It couldn’t have been a more different atmosphere. Back in the heady consensus-driven days of the 1975 referendum on whether to stay in the ‘Common Market’, every single national newspaper urged a ‘yes’ vote with the exception of the Morning Star. Rupert Murdoch, the Mail’s Sir David English, prime minister Harold Wilson and former PM Edward Heath all scorned the arguments of left-wing proponents of a ‘no’ vote like Tony Benn and urged Britain to renew its ties to the rest of Europe. The result was a 2 to 1 ‘yes’ vote and relief for the political establishment.
Fast forward to June 24, 2016 and things are very different. The decision to leave the European Union is evidence that consensus has now officially broken down. ‘Today we wake to a deeply divided country’, cried Lib Dem leader Tim Farron on the morning of the referendum result while the Guardian commentator Jonathan Freedland suddenly noticed that, given the hugely different poll results between the biggest metropolitan centres and the rest, ‘England is exposed as a land divided’. Story after story now talks of ‘Divided Britain’: a land marked by a collapse in trust and working-class communities at war with the political ‘mainstream’.
