Britain votes on European Union membership after tight and bitter campaign

European Union diplomats meeting in Berlin told Britain to hurry up and trigger the formal exit process – something the United Kingdom has said won’t happen for several months.

“The reason for the special relationship is basically because we have very similar interests and very similar ways of looking at the world”, he said.

He said that Britain and European Union “will remain indispensable partners of the United States even as they begin negotiating their ongoing relationship to ensure continued stability, security and prosperity for Europe, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the world”.

There was widespread agreement among experts before the referendum that the prime minister, who put his integrity on the line for a “Remain” vote, could not survive losing.

Stephen Booth, the co-director of Open Europe, a nonpartisan think tank based in London and Brussels, said that of the roughly 5 million net immigrants to the United Kingdom between 1990 and 2014, over three-quarters came from outside Europe.

In addition, the hundreds of British citizens employed by the EU’s institutions and agencies could keep their jobs conceivably for a few more years.

In 1975, in a referendum on whether the United Kingdom should stay or leave the European Community (Common Market) Area, the country voted for staying in with a resounding 67.2 per cent vote.

Were that to happen, “Cameron will be considered the worst prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom”, he said.

Also seeking to calm frayed nerves was the most prominent “leave” campaigner, Boris Johnson. “I think places like Scotland and England, I think you’re going to see a lot of activity”.

“It is not an amicable divorce but it was also not an intimate love affair”.

The yen’s gains intensified the concerns of Japanese policymakers, who want a weaker currency to support exports and their deflation-hit economy.

“There is urgency. There is no time to lose”, said French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. “There is no doubt that this is a blow to Europe and to the European unification process”, Merkel told reporters in Berlin.

He added: “We should be proud of the fact that in these islands we trust the people for these big decisions”.

The referendum has triggered political and financial turmoil around the world.

European stock markets dropped around eight percent at opening before recovering later, while British bank shares lost a quarter of their value in morning trade. Numerous key arguments on either side concerned the contours of the U.K. -EU relationship, and quite sensibly so. He has always been the bookmakers’ favourite to replace Cameron.

Many Labour lawmakers were strongly pro-“remain” and accuse the socialist Corbyn, a longtime critic of the European Union, of failing to rally Labour supporters behind staying in the bloc.

Labour legislator Frank Field said Saturday that Corbyn “clearly isn’t the right person to actually lead the party into an election because nobody thinks he will actually win”.

In an early sign of the Brexit fallout in Brussels, Britain’s European commissioner for financial services, Jonathan Hill, said he would stand down.

It turns out that there’s some evidence that many people might not have known exactly what they were doing.

Corbyn said “we must talk about immigration. but we will never pander to prejudice”.