The UK’s Conservative Party has said that, if elected, it will launch a referendum on whether the country should stay or leave the EU, which it joined 40 years ago. The vote would take place by 2017. The UK, argue Eurosceptics within the country, is fed up with layers of heavy regulation coming from Brussels and with its wider-reaching influence on policies that jar with the UK's pro-market and pragmatic ways.
In the years since the crisis hit, the UK’s economy has struggled, which, as is the case in many other European countries, has fuelled nationalistic sentiment, playing into the hands of the right-wing UK Independence Party, which strongly opposes the UK's membership of the EU.