ABSTRACT
The outcome of the Brexit referendum in June 2016 – a narrow majority for the United Kingdom (UK) to leave the European Union (EU) – came as a surprise to most commentators and participants. Even Nigel Farage famously conceded it looks like ‘Remain will edge it’ as the polls closed (Cooper and Forester 2016). There had been a diffuse but fairly widespread sense that the status quo would be retained. This sense prevailed despite the fact that the polls were very tight, especially if an image of the overall picture was built from analysis of the UK’s four ‘nations’ (Henderson et al. 2016). In fact, the campaign and result revealed deep disunity among citizens and widespread distrust of authority. Division and distrust were engendered by engrained, long-standing features of the UK State (Evans and Menon 2017), including the failure of political parties to articulate and aggregate EU issues, the challenges posed by plural national identities across the UK and (the role of the State in) the uneven spatial development of the UK economy.
