Britain Braces For EU Vote Result

London: After 15 hours of voting, from the remote Scottish isles to the tip of Gibraltar, Britain on Thursday braced for a momentous choice as officials began counting ballots in a referendum that could reshape the country's place in Europe and radiate economic, political and security implications across the globe.

The count followed a bitterly divisive referendum campaign, focused on questions of immigration and identity, that will determine whether Britain remains in the European Union.

As the polls closed and voting ended Thursday night, anti-EU firebrand Nigel Farage told Sky News that it "looks like 'remain' will edge it," suggesting that he was preparing for a loss. Other "leave" leaders refused to concede defeat.

An opinion poll conducted Thursday by the research firm YouGov showed "remain" with a four-point lead, according to results released after voting ended. The findings sparked a bump in the value of the pound to a 2016 high, and markets rallied.

Counting was expected to continue throughout Thursday night and into Friday morning. A final result was not expected until breakfast time in London on Friday, although early returns were due Thursday evening Eastern time and could give a strong indication of which way Britain will go.

The first official results came just before midnight, with voters in the British territory of Gibraltar choosing overwhelmingly to stay in the EU, although that was expected.
 Among five polls released on the eve of the vote, two showed a lead for "in," two gave the edge to "out," and one forecast a tie. The final average of all polls on the day before the vote was 50-50, reflecting the too-close-to-call drama on one of the biggest questions to face Britain in decades.

After voting began, however, two new surveys appeared to show a late-breaking shift toward the "remain" camp. The polling firms Ipsos Mori and Populus found a clear lead for those seeking to keep Britain from an EU break.

The U.S.-based firm SurveyMonkey, one of the few forecasters to correctly call last year's British election, also reported a potentially decisive shift toward "in" over the final days of the campaign.

Financial markets nudged higher in Asia and were sharply up in Europe in an apparent sign that traders and investors were betting that Britain would stay in the 28-nation bloc. On Wall Street, stocks also opened sharply higher Thursday. A possible British exit - popularly known as Brexit - would inject huge uncertainties into global financial networks.

A vote for Britain to stay in the EU would calm nervous allies, economists and investors worldwide. They have looked on with growing apprehension as Britain has flirted with a choice that experts have warned could lead to global market shocks and a rip in the Western alliance.

But a vote for the status quo would do little to assuage the grievance of millions who have demanded that Britain declare independence from what many here regard as an oppressive Brussels bureaucracy that enables mass migration into the country.

The outcome could be a make-or-break moment for Prime Minister David Cameron, who has campaigned vigorously for voters to stay in the EU and has cast the referendum as a choice between an insular, intolerant "little England" and an outward-looking, pluralistic Great Britain.

It is highly unlikely, however, that he has achieved the goal he originally had when he called the referendum in 2013: to unite the country, and especially his Conservative Party, behind a common stance on an issue that has divided public opinion here for decades.

Instead of getting a resolution to the question once and for all, Cameron has been left with the raw wounds of a campaign that exposed more clearly than ever the fault lines in British society.

"It's not going to be the settled will of the British people," said Steven Fielding, a professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. "And for Cameron, that will create an instability and a threat."

The threat comes from Cameron's fellow Conservatives, many of whom openly defied him and led the push for Brexit. As the campaign's rhetoric turned increasingly vitriolic, the prime minister found himself accusing former allies and close friends of lying to the British people; they replied in kind.

If the vote goes against Cameron, he is widely expected to step down or be forced out. Even if it goes his way, he will face hard choices over whether to purge the dissenters or welcome them back into his government. If he is not able to bring his party back together, he could face a serious challenge to his hold on the keys at 10 Downing Street, with aggrieved backbench Tories already talking of a plot to oust him.

Any hopes of a coup may have encountered a setback Thursday night, when 84 pro-Brexit Tories in Parliament signed a letter saying they believed Cameron needed to stay on as prime minister - although they did not say for how long.

When Cameron first set a date for the vote back in February, he may have expected a relatively easy victory. But the campaign soon went off script, as Justice Secretary Michael Gove and then-London Mayor Boris Johnson - friends and sparring partners of Cameron's since his days at Oxford - both declared their intention to campaign for "out."

Soon afterward, the "leave" campaign found a compelling rallying cry with its call for voters to "Take Back Control," a slogan that resonated among an electorate ill at ease with record levels of immigration - much of it from Europe under the EU's free-movement policy.

But "leave" may have overplayed its hand with its reliance on what critics saw as increasingly nativist rhetoric. That was particularly true after the killing last week of pro-EU lawmaker Jo Cox, whose death appeared to awaken a passion in "remain" supporters that had been previously lacking, as well as a backlash against xenophobic aspects of the "leave" camp.

Still, the prevailing tone of the campaign on either side was fear and loathing, with neither side venturing for long into hope or aspiration.
That spirit mirrored the angry mood of voters across the Atlantic, in the United States, and surprised even close observers of a nation that sees itself as deeply pragmatic and rational.

"Notions of Britain as a deferential, consensual society at ease with itself have been thrown out the window," Fielding said. "This campaign has revealed a very profound mistrust among a substantial segment of society toward conventional political authority. The EU became a lightning rod for mistrust of politics more broadly."

The campaign split the country along essential lines: Old vs. young. Provincial vs. metropolitan. Scotland vs. England. Native-born Britons vs. immigrants.

The bitter divisions between the two camps played out until the very end. In the closing hours of the vote, the "leave" campaign emailed supporters to warn them of the potential for "people in London to force you and your family to stay in the EU."

The plea featured a photo of voters lined up outside a polling station in "a leafy London suburb," and urged those in "the heartlands of the country" to phone their friends and remind them to vote.

Turnout on Thursday was considered heavy and was expected to be higher than during last year's general election, when two-thirds of eligible Britons cast ballots. They did so Thursday at thousands of polling stations nationwide, in venues that included schools, church halls, tea rooms and laundromats.

In the small town of Birstall in West Yorkshire, voters streamed into a library outside of which, exactly a week ago, Cox was killed on her way to meet with constituents. A crowd of hundreds held hands during a minute of silence at 12:50 p.m. - the time of the attack - and chanted, "We stand together."

Before Cox's killing, "leave" had been surging in the polls. After the 41-year-old's death - and the subsequent charging of a man with a long record of neo-Nazi connections who gave his name in court as "death to traitors, freedom for Britain" - the pendulum began to swing back.

As the first votes were cast Thursday morning - with the often-variable British weather running the gamut from a downpour in London to sunny, clear skies in Scotland - anxiety was the prevailing mood.

Hilary Clarke, a 45-year-old stay-at-home mother, was the first to vote at a southwest London polling station. She said she would use her stubby pencil to check "remain" on her ballot.

"If I had been confident, I wouldn't be standing in the rain at 7 in the morning," she said as she sheltered beneath a colorful umbrella. "The reason I'm first in the queue is I'm going straight to the airport to go to Barcelona, and I may not return if vote goes the wrong way."

Clarke, who had endured a sleepless night tuned to the cracks of thunder and the cries of woken children, said she could not understand the logic of those pushing for "leave."

"I can see that sometimes it seems we are hemorrhaging money to the EU," she said. "But at the same time, we seem to get so much more back than we give. Even if you're disagreeing with what's said at the table, it's better to have a place at it."

But for "leave" voters, Britain's four decades of membership in the EU and its precursors have only dragged the country down.

Andreas Hajialexandrou, a 48-year-old businessman of Greek Cypriot heritage, said the country could simply not withstand the impact of record numbers of immigrants from elsewhere in Europe.

"There are pressures on local services. I speak to our local [doctors] and they are just swamped," he said. "The question is, how long can you support that level of immigration?"

© 2016 The Washington Post

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