity of their opposition. For example, in November 2010, The Express launched its ‘Get Britain Out of Europe’ campaign – a campaign carefully framed as a struggle to ‘repatriate British sovereignty from a political project that had comprehensively failed’ to help the British ‘win back their country’ (The Express, 2010). It is no surprise then, that the likes of David Olusoga see Brexit as the pursuit of ‘Empire 2.0’ (Guardian, 2017), when we are to consider the media’s focus on British identity as being paradoxical to that of European identity. The media were therefore able to build upon pre-existing structural factors by using arguments of identity, sovereignty and being ‘British’ to compound Euroscpetic feeling.
(Economist, 2016)
Another facet of the media’s long-term campaign, was the creation and maintenance of myths or – what The Economist called ‘little white lies, half-truths and disinformation’, ranging from the surreal to the bizarre. The graph below outlines the kind of myth printed in the British press after the consolidation of the British media’s Euroscepticism in the early 1990s, all of which were proved to be inaccurate by the European Commission (after the creation of a website dedicated to the debunking of anti-EU myths). However, arguably one of the most interesting myths published by a British tabloid, came in the form of the Sun’s claim that ‘the Queen would suddenly have to make her own tea because of new EU rules’ (The Economist, 2016). One could argue that this was an attack on British identity – with the EU presented as a threat to two of Britain’s most notable institutions – the monarchy and tea. Furthermore, in 1998, the Daily Telegraph seethed that ‘new bus safety rules could ban [double-decker buses] from Britain’s streets,’ with ‘the British symbol, recognized worldwide, [now under] threat’ (The EC in the UK, 1998).  Myths, as such, acted as a vehicle for the continuation of easy to digest anti-EU sentiment within the British press.
The print media’s long-term campaign harnessed the interpretation that Europe was a threat to British identity. The promulgation of myths concerning the European Union simply reiterated Europe’s ‘otherness’ in relation to Britain by presenting the institution as detrimental to British sovereignty. The longevity of this campaign (spanning over twenty five years) ensured that the public were well accustomed to anti-European sentiment – thus ensuring that those advocating Leave had plenty of material from which to start their campaign and convert those who were indifferent towards Europe, to leave voters.
The 2016 Referendum
The British press’s sustained attack on Europe and the ‘drip, drip of anti-European propaganda,’ (Shipman, 2016) built upon Britain’s long-established structural Euroscepticism to consolidate anti-European feeling within British culture. As such, and due to the ‘cumulative influence of the media’ (Berry, 2016), the short-term Leave campaign was the final push needed to convert a public already ‘primed by the media to be Eurosceptic’ to vote leave (Berry, 2016). Analysis of a sample of over 3,000 articles published in the months leading up to the referendum found that 41% of articles were pro-leave, 27% were pro-Remain, 8% had no position and 24% were undecided (Levy et al, 2017). Six out of the nine most prominent papers in the UK adopted a staunch ‘Leave’ approach, and thus, it is possible to identify a greater level of public engagement with and consumption of pro-Brexit newspapers. The media’s approach in the final months and days before the referendum was identity based. For example, David A.L. Levy, Billur Aslan and Diego Bironzo stress the importance of the headlines that newspapers chose to run on the day of the election. Although it is impossible to predict the impact that such headlines may have had upon the way people vote, their findings go some way in identifying the rhetorical context that framed the referendum itself.
Newspaper
Headline on Referendum Day
The Sun
Independence Day
Daily Express
Your country needs you; vote leave today
Daily Star
Your country, your vote. Grab your future by the ballots.
(Levy et al 2017: 33).
Above is a sample of such headlines, all three of which have a definite nationalistic undertone. The Daily Express’s ‘Your country needs you’, is particularly evocative – with its harking back to Kitchener- and could be said to uphold the narrative that the European Union is to the detriment of Britain and Britishness. ‘Independence’ (according to the Sun) and as such British freedom, is presented as being only guaranteed by a vote to leave the EU.  Furthermore, Levy et al. also highlight the way in which the Leave-supporting press used arguments of sovereignty, with 29% of ‘arguments’ alluding to the European Union’s stifling of British and Parliamentary Sovereignty (Levy et al. 2017: 21). Issues of Britishness, identity, sovereignty – and thus the long-standing structural factors that contributed to Britain’s EU-hostility – became fuel to feed the media’s Eurosceptic message. Just as in the long-campaign, the media’s short-term campaign focused on the EU as being in opposition to British identity – we needed to ‘take back control’ and regain our independence. The shift in approach by the press from 1975 to 2016 allowed for the creation myths and narratives that constructed and emphasised the ‘otherness’ of Europe in relation to the accepted norms of British culture and identity.
The media’s ability to utilize Britain’s structural insecurities towards Europe meant that the stage was set for the emergence of an effective Leave campaign. The media’s presentation of Britain’s ‘otherness’ was incorporated into the approach of those campaigning to Leave (for example Vote Leave and the non-official campaigns of Leave.EU and UKIP). Using the arguments already presented by the media, the Leave campaign stressed both the otherness of Britain in Europe alongside the otherness of those immigrating to the UK. Arguments with which the public were already familiar, were therefore merely reinforced during the short-campaign by politicians such as Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.
Vote Leave could be said to have had a far clearer message than their Stronger IN counterparts – with the main thrust of their case revolving around the clearly identifiable principles of sovereignty, money and immigration. Put simply but effectively, by the pollster of the Remain campaign Andrew Cooper, ‘the leave campaign seemed to have all the best tunes’ (The Guardian, 2016). This, combined with a media-friendly approach to presenting such ‘tunes’, with charismatic leaders to sing such ‘tunes’, meant that the Remain campaign (who were unable to build-upon long-established pro-EU sentiment), had an uphill battle. The messages advocated by proponents of Brexit during the campaign resonated with the public precisely because of the groundwork provided by long-term factors (such as the media and issues of identity).
Leave had a simple message, and the advantage of presenting an anti-immigration discourse already familiar to the public. The ‘weaponizing’ of immigration, in this sense, can be seen as not only the questioning of whether Britain ‘belongs’ in Europe, but also whether ‘others’ belong in Britain. Such narratives were pursued by Vote Leave, Leave.EU and UKIP to great effect – even in parts of the country with very little immigration. The key here was the synergy of the Eurosceptic press and prominent Leave campaigners, who – together – were able to utilize British identity as a platform from which to highlight the ‘otherness’ of Europe. Kerry Moore, when analyzing Wales’s vote to Leave, stressed the importance of the media and of politicians’ long-term campaign of introducing anti-immigration sentiment, even in parts of the country where immigration was not an issue.  She notes that ‘it was not just a xenophobic campaign, arguably, but the cumulative force of an anti-immigration sentiment, long legitimated by the political mainstream and reproduced in the news media that won it for Leave’ (Moore 2016: 28).  Although this argument does not necessarily correspond with Scotland’s referendum result, it points at the cultivation of a certain culture towards Europe, whereby in other parts of the country a British sense of ‘pride’ allowed for the absolution of responsibility for our nation’s social-ills. This ‘cultivation’ is the result of the media’s capitalizing upon structural Euroscepticism, and the Leave campaign’s ability to further communicate this anti-immigration sentiment to the British public.
Stronger IN, on the other hand failed to make the positive case for immigration. Instead, they prioritized arguments concerning the economy, for which they were accused of scare-mongering. The Remain camp also failed to deal with the consequences of the ONS’s figures concerning net migration in 2015: 333,000 (ONS, 2016). The publication of such figures came at precisely the wrong time for those advocating continued EU membership, with Will Straw admitting that, ‘immigration was snuffling out our opportunity to talk about the economy,’ (The Guardian, 2016). At this point, Remain did not change tactic – they continued stressing the line that Britain would be ‘stronger, safer, and better off in the EU’ (a phrase which Shipman rightly notes, ‘needed explaining’). Vote Leave – under the leadership of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, used such figures to their benefit, with a leaked joint-letter to David Cameron (published in The Sunday Times), attacking the Conservatives’ immigration targets. They wrote that ‘this promise is plainly not achievable as long as the UK is a member of the EU and the failure to keep it is corrosive of public trust in politics’ (The Guardian, 2016). The language of trust is important here as it feeds into the presentation of a vote to leave as being a vote against the ‘establishment’. Such an approach was seen as advantageous to Leave, and was thus echoed by numerous Brexiteers, including Priti Patel who labelled Cameron and Osborne ‘too rich’ to understand the impact of immigration on ordinary people (Financial Times, 2016).
It is clear therefore that it was not only what was said that is important, but also the way in which arguments were framed. Leave figures such as Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage were able to do this by tapping into the pre-existing worries surrounding British identity. For example, the Leave campaign remodeled colonial and imperial language by exalting the pride that the nation felt after winning World War II and defeating the Nazis. Elliott Green notes that references to the war ‘featured prominently in the Leave campaign’ (LSE, 2017), such as Nigel Farage’s proclamation that ‘That’s what we need, isn’t it? A great escape from the European Union” (Reuters, 2016). Another example given is that of Boris Johnson, who compared the European project and the notion of an ‘ever closer union’ to the work of Napoleon and Hitler. He claimed ‘various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this [unite Europe] by different methods’ (The Telegraph, 2016). The notion of an ‘ever closer union’ – which itself was born from the horrors of World Wars and the desire for a peaceful Europe, was dismissed by Eurosceptics as being counter to Britain’s post-war spirit. Leave tapped into the understanding of Europe within the British psyche.