But if Britain leaves, Schaeuble added, Europe in the end “will manage without Britain”.
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On Brexit issue the British electorate nearly evenly split on whether to leave or remain within the E.U. Pew’s survey was conducted between April and May 2016 and had more than 10,000 respondents in telephone and face-to-face interviews.
LONDON, June 10 Sterling inched down on Friday as the cost of hedging against swings in its value around the June 23 referendum on Britain’s European Union membership rose to the highest in seven years. Switzerland has a similar arrangement.
The looming referendum has polarised politicians on the matter of whether Britain should stay in the European Union or quit, with a range of polls implying the vote could go either way.
George Soros, who infamously forced the Government to pull the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday in 1992, said a break-up of the Union would be “unavoidable” if Britain detaches itself from Brussels. In is in. Out is out.
The one crumb of comfort for the Remain camp is that when people were asked to predict the referendum result, the average figures were 52 per cent for Remain and 48 per cent for Leave.
On the continent, he said, eurozone finance ministers “are preparing for all possible scenarios in order to limit the dangers”.
These numbers will continue to bounce around until the vote actually occurs, but the betting odds suggest that markets would respond much more dramatically to a vote for Brexit than a vote for the United Kingdom to remain in the EU. Our future trade will be hit and our manufacturing sector, which relies on the single market’s free movement of goods and people, will be at risk. He hoped it would effectively kill the surging threat on his party’s right flank from the nationalist U.K. Independence Party and silence the many Euroskeptics in his own Conservative Party.
“We can not simply push for more integration as an answer to a Brexit”, Schaeuble said. “At some point, the British will realise they have taken the wrong decision”. It means we are going to have tensions over and over again, because they are pursuing two different objectives, within one institutional agreement.
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Despite years and years of countries threatening to leave the European Union (here’s looking at you, Greece), no country has come as precipitously close as Britain, which votes on June 23 whether or not to say toodle-pip to the EU.
