Whether Britain should or should not be a member of the European Union (EU) and, if so, on what terms, has long been a disruptive and divisive issue in British party politics. In 1975 it occasioned the first ever UK-wide referendum. In the 1980s it helped split the Labour Party and in the 1990s gave rise to serious tensions in the governing Conservative Party. Most recently, it has disturbed the normal rhythms of postwar English electoral politics with the rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).
It was the rise in UKIP support — and continuing tensions inside the Conservative Party — that persuaded David Cameron to promise in January 2013 that, should the Conservatives win an overall majority in the 2015 general election, he would, after renegotiating Britain’s terms of membership, hold a second referendum on Britain’s EU membership. In an implicit acknowledgement of the inability of the country’s mechanisms of representative democracy to resolve the European question, it was back to the tactics of the 1970s.
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