United Kingdom

Also on March 27, May pledged to resign as party leader and prime minister if the House of Commons were to approve her plan, a gambit that won support from some “hard Brexit” opponents of the plan. On March 29, owing to an antique procedural rule invoked by Speaker of the House John Bercow, only the withdrawal agreement portion of May’s plan was voted upon by the House of Commons (excluded was the “political declaration” that addressed what the U.K. and EU expected of their long-term relationship). Although the vote was closer than the previous two (286 in support, 344 in opposition), the plan once again went down in defeat. The U.K. now had until April 12 to decide whether it would leave the EU without an agreement on that day or request a longer delay that would require it to participate in elections for the European Parliament. May asked the EU to push back the deadline for Brexit until June 30, and on April 11 the European Council announced that it was granting the U.K. a “flexible extension” until October 31.

Shortly thereafter, in response to the Conservative Party’s seeming inability to position the country to leave the EU, Nigel Farage launched the Brexit Party. It proved to be a big winner in the elections for the European Parliament in May, capturing about 31 percent of the vote. The next closest finisher was the Liberal Democrats, with about 20 percent of the vote, while Labour claimed some 14 percent and the Conservatives only about 9 percent.

Having failed to garner sufficient support from Conservatives for her exit plan, May entered discussions with Labour leaders on a possible compromise, but these too proved fruitless. When May responded to that disappointment by proposing a new version of the plan that included a temporary customs relationship with the EU and a pledge to hold a parliamentary vote on whether to stage another referendum on Brexit, her cabinet revolted. Isolated as never before, the prime minister announced on May 24 that she would step down as leader of the Conservative Party on June 7 but would remain as caretaker premier until her party had chosen her successor. After a series of votes by the parliamentary Conservative Party winnowed a list of 10 candidates to two, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt stood in an election in which all of the party’s roughly 160,000 members were eligible to vote. Johnson took some 66 percent of that vote to assume the leadership. He officially replaced May as prime minister on July 24. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Society, state, and economy

State and society

Despite the so-called “dismantling of controls” after the end of World War I, government involvement in economic life was to continue, as were increased public expenditure, extensions of social welfare, and a higher degree of administrative rationalization. In the interwar years the level of integration of labour, capital, and the state was more considerable than is often thought. Attempts to organize the market continued up to the beginning of World War II, evident, for example, in government’s financial support for regional development in the late 1930s. Few Britons, however, felt they were living in a period of decreased government power. Nonetheless, attachment to the “impartial state” and to voluntarism was still considerable and exemplified by the popularity of the approved organizations set up to administer health insurance in the interwar years. The governance of society through what were now taken to be the social characteristics of that society itself, for example, family life as well as demographic and economic factors—developed by Liberal administrations before World War I—along with the advent of “planning,” continued to be the direction of change, but the connection back to Victorian notions of moral individualism and the purely regulative, liberal state was still strong. Even the greatest exponent of the move toward economic intervention and social government, John Maynard Keynes, whose General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1935–36) provided the major rationale for subsequent state intervention and whose work downgraded the importance of private rationality and private responsibility, nonetheless believed that governmental intervention in one area was necessary to buttress freedom and privacy elsewhere, so that the moral responsibility of the citizen would be forthcoming.