After a bitter referendum campaign, the United Kingdom has voted for Brexit, making the decision to leave the European Union. This is the first time that the E.U. has lost a member and will have dramatic consequences for European politics. Although the United Kingdom has sometimes been an uncomfortable member of the E.U., it has played a crucial role, for example in helping to create a shared market across Europe and in pushing for the enlargement of the E.U. to include Eastern European countries after the end of the Cold War. Now, the U.K. has decided to leave.
Brexit will reshape British parliamentary politics
The first loser from Brexit is the man who decided to hold a referendum in the first place: British Prime Minister David Cameron. After winning moderate concessions from the E.U., he pressed for a “yes” vote. His failure to secure one has forced him to resign. Cameron’s Conservative Party has been badly split on E.U. questions for the last two decades, and one of his major rivals, former London mayor Boris Johnson, belatedly started to advocate Brexit, in what was widely perceived as an effort to challenge Cameron and his chosen successor. The Conservative Party is about to be plunged into a bitter leadership fight.
However, the Conservatives’ main political rival, the Labour Party, is unlikely to do much better. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Labour, was an ineffective and not especially enthusiastic campaigner for the “remain” side. Labour’s traditional strongholds in the north of England voted heavily in favor of leaving. Corbyn too has many enemies in his own party, some of whom will very likely use this to try to unseat him.
The splintering of the United Kingdom will accelerate
The U.K. consists of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. England and Wales voted decisively in favor of leaving the European Union. Scotland, and to a lesser extent Northern Ireland, wanted to stay. This split may exacerbate existing fault lines in British politics. Scotland held a failed referendum on independence a couple of years ago; some voices in the Scottish independence movement are already pushing for a new referendum that might allow Scotland to leave the U.K. and remain part of the E.U. Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein party has already said that it wants to renew its push to reunite Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.