Britain Voted on Europe in 1975 — and the Result Shaped Brexit

On the morning of 24 June 2016, the pound was falling off a cliff, David Cameron was resigning on the steps of Downing Street, and stunned broadcast presenters were searching for words to describe something that, they kept insisting, had never happened before. Except it had — and almost nobody remembered.

A Nation That Had Been Here Before

Britain had done this before: stood at the edge of a decision about Europe, held its breath, and jumped. The 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, which delivered a 52%-to-48% Leave result on 23 June 2016, was not the first time the British public had voted on its relationship with Europe. It was the second. Forty-one years earlier, a different prime minister had held a different referendum on the same essential question. The result had gone the other way. Yet the debate, the passions, and the fault lines were eerily familiar.

To understand what Brexit actually was — where it came from, why it cut so deep, why the wounds proved so difficult to close — you have to travel back to 1975, to a referendum most Britons alive in 2016 had either forgotten or never known. Recovering that forgotten vote reframes the entire story. It reveals that the Leave result of 2016 was not an earthquake that came from nowhere. It was the delayed aftershock of a tremor that had been building for more than half a century.

How Britain Got Into Europe in the First Place

The story of Britain and Europe after the Second World War is, at its core, a story of magnificent ambivalence. Winston Churchill, speaking in Zurich in September 1946, called passionately for a “United States of Europe” — and was careful, in the same breath, to position Britain as a friend and sponsor of that project rather than a participant in it. Britain, in Churchill’s vision, would be a patron of European unity, not a member of it. The Empire, the Commonwealth, the special relationship with America: these were anchors sufficient for a great power. Europe was for the continentals.

That posture hardened into policy. When six nations signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and founded the European Economic Community, Britain stayed out, betting that its network of Commonwealth trade and its Atlantic alliance mattered more than a continental customs union. It was a calculated decision, and within a decade it looked like a miscalculation. The EEC economies were growing faster than Britain’s. The Commonwealth was not the economic bloc its advocates had promised. The special relationship did not translate into special trading terms.

Harold Macmillan applied to join in 1961. Charles de Gaulle said no in January 1963, delivering his veto with characteristic hauteur and the clear implication that Britain was not truly European in its instincts. Harold Wilson tried again in 1967. De Gaulle said no again. The French president’s doubt about Britain’s European commitment was, as history would eventually show, one of the more accurate geopolitical assessments of the twentieth century.

It was Edward Heath who finally got Britain through the door. On 1 January 1973, the United Kingdom joined the European Community — and crucially, it did so without asking the British people. No referendum was held. Heath believed parliamentary approval was sufficient democratic mandate. That democratic gap — the sense that a decision of historic magnitude had been taken over the heads of ordinary voters — would fester for decades, feeding directly into the debate that eventually produced both the 1975 and 2016 referendums.

1975: The Referendum Nobody Asked For (Until Everyone Did)

Harold Wilson won the February 1974 general election partly on a promise to renegotiate Britain’s EEC membership terms and put the result to the people. The promise was, in significant measure, a political manoeuvre. Labour was deeply split on Europe: the hard left regarded the EEC as a capitalist club that would constrain socialist government, while the moderate right of the party saw it as a guarantor of stability and prosperity. A referendum would let Wilson campaign for staying in while allowing Cabinet colleagues who passionately disagreed to campaign publicly for leaving. It was a device for managing a party as much as for consulting a nation.

Wilson’s renegotiation produced modest results — adjustments to budget contributions and tweaks to Commonwealth food import arrangements. Critics called it cosmetic. Wilson called it a success and recommended a Yes vote. The campaign that followed was Britain’s first ever national referendum: a vivid constitutional moment in which Cabinet ministers openly campaigned against each other and the usual rules of collective responsibility were suspended in favour of an experiment nobody was entirely sure about.

On 5 June 1975, Britain voted. Turnout was around 65 percent. The result was decisive: roughly two thirds of those who voted chose to stay in the European Community. It looked, at the time, like the matter was settled. The question had been asked and answered.

Except it wasn’t. Look closely at the geography of that 1975 vote and you can already see the future. Scotland and Wales voted Yes, but with somewhat less enthusiasm than England. Out on the periphery, two areas broke ranks entirely: Shetland and the Western Isles voted No — small, stubborn signals of the dissent that would grow, over the following decades, into something much larger.

The Arguments That Never Went Away

Read the pamphlets from the 1975 campaign and then read the speeches from 2016, and the disorientation is remarkable. Sovereignty. Borders. The democratic deficit of unelected Brussels bureaucrats making rules for British citizens. The threat to parliamentary supremacy. The economic risks of staying in versus the economic risks of leaving. The language is almost interchangeable across forty years, as though the arguments had been placed in a drawer in June 1975 and taken out, slightly dusty but otherwise intact, in the run-up to June 2016.

The No campaign of 1975 was one of the stranger political coalitions in modern British history — a mirror image of the cross-party Leave alliance of 2016. On the left stood Tony Benn and Michael Foot, who believed the EEC would strip elected governments of the power to manage their own economies. On the right stood Enoch Powell, who saw European membership as an affront to national sovereignty and parliamentary democracy. They despised almost everything about each other’s politics. On this one question, they were in complete agreement. The echo in 2016 — when Nigel Farage and sections of the hard left found themselves on the same side of the argument — was impossible to miss.

In 1975, the business establishment, the major newspapers, and the cross-party mainstream all backed Yes. In 2016, the equivalent forces backed Remain. In both cases, a significant portion of the electorate heard that establishment chorus, weighed it, and voted the other way anyway. Twice, in the same argument, the weight of institutional authority pointed in one direction, and a decisive slice of the public’s instincts pulled against it.

Historians of the period speak of what might be called Eurosceptic continuity — a persistent strand of British political culture that never accepted EEC or EU membership as fully legitimate, that survived the 1975 defeat, regrouped, and spent four decades waiting for another chance. That strand never went underground. It sat in Parliament, in the press, in think tanks and campaign groups, keeping the argument alive through every treaty revision, every expansion of European competences, every moment when Brussels seemed to reach further into British life.

The Decades Between: From Community to Union

What made the argument impossible to put down was that Europe kept changing. The organisation Britain had voted to join in 1975 was not the organisation it eventually left in 2020. The Single European Act of 1986 deepened the single market but also accelerated political integration. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 went further still, creating the European Union as a formal political entity, laying the groundwork for a single currency, and invoking the phrase “ever closer union” in a way that alarmed those who had thought they were signing up to a trading arrangement rather than a nascent federal project.

The sharpest symbol of how the debate had shifted came from an unexpected direction. Margaret Thatcher had campaigned for Yes in 1975. By 1988, standing in Bruges, she was delivering what became a founding text of modern Euroscepticism — a speech warning that Britain had not rolled back the frontiers of the state at home only to see power reimposed from Brussels. The politician who had urged Britain to embrace Europe was now articulating, with characteristic force, exactly why so many Britons had come to resent being there.

The Maastricht rebellions of 1992 and 1993 showed the depth of that resentment in parliamentary terms. A group of Conservative MPs defied their own government to vote against the treaty’s ratification, forcing a prolonged constitutional crisis and demonstrating beyond any doubt that the 1975 referendum had not settled the question. It had only postponed it.

Britain’s relationship with the EU was always that of a member who had never quite fully arrived. It kept its own currency, declining to join the euro. It stayed outside the Schengen zone of open borders. It negotiated opt-outs and special arrangements, maintaining a posture of partial belonging that satisfied nobody entirely — neither the integrationists who wanted full commitment nor the sceptics who wanted none.

23 June 2016: The Second Verdict

David Cameron’s decision to hold the 2016 referendum was the product of pressures that had been accumulating since Heath took Britain in without a public vote. UKIP was pulling votes from the Conservative base. The Maastricht generation of Tory MPs had never been reconciled to European membership. Cameron’s 2013 Bloomberg speech, in which he promised an in-out referendum if the Conservatives won the 2015 general election, was an attempt to lance a boil that had been forming for decades. He won the election. He held the referendum. The result, as Britannica’s account of Brexit details, reshaped British politics entirely.

The geographic picture that emerged on the morning of 24 June was both familiar and striking. Leave won decisive majorities across most of England and Wales. Every single counting area in Scotland returned a Remain majority. Northern Ireland also voted Remain. The fracture was not just about Europe — it was about what Britain was, what it meant, and whose country it felt like. A line drawn from the Shetland and Western Isles No votes of 1975 to the Scottish Remain majorities of 2016 traces a long argument about whether any single referendum held across the United Kingdom could fairly represent the distinct political instincts of its constituent nations.

The margin — 52% to 48% — carried its own psychological weight. Close enough that nearly half the country felt the result was unrepresentative. Wide enough to be constitutionally decisive. And note the arithmetic of history: the No side in 1975 had lost by a far larger margin — roughly one third against two thirds. Forty-one years later, just over half voted to leave and just under half voted to stay. The argument had narrowed dramatically, and that near-equality would drive the parliamentary paralysis and political bitterness that followed.

Brexit formally occurred on 31 January 2020, when the United Kingdom officially left the European Union — ending a partnership that had stretched back almost fifty years. The BBC’s full results breakdown remains one of the most granular records of how the country divided that night, council area by council area, preference by preference.

What the Forgotten Referendum Tells Us

The lesson of 1975 is not that referendums are bad instruments of democracy, or that the British were wrong to vote as they did. The lesson is that a vote can decide a question legally while leaving it culturally unresolved. Britain voted to stay in the European Community in 1975 by a margin that looked conclusive. The underlying questions — about sovereignty, about parliamentary democracy, about what kind of country Britain wanted to be — were not answered by that vote. They were deferred. The 1975 result gave everyone permission to stop arguing for a while, but it gave nobody a reason to change their mind. Those who had voted No simply waited.

There is a principle here that extends far beyond Brexit. A culturally contested result in a constitutional referendum does not end a debate — it sets the clock running on the next one. The losing side does not dissolve. It reorganises, reframes its arguments, and watches for the moment when circumstances move in its favour. In Britain’s case, that moment took four decades to arrive.

The UK Parliament’s own background briefing on the 2016 referendum situates the vote within a long history of British ambivalence about European integration — an ambivalence that predates even the 1975 vote and runs through every decade of membership. The story of Britain and Europe is not, in the end, purely a story about economic calculation or political ideology. It is a story about identity: about a nation that joined a project it was never entirely certain it believed in, that could never quite decide whether it was European in any meaningful sense, and that voted twice on the same fundamental question and gave different answers.

The 1975 ballot papers are long since pulped. The 2016 ballot papers are archived. Two snapshots of the same unresolved argument, separated by a generation, connected by a continuous thread of debate and feeling and suspicion that no single vote, it turns out, was ever quite enough to cut. The argument did not end on 31 January 2020 when Britain formally left the EU, any more than it ended on 5 June 1975 when Britain formally decided to stay. It simply found a new form — as it always had, as perhaps it always will.