Paula Minelgaite

This research aims to gain an insight into the mindset of people who were allowed to vote in 1975 and 2016 referendums on UK's membership of the EU, and what changed during the 42 years that UK was part of the EU to make people want to leave. People who wanted to remain in the EU tend to blame the North and the poor. According to statistics, less educated, older people were more likely to vote to leave. However, the situation is not as simple and I wanted to explore these complexities. 

The aim was to find out how the electorate could have been influenced. I decided to analyse newspaper articles, as they are the one source of information for the public which actually existed during both referendums. I analysed The Sun newspaper headlines to see how the most popular newspaper in the UK reported on the EU, and which campaign it supported. The project involved interviewing people who were old enough to have voted in the 1975 and the 2016 referendums. It also includes photographs from my family’s archive taken during the period when the UK was part of the EU. This is in order to expose my bias as the author and to humanise immigrants like myself. Their purpose is to provide some insight into how the personal is related to the political.