But for Euroskeptics, Brussels’s faltering response highlighted the EU’s dysfunction, and UK policymakers bristled at suggestions that EU asylum policy might be altered to make it harder to deport migrants to other EU countries. The UK is exempt from the EU’s 2015 plans to resettle hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa, thanks to opt-outs from EU immigration policy. Drawing on this anger, in 2014, the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) surged, winning the most votes in the UK’s elections to the European Parliament with an anti-immigration platform.Ī wave of asylum seekers arriving from beyond the bloc’s borders also drove tensions. “It was never envisaged that free movement would trigger quite such vast numbers of people moving across our continent,” he said in 2015. Cameron called the situation unsustainable. The issue of migration from within the EU is fraught, as the UK is currently required to accept the free movement of EU citizens.Įconomic migration from Eastern Europe spiked after the EU expansions of 20, pushing net migration to the UK to more than three hundred thousand people per year by 2015. Many conservatives never reconciled with membership in the EU, and discontent rose in particular over immigration. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared in 1988, “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level.” Why did Prime Minister David Cameron try to change the terms of membership? The UK didn’t join the single currency or the border-free Schengen Area, and it negotiated a reduced budget contribution. What is the history of the UK’s membership in the EU?Īs integration deepened throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the UK’s leaders pushed for opt-outs. Meanwhile, some fear the Brexit process could accelerate nationalist movements from Scotland to Hungary, which would have unpredictable consequences for the EU. With British leaders now committing to leave the EU single market by October 2019, the country could face the loss of preferential access to its largest trading partner, the disruption of its large financial sector, and even the breakup of the UK itself. Under his successor, Prime Minister Theresa May, the UK has spent years trying to negotiate a new relationship with the EU. The victory of the Leave campaign in a June 2016 referendum on the UK’s future in the bloc led to the resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron. Advocates of a British exit, or Brexit, from the union argued that by reclaiming its national sovereignty, the UK would be better able to manage immigration, free itself from onerous regulations, and spark more dynamic growth. London has kept its distance from EU authority by negotiating opt-outs from some of its central policies, including the common euro currency and the border-free Schengen Area. Why Putin’s War With Ukraine Is a Miscalculationįor decades, the United Kingdom has had an ambivalent and sometimes contentious relationship with the European Union.
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