Britain’s EU referendum campaign resumes after MP murder
LONDON (AFP) — Reeling from the murder of MP Jo Cox, the EU referendum campaigns resumed yesterday, with just four days to go until the critical vote that will shape Britain’s future.
The Remain and Leave camps suspended campaigning for three days after the killing of Cox on Thursday. A 52- year- old man has appeared in court charged with her murder.
But with the polls too close to call, leaders were to hit the television studios yesterday to begin their final push for votes.
Prime Minister David Cameron, who wants Britain to stay in the European Union, said the country was facing an “an existential choice” from which there would be “no turning back.”
Meanwhile, Britain’s Sunday newspapers picked sides in their final editions before the referendum.
The Mail on Sunday and The Observer gave their support to the Remain camp, while The
Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph broadsheets backed quitting the EU.
Resuming the campaign, Cameron said the British economy “hangs in the balance,” with trade and investment set to suffer in the event of a Leave vote and a “probable recession” that would leave the UK “permanently poorer.”
“If you’re not sure, don’t take the risk of leaving. If you don’t know, don’t go,” he wrote in The
Sunday Telegraph. “If we were to leave and it quickly turned out to be a big mistake, there wouldn’t be a way of changing our minds and having another go. This is it.”
Cameron, finance minister George Osborne and opposition Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, from the Remain camp, were all set for major TV appearances yesterday.
Meanwhile Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, was set to do the same for the Leave camp.
The What UK Thinks website’s average of the last six polls, conducted between June 10 and Saturday, put the Remain and Leave camps absolutely level on 50-50, excluding undecided voters.
The Leave camp had been a few percentage points ahead in recent polling, but fresh surveys showing a rise in support for remaining brought the average neck-and-neck.
They included the first carried out since Cox’s murder: a Survation poll on Friday and Saturday that put the Remain on 45 percent and Leave on 42 percent.
The results were the reverse Survation’s Thursday poll, which had Leave ahead by 45 to 42.
Labor MP Cox had campaigned for Britain to stay in the EU.
She was shot and stabbed in the street in what police called a “targeted” daylight attack in her constituency.