The article explores why the EU and European leadership did not at least give Cameron some real, tangible concessions showing they were serious about reforming the EU. Instead he was sent back empty handed, with a flea in his ear about the UK being time wasters.
I recall a speech by Major in Germany at the time, that the risks of UK voting to leave were very significant indeed. He was not taken seriously. So instead Cameron was left thrashing around trying to save his skin by attempting to sell us a polished t**d, while Osborne turned on his Michael Corleone impersonation. Even the Remainers largely dropped the mantra, “Remain within a reformed EU” within a few weeks, because they realised it sounded so very hollow and was being laughed at.
I was (naively) actually hopeful that Cameron would come back with some sort of roadmap, however nebulous, for real reform in the EU, although I doubt anything he came back with by then would have persuaded me personally to vote Remain. But instead he failed miserably – came back with a few weasel words. I cannot speak for others, but the message that finally came through loud and clear to this Brexiteer was: you cannot reform the unreformable. Also, now looking back, another inescapable conclusion is, the point is moot if the European leaders in fact genuinely wanted the UK to Remain.
At that time, even suggesting that the EU needed reform was an idea which – if expressed – would earn you a bit of a dressing down if you were outside the UK (I speak from experience. Extensive experience). That very same idea has now taken root right across the EU. I think perhaps it took longer for the penny to drop outside of the UK because of the higher emotional attachment to the EU on this side of the channel. People are generally less willing to admit that there’s something wrong with something they love.
I don’t think he ever understood the EU, Britain’s role in it , its way of thinking. The comments in the papers for the last five years show an extraordinary lack of understanding even of its basic mechanisms. I remember one hapless Hansard clerk being given six weeks to find out how many laws Britain had derived from EU Directives. That is, excluding trade, product standards, the CAP , economic regulation. Some 250000 pages of legislaton were involved. That our MPs and media experts had no idea was sad but did not surprise me. In the 15 years I worked,for the EU, I was never asked, either by my old university or by friends and acquaintances ,anything about how it worked, what it or I did. Snarky comments about high salaries, that was about it. Good things were presented as ideas of the government. Bad things were the fault of the EU. Even the accession of ten former Soviet,Colonies in 2004 took place without a fanfare, a back story. Perhaps because Yalta and Potsdam were too embarrassing to remember. Then there was 2012 and the PIGs, and the alleged contagion. The Guardian, among others, trumpeted the forthcoming decline of the euro and the fall of capitalism. I am sure this affected the Brexit vote in 2016, but by then the FT, the Economist,etc, had long forgotten their earlier words..
Yes. What amazes me is that people expect the Camerons of the world to understand some of these complexities and they obviously don’t. To me this is like having Ronald Reagan as head of a government – he doesn’t actually understand anything but relies on trusted advisers. But if the advisers don’t understand either……..
Sure, but there was a huge debate in the run up to Referendum, and nothing stopped those with deep technical knowledge of the workings of the EU from putting their case forward – they weren’t obliged to participate in the pythonesque ” ..yes it is… no it isn’t.. ” style debate, they could have tried introducing some of the complexities they saw into the debate to make it more sophisticated.
In fact, every time they attempted to make the case that the UK was so interlocked into the legal, political and economic frameworks of the EU that it couldn’t leave without self-harm, they damaged their own case. If such an argument was ever put to me, my instant reaction would be an angry: ‘How on earth did that happen? Did you all do that behind our backs?’, because I don’t recall mainstream politicians ever explicitly stating to us the consequences of signing up to Maastricht, Lisbon etc was that we were slowly removing our ability to backout in practice, all the while maintaining the pretence that sovereignty was in fact only pooled at our behest with us in full control and that our citizenry could in fact retract that privilege at will. And my reaction to the Remain case was often: ‘so what you are in fact saying is, you have been lying to us all these years and we don’t really have the option to retract?’. Can you see why that might make some people angry and lash out in a way you don’t necessarily consider rational.
As to the Yalta/Potsdam stuff, well those Eastern European countries became victims of a stitch-up between Roosevelt and Stalin, with Churchill having a minor say. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they were courted by the EU (and by the UK more than anyone) and they started joining, but I would make the case it was somewhat of a Faustian bargain – they didn’t fully understand the value systems they were buying into, they just saw the big subsidies that would come their way and their eyes lit up – they didn’t necessarily see they were would be jockeyed out of their cultural and political comfort zones over time as part of the package.
Unfortunately the European Commission is so intransigent and ideological that there will be no “grand bargain” to heal the rift, and it will result in the EU’s demise.
It was clear that if the EU didn’t give a fig for the position of a British PM when Britain could still actually leave, it would care even less once we were inextricably concreted into it by euro membership and the surrender to EU control our army, deterrent, and UN Security Council seat. A defeat for Leave in the referendum would have led directly and rapidly to Kenneth Clarke’s dream.
Chris Wheatley
2 years ago
Brexit is not about governments; it is about people. It is about the weakness of Cameron, followed by the weakness of May followed by the strength of Johnson. In the press and in these columns Johnson gets a huge amount of flak but his strength drove Brexit onwards.
The resulting problems with Europe did not arise because of the thousands of minor people in Strasbourg and Brussels but because of the strength of Macron and Merkel. (We would say intransigence, not strength). They stood for what they believed and they turned Britain back into an enemy of Europe. Merkel has gone. Macron will soon go and new people will come along with different things to prove. Time always heals.
Earl King
2 years ago
I always felt the Brits were a poor fit for the EU. First they never bought in to the Euro and secondly I don’t believe they ever wanted to be subservient to Germany let alone having the size of their electric tea kettles determined by someone in Brussels who drinks coffee. Other than Germany it is hard for me to think any country in the world wants unrestricted immigration…..Especially from populations that have such a different culture and experience.
Paul Dacre (at that time in charge of The Daily Mail) visited Cameron at No. 10 to discuss why the Mail was supporting Brexit. In the background the BBC 6 o’clock news was playing scenes of migrants floooding across borders into the EU. Dacre turned to Cameron and said whilst that continues the UK will never vote to stay in the EU. Whatever you think of Dacre, he instinctively understands the people of the UK in a way that Cameron certainly did not. (All Out War by Tim Shipman was an excellent read.)
Matt B
2 years ago
Good article. The EU’s approach to its borders and the UK may also be seen in the current context of French-German cosying up to Russia, while the UK contests Russia’s annexed Crimean waters alone (US over the horizon) and contributes trip-wire troops to the Baltic. As for divergence, hasn’t Germany long been heading down a Sino-Russian road, with France and half the EU behind?
Last edited 2 years ago by Matt B
Paddy Taylor
2 years ago
It simply never occurred to anyone in the EU itself, or among the governments of the EU member states, that anyone would be so (as they saw it) stupid as to vote to cast themselves out of the club, or even if they did, that any government would allow such a decision to stand.
We’d always been semi-detached from the European project (Schengen, EZ) – with even remain supporters admitting they could see faults with the EU but believing that, by Remaining, the UK could help reform it. (The perfect example of the triumph of hope over experience if ever there was one)
David Owen, probably the most pro-EU front rank British politician of my lifetime – and a man who knew the people and systems within the senior Brussels ranks better than most, recognised the impossibility of such a dream. After a career as a committed champion to the European cause he recognised that the EU in its current incarnation was “Structurally incapable of reform” and eventually backed and campaigned for Brexit.
It never occurs to some Remainers that he might have known a little more about it than those who insist all of us Brexit supporters were simply ignorant, racist coffin-dodgers who wanted a return to the 1950s.
It is the EU leaders’ blind adherence to “the project” that means they can offer no concessions and brook no dissent. That refusal of EU leaders and supporters to accept there are perfectly well-intentioned and well-informed people who are opposed to any further integration is what will eventually lead to the collapse of the bloc.
I’m fairly sure that Brexit was merely the first of many.
Last edited 2 years ago by Paddy Taylor
Peter LR
2 years ago
Thank you; very comprehensive and unopinionated.
It will be very interesting to see what the EU becomes next year when both Merkel and Macron are gone.
Katharine Eyre
2 years ago
“But the Northern Ireland Protocol is also the EU’s burden. Brussels must now reconcile its expressed commitment to the Good Friday Agreement and its need to defend the borders of the Single Market…”
Haha, very subtly and diplomatically put 😉 Does anyone still really believe the EU cares a jot about the GFA? “As Macron showed that October when he vetoed the start of accession talks for North Macedonia and Albania, the French President doesn’t believe that the EU is strengthened by sheer size. He thinks the Union needs to look like it is exercising power.”
The veto was about French domestic politics more than anything. Lots of Albanians still try and claim asylum in France and it would have been hard, if not impossible to explain to the French people why EU membership talks should be started with the country. The risk of ceding power to Le Pen (who at that point looked like quite the threat) was too large.
Alleged commitment. Macron would be quite happy to see renewed instability, and the loss to the UK of both NI and Scotland. And Brexit was negotiated with as many delayed policy IEDs along the road as possible. It’s a politics of spite: e.g. allies do not contest eachother’s territorial integrity or threaten to cut off energy supplies (formerly a Russian game)
France (and especially Macron and his mates) see the EU as France’s vehicle back to greatness (although, weirdly, it’s only ever Britain who is accused of trying to turn back the clock – funny that!) Britain’s decision to leave is a huge threat to that ambition. So, as the author also points out, Brexit needs to be seen to be awful to stop other countries getting ideas and throwing a spanner in the great French works. Witness the near frenzy that happened when the UK zipped ahead with vaccinations – it drove them mad.
Friendships drop by the wayside fairly quickly when one side feels like the other side is endangering their appointment with destiny.
De Gaulle caused a lot of problems. The visciousness of French colonisation (Madagascar, Algeria, Indo-China) was all about the pig-headedness of De Gaulle and France is still trying to live in his time, still trying to prove that France is great – when it is, in fact, just ordinary.
No I don’t mean decolonisation. From memory, parts of Algeria (populace parts) were not included in 1848. The Algerian wars were not about decolonisation, they were about trying to hang on to the colonies. Also true for Madagascar. Indo-China is very complex but Dien Bien Phu was not about decolonisation but was about hanging on.
If you are an expert in the field, you will use ‘decolonisation’ as the term for hanging on to colonies but in everyday English this would be meaningless to most people.
Well, Algeria does have oil. Not sure about its viscosity.
Matt B
2 years ago
There is an ironic side-bar to this aspect raised by Helen: “By the early summer, the risk for Angela Merkel was not whether British voters would choose to leave the EU but whether her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s attempt to expel Greece from the Euro would succeed. ”
The very spectacle of the EU’s harrowing of Greece to save lending banks led some to question the EU for the first time – a second-order effect of failing to see Greece’s plight interacting with UK perceptions going into its ‘unlikely’ later refrendum.
Last edited 2 years ago by Matt B
Charlie Dibsdale
2 years ago
I think the EU could have made concessions. The free movement of people as a principle could have been kept, but a time limit on open immigration from recently joined Eastern European countries could have been temporarily limited until countries in the union levelled up economically. The EU humiliated Cameron.
Martin Smith
2 years ago
Cameron, as all his subsequent behaviour has shown, is a shallow, lazy amateur who mistakes ‘connections’ for relationships and words for actions. Johnson, a product of the same production line, is equally vain and indolent, but at least shows persistence under pressure coupled with childlike buffoonery which, when all around are humourless, fragile egoists, has proven to be sufficient for success…
Liam O'Mahony
2 years ago
I find it telling that in all the comments there is virtually no mention of Northern Ireland! I’m assuming this proves the average Britton has zero interest in NI? This is not a criticism by the way: as a citizen of the ROI I find NI politics a huge turn off.
I wonder if the UK lost NI would the vast majority of British citizens care? Would they even notice? Are BJ, the Tories and the British in general sick of NI, DUP intransigence, Sinn Féin threats (backward-looking extremists on both sides: a sizeable proportion of the 1.6m pop.)? Just as so many of us in the Republic are: we happy little Europeans!
Chris Eaton
2 years ago
The EU bungles itself on a daily basis. And by ‘bungles’ I mean…well, I think you know what I mean. If not, I’ll be happy to explain.
Douglas McCallum
2 years ago
The article asserts that “the British electorate did collectively decide that the UK should exist the EU”. Wrong!! In fact, the great majority of the electorate (62.5%) either voted Remain or stayed home and didn’t vote. The pro-Brexit vote (37.5%) was very much a minority of the electorate. Now, if you wish to say that a majority of those voting in the Referendum voted for Brexit, that of course is correct. But to claim that “the British electorate” voted for Brexit is simply wrong – and seriously misleading. Not a promising way to start an article.
The article explores why the EU and European leadership did not at least give Cameron some real, tangible concessions showing they were serious about reforming the EU. Instead he was sent back empty handed, with a flea in his ear about the UK being time wasters.
I recall a speech by Major in Germany at the time, that the risks of UK voting to leave were very significant indeed. He was not taken seriously. So instead Cameron was left thrashing around trying to save his skin by attempting to sell us a polished t**d, while Osborne turned on his Michael Corleone impersonation. Even the Remainers largely dropped the mantra, “Remain within a reformed EU” within a few weeks, because they realised it sounded so very hollow and was being laughed at.
I was (naively) actually hopeful that Cameron would come back with some sort of roadmap, however nebulous, for real reform in the EU, although I doubt anything he came back with by then would have persuaded me personally to vote Remain. But instead he failed miserably – came back with a few weasel words. I cannot speak for others, but the message that finally came through loud and clear to this Brexiteer was: you cannot reform the unreformable. Also, now looking back, another inescapable conclusion is, the point is moot if the European leaders in fact genuinely wanted the UK to Remain.
At that time, even suggesting that the EU needed reform was an idea which – if expressed – would earn you a bit of a dressing down if you were outside the UK (I speak from experience. Extensive experience). That very same idea has now taken root right across the EU. I think perhaps it took longer for the penny to drop outside of the UK because of the higher emotional attachment to the EU on this side of the channel. People are generally less willing to admit that there’s something wrong with something they love.
I don’t think he ever understood the EU, Britain’s role in it , its way of thinking. The comments in the papers for the last five years show an extraordinary lack of understanding even of its basic mechanisms. I remember one hapless Hansard clerk being given six weeks to find out how many laws Britain had derived from EU Directives. That is, excluding trade, product standards, the CAP , economic regulation. Some 250000 pages of legislaton were involved. That our MPs and media experts had no idea was sad but did not surprise me. In the 15 years I worked,for the EU, I was never asked, either by my old university or by friends and acquaintances ,anything about how it worked, what it or I did. Snarky comments about high salaries, that was about it. Good things were presented as ideas of the government. Bad things were the fault of the EU. Even the accession of ten former Soviet,Colonies in 2004 took place without a fanfare, a back story. Perhaps because Yalta and Potsdam were too embarrassing to remember. Then there was 2012 and the PIGs, and the alleged contagion. The Guardian, among others, trumpeted the forthcoming decline of the euro and the fall of capitalism. I am sure this affected the Brexit vote in 2016, but by then the FT, the Economist,etc, had long forgotten their earlier words..
Yes. What amazes me is that people expect the Camerons of the world to understand some of these complexities and they obviously don’t. To me this is like having Ronald Reagan as head of a government – he doesn’t actually understand anything but relies on trusted advisers. But if the advisers don’t understand either……..
Sure, but there was a huge debate in the run up to Referendum, and nothing stopped those with deep technical knowledge of the workings of the EU from putting their case forward – they weren’t obliged to participate in the pythonesque ” ..yes it is… no it isn’t.. ” style debate, they could have tried introducing some of the complexities they saw into the debate to make it more sophisticated.
In fact, every time they attempted to make the case that the UK was so interlocked into the legal, political and economic frameworks of the EU that it couldn’t leave without self-harm, they damaged their own case. If such an argument was ever put to me, my instant reaction would be an angry: ‘How on earth did that happen? Did you all do that behind our backs?’, because I don’t recall mainstream politicians ever explicitly stating to us the consequences of signing up to Maastricht, Lisbon etc was that we were slowly removing our ability to backout in practice, all the while maintaining the pretence that sovereignty was in fact only pooled at our behest with us in full control and that our citizenry could in fact retract that privilege at will. And my reaction to the Remain case was often: ‘so what you are in fact saying is, you have been lying to us all these years and we don’t really have the option to retract?’. Can you see why that might make some people angry and lash out in a way you don’t necessarily consider rational.
As to the Yalta/Potsdam stuff, well those Eastern European countries became victims of a stitch-up between Roosevelt and Stalin, with Churchill having a minor say. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they were courted by the EU (and by the UK more than anyone) and they started joining, but I would make the case it was somewhat of a Faustian bargain – they didn’t fully understand the value systems they were buying into, they just saw the big subsidies that would come their way and their eyes lit up – they didn’t necessarily see they were would be jockeyed out of their cultural and political comfort zones over time as part of the package.
Interesting
Unfortunately the European Commission is so intransigent and ideological that there will be no “grand bargain” to heal the rift, and it will result in the EU’s demise.
Yes, but a bit of wishful thinking?
It was clear that if the EU didn’t give a fig for the position of a British PM when Britain could still actually leave, it would care even less once we were inextricably concreted into it by euro membership and the surrender to EU control our army, deterrent, and UN Security Council seat. A defeat for Leave in the referendum would have led directly and rapidly to Kenneth Clarke’s dream.
Brexit is not about governments; it is about people. It is about the weakness of Cameron, followed by the weakness of May followed by the strength of Johnson. In the press and in these columns Johnson gets a huge amount of flak but his strength drove Brexit onwards.
The resulting problems with Europe did not arise because of the thousands of minor people in Strasbourg and Brussels but because of the strength of Macron and Merkel. (We would say intransigence, not strength). They stood for what they believed and they turned Britain back into an enemy of Europe. Merkel has gone. Macron will soon go and new people will come along with different things to prove. Time always heals.
I always felt the Brits were a poor fit for the EU. First they never bought in to the Euro and secondly I don’t believe they ever wanted to be subservient to Germany let alone having the size of their electric tea kettles determined by someone in Brussels who drinks coffee. Other than Germany it is hard for me to think any country in the world wants unrestricted immigration…..Especially from populations that have such a different culture and experience.
Paul Dacre (at that time in charge of The Daily Mail) visited Cameron at No. 10 to discuss why the Mail was supporting Brexit. In the background the BBC 6 o’clock news was playing scenes of migrants floooding across borders into the EU. Dacre turned to Cameron and said whilst that continues the UK will never vote to stay in the EU. Whatever you think of Dacre, he instinctively understands the people of the UK in a way that Cameron certainly did not. (All Out War by Tim Shipman was an excellent read.)
Good article. The EU’s approach to its borders and the UK may also be seen in the current context of French-German cosying up to Russia, while the UK contests Russia’s annexed Crimean waters alone (US over the horizon) and contributes trip-wire troops to the Baltic. As for divergence, hasn’t Germany long been heading down a Sino-Russian road, with France and half the EU behind?
It simply never occurred to anyone in the EU itself, or among the governments of the EU member states, that anyone would be so (as they saw it) stupid as to vote to cast themselves out of the club, or even if they did, that any government would allow such a decision to stand.
We’d always been semi-detached from the European project (Schengen, EZ) – with even remain supporters admitting they could see faults with the EU but believing that, by Remaining, the UK could help reform it. (The perfect example of the triumph of hope over experience if ever there was one)
David Owen, probably the most pro-EU front rank British politician of my lifetime – and a man who knew the people and systems within the senior Brussels ranks better than most, recognised the impossibility of such a dream. After a career as a committed champion to the European cause he recognised that the EU in its current incarnation was “Structurally incapable of reform” and eventually backed and campaigned for Brexit.
It never occurs to some Remainers that he might have known a little more about it than those who insist all of us Brexit supporters were simply ignorant, racist coffin-dodgers who wanted a return to the 1950s.
It is the EU leaders’ blind adherence to “the project” that means they can offer no concessions and brook no dissent. That refusal of EU leaders and supporters to accept there are perfectly well-intentioned and well-informed people who are opposed to any further integration is what will eventually lead to the collapse of the bloc.
I’m fairly sure that Brexit was merely the first of many.
Thank you; very comprehensive and unopinionated.
It will be very interesting to see what the EU becomes next year when both Merkel and Macron are gone.
“But the Northern Ireland Protocol is also the EU’s burden. Brussels must now reconcile its expressed commitment to the Good Friday Agreement and its need to defend the borders of the Single Market…”
Haha, very subtly and diplomatically put 😉 Does anyone still really believe the EU cares a jot about the GFA?
“As Macron showed that October when he vetoed the start of accession talks for North Macedonia and Albania, the French President doesn’t believe that the EU is strengthened by sheer size. He thinks the Union needs to look like it is exercising power.”
The veto was about French domestic politics more than anything. Lots of Albanians still try and claim asylum in France and it would have been hard, if not impossible to explain to the French people why EU membership talks should be started with the country. The risk of ceding power to Le Pen (who at that point looked like quite the threat) was too large.
Alleged commitment. Macron would be quite happy to see renewed instability, and the loss to the UK of both NI and Scotland. And Brexit was negotiated with as many delayed policy IEDs along the road as possible. It’s a politics of spite: e.g. allies do not contest eachother’s territorial integrity or threaten to cut off energy supplies (formerly a Russian game)
France (and especially Macron and his mates) see the EU as France’s vehicle back to greatness (although, weirdly, it’s only ever Britain who is accused of trying to turn back the clock – funny that!) Britain’s decision to leave is a huge threat to that ambition. So, as the author also points out, Brexit needs to be seen to be awful to stop other countries getting ideas and throwing a spanner in the great French works. Witness the near frenzy that happened when the UK zipped ahead with vaccinations – it drove them mad.
Friendships drop by the wayside fairly quickly when one side feels like the other side is endangering their appointment with destiny.
De Gaulle caused a lot of problems. The visciousness of French colonisation (Madagascar, Algeria, Indo-China) was all about the pig-headedness of De Gaulle and France is still trying to live in his time, still trying to prove that France is great – when it is, in fact, just ordinary.
You mean decolonisation. Algeria was a department of France more than 100 years before Hawaii became a State in the US.
No I don’t mean decolonisation. From memory, parts of Algeria (populace parts) were not included in 1848. The Algerian wars were not about decolonisation, they were about trying to hang on to the colonies. Also true for Madagascar. Indo-China is very complex but Dien Bien Phu was not about decolonisation but was about hanging on.
If you are an expert in the field, you will use ‘decolonisation’ as the term for hanging on to colonies but in everyday English this would be meaningless to most people.
Eh … de Gaulle made the decision to decolonize Algeria. It’s why the pied-noirs hated him and made several attempts on his life.
Were you going for “viciousness” or “viscousness” there? 😉 Viscous colonisation…the mind boggles…
Well, Algeria does have oil. Not sure about its viscosity.
There is an ironic side-bar to this aspect raised by Helen: “By the early summer, the risk for Angela Merkel was not whether British voters would choose to leave the EU but whether her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s attempt to expel Greece from the Euro would succeed. ”
The very spectacle of the EU’s harrowing of Greece to save lending banks led some to question the EU for the first time – a second-order effect of failing to see Greece’s plight interacting with UK perceptions going into its ‘unlikely’ later refrendum.
I think the EU could have made concessions. The free movement of people as a principle could have been kept, but a time limit on open immigration from recently joined Eastern European countries could have been temporarily limited until countries in the union levelled up economically. The EU humiliated Cameron.
Cameron, as all his subsequent behaviour has shown, is a shallow, lazy amateur who mistakes ‘connections’ for relationships and words for actions. Johnson, a product of the same production line, is equally vain and indolent, but at least shows persistence under pressure coupled with childlike buffoonery which, when all around are humourless, fragile egoists, has proven to be sufficient for success…
I find it telling that in all the comments there is virtually no mention of Northern Ireland! I’m assuming this proves the average Britton has zero interest in NI? This is not a criticism by the way: as a citizen of the ROI I find NI politics a huge turn off.
I wonder if the UK lost NI would the vast majority of British citizens care? Would they even notice? Are BJ, the Tories and the British in general sick of NI, DUP intransigence, Sinn Féin threats (backward-looking extremists on both sides: a sizeable proportion of the 1.6m pop.)? Just as so many of us in the Republic are: we happy little Europeans!
The EU bungles itself on a daily basis. And by ‘bungles’ I mean…well, I think you know what I mean. If not, I’ll be happy to explain.
The article asserts that “the British electorate did collectively decide that the UK should exist the EU”. Wrong!! In fact, the great majority of the electorate (62.5%) either voted Remain or stayed home and didn’t vote. The pro-Brexit vote (37.5%) was very much a minority of the electorate. Now, if you wish to say that a majority of those voting in the Referendum voted for Brexit, that of course is correct. But to claim that “the British electorate” voted for Brexit is simply wrong – and seriously misleading. Not a promising way to start an article.
In fact, the great majority of the electorate (66%) either voted Leave or stayed home and didn’t vote. 🙂