BREXIT IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
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External
The decision to leave the European Union on 31 January marks the end, not just of four years of parliamentary warfare, but of a distinct phase of British history: a 47-year period in which Britain's economic, diplomatic and political strategy all centred on the EU. Membership affected almost every area of British politics and society: from gay rights and environmental policy to the devolved settlement and the Northern Ireland peace process. It rewired Britain's economy, its trade relations and its constitution, changing who Britons traded with, the food they ate, where they went on holiday and who had the right to live and work in the UK. For good or for ill, leaving reopens many of the big strategic questions of British politics, concerning its constitution, its economic model and its place in the world as a post-imperial power. This lecture sets Brexit in a longer historical perspective, asking how membership emerged as an answer to those questions, how consent was built for membership and how that consent was lost in the years before 2016.
Robert Saunders is Reader in British History at Queen Mary University of London. His books include Yes to Europe: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain (2018), which won the American Historical Association's Morris D. Forkorsch Prize in 2019, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics (2011) and Making Thatcher's Britain (2012). He writes regularly for the New Statesman magazine and has featured on the BBC, CNN, NPR and a range of other outlets.
Co-hosted by the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, this event is part of the Discover the Past series. To see the full list of events, visit the Discover the Past web page.
The Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck has a distinguished tradition as an international centre of excellence. We are the only university department in London to include archaeologists, classicists and historians investigating every period from prehistory to the early twenty-first century. Join us to discover the past and engage with the present across continents and cultures.
Photographs may be taken at this event for future use in printed and online publicity, and social media.
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Department of History, Classics and Archaeology