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The decision by voters in a referendum on 23 June 2016 that the UK should leave the EU – by a margin of 51.8% (17.4m votes) to 48.2% (16.1m votes) on a turnout of 72.2% of the eligible franchise – plunged the UK into its greatest political and economic crisis since the end of the Second World War (WW2). The referendum result was not widely predicted by those in the UK government or even the main campaign groups and sent shockwaves through the political classes in the UK, Europe and beyond. Indeed, internal polling by the official ‘remain’ campaign, Britain Stronger in Europe, and the head of the UK Statistics Authority had predicted up to a ten-point margin of victory on the day of the vote (Evans and Menon, 2017; Shipman, 2016). The result confirmed that, after 43 years, significant sections of the British electorate had still not fully reconciled themselves to the UK’s position as an EU member-state. This occurred despite extensive evidence of the Europeanisation of the British state and politics over this period (Bache and Jordan, 2006), albeit in ways which may have escaped the awareness of the average voter (Hawkins, 2012).
The question which has preoccupied scholars since the referendum is why, after over four decades as a member-state, more than half of those who voted – around a third of the UK’s adult population – felt their destiny lay outside this shared endeavour with their closest neighbours. As will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter, answers to this question have been sought in a variety of places: the socio-economic profile of leave voters; the immediate political context in which the referendum was called and held – most notably the austerity policies implemented since 2010 – and in terms of the key tropes, events and personalities which dominated the referendum campaign (Clarke et al., 2017). Others have thus sought longer term or comparative explanations of British Euroscepticism and the emergence of populist, nativist radical right parties across Europe and beyond (Vasilopoulou, 2018). To some degree, these were all factors in delivering the outcome of the vote. Yet any analysis of the referendum which does not place voter choices of 23 June 2016 in the wider historical and discursive context of the British ‘Europe’ debate is incomplete. The Brexit decision relates to questions of political and national identity which have underpinned debates on European integration and the allegiances which citizens feel toward the EU. However, these political-cultural explanations of the referendum outcome must also be able to account for both the ‘stickiness’ and the affective force of Eurosceptic narratives which see the destiny of the UK as separate from that of its continental neighbours.
The referendum campaign demonstrated the importance of the media in shaping popular conceptions of the EU in the UK. From a short-term perspective, the official campaign period saw the condensing and consolidation of ideas and arguments about the relationship between Britain and Europe which had slowly percolated in popular discourse over the preceding half century, and with ever greater intensity over the preceding three decades. It also underlined the shift which had occurred in the media landscape, undetected by many at the time of the vote, from traditional print and broadcast media to online and social media platforms. This precipitated a shift away from the authority and journalistic norms of established news brands like the BBC to consumer-populated platforms such as Facebook, on which information of often uncertain provenance could be quickly and widely disseminated, and to which existing regulatory regimes and election financing laws, designed for the analogue age, seemed ill equipped to respond (Ruzza and Pejovic, 2019).
From a longer-term perspective, the parameters of debate in the UK about the EU had been shaped by a hostile (especially print) media environment (Anderson and Weymouth, 1999; Gavin, 2000; Ichijo, 2002; Geddes, 2003; Hawkins, 2012, 2015; Daddow, 2012, 2015; Copeland and Copsey, 2017; Moore and Ramsay, 2017; Koller et al., 2019). Fearful of the potential electoral consequences of alienating titles such as The Sun and The Daily Mail, pro-European politicians – including those less ideologically convinced who nonetheless understood the strategic and economic importance of the EU to the UK – neglected or failed to make the case for the UK’s membership of the EU to the general public. They were unable (and in some cases, unwilling to try) to shift the key terms and underlying assumptions of the ‘European’ debate which provided the context for both the campaigns to hold, and subsequently to win, a referendum on EU membership.
Drawing on the insights of post-structuralist discourse theory (DT), this book offers an account of the Brexit referendum outcome as the result of a hegemonic discursive project which combined long-standing Eurosceptic tropes of British exceptionalism and separation from ‘Europe,’ with an expansive political project to associate EU membership with a wider political agenda to form a temporary electoral coalition capable of delivering a majority vote on 23 June. It argues that while short-term explanations for the referendum result are important – and a different result in such a close outcome could certainly have emerged had individuals taken different decisions or events played out in different ways – the leave vote was made possible by a decades-long process of ‘softening up’ by Eurosceptic voices afforded a disproportionately prominent platform within the UK public sphere, and particularly within the print media. This facilitated the emergence of predominant Eurosceptic discourse and shaped the terrain on which debates about the EU occurred, the terms in which they were couched and the conceptual lens through which they were viewed. As MacShane (2016) has commented, the embedded tropes of a decades-long denigration of the European integration project in the UK simply could not be overturned by even the most effective short campaign before the referendum.
While the outcome of the Brexit vote is not reducible to the discursive context in which the referendum was held, it was a key contextual factor which was a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for the leave vote. The pre-eminence of Eurosceptic discourses – and their centrality to ideas of Britishness and Anglo-British national identity – affected the political landscape in profound ways which led ultimately to the conditions emerging in which the proposition of leaving the EU came onto the political agenda, a referendum on this was held and ‘lost.’ It provided not just the conceptual vocabulary in which debates on the EU were conducted, but facilitated the emergence of a population of potential leave voters socialised into a particular understanding of the EU and its effects on the UK as seen through the lens of the predominant Eurosceptic discourse.
Opinion poll data consistently showed that EU affairs were a low salience issue for voters behind the economy and public services at least prior to 2015. Brexit was thus not the (inevitable) consequence of an actively engaged and ideologically committed anti-European electorate, but was facilitated instead by the existence of a wider population of ‘latent Brexiters.’ That is to say, the existence of an apparently large section of the population, particularly of England but also elsewhere in the UK, who may not be consciously engaged with questions of European integration or particularly exercised by the activities of the EU and its impact on their lives but who – when asked the question ‘remain or leave?’ – could be effectively mobilised to vote for the latter. In the lead up to the referendum itself, the arguments made by the various leave campaigners and campaign groups drew on, and resonated with, what the public already ‘knew’ – or perhaps more accurately what it had been told – about the EU and its effects on the UK in the preceding decades.
Despite its frequent characterisation as a working-class rebellion or a revolt of the ‘left behind,’ Brexit is fundamentally an elite political project devised and executed by a small group of ideological Eurosceptics, which consolidated on the fringes of the Conservative Party in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Inspired by the confrontational rhetoric of Margaret Thatcher on the UK’s budgetary obligations and an emerging ‘social Europe,’ this group emerged as a more coherent unit within the parliamentary party and activist ranks through the experiences of the ‘Maastricht’ era; i.e. the opposition to the ratification of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) by John Major’s government in 1992. Their ‘defeat’ on Maastricht led the rebels to commit to agitate for the UK’s exit, a project they pursued with no small degree of success over the next two-and-a-half decades. By the time of the next Conservative majority government in 2015, their anti-EU views had moved from the party fringes to the mainstream, becoming the predominant position of grassroots members, activists and the parliamentary party. For many of these, like Douglas Carswell and the aptly named Mark Reckless ‒ who resigned the Conservative whip and ultimately lost their seats as MPs over the issue of Brexit ‒ opposition to EU membership took on an almost existential quality as the defining issue of their political lives, for which they were prepared to sacrifice their careers.
David Cameron’s majority government was elected following a 2015 manifesto commitment to hold an ‘in-out’ referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. Yet to win the ensuing vote, leave supporters would need to reach out beyond the membership of the Conservative Party and the minority of voters identifying the EU as a high salience issue. With support from key financial interests – particularly those in the hedge fund sector and in many cases with close connections to the Conservative Party establishment – the leave elite were able to assemble a contingent coalition of voters in June 2016 that formed a small but sufficient majority of those voting to deliver their long-held objective. To do this, they had to build on the underlying assumptions and the tacit ‘knowledge’ of voters about ‘Europe’ to create an ‘equivalence’ between EU membership and wider social and political grievances held by potential leave voters. Perhaps most crucially, their task was not just to convince voters of their argument but to motivate them to turn out and vote for it on 23 June.
This book examines the discursive strategies employed by the most prominent leave campaigners during the 2016 referendum campaign, focusing on their intertextuality with both existing Eurosceptic discourses and wider issues of political salience with the potential leave electorate, most obviously the (post-austerity) economy and immigration. It places this in the context of longer-standing Eurosceptic discourses examined through a case study of the media coverage of the most recent EU treaty reform process. Following previous studies of Brexit (Wellings, 2019), and Euroscepticism over the longer term (Hawkins, 2012, 2015), the argument presented here is that explanations for the referendum result are to be found in England. While the aspects of Eurosceptic thought found some appeal in the Celtic nations of the UK – particularly in Wales and among the Unionist population of Northern Ireland – the referendum result was delivered by English voters who make up the overwhelming majority of the UK electorate. Moreover, what is often characterised as British Euroscepticism is, in fact, largely an Anglo-British phenomenon, drawing on an explicitly English conception of Britishness and the associated tropes of identity and nationhood. Opposition to the EU, it is argued, is an effect of emergent English nationalism, albeit one articulated in the terms of Britain and the protection of British sovereignty and statehood (Wellings, 2019). Consequently, the focus of the analysis presented in this volume is on English voices, speaking of Britain for an English audience.
The argument developed below employs key concepts derived from post-structuralist DT through which it is possible to understand and explain the path to Brexit. The critical logics approach set out below analyses not only the structure of Eurosceptic discourses (social logics) – the assumptions they make and the positions they put forward – but also the transient political coalitions which formed the ‘leave people’ (political logics) and, crucially, the emotive force of the leave offering, which was able to drive turnout (even among previous non-voters) to deliver the referendum result (fantasmatic logics) (Glynos and Howarth, 2007). This ‘affective grip’ of Eurosceptic ideology over such a significant percentage of the population is key to explaining the referendum outcome.
Delivering the referendum
The decision by former Prime Minister, David Camero...
