The Sun and the Guardian are diametrically opposed on the referendum, but both papers used views from space on their front pages to make their differing cases.
The Sun has Britain heading for the sunny uplands on “Independence Day” - the rallying cry of leave campaigner Boris Johnson.
Meanwhile, the Mirror’s front page looks in the other direction – down a deep hole in the earth – to warn readers of what it sees as the perils of Brexit.
I’m handing over this live blog now to Matthew Weaver, who’ll cover the next several hours of polling day. Our live coverage runs right through to polls closing at 10pm and beyond, when Andrew Sparrow returns to catch all the results being churned out and turn them into sense. I’ll also be back on Friday morning for those key counts. Thanks for reading and for the many comments.
It’s only a bit of rain. Photograph: Neil Hall/Reuters
The early morning weather in Glasgow is radiantly sunny, with all that is inferred to mean for turnout.
The Scottish papers are well aware of the importance of this country’s predicted EU-phile tendencies today, with the Scottish Daily Mail declaring that “Scotland holds the key to Brexit” and the Daily Record’s front-page banner urging readers to vote remain.
Elsewhere Scottish party leaders have been reminding their Twitter followers to vote, while Ukip MEP David Coburn has been urging voters to #useapen in case those dastardly pencils given out at polling stations are a cunning ploy from remain to (literally) rub out his side’s support.
We’ve yet to see how committed pro-independence supporters in Scotland react to Farage et al co-opting the hashtag #independenceday.
Polls open in #EUref - #VoteRemain to continue to be an outward looking nation. Let's make Scotland's voice heard.
As the UK votes on whether to stay in the EU or leave, the Guardian sent seven photographers to capture the mood in various European communities who have made their home in the UK, from a Greek Orthodox church to a German bierkeller.
Whichever way you’re voting, these images are a beautiful way to kick off your day:
There’s only one important item on the agendas of investors across the world today. Britain is heading to the polls after a lengthy, bitterly fought campaign to decide if she stays in the European Union, or should leave.
Traders in the City are preparing for a lengthy shift – perhaps staying late into the night, or returning to the office early tomorrow morning.
Friday is likely to be one of the most dramatic and volatile trading sessions in many years, especially if the public choose to leave the EU. Analysts have predicted that the pound could slump by 15%, while shares would probably suffer big losses.
Voting has just begun, with pollsters saying that the result is hard to call – especially as around 10% of voters are still undecided.
If you’re planning to stay up for the results tonight, you need to plot your day carefully. Sleep might, after all, be needed at some point. So my colleague Jessica Elgot has come up with this nifty hour-by-hour guide, starting from 10pm:
Polls will close, and on election nights this is normally the moment broadcasters show their exit polls and make their projection for the night ahead.
However, that won’t happen this time as there’s no exit poll for this referendum. Some banks are said to have commissioned private exit polls, but they will be kept for their employees.
So if anyone tells you they know what’s going to happen at this stage, they’re a chancer, unless they are an eagle-eyed watcher of sterling derivative markets. Sky News has commissioned a survey from YouGov of people previously polled, asking how they voted on the day. This will be released at 10pm, but this is not, repeat not, an exit poll and shouldn’t be treated like one.
Of course, it’s not just London and south-east England that have weather. Other parts of the UK are also entitled to have weather. Theirs is rather better today:
It's a gloriously sunny morning in Glasgow; assuming will positively affect turnout for #EURef if not voters' mood pic.twitter.com/X8MlU0HVmR
With the polls telling us that around 10% of voters are still unsure how they will cast their ballot, you could perhaps do worse – OK, not much worse – than go by the roll of a dice.
(Pedantic readers, please note: I know it should be a die, but that reads oddly and I’m trying to keep things cheerful.)
The dice idea came into my head when David Cameron said ‘we must not roll a dice to decide out children’s future’. Everybody will be doing that because of misinformation. Most people will be metaphorically throwing a dice – we don’t know what will happen either way.
Here he is with his unnecessarily large cube. Democracy’s a funny thing.
Voter leaves EU choice to chance by rolling dice: A CONFLICTED voter will entrust the fate of his referendum ... https://t.co/Xz0pA0i8bK
Will rain in London and south-east England put off voters today? Spectacular thunder and lightning overnight might have caused a few to oversleep this morning, but the bigger problem is likely to be travel disruption caused by heavy downfalls and flash flooding in some areas.
The London Fire Brigade says it received a day’s worth of calls in just an hour and a half to reports of weather-related incidents including lightning striking property, flooded homes and businesses and rising waters trapping vehicles.
The sky seen lit up by a spectacular lightning storm in Kent. Photograph: Graham Mitchell /Barcroft Images
On the London underground, the District line, DLR and Overground were all suspended or delayed because of flooding. Gatwick Express southbound services have been suspended, and South West Trains, Southern and TFL Rail are also suffering major delays.
Outside London and south-east England, the weather is expected to be fine and settled today.
Yes, it’s here: the day you’ve been dreaming of/dreading; the day you didn’t believe would ever really happen. Polling stations open this morning for those who haven’t already posted back their ballots (hello, decisive and organised voters!) to cast their cross to remain in the European Union or leave.
Here I’ve rounded up all you need to know for the long day ahead. Then this live blog – steered by me and a cast of colleagues – will take you through until polls close this evening, at which point Andrew Sparrow climbs into his seat for a night of results.
Do come and chat in the comments below or find me on Twitter @Claire_Phipps.
The big picture
The last few hours have been strewn with final pleas – and if the polls are correct in saying the percentage of those voters still undecided could be in double figures, there might yet be receptive ears for those pleas to fall upon. So here they are, in a nutshell.
David Cameron: “It is a fact that our economy will be weaker if we leave and stronger if we stay … Put jobs first, put the economy first.”
Boris Johnson: “Democracy is vital but it only works when you can kick the buggers out when they make a mistake. If we vote to leave we can take back control of our democracy and our immigration policy.”
Nicola Sturgeon: “I believe in independence for countries but I also believe independent countries must work together for the greater good … If we vote remain, we protect them; if we don’t vote remain, then we put all of these things at risk.”
Nicola Sturgeon at Ed-IN-burgh airport. See? Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
Gordon Brown: “This is not the Britain I know, this is not the Britain I love. The Britain I know is better than the Britain of these debates, of insults, of posters.”
Yvette Cooper: “What the leave campaign have done is push lies and also pit human beings against other human beings. That is what is wrong, immoral and just not British.”
Andrea Leadsom: “Tomorrow we will either wake up to the bright freedom of our independence day, or to the humdrum drudgery of just another day under the newly triumphant eye of the Brussels bureaucracy.”
Nigel Farage: “Let’s stop pretending what this European project is: they have an anthem, they are building an army, they have already got their own police force, and of course they have got a flag. At the end of the day … when people vote they have to make a decision – which flag is theirs?”
Nigel Farage: he’s not flagging. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters
John Major: “If our nation does vote to leave … we will be out, out for good, diminished as an influence upon the world, a truly Great Britain shrunk down to a little England, perhaps without Scotland, perhaps with a grumpy Wales, and certainly with a Northern Ireland divided from the south by the border controls that would then be the edge of the European Union.”
Iain Duncan Smith: “David Cameron is colluding with the EU and lying to the British people. Families are suffering the consequences of uncontrolled migration – a direct result of the EU’s obsession with freedom of movement.”
Jean-Claude Juncker: “Out means out. British policymakers and British voters have to know that there will be no kind of renegotiation.”
Tim Farron: “You’ve got to hold and give but do it at the right time. You can be slow or fast but you must get to the line. They’ll always hit you and hurt you, defend and attack. There’s only one way to beat them, get round the back.”
There won’t be official exit polls this evening, so the last-ditch forecasts are all we’ll have until the real results land. And those final polls tell us that remain is ahead, that leave is ahead, and that it’s neck-and-neck.
ComRes for the Daily Mail and ITV News puts remain on 48%, leave on 42% and undecideds on 11% (yes, that’s 101% – let’s assume there’s some rounding here). With undecideds lopped off, it becomes remain 54% to leave 46%.
YouGov gives In a two-point cushion, with remain leading leave by 51% to 49%.
Opinium swung a notch the other way, with leave on 45%, remain on 44% and 9% still to make up their minds.
And a final TNS poll also edges the Outers ahead, with leave on 43%, remain on 41% and 16% not decided or not voting at all.
The FT poll of polls rounds off the campaign with remain on 47% and leave on 45%.
Number Cruncher Politics – which stood out in last year’s general election for actually predicting a Conservative victory – now puts the probability of a remain win at 74%.
Don’t expect too much today, bar politicians and voters heading to polling stations. (Nonetheless, stick with the live blog, won’t you?) It all hots up after 10pm, when voting stops and counting starts. So, in Friday timings:
00.00-00.30: Expect Sunderland to declare. They’re always super quick. Other authorities, including Wandsworth and the City of London, are also due to report early.
2am sees a big tranche of announcements, with 22 councils due to speak up around now.
By 3am, we’ll be two-fifths of the way through. Stay strong. Drink caffeine.
At 3.30am we should hear from a number of Scottish authorities, including Edinburgh and Aberdeen.
4am: 88 authorities announce their counts. We might wonder if we can make a guess at this point. Don’t hold us to that.
5am: 90% of the way there. You might start to think about sleep. Hang on.
By 8am, we really should know the result. Have breakfast. Toast with a bucks fizz. Drown sorrows. Call in sick. Go to bed.
Paul Mason, writing on Medium, says a vote to remain is not a mandate for the “neoliberal, anti-democratic” EU:
On Friday, with the referendum over, I will join with radical and progressive movements across Europe to oppose your austerity strategy and the political cant that justifies it – aka neoclassical economics. And I will go on fighting the austerity imposed by the UK government …
I hope remain wins tomorrow. But the problem will still be there: neoliberal austerity promoted by the European Union is destroying the values of Europe. A generation of young people is being taught to despair and fear the future.
For this reason I will push for a mandatory re-run of a referendum on EU membership every seven years. I encourage the peoples of all other countries to exercise this right regularly.
Juliet Samuelin the Telegraph writes in defence of the referendum campaign:
For all the fear and anger and viciousness, I believe voters will make the right decision. I’m not referring to which way they’ll vote. I mean that voters broadly understand, either instinctively or rationally, what the arguments are and where they stand. We’ve heard time and time again in this campaign how ‘confused’ the public is and how desperate for ‘facts’ voters are. Esteemed commentators have wrongly concluded that this makes people unqualified to vote on such a serious matter.
The opposite is true. The insatiable desire for ‘facts’, the endless letters and phone-ins and questions, tell us that voters know they are not hearing definitive predictions, but points of view and spin. They would like certainties, but they have not heard anything that amounts to one. And so they know that their vote in the referendum is really just a judgment call: whom do I trust? What risk can I bear? And, fundamentally: what do I value?
The view from Gibraltar: pay-per-view binoculars at the southern tip of the peninsula. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Max Colchester and Jenny Grossin the Wall Street Journal win fascinating fact of the day with news that residents of the Isle of Man cannot vote in the referendum (but Gibraltarians can):
The debate over Brexit, as Britain’s potential exit from the EU is known, isn’t simple. Neither is figuring out who gets to cast a vote.
During world war one, the UK passed laws allowing ‘British subjects’ from across the empire to vote in UK general elections. The empire crumbled but the rights live on. People from some 53 countries can vote in the referendum as long as they live in the UK or Gibraltar, a British territory off the tip of southern Spain. People residing in Gibraltar can’t vote in general elections but got a pass for this one …
The Isle of Man counts as abroad … Today, it is a ‘self-governing Crown dependency’, which means it isn’t part of the UK, even though Britain is responsible for its foreign affairs.
The day in a tweet
Well played, Germany: they don’t think it’s all over.
All the polls would tell us it has to be Europe’s The Final Countdown. But no! What do the polls know, anyway. Let’s go for the Hokey Cokey instead: in, out, shake it all about. That’s what it’s all about.
And another thing
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