There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

by Fiona Hill

Many Tories believed that EU membership imposed onerous economic, political, and legal constraints on the United Kingdom. Membership drained tax revenues away for EU common funding and prevented the UK from charting its own course on trade and general business issues. Some decried the growing strain on the UK’s schools, public services, and NHS budgets caused by the EU’s free-movement-of-people directive, which had boosted Britain’s population by an estimated 3.6 million after 2004. Others saw benefits from continued formal membership but wanted to push Brussels on institutional and budgetary reforms to increase the UK’s room for maneuver. The prime minister at the time, David Cameron, fell into the latter camp. Cameron hoped to resolve the party’s internal disputes once and for all by throwing the issue open to the population at large. He gambled that he could use the referendum to improve his negotiating leverage with the EU hierarchy in Brussels.