LONDON >> Members of the Driscoll family tend not to fight. If they do, it is over whose turn it is to vacuum.

Leslie Driscoll, 55, sells hot cross buns in an English bakery in London and addresses her customers with “love” or “darling”; her husband, Peter, 54, works as a floor layer; their daughter, Louise, a 19-year-old with dyed blue hair, is a barista in a hip coffee shop.

But last week, the Driscolls fell out. Badly. They had an argument so big they did not speak to one another for days, Leslie Driscoll said. Shortly afterward, her husband went off in a huff to see friends up north, in Derby.

The source of the family drama: whether Britain should remain part of the European Union, a process often referred to as “Brexit.”

With only days to go until the referendum on membership in the bloc on Thursday, polls suggest that the country is deeply split along socioeconomic and regional lines, with many older and working-class voters in England favoring leaving, and younger and better-educated Britons, and a majority of those in Scotland and Northern Ireland, favoring staying.

As the consequences of the choice come into focus for voters, tensions are bubbling. In the case of the Driscoll family, they are boiling over.

“I completely disagree with her,” Louise Driscoll said on a recent afternoon, looking at her mother squarely in the face as they sat in a cafe. “We shouldn’t be leaving, like, an organization that has helped us more than we could ever help ourselves if we were to go it alone.”

Louise is the only one in her family who wants Britain to remain. Her parents and her 80-year-old grandfather want out.

“This is a little island,” her mother said matter-of-factly, lighting up a cigarette and letting the ash fall on her glittery sneakers. “We should look after our own first. Charity begins at home.”

“But we are all people!” Louise said. “We should help each other.”

“It don’t work that way, darling,” her mother replied, shaking her head. “If you’re born here, you pass as English. I don’t care whether you’re black, white, green or blue, or purple with pink spots on — you’re English.”

Those born abroad, Leslie Driscoll said, “have got their own governments, their own parliaments, whatever.”

Up and down the country, the debate over Europe is pitting husband against wife, children against parents, sisters against brothers, divisions unlikely to be healed easily after the referendum is decided.

Even the family of Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London and the most prominent face of the campaign for leaving the bloc, has not been immune to disputes: His father, Stanley; sister, Rachel; and brother Jo, who is a member of Parliament and who worked closely with Prime Minister David Cameron, favor remaining in the union. Boris Johnson’s mother, Charlotte Johnson Wahl, wants to leave. (Rachel Johnson reportedly tried to dissuade the former mayor from backing a British exit over a soggy game of tennis, but the attempt was unsuccessful.)

In Islington, the neighborhood in London where members of the Driscoll family have lived for eight generations, residents are increasingly going public with their voting intentions, which is a rarity in Britain.

Rows of houses on some streets have “Remain” posters in their windows. On a thoroughfare filled with butchers, bakeries and fish-and-chip-shops, tradespeople nodded their head vigorously when asked whether they were planning to vote out.

The debate over Britain’s continued membership in Europe has touched on issues as varied as immigration, terrorism, the economy, London’s housing shortage and the fate of the National Health Service.

Some of these issues, like immigration, are directly related to the European Union. Others, like the shortage of affordable housing, have little to do with it.

Yet those distinctions are blurring. For many, the referendum is as much a chance to register displeasure with the country’s direction as it is an opportunity to reject or embrace Europe. The stance of some voters is being shaped by personal experience and anecdote.

There is, for example, a widespread perception that European citizens are flocking to Britain, especially from Eastern Europe, to take advantage of its social welfare system. But Britain’s welfare system is not as generous as those of many other European nations, and fewer than 7 percent of immigrants receive benefits.

In Leslie Driscoll’s case, she remembers her grandfather pawning and re-pawning his suit to get by. That memory was revived, she said, with the discovery a few years ago that a newly arrived Polish family in her neighborhood had received money to buy a car and move into a four-bedroom house.

“Years ago, we never had social security or anything like that,” Leslie Driscoll said. “You sold your own.”

Her grandmother would get her “granddad’s suit out of pawn when he got paid on Friday, put it back in pawn on Monday,” Leslie Driscoll said. “That’s how they lived.”

Having different cultures and communities is “fantastic,” she said, “but what I don’t like is the fact that, through having that, we’ve now left ourselves open. I feel like a second-class citizen in my own country.”

Leslie Driscoll is proudly English (not, in her mind, British — she crossed out the word on her passport and replaced it with “English”). Her father fought in World War II, and her grandfather in World War I. She has lived all her life in this area of London.

Louise grew up in the same area but in a more prosperous, multicultural Britain than earlier generations had. In school, she was one of only two white students. Her friends are Eritrean, Nigerian and South African.

Louise Driscoll voted for the Green Party in last year’s general election and was appalled that her mother, traditionally a Labour voter, had opted for the anti-Europe, anti-immigration U.K. Independence Party. (“Sorry, I know I’m a bit antiquated — can’t help it, love,” Leslie Driscoll replied, somewhat sheepishly, after her daughter uttered an expletive.)

Louise Driscoll said she understood the pressures that immigration placed on schools and hospitals. But leaving the EU worried her, she said, because it risked wrecking the economy and making it hard for young people to secure employment. It took her eight months to find work as a barista, she said.

“If I wanted to work abroad, it would be a lot easier if England was in the EU,” Louise said.

Her mother suggested that Louise move to New York, possibly unaware of the paradox that this would make her an immigrant herself.

Almost inevitably, the debate over immigration veered into an argument about terrorism. Britain’s porous borders were letting terrorists slip through, Leslie Driscoll said, repeating a message the camp to leave the European Union has relentlessly pushed on voters.

Louise Driscoll asked why she wanted to shut immigrants out of England.

“It ain’t the nice ones I’m worried about,” her mother replied. “It’s the nasty ones.”

“To have opened the floodgates, it’s like saying, ‘Come, and come and kill us,’” she said, adding that members of the Irish Republican Army had at least notified the public before setting off bombs across Britain during the 1970s and 1980s.

“We can get on a bus tomorrow with a bloke with a backpack, and bye-bye, boom,” Leslie Driscoll said. “Yeah? Nothing to do with what they call their beliefs.”

Louise Driscoll rolled her eyes.

In what sounded like a final plea, she said: “At the end of the day, the EU is going to affect my generation more than it will affect your generation. So shouldn’t it be down to us to decide whether or not to stay?”

Her mother fell silent and was thoughtful.

“I am 55 years of age,” she said slowly. “I know — I appreciate that in 50 years’ time, you’ll be here and I won’t, and you’ll have to put up with whatever’s happened.”

She paused.

“But I still want out,” she said. “Sorry.”