On 23 June 2016 more than 33 million Britons went to the polls, 72.2% of the electorate: a turnout not seen in a national vote since the 1990s. The ballot paper asked: "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" By the early hours of 24 June the result was clear: 17,410,742 votes to leave (51.9%), 16,141,241 to remain (48.1%). A difference of about 1.27 million votes that changed the country's history.
The two campaigns
The official Leave campaign, Vote Leave, was led by Boris Johnson, former mayor of London, and minister Michael Gove, with strategist Dominic Cummings in charge. Its slogan, Take Back Control, summed it all up: regaining control over laws, borders and money. Alongside it, with a harder line on immigration, was Nigel Farage's Leave.EU. The Remain side, Britain Stronger in Europe, had the backing of prime minister Cameron, most of the government, the Labour opposition, business and almost all economists, and focused on the economic risks of leaving, a strategy its opponents dubbed Project Fear.
The campaign was bitter. On 16 June, a week before the vote, Labour MP Jo Cox, a Remain supporter, was murdered in her Yorkshire constituency by a far-right extremist: campaigning was suspended for three days. In the following years the Electoral Commission fined Vote Leave for breaking spending limits, and there was much debate about the use of data and targeted advertising on social media.
Who voted how
The vote drew a sharp map of Britain's divides.
- Place: England voted Leave by 53.4% and Wales by 52.5%; Scotland chose Remain with 62% and Northern Ireland with 55.8%. London voted Remain with almost 60%. In Gibraltar, an overseas territory, Remain topped 95%.
- City and country: the big university cities (London, Manchester, Bristol, Liverpool, Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh) voted to stay; declining industrial towns in the north and Midlands and the eastern coast voted to leave. The highest Leave vote was in Boston, Lincolnshire, with 75.6%.
- Age: according to post-vote polls, about three in four 18-24-year-olds voted Remain, while six in ten voters over 65 chose Leave.
- Education: the most predictive variable. Areas with more graduates voted heavily to stay, those with fewer qualifications to leave.
Why Leave won
Scholars point to several intertwined causes. The first is immigration: between 2004 and 2016 the foreign-born population had grown rapidly, and in many provincial areas the change was felt as imposed from above. The second is economic: areas that lost their industry in the 1980s and then suffered public spending cuts after the 2008 crisis felt forgotten by London. The third is identity: for many older English voters Europe represented a loss of sovereignty and national identity. Finally, distrust of the political and economic elites who backed Remain played its part.
The immediate consequences
On the morning of 24 June sterling lost about 8% against the dollar, its biggest one-day fall in decades. Cameron announced his resignation outside Downing Street. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn faced an internal revolt, Scotland said it would consider a new independence referendum, and in Brussels a period of uncertainty began that would last four years. For what came next see the full chronology and the Brexit special.