Until the 1970s, methods of direct democracy remained outside the political and constitutional traditions of the United Kingdom. True, there had been limited local plebiscites on the question of prohibition earlier in the twentieth century. Equally, the Edwardian era witnessed attempts to introduce the referendum as a means of resolving controversial political and constitutional issues; most notably, opponents of Irish home rule advocated a referendum as a means of demonstrating the lack of popular support enjoyed by the Liberal government’s proposed constitutional reforms. Nevertheless, in general the referendum was viewed as being incompatible with Britain’s parliamentary traditions. Moreover, from the initial creation of a mass electorate in the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, the authority of Parliament remained, with perhaps a few momentary exceptions, largely unquestioned, a popular consensus rooted in both the historic prestige enjoyed by the House of Commons, which transcended political divisions, as well as the central role that the battle for the franchise had played within the nineteenth-century radical tradition inherited by the Labour Party. And while a progressive account of British political history might stress the measured expansion of the electorate, the dominant view remained that those returned to Parliament were elected to exercise their judgement, not take formal direction. In Vernon Bogdanor’s phrase, beyond their participation in elections, in this period ‘the British constitution knew nothing of the people’. Britain was understood to be a representative, parliamentary democracy: famously, when rebuffing Winston Churchill’s suggestion in May 1945 that a referendum be held to ascertain if the public wished the wartime coalition to continue until the final conclusion of the Second World War, the Labour leader and then Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, described the referendum as ‘a device … alien to all our traditions’, which had ‘too often been the instrument of Nazism and Fascism.’

During the 1970s, however, UK governments resorted repeatedly to the referendum as a method of answering constitutional questions that appeared to be impossible to resolve via traditional electoral politics. In March 1973, following the imposition of direct rule from Westminster, a border poll was organised in Northern Ireland in an ineffectual effort to legitimate the new constitutional settlement. Two years later, the first nationwide referendum was held to determine whether the UK should remain within the EEC.