“You cannot unscramble the egg”- still applicable?

Maike Hörstmann
From Empire to Europe
2 min readJun 21, 2016

The Referendum is THE TOPIC this week in Europe. And the public opinion of whether to stay or to leave the EU changes almost every day.

In 1975 the British had their first Referendum. Although Great Britain had just recently joint the EWG, the EU’s focusing on the market worried most of the British such as the political project as such. And until today, lots of people in Great Britain don’t feel comfortable with the supranational institutions in Brussel.
The Labour Party under Harold Wilson used a similar strategy as David Cameron does nowadays — first both tried to negotiate special conditions with thei Eu partners and then they claim to vote for staying in the EU.

At the time of the first Referendum, the most concise sentence probably came from the Labour Party member David Ennals regarding the problems an exit might have. He said that “you cannot unscramble the egg”. You can never turn a scrambled egg back into a normal egg. (http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/brexit-wie-grossbritannien-1975-ueber-europa-abstimmte-a-1097542.html)

But is this still correct? Can you really not unscramble the egg? I, as a supporter of the EU, would say ‘Yes, it is’. But when searching the headlines concerning the Referendum, I can find more and more articles like this: “Swedes tell Britain: if you leave the EU, we’ll follow” or “Jeder dritte Deutsche ist für einen EU-Austritt” (one in three Germans is for leaving the EU). (http://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article155178318/Jeder-dritte-Deutsche-ist-fuer-einen-EU-Austritt.html)
This does really concern me. And so do statistics like this:

(http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/04/swedes-tell-britain-if-you-leave-the-eu-well-follow/)

I mean, of course there are still a lot of people in favour of the EU but it seems possible that this might change in kind of a lot of places within a not-too-far-away-future.

So, I am anxious to see what the outcome will be on June 23rd.

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