The Politics and Economics of Brexit by Simon Bulmer & Lucia Quaglia

Author:Simon Bulmer & Lucia Quaglia [Bulmer, Simon & Quaglia, Lucia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138389854
Google: 845cuQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 40758437
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

The demand for Brexit

All three factors hypothesized to generate demand for disintegration were present in the run-up to the Brexit vote. The internal market and the Eastern enlargement of the EU gave an unanticipated and undesired boost to immigration to the UK. The right-wing Eurosceptic United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) strengthened its role in British politics and scored important electoral successes. Finally, David Cameron announced a referendum on membership to placate Eurosceptics in his own Conservative Party and counter the electoral threat of UKIP.

Whereas the UK has regularly opposed the transfer of core state powers to the EU, it has always been an ardent supporter of the internal market and enlargement. And whereas it has regularly sought opt-outs from treaty revisions, it was one of only four member states opening its labour market to the ten new member states in 2004. Thanks to its liberal immigration policy and economic attractiveness, the UK has seen an increase in net migration since the late 1990s. This net migration has initially originated from outside the EU – and has remained a predominantly non-EU phenomenon. Yet the share of net migration from the EU has risen since the mid-2000s, first after Eastern enlargement and then again because of the Great Recession.2 Immigration from the EU has been an effect of British advocacy for deep and wide European market integration, but British governments neither intended nor anticipated its size and growth. Consequently, both major parties have abandoned their liberal immigration policy stances. Yet intra-EU migration is guaranteed as an individual right by the EU’s freedom of movement rules. Despite its pledge to bring down immigration significantly to the ‘tens of thousands’, the Conservative government failed to do so ahead of the Brexit vote. In a YouGov survey at the end of 2015, 63 percent of the respondents named immigration as the most pressing issue facing Britain – giving it a 24-percentage point lead over healthcare, the second issue (Clarke et al. 2017: 11). The discrepancy between issue salience and government performance was ready for exploitation by a challenger party.

This is what UKIP did. The party combined its traditional Europhobia with ‘strident opposition to mass immigration and the free movement of EU nationals. The dual strategy of communicating both anti-EU and anti-immigration messages was accompanied by populist attacks against the established parties’ (Clarke et al. 2017: 88). This formula resonated well with voters and carried UKIP to electoral success, above all in the 2014 European elections (Clarke et al. 2017: 111–45). In addition, UKIP infused the EU membership issue with the salience of the immigration issue and the dissatisfaction with government performance and thus put powerful momentum behind the Leave campaign.

Since the 1975 EU referendum, direct democratic mechanisms had not driven or constrained British EU policy. In contrast to Denmark, the other champion of differentiated integration, none of the British opt-outs resulted from negative referendums. Rather, UK governments secured differentiated integration in negotiations ahead of intergovernmental agreement. Yet, the Europe-wide divide between more integration-friendly political and economic elites and sceptical citizens applies to the UK as well.

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