Political, Public and Media Discourses from Indyref to Brexit: The Divisive Language of Union (Rhetoric, Politics and Society) 3030673839, 9783030673833

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Political, Public and Media Discourses from Indyref to Brexit The Divisive Language of Union Fiona M. Douglas

Rhetoric, Politics and Society

Series Editors Alan Finlayson, University of East Anglia, Norfolk, UK James Martin, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK Kendall Phillips, Syracuse University, Syracuse, USA

Rhetoric lies at the intersection of a variety of disciplinary approaches and methods, drawing upon the study of language, history, culture and philosophy to understand the persuasive aspects of communication in all its modes: spoken, written, argued, depicted and performed. This series presents the best international research in rhetoric that develops and exemplifies the multifaceted and cross-disciplinary exploration of practices of persuasion and communication. It seeks to publish texts that openly explore and expand rhetorical knowledge and enquiry, be it in the form of historical scholarship, theoretical analysis or contemporary cultural and political critique. The editors welcome proposals for monographs that explore contemporary rhetorical forms, rhetorical theories and thinkers, and rhetorical themes inside and across disciplinary boundaries. For informal enquiries, questions, as well as submitting proposals, please contact the editors: Alan Finlayson: [email protected] James Martin: [email protected] Kendall Phillips: [email protected].

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14497

Fiona M. Douglas

Political, Public and Media Discourses from Indyref to Brexit The Divisive Language of Union

Fiona M. Douglas School of English University of Leeds Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK

Rhetoric, Politics and Society ISBN 978-3-030-67383-3 ISBN 978-3-030-67384-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67384-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Ian

Acknowledgements

The writing of any book goes far beyond the efforts of its author, and thanks are due to the following people, without whom this book would never have been completed. My thanks, firstly, to Ambra Finotello (Palgrave) who gave me the opportunity to write it. David Fairer (Emeritus Professor, University of Leeds), with his forensic attention to written style, read and provided comments on the first draft. Chris Norton and his Nexis-to-Corpus program helped me to build the indyref corpus, also wrestling with the Guardian comments data to make it usable. David Woolls lent his computational expertise to help me with the Twitter data and checking the reliability of the pre-EU Referendum and post-Brexit corpora. Any shortcomings in the analysis and commentary are naturally my own. Alison May, David Fairer, José Pérez Díez and Catherine Batt patiently endured my progress updates and encouraged me to see it through. Finally, special thanks go to my husband, Ian McFaull, who was enthusiastic and positive throughout, and who always believed that the result would be worth it. Fiona M. Douglas

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Contents

1

Introduction

1

2

Contexts of Union

5

3

Acts of Identity and (Dis)Union

25

4

Language, Identity, Politics

39

5

This Fractured Isle: Indyref

53

6

Breaking with Europe

85

7

Brexit and Beyond

Index

129 157

ix

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

6.12 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8

Indyref to Brexit key events timeline Hashtag frequencies in pre-EU Referendum Twitter corpus References to key political protagonists in pre-EU Referendum corpus Vote Leave website Britain stronger in Europe website Remain campaign report titles Collocates of control in pre-EU Referendum corpus Vote Leave campaign website materials Immigrant in Hansard corpus (1945–2020) Migrant in Hansard corpus (1945–2020) Collocates of Muslim(s) in pre-EU Referendum corpus Racial/religious terms in indyref and pre-EU Referendum corpora Collocates of traitor(s) in pre-EU Referendum corpus Pre- and post-Referendum semantic clusters on Twitter Pre-EU Referendum keywords Post-Brexit keywords (Im)migrant( s) and (im)migration from indyref to post-Brexit Racist(s), racism and racial from indyref to Brexit Racial and religious terms from indyref to post-Brexit UK General Election results (2001–2019) UK General Election results in Scotland (2001–2019)

3 89 92 97 98 100 108 109 118 119 121 122 124 132 135 136 138 140 141 143 143

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.9 Fig. 7.10 Fig. 7.11

Scottish Parliamentary election results (1999–2016) Traitor in Hansard corpus (2000–2020) Betrayal in Hansard corpus (1900–2020)

144 146 147

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This chapter sets the scene by summarizing the key political events that have brought the future of two political unions (the United Kingdom and the European Union) into doubt. It argues that the Scottish Independence Referendum and the European Union Referendum are part of wider diachronic trends towards fragmentation and disunion. The chapter emphasises the importance of language to do politics, for our sense of identity and ultimately its power to unite or divide. It concludes by briefly summarising the scope of the three specially designed corpora of political, media and public discourse totalling over 143 million words that underpin the analysis in subsequent chapters. Keywords Language · Identity · Unity · Division

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. (W.B. Yeats: ‘The Second Coming’)

The United Kingdom faces an uncertain future. It remains to be seen whether anything approaching Yeats’ apocalyptic vision comes to pass, but there is no denying the cataclysmic effect of recent political events,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. M. Douglas, Political, Public and Media Discourses from Indyref to Brexit, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67384-0_1

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and the United Kingdom is undoubtedly in uncharted and difficult territory. In just six years, there have been two Referendums on the future of Union: the Scottish Independence Referendum (2014) and the European Union Referendum (2016); three General Elections and three UK Prime Ministers (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson); the Scottish Parliamentary, Northern Ireland and Welsh Assembly Elections (2016), and a second Northern Ireland Assembly Election (2 March 2017). For nearly three years, the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont was suspended over deep-seated party disagreements. Centrifugal politics are the order of the day, and the ever-widening spirals of disunity look likely to persist within the United Kingdom and beyond. What began as friction, has quickly led to fragmentation, and could well end in fracture. But how did this situation arise and what might the future hold? This book presents a diachronic perspective on the political, media and public discourses surrounding two unions—the United Kingdom and the European Union—both of which now face uncertain futures. Its focus on the use of language, both to unite and divide, is key. We do politics via language. Language has the power to inform, persuade, manipulate and mislead. Language also has complex links to identity: it can make us feel as if we belong (ingroup) or it can be used to make us feel excluded (outgroup). Language reveals our value systems, preferences and prejudices. It reveals which social groupings we identify with and those we value, but it also exposes those we do not. Examination of the linguistic strategies used by politicians, the media and the public gives insights into their underlying ideological viewpoints, regardless of whether these are overtly stated or even consciously recognised. This study is based on analysis of three specially designed corpora of political, media and public discourse covering events from indyref (the Scottish Independence Referendum) in 2014 to the EU Referendum in 2016, and through to 2019 and the Brexit aftermath (the indyref corpus, pre-EU Referendum corpus and post-Brexit corpus, respectively) totalling over 143 million words. The corpora comprise a wide range of different text types including newspaper articles, speeches, televised and parliamentary debates, party websites, Twitter postings and observations from political pundits to achieve as broad a perspective as possible. Indyref and Brexit form the bookends of a series of seismic political events that took place from 2014 to 2020 and shook the UK political landscape to its core (see Fig. 1.1). The corpora reveal the emergence of increasingly divisive discourses across these pivotal political events and

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INTRODUCTION

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18 Sept 2014

Scottish Independence Referendum

Scotland votes 55% to 45% to stay in UK

7 May 2015

General Election (1)

David Cameron (Conservative PM) wins second term

5 May 2016

Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Parliamentary/Assembly Elections

23 June 2016

EU Referendum

29 March 2017

Article 50 triggered

8 June 2017

General Election (2)

Theresa May calls snap election but loses parliamentary majority.

12 December 2019

General Election (3)

Boris Johnson calls snap election and increases majority.

31 January 2020

UK leaves the EU

UK votes 52% to 48% to leave the EU. David Cameron resigns.

Fig. 1.1 Indyref to Brexit key events timeline

this study examines the underlying ideological, national, political and societal rifts they reveal. By exploring UK-wide viewpoints on the unfolding narratives, it considers the extent to which nationalist and unionist debates did not disappear after the ‘No’ vote in the Scottish Independence Referendum, but instead were waiting in the wings during subsequent election campaigns, only to re-emerge and reassert themselves with a vengeance in the EU Referendum and the post-Brexit period. What identities were invoked during and after these Referendum campaigns—national, supranational, social, ethnic or racial—and how were they perceived by the media and electorates? Were such identities constructed, maintained, or challenged by linguistic choices, and what is the relationship between politics and the power of language to unite or divide?

CHAPTER 2

Contexts of Union

Abstract This chapter gives the historical background to the United Kingdom and Britain’s membership in the European Union. It traces Acts of Union between the four UK partner nations (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) from the sixteenth century to the present day, highlighting key issues that have threatened their establishment and continuation: nationalism, sovereignty, language, religion and violence. It considers the desires for greater independence that led to the (re)establishment of national Parliaments/Assemblies in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, devolved powers for the partner nations, and the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. It outlines the history of the UK’s membership of the European Union, and the 2016 Referendum that resulted in Brexit. It concludes by asking what the future holds for an increasingly (dis)United Kingdom. Keywords History · Acts of Union · Parliament · Devolution · Referendums

Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this chapter (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67384-0_2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. M. Douglas, Political, Public and Media Discourses from Indyref to Brexit, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67384-0_2

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Acts of Union We begin by exploring questions of union, considering both UK-internal relationships between the countries of Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales, and the United Kingdom’s external bonds with Europe. The history of the United Kingdom is a long and complex one, and the individual unions underpinning the relationships between its constituent nations have been evolving since the sixteenth century. The current political situation may have brought constitutional questions into sharper focus, but a brief consideration of the past reveals that such turmoil is not without precedent. According to Frame (1996: 74), ‘traditions of dissent’ in Ireland, Scotland and Wales—a sense of being ethnically and culturally distinctive, of being marginalised and oppressed by their larger English neighbour—were ‘built into the fabric of the United Kingdom’ from the outset.

Wales The first Act of Union, between England and Wales, drawn up under the reign of Henry VIII in 1536 and revisited in 1543, attempted to regulate the relationship between England and Wales. Much of Wales had been a principality of the English crown since the defeat of the Welsh price Llewelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282 and the passing of the 1284 Statute of Rhuddlan during the reign of Edward I; but the Marcher lords had continued to rule their own territories, and there were several other independent lordships in the south and in Montgomeryshire (Jenkins 2014). There were several uprisings against English rule, the most famous being the rebellion led by Owain Glyndwr ˆ at the beginning of the fifteenth century which tried to establish Welsh independence. But although Owain achieved mythic status (akin to that of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce of Scotland) and had widespread Welsh support, the uprising was ultimately unsuccessful. The sixteenth century Laws of Wales Acts (as the ‘Union’ is more properly called), passed by the English parliament, brought the whole of Wales under the sovereignty of the Tudor monarch and abolished the powers and territories of the March Lords, establishing instead the seven counties of Brecon, Denbigh, Flint, Glamorgan and Pembroke, Monmouth, Montgomery and Radnor (Merriman and Wormald 1995). Unlike Scotland and Ireland, Wales had never been an independent united nation, so this was union by absorption.

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In the preamble to the 1536 Act, Wales was described as already being ‘incorporated, united and annexed to and with the realm of England’ (Welsh Government, n.d.); this Act of Union consolidated, formalised and extended English control in Wales. It was therefore a very different type of union from those that were to come with Ireland and Scotland. The Welsh Acts of Union, like those that were to follow, were not purely concerned with matters of political sovereignty. Religion was, and continued to be, a powerful factor. Henry VIII, having broken with Rome over the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, was worried about the loyalty of the Marcher lords, many of whom were Roman Catholic. He was also afraid that the French and Spanish Catholic monarchies might invade England through Wales, especially via the southwest. Henry VIII had Welsh ancestry, but he identified with Wales much less strongly than his father, Henry VII, who had been born in Pembroke. Under the terms of the 1536 and 1543 Acts, English became the official language of administration in Wales, and the country was brought under the rule of English law, though Wales retained its own courts, the Great Sessions, (equivalent to English county assizes) until 1830 (Boyce 2012). Wales was granted permission to be represented in the English Parliament, but all 27 representatives, and all officials in Wales, had to use the English language rather than Welsh. This linguistic, legal and administrative sovereignty of English had profound and lasting effects on Welsh national identity (Thomas 2015), especially as most ordinary people still spoke Welsh. Some forty years later, and in line with Elizabeth I’s desire to support the Reformation and the Protestant faith in Wales, Parliament agreed that the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible should be translated into Welsh, the latter giving rise to William Morgan’s important 1588 translation, and cementing links between the Welsh language, religion, and cultural identity that persisted for centuries. Although Welsh was now a language that lacked official status, being excluded from public and legislative domains, it became closely linked with Welsh identity and non-conformist Protestantism. A series of religious texts published in the vernacular, alongside increasing Welsh literacy nurtured by indigenous missionary schools, fused literary, religious and national consciousness (Chambers 2003; Chambers and Thompson 2005; Davies 2014). Welsh finally achieved equal official status with English under the 1967 and 1993 Welsh Language Acts (UK Government, n.d.). In 1866, a cultural and later nationalist movement, Cymru Fydd (Wales of the Future), was founded. Initially, its key aims were to achieve equality

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with England rather than separation, home rule or sovereignty: ‘the voices of England and of Wales should be joined, not in unison, but in harmony’ (cited in Bogdanor 2001). Though Cymru Fydd became more nationalist in character in the 1880s before its eventual collapse in 1896, the situation in Wales was arguably very different from that in Ireland or Scotland (Boyce 2012). Although there was some resentment towards its more powerful English neighbour, Wales enjoyed closer and more harmonious ties with England, the influential landowners often being Welsh-speaking and/or linked by marriage to Welsh nationals, rather than alien and absentee landowners, as was the case in Ireland. The industrialisation of south Wales during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries inevitably increased the use of English over Welsh, as English incomers brought their language with them, and further strengthened the economic links between England and Wales. Despite attempts by individuals such as Tim Ellis and Lloyd George to raise support for home rule, Wales remained divided on the issue (Boyce 2012). A series of nineteenth-century government education reports, including the infamous 1847 Treachery of the Blue Books, promoted English-medium education whilst damning the use of Welsh as being indicative of moral laxity, responsible both for societal ills and lack of economic advancement (Jones and Martin-Jones 2003). By the twentieth century, English had become the dominant language in Wales. Plaid (Genedlaethol) Cymru, established in 1925, like Cymru Fydd, was initially concerned mainly with the cultural and linguistic distinctiveness of Wales, and it was not until 1932 that the party took up the issue of self-government (Jones and Martin-Jones 2003). The question of devolution for Wales became a political reality with the Referendum of 1979, but it was overwhelmingly rejected by the Welsh people with four to one voting against the proposals. The second Referendum, held on 18 September 1997 following the publication of the government’s proposals in the White Paper ‘A Voice for Wales’, returned a very slim majority in favour of devolution for Wales—50.3%, and only 6721 votes (Welsh Parliament 2020). The powers devolved to the Welsh Assembly by the 1998 Government of Wales Act (UK Government, n.d.) establishing the Welsh National Assembly were significantly less than those given to the Scottish Parliament, with all primary law-making powers reserved to Westminster. Further powers were devolved to the National Assembly in 2006, 2011, 2014, and again in 2017, with the St David’s Day or Wales Act (UK Government, n.d.). On 6 May 2020, the Welsh

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Assembly was officially renamed the Welsh Parliament. In some respects, Welsh nationalism seems to be rather different from that found in the United Kingdom’s other Celtic nations, though there is some evidence that, post-Brexit, Plaid Cymru may be intensifying its push for independence, especially if Scotland were to go down this route. Like England, Wales voted to leave the EU in the 2016 European Union Referendum (52.5 to 47.5%). Is this further evidence of the close political and social links between the two countries, or are there other, more complex reasons which might explain it? Though the ‘harmonisation’ of the Welsh and English political administrations has been largely peaceful, Welsh extremist groups Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (MAC—the Movement for the Defence of Wales) and Meibion Glyndr (Sons of Glyndr) did undertake violent direct action over a thirty-year period between 1963 and 1993 including arson, bombings and various terror threats, including those made in relation to the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969, though such events are seldom referred to nowadays and seem to have dropped from public consciousness. But whilst England and Wales may seem, at least superficially, to be politically mostly ‘on the same page’, the same cannot be said about the much-contested UK sovereignty in Northern Ireland, where the situation has been characterised by the ongoing conflict.

Ireland In 1541, the Irish Parliament passed the Act of Kingly Title, making Ireland a kingdom under the control of the English crown rather than a collection of local dynastic lordships, and dealing with the problematic status of Henry VIII’s Irish sovereignty (Rapple 2009). The Nine Years war from 1594–1603—an unsuccessful rebellion of the Irish Gaelic Chieftains against English rule—was followed by sectarian troubles during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms between 1639 and 1651 and, most famously, the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The seventeenth-century penal laws fuelled further resentments and uprisings, which continued into the eighteenth century. Following the 1798 Irish rebellion, the Irish Parliament was abolished in 1801 under the Act of Union, and Ireland became part of the new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It remained so until 1921, though rebellions were launched in 1803, 1848, 1867 and 1916. In the 1830s and 1840s, Catholic nationalist and mayor of Dublin, Daniel O’Connell, campaigned for the repeal of the Act of

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Union, but failed to gain adequate support for the scheme in the House of Commons. Discontent with British rule led to the question of the governance of Ireland being raised again in the late nineteenth century, but this time Irish Nationalists under Isaac Butts urged Home Rule rather than repeal of the Union, i.e. devolution rather than complete separation. 1886 saw the first attempt to introduce a Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons, with the support of the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, and Irish Nationalist leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, but the attempt was defeated by British and Irish Unionists. A second attempt was made in 1893 but, although passed by the House of Commons, it was defeated in the House of Lords. It was nineteen years later, in 1912, that a third attempt was made. In 1914, the British Parliament passed the Home Rule Bill granting home rule to Ireland, but it was delayed by the outbreak of World War I. The bloody conflict of the Easter Rising of 1916, which declared Ireland’s independence from British rule, was followed by the War of Independence (1919–1921), and ultimately by the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, under which Ireland was divided into the twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State and the six northern counties of Ulster, with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) as the ruling party in Northern Ireland. Civil war and further troubles followed, and the Irish Free State became the independent republic of Ireland in 1949. The tensions did not end there, of course, and in Northern Ireland especially the conflict continued with both loyalist and unionist paramilitary organisations clashing repeatedly. Throughout its troubled history, Ireland’s political narrative has been heavily influenced by the religious, and to some extent economic, divides between Catholics and Protestants, and sectarian violence has flared periodically. What we now think of as ‘The Troubles’ began in the 1960s. At the time, the Ulster Unionist Party was still running Northern Ireland from Stormont, but in 1972, as the violence continued to escalate, ‘direct rule’ was imposed by the UK government, and power shifted back to London. In 1973, the Northern Ireland border poll Referendum on whether to continue as part of the United Kingdom or to rejoin with the south to form a united Ireland was boycotted by the Nationalists, the Northern Ireland Assembly was established, and further violence ensued. Although the signing of the historic Belfast Agreement, otherwise known as the Good Friday Agreement, (UK Government, n.d.) on 10 April 1998 after thirty years of conflict, ratified by 22 May 1998 Referendums in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and the instantiation of the new Northern Ireland

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Assembly at Stormont did much to calm the situation, the disagreements and violence, though greatly reduced, continued. Dissident paramilitary groups continued their activities, and in August 1998, just four months after the signing of the historic agreement, 29 people were killed by republican dissidents in the Omagh bombing. The 1998 Northern Ireland Act repealed the 1920 Government of Ireland Act and stated that Northern Ireland could not cease to be part of the United Kingdom ‘without the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland’ (UK Government, n.d.). The new Assembly was suspended four times, and in 2002, direct rule from London was reinstated. Following the 2003 election, the Assembly was ‘restored to a state of suspension’ (Northern Ireland Assembly 2020). The 2006 Northern Ireland Act, and the 13 October 2006 St Andrews Agreement (UK Government, n.d.) established a Transitional Assembly, with power re-devolved to the Assembly on 8 May 2007, the same year that saw the British Army cease its military operations in Northern Ireland. The situation has been further complicated by recent events in the Stormont and Westminster parliaments. The Northern Ireland Assembly was dissolved in January 2017 following the resignation of the Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness (Sinn Féin) over First Minister Arlene Foster’s involvement in the green energy Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) Scheme, and the resulting collapse of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin coalition-led devolved government in Stormont. The second Northern Ireland Assembly election within 10 months on 2 March 2017 did little to restore political harmony and, months on, several deadlines to reach a deal having expired, Northern Ireland was still without an Executive amidst fears that direct rule might be reintroduced. It would be nearly three years before the Northern Ireland Assembly reconvened. Although religion still plays a very significant role in Northern Ireland politics, the Catholic–Protestant and nationalist–unionist divides are further underlined by questions of language, specifically Irish vs. Ulster Scots. The 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement specifically addressed these by asserting the ‘importance of respect, understanding and tolerance in relation to linguistic diversity, including in Northern Ireland, the Irish language, Ulster Scots and the languages of the various ethnic communities’ (Northern Ireland Office 1998), though the document pays much more attention to the status of Irish than of other varieties. Annex B of the

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2006 St Andrews Agreement commits the Government to introduce an Irish Language Act and to ‘work with the incoming Executive to enhance and protect the development of the Irish language’ (something the DUP deny having agreed to) and to enhance and develop ‘the Ulster Scots language, heritage and culture’ (UK Government 2006). The language question has not gone away either. In 2015, Sinn Féin attempted to introduce an Irish Language Act to the Assembly but gained insufficient support. Post-Brexit, and with the Northern Ireland Assembly disbanded in March 2017 in the wake of the RHI row, the language issue remained unresolved. As one of the conditions under which they would support the re-establishment of the power-sharing government, Sinn Féin demanded a stand-alone Irish Language Act putting Irish alongside English as an official language with equal status. Language in Northern Ireland is politically salient as a potent symbol of cultural and religious identity. The 2 March 2017 election reduced the DUP’s Northern Ireland Assembly majority to only one seat over their nearest rivals, Sinn Féin. Three months later, the 8 June UK General Election saw the Ulster Unionist Party and the Social Democratic and Labour Party lose all their Westminster seats to the DUP and Sinn Féin (returning 10 and 7 seats, respectively); in Westminster, Northern Ireland politics has effectively become a two-horse race. Theresa May’ s controversial deal with the DUP in the wake of the June 2017 UK General Election raised tensions further and did nothing to resolve the divisions and ongoing political conflict. Northern Ireland and the controversial ‘backstop’ played an important role in UK and EU Brexit discussions, and at one point threatened to derail things entirely. The backstop was an insurance protocol in the (unratified) Brexit agreement to ensure that there was no hard (i.e. customs) border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, the latter being part of the European Union. It would have kept Northern Ireland (and the United Kingdom) within some aspects of the European single market until a solution to prevent a hard border could be found. It was rejected by Boris Johnson, who agreed a new, differentiated relationship between Northern Ireland and the EU, which means that Northern Ireland is treated differently from the rest of the United Kingdom over rules for goods and customs, and has an open border with the Republic of Ireland. Post-Brexit, in a divided island where the Irish Republic in the south is a full member of the European Union but Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, the new European land border looks likely to be a hotly contested issue. Like Scotland, Northern Ireland voted

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to remain in the EU (56% remain to 44% leave), and many there are contemplating what will happen when the United Kingdom leaves, with worries that the Troubles may return. In the wake of Brexit, Sinn Féin has proposed that a Referendum on the unification of Ireland be held within five years and has argued that Northern Ireland should have special designated status within the EU. (The Scottish Nationalist Party made similar recommendations about the status of Scotland in the post-Brexit United Kingdom and European unions.) Much will depend on the outcome of trade talks with the EU during 2020, but there could be a de facto customs border in the Irish Sea, separating Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom. The latter has prompted the exploration of a variety of ‘solutions’, including a putative bridge to be built between the United Kingdom (probably in Scotland) and Northern Ireland. On 13 January 2020, a devolved government was restored to the Northern Ireland Assembly after a gap of nearly three years. Arguably the Stormont power-sharing deal was one of expediency made in the wake of the Conservative Party’s landslide victory in the December 2019 General Election, and the consequent erosion of the DUP power base in the UK Parliament. The looming prospect of a Northern Ireland on the frontier of the European border may have been a contributing factor, as the new Northern Ireland protocol gives Stormont a unilateral exit mechanism should it be unhappy with the outcome of the Brexit trade and ‘divorce’ settlement. The Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey (NILT) (September 2019–February 2020) suggests that although Brexit has caused political retrenchment to existing nationalist and unionist identity positions, unionists do not feel that Brexit poses any significant threat to the Union, and it has little effect on their desire to remain British or their commitment to the devolved Stormont Assembly (McDonald 2020).

Scotland When James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne in 1603 following the death of Elizabeth I, he brought England and Scotland together under one sovereign, and so began four centuries of close, though not necessarily untroubled, union. James I/VI had initially wanted to bring about full legal and political union of the two countries, but the English parliament threw out his suggestion and would agree only to a Union of the Crowns . Unlike the two earlier unions, this was

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in principle at least a union of equals, but it was forged in political and religious turmoil. James VI, son of Mary Queen of Scots (executed in 1587 by Elizabeth I), had formed an alliance with the English queen in 1586 under the Treaty of Berwick, in the hopes of one day being named her successor. Unlike his Catholic mother, whom he never knew, James had been raised as a Protestant and so, on religious grounds at least, was a potentially acceptable successor to Elizabeth, the Reformation having made religion a decisive factor in political and dynastic matters. James moved the royal court south and, despite his promises, only visited Scotland once during his reign, 1603–1625. There were profound anglicising cultural and linguistic impacts attendant on the Union, though some of these had been emerging for several decades. With the removal of the Scottish court south to London, royal patronage for Scottish poets and playwrights meant writing in English or Latin rather than their native Scots (or Inglis as it was frequently known), and probably a move to the London-based court. It was another hundred years before the two nation states would form what we now think of as the Union. Under the Treaty of Union in 1707 (UK Government, n.d.), the Scottish and English parliaments were unified into a single parliament, and the two kingdoms came together to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain. At that point, Scotland effectively became a ‘stateless nation’ (McCrone 1992), though retaining its own church, education and legal systems. Although it is often assumed that the devolution initiatives of the 1990s were the earliest manifestation of calls for self-government, this is not the case. David Lloyd George, who later became UK Prime Minster, openly advocated Welsh devolution in the 1890s (Ellis 1985) and, in 1895, as part of ongoing debates on Irish Home Rule, a motion in the House of Commons introduced by Kirkcaldy MP Sir J.H. Dalziel called for Parliament ‘to devolve upon Legislatures in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England … the management and control of their domestic affairs’ (Hansard 29 March 1895, vol 32 cc523-60; Colley 2014). Some years later, in 1912, Winston Churchill, then MP for Dundee, suggested that there should be regional assemblies for England and separate parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Scottish nationalism has been a largely non-violent affair, though several extremist nationalist groups (such as the Tartan Army) appeared during the 1970s and 1980s, carrying out bomb threats and other militant action, but these movements had little political impact. Some years later, the run-up to the Scottish Independence Referendum resulted

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in allegations of threats and intimidation being made towards specific individuals. Although the 1979 Scottish Referendum on devolution held under Jim Callaghan’s Labour government following pressure from the SNP returned a narrow majority ‘Yes’ vote (52%), it did not exceed the 40% of the electorate required to enact political change. Was this a missed opportunity for Scotland, or a narrow escape? Opinions differ. There were grumblings at the time about the strictures of the 40 per cent rule, and some feelings of regret, but it was largely back to the status quo and business as usual. The SNP held only two seats in 1979 and were a small minority party who seemed unlikely to gain sufficient ground with the Scottish electorate to realise their ambitions of an independent Scotland. In 1997, under Tony Blair’s Labour administration, Scotland voted again on devolution: should Scotland have its own parliament and should that parliament have tax raising powers? This time, the rules were simpler with no electoral threshold set, and a majority voted ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes’. The Scotland Act 1998 (UK Government, n.d.) enshrined Scottish devolution in law and led to the reinstatement of the Scottish Parliament on 1 July 1999, a historic occasion marked by a celebratory ceremonial opening of the Parliament in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen. It was a day where Scottish national identity was very much to the forefront, with Sheena Wellington singing Burns’ A Man’s ‘A Man For A’ That’, and specially commissioned music and readings that celebrated Scottish history, culture and values. Even the Queen’s outfit was in keeping with the mood—a striking ensemble of purple and green, reminiscent of the colours of the Scottish thistle. Speaking a few years previously at the Scottish Labour Party conference in 1994, John Smith, then leader, had described a reinstated Scottish Parliament as being ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’ and predicted that it would form the ‘cornerstone’ for ‘democratic renewal’ in the United Kingdom (Torrance 2020: 4). Whether devolution truly ‘settled’ the will of the Scottish people is, of course, in hindsight, problematic. Devolution in Scotland was not without its problems, both internally (in operational terms) and externally (in terms of its relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom and especially its larger English neighbour). It was clear that 1998 had not settled things once and for all and that the ‘devolution paradox’, whereby Scottish voters wanted greater autonomy but were reluctant to embrace increased UK-wide federalism, persisted (Curtice 2006; Torrance 2020). The ongoing tug of war between centripetal and centrifugal politics was

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far from over. In 2007, the then First Minister, Alex Salmond, launched the ‘National Conversation’ with the publication of the White Paper on Choosing Scotland’s Future (Scottish Executive 2007). It outlined three possibilities: continuing the constitutional settlement with little or minimal change, extending devolved power in Scotland, or moving towards full independence. In response, and with the support of the UK Government, the independent Calman Commission (2008) was set up to ‘recommend any changes to the present constitutional arrangements that would enable the Scottish Parliament to serve the people of Scotland better’ and ‘continue to secure the position of Scotland within the United Kingdom’ (Scottish Parliament Proceedings 6 December 2007). The Calman Commission made 63 recommendations, some of which, in 2009, were accepted and others rejected by the Scottish Government (specifically the recommendations on the sharing of taxation powers), and in response to which it announced a Referendum (Scotland) Bill. Subsequent amendments were made to the Scotland Act in 2012, and there was an ideologically important change in nomenclature with the Scottish Executive officially renamed as the Scottish Government. 2012 was a pivotal year, as the UK Prime Minister David Cameron, in a televised interview, promised to approve a Referendum on Scotland’s future. This was followed by months of discussion between the UK and Scottish governments culminating in the signing of the Edinburgh Agreement in October 2012, which effectively set out the ground rules for the Scottish Independence Referendum.

Scottish Independence Referendum (2014) On the 18th of September 2014, Scotland stood at a political crossroads. The Independence Referendum (indyref) would decide whether Scotland remained in the United Kingdom, or chose independence— thereby ending centuries of political, economic and constitutional union. The stakes were high, and the implications for the future of Scotland and the rest of the UK massive. At 85%, the turnout rate for the historic Independence Referendum was the highest recorded for any election in the United Kingdom since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1918 and, for the first time, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds were allowed to vote. The question asked was: ‘Should Scotland be an independent country?’ It was clear that the vote was likely to be close; a YouGov poll on 6th September put the result at 51% Yes, 49% No. After months of what

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looked like Westminster complacency and very little visibility of UK political leaders north of the border, unionist political panic ensued, and David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband joined forces to argue for the future of the Union, making separate trips to Scotland to lobby for the ‘Better Together’ campaign. But it all looked like too little too late. In response to the YouGov poll, Gordon Brown, previous UK Labour Prime Minister and supporter of the Union, set out a series of measures and a timetable for further devolution, and a week later, the three UK leaders endorsed and published The Vow in the Scottish tabloid newspaper The Daily Record (see Chapter 5). On the eve of the Referendum, Gordon Brown, who crucially was a Scot with the appropriate gravitas and political pedigree (this was one occasion where having the ‘right accent’ really mattered), made what came to be known as his barnstorming speech. He was widely hailed as having saved the Union at the eleventh hour, and of having achieved what the UK political leaders could not; the next day, Scotland narrowly voted to stay in the United Kingdom. Although a 55% majority voted to remain part of the United Kingdom, the strength of the ‘Yes’ campaign sent shockwaves through the UK political establishment. The next day, David Cameron said: The people of Scotland have spoken. It is a clear result. They have kept our country of four nations together. … we have heard the settled will of the Scottish people […] a stronger Scottish Parliament backed by the strength and security of the United Kingdom’. (UK Government statement, 19 September 2014)

Alongside promising increased devolved powers for Scotland, he vowed to give people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland more power over their own affairs and argued that the so-called West Lothian question (i.e. English votes for English laws) should be revisited. In just one day, Scotland could have overturned hundreds of years of history and close collaboration; this was potentially landscape-altering on a tectonic scale. Although the initial quake subsided, the aftershocks rumbled on, and Cameron’s promises of further devolution for all four partner nations could yet have far-reaching consequences, especially in the wake of the EU Referendum and the different voting patterns across the United Kingdom. The Scotland Act 2016 granted further powers to Scotland, and whilst recognising the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government

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as ‘a permanent part of the United Kingdom’s constitutional arrangements’, also necessitated another Referendum before these institutions or the UK constitutional arrangement could be dissolved (Torrance 2020). Two General Elections and an EU Referendum later, the uncertainty over the future of the Union continues, and it now seems doubtful that the United Kingdom, and its wider relationships with European Union partners, can long remain unaltered. Scotland, though one of the smaller countries in both unions, may yet prove to be kingmaker.

The European Union The end of the Second World War brought welcome peace, but it also raised important questions about how best to rebuild a war-torn Europe facing serious economic challenges, prevent the re-emergence of radical nationalisms, and deal with rising Cold War tensions (McCormick 2014). There were also concerns about long-standing disagreements between France and Germany. 1949 saw the creation of the Council of Europe which brought together ten Western European countries to promote human rights and democracy but, for some, this did not go far enough, and they wanted greater political and economic integration. In 1952, Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands came together as the European Coal and Steel Community to try to ensure economic and political stability. As one of the main players in the Second World War, the United Kingdom was invited to join, but declined. The 1957 Treaty of Rome (which again, the United Kingdom declined to sign) established the European Economic Community (EEC), otherwise known as the ‘Common Market’, and was designed to encourage greater cooperation between member states by allowing common trade and agriculture policies, and free movement of people across borders. With its own economy comparing unfavourably with that of the EEC nations, especially France and Germany, the United Kingdom applied to join, but the application was twice vetoed by France, in 1963 and 1967. Although the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark were members of the Council of Europe, they did not join the EEC until 1973 under the Treaty of Accession. Two years later, in 1975, the UK Labour Government held a Referendum on whether to retain membership of the EEC; a two-thirds majority voted to remain. Having joined the European single market under its own negotiated terms in 1987, the United Kingdom did not seek further integration

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with Europe. However, the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 brought the United Kingdom into an even closer relationship with its European neighbours, heralding further economic and political integration, and raising thorny issues around the advantages and disadvantages of monetary union and freedom of movement of EU citizens. Although the United Kingdom opted out of monetary union at the Maastricht summit, this was to be a turning point in EU/UK relations. Despite having obtained concessions on economic integration, unlike most other EU member states, the United Kingdom did not put border controls in place or introduce a five-year transition period before opening its borders following the 2004 expansion of European membership, and it greatly underestimated the likely net migration from other EU countries, especially those from the new Central and Eastern Europe member states (Evans and Menon 2017). Immigration figures greatly exceeded what the UK government had predicted, and by 2014 there were almost 1.5 million migrant EU workers in the United Kingdom (Vargas-Silva and Markaki 2015; Evans and Menon 2017). This was to become a key issue in the 2016 EU Referendum debates. The emerging crisis of migration to southern Europe further fuelled UK worries and anti-Europe rhetoric. Forty-one years on from the first EU Referendum, the story was very different. On 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom electorate voted by a majority of 52 to 48% to leave the EU. Brexit, as it had been dubbed—no longer just an ideological aspiration of the Leave campaign—looked set to become a political and economic reality. As Clarke et al. (2017) argue, the Referendum outcome was the culmination of many years of growing discontent with the EU amongst the UK electorate. However, the picture across different parts of the United Kingdom showed a more complicated response to the Referendum question. Whilst England, the area with the largest electorate by far, voted by a majority of 53.4 to 46.6% to leave, as did Wales with 52.5% in favour of leave vs. 47.5% to remain, the story in Scotland and Northern Ireland was very different. In Northern Ireland, 55.8% voted to remain against 44.2% to leave; in Scotland, the vote to remain was even stronger at 62% vs. 38% to leave. In the context of the Scottish Independence Referendum two years earlier, the difference in voting patterns and electorate sizes between Scotland and England inevitably led Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, to assert that Scotland was being taken out of the EU against the will of the Scottish people. In Northern Ireland, the situation was even more complex, with the prospect of a hard border and a customs division

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between the north and south of Ireland challenging the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement, and eventually giving rise to the contentious backstop solution proposals.

The End of Union with Europe The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, who had led the campaign to remain in the European Union, resigned on 24 June 2016, despite having previously said that he would not do so. His attempt to silence Eurosceptics in the Conservative party by calling the Referendum had spectacularly backfired. Having won the Conservative party leadership contest, Theresa May became PM on 11 July 2016 and, in an unexpected move, appointed Boris Johnson (who had been a major spokesperson for the Leave campaign) as Foreign Secretary. In July 2016, the cross-party Constitution Reform Group published draft legislation designed to stabilise the United Kingdom in the wake of Brexit: ‘The Constitution Reform Group is clear that by reinventing the Union in this new and logically defensible way, we can secure it for centuries to come’ (quoted in The Scotsman, 14 July 2016). It proposed that the UK Parliament should control central policy issues such as defence, foreign affairs, immigration, human rights, national security and constitutional matters, with the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies, and a new English Parliament dealing with other policy areas and having full sovereignty over their own affairs. The proposals would reverse the current situation whereby sovereignty resides with the Westminster parliament, other parliaments and assemblies having only certain devolved powers. The group warned that ‘The United Kingdom risks disintegration unless we have a new constitutional settlement to guarantee the rights and autonomy of each constituent nation and region within a reformed UK under a new Act of Union’ (Constitution Reform Group). Whether or not their proposals will gain traction remains to be seen, but the sovereignty of the UK parliament is under intensifying pressure from a variety of sources both within and external to the United Kingdom. May’s negotiations with the EU on the terms of the withdrawal bill were heavily criticised, most especially over her insistence on holding to several ‘red lines’ which she said were essential to ensure the UK’s future as ‘a fully independent, sovereign country’ (Conservative Party Conference speech, 2 October 2016). Following nine months of UK

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parliamentary wrangling and intensive negotiations with the European Union, Article 50 was formally triggered on 29 March 2017, with a twoyear countdown to the leave date (29 March 2019). In an attempt to strengthen her hand, May called an unexpected General Election to be held in June 2017, a year on from the Referendum result, but lost her parliamentary majority and was forced to make a deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party to stay in power. Further long months of negotiation with the EU followed, and in July 2018 her plans for a much softer than anticipated Brexit as outlined to her Cabinet in the Chequers plan resulted in the resignation of the Brexit Minister, David Davis, and of the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson. Ongoing disagreements in the UK parliament over the proposed deal with the EU led to a series of parliamentary disagreements and extensions to the negotiations with the EU. In March 2019, UK MPs rejected the Government’s EU Withdrawal Agreement, and Brexit was delayed. The European elections in May 2019 brought victory for Nigel Farage’s Brexit party and significant gains for the Liberal Democrats. The Conservative and Labour parties both sustained major losses, and the UK Independence Party (from which Nigel Farage had resigned as leader in July 2016) failed to elect any MEPs. In Scotland, the Scottish Nationalist Party continued to dominate. It was widely seen as a pro-Brexit and antipolitical establishment vote. In an emotional statement during which she spoke of her ‘deep regret’ that she had been unable to deliver Brexit, Theresa May stepped down as Conservative leader in June 2019. Boris Johnson, who had campaigned for Leave, took over the reins in July. In an attempt to break the ongoing parliamentary deadlock, he held a snap election on 12 December 2019, promising to ‘get Brexit done’. It was a risky strategy that worked; there was a major swing to the Conservatives, with Labour having their worst result since 1935, and Boris Johnson gained a large parliamentary majority of 80 seats. The gamble had paid off. The following month, parliament passed the Withdrawal Agreement Bill, and at midnight on 31 January 2020, the United Kingdom officially left the European Union, setting in motion an 11-month transition period until 31 December 2020. Whether a trade deal will be agreed and ratified by then is, at the time of writing, unknown. The United Kingdom may well be heading for a no-deal or so-called hard Brexit and into uncharted territory. Time will tell. So, where does the break with the European Union leave the United Kingdom Union? The Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for

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Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly all withheld their consent to the EU Withdrawal Bill, but despite this it was passed by the UK Parliament—arguably without the mandate of any of the smaller partner nations. Since the EU Referendum result, Scotland has issued repeated calls for a second Referendum on Scottish independence, but the UK Government has continued to rule this out, saying the Referendum was a ‘once in a lifetime’ decision. In January 2020, Scotland passed the Referendums (Scotland) Bill, and the Scottish Government had indicated that it wished to hold a second Referendum vote during 2020. However, 2020 was to prove a year unlike any other, due to the global Coronavirus pandemic, and preparatory work was halted by the Scottish Government in March when the United Kingdom went into lockdown. Although this was a medical rather than a political crisis, what these unprecedented times showed was that each of the four nations of the United Kingdom was determined to make its own rules for its national territory and its citizens, and the UK’s response became increasingly fragmented with disjointed legal requirements, timelines and recommendations. With no post-Brexit trade deal with the EU on the table as yet, and the UK partner nations accepting the need to avoid UK-internal trade barriers whilst also looking to protect their own interests, the devolved administrations of Scotland and Northern Ireland especially look to be on a collision course with the UK Government. The very survival of the United Kingdom may be uncertain as deep-seated divisions across national, political and social class lines continue to grow, and its constituent nations drift further and further apart. It seems that the United Kingdom is becoming an increasingly ‘disunited’ kingdom.

References Bogdanor, V. (2001). Devolution in the United Kingdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boyce, D.G. (2012). Wales and the British State: ‘The outer form of subjugation’. In R. English & C. Townsend (Ed.), The State: Political and historical dimensions (pp. 44–65). London: Routledge. Chambers, P. (2003). Social networks and religious identity: An Historical example from Wales. In G. Davie & L. Woodhead with P. Heelas (Ed.), Predicting religion: Christian secular and alternative futures (pp. 74–85). Aldershot: Ashgate. Chambers, P., & Thompson, A. (2005). Coming to terms with the past: Religion and identity in Wales. Social Compass, 52(3), 337–352.

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Clarke, H.D., Goodwin, M., & Whiteley, P. (2017). Brexit: Why Britain voted to leave the European Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colley, L. (2014). Acts of Union and Disunion. London: Profile. Constitution Reform Group. (2019). http://constitutionreformgroup.co.uk. Accessed 31 August 2020. Curtice, J. (2006). A Stronger or Weaker Union? Public reactions to asymmetric devolution in the United Kingdom. The Journal of Federalism, 36(1), 95–114. Davies, J. (2014). The Welsh language: A history. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Ellis, P.B. (1985). The Celtic revolution: A study in anti-imperialism. Talybont: Y Lolfa. Evans, G., & Menon, A. (2017). Brexit and British politics. Cambridge: Polity. Frame, R. (1996). Overlordship and reaction, c. 1200–c.1450. In A. Grant & K.J. Stringer (Ed.), Uniting the Kingdom? The making of British history (pp. 65–84). London: Routledge. Jenkins, P. (2014). A history of modern Wales 1536–1990. London: Routledge. Jones, D.V., & Martin-Jones, M. (2003). Bilingual education and language revitalization in Wales: Past achievements and current issues. In J.W. Tollefson & A.B.M. Tsui (Ed.), Medium of instruction policies: Which agenda? Whose agenda? (pp. 43–70). London: Routledge. McCormick, J. (2014). Understanding the European Union (6th ed.). Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. McCrone, D. (1992). Understanding Scotland: The sociology of a stateless nation. London: Routledge. McDonald, H. (2020, June 17). Brexit revives unionist and nationalist divide in Northern Ireland. Guardian. Merriman, M., & Wormald, J. (1995). The High Road from Scotland. In A. Grant & K.J. Stringer (Ed.), Uniting the Kingdom? The making of British history (pp. 111–132). London: Routledge. NILT. Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey. (September 2019–February 2020). https://www.ark.ac.uk/nilt/2019/. Accessed 31 August 2020. Northern Ireland Assembly. (2020). History of the Assembly. http://www.nia ssembly.gov.uk/about-the-assembly/general-information/history-of-the-ass embly/. Accessed 31 August 2020. Northern Ireland Office. (1998). The Belfast Agreement. https://www.gov.uk/ government/publications/the-belfast-agreement. Accessed 31 August 2020. Rapple, R. (2009). Martial power and Elizabethan political culture: Military men in England and Ireland 1558–1594. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scottish Executive. (2007). Choosing Scotland’s future: A national conversation: Independence and responsibility in the modern world. https://www.webarc hive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20170401092121/http://www.gov.scot/Pub lications/2007/08/13103747/0. Accessed 20 May 2020.

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Scottish Parliament Proceedings. (2007, December 6). https://www.parliament. scot/parliamentarybusiness/16571.aspx. Accessed 3 September 2020. Thomas, A.E. (2015). The life and times of the English Princes of Wales. Leicester: Troubadour Publishing. Torrance, D. (2020, April). “The settled will”? Devolution in Scotland, 1998–2020. House of Commons Library Briefing Paper Number CBP-8441. https://com monslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8441/. Accessed 13 May 2020. UK Government. (n.d.). Union with England Act (1707). https://www.legisl ation.gov.uk/aosp/1707/7/contents. Accessed 3 September 2020. UK Government. (n.d.). Welsh Language Act (1993). https://www.legislation. gov.uk/ukpga/1993/38/contents. Accessed 3 September 2020. UK Government. (n.d.). Belfast Agreement (1998). https://www.gov.uk/govern ment/publications/the-belfast-agreement. Accessed 3 September 2020. UK Government. (n.d.). Government of Wales Act (1998). https://www.legisl ation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/38/contents. Accessed 3 September 2020. UK Government. (n.d.). Northern Ireland Act (1998). https://www.legislation. gov.uk/ukpga/1998/47/contents. Accessed 3 September 2020. UK Government. (n.d.). Scotland (1998). https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1998/46/contents. Accessed 3 September 2020. UK Government. (n.d.). St Andrews Agreement (2006). https://www.legislation. gov.uk/ukpga/2006/53/contents. Accessed 3 September 2020. UK Government. (n.d.) Wales Act (2017). https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/2017/4/pdfs/ukpgaen_20170004_en.pdf. Accessed 3 September 2020. UK Government Statement. (2014, September 19). Scottish Independence Referendum: statement by the Prime Minister. https://www.gov.uk/govern ment/news/scottish-independence-referendum-statement-by-the-prime-min ister. Accessed 13 May 2020. UK Parliament. (n.d.). Hansard. https://hansard.parliament.uk/. Accessed 3 September 2020. Vargas-Silva, C., & Markaki, Y. (2015). EU Migration to and from the UK. Migration Observatory Briefing. COMPAS, University of Oxford. Welsh Government. (n.d.). Laws of Wales Act (1536). https://law.gov.wales/ constitution-government/how-welsh-laws-made/timeline-welsh-law/?lang= en#/constitution-government/how-welsh-laws-made/timeline-welsh-law/? tab=overview&lang=en. Accessed 3 September 2020. Welsh Parliament. (2020). The history of Welsh devolution. http://www.assembly. wales/en/abthome/role-of-assembly-how-it-works/Pages/history-welsh-dev olution.aspx. Accessed 20 August 2020.

CHAPTER 3

Acts of Identity and (Dis)Union

Abstract This chapter explores questions of identity, the crucial role played by language in constructing and maintaining identities, ingroups and outgroups, the importance of ‘othering’ and ‘difference’, and which identities are the most significant in the context of political, media and public discourse from indyref to Brexit. It focuses on national, supranational, racial, ethnic and social class identities, and considers the extent to which these identities are complementary, inclusive or divisive. It asks what effects migration and multiculturalism have had on these identities, and the extent to which these trigger fear of the ‘Other’ and disunity. Keywords Identity · National/supranational identity · European identity · Ingroups/outgroups · Othering

Introduction This chapter explores questions of identity, or more accurately identities —because identities are complex, multifaceted, multifarious, mutable and, most importantly, multiple. Each of us inhabits various identities (e.g. national, supranational, racial, ethnic, political, social), which we can unproblematically occupy, many of them simultaneously. This study © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. M. Douglas, Political, Public and Media Discourses from Indyref to Brexit, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67384-0_3

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considers the importance of ‘othering’ and ‘difference’ in identities, the crucial role played by language in constructing and maintaining them, and which identities are the most significant in the context of political, media and public discourse from indyref to Brexit.

Language and Identity Language is a marker of identity—a simple fact that holds that true for both individuals and nations. Language simultaneously includes and excludes; it divides the us from the them; it can also raise linguistic tariffs for group membership. The Middle French and Latin etymological roots of ‘identity’ are concerned with sameness (c.f. identical) and individuality (OED Online). When we talk about identity, we are dealing with those things that make us feel similar or connected to some people, and dissimilar or disconnected from others. According to Social Identity Theory, a person’s sense of who they are is based on their social group memberships (Tajfel 1974). We categorise the world and people around us by whether they belong to the same social grouping as ourselves (ingroup) or another (outgroup). Being a member of these groups gives individuals a sense of belonging and self-esteem. Consequently, individuals will try to enhance the status of the social groupings to which they belong by emphasising their positive aspects, whilst simultaneously seeking to undermine outgroups by concentrating on their negative aspects. ‘Othering’ is therefore central to identity construction. Because language is so integral to human relationships, it is one of the main ways in which we construct, express and maintain our own identities and those of others, within and beyond our social groupings. It enables us to identify with some individuals and social groupings, whilst simultaneously ‘othering’ those with whom we do not identify. Language has both communicative and symbolic functions, i.e. what is meaningful goes beyond the propositional content of utterances; language can function as ‘an emblem of groupness … a symbol, a rallying point’ (Edwards 1985: 17). Linguistic Accommodation Theory argues that speakers modify their speech in order to sound more like their interlocutors as a way of achieving greater social coherence with them—convergence. But speakers can also play up linguistic differences as a ‘symbolic act for asserting or maintaining their distinct identity’ (Campbell 2004: 125), i.e. as a means of indicating divergence. We each perform linguistic ‘Acts of Identity’ whereby:

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the individual creates for himself [/herself] the patterns of his [/her] linguistic behaviour so as to resemble those of the group or groups with which from time to time he [/she] wishes to be identified, or so as to be unlike those from whom he [\she] wishes to be distinguished. (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985: 181)

These symbolic uses of language might involve the use of specific words or, in the spoken mode, a particular accent. (Both Scottish lexis and Scottish accents played a significant role in the indyref campaigns, as discussed in Chapter 5.) So, language can be used to perform identities. Van Dijk, whose CDA work on ingroups and outgroups is principally concerned with power relationships, symbolic elites and racist discourse in political and media language, emphasises the polarisation that often takes place ‘between a positive representation of the ingroup and a negative representation of the outgroup’ (2016: 73). Whilst language can be used to create and maintain social bonds, it can also be used to raise boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This capacity for language both to unify and divide is of especial interest to this study. By examining the language used, we can expose the underlying ideological viewpoints and identities being evoked and investigate how language is being used to enact unity or disunity. So, what were the most important identities that came into play as these political events unfolded: cultural, ethnic, national, racial, social, supranational?

National Identities In the context of debates on the future of union in the UK and EU, national and supranational identities are key. But what is national identity and what are its constituent markers? Is it based on place of birth, residence, ancestry, accent or even ethnicity? (see McCrone and Bechofer (2015) for extended discussion of the salience of, and complex interrelationships between, these identity ‘markers’, and how they vary across the UK). Is identity something fixed that we simply have based on our nationality or citizenship, or is it instead a process, something that we do and shape? The truth is probably somewhere between the two, but this means that there is an important role for social action and how people choose to ‘negotiate and mobilise’ national identity—i.e. how you play your identity cards (McCrone and Bechhofer 2015: 26, 31). One means by which this can be achieved is via the ‘discursive construction of national

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identity’ (Wodak et al. 2009)—i.e. using language to signal our membership of, or allegiance to, specific nation states. Anderson (1991: 145), in his highly influential work on imagined communities , identifies language as an important factor in creating a sense of national identity because it has a historicity that connects us to the past and our ancestors, whilst simultaneously binding us together with others in the ‘contemporaneous community’. Wodak et al. (2009: 22) argue that this imagined community ‘is constructed and conveyed in discourse’—so language has a central role to play in identity construction and maintenance. Billig (1995: 6–8) argues for banal nationalism, whereby nationalism is routinely ‘flagged’ through the daily reproduction of ‘ideological habits’ so that it becomes unnoticed and taken-for-granted. National identity, he contends, ‘is to be found in the embodied habits of social life. Such habits include those of thinking and using language’.

National or Supranational Identities When we move beyond the nation, is it reasonable to assert that people have supranational identities? In the context of the present study, it is necessary to examine European identity, and what this means for Britain’s relationship with the EU. However, before doing so it is useful also to consider the extent to which Britishness might, in some contexts, also be considered a supranational identity. How does British identity intersect with Scottish, English, Irish and Welsh national identities? When asked to choose which identity best describes them, in 2007, 77% of Scots claimed to have a Scottish rather than British identity, 56% of the Welsh prioritised Welsh identity, and 47% of English respondents claimed to be English compared to the 38% who said they were British (McCrone and Bechhofer 2015: 165). So, in Scotland, by a significant margin, and in Wales, people claimed to have more allegiance to their national rather than state identity. In Northern Ireland, 56% claimed to be British rather than Irish (33%). The Northern Irish situation is an interesting anomaly, but it must be remembered that in Northern Ireland claiming Britishness rather than Irishness (or vice versa) is likely to split along religious (i.e. Protestant vs. Catholic) lines, and Irish and British identities may be considered mutually exclusive. Of course, many people operate with dual identities, i.e. more Scottish than British, equally English and British, etc. McCrone & Bechofer’s

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examination of the 2007 data in response to the so-called Moreno question with its more nuanced options (e.g. Scottish, not British; More Scottish than British; Equally Scottish and British; More British than Scottish; British, not Scottish) showed that 67% of English respondents, 58% of Welsh respondents, and 43% of Scottish respondents identified as British as well as English, Welsh or Scottish (2015: 166). Within the UK, what is the relationship between national identity and levels of political autonomy, i.e. have alterations to the Union in recent decades affected individuals’ affiliations with nation? Devolution settlements for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland triggered concerns that, in England, British identity might decline and English identity increase (Condor et al. 2006), and there is some evidence that allegiance to Britishness across the partner nations has declined over time. In a forcedchoice question: Would you describe yourself as British, Scottish, English, Irish, British and Scottish or European? using data drawn from a range of sources, clear trends emerge over time and there are noticeable differences between nations. In Scotland in 2012, 69% identified as Scottish and only 20% as British when forced to choose only one identity. In England, 43% of people chose British—a decline from 65% twenty years earlier in 1992—but this decline occurred before devolution and was not necessarily triggered by devolution or in response to Scottish, etc. nationalism (Kenny 2014). In Northern Ireland, 39% chose British (down from 48% in 2004) rather than Northern Irish (British Social Attitudes 30). In Wales, percentages remained stable between 1979 (58% Welsh; 34% British) and 2003 (60% Welsh; 27% British); directly comparable data for later years are unavailable. What we can say is that devolution has certainly not strengthened Britishness and, of all the partner nations, people in Scotland have the lowest levels of affiliation with a British identity. It might be imagined that questions of national identity and independence are closely intertwined, and that those who were pro-independence in the Scottish Independence Referendum had a stronger sense of Scottish identity than those who wanted to maintain the Union, and yet the data show that even amongst voters who said they felt ‘Scottish not British’, only 53% said they planned to vote ‘Yes’ to Scottish independence (British Social Attitudes 31). Bond (2015: 3), examining Scottish-British Moreno question data over a 20-year time period, found that contrary to what might have been expected there was a ‘decline of those in the ‘Scottish not British’ and ‘More Scottish than British’ categories, from a high point of more than 2/3 in the year that the Scottish Parliament was re-established

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(1999), to a (narrow) minority in the year of the independence referendum’. But he also found that, during 2014, there was a closer alignment between people’s sense of national identity as ‘Scottish not British’ or ‘more Scottish than British’ and their views on Scottish independence and the SNP. As we shall see in Chapter 5, ownership of Scottishness and a sense of pride in Scottish national identity were hotly contested issues during the indyref campaign, with both ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ camps laying claim. Bond (2015: 8–9) argues that even though national identities in Scotland need to be thought of as ‘social as well as political phenomena’, they are more likely to be ‘more politicised when key decisions are at stake regarding Scotland’s status as a “stateless” or “understated” nation (McCrone 2005), or a formally independent state’. So, the situation is complex, but there are discernible differences and shifts over time, and there is a growing centrifugal rather than centripetal trend in UK identities, with national identities on the increase and supranational identities in decline. One of the most interesting recent shifts is that around English national identity. As the dominant partner (in terms of population and therefore electorate size and political clout), England has never faced the challenges of the other partner nations, and it is often asserted that nationalism is born of struggle against the larger dominant ‘other’. Englishness and Britishness are less clearly delineated with respect to each other, and there has traditionally been a tendency to syncretise the two (Kumar 2003). Kumar (2011: xv) argued that the English ‘have never established a strong sense of national identity’, but there are signs that this is beginning to change. Between 1997 (the year devolution was announced) and 2005, the proportion of the English population citing ‘British’ as their primary identity declined (from 63 to 48%) and, combined with a lack of identification with a European identity, there was an increase in affiliation with ‘English’ as primary identity (31 to 40% from 1992–2005, rising to 47% in 2006). This decline in a sense of Britishness has been much more prominent in England than in the other partner nations (Kumar 2015: 97). Kenny (2014, 2016) argues that the English have, in recent years, felt increasingly politically disenchanted, and since 2000 have felt more and more frustrated about the position of England visà-vis the other nations in the UK. The question arises, to what extent has this growth in nationalist sentiment been fuelled by additional powers being granted to the devolved nations, a political rhetoric demanding that English voices be heard, and David Cameron’s demand for ‘English votes

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for English laws’ in the wake of the Scottish Independence Referendum vote (Kumar 2010)? Kenny (2014: 20), based on Condor’s (2006) empirical work, suggests that English national identity has become ‘more salient and meaningful’ at the expense of British identity, and attributes this not to politically structural developments such as devolution, but instead to anti-establishment and anti-multiculturalist sentiment, and a general discontent with the economic and societal status quo. Fenton (2012) describes some sections of English working-class society as characterised by resentful nationalism. These attitudes, combined with the increasing salience of social class identity rather than political identity, and longstanding British Euroscepticism, may help to explain UKIP’s success, as UKIP politicised English identity and nationalism (Mann and Fenton 2017). Hayton (2016: 401) describes the UK Independence Party as ‘increasingly keen to tap into and articulate a sense of English grievance’, even though it is ostensibly a (UK) unionist party; the UKIP Constitution talks about maintaining the ‘integrity’ of the United Kingdom alongside the belief that the UK should be governed by UK citizens and laws, should not ‘surrender …[its] sovereignty’, and should therefore leave the EU (UKIP 2012). Although UKIP presents itself as a UKwide party protecting Britain (the nation) from the threat of Europe, most of its elected seats have been in English constituencies, and it has a problematic status in Scotland and Wales, which already have their own well-established nationalist parties in the SNP and Plaid Cymru. UKIP’s simultaneously unionist and nationalist stance is inevitably at odds with the SNP and Plaid, and so it is a de facto English rather than British political party (Mycock and Hayton 2014; Hayton 2016). UKIP supporters are more likely to identify as English rather than British, and their dislike of the European Union’s fiscal call on the UK sits alongside a feeling that Scotland is getting more than its fair economic share of the UK finances (Mann and Fenton 2017). These notions of ‘Englishness’ have been both a blessing and a curse for UKIP, who, although arguing for restored Britishness, have also supported the idea of an English Parliament, and thus run the risk of (re)conflating Englishness and Britishness (Mycock and Hayton 2014). But the other Westminster parties also face political difficulties following devolution for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as they must simultaneously speak for England and the whole of the UK. Kenny (2016) aligns English nationalism with Euroscepticism and argues that it contributed strongly to the success of the Leave

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EU referendum campaign with those more likely to identify as English (rather than British) being more likely to support Brexit and leaving the EU. This is a quite different pattern from the Scottish Independence Referendum where Scottish identity and voting patterns were much less closely aligned. So, across the UK, national and supranational identities and their intersections have become increasingly complex and divisive. How do these relate to political and social class identities, which arguably cut across both?

British Political and Social Class Identities Since the development of New Labour and the election of Tony Blair as Prime Minister in 1997, the boundaries between the political centreleft and centre-right in the UK have blurred substantially, and the main political parties have ideologically converged on many issues. This has led to the development of what has been called ‘elite consensus’ and a growing sense of political disenfranchisement amongst working-class voters and those without a university-level education (Evans and Menon 2017: 27). The last forty years have seen a fall-off in voting participation by the UK electorate, particularly in those from lower socio-economic backgrounds; a feeling that politicians were no longer representing their interests or concerns bred widespread political apathy. Dissatisfaction with the mainstream political parties, and with politicians more generally, helped to further the rise of UKIP, a party that sells itself on representing the ordinary working (wo?)man, and whose most successful leader, Nigel Farage, though from a fairly affluent upper-middle-class background (educated at the fee-paying Dulwich College and, having rejected a university education, made a career as a City broker), succeeded in developing an approachable everyman persona that appealed to many of those who felt that the main political parties had deserted them. Mann and Fenton (2017: 4) argue that discontented nationalism, based on socio-economic circumstances and rooted in social class lived experience, is a powerful factor in what they term the ‘growing assertion of substate identities’. Social class, they argue, is directly affecting allegiance to national identities. This is especially the case in England, where a sense of political disenchantment is increasingly felt by those belonging to the working-class demographic (Kenny 2016).

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European Identity and Euroscepticism The 2016 EU Referendum result was probably as much about disenchantment, populist politics and political personalities (the ‘Boris effect’ was statistically significant [Clarke et al. 2017]) as it was about the perceived pros and cons of EU membership. Euroscepticism, though brought politically to the fore by the EU Referendum, is not a new phenomenon. In over forty years of EU membership, Britain has remained relatively ideologically detached from the rest of Europe. Evans and Menon (2017: 17–18) note that the British have a much weaker sense of European identity than other member states, and that Britain is usually rated 28th out of 28 in surveys of EU countries, with approximately 60% of Brits not identifying as European at all. McCrone and Bechofer (2015: 199), observing the growth of nationalist politics across western Europe, note that ‘having “made Europe”, there has been a failure to make Europeans’, and describe European supranational identity as ‘merely a veneer’. British attitudes to the EU during most of its period of membership can be characterised as ‘general dislike combined with profound disinterest’ but there has been a spike in disapproval ratings since 2004, and a close connection between anti-EU sentiment and growing concerns about immigration (Evans and Menon 2017: 18). Though on the face of it ‘taking back control’ (the Leave campaign’s mantra) was about the UK’s political sovereignty vis-à-vis Europe and being able to control levels of incoming migration, arguably it was also about wresting back control from socially liberal political elites within the UK and expressing general disenchantment with mainstream politics. The EU Referendum result was less about a rejection of European identity and more about class divides and perceived socio-economic injustices within the UK. Evans and Menon (2017: 88) argue: ‘social divisions had been exposed, but these divisions were not created by the Referendum, or by Brexit. Britain is not now more divided than hitherto. The Referendum simply gave voice to these longstanding divisions.’ Those from less welleducated, socio-economically disadvantaged groups and deprived areas of the country were more likely to vote Leave, and to feel that immigration was threatening their local community and way of life. So, fear of the ‘other’ played a significant part in the Referendum result.

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Identities of the ‘Other’ One of the key questions at the heart of these identity constructions is where the ‘other’ resides and how it is defined. Europeanness is seen by many in the British electorate as representing the ‘other’ and external to British concerns. In the context of the EU as a supranational body with multiple members drawn from discrete nation states, this is perhaps understandable. What is perhaps more interesting (or disturbing) is where the ‘other’ is identified as being within. Virdee and McGeever (2018: 1803) talk about ‘“internal others” against whom the nation has often defined itself, including, most notably, racialized minorities and migrants’, and they claim that this is often ‘elided’ in discussions of Brexit. They focus on the perceived ‘racialized enemy within—“the Muslim”’ (Virdee and McGeever 2018: 1812). What part is played by ethnic and racial identities in the construction of ‘self’ and ‘other’? There is some evidence that ethnicity may impact on whether people self-identify as British rather than with one of the partner nation identities, and in how they are perceived by others (McCrone and Bechofer 2015) but this varies across the UK (Scotland is generally seen as more inclusive in this respect) and it depends both on the individual and the context in which the question is asked. ‘Englishness’ rather than ‘Britishness’ may be seen by some as raising questions of ethnicity rather than national identity. Those from ethnic minority backgrounds may identify more as British than English and may feel that the latter is premised on ‘whiteness’, though there are differences between different British ethnic communities (Kenny 2014). The 2011 combined census results for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland found that 87% of people in the UK were White, and 13% belonged to a Black, Asian, Mixed or other ethnic group.

Migration and Multiculturalism Modern Britain is a multicultural society with a history of successive governments encouraging immigration to address labour shortages: e.g. in the post-war years, from former British colonies such as Bangladesh, India and Pakistan following the partition of India, and also the Caribbean ‘Windrush’ generation (many second and third-generation British citizens trace their families back to these mass migration movements); in more recent times, EU migration, often short term, has brought in workers for

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the seasonal agricultural and hospitality sectors especially. Between 2008 and 2018, the population of non-British nationals and those born outside the UK has increased, as has net migration, which has been the main driver in UK population increases since the 1990s, though long term net migration has been relatively stable since the end of 2016 (i.e. postEU Referendum). ‘Different patterns for EU and non-EU migration have emerged since mid-2016 … non-EU net migration is now at the highest level since 2004. In contrast, EU net migration … has fallen to a level last seen in 2009’ (Office for National Statistics 2019a). In 2018, 86% of the UK population were born in the UK and 91% were British nationals. These figures compare with 89% and 93% in 2008. ‘Polish has been the most common non-British nationality’ since 2008 (though figures fell in 2018) and ‘remains the most common non-UK country of birth, having taken over from India in 2015’ (Office of National Statistics 2019b), though more EU8 citizens (i.e. those from Central and Eastern European countries) are now leaving the UK than arriving. Despite the historical context and the demonstrable economic benefits of inward migration, multiculturalism, patriotism and ‘belonging’ are increasingly politically sensitive topics in the UK, and the 2016 EU Referendum brought this into sharp relief. With allegiance to ‘Britishness’ declining, and Englishness being reclaimed and perhaps redefined, how does this fit with a multicultural United Kingdom? For many years, the brand of ‘Englishness’ associated with the iconography of the St George’s flag, and with the British National Party (BNP) and the English Defence League, was widely vilified in mainstream political circles, though it had some traction in white, mainly working-class communities. But in recent years, it has been assimilated into the cultural mainstream via sporting events and by the focus on St George’s Day as something to be widely celebrated, with a variety of cultural events attached and the red and white flag flown on many local and regional civic buildings. Virdee and McGeever (2018: 1804) assert that ‘Englishness has been reasserted through a racializing, insular nationalism, and it found its voice in the course of Brexit’. Concerns about multiculturalism and immigration are, of course, not necessarily the same thing, but there is evidence that these debates elided during the EU Referendum campaign, and sometimes tipped over into racism and xenophobia. (This is considered further in Chapter 6). Some of the arguments, imagery and ideologies put forward by the Leave campaign seemed to lump together asylum seekers, EU

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national migrants and those from British ethnic minority groups, particularly Muslims, into a discourse of problem and threat—most notably in the infamous UKIP ‘Breaking Point’ poster (Favell 2020). In many quarters, Brexit became less about membership of the EU and more about race and ethnicity, veiled in discussions about immigration (see Chapters 6 and 7 for analysis).

A Confluence of Identities These multiple identities—national, supranational, social, political and ethnic and/or racial—are interacting in complex ways and reshaping British and European politics. The rise of far-right political parties across Europe in recent years suggests that this is not solely a UK issue, but the question of who belongs and who does not is an increasingly fraught one politically. The perceived threat from the ‘Other’ seems ever closer and more urgent, rapidly encroaching on the ‘we’. And, as has already been argued, much of this sense of threat and division is linguistically constructed (Cap 2017; Wodak 2015). Chapters 5–7 examine the indyref , pre-EU ref and post-Brexit corpora to see how this is manifested.

References Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage. Bond, R. (2015). National identities and the 2014 Independence Referendum in Scotland. Sociological Research Online, 20(4), 92–104. British Social Attitudes Survey. https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/. Accessed 3 September 2020. Campbell, L. (2004). Historical linguistics: The state of the art. In P.G.J. Van Sterkenburg (Ed.), Linguistics today: Facing a greater challenge (pp. 109– 140). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Cap, P. (2017). The language of fear: Communicating threat in public discourse. Palgrave Macmillan. Clarke, H.D., Goodwin, M., Whiteley, P. (2017). Brexit: Why Britain voted to leave the European Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Condor, S. (2006). Temporality and collectivity: Diversity, history and the rhetorical construction of national entitativity. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45(4), 657–682.

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Condor, S., Gibson, S., Abell, J. (2006). English identity and ethnic diversity in the context of UK constitutional change. Ethnicities, 6(2), 123–158. Edwards, J. (1985). Language, society and identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Evans, G., & Menon, A. (2017). Brexit and British politics. Cambridge: Polity. Favell, A. (2020). Crossing the race line: “No Polish, No Blacks, No Irish” in Brexit Britain? Or, the Great British Brexit swindle. Research in Political Sociology, 27. Fenton, S. (2012). Resentment, class and social Sentiments about the nation: The ethnic majority in England. Ethnicities, 12(4), 465–483. Hayton, R. (2016). The UK Independence Party and the politics of Englishness. Political Studies Review, 14(3), 400–410. Kenny, M. (2014). The politics of English nationhood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kenny, M. (2016). The genesis of English nationalism. Political Insight, 7 (2), 8–11. Kumar, K. (2003). The making of English national identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kumar, K. (2010). Negotiating English identity: Englishness, Britishness and the future of the United Kingdom. Nations and Nationalism, 16(3), 469–487. Kumar, K. (2011). Preface. In A. Aughey & C. Berberich (Ed.), These Englands: A conversation on national identity (pp. xv–xvi). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kumar, K. (2015). The idea of Englishness: English culture, national identity and social thought. Farnham: Ashgate. Le Page, R.B., & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of identity: Creole-based approaches to ethnicity and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, R., & Fenton, S. (2017). Nation, class and resentment: The politics of national identity in England, Scotland and Wales. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McCrone, D. (2005). Cultural capital in an understated nation: The case of Scotland. British Journal of Sociology, 56(1), 65–82. McCrone, D., & Bechhofer, F. (2015). Understanding national identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mycock, A., & Hayton, R. (2014). The party politics of Englishness. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 16(2), 251–272. OED Online. (n.d.). https://www.oed.com/. Accessed 3 September 2020. Office for National Statistics. (2019a, February). Migration statistics quarterly report. https://www.ons.gov.uk/. Accessed 24 June 2020. Office for National Statistics. (2019b, August). Overview of the UK population. https://www.ons.gov.uk/. Accessed 24 June 2020. Tajfel, H. (1974). Social identity and intergroup behaviour. Social Science Information, 13 (2), 65–93.

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UKIP. (2012). The Constitution of the UK Independence Party. https://www. ukip.org/the-constitution?id=07. Accessed 10 January 2020. van Dijk, T.A. (2016). Critical discourse studies: A sociocognitive approach. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Ed.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (3rd ed.) (pp. 62–86). London: Sage. Virdee, S., & McGeever, B. (2018). Racism, crisis, Brexit. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(10), 1802–1819. Wodak, R. (2015). The politics of fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean. London: Sage. Wodak, R., de Cilla, R., Reisigl, M., & Liebhart, K. (2009). The discursive construction of national identity (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Language, Identity, Politics

Abstract This chapter opens by defining political discourse and goes on to outline the key theoretical and methodological approaches that underpin the study: (critical) discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, the study of rhetoric and multimodal analysis. It argues for an interdisciplinary and mixed methods approach, and explains some of the linguistic terminology used in subsequent chapters such as modality, tense and aspect, deixis and corpus linguistics concepts such as collocations, keywords, KWIC and n-grams. It considers the importance of the deictic centre and the role played by metaphor in conceptualising the nation. Keywords Discourse analysis · Corpus linguistics · Rhetoric · Multimodality · Metaphor

Political Discourse The political events of the last few years and their aftermath have been well documented and discussed; but less has been written about the discourse surrounding these events. The language used by politicians, commentators, the media and others can unite and divide us. ‘Political discourse’ is frequently studied, but as a term seldom well defined © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. M. Douglas, Political, Public and Media Discourses from Indyref to Brexit, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67384-0_4

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(Ädel 2010). In this book, it includes those discourses that emerge when political actors engage in political communication within and beyond government contexts (e.g. political debates in parliament and politicians being interviewed in the media), and secondly, media commentary on, and wider public response to, political actors, events, debate, etc. It therefore covers a range of discourse types, fields and modes from spoken texts such as parliamentary debates, political speeches and political interviews (what we may traditionally think of as political rhetoric), written texts such as letters, official reports and newspaper coverage, to online environments such as political party and other websites and Twitter discussion. These multifarious text types are included in the corpora that underpin the analysis in subsequent chapters. Politicians have long sought to persuade others of their policies and points of view through their use of language; but whilst the media through which they do so may have changed over time, with consequent alterations in rhetorical style (e.g. the growth of ‘sound-bite politics’ during the twentieth century and the increasing importance of social media in recent years), political discourse remains an influential factor in how societies are governed, how decisions are reached and how the electorate responds. The media (TV, radio, newspapers, online news sources, Twitter, etc.) have an important role to play in communicating politicians’ views to public audiences, whilst simultaneously, in democratic societies at least, offering them up for critique. The media audience (the electorate), though less obviously involved in generating political discourse until recent years through Twitter and other social media platforms, ultimately decides who stays in government and who goes. Language IS power, and the ability to wield it to persuade others is a vital skill that politicians must master.

Theoretical Approaches The academic study of political discourse has traditionally split along disciplinary lines with little dialogue between camps (Condor et al. 2013). Those who would describe themselves as political scientists with interests in political communication, ideology, rhetoric or theory, seldom engage with linguistic research into political language, and vice versa, though this situation is starting to change. For example, Reisigl (2008: 96) recommends a transdisciplinary politolinguistic approach that ‘connects rhetoric, critical discourse analysis, and concepts in political science’, and the case

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study chapters in Johnstone and Eisenhart (2008) combine rhetorical and linguistic analyses from multiple perspectives, but all relying on empirical data. The academic fields of rhetorical and linguistic analysis are clearly related, and both can be used to uncover how individuals seek to persuade others. This book attempts to straddle the divide between linguistic research and more theoretically driven or classically influenced studies of rhetoric, and it engages with research from multiple disciplinary perspectives: linguistic, rhetorical, political, media, historical and sociological. There are many points where these analyses of political discourse overlap, even though those who study them may use different frameworks and terminologies. The central methodological approach adopted here is that of corpus linguistics, which by its very nature is empirical and data-led rather than theory-driven. In addition, it uses methods from (critical) discourse analysis and the study of rhetoric, but also considers the political, social and historical contexts within which the texts were produced. Such a mixed methods approach is not without precedent. Charteris-Black (2011, 2013, 2014) combines analysis of politicians’ spoken rhetorical style in political speeches with critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistic methods, though his primary focus is on the persuasive power of metaphor. Lutzky and Kehoe (2019) use corpus methods to interrogate discourses of Brexit in the Guardian newspaper between 2000 and 2017, whilst Wenzl (2019) uses a combination of discourse and corpus analysis to investigate how national identities are constructed in parliamentary debates about EU membership.

Critical Discourse Analysis There are several key tenets of critical discourse analysis (CDA) that are helpful here. For critical discourse analysts, language is a form of ‘social practice’ or ‘social action’ and is intimately linked to unequal power relations. They believe that powerful elites (politicians, journalists, influential organisations and other trusted authoritative sources) have privileged access to, and control over, public discourse, and further, that they are able to use language to maintain their dominant positions in the hegemonic status quo (Reisigl and Wodak 2009). By controlling and exploiting language, they exert a form of ‘mind control’ (Van Dijk 2015: 472) over those less powerful than themselves—i.e. media audiences and the electorate. Critical discourse analysts also maintain that

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language reproduces ideologies. ‘There are always different ways of saying the same thing, and they are not random, accidental alternatives. Differences in expression carry ideological distinctions’ (Fowler 1991:4). By studying a speaker’s or writer’s language, we can uncover their underlying ideological viewpoints, with their attendant assumptions, value systems, preferences and prejudices, regardless of whether these have been openly articulated. The use of language can constrain, shape or influence the way we view the world. This ability of language to influence the way we think and perceive things is central to the persuasive power of political and other types of rhetoric, and so the importance of scrutinising these discourses is self-evident. CDA sees language as inextricably bound to its socio-political and cultural contexts; therefore, it contends that we must examine both the discourses and the contexts in which they occur. The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) taken by Reisigl and Wodak (2009: 90) and CharterisBlack (2014: 123ff) goes further, emphasising the ‘intertextual’ and ‘interdiscursive relationships’ between texts and discourses, in addition to extra-linguistic social variables such as historical context and situational frames. DHA’s commitment to data triangulation allows it to draw on multidisciplinary approaches and theoretical perspectives. Critical discourse analysis has come in for its own share of criticism, with objections raised about its methodological approaches (i.e. how and in what quantities it selects texts for analysis), researcher bias and preoccupations and its socio-political agendas—one of its main emphases being the explicit critique of powerful social elites. To address these methodological objections, some practitioners have successfully combined CDA with corpus linguistics (Baker 2006, 2012; Baker et al. 2008; Bednarek and Caple 2014; Charteris-Black 2011, 2013, 2014).

Corpus Linguistics A corpus is an electronic, well-organised and structured collection of texts, collected according to specific design criteria, and ordered in such a way as to be a representative sample of the language under study (Sinclair 1991). Using corpus approaches, it is possible to analyse many millions of words of text, rather than being constrained by the limits of what is possible using manual analysis alone, and the problems contingent on selective sampling methods. One of the criticisms aimed at CDA research is that sometimes the texts have been cherry-picked to

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achieve maximum ideological impact from the analysis. A well-designed extensive corpus which aims to be ‘representative’ and ‘balanced’ (the corpus-building golden rules) should mostly overcome these issues, and the large quantities of data involved inevitably throw up new and unexpected lines of enquiry, which might have been missed entirely if only a small number of texts were examined. Corpus linguistic approaches, whilst not entirely objective or free from researcher bias, have the advantage of scale, in that they are based on empirical evidence, allow us to analyse a much greater quantity of data, and to subject it to quantitative and qualitative analysis in order to observe trends and anomalies. The key here is the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, of both macro and micro analyses; done properly, corpus linguistics is not just about ‘number-crunching’ (Mair and Hundt 2000). Corpus linguistic approaches give the researcher different perspectives on the data, and thus support methodological triangulation. Corpus linguists often use specialist text analysis and concordancing tools to interrogate the corpus; this study uses Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2016). The tools incorporated in this and similar software such as AntConc allow the researcher to adopt a variety of ways of viewing the data, harnessing the power and speed of computational analysis, whilst still being able to control the parameters within which the data are considered and manipulated. Basic tools like alphabetical and frequency-ordered word lists can give useful insights into the main preoccupations of the texts and how these are lexicalised. They also allow us to search for specific words like pronouns (we, they, us, them), prepositions (in. at, on, by −the latter helps with finding passive voice constructions which may tell us something about agency patterns—see Chapter 6), proper nouns (indyref, Brexit ) and key vocabulary items that are of interest to the researcher. Concordancing tools with their KWIC (Keywords in Context) functionality allow us to see words in their immediately surrounding context and thus to obtain insights into language in use. By sorting the concordance lines, we can track things like patterns of pre- and postmodification around people and naming strategies for key social actors (e.g. hard-line Brexiteer, Jacob Rees-Mogg; beleaguered Prime Minister, Theresa May; Boris Johnson, who recently resigned as foreign secretary, etc.). We can also investigate collocational patterns—i.e. words that co-occur within a pre-specified span which is more than chance (Sinclair 1991)— which may tell us much about the ideological perspective of the text producers and how they view the intended audience. For example, are

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some societal groups typically associated with negative prosody (i.e. where the surrounding context makes it clear that these are negatively evaluated e.g. desperate indyref supporters ) and is this the same across the corpus, or can it be linked to different underlying ideological perspectives, social actors or changes across time? More advanced tools like Wordsmith’s Keywords enable comparisons to be made between corpora to see whether some words are more, or less, frequent or salient than might be expected. Keywords analysis is most often carried out by running the specialist corpus against a much larger reference corpus (which is designed to be representative of the overall data population), and via a series of statistically generated comparisons, looking to see whether the words in the specialist corpus occur more or less frequently than might have been expected given their frequencies in the larger reference corpus. Positive keywords are those which appear more frequently than would be expected when one wordlist is compared to another; negative keywords are those which appear less frequently than expected. For this study, the specialist corpora were run against the British National Corpus (BNC)—a 100 million words corpus containing samples of both written and spoken language from a wide range of sources and designed to be representative of British English from the later part of the twentieth century. Where appropriate, different subcorpora (e.g. Scottish vs. UK newspapers) were run against each other in order to make comparisons. It is also possible to obtain collocational pattern information on frequently occurring clusters (or ‘n-grams’) and to paint a collocational picture of the ways in which words combine, to see whether they have semantic preferences. Collocational analysis can also reveal how meaning is created over time by word associations being habitually reproduced and deeply embedded in discourse. Over time, additional connotative meanings may attach to the central denotative (dictionary) meanings of words. Using corpus methods, it is also possible to look for attitudinal language features such as modal auxiliary verbs (may, should, must ) and modal adverbs (clearly, certainly, definitely) which give insights into the attitudes, opinions and viewpoints of text producers and their underlying (and possibly unstated) ideological positions. There are two main types of modality: deontic—the modal system of obligation or duty, ranging along a continuum from permission, though obligation to absolute requirement, and epistemic—the modal system of certainty/uncertainty, ranging along a continuum from possibility to certainty.

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Wildcard searches allow the identification of things like progressive aspect -ing verb forms that may be used to heighten a sense of threat or action. It is also possible to find metaphors using corpus methods, as illustrated by Charteris-Black’s (2011; 2013) work on political rhetoric. At all points, it is possible to go back to the wider textual context, and so observe longer narrative and/or rhetorical patterns. A distinction is often drawn between ‘corpus-based’ and ‘corpusdriven’ approaches (Tognini-Bonelli 2001). Corpus-based research uses corpus methods to test out theories or hypotheses about language via deductive reasoning, whereas corpus-driven research is a more inductive approach which emphasises the corpus as the sole source of evidence for our hypotheses about language. In practice, many studies, this one included, adopt a hybrid approach—i.e. evidence that seems to ‘arise’ from the corpus is investigated alongside pre-determined research questions and hunches about language structure and use. Partington et al. (2013) advocate ‘corpus-assisted discourse studies’ or CADS, an approach which eschews the political and ideological agendas of critical discourse analysis whilst focusing mostly on socio-political and media discourse, and argue that CADS combines quantitative and qualitative analysis, conferring significant benefits and overcoming potential shortcomings of both. This mixed methods approach is shared by others working at the intersection between corpus linguistics and (critical) discourse analysis, such as Gabrielatos and Baker’s (2008) work on the language used to describe refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. This study employs the analytical tools of discourse analysis, harnessing them to the power and advantages of scale offered by corpus linguistics, without being overly constrained by CDA’s ideological viewpoints or its preoccupations with ‘dominance, discrimination, power and control’ (Baker 2012: 280), and combining them an awareness of traditional methods of analysing rhetoric, and the ways in which language can be shaped and manipulated to achieve rhetorical effect.

Rhetoric Rhetoric—the art of using language to persuade—is intrinsic to political discourse. Much present-day research and writing on rhetoric draws on classical thinking, the most well known of which is Aristotle (384322 BC, pupil of Plato)’s treatise, The Art of Rhetoric, in which he sets

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out the three proofs or persuasive appeals of rhetoric: logos the appeal to reason, pathos the appeal to emotion and ethos the persuasive appeal of one’s personality and stance (Cockcroft et al. 2013). Aristotle also differentiated between logos, the logical content of a speech and its lexis, i.e. style and delivery—so form and content. Cicero (106-43 BC) describes rhetoric as ‘one great art comprised of five lesser arts: inventio [the finding of appropriate material or topics], dispositio [the arrangement of the argument or ideas], elocutio [the selection of appropriate language—i.e. style], memoria [learning the speech], and pronunciatio [performance, including gesture and vocal delivery]’ (my emphases and interpolations). These ‘arts’ or canons of rhetoric serve both as templates for those engaged in rhetorical practice and as analytical categories for those undertaking rhetorical criticism. One of the most influential ideas in rhetoric is that of kairos meaning ‘opportune moment’ i.e. ensuring that one’s words are appropriate for a particular time, place and context, appropriate to the audience, and that they are fit for the subject matter decorum (Silva Rhetoricae). These classical models are still used by present-day studies of political rhetoric, alongside analysis of how rhetorical effects are achieved stylistically using rhetorical figures or tropes and schemes. Satisfying as it is to label specific figures using the established classical terminology, doing so does not necessarily provide holistic insights into how the language of a text (or body of texts) or of a specific individual works. The practice can also be alienating and obfuscatory for non-specialists, who must navigate their way through the enormous and technical Latinate vocabulary or ‘forest of rhetoric’ in order to ascertain what is meant by the analyst. In this book, therefore, preference is given to the use of more generalised, and hopefully more accessible, linguistic terms, with equivalences to rhetorical figures and fuller explanations given as appropriate. This approach also allows the corpus linguistic methodology to be exploited to its full potential. Rhetoric has not always been viewed positively, and throughout the centuries, many have expressed concern at its capacity to mislead audiences. Plato (427-347 BC) famously outlined the differences between true and false rhetoric, and described it as the ‘art of enchanting the soul’ (Phaedrus 576), a view echoed by Locke (1979/1690: 508) who describes it as ‘that powerful instrument of error and deceit’, and more recently by commentators such as the former BBC Director General and CEO of the New York Times, Mark Thompson (2016a, 2017) who view present-day political discourse as deeply flawed and often used to mislead.

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In recent years, there has been increasing talk of ‘anti-rhetoric’, with Donald Trump often being cited as a key exponent of this type of political discourse. Writing in the New York Times, Thompson (2016b) argues that ‘for all its protests, anti-rhetoric is just another form of rhetoric and, whether Mr. Trump is conscious of it or not, it has its own rhetorical markers … Anti-rhetoric also uses “I” and “you” constantly, because its central goal is not to lay out an argument but to assert a relationship, and a story about “us” and our struggle against “them”’. This book is concerned with the power of rhetoric, and language more generally, not just to mislead, but also to divide, and both rhetoric and anti-rhetoric can be used to promote ingroup alignment whilst simultaneously ‘othering’ perceived outgroups. Divisive political language is not something new; indeed, as Charteris-Black (2011) points out, conflict, otherness and the ‘enemy’ are inherently part of political discourse, and can be used to ‘arouse passions, fears, and hopes, the more so because an enemy to some people is an ally or innocent victim to others’ (Edelman 1988: 6). The polarisation of ‘we’ and ‘they’, ‘us’ and ‘them’ is not only central to political discourse, but also underpins our identities about who we are (and are not), who and what we identify with (and do not) and how we ideologically position ourselves and others within society.

Multimodal Discourse Some of the text types examined in this study (e.g. newspapers and websites) are multimodal—i.e. they incorporate textual, visual, audio, audio-visual features, etc. in the same text. Speeches are also multimodal, in that the actual words spoken sit alongside how the speech is delivered, including matters of intonation, pitch, loudness, pauses and other paralinguistic features such as gesture and facial expression. We can talk about the ‘visual rhetoric’ of images (Scott 1994; McQuarrie and Mick 1999), and often images and text interact with each other in complex ways to generate meaning (see Chapter 6 which discusses the visual rhetoric of Leave. EU’s ‘Breaking Point’ poster). By juxtaposing text and image, text and sound, etc. we can create new ways of meaning, as readers/viewers will automatically, and often subconsciously, seek ways to make connections between them. This makes it possible for text producers generating these text-plus-image combinations to imply that two things are connected without explicitly stating this to be so. Multimodality generates multiple meaning potentials, and meaning-creation

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becomes ‘an interactive, dynamic and symbiotic process’ (Wee 1999; vi; cited in Yuen 2004), with those consuming the texts becoming part of the meaning-making process. Unscrupulous text producers can exploit this by tapping into audiences’ pre-existing prejudices and ideological positions and encouraging them to interpret these multimodal meaning potentials in specific ways, without themselves necessarily falling foul of legal and other constraints by making these connections explicit. One of the challenges for this study is that conventional corpus or text analysis tools cannot cope with this type of data, and so it has been necessary to adopt a different, more focused, manual approach allowing detailed consideration of the ways in which these different semiotic resources are being combined.

Conflict at the Deictic Centre Rhetoric is situated discourse; i.e. it is usually devised at a particular time in response to a specific need and targeted towards its intended audiences (cf. kairos ). Political rhetoric is ‘persuasive speech as a situated practice of argumentation’ (Martin 2014: 9), and as such it is replete with references to time and place. The linguistic concept of deixis (from the Ancient Greek meaning ‘pointing’) is helpful in identifying these situational aspects of discourse. It posits that texts are located in three dimensions: space, time and person. Fowler (1991: 232) argues that ‘discourse always has in mind an implied addressee, an imagined subject position which it requires the addressee to occupy’. By analysing the deictic centre of a text (conventionally the present time, place and role of its speaker/writer), we can discover a great deal of contextual information about the utterance, the viewpoints of its producer(s), and predict its intended audience(s). Temporal deixis includes words and phrases such as today, now, then, etc. but can also be implied by words like change. Duration and novelty/newness are important in political discourse, and more subtle elements in language like tense and aspect can also help situate the reader/listener with respect to the text and its producer(s). Tense relates to the location of an event or action in time, either the present or the past, and is marked by verb inflections such as –s and – ed. For example: The government call s/call ed for restraint. (In English, there is no formal future tense; instead, futurity is expressed by constructions such as ‘will + main verb’ or ‘be + going to’.) Aspect refers to whether the event or action is viewed as completed (perfective aspect) or

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ongoing (continuous/progressive aspect). It works in conjunction with tense, so utterances are locatable with respect to both tense and aspect. For example: The government has been call ing for restraint. By examining the ‘deictic centre’ of a text—i.e. the imagined position vis-à-vis time, space and person that a text assumes or forces the reader/listener to occupy, it is possible to establish its underlying ideological viewpoint, and where the boundaries of the ingroups and outgroups lie. Key linguistic features that can be used to do this work are pronouns (we, they, us, them, ours, theirs, etc.) and other deictically marked expressions such as ‘those people’, ‘our country’, ‘fellow Brits ’.

Metaphor In traditional theories of metaphor, the source is mapped onto the target domain for creative, stylistic or literary effect, and the result is novel or striking. Conceptual metaphors are cognitive links between concepts and domains—i.e. ways of thinking about the world—that have become so conventionalised, productive and frequently occurring as to permeate the mental lexicon without speakers necessarily being aware of them (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Because these metaphors are concerned with normalised cognitive and linguistic practices, they may well be constructing, as well as reflecting, the way we view the world. Metaphors are a common occurrence in political and media discourses, and are often used to conceptualise ‘the nation’ e.g. BUILDING THE NATION; NATION AS FAMILY: NATION AS CONTAINER (the latter can be full or empty, has boundaries, and its proximal centre requires protection from the threat of the ‘other’—outside forces). The container metaphor means that you are either in or out, and protection is by exclusion (Charteris-Black 2006). Cap (2019) draws attention to the importance of the container metaphor in British (anti)immigration discourse and traces it in Nigel Farage’s UKIP speeches between 2013 and 2016, highlighting typical lexical items such as ‘absorb’, ‘borders’ and ‘burst’, where waves, floods and surges of migrants are threatening the security of the nation. By examining the metaphors used to describe it, we gain insights into the ideological construct that is the nation or imagined community. So, what does analysis of the indyref, pre-EU ref and post-Brexit corpora reveal about us and them, presumed deictic centre(s) and imagined communities, and how political rhetoric and other types of discourse can be used to unite or divide?

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References Ädel, A. (2010). How to use corpus linguistics in the study of political discourse. In A. O’Keefe & M. McCarthy (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of corpus linguistics (pp. 591–604). Abingdon: Routledge. Baker, P. (2006). Using corpora in discourse analysis. London: Continuum. Baker, P. (2012). Acceptable bias?: Using corpus linguistics methods with critical discourse analysis. Critical Discourse Studies, 9(3), 247–256. Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., Khosravinik, M., Krzyzanowski, ˙ M., McEnery, T., Wodak, R. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse & Society, 19(3), 273–306. Bednarek, M., & Caple, H. (2014). Why do news values matter? Towards a new methodological framework for analysing news discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis and beyond. Discourse & Society, 25(2), 135–158. Cap, P. (2019). ‘Britain is full to bursting point’: Immigration themes in the Brexit discourse of the UK Independence Party. In V. Koller, S. Kopf, & M. Miglbauer (Ed.), Discourses of Brexit (pp. 69–85). London: Routledge. Charteris-Black, J. (2006). Britain as a container: Immigration metaphors in the 2005 election campaign. Discourse and Society, 17 (5), 563–581. Charteris-Black, J. (2011). Politicians and rhetoric: The persuasive power of metaphor (2nd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Charteris-Black, J. (2013). Political style – A study of David Cameron. In P. Stockwell & S. Whiteley (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of stylistics (pp. 536– 557). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Charteris-Black, J. (2014). Analysing political speeches: Rhetoric, discourse and metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cockcroft, R., & Cockcroft, S. (with H. Craig & L. Hidalgo Downing). (2013). Persuading people: An introduction to rhetoric (3rd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Condor, S., Tileaga, C., & Billig, M. (2013). Political rhetoric. In L. Huddy, D.O. Sears, J.S. Levy (Ed.), Oxford handbook of political psychology (2nd ed.) (pp. 262–300). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edelman, M. (1988). Constructing the political spectacle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fowler, R. (1991). Language in the news: Discourse and ideology in the press. London: Routledge. Gabrielatos, C., & Baker, P. (2008). Fleeing, sneaking, flooding: A corpus analysis of discursive constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press, 1996 − 2005. Journal of English linguistics, 36(1), 5–38. Johnstone, B., & Eisenhart, C. (Ed). (2008). Rhetoric in detail: Discourse analyses of rhetorical talk and text. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Locke, J. (1979/1690). An essay concerning human understanding. New York: Oxford University Press. Lutzky, U., & Kehoe, A. (2019). ‘Friends don’t let friends go Brexiting without a mandate’: Changing discourses of Brexit in The Guardian. In V. Koller, S. Kopf, & M. Miglbauer (Eds.), Discourses of Brexit (pp. 104–120). London: Routledge. Mair, C., & Hundt, M. (Eds.). (2000). Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory (No. 33). Rodopi. Martin, J. (2014). Politics and rhetoric: A critical introduction. Abingdon: Routledge. McQuarrie, E.T., & David G.M. (1999). Visual rhetoric in advertising: Text interpretative, experimental, and reader-response analyses. Journal of Consumer Research, 26(1), 37–54. Partington, A., Duguid, A., & Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns and meanings in discourse: Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Reisigl, M. (2008). Analysing political rhetoric. In R. Wodak & M. Krzyzanowski (Eds.), Qualitative discourse analysis in the Social Sciences (pp. 96–120). Basingstoke: Palgrave. Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2009). The discourse-historical approach. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (2nd ed.) (pp. 87– 121). London: Sage. Scott, L.M. (1994). Images in advertising: The need for a theory of visual rhetoric. Journal of Consumer Research, 21(2), 252–273. Scott, M. (2016). WordSmith Tools version 7. Stroud: Lexical Analysis Software. Silva Rhetoricae (The forest of rhetoric) (n.d.). http://humanities.byu.edu/rhe toric/silva.htm. Accessed 25 July 2020. Sinclair, J.M. (1991). Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, M. (2016a, August 27). From Trump to Brexit rhetoric: How today’s politicians have got away with words. The Guardian. Thompson, M. (2016b, August 27). Trump and the dark history of straight talk. The New York Times. Thompson, M. (2017). Enough said: What’s gone wrong with the language of politics? London: Vintage. Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001). Corpus linguistics at work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Van Dijk, T.A. (2015). Critical Discourse Analysis. In D. Tannen, H.E. Hamilton, & D. Schiffrin (Ed.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 466– 485). Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

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Wenzl, N. (2019). ‘This is about the kind of Britain we are’: National identities as constructed in parliamentary debates about EU membership. In V. Koller, S. Kopf, & M. Miglbauer (Ed.), Discourses of Brexit (pp. 32–47). London: Routledge. Yuen, C.Y. (2004). The construal of ideational meaning in print advertisements. In K.L. O’Halloran (Ed.), Multimodal discourse analysis. Systemic functional perspectives (pp. 163–195). London: Continuum.

CHAPTER 5

This Fractured Isle: Indyref

Abstract This chapter focuses on the language of the Scottish Independence Referendum, considering the language used in the build-up to the Referendum, the ‘Yes Scotland’ and ‘Better Together’ campaigns, and reactions to the vote. The analysis is based on a 60 million words indyref corpus and compares reporting of the campaigns by Scottish and UK newspapers, alongside a subcorpus of Guardian readers’ comments. It looks at how questions of independence, nationalism and unionism were dealt with, and the importance of symbolic nationalism and Scottish identity, finding evidence of othering , both in nationalist vs. unionist and Scotland vs. England discourses and in racially defined conceptions of us and them. It concludes by examining party political texts such as party websites and the speeches given by key political protagonists. Keywords Nationalism · Independence · Nationalist symbols · Racism · Speeches

Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this chapter (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67384-0_5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. M. Douglas, Political, Public and Media Discourses from Indyref to Brexit, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67384-0_5

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Introduction This chapter considers the questions raised about the future of the UK Union by the Scottish Independence Referendum (commonly known as indyref —the social media hashtag used throughout the campaign) held on 18 September 2014. It considers the language used in the build-up to the Referendum, the ‘Yes Scotland’ and ‘Better Together’ campaigns, and reactions to the vote. It examines how the Scottish newspapers dealt with the reporting of such divisive campaigns without alienating their mostly Scottish readerships and asks whether the coverage and ideological positions adopted were different in the UK/English press, and whether this was primarily a campaign about independence for Scotland vs. remaining in the United Kingdom or whether, in some quarters, it became a Scotland vs. England grudge match. How were nationalism and independence portrayed, and what were the key themes that emerged in the ongoing debates? Newspapers give us important insights into what was going on, but they are representing events through a journalistic lens. What did ordinary people think about indyref and the questions it raised, and what kinds of language did they use in discussing them? Analysis of online newspaper comments pages offers insights into how the public viewed the ongoing debates, and the linguistic terms of engagement they used to discuss them. And what of the politicians and political parties involved? How did they make their cases? Were they convincing, and what effect might their discourse practices have had on the outcome of the vote? Chapter 2 considered the historical context of the Union and how it had altered over the three centuries since its inception, particularly following the devolution settlement enshrined in the Scotland Act 1998 and subsequently amended in 2012 and 2016. Paterson (2015: 25–26) describes two opposing views of the Union held by Scots: the first ‘pragmatic’—‘a wise bargain, struck by far-seeing politicians’; the second a ‘betrayal, Scotland bought and sold by corrupt elites’. He argues that this ‘duality – not the one or the other, but both’, and the tension between these viewpoints is the ongoing reality in Scotland, with Scotland dissatisfied within the Union because it feels it is not treated as an equal partner, yet not wholly discontent enough (to date, at least) to want to leave. In this chapter, we consider the discourses surrounding the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. The state of the Union, and whether it should be maintained, was the crux of both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns.

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The Indyref Corpus The analysis in this chapter is based on a specially compiled 60 million words indyref corpus comprising media, political and public discourses during the 6 months lead-up to and immediate aftermath of the September Referendum and using the search terms ‘(Scottish) independence (referendum)’ and ‘indyref ’. It includes coverage of the events by Scotland’s two main broadsheet newspapers (The Herald and The Scotsman) and their Sunday counterparts (the Sunday Herald and Scotland on Sunday, respectively) and Scotland’s biggest tabloid newspaper the Daily Record and its Sunday equivalent (the Scottish Sunday Mail ). The same search terms were run on three UK London-based newspapers: the right-wing tabloid Daily Mail and its Sunday counterpart the Mail on Sunday, centre-right broadsheet The Times and the left-wing Guardian. The newspaper component of the indyref corpus (1 May–30 September 2014) is 3.8 million words in total, of which approximately 0.8 million words are UK (possibly better described as ‘English’) newspaper coverage. So, the Scottish newspaper subcorpus is more than four times larger than the English newspaper subcorpus, despite being generated by the same search parameters. The newsworthiness concept of proximity (Bednarek and Caple 2017) explains why the Scottish newspapers carried more coverage of the Independence Referendum than their UK counterparts, but for a Scot living in England, it was noticeable just how little attention the UK media paid to the Scottish Independence Referendum until the last few days of the campaign. South of the border, there seemed to be a general lack of awareness of what was going on and why it should matter to the rest of the United Kingdom. Basic facts such as the lowering of the voting age to 16 for the Independence Referendum vote, and the frequently used abbreviation and hashtag indyref acquired little traction outside Scotland—as witnessed by the English and Scottish newspaper subcorpora where five occurrences of indyref compared with 133. As we shall see later, this trend was mirrored in the UK government and Westminster’s reaction to the campaign, with David Cameron and other key UK political figures seemingly disconnected from what was happening in Scotland. The content of the main Scottish political parties’ websites during the indyref period was also captured in the corpus: the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP ), Scottish Labour, Scottish Conservatives and the Scottish Greens. Key speeches from Alex Salmond (Scotland’s First Minister and

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leader of the SNP), David Cameron (UK Conservative Prime Minister) and Gordon Brown (ex-UK Prime Minister and pro-Union Labour MP) add to the political discourse dimension of the indyref corpus. Together, these party political texts comprise some 1.2 million words. A further component of the indyref corpus attempts to capture input from members of the public and those outside the political elite and journalism: reader comments from The Guardian newspaper’s online edition totalling approximately 55 million words. Analysis of the indyref corpus keywords tells us a great deal about the main topics and preoccupations of the corpus, and they showed that debates on ‘currency’ (nearly 80,000 occurrences) were indeed highly salient (17th in frequency list), with the potential for a ‘currency union’ the most frequently occurring collocational pair. The economy at c. 25,000 was clearly important, but interest was firmly fixed on the future of the pound (also c. 25,000 occurrences). The economy and the future of the pound were hugely influential in the independence debates. Evans and Menon (2017: 51) draw an interesting comparison between the timing and therefore the effectiveness of economic arguments in the Scottish and EU Referendum campaigns, claiming that ‘during that [indyref] campaign, the economic arguments against independence were presented only a few weeks before the actual vote, serving to maximise their impact’. Analysis of the word keep in the indyref corpus backs up this preoccupation with economic matters. Given that keep signals preservation of the status quo (cf. discussion of protecting the nation from the threat), righthand collocates are of interest: keep the Tories (out) has 195 entries, keep the Union has approximately 400 entries, keep Scotland has 750 (some of which are in/out of the UK/EU ), but keep the pound has over 1700 entries. The Union was 20th in the keywords list (c. 95,000). As we might expect, identity was discussed quite frequently with over 5700 occurrences. Of these, some 1000 were national identity, 423 British identity, 230 Scottish identity and 185 English identity. A sense of identity was also salient. Both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns sought to appeal to Scottish national identity. Taken together, division, divide*, divisiv* etc. account for some 12,000 occurrences, so the divisive nature of the debates and the discourse surrounding them is evident in the corpus. The border (c11,000 entries) between Scotland and England was noticeably present—a topographic metaphorical invocation of ideological difference and the national boundary between us and them, something returned to

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later when considering Scotland vs. England ‘othering’ and the role of the container metaphor in conceptualising the nation.

The Scottish Press Scottish newspapers have a long-standing and special national significance and have helped to maintain Scotland’s separate institutions, civil society and public sphere as a distinctive part of the United Kingdom (Dekavalla 2016). Whether they are indigenous newspapers such as The Herald, Scotsman and Daily Record, or what Law (2001) terms ‘interloper’ newspapers (Scottish editions of UK newspapers such as The Scottish Sun), they all have content and deictic centres that are proximal to a Scottish viewpoint, and designed to appeal to their largely Scottish readerships. In his highly influential study on imagined communities and the spread of nationalism, Anderson (1991) argues for the importance of newspapers in connecting members of the imagined community, and Billig (1995) suggests that the press’s use of banal nationalism (see Chapter 3) constructs readers as part of a wider national community. Of course, both authors were writing before the rise of online and social media; but even though social media plays an important role in how many people think about politics nowadays, the newspapers arguably still exert considerable influence over both voter intentions and, more especially, the political elite and establishment (Law 2015), with the press heavily influencing the agenda for BBC news and current affairs programmes. Despite its challenges, the Scottish press (and media more generally) maintains its distinctiveness within the marketplace and caters to a predominantly Scottish or Scottish domiciled audience. So, how did Scotland’s newspapers deal with reporting on the potentially extremely divisive ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns, without alienating their readerships, in a context where even individual families in Scotland were frequently divided on the desired outcome? Both The Herald and The Scotsman developed designated websites for the Independence Referendum. Dekavalla (2015, 2016) claims that Scottish newspaper editors saw the Referendum as an opportunity to reconnect with their readerships, due to the paucity of coverage outwith Scotland. Though the Scottish press have a distinctively Scottish identity in terms of coverage, viewpoint and political and cultural agendas, they have always had, and during indyref retained, an overwhelmingly unionist

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stance; only the Sunday Herald came out in support of Scottish independence in the run-up to the Referendum—a decision which briefly doubled their sales figures (Linford 2014). So, did physical location (i.e. Scottish or UK/English) and political stance impact on the newspapers’ linguistic practices, whether consciously or otherwise? Newspapers’ ideological and political viewpoints can be adduced from a variety of evidence types. As we have seen in Chapter 4, discourse practices can reveal underlying political and ideological viewpoints, whether these be overtly or covertly expressed and, indeed, whether the authors/editors are conscious or unaware of what they are doing. In some cases, such as with the Daily Record’s exclusive publication two days before the Referendum of ‘The Vow’ (a statement from the three leaders of the UK Unionist parties, David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, promising extensive new powers for the Scottish Parliament in the event of a ‘No’ vote), the point of view is overtly signalled. ‘The Vow’ was printed on the front page in the style of a historical parchment document signed by each of the leaders. Despite its eye-catching presentation of the scoop, publication of ‘The Vow’ was thought to have had little effect on the outcome of the vote (McCrone 2018). But the point of view can also be revealed more subtly by linguistic choices (conscious or subconsciously made) and patterns of conventionalised discourse practices. As discussed in Chapter 3, nations can be thought of as symbolic communities that are to some extent constructed by discourse (Wodak et al. 2009), and ‘there is a sense of contemporaneous community which language alone suggests’ (Anderson 1991: 145). Specific elements in language can linguistically circumscribe ingroup and outgroup boundaries; in effect, language can be used to imagine the nation. Analysing lexical choices, especially in the context of their surrounding collocation patterns, can give useful insights into underlying ideological perspectives. So, what did the lexical and collocation patterns in the indyref corpus reveal?

Nationalism vs. Unionism In the context of indyref, which was fundamentally concerned with the future of the Union, and given that the majority of the Scottish newspapers were in favour of a ‘No’ vote, how did the newspapers represent the independence debates, nationalists and nationalism, and (how) did this differ from the ways in which unionism and unionists were described?

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Was the coverage different in the English newspaper subcorpus? And how and where was Scotland, the real or imagined community, located in the arguments? The use of the term nationalists (833 entries) in the Scottish newspaper corpus and examination of its R1 collocates (i.e. those words occurring immediately to the right of nationalists ) is instructive. There is an overwhelmingly negative semantic prosody, which paints the nationalists as aggressive, misguided and untrustworthy. Nationalists: insist(ed), admit, appear, intimidate, branded, called, claim, condemned, criticised, dismissed, boycotted, played, believ(ed), think, wanted, intend, promise(d), told, played, behave (misbehave!), and [are] breaking, peddling, enthusing, cynical with fortunes, visions and dreams. The verbs associated with nationalists (i.e. what they do) are anything but neutral. When we look at nationalist (109 occurrences) as an adjectival pre-modifier of a noun (i.e. ‘nationalist ____’) in the Scottish newspapers, further evidence of a predominantly negative semantic prosody emerges. Collocates include attempts, argument(s), games, cause, sentiment, propaganda, mantra, narrative, revelation, orthodoxies, sympathisers, protesters, bully, radicals and mob. Nationalism in the Scottish newspapers (308 entries) is blind, narrow, emotional, old, touchy. By contrast, Unionism nets only 37 entries, and Unionists, many of whom are obviously not Scottish, have far fewer entries (193) than their counterparts on the opposite side of the political spectrum, so quantitatively speaking there is a concentration on ‘othering’ of nationalists. Although pre-modifying Unionist with 447 entries (again, many are describing the DUP or UK Unionists, so not relevant here) has some negative prosody in its collocations, this is notably to a much lesser degree than is the case with ‘nationalists’. Union has 3720 occurrences and is, as expected, a major plank in the coverage of the Independence Referendum by the Scottish press. The Union accounts for 1115 entries, pro-union for 362, and European Union for 426. Much of the indyref debate centred on economic matters and, in particular, whether or not Scotland would be able to retain the pound following a ‘Yes’ vote; hence frequently occurring L1 collocates of union were currency (1186), monetary, sterling and economic. Membership of the EU was clearly already a key concern for the Scots even before Brexit hove into view, though at this point the concentration was on whether an independent Scotland would be able gain membership or retain its EU status and not, as would later become the case in 2018, whether Scotland would be taken out of the EU against its will following

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a UK exit from the European Union. Further examination of the collocates shows that the ‘union’ can be old [an interesting appeal to history here], political, social, our, closer, continued, and real; moving out into the wider sentence contexts, we see words like backing, remaining, save, staying, preserve, favour, successful, together, better, support. The semantic prosody surrounding union is overwhelmingly positive. We can deduce from this that the political deictic centre in the indyref Scottish newspaper subcorpus is indeed firmly rooted in the pro-Union ‘No’ camp and is largely antagonistic towards nationalism and nationalists. That being the case, were the representations of nationalists, nationalism and unionists /unionism noticeably different in the English newspaper corpus? In the English newspapers, which we might expect to be even more pro-unionist, unionism has only 4 entries and unionist( s) 146. Nationalist( s) is much more frequently used (428 occurrences) but displays a more mixed semantic prosody than was found in the Scottish newspapers. The English newspaper subcorpus is less than a quarter of the size of the Scottish one, so proportionately speaking nationalist(s) are discussed nearly twice as frequently in the UK press when compared to the Scottish press. Why should this be the case? In terms of the deictic centre, the English newspapers, even those with Scottish editions, are distally located, hence the naming conventions may be altered and no banal nationalism in evidence; but it cannot all be explained by the English press seeing Scottish nationalists as ‘other’, given that the majority of the Scottish press adopted a similar (albeit nation-internal and proximal) viewpoint. Many of the frequently occurring L1 collocates of nationalist(s) in the English newspapers are positive: veteran, modern and patriotic, as are some of the R1 collocates, e.g. courage, though some of the right-hand collocates are more negative: deception, mobs, elite, vandalism, argument, claims and some of the left-hand collocates suggest that nationalists are on the receiving end of abuse and accusations. But overall, collocates of nationalists are noticeably much more neutral in the English newspaper corpus. The verbs associated with nationalists are rather different also: will, want, would, wish, might, like, expect, plan, love, took, campaign, win, etc. with only a few negative semantic prosodies: claim and hate. Nationalism in the English newspapers (at 130 entries, again this term is comparatively more frequent in the English than Scottish newspaper subcorpus) in L1 collocates is Scottish [explained by distance from the deictic centre), civic [which is what the SNP espoused], ethnic, English, tribal, Welsh,

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intolerant, romantic and populist and can be kill [ed]. Nationalism is sometimes associated with blood, snake, noisy, and infrequently tides or waves, so the picture is more mixed than in the Scottish newspapers. (See discussion of the role of metaphor below.) Based on the collocational analysis, attitudes towards Scottish nationalists and nationalism are much more negative within Scotland and the Scottish press than they are outside. The differences may, in part, be explained by the wellworn concept of the Scottish cringe—i.e. a set of, allegedly, widespread cultural beliefs promulgated by Scots themselves that suggest a lack of self-confidence and self-worth, and a sense of inferiority about Scotland’s cultural heritage coupled with acute embarrassment about overt expressions of Scottishness. Or perhaps it is inevitable given that indyref was a national battle being fought on Scottish soil, and the pro-Union stance of the majority of the Scottish newspapers. Even so, it is notable that defending the status quo seems to rely much more heavily on denigrating the ‘other’ (nationalists/nationalism) and the threats they pose than it does on ‘talking up’ the advantages of retaining the existing Union. Both the newspaper corpus evidence and accounts at the time and since suggest that the ‘Better Together’ campaign was viewed as a predominantly negative and, at times, lacklustre affair. According to Torrance (2014: 13), political journalist, author and historian who was close to the action in Edinburgh and kept a diary for 100 days from the start of the Independence Referendum campaigns until the weekend after the vote, ‘the Yes campaign seized control of the narrative early on: having cast the debate in voters’ minds as a battle between hope and fear, positivity and negativity’ and characterised the arguments of the ‘No’ campaign against independence as ‘scaremongering’. Of course, arguing for hope and a bright new future is often rhetorically easier and more compelling than arguing for the status quo. The same problems would dog the ‘Remain’ campaign four years later in the EU Referendum.

Metaphor What metaphors do we find in the indyref corpus? There are over 300 references to the family of nations, though many of them are rejecting this as mere Conservative and/or Cameron rhetoric—as discussed later, David Cameron pleaded with Scots not to break up the UK family of nations in his pre-Referendum speech. An extension of the Family metaphor, the

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divorce metaphor is prevalent in the indyref corpus with divorc* referring to the break-up of the United Kingdom yielding approximately 3000 occurrences. The container metaphor is also prevalent, and interestingly, we see the natural disaster conceptual metaphor associated, not only with migrants (c.f. Gabrielatos and Baker 2008) (and there are comparatively few occurrences of this in the indyref corpus but with other ‘threats’; flood* is the most productive variant, though in this corpus you are as likely to be flooded by ‘the English’ as you are with ‘migrants’), but also with nationalists, nationalism and independence. We find wave, surge (in support for ‘Yes’, for independence, of nationalist feeling, in SNP membership, and in UKIP support) and tide. So, whereas the natural disaster and fluids metaphor is typically used in discourse to conceptualise a threat to the nation from outside, in the indyref corpus it seems that sometimes the threat to the nation is from within—from those who are keen to break away from the centre, and in so doing threatening the integrity of the (United Kingdom) container. Even more noticeable, in the Guardian comments, were the repeated threats/promises of building a wall (approx. 150). These ranged from a wall around Scotland, a wall between nations, a wall along the border to a wall to keep the English out and rebuilding Hadrian’s wall. Of course, building such walls has a long historical precedent, and Hadrian’s wall was built to protect the northwestern frontier of the Roman empire from the unconquered barbarian Picts (the pre-Scots), but the build the wall and build a (great) (big) wall occurrences in the Guardian online comments are oddly and uncomfortably prescient of Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign slogan re the Mexican border.

Waving the Saltire Symbolic nationalism played a significant part in the Referendum campaigns. The ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ (or ‘Aye’ and ‘Naw’) campaigns were fought, at least partly, on the grounds of Scottishness and what that meant. (There was symbolic use of distinctively Scots lexical forms aye and naw on campaign badges, and the Scottish Youth Parliament’s website designed to help young voters make up their minds was called ‘Aye, Naw, Mibbe’ (Yes, No, Maybe). Both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns sprinkled Scots lexis through their speeches and promotional materials as a way of indicating authentic ingroup membership.) Although at the time, there

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was much made by the ‘Yes’ campaign of the social justice agenda, and by the ‘No’ campaign on the economy and the future of the pound, questions of nationalism and patriotism were unquestionably key drivers for both sides. Both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns used Scottish iconography in their attempts to win voters. Shared images, symbols, rituals, myths, language, and discourse play an essential role in reproducing social groups, including nations. The members of a nation must construct their national memory and common past, as well as their national future, through discourse. (Stanojevi´c and Šari´c 2019: 5)

Building on Anderson’s (1991) concept of the nation as ‘imagined community’, Bechhofer and McCrone (2012: 546) contend that ‘the national flag, a ‘symbolic container’ (Eriksen 2007: 2), stands as a metonym for the nation: the object somehow becomes the nation by association’, the flag signifying and reminding us of our shared national and cultural heritage. Elgenius (2018: 2–3) argues that ‘nations become visible through their symbols (flags, anthems and emblems)’ and that flags are successful political symbols and rallying points because they ‘authenticate boundaries’ between the ingroup and the outgroup—those who belong and those who don’t. Iconography and symbols can be a powerful way of distinguishing ourselves from our neighbours, particularly so in the context of the United Kingdom where national, cultural and political identities are complex and often multiple, e.g. Scottish and/not British (Bechhofer and McCrone 2012). Flags are clearly salient in indyref discourses as there are 4962 occurrences of flag in the indyref corpus, the majority of which are nouns. Union flag (799) is the most commonly occurring bigram, whereas Scottish flag has 196 entries. English, Welsh and British flags also figure. Flag waving (515) is also relatively common. Flags are things that belong to us or them and mark our sense of belonging or otherness, and it is clear that during the indyref campaign, people were talking about them as well as waving them. The Scottish Saltire, or St Andrew’s flag, thought to have originated in the ninth century, though its first known use is in the twelfth century, is a powerful symbol of Scottish national identity and a totemic rallying point, and it functions as such in the indyref corpus. In the Scottish newspaper subcorpus, there are 177 occurrences of Saltire(s). The Saltire

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and the waving of Saltires are the most frequent occurrences, and it is unfurled, hoisted, draped, strung and saluted. (There are only 3 Scottish/Scotland’s Saltires —as we would assume the implied audience as the Scottish ingroup knows what the Saltire is.) In the English newspapers, there are 72 Saltires of which 7 are Scottish Saltires, so this Scottish symbol is used comparatively more frequently by the United Kingdom than the Scottish press—which seems to speak again to the prioritisation of ‘othering’ in these debates. In the larger Guardian comments subcorpus, there are nearly 1400 Saltires. There are the familiar waving and flying collocates, but also wrap(ing/ed), burning and swastika which sound altogether more sinister. In the wider contexts, the Saltire is mentioned not only in connection with Alex Salmond and David Cameron (Alex Salmond, in 2013, was criticised for staging a political stunt when he unfurled a Saltire behind David Cameron’s head at Andy Murray’s Wimbledon victory match), but also alongside Ed Miliband, England, Downing Street and the Union. So here, the flag is taking on a wider symbolic importance about potential divisions between the Scottish and English perspectives and nationalist and unionist stances. The Saltire is an emblem with variable significations. For most Scots, it is a symbol of Scottish national identity. For others, it is a symbol of nationalist politics and struggle (it was appropriated by the SNP in the 1970s). In Gordon Brown’s speech on the eve of the Referendum, he urged the people of Scotland to ‘tell the nationalists this is not their flag, their country, their culture’. It is clear that in the Guardian comments, this emblem of nationhood is still a symbolic site of nationalist vs. unionist struggle, with a fair bit of anti-Scottish and anti-English wrangling thrown in for good measure. For example: You need to take your Saltire-tinted glass off will all paint our faces blue and wave Saltires until we are sick of it dance about like numpties wearing Saltires the saltire waving blue-faced nationalists Unionist thugs are burning the Saltire and waving union Jacks patriotic Scots can fly the Saltire and still reject independence trying to deny you the use of the Saltire.

The evidence shows that flying the flag for Scotland and/or independence can be both a literal and a metaphorical activity. The Saltire was a potent symbol of Scottishness for both sides in the debate.

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Scotland vs. England Comparing the UK (English) and Scottish newspaper subcorpora yields some revealing results especially in keyness patterns. Our and we appear comparatively much less frequently in the UK newspapers than the Scottish ones. This might be expected given the deictic centre and the Scottish focus of the Independence Referendum—indeed, they are two of the most negatively keywords. Also appearing with less frequency in the UK newspapers than might have been anticipated are SNP, independence and referendum. MPs are positively key in the English newspaper subcorpus, as is YouGov. So, it appears that the UK newspapers are more concerned with Westminster government than Scotlandinternal politics. Again, we might expect this given their target readerships, but a picture is beginning to emerge in the data of the United Kingdom being somewhat removed (and perhaps largely disengaged?) from what is happening in Scotland. Williamson and Golding (2016: 111) found that the Scottish Independence Referendum was ‘more or less invisible’ in the English press during the run-up to the vote, and that after a major spike in coverage during August 2014 in the period immediately before the vote and some discussion during the aftermath in September, it had ‘all but disappeared by mid-October’. In the Scottish newspapers subcorpus, examination of collocates of the 24,400 occurrences of Scotland shows that one of the most common three-word clusters is an independent Scotland. The phrase independent Scotland occurs 2895 times and if Scotland 732 times. As might be anticipated, people of Scotland is another frequent n-gram. Scotland +verb suggests personification—a common feature of describing nation states: Scotland can (214); Scotland cannot (13) and Scotland can’t (11); Scotland could (480); Scotland couldn’t (6); Scotland has (570); Scotland had; Scotland is (941); Scotland should (261); Scotland will (793); Scotland would (1401). Scotland appears with approximately the same relative frequency in the English newspaper subcorpus, and the collocation patterns are largely the same as those found in the Scottish press. However, there is significantly more concentration on the hypothetical outcome of independence in the English newspapers, with ‘if Scotland’ twice as frequently occurring in relative terms, with the potentially negative consequences often heavily underlined:

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The former secretary general of Nato, Lord Robertson, has argued that “it is far from scaremongering to use the term Balkanization to predict what might happen if Scotland were to break from its 300 year old union. (The Times 16 August 2014) George Osborne has warned: if Scotland walks away from the UK, it walks away from the UK pound. (Daily Mail 7 May 2014) Lord Birt, a former director general of the BBC, has warned that the corporation would be forced to make deep cuts if Scotland votes for independence, losing up to a quarter of its current spending. (Guardian 19 August 2014) Britain’s role as a world power could end if Scotland becomes independent, the man leading the fight to save the UK has warned. Former Chancellor Alistair Darling, head of the campaign to stop Scotland breaking away, says other nations would seize the chance to punish what was left of a depleted Britain. (Mail on Sunday 13 July 2014)

These excerpts suggest that ‘Project Fear’ was a key factor in the 2014 Referendum debates. Although the term has since become associated with the Brexit campaign, it was first jokingly coined by the ‘Better Together’ indyref campaign team ‘as an ironic suggestion for Yes Scotland—a handy name it could use in its constant complaints about Better Together’s alleged Unionist scaremongering’ (Jack 2016). In a massive error of judgement, Rob Shorthouse, Communications Director of the ‘Better Together’ campaign mentioned it to journalists at the 2013 Scottish Conservative Conference; it was an own goal that would haunt the unionist ‘No’ campaign.

‘Othering’ and Name Calling Chapter 2 considered the historical contexts behind the ‘traditions of dissent’ (Frame 1996: 74) between the smaller partner nations and their larger, more powerful English neighbour. The rivalries and, in some cases, downright animosities between Scotland and England are longstanding, deep-seated and well known, and often played out in the use of stereotypes and humour. Scotland vs. England ‘othering’ and vice versa ranges from playful banter to aggressive racism and occurs in a variety of contexts from sporting fixtures to media reportage, political

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discourse and individual name calling or harassment. Hall (1997: 237) underlines the importance of language in constructing difference from the ‘other’ in terms of race, nationality, etc. through binary oppositions such as black/white, British/foreigner and through ‘symbolic boundaries’. Derogatory terms for the ‘other’ such as Jock or Sassenach, whether viewed as tongue-in-cheek jokes, malicious name-calling, or borderline racism are arguably evidence of a darker side of ‘othering’ that emerges in these debates. As we shall see, this is more likely to be found in contexts other than mainstream newspaper articles which, though they may be partisan, are subject to a rigorous editorial regime. Sassenach(s) in its various spelling variants, meaning English, and originally, also English-speaking, mainly occurs in the Guardian comments (388 entries). The word derives from Saxon, with the earliest attestation in the Dictionary of the Scots Language in 1706 appropriately enough in ‘Letters from E.C. to E.W. Concerning the Union’. Over time, it has become a somewhat jocular, though also frequently derisory and othering, term for English people (formerly, it could also be applied to Scots lowlanders), so it is perhaps apt that it turns up here in the indyref corpus. In the Guardian comments (i.e. online comments made by readers in response to Guardian newspaper articles on indyref), Sassenach is sometimes used in a jocular way by people describing themselves, but it also has a darker side, with left- and right-handed collocates including words with self-evidently negative semantic prosody such as: bloody, bullying, bastard(s), damn, evil, hating, hellhole, nasty, racist, sucking, screwing, raiding, xenophobic, oppression, anti-, UKIP and also (arguably!) taxing. Anti-English sentiment in Scotland has been noted by Watson (2003) and others. Jock(s) (a rather derogatory nickname for Scots), with 1580 occurrences, is much more frequent, and although there is some self-naming (34 occurrences of us Jocks ), the word is often an aggressive othering device. Jocks are described as: chippy, disloyal, dumb, ginger, greedy, grumbling, junkie, mad, miserable, moaning, nasty, pesky, recalcitrant, retard, selfish, scrounging, silly, sorry, sponging, stupid, treasonous, troublesome, turbulent, uppity, ungrateful, unruly, upstart, useless, whining, whinging. Blaine (2016) draws attention to Iain Macwhirter’s comments in the Sunday Herald in the run-up to the Scottish Independence Referendum: Look at the readers’ comments left on any UK newspaper site and you will often see the Scots derided as educationally subnormal scroungers,

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whingers, dupes, drunks, parasites and much worse. There is a patronising scolding tone to much UK newspaper commentary, which would be offensive were it applied to ethnic minorities. (Macwhirter 2014)

Analysis of the Guardian comments in the indyref corpus suggests this is an accurate characterisation, and this is where the most obvious ‘othering’ and polarisation in the corpus occurs. When compared with the rest of the indyref corpus, English emerges as a prominent keyword (11th most key) in the Guardian comments from readers. There are 89,488 occurrences of English in the Guardian online comments, accounting for 0.15% of the total running words in this subcorpus. Against English and all English are prominent collocational pairings, but the English is markedly prominent as the most common L1 collocate—accounting for approximately one-third of the L1 collocates—and it usually refers to the English as a discrete body of people (e.g. the English are …) rather than as pre-modifiers e.g. the English residents. In the same corpus, Scots has 84,204 occurrences (again 0.15% of the corpus total running words), of which 33,884 are premodified by ‘the’. Again, the majority are the Scots followed by a verb—i.e. the Scots as a race/nation. So, we have a polarisation of two nationalities here. We might expect the Scots to be more frequent given the focus of the corpus and the search terms used, but it is noteworthy that the English have even higher prominence. The frequent usage of the English/the Scots suggests that frequent generalisations are being made about the ‘other’, and that identity is as much or more about who one is not as who one is (see Chapter 3). In the Guardian comments, sentiment* has more than 3200 occurrences, with the most frequently occurring collocates being anti-English sentiment (over 500 entries—compared with around 130 entries for antiScottish sentiment and 100 for nationalist sentiment ). There are more complaints about anti-English posts than anti-Scottish posts, though that may tell us as much about the nationalities and views of those posting as anything else. The derogatory term cybernat(s), a coinage to describe online independence supporters, occurs only 43 times in the Scottish newspaper component of the corpus, and is fairly evenly split between The Scotsman and The Herald. The less contentious abbreviation Nat(s) for ‘nationalists’ occurs only 33 times. Cybernats occurred 22 times in the English newspaper corpus; Nats only 6 times. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these terms were much more likely to be found in online comments, where we have

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individual voices of readers (and in some cases, online trolls) rather than the institutional voice of the newspaper. We find over 3220 occurrences of cybernat(s) in the Guardian comments corpus and also some analogous, albeit infrequent, terms like cyberbrit(s) and cyberbritnats. The debates carried out in the online newspaper comments pages were considerably less measured, much more polarised, and often surprisingly aggressive and confrontational in tone. According to The Herald (Whitaker 19 Feb 2017), ‘widespread online abuse was widely seen as a stain on the 2014 independence referendum’—the threats made against JK Rowling when she came out in favour of a ‘No’ vote were widely reported at the time, but cyberbrits’ trolling activities received much less scrutiny. Stuart Campbell, who runs the pro-nationalist ‘Wings over Scotland’ site, claimed to have received online death threats during the 2014 indyref campaign. When interviewed in 2017, Campbell said that the Brexit vote, Donald Trump’s election victory and the looming prospect of indyref2 have: emboldened a certain type of extreme British nationalist – the tone of the EU referendum campaign and the US Presidential one made really aggressive behaviour seem more mainstream and acceptable, plus once they won they didn’t feel any need to rein themselves in any more. (Whitaker 2017).

Chapter 7 will assess the veracity of Campbell’s claim that things have got worse over time. For now, we continue to examine aggressive linguistic behaviours in the indyref corpus. As discussed, there was evidence of anti-nationalist and anti-Scottish and anti-English discourse practices, but one thing that I had not anticipated finding in the indyref corpus was an unexpected level of concentration on ethnic and racial terms.

Race, Ethnicity and Racist Discourse These themes did not seem prevalent or especially relevant to the indyref campaigns or debates. It is generally considered that the politics of race and identity are much more important in England than Scotland (McGarvey and Mulvey 2016) and that, in Scotland, racism is ‘portrayed as a predominantly English problem’ (De Lima 2001: 143; cited in Hopkins 2008). As we now know, these themes would later feature prominently in some Brexit discourses, especially those around UKIP,

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and may even have been key motivators for some voters in the EU Referendum, but they were not themes that I expected to see figure prominently in the indyref corpus. The overall proportion of black and minority ethnic population is still much lower in Scotland than in England (4% compared with 14% in the 2011 Census), and the distribution of ethnic groups is rather different, with the majority belonging to Pakistani, Chinese or Indian community groups and relatively low numbers from Black African or Black Caribbean communities, though this is changing. One of the biggest changes in Scotland’s demographic has been in the growth of the Polish population (Scotland’s Census). BAME Scots, e.g. those with Pakistani or Chinese heritage, both of which have wellestablished communities in Scotland, are much more likely to describe themselves as Scottish rather than British; their counterparts in England are much less likely to describe themselves as English (McGarvey and Mulvey 2016). So, there is a sense in which those from BAME backgrounds are seen (and see themselves) as more integrated and integral in Scotland, compared to the rest of the United Kingdom. Under the 1998 Scotland Act, immigration and nationality were matters reserved to Westminster. This has since become a bone of contention as Scotland tends to view immigration differently from the rest of the United Kingdom, with the Scottish government stressing the benefits of immigration—skilled workforce, strengthen the economy, etc. in a country that has faced problems due to net outward migration (Scotland’s Future—Scottish Government 2013). The 2004 Fresh Talent: Working in Scotland scheme was designed to combat falling population numbers by encouraging people to settle in Scotland (Scottish Executive 2008). Under the scheme, international graduates from Scottish universities could live and work in the country for two years following graduation without the need for a work permit (Scottish Executive 2008). Immigration is generally viewed less negatively in Scotland than in the rest of the United Kingdom and England especially and, even though there are concerns about levels of immigration expressed in both countries, in Scotland only about a third of the population sees it as bad for the country (Hunter and Meer 2018; British Social Attitudes Survey). Of course, that does not mean that racism is not experienced by those living north of the border (Hopkins (2008) summarises various studies showing that it is), but it perhaps helps to explain why immigration did not form part of the official political discourses around the Scottish Independence

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Referendum. The SNP has adopted an inclusive civic (rather than ethnic) nationalism and is pro-immigration. Migration is crucial to the development of Scotland as an inclusive, fair, prosperous, innovative country ready and willing to embrace the future. It is essential to our economic prospects and our demographic sustainability that Scotland continues to attract the level and nature of migration it needs. Migration is not just about economic prosperity. It has helped to shape Scotland – just as people born in Scotland have helped to shape nations across the world so people migrating to Scotland have shaped and changed our own country. People from overseas who come to Scotland to live, to study or work, or to raise their families are our friends and neighbours. They strengthen our society and we welcome them. (Scottish Government 2018)

This is an excerpt from a 2018 Scottish Government policy discussion document arguing for powers over immigration (currently reserved to Westminster) to be devolved to Scotland in view of its different needs, and to safeguard free movement from EU countries and to allow Scotland to manage its own international migration. Outward migration combined with falling birth rates and population decline (particularly in rural areas) and an ageing population have caused specific problems for Scotland; the UK population (as a whole) experienced net increases over this period (1950s–1990s). Projections indicate that the situation in Scotland is likely to worsen (11,000 more deaths than births in 2041) unless net inward migration can reverse the trend (Scottish Government 2018). Of course, as Bond (2006) points out, the views of the Scottish Government do not necessarily accord with those of its citizens, and there is some evidence that hostility towards migration is growing within and towards some population sub-groups. On the whole, the indyref corpus evidence showed fairly sympathetic views towards migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Collocates like compassionate, humane, protection, support, attract, welcome(d), opportunity, desperate, destitute, starving, skilled and citizenship are very different from the patterns associated with these words in the pre-EU Referendum corpus (see Chapter 6). There are some ‘fearmongering’ terms such as millions, flooding, influx but largely the impression is of a society that is sympathetic to migrants, and recognises the desperate plight of many asylum seekers and refugees alongside the opportunities offered by migration and the positive contribution that many such migrants make.

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It was surprising, therefore, to find fairly extensive references to race and ethnicity in the indyref corpus. In the majority of cases, these terms and discussion were located in the Guardian comments—so these were individual voices rather than the institutional public voice of the newspaper. Even so, they were much more widespread than might have been thought, and many of the exchanges seem perhaps unexpected given the Guardian readership (though those commenting are likely to be a very small subsection of the readership in the region of 1% (Belam 2012) but many have the flavour of decidedly non-liberal and non-left-wing viewpoints. Although they may not be representative of the views of the readership at large, online comments give us at least a flavour of the ideological positions and representations circulating within certain sectors in society (Paprota 2017). Initially, these findings surfaced serendipitously whilst I was looking for something else; searches on brown (designed to uncover references to Gordon Brown in the corpus) threw up unanticipated collocates such as people, skin(ned), faces —all in the Guardian comments—and so I began to interrogate the corpus for racial or ethnic references. The patterns that emerged were unexpected and rather shocking. There were 1000 occurrences of white in relation to ethnicity. The vast majority were in the Guardian comments, but there were also some in the Herald and Scotsman. 52 collocated with British (white British), 37 were white English*; 25 were (non-)white Scots/Scottish/Scotland. 30 were white males; 19 white men; 25 white men; there were only 3 references to white woman/women. 60 were (non-)white person; 45 were white working class *; 26 were white supremacist/supremacy. Foreigners was more frequent than expected (1700 entries) and often had negative semantic prosody in L1 contexts: Johnny Foreigner (19), bloody foreigners (25), wealthy foreigners (11), rich foreigners (10) and, as double othering: those foreigners (8), these foreigners (10), the foreigners (56), owned by foreigners (25). Groups, religions and cultures explicitly mentioned in reasonably high frequencies were: Islam (107) and Islamic (303); Jews (275) and Jewish (238); the taboo term Paki (15) and Pakistan(i) (244); black people (68); Muslim(s’) (626); Polish (619) and Asian (376). The majority of these occurrences (many of which are unprintable) appeared in the Guardian comments (UK broadsheet website), but Hussain & Miller (2006) found evidence of Islamophobia in Scotland, and McCollum et al. (2014: 92) present evidence from the 2006 and 2010 Scottish Social Attitudes Surveys that ‘a significant and consistent share of the Scottish

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public appears to believe that ethnic minorities pose a threat to Scotland’s identity’, with these views often linked to education levels (those with higher levels of educational attainment are generally less likely to feel that migrants are ‘taking their jobs’) and age (the evidence suggests that younger people in Scotland are most opposed to migration—which runs counter to expectations). The arguments over Scottish independence were frequently elided with racial politics in ways that suggest racist undertones. For example: Beware, Scots! Don’t end up as England’s Pakistan! By demanding their own separate Muslim state or Pakistan, the Indian Muslims, from being the powerful minority that practically ruled Indian politics, the tail that wagged the Indian dog, straightaway dropped to the status of a powerless minority segregated in two corners of the subcontinent, handing over the main part of India to untrammelled control by the Hindus. As Patrick French, one of the best historians of the Indian independence story put it: Indian Muslim power was broken for ever by the creation of Pakistan. An even worse fate, in terms of loss of power, threatens the Scots today. (Guardian Comments, 4 September 2014). The comments on here from some Little Englanders on here are quite appalling and verging on racist. Substitute the word Scottish for Jew, or Muslim and I think PC Plod would be knocking on a few doors. Just to attempt to educate the ignorant, Scottish Independence has nothing to do with any kind of anti Englishness. We in Scotland have had enough of Westminster and its incompetence, illegality, corruption, patronage, and complete lack of democracy. (Guardian Comments, 12 February 2014)

It was also surprising to note how often racist appears in the indyref corpus (3345 occurrences), racism (1800), racial (499) and racists (592). In the newspapers, the majority of such occurrences are in reference to UKIP and/or Nigel Farage and whether or not they are racist, but in the Guardian comments, quite a different discourse emerges. There are many accusations of racism, and a noticeable blurring of the lines between ‘racism’ and ‘nationalism’. The most frequently occurring right and left collocates are Scottish, English, Scotland, Scots and there are accusations in both directions of anti-English and anti-Scottish racism. The most frequently occurring 3-word clusters are: anti English racism (1st);

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against the English (4th); anti English racists (5th); anti English racist (6th). Of course, racism in the press is not a new phenomenon (van Dijk 1991, 2000) but the online medium has given it a new forum that is potentially much more difficult to moderate or control, and racial comment seems more often ‘tolerated’ when in response to political news stories (Hughey and Daniels 2013). But given the increasing influence of online media in public opinion forming, this is a worrying trend. The Guardian is clearly aware that the online comments facility is open to abuse. In 2016, they published research into ‘the dark side of Guardian comments (Gardiner et al. 2016), and found that although ‘hate speech’ as defined by law was seldom present (and if so, it was removed by moderators and the commenter banned), ‘xenophobia, racism, sexism and homophobia were all seen regularly’. The Guardian’s own Community standards say: ‘We will not tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of hate-speech, or contributions that could be interpreted as such’. In 2016, the Guardian took the decision to reduce the commenting facility on stories relating to contentious subjects such as migration and race (Hamilton 2016), and so it is not possible to trace these patterns in Chapter 6 when we look at the discourses around the EU Referendum.

Party Political Discourse Examination of the political party websites underlined the SNP’s antipathy for the Westminster government. There were 4360 occurrences of Westminster on the SNP website and accompanying blogs, and common collocates were establishment, cuts and elections, with common phrases including power at Westminster and balance of power. Comparison of the party websites revealed some very interesting differences in priorities. The Scottish Greens were predictably focused on energy, fracking, communities and jobs. Scottish Labour was concerned with health service-related issues, policing, infrastructure (Scotrail and Calmac), fracking, gender, and family-related issues. The SNP was focused on Westminster, independence, the vote, polls, powers, campaign, policy, the economy, support and the future. The Scottish Conservatives focused on land, the future, the economy, the north, rural life, the United Kingdom and Britain. So, there is some credence in the claims that the

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SNP fought a hearts and minds campaign, rather than one focused on domestic problems and policy.

Key Protagonists David Cameron, as the serving Prime Minister during the Scottish Independence Referendum campaign and co-signatory (along with Alex Salmond) of the Edinburgh agreement in 2012 that gave the go ahead for the Referendum, is clearly a significant figure and is mentioned 33,600 times in the whole corpus. Gordon Brown, ex-Prime Minister is mentioned 14,720 times—rather more than might have been expected given that he wasn’t part of the ‘No’ campaign until the very end, coming out of semi-retirement ten days before the Referendum in what was seen as Labour’s last-ditch attempt to save the Union. The ‘Better Together’ campaign fronted by Alastair Darling, Jim Murphy and Douglas Alexander, according to opinion polls, was floundering. Cameron was aware of his personal and party’s lack of popularity in Scotland, and it is alleged that this was why he took a back seat until, in a last-minute panic having realised that the nationalists might win the vote, he cancelled PMQs, and he, Clegg and Miliband each travelled to Scotland in a last-ditch attempt to rally support for a ‘No’ vote. Their interventions were largely seen as too little, too late, and out of touch with the Scottish electorate. Without Gordon Brown and his greatly acclaimed ‘barnstorming’ speech on the eve of the Referendum, the outcome might have been very different. In the indyref corpus, Cameron is portrayed much more negatively than Brown. This is especially noticeable in the Guardian comments, where we get various epithets to refer to David Cameron and his colleagues: Cameron and: co.; his cronies; Eton(ian) bunch/pals/sidekicks; friends; gang; ilk; mates; mob; posh English/Tory pals; unelected posh boys; wonks, etc. (There are a few similar epithets for Gordon Brown, but these are far less frequent in occurrence and variety.) As these are comments by individuals rather than the institutional voice of the newspaper, they tend to be more forthright. Obviously, the Guardian is a left-wing newspaper, so it is likely that the majority of those reading it and commenting on articles are politically left of centre, but even so, there is a marked difference in the way the two men are portrayed. And given that the Guardian is a United Kingdom rather than homegrown Scottish newspaper, the opposite result might have been expected. There are some 150 entries

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in the corpus speculating on/hoping for a possible Cameron resignation, and examination of newspaper headlines featuring David Cameron shows him to be mainly associated with negative actions and outcomes and suggests that he is ineffectual, e.g.: Cameron accuses Salmond of refusing to focus on big issues (Times ) Cameron accuses SNP of threats to business leaders over no vote (Guardian) Cameron denies EU policy harms Union (Times ) Cameron faces ‘a wave of fury’ if Union is lost (Times ) Cameron gives clash of the Scots a miss (Times ) Cameron insists No will win as powers deal is promised (Herald) Cameron set to ‘lovebomb’ Scotland in run-up to poll (Scotsman)

Compare this with the headlines associated with Gordon Brown, and a clear contrast emerges. Brown is portrayed as a warrior champion fighting on the side of right. Brown accuses ministers of blunders over Scottish vote (Guardian) Brown and Darling reunite to work better together (Times ) Brown in wake-up call warning over referendum moves (Scotsman) Brown makes passionate appeal to Labour voters in final no rally (Guardian) Brown stands up for Darling (Times ) Brown to help lead the fight against Scots independence (Times ) Brown to the rescue? No camp sends for ex-PM to save union (Guardian) Brown vows to ‘nail the SNP lie’ about the NHS (Herald) Brown: Yes vote will bring inequality until doomsday (Scotsman)

Given The Times ’s endorsement of the Conservative Party in the 2010 General Election, their stance is perhaps surprising. Cameron’s ‘no going back’ speech of 16th September 2016 evoked the NATION AS FAMILY and BUILDING A NATION conceptual metaphors. It described Cameron and the rest of the United Kingdom as being utterly heart-broken if the potential break-up of our family of nations, i.e. the United Kingdom, came to pass and uses emotive words like home, friend, love, separation, painful divorce, and appealed to the Scottish electorate to think of the impact of a ‘Yes’ vote on their children, grandchildren and future generations. But the deictic centre of his speech was so obviously removed from Scotland that it failed to have the desired

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effect. (This was one occasion when Cameron chose not to draw attention to his partly Scottish ancestry and is likely it would have backfired if he had.) Much of the speech sounded like Westminster warnings, or even threats, towards a recalcitrant Scotland: If Scotland votes yes, the UK will split, and we will go our separate ways forever. It would mean – for any banks that remain in Scotland – if they ever got in trouble it would be Scottish taxpayers and Scottish taxpayers alone that would bear the costs. You don’t get change by undermining your economy and damaging your business and diminishing your place in the world.

In addition to warnings about the economic impact, it paints a bleak picture of the withdrawal of British embassy support for travellers, and problems around national security, the NHS and welfare state but couches these warnings as ‘friendly advice’: ‘To warn of the consequences is not to scare-monger. It is like warning a friend about a decision they might take that will affect the rest of their lives – and the lives of their children’. Negative semantic prosody is widespread: ripping your country apart; undermining your economy and damaging your businesses and diminishing your place in the world. Although the speech attempts to argue for shared concerns about civic responsibilities across the political spectrum and across the United Kingdom, promising change and a better future, rhetorically and theatrically it was much less powerful and convincing than Gordon Brown’s impassioned delivery the next day. Though described by many of the UK newspapers (e.g. Guardian, Independent, Telegraph) as Cameron’s ‘emotional speech/plea’, when compared with Brown’s speech and in terms of kairos , the delivery and rhetoric came across as rather careful and sterile, and may have been viewed by many in the Scottish electorate (its target audience) as hectoring and threats by the distant Westminster/UK government/English ‘other’.

Gordon Brown’s Speech on Eve of Referendum Gordon Brown’s plea for the Union speech on the eve of the Referendum was described by many commentators as the best of his career, the most powerful speech of the whole ‘No’ campaign, and a pivotal moment for the Referendum outcome. His timely intervention was welcomed by

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David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband. Rhetorically, in many ways, the speech was as might have been expected in its use of devices such as tricolon (e.g. proud of our Scottish identity, proud of our distinctive Scottish institutions, proud of the Scottish Parliament ), syntactic parallelism (we built the peace together, we built the health service together, we built the welfare state together, we will build the future together), antithesis (this is not the fear of the unknown, this is now the risks of the known; this is not a decision just for this time: this is a decision for all time), use of anaphoric imperative let us tell/keep…’ constructions which have undertones of religious discourse, plus lots of appeals to shared Scottish identity (we, our Scottish, our Scotland, people of Scotland, we Scots etc.) and it evoked both the BUILDING THE NATION metaphor, but also its obverse—break, sever, smash. But the speech was delivered without notes (i.e. memoria), with passion, authority and conviction, and its repetitive rhetorical patterning powerfully punctuated and emphasised by a raft of paralinguistic features such as gesture, dramatic pauses and tone of voice that made it into a ‘barnstorming’ performance that shocked political pundits across the United Kingdom and probably swayed many last-minute deciders. Brown managed to combine logos , pathos and ethos to make a rousing speech that carried weight with the Scottish electorate. Paterson (2015: 43) comments on Brown’s unique ‘insight … that he had to appeal to gut-instinct national identity and patriotism’ delivered in a style redolent of ‘the moral passion of the covenanters’, and watching the speech, one is reminded more than a little of the long tradition of exhortatory and extemporised preaching in Scottish churches. As the son of a Church of Scotland minister and a lifelong member of the Scottish kirk, such discourses would be familiar to him and, perhaps, to a good proportion of his audience. His delivery successfully exploited all the paralinguistic features that make good public speaking so memorable— compelling use of dramatic pauses, rising and falling intonation, pitch, modulations in loudness and tone, expressive hand and facial gestures— and, crucially given its subject matter, with its rousing words delivered in an authoritative but ‘authentic’ Scottish accent. His speech appealed for unity rather than division, with a solid commitment to the Union (we, together, our UK, comradeship, community, cooperation, partnership, solidarity, sharing ), warned of the dangers of voting ‘Yes’ (risks 1-7 , break, sever, smash, abandon, problems could implode at any time, minefield, throw … into the dust ) and set aspirations for the future alongside admonitions about the enormity and finality of the decision facing voters (my children,

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all of Scotland’s children, future generations, in centuries to come, decision from which there is no going back, decision for all time). But, crucially, it was delivered by a Scot in Scotland. This was one occasion where having ‘the right accent’ and congruent national ‘pedigree’ really mattered.

Alex Salmond and the Dream that Shall Never Die The other key political protagonist who had the right Scottish pedigree (and accent) was Alex Salmond—leader of the SNP and Scotland’s First Minister. There is a sense in which the real battle on Scottish independence was fought between the two Scottish heavyweights, Salmond and Brown, with Cameron and the other UK politicians appearing as rather inconsequential bystanders. A charismatic but divisive figure, Salmond’s rhetorical skills were most evident in his political speeches. In the run-up to the Referendum, he gave numerous speeches and took part in BBC head-to-head debates. He performed much better in the former. He was careful to situate the SNP’s brand of Scottish nationalism as civic rather than ethnic nationalism—something that had a practical application in the decision over who was eligible to vote in the Referendum: all European Union and Commonwealth residents in Scotland aged 16 or over were included in the electorate; Scottish ex-pats resident elsewhere in the United Kingdom could not. His speeches focus on the momentous decision facing Scotland and the one opportunity to ‘build a better Scotland’ and not to be ‘feart’ (i.e. afraid). about ‘putting Scotland’s future in Scotland’s hands’ (speech to SNP Party Conference April 2014). Salmond frequently peppered his speeches with Scots words, and it could be argued this was as much about building a sense of ‘authenticity’ and appealing to Scottish audiences as it was a natural consequence of his own Scottish background. Many Scots are aware of much of their distinctively Scottish linguistic repertoire (particularly those who have spent a lot of time outside their place of origin, or living and working alongside non-Scots, as Salmond has) and they can deploy it deliberately as a type of linguistic flag-waving, and as a way of delineating ingroup and outgroup membership. As a lowland Scot, Salmond has both ‘afraid’ and the stylistically marked Scottish cognate ‘feart’ in his linguistic repertoire. By choosing the Scottish rather than the English variant, he is making common cause with Scottish audiences. In effect, he is saying: ‘I’m one of you’. He is also appealing to nationalist sentiment.

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Salmond’s Independence Referendum speeches evoke self-belief and historic opportunity: ‘As a country we have re-discovered national selfconfidence. As a nation, we are finding our voice’. ‘Scotland is on the cusp of making history. The eyes of the world are upon us’ (speech to international press event, 11 September 2014). His intended Referendum victory speech talked about a nation reborn, a new democracy, new politics, democracy reclaimed, and the greatest day in Scotland’s history. By the early morning of 19 September 2014, it was clear that the ‘Yes’ campaign had lost the vote, and the newspapers widely reported that Salmond’s dreams of an independent Scotland were dead. Were they? Despite having argued previously that the Referendum was a ‘once in a generation opportunity’ (foreword to Scotland’s Future), in his concession speech, Salmond said: ‘Scotland has by a majority decided not, at this stage, to become an independent country’ [my emphasis]. Later that day, in a news conference from Bute House during which he announced that he would be stepping down as First Minister in light of the defeat, he remarked: ‘for Scotland the campaign continues and the dream shall never die’. It is a speech he describes as being ‘gracious in tone but resilient in defeat’ in his autobiographical account of the campaign and its aftermath, The Dream Shall Never Die (Salmond 2015), a book which gives some interesting insights into both his character and motivations. In his last speech to the Scottish Parliament as First Minister on 18 November 2014, Alex Salmond remarked ‘Scotland has changed—changed utterly and much for the better over the 15 years of this parliament and over the seven years of this government’. Given his reputation for rhetorical flourishes, this intertextual reference to W.B. Yeats’ overtly political poem Easter 1916, written in response to the Easter Rising in Ireland against British rule, surely cannot be accidental. The poem ends with the lines ‘Are changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born’. The parallel being drawn between historical Irish and future Scottish independence is inescapable; for Salmond, at least, the dream of independence for Scotland and the threat of the ultimate dissolution of the United Kingdom lived on.

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References Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Bechhofer, F., & McCrone, D. (2012). Imagining the nation: Symbols of national culture in England and Scotland. Ethnicities, 13(5), 544 − 564. Bednarek, M., & Caple, H. (2017). The discourse of news values: How news organizations create newsworthiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Belam, M. (2012). The Guardian publishes stats on the size of their commenting community. http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2012/12/gua rdian-comments-part-1057.php. Accessed 13 June 2019 Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage. Blain, N. (2016). Afterword: Reimagining Scotland in a new political landscape. In N. Blain, N., & D. Hutcheson (Ed.) (with G. Hassan), Scotland’s Referendum and the media: National and international perspectives (pp. 228 − 241). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bond, R. (2006). Belonging and becoming: National identity and exclusion. Sociology, 40(4), 609–626. British Social Attitudes Survey. https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/. Accessed 3 September 2020. Dekavalla, M. (2015). The Scottish newspaper industry in the digital era. Media, Culture and Society, 37 (1), 107–114. Dekavalla, M. (2016). Framing referendum campaigns: The 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum in the press. Media, Culture and Society, 38(6), 793−810. Elgenius, G. (2018). Symbols of nations and nationalism: Celebrating nationhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Eriksen, T.H. (2007) Some questions about flags. In T.H. Eriksen & R. Jenkins (Ed.), Flag, nation and symbolism in Europe and America (pp. 1–13). London: Routledge. Evans, G., & Menon, A. (2017). Brexit and British politics. Cambridge: Polity. Frame, R. (1996). Overlordship and reaction, c. 1200−c.1450. In A. Grant & K.J. Stringer (Ed.), Uniting the Kingdom? The making of British history (pp. 65 − 84). London: Routledge. Gabrielatos, C. & Baker, P. (2008). Fleeing, sneaking, flooding: A corpus analysis of discursive constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press, 1996–2005. Journal of English Linguistics, 36(1), 5–38. Gardiner, B., Mansfield, M., Anderson, I., Holder, J., Louter, D., Ulmanu, M. (2016, April 12). The dark side of Guardian comments. The Guardian. Hall, S. (1997). The spectacle of the ‘other’. In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 324 − 344). London: Sage.

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Hamilton, M. (2016, January 31). Online comments: We want to be responsible hosts. The Guardian. Hopkins, P. (2008). Politics, race and nation: the difference that Scotland makes. In C. Dwyer & C. Bressey (Ed.), New geographies of race and racism (pp. 113 − 124). London: Routledge. Hughey, M.W., & Daniels, J. (2013). Racist comments at online news sites: A methodological dilemma for discourse analysis. Media, Culture and Society, 35(3), 332−347. Hunter, A., & Meer, N. (2018). Is Scotland different on race and migration? Scottish Affairs, 27 (3), 382−387. Jack, I. (2016). ‘Project Fear’ started as a silly private joke during another referendum, but now it won’t go away. The Guardian. Law, A. (2001). Near and far: Banal national identity and the press in Scotland. Media, Culture and Society, 23(3), 299−317. Law, A. (2015). Mediating the Scottish independence debate. Media Education Journal, 56, 3−7. Linford, P. (2014, September 25). Pro—Independence newspaper sees circulation double. HoldtheFrontPage. https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2014/ news/pro−independence−newspaper−sees−circulation−double/. Accessed 25 July 2020. Macwhirter, I. (2014, February 23). After bullying and Bowie there will be nothing united about this Kingdom following the referendum. Sunday Herald. McCrone, D. (2018). Afterword: 2014 and after: The changing anatomy of civil society and media in Scotland. Scottish Affairs, 27 (1), 110 –114. McGarvey, N., & Mulvey, G. (2016). Identities and politics in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum: The Polish and Pakistani experience. In R. Medda -Windischer & P. Popelier, P. (Ed.), Pro-independence movements and immigration (pp. 134–162). Brill: Leiden. Paprota, M. (2017). Representations of Eastern Europeans in the UK in reader comments of two British online newspapers. In J. Chovanec, J. & K. Molek -Kozakowska (Ed.), Representing the other in European media discourses (pp. 183−206). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Paterson, L. (2015). Utopian pragmatism: Scotland’s choice. Scottish Affairs, 24(1), 22 –46. Salmond, A. (2015). The dream shall never die. London: William Collins. Scottish Executive. (2008). Fresh talent: Working in Scotland scheme—And evidence review. https://www2.gov.scot/resource/doc/235857/0064664. pdf. Accessed 25 May 2020. Scottish Government. (2013). Scotland’s future. https://www.gov.scot/publicati ons/scotlands-future/. Accessed 3 September 2020.

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Scottish Government. (2018). Scotland’s population needs and migration policy: discussion paper on evidence, policy and powers for the Scottish Parliament. https://www.gov.scot/publications/scotlands−population−nee ds−migration−policy/. Accessed 25 May 2020. Stanojevi´c, M.M., & Šari´c, L. (2019). Metaphors in the discursive construction of nations. In L. Šari´c & M.M. Stanojevi´c (Ed.), Metaphor, nation and discourse (pp. 1−34). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Torrance, D. (2014). 100 days of hope and fear: How Scotland’s Independence Referendum was lost and won. Edinburgh: Luath Press. van Dijk, T.A. (1991). Racism and the Press. London: Routledge. van Dijk, T.A. (2000). New(s) racism: A discourse analytical approach. In S. Cottle (Ed.), Ethnic minorities and the media (pp. 33–49). Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Watson, M. (2003). Being English in Scotland: A guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Whitaker, A. (2017, February 19). The truth about Scotland and online abuse: ‘Cybernats’ and ‘cyberbrits’ are just as bad as each other. Sunday Herald. Williamson, K. & Golding, P. (2016). The English Press and the Referendum. In N. Blain, N. & D. Hutcheson (Ed.) (with G. Hassan), Scotland’s referendum and the media: National and international perspectives (pp. 109–120). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wodak, R., de Cilla, R., Reisigl, M., & Liebhart, K. (2009). The discursive construction of national identity (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Breaking with Europe

Abstract This chapter focuses on the language used in the run-up to the EU Referendum. Based on analysis of a 33 million words pre-EU Ref corpus, it compares the language of the Leave and Remain campaigns, including consideration of the powerful semiotics of Leave’s multimodal campaign materials and the mostly negative campaigning style of the Remain camp, dubbed Project Fear by its opponents. It includes analysis of the language used in newspaper coverage of the campaigns, and a sizeable Twitter corpus. Analysis considers questions of nation, independence, sovereignty and taking back control. It compares the language surrounding migrants, migration and specific racial groups with the indyref campaigns, and anti-immigration and sometimes xenophobic discourses. Keywords Leave · Remain · Project fear · Sovereignty · Xenophobia

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this chapter (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67384-0_6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. M. Douglas, Political, Public and Media Discourses from Indyref to Brexit, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67384-0_6

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Introduction This chapter deals with the run-up to the European Union Referendum vote on 23 June 2016. Like the indyref debates, the EU Referendum Leave and Remain campaigns were highly polarised. The arguments and language used on both sides were often emotive, and the stakes were high. Both referendums were about the future of union, and both grappled with questions of independence, sovereignty, nationalism and identity. Language explicitly came to the fore in both the Leave and Remain campaigns, as the debate became increasingly hostile on both sides, with numerous public figures calling for linguistic restraint. Comparisons will be drawn with the earlier indyref corpus to see whether any trends can be discerned. The discussion will consider a range of discourse types ranging from the pitches made by prominent politicians in the Remain and Leave campaigns plus government and other reports, to UK and US newspaper coverage of the pre-Referendum build-up, and Twitter comments.

Pre-EU Referendum Corpus In total, the pre-EU Referendum corpus comprises some 33 million words, with 31 million words coming from Twitter posts, 1.2 million from UK (English) newspapers and 225,000 from Scottish newspapers (in total 2266 articles collected in the period between 1 and 23 June 2016), plus 97,200 words from two US newspapers (The Washington Post and the New York Times —106 articles). In addition, there are speeches and statements made by prominent political figures, letters from them to the PM, and selected news interviews in the run-up to the vote. The search terms used to build the corpus were Brexit and EU/European referendum. The newspaper subcorpus includes publications that backed both sides of the debate. It comprises the right wing and Leave supporting Daily Mail and its sister paper the Mail on Sunday (which came out in favour of Remain), The Times (London)—mainly balanced in terms of its coverage but marginally pro-Remain, and the heavily pro-Remain Guardian (Levy et al. 2016), and the Scottish dailies—The Scotsman, The Herald and Daily Record, plus the Sunday Mail —all of which backed the Union. There is evidence to suggest that in terms of overall coverage and circulation figures across the UK nationals, Leave had the advantage by about 4.8 million to Remain’s 3 million readers, and that newspaper coverage was heavily skewed towards the Leave campaign. Moore and Ramsey

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(2017a) identified the economy as the campaign issue most frequently covered by the media. Levy et al. (2016) found that different sides of the debate and different newspapers prioritised different issues, with the broadsheets and the Remain campaign mostly focused on the economy, whilst the Pro-Leave newspapers and campaign, whilst also interested in the economy, prioritised issues of migration, sovereignty and terrorism. Levy et al.’s research was based on analysis of 3403 newspaper articles drawn from Tuesday and Saturday London editions of nine national newspapers, during the four months of the campaign (they found that half of their articles came from the last month of the campaign, which supports the sampling regime adopted by the present study). Their sampling, coverage and methodological approaches are somewhat different from those adopted here. Nevertheless, their analysis is robust, and there is no intention to replicate it. One line of enquiry that their corpus did not facilitate was a comparison of Scottish and English (UK London-based) newspapers. As this study is concerned with the extent to which specific discourses were or were not replicated across the UK, these comparisons are made below, where appropriate.

Twitter The Twitter subcorpus collected data in the run-up to the EU Referendum from 30 March to 23 June 2016. In total, it comprised over 4 million tweets. In addition to the usual corpus-based content and collocational analysis, Twitter’s functional apparatus of hashtags (#), user IDs and @mentions allows us to examine trending topics, who is saying/sending what, and who/what gets mentioned. Zappavigna (2015) views hashtagging as ‘social practice’ (2015: 278). Hashtags effectively attach keywords (in the lay, not corpus sense) to tweets as a form of metadata labelling (Zappavigna 2012), so they help to categorise, organise and group the discourse threads. Because they are usually picked up and used by other users to refer to the same topic and join the ongoing conversation, they can to some extent be considered as self-labelling and/or affiliation strategies, particularly in the context of political discourse such as the Twitter discussions in the run-up to the EU Referendum. Of course, there isn’t always a direct relationship between the use of a particular hashtag and agreement with, or endorsement of, the particular point of view or organisation it represents, but it is reasonable to assume that in the majority of cases, people recognise the categorisation that is

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likely to accompany the use of specific hashtags. Zappavigna examines the role of hashtags in generating ‘ambient affiliations’ and functioning as ‘ideational labels’, i.e. ‘whereby people sharing associated values bond around these user-defined topics’ (2012: 14). Twitter and the use of hashtags builds ‘associative communities that emerge through microblogging’ (Zappavigna 2012: 99), and those associated with politically controversial topics tend to persist and be adopted by users. Hashtags may be attached to positive or negative appraisal but what the frequency of use of hashtags does uncontroversially show, however, is the most salient topics and keywords in an ongoing discussion. As expected, #BREXIT was by far the most frequently used hashtag (778,523), followed by #EUREF (125,100) and #EUREFERENDUM (119,207). Arguably these are neutral terms used to label the overarching context, though in some circumstances #BREXIT could be seen to be promoting exit from the EU as a preferred choice rather than simply as a contextual, space and time delimited label. What was much more revealing was analysis of the hashtags to see whether it was possible to discern bias towards the Leave or Remain camps. #VOTELEAVE was the most frequently occurring of the obviously partisan hashtags, and of course this was the name of the official campaign for a Leave vote as fronted by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Overall, prominent Leavepromoting hashtags totalled over 183,000, with Remain hashtags some way behind with a frequency of just under 146,000. A rough and ready estimate of support for both sides was gained by examining the top 120 most frequently used hashtags occurring directly before the sharing of an http link, to see whether they seemed to be promoting a proLeave or pro-Remain stance. This shows that on the Leave side, there were 18,688 pro-Leave supporting hashtags (spread across 27 different hashtags), whilst on the Remain side, there were only 9799 pro-Remain supporting hashtags (spread across 15 different hashtags). These estimates suggest that, in the Twittersphere, discussion of (and largely support for) Remain was only 50% of that for Leave. The most frequent user tags were Leave (22,190), Cameron (20,507), STRONGERIN (15,880) and Farage (11,263). BORISJOHNSON came in at 7862, LEAVEEUOFFICIAL at 7390, OSBORNE at 5443 and JEREMYCORBYN at 4167, so these patterns match those noted below re the most and least prominent political voices (Fig. 6.1). Analysis of three-word clusters including one of the corpus’s most frequent words, ‘you’, shows the most frequently occurring entries to

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140,000 120,000 100,000 80,000 60,000 40,000 20,000 0

Fig. 6.1 Hashtag frequencies in pre-EU Referendum Twitter corpus

be: you need to, do you think, you want to, make sure you, need to know, if you want, if you are, what do you, if you don’t, if you vote. Those emboldened mirror Zappavigna’s (2012) findings in a corpus of tweets collected in the 24 hours after Obama won the 2008 US presidential election. However, what the much larger pre-vote EU Referendum Twitter corpus also shows is a preponderance of trigrams which put the onus for action onto users and remind them that they will be responsible for the outcome of the vote. The analysis of n-grams (i.e. recurring word strings) is a commonly used approach in corpus linguistics, and in recent years has been used by forensic linguists for authorship attribution and the identification of idiolects (e.g. Wright 2017). Trigrams—most frequently occurring 3-word clusters in a corpus—are useful because: ‘trigrams allow insights into complex/intricate aspects of the data and raise issues that corpus outputs focussed on single-words do not raise’ (Ancarno 2018: 143). They are especially useful as they often include function words, which bigrams may not, and so for some speakers may be more indicative of their idiolect. ‘You’ + modal auxiliary/lexical modal verb and ‘you’ + subordinating conjunction if , and the use of rhetorical questions, whilst fostering a sense of an active online community, make clear that in the run-up to the Referendum, it is all to play for. Analysis of the clusters around ‘we’ show this even more clearly: if we Brexit, if we leave, if we vote, we need to, we leave the, if we stay, if we remain, we will be; they also show much higher frequencies on the Leave than Remain sides of the

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debate. Once again, the indication is that leaving was talked about much more frequently than remaining. Twitter posts are an interesting mixture of public, political and private discourses. There were tweets from the official Leave and Remain campaigns, prominent politicians, political pundits and media commentators, all of which we might usefully characterise as types of institutional discourse. The EU Referendum also attracted bot activity (i.e. automated messages sent out at frequent intervals and promulgating specific viewpoints). Estimates vary, but there may have been around 65,000 bot tweets sent during the 4-week period in the run-up to the Referendum (Bastos and Mercea 2019), with the majority supporting Leave. Twitter also attracts trolls—human tweeters who may spread rumours, false information or abuse online. As has been well publicised, some of this bot and troll activity is thought to have originated in Russia and to be malicious in intent. In addition, many Twitter posts were made by individuals posting in a personal rather than institutional capacity, and so there is public discourse represented also. Of course, we must remember that Twitter is not necessarily representative of all social demographics; it tends to be populated by highly motivated younger people, often with axes to grind, who are more likely to be men when the topic is political debate (Bouko and Garcia 2019: 175; Llewellyn and Cram 2016: 90).

Keywords and Key Issues As we have seen in the previous chapter, keywords analysis can suggest possible lines of enquiry within a large corpus. The pre-EU Referendum corpus was run against the British National Corpus wordlist to see what keywords emerged. Many of the positive keywords (i.e. those that occur more frequently than would be expected given comparison with the reference corpus) were predictable given the corpus’ search terms and focus: Brexit, EU , Europe, referendum, campaign, debate, poll(s), vote, voting, voters, UK, UKIP, Leave, VoteLeave, Stay and Remain, alongside references to key political protagonists. Examination of the top 200 most positively key words suggests that key arguments in the campaign websites (Zappettini 2019) were being picked up and discussed by the press and Twitter users. Several prominent semantic clusters emerge. Semantically speaking, these form three supracategories:

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• race and self -determination (nationality, (im)migration, sovereignty) • economic, social and personal wellbeing (the economy, jobs, the NHS) • danger and uncertainty (moral panic, risks from the unknown). Moore and Ramsey (2017a) identify the key issues covered by the media during the campaign as being: the economy, immigration, sovereignty, dishonesty, fear and the establishment. These categories, combined with those identified by Zappettini (2019) from the campaign websites and the ones identified here using the corpus evidence, are congruent, and the corpus evidence suggests that political, public and media discourses were largely focusing on the same issues. Keywords evidence also pointed up immigration as a highly salient topic in the corpus.

Key Protagonists Levy et al. (2016) argue that the debates conducted in the newspapers were heavily politicised, with only key political figures routinely cited. This pattern is replicated in the corpus as a whole, i.e. across text types. The political figures most frequently referenced were: • Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, who set the EU Referendum in train in a bid to silence his party’s Eurosceptics once and for all (94,000 occurrences) • Nigel Farage (37,600) who fronted the unofficial ‘Leave.EU’ campaign and whose UKIP party was vigorously campaigning for a ‘yes’ vote • Boris Johnson (34,000 entries—nearly half of which used the familiar first name Boris only) • Michael Gove (17,600). Both Johnson and Gove were Vote Leave spokespersons and fronted the infamous red Brexit bus campaign • George Osborne, Conservative, Chancellor of the Exchequer (28,700). Conservative voices, of both persuasions, dominated the debates. It is noticeable that the Labour Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, was mentioned only 10,637 times, and although he eventually came

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Boris Michael David George Jeremy Alex Nicola Johnson Gove Cameron Osborne Corbyn Salmond Sturgeon

ConservaƟve/Remain

Nigel Farage

out in favour of Remain, he also said the EU’s structures required reform, and criticised the Remain campaign in the run-up to the vote. Post Referendum, he was frequently condemned for his equivocal and varying stances on Brexit and noticeable reticence at key points in the ongoing debates. Overall, the Remain politicians are mentioned more often than the Leave ones, though as the sitting PM and instigator of the Referendum, David Cameron was likely to get more coverage anyway (Fig. 6.2). These patterns broadly accord with Levy et al’s (2016) analysis of the London-based press, and Moore and Ramsey’s (2017a) analysis of the press and online news magazines and broadcasters. The question to be asked, therefore, is given that Remain politicians got more coverage, why was the campaign ultimately unsuccessful? Analysis of the corpus highlighted an unexpected focus on Donald Trump—over 23,500 occurrences, the majority of which occurred on Twitter (Only about 140 occurrences were from newspapers, and these were split between UK and US publications). In May 2016, the then Republican Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, came out in support of

UKIP/Leave

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Fig. 6.2 References to key political protagonists in pre-EU Referendum corpus

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Brexit. He visited the UK (his Turnberry golf course) on the day after the Referendum and hailed the result as a ‘great victory’. It is evident that Twitter was fuelling a discussion about Donald Trump’s views on Brexit, and most of the entries explicitly link the two—i.e. Brexit is found within the immediate collocational horizons. Discussion of Donald Trump’s views on migrants also come to the fore in the Tweets, and there is also mention of riots and religious extremism (We will return to the discussion of migrants later in the chapter). Trump is also associated with several key right wing political figures: Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, and Vladimir Putin. Much has been written about the rise of the (far) right wing across and beyond Europe in recent years. Wilson (2017: 543–544) draws parallels between Brexit and the 2016 election of Donald Trump, linking both with a ‘wave of populism’, ‘a general howl of populist rage against social and economic changes that have benefited some massively, but have also left significant sectors of the population feeling aggrieved, left behind and ignored’. It should be noted that during and since the EU Referendum, Trump has expressed support for both Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, and there appears to be a reciprocal admiration. Nicola Sturgeon, SNP and Scotland’s First Minister, had only 3640 entries, and her colleague, Alex Salmond, 1590. Scotland has 12,388 mentions compared with the UK’s 197,509 (i.e. 6%), Scots (2834), British (48,524; 0.14%) and Brits (13,960; 0.04%), so it is clear that the EU preReferendum political, media and public discourses focused on the United Kingdom rather than its constituent nations. Whilst this makes sense insofar as the EU Referendum would result in the UK as a whole staying or leaving, it also gives some indication of the lack of focus on the potential consequences of a split in the vote across the UK member nations, and the possible disintegration of the UK union thereafter. Moore and Ramsey (2017a) also note a lack of media coverage of the future of devolved nations such as Scotland during the campaign. Once again, Scotland (and this time also Northern Ireland) was left out of the reckoning.

Brexit: Leave or Remain The term Brexit has become ubiquitous in all discussions of the run-up to and aftermath of the EU Referendum. First coined in a blog post by the Chairman of the think tank British Influence (Wilding 2012) some eight months before David Cameron announced there would be an EU

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Referendum, the neologism quickly caught on, and has been used to argue for both leaving and staying in the UK. The portmanteau word Br + exit (formed by analogy with Grexit: Greek + exit 2010 coinage in response to the Greek debt crisis, when it looked as if Greece might have to leave the EU) entered the OED in 2016, and was dubbed the word of the year by Collins Dictionary. Whilst functioning as a nominal (i.e. like a noun, it refers to an entity/thing), Brexit has the advantage that the exit verb part of the blend acts as a nominalisation (i.e. where a verb or process undergoes conversion to form a new noun), and hence has some of the dynamism and action attributes we associate with verbs and processes (Fontaine 2017). It is a highly successful neologism, with much of its popularity resting on its simplicity and semantic transparency, and it ‘activates a more theatrical frame than the word “leave”’ (Charteris-Black 2019: 36). There are 7895 occurrences of the cluster if we Brexit, where Brexit is being used as a verb. Like other nominalisations, it has the advantage that it can supress agency (i.e. who/what did X to whom/what?) and almost takes on agency of its own—e.g. Brexit will …. It was one of the search terms used to build the corpus, and therefore unsurprisingly is the most frequently occurring word at more than 1,466,000 entries. Deacon et al. (2016) found a pro-Leave bias in their analysis of UK national newspapers in the run-up to the Referendum, and Levy et al. (2016) argue that UK press coverage was heavily skewed towards Leave, with nearly twice as many pro Leave to Remain articles, and the articles themselves being highly politicised, with individual politicians from both sides as the majority spokespersons, and little input from other ‘experts’ (Michael Gove notoriously claimed that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’ in a Sky News Q&A on Brexit in early June 2016, when asked to name any economists who backed Brexit. Wodak (2013: 28) says that ‘strong anti-intellectualism’ and an ‘arrogance of ignorance’ pervades right wing populist discourses). This was a referendum in which social media arguably had more impact on voters than the traditional print and broadcast media, though newspapers and broadcast media were still agenda setters with the general public, fed into the digital Brexit campaigns, and politicians used them to promote their own campaigns and to criticise the opposing side. Hänska and Bauchowitz’s (2017) analysis of 7.5 million Brexit-related tweets in the month leading up to the EU Referendum found that the Leave campaign got more coverage and gained more traction, with Leave users outnumbering Remainers, and being nearly twice as active.

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Leave has over 173,000 entries and Remain over 150,600 entries, so both sides of the debate were represented, with some preference for ‘Leave’ (Stay had 37,906 occurrences). Both sides of the Brexit debate (Leave and Remain) used verbs as their slogans, though leaving, and especially Brexiting, sound much more active and exciting than remaining (or Remoaning!), and Bremain (the Remain equivalent of Brexit—15,491 occurrences, many of which are hashtags) never really caught on, though it has been pilloried by humorous neologisms such as Bremainer (157). When the campaign slogans are taken into account, the patterns become stronger still in favour of Leave: VoteLeave (126,957), StrongerIn (57,583), BetterTogether (687). Overall, the corpus and other evidence suggest that Leave had the upper hand in the run-up to the Referendum in terms of coverage and its lexical choices, but were there other reasons why the Leave campaign was so successful?

Leave The Leave campaign, fronted by Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Gisela Stuart and managed by Dominic Cummings, was a cross-party alliance with representatives from the Conservatives, Labour, and UKIP. Its key campaign messages were: • Immigration—the UK would be able to control its own borders and immigration. The EU freedom of movement requirement would no longer apply after Brexit. The campaign raised fears that immigration was set to increase, and that the expansion of the EU, and in particular Turkey’s application to join, would prove to be an ongoing problem. • Economy—the UK would gain an extra £350 million per week from monies that would have gone to the EU, with this money being redirected towards spending on the NHS, schools and housing. This pledge (infamously painted on the side of the red Brexit bus) and the sums involved have since been widely discredited. There were also claims that the UK would have to bail out the Eurozone if other EU countries found themselves in financial difficulty, as had been the case with Greece in 2010 and, to a lesser, extent Spain in 2012. • Trade—the UK would be free to trade with whichever countries it wanted to.

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• Legislation—the UK would no longer have to abide by EU laws and policies or be subject to European Court rulings. The Vote Leave campaign’s slogan was ‘Vote Leave, take back control’. Using a Discourse Historical Approach (see Chapter 4), Zappettini (2019) examines the key arguments used by the Vote Leave and Britain Stronger Together (Remain) official campaign websites. She summarises Vote Leave’s focus as achieving independence from the EU and addressing the perceived loss of sovereignty (being ‘constrained’, ‘tie[d] down’ or ‘dominated’ by Europe), with specific arguments focusing on the economy, political/legal integration, immigration and freeing Britain from the costly burden and ‘red tape’ of the EU (Zappettini 2019: 410). The slogan and the campaign also hinted at an historical golden age when Britain was in control of its own destiny and a much more powerful global force—and, in some cases, evoked an imperialistic and romanticised nostalgia for empire. Vote Leave invested heavily in targeted digital media advertising, with the campaign director, Dominic Cummings, describing this as accounting for 98% of their budget (Moore and Ramsey 2017b). The Vote Leave website gives a good indication of their overall campaigning style (see Fig. 6.3). It is characterised by positive dynamic modality, i.e. attitudinal features (we will be able to; we can control; we can make), epistemically non-modal assertions (we’ll be in charge; we’ll be free to trade), and uses our, we, and us to appeal to its audience. The Vote Leave website’s simple, unwordy structure, with child-like, hand-drawn arrows guiding from point to point and ultimately to the campaign slogan, is in marked contrast to the more cluttered and less visually appealing Britain Stronger in Europe website (see Fig. 6.3). Virdee and McGeever (2018: 1803–1804) argue that the Leave campaign: was underscored by two contradictory but inter-locking visions. The first was a deep nostalgia for empire, but one secured through an occlusion of the underside of the British imperial project: the corrosive legacies of colonialism and racism, past and present. The second was a more insular, Powellite narrative of retreating from a globalizing world that is no longer recognizably “British” … [and] carefully activated long-standing racialized structures of feeling about immigration and national belonging. [my emphasis]

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Fig. 6.3 Vote Leave website

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Fig. 6.4 Britain stronger in Europe website

Remain The Remain campaign, chaired by Sir Stuart Rose, drew support from within parts of the Conservative and Labour parties, and elsewhere. Its slogan was ‘Britain Stronger in Europe’. Zappettini (2019: 409–410) characterises the Remain campaign website as highlighting the benefits of current EU membership and the single market, and the predicted negative consequences of Brexit on jobs, economy and prosperity, with specific focus on family finances, UK business, workers’ rights, the NHS, jobs, economic development, Britain’s leadership, and international relations and security (see Fig. 6.4).

Project Fear Levy et al. (2016) claim that the Remain campaign was predominantly negative in tone, focused on fear about the future, and led by only a few people—David Cameron and George Osborne. They argue that the Leave campaign presented a more balanced argument between critique of the status quo and positivity about a post-Brexit Britain that had regained its sovereignty, and it was much more optimistic in tone. Similarly, Zappettini (2019) describes the Remain campaign discourse as characterised by ‘the overt nominalisation’ of benefits vs. risk to ‘you’ and your’ family,

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and notes the failure to ‘engage substantively with discourses of immigration’, including any potential benefits thereof, whilst Berry (2016) argues that the Remain campaign ‘lacked a simple clear narrative on the benefits of EU membership’. Remain’s negative campaigning style and failure to clearly explain to voters why staying in the EU was beneficial may have been one of the major reasons why they failed to win. Of course, as noted in Chapter 5, it is often much easier to argue for change than it is to defend the status quo. The corpus evidence also suggests that the Remain campaign sought to win support on the basis of anti-Leave rhetoric rather than pro-Remain arguments. Analysis of seven official Remain campaign reports shows that the most frequently occurring content word was leave. Arguments in these reports were largely articulated on the basis of damage to the economy, business and jobs if trade agreements and access to the single market were lost following Brexit—i.e. in terms of risks consequent on a Leave vote. Even the titles of these reports, which range along a continuum between pro-Remain and anti-Leave arguments, are weighted towards criticising Leave rather than putting forward positive messages about the benefits of Remain (Fig. 6.5). The dilemma for Leavers was the fact that all they could promise voters was an anti-climax, the prospect of more of the same. Brexiteers, in contrast, promised a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change the course of history (Buckledee 2018: 119).

This tendency towards negativity and criticism of Leave, plus a focus on the risks of Brexit, rather than articulating positive reasons for Remaining led to the Remain campaign being dubbed ‘Project Fear’ by the Vote Leave figurehead, Boris Johnson—a reintroduction of the term first used of the indyref ‘Better Together’ campaign (When compared with indyref and its outcome, interesting parallels and contrasts begin to emerge). In a sense, ‘Project Fear’ was a highly dubious criticism given Vote Leave’s concentration on the perceived dangers of uncontrolled immigration. But though Vote Leave underlined the problems and risks (as they saw them) associated with immigration and staying in the EU, they could also (and did!) talk about a better future and regaining past sovereignty and control. They may have promoted ‘moral panic’ but they also proffered hope.

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REMAIN

Why Britain is Stronger in Europe 10 ways being in the EU strengthens defence

Europe’s single market

100 times the Leave campaign’s lost the economic argument Leave campaigners’ £80 billion of reckless unfunded spending What does Leave look like? Britain out of Europe

LEAVE

Fig. 6.5 Remain campaign report titles

Moral Panic Cohen’s (1972) classic sociological account of ‘moral panic’ argues that society and the mass media have a tendency towards ‘alarmist debate’ (McEnery 2005: 14) in response to particular problems, groups of people or sets of events (the ‘object of offence’) that are seen as threats. In the mass media’s highly stylised and stereotypical representation of these issues, newspaper editors, journalists, politicians and other officials are presented as upholding moral standards and taking a stand for justice (‘moral entrepreneurs’), whilst the perpetrators and groups responsible are vilified and become ‘scapegoats’ (Cohen 1972; McEnery 2005). Moral panics are therefore extreme cases of ‘othering’. The discourse around these ‘moral panics’ tends to be marked by strongly evaluative and polarised language, and there is a concentration on negative ‘consequences’, ‘corrective action’ taken to address the issues, and ‘desired

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outcomes’ McEnery (2005: 6–7). Classic scapegoats (i.e. those seen as responsible for these problems) are often marginalised societal groups such as migrants (Taylor 2014) and religious minorities, and the Vote Leave, Leave.EU and wider societal discourses in the run-up to the EU Referendum were increasingly focused on the moral panic associated with rising immigration and increasing numbers of migrants. The language of risk and moral panic is also evident in warn—another pre-EU Referendum corpus keyword (22,138), and as noted in Fig. 6.2, fear(s), threat(s) and accusations of scaremongering were also prevalent.

The Future Both the Leave and Remain camps advanced arguments based on worries about the future as key planks in their campaigns, but whilst Leave was accused of using scaremongering tactics over immigration, they also advantageously outlined what they saw as a better future postBrexit. Future emerges as a salient word in the corpus. It has over 20,160 occurrences (0.06%) and appears in the top 200 most frequently occurring words (If grammatical content words such as prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, etc. are discounted, it appears in the top 100). After the future, it is most commonly our future and your future, and less frequently their, Britain’s, better, children’s, brighter or an uncertain future, so the future is constructed as something that voters can influence and shape. It is also something that will affect children, kids and future generations. Consideration of the wider contexts surrounding future shows it to be something that is mostly positive, and in our/your hands to decide for future generations. There are 179 occurrences of VoteLeave in R1 position compared with only 71 of Strongerin and 57 of VoteRemain. The latter two indicate another major flaw in the Remain campaign—the failure to develop a single campaign slogan. Better future was overwhelmingly associated with voting leave in the corpus as a whole, and better off out was nearly twice as prevalent as better off in. Hope, though on the surface a semantically positive word associated with the future, emerges as prosodically negative in this corpus. Its most frequent L1 collocates include: let’s hope, only hope, really hope, just hope, sincerely hope, still hope, best hope, false hope, what hope and last hope –which indicate hopelessness rather than hopefulness, and resignation towards the likelihood of a Leave vote. Believ* (i.e. believ(es )(ed)(ing )), a word that occupies partially overlapping semantic space and occurs quite frequently

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(19,588 occurrences), also has an overwhelmingly pessimistic semantic prosody. L1 collocates are often negative: don’t, can’t, cannot, doesn’t, don’t, won’t, never plus expressions of disbelief that people, anyone, voters, nobody, economists could really, actually, truly, honestly, seriously, firmly, genuinely, still, even BELIEV*. The R1 collocates indicate the things that people can’t believe in: anything, everything, they ( +them, their), Britain, Boris, Cameron, Gove, Pinocchio (Osborne), government, Brexit (project). When compared with the BNC or other reference corpora such as the NOW (News on the Web) corpus (10.6 billion words), belief, in this corpus, is anything but affirmational or aspirational. Analysis of two small grammatical words in the corpus (will and if ) gives further insights. Will is formally a modal auxiliary verb with some epistemic modality properties, but it is also one of the major ways of indicating futurity in English; unlike other languages, English has no formal future tense. Will is the most frequently occurring modal auxiliary verb in the corpus (and, indeed in most corpora) with 206,783 occurrences. Key actors associated with this auxiliary (drawn from the top 35 L1 collocates) are: Brexit (26,489), they, Britain, vote, referendum, people, Cameron, Remain, Europe, leave, voters, economy, prices, Turkey, EUreferendum, result, Scotland, Tories, time, country, world, nothing, countries, Trump, government, immigration, Brits, England, Osborne. Many of these are as expected. What is more interesting, however, are will ’s most frequently occurring R1 collocates—mostly main verbs—many of which are negative: vote, Brexit, happen, make, never , still, take, leave, they, lead, cause, lose, mean, affect , remain, help, continue, fall, come, change, follow, cost , give, stop, only, become, stay, decide, bring, need, rise, look, suffer. In addition, negative expressions such as will not (5958) and will never (2350) are used frequently. The subordinating conjunction if , which can be used to introduce conditional clauses (i.e. to express a hypothesis or condition), occurs relatively frequently (168,555 times—0.5%), and is a useful word to explore potential outcomes in a landscape of unknowns. In the corpus as a whole, the majority of collocates around if are talking about ‘if we leave’ rather than ‘if we stay’, so there is a much stronger focus on the consequences of a Brexit Leave vote than on the benefits of remaining. All these linguistic strategies combined to make Leaving or Brexiting a much more attractive and aspirational prospect than the static remaining.

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The Rise of Nationalism, Racism and Xenophobia Many complained that the language of the ‘Leave’ campaign and its followers was becoming not only increasingly nationalist, but also racist and xenophobic. So, how widespread were these linguistic practices, and where were they to be found: in the language of the politicians, the media or the public? What were the discourses used around immigration, and is there evidence of negative language used about certain social, ethnic or racial groups as Referendum day approached? How did language contribute to the societal ingroups and outgroups that were created, and a sense of who belonged and who did not?

Nation and Nationalism In Chapter 5, we noted the prominent role of nationalism in the indyref debates about Scottish independence and the future of the Union with the rest of the UK, so what was the role of the union and the nation and nationalism in the EU Referendum debates, and how were nationalists represented? Unionist (s) (488) and unionism are infrequent and unimportant in the pre-EU Referendum corpus, so, as we might have expected, the UK union is not lexicalised as an especially important concept in this corpus. At 0.04%, nation was twice as frequent in the indyref corpus as it was in the pre-EU Referendum corpus (0.02%), but the ways in which the nation was represented are similar. Both talk about it being sovereign, great, proud, rich(est), divided and democratic. As expected, in the indyref corpus, it is frequently independent. In the pre-EU Referendum corpus, the nation can be hated or terrifying. In the indyref corpus, there are 20,155 occurrences (0.03%) of nationalist( s), and this word is, as we would expect, much more prevalent in the indyref corpus. In the pre-EU Referendum corpus, there are only 1576 occurrences of nationalist( s) and of these, the majority are Scottish (283), with others being Texas (55), English (41), British (24), separatists (23), Irish (16), white (14), Bolton (12), or racist (12), so nationalism is a much less salient concept in the Brexit debates. Nevertheless, nationalism (1632) has an overwhelmingly negative semantic prosody in the pre-EU Referendum corpus, both in its immediate and wider surrounding contexts, collocating with words like: scare, jagged, razor, battle, individualism, xenophobia/xenophobic, racism, narrow, incoherent, Trump, extreme, aggressive, blind, breakup and, just as in the

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indyref corpus, it comes in waves, and it surges and rises. So, in both referendums, nationalism was constructed negatively. In the case of the pre-EU Referendum corpus, this finding might seem odd, given Vote Leave’s successful appeal to (British) nationalist and anti-European sentiment. So, what is going on here? One of the reasons is likely to be differences between Scottish and British, but especially English, nationalism. McCrone and Bechhofer (2010: 940) argue that ‘the politics of national identity plays differently’ in Scotland and England, and that whereas national identity is part of party politics in Scotland, this is not the case in England. Kumar (2003) notes differences between the ways Scots and English people ‘do’ national identity and, as we saw in Chapter 3, Scots tend to have a stronger sense of national identity than English people do. Bechhofer and McCrone (2012) found that the Scots and the English have different perceptions about their respective national cultures, but that both viewed their national flag (the Saltire and the flag of St George) as important, and in neither case did their national identity have much impact on how they viewed symbols of British culture, such as the Union Jack. They found small but statistically significant differences between how the Scots and English viewed symbols of British culture such as the Union Jack (the English were slightly more likely to favour it). There are 440 occurrences of union jack and 202 of union flag in the pre-EU Referendum corpus. Flag has 2531 entries and is almost always used as a noun rather than a verb. The flag can be EU, Union (Jack), England, English, British, Brexit, national, country’s, our, own, my, your, their flag and it can be burned, flown, saluted or waved. The symbolism of flags was salient in this referendum, as it was in the Scottish one. Indeed, various European cities such as Madrid, Warsaw and Vienna projected the Union Jack or its red, white and blue colours onto landmark buildings on the eve of the Referendum to show support for Britain remaining in Europe; Brussels (home of the European Parliament) was lit up on 30 January 2020 to mark the departure of Britain from the EU. Britishness clearly matters, with over 48,500 entries (0.14%), and many of its most common collocates are people focused: people, public, voters, expats, citizens, friends and workers with the most common trigram being the British people and the British public, so there is an invocation of the national collective. R1 collocates of national show a focus on security, sovereignty and the economy. For nation, the most frequent R1 collocates are sovereign, independent and great. Country (which is arguably

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a synonym of nation) has 66,347 occurrences in the indyref corpus (0.11%), of which 3916 are an independent country. It is less frequent in the pre-EU Referendum corpus (at just over 27,000 entries (0.08%), but it is very clearly associated with the Vote Leave campaign and with taking back control (see next section).

Independence and Sovereignty Once the EU Referendum results were in, Nigel Farage said the 23 June 2016 should go down in history as Britain’s ‘Independence Day’, and this phrase was also used by Boris Johnson in the final televised debate on 21 June 2016, though it was clearly already extant in discourses throughout the campaign; common clusters are Brexit independence day, our independence day and UK independence day. This epithet had the benefit of being able to take advantage of the fact that the third movie in the Independence Day franchise—Resurgence—was being released in the US on 24 June 2016. The movie’s main plotlines centre on the effects of alien invasion—a very useful analogy for those on the pro-Brexit side. Both Nicola Sturgeon (SNP) and Nigel Farage (UKIP and then Brexit Party) have argued for independence, though in different constituencies and with very distinctive agendas. In 2014, the BetterTogether campaign had urged Scots to vote ‘No’ in indyref to ensure their future in Europe. In 2016 in Scotland, the SNP still wanted an independent Scotland but the continuation of union with Europe. UKIP wanted independence from Europe but within the context of a ‘United’ Kingdom. The UK’s main pro-union parties were solidly united behind one union, but in some disarray over the other. How were these separatist and unionist identities played out and reconciled? In the pre-EU Referendum corpus, independence was split in usage between references to the EU and Scottish Referendums. Unsurprisingly, in the newspapers, the Scottish Herald and Scotsman were more likely to discuss Scottish independence and the possible consequences of the EU Referendum vote for the future of the UK union, but there was some coverage of this angle by the other non-Scottish newspapers. Prominent Tory and Labour politicians such as the PM David Cameron, Chancellor George Osborne, and ex PMs Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Sir John Major all warned that a ‘Yes’ vote in the EU Referendum could trigger calls for a second Scottish Independence Referendum, as did First

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Minister Nicola Sturgeon (SNP). There are 9520 entries for independence, the majority of which (18%) are Scottish independence, and much of the discussion around independence is focused on the likelihood of a Leave vote triggering a second Scottish Independence Referendum, so there is some awareness of the potential consequences of a Brexit vote. Britain’s independence, British independence and independence from the EU are much less frequently discussed, so arguments in the EU Referendum were not couched in terms of independence from the EU. What, then, about sovereignty? The full extent of UK parliamentary sovereignty was arguably diminished by membership of the EU (thus making the United Kingdom subject to the rulings of the European Parliament) and by devolution of, and increased powers for, each of the UK partner nations, followed by increasing regional devolution within England. (Tax-raising powers for Scotland were considered a fundamental part of devo-max, i.e. full fiscal autonomy.) Regaining lost sovereignty was made much of by the Leave campaign, and sovereignty was debated several times in the House of Commons during February 2016 and has been since, but did the wider discussions pick up on this? Moore and Ramsey (2017a) argue that whilst sovereignty was often covered by the media in the EU Referendum campaign coverage, it was a secondary rather than primary issue, and was often discussed in the context of other issues such as immigration and the economy; Prosser et al. (2016) found that Leavers usually mentioned sovereignty and immigration together, and saw them as closely linked. Cap (2019) argues that in public discourse between 2013–2016, immigration and anti-immigration were seldom discussed without mention of UK sovereignty and democracy. Sovereignty—the ability to self-govern, make laws, decide on trade deals, control migration and especially associated with parliamentary sovereignty was a key plank in the Vote Leave arguments, and yet it is a rather nebulous concept, and tricky to define. Surprisingly, sovereignty has only 106 occurrences in the pre-EU Referendum corpus, and collocates closely with Brexit and loss, whilst sovereign has a mere 1664 entries, with a sovereign nation the most common three-word cluster. Taken together, sovereign and sovereignty account for 0.005% of the corpus, so they are not especially frequent. Sovereign closely collocates with L1 collocates independent, free, democratic and R1 with nation(s), state(s), powers, country/countries, democracy, parliament, wealth, bond(s), power(s), right, control, headache, wounds, debt. Although mainly discussed on Twitter, sovereign(ty) also appears in newspaper reports and in politicians’ writing

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and speeches (on both sides of the divide). By contrast, in the indyref corpus, there are 4105 occurrences of sovereignty and 6570 of sovereign— together accounting for 0.2% of the corpus—so sovereignty was four times more frequently discussed in the indyref debates than it was in the EU Referendum debates. This was an unexpected finding given the focus on sovereignty in the EU Referendum debates, so what was going on? Were other linguistic expressions doing the same work?

Taking Back Control The Leave campaign talked about ‘taking back control’ (which is arguably much easier for voters to understand than ‘sovereignty’), and in a Sky News interview lasting less than an hour on 3 June 2016, Leave spokesperson Michael Gove used the word control no fewer than 35 times (Cooper 2016; cited in Buckledee 2018: 116). Taking back control can exploit the potential of the progressive (-ing) verb form (see Chapter 4) to suggest a dynamic and ongoing struggle. At 0.04%, control was a much more frequently occurring word in the corpus (15,162 occurrences), and the most frequently occurring three-word cluster was indeed take back control with a frequency of 2180. Examination of the immediate contexts of control (see Fig. 6.6) indicate that its overwhelming preoccupation was with control of (im)migration and borders, though there was also some discussion of control over the economy and law making and exercising sovereignty and democracy. In effect, control became a populist euphemism for antiimmigration discourses in the run-up to the EU Referendum. This is self-evident in the Vote Leave website materials which point towards the campaign slogan ‘Vote Leave, take back control’ (see Fig. 6.7). The corpus evidence conclusively demonstrates that this euphemism was adopted across a whole range of text types and found active currency in the wider population, as shown by its use in the Twitter data. Being ‘in control’, i.e. exercising control over others, sounds much more positive than less oblique references to what are essentially anti-immigration statements, and the corpus shows that the anti-immigration subtext had become embedded in the connotations associated with this phrase. Charteris-Black (2019) argues that taking back control successfully activated nationalist sentiment that framed the EU as an oppressive and authoritarian foreign force, rather than as a community of which the UK was already a part, and that framing its arguments in terms of

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L3 BREXIT EVEN WILL VOTE LEAVE WOULD LET'S THAT VOTELEAVE THEY BRITAIN HAVE ABOUT ONLY REFERENDUM PEOPLE WANT IMMIGRATION CARD CONTROL MORE NEED REMAIN WITH GIVE BACK MEANS TAKE LETS BORDERS

L2 TAKE THEY HAVE BREXIT TAKING WANT WILL LEAVE UNDER BACK ABOUT ABLE NEED POWER GIVE HELP WOULD SOVEREIGNTY IMMIGRATION MORE FROM BRITAIN WITH VOTELEAVE HOLYROOD LET'S THAT MUST DEMOCRACY WANTS

L1 BACK TAKE BORDER CANNOT HAVE MORE REGAIN CAN'T IMMIGRATION TAKING WANT LOSE DEMOCRATIC FULL CANNOT UNDER TOTAL LOST PASSPORT WILL BREXIT ABOUT COULD MUST GAIN BETTER LOSING LESS MIGRATION SELF

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CONTROL OVER BREXIT IMMIGRATION FROM VOTELEAVE MIGRATION BACK HTTPS POLLY YOUR VOTELEAVE BORDERS THEIR EUREF WHAT IT'S WITH EUREFERENDUM THIS THAT THEY AFTER FREAKS WILL WHEN LIKE PEOPLE ITVEUREF POST LEAVE

Fig. 6.6 Collocates of control in pre-EU Referendum corpus

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R2 BREXIT BORDERS IMMIGRATION YOUR VOTELEAVE TOYNBEE VOTELEAVE THEIR LIKE HTTPS LEAVE NETFLIX WHAT FROM BRITAIN INSIDE THIS WILL THAT EUREF EUREFERENDUM THEY EUROPE BRUSSELS AFTER MIGRATION COUNTRY DESTINY LAWS MORE

R3 BREXIT BORDERS COUNTRY DESTINY VOTELEAVE VOTELEAVE FUTURE LEAVE EUREF LAWS ECONOMY WILL THAT DEMOCRACY IMMIGRATION HTTPS SOVEREIGNTY CONTROL THIS REFERENDUM MONEY EUREFERENDUM HAVE WHAT FROM REMAIN PEOPLE BORDER WOULD WITH

R4 BREXIT VOTELEAVE HTTPS LEAVE VOTELEAVE DESTINY COUNTRY WILL THAT MANY BACK HAVE THIS SAYS REMAIN BORDERS REFERENDUM EUREF LAWS IMMIGRATION EUREFERENDUM CONTROL PEOPLE FROM WHAT WITH THEY DON'T MORE WOULD

R5 BREXIT VOTELEAVE HTTPS VOTELEAVE WILL LEAVE CONTROL EUREF THIS EUREFERENDUM WHAT REFERENDUM THAT HAVE LABOUR BORDERS FROM REMAIN WOULD WITH CAMERON THEY PEOPLE BRITAIN LEAVEEU YOUR STRONGERIN MAKE IMMIGRATION NEWS

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Fig. 6.7 Vote Leave campaign website materials

regaining sovereignty allowed the Leave campaign to reject accusations that it was racist and present itself as defending democracy. By contrast, in the indyref corpus, control was overwhelmingly associated with the economy, currency and fiscal matters, so each referendum was developing its own internal ideologically revealing vocabulary. Words are sticky, attracting new and differentiated meanings by the company they

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keep. ‘Control’ in the EU Referendum discourses became inextricably linked with questions of immigration and race. As the Leave campaign progressed and gained traction, and multimodal semiotic potentials were exploited, any mention of ‘control’ could be relied upon to trigger (importantly, without explicitly mentioning) fears about immigration and to tap into racial prejudices. These Vote Leave campaign website materials maximally exploit the power of multimodal discourse. The use of statistics, visual metaphors to represent large scale population migration including advancing threat indicated by an arrow that increases in size as it approaches the UK, and barbed wire (presumably to protect UK borders) present menacing images. The use of the progressive aspect in joining and expanding, alongside the use of will continue to be and the imperative Imagine what it will be like present a bleak and frightening future unless people vote to leave the EU. Analysis of the collocations around the verb take shows take back control to be the most commonly occurring cluster (at 2168 occurrences, it accounts for 7% of overall usage of take). It was one of the most successful and memorable slogans of the Leave campaign, as it suggests both a better future and a sense of lost entitlement and ownership regained. It also has the advantage of being able to function as a standalone imperative as well as one that is maximally extensible—take back control (of ): (our) borders, country, democracy, trade, UK, waters — and take back control from the EU . Take in this corpus is a notably emotively charged verb. It is clearly associated with Brexit and VoteLeave, and there are references to borders, country, Britons which evoke the image of a bounded sovereign country. There are also clear references to us and them—I’ll, my, our, us, we, you, their, they, them—alongside the use of modal auxiliary and lexical verbs such as can, can’t, could, should, would, must, need, want, will plus the use of imperative let’s, all of which suggest that by voting Leave, people can and will make a difference and ‘take back control’. It is a slogan of empowerment designed to appeal to those who may be disaffected with the EU and the establishment, and semantically, being in control is usually viewed as a positive thing. ‘Vote Leave’ (another imperative) has the same potential. ‘Control’ also suggests that the other side’s accusations of ‘risk’ may be unfounded.

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Britain Stronger in Europe The Remain campaign never coined an equivalently powerful slogan. The declarative mood Britain Stronger in Europe has nothing like the same resonance or rallying power, though stronger is clearly used to support pro-Remain arguments, collocating with safer, better, together, united and outlining the dangers for Britain being out or outside. It is notable that England is the only one of the UK nations explicitly mentioned in these reoccurring clusters, and a stronger economy is one of the major concerns. Stronger appears 5126 times and stronger together appears 288 times. But work[ing], stronger, better, come, stay, stick, stand, get and closer together sound less dynamic, more static, and much harder work than leaving. It is interesting to note that the indyref unionist Better Together slogan reappeared in the Brexit debates and was often used on Twitter to refer to the European Union and Brexit to further Remain viewpoints. Together appears 5608 times; better together appears 277 times and stronger together and better together were the second and third most frequent L1 collocational pairings. In a piece that must have rankled with Scottish nationalist perspectives and perhaps with Remain voting Scots more generally, Boris Johnson in his Telegraph column on 26 June 2016 in the immediate aftermath of the EU Referendum result wrote about the UK’s four nations being ‘better together in forging a new and better relationship with the EU’ (Johnson 2016).

Freedom One other important concept to consider in the pre-Brexit debates is freedom, as that was one of the implied benefits of leaving the EU and regaining sovereignty—according to the Vote Leave campaign. As we have seen in Fig. 6.5, being ‘free to trade’ and ‘free to seize new opportunities’ were outlined as specific benefits of leaving the EU. Free accounts for 0.05% of the corpus (18,295 words) and freedom (9956 words) for 0.03%, but examination of the corpus shows that although these Vote Leave freedom of opportunity messages were important, other types of freedom dominated the pre-Referendum discourses. The most frequently occurring 3-word clusters were freedom of movement (911) (i.e. making reference to EU rules on migration), which was more than 4 times more frequent than Brexit for freedom (210) and more than 5 times more frequent than for our freedom (180) and vote for freedom (176). The same

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patterns emerge around free with free movement of people the topic of the most frequent clusters, followed by clusters focused on free trade, and then clusters talking about sovereignty and freedom from EU rules. So once again, discussions about immigration and EU freedom of movement dominated. Closer examination of the collocational horizons around freedom reveal some interesting patterns. Frequent collocates of freedom such as independence, sovereignty and liberty indicate that this was one of the key words used when discussing sovereignty. Interestingly, the word democracy often emerges in these contexts, and it seems that sovereignty, freedom, and independence are frequently conflated with democracy, with the alternative being tyranny and slavery. Presumably the implication is that a federal Europe is in some ways anti-democratic. Freedom of speech/free speechis also invoked, and there is talk of traitors , fighters and fighting to the death. These are highly charged emotional and emotive arguments. As Buckledee (2018: 79) notes: Brexit campaigners presented the referendum debate as an epic battle between on the one hand high-minded principles that we all hold dear— freedom, democracy, independence—and, on the other, aspects of EU reality—regulation and bureaucracy, the unelected Commission, impositions from Brussels.

But whilst Buckledee (2018) focuses on the Leave camp’s invocations of freedom, what is noticeable in the pre-EU Referendum corpus is that, to some extent, freedom cuts both ways. The references (mainly on Twitter) to people having fought and died for freedom/to free Britain usually refer to the Second World War and are invoked by both the Leave and Remain camps, though Leave undoubtedly predominates. For example: • It’s an insult to all the men and women who fought 2 world wars resisting German military domination! • Referendum! Britain has to start asking its self what its fathers and forefathers fought in Two world wars FOR!??? [sic] • The values they fought for aren’t so evident now. That’s why almost all current and recent ex Service people I know want #Brexit • Remember on the anniversary of VE Day that brave Brits fought & died to save us from being controled by Europe. For them we must vote BREXIT [sic]

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• Camoron is a traitor to UK and what my parents fought for.Freedom. AndSovreignity [sic] • Nonsense. They fought and died fighting Nazis who were elected as are EU MEPs. • Polish paras fought with Brits at Arnhem. Think about it • #Brexit no member of the EU has fought each other, an achievement when European countries fought one other for most of the twentieth century. • I’m damn sure neither of my grandads fought fascism to see this country turn out like it is today! The tenor of these Twitter comments (and there are other much more extreme examples, including a fair amount of anti-German sentiment in pro-Leave tweets), gives an insight into just how xenophobic some of the debates were in public fora (cf. Buckledee’s [2018: 98] discussion of racial stereotypes re ‘bullying, war-mongering Germans’ in Brexit discourses). Of course, precedents for this type of xenophobia were set by those leading the campaigns. As the Leave campaign gained momentum in May 2016, in an interview with The Telegraph, Boris Johnson compared the EU to Hitler in its pursuit of a powerful super state and suggested that Winston Churchill would have joined him on the Brexit bus (Ross 2016a, b). Although acknowledging that they used ‘different methods’, the comparison is startling and, on reflection, rather shocking. Post Referendum, in March 2019, Nigel Farage compared Theresa May’s Brexit deal to the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, claiming it is a similar act of ‘betrayal’ (Stone 2019), and in a BBC News interview with Andrew Neil on 12 July 2019, Jonathan Powell (former Chief of Staff to Tony Blair) caused a furore when he likened the rise of the Brexit party in the UK to the rise of Hitler in Germany. There are other examples of similar tactics and unsavoury arguments were being made on both sides.

Immigration It is widely thought that the Leave campaign’s focus on immigration may well have won them the vote. Moore and Ramsey (2017a: 8) describe it as ‘the most prominent referendum issue’ which often appeared on newspaper front pages. Immigration tripled in the amount of coverage it received during the campaign and rose faster than any of the other issues. Goodwin and Milazzo (2017: 462) also argue that concerns over

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immigration were pivotal in the Brexit vote, and that Leave’s decision to focus on this as the key campaign issue in the latter part of their campaign swung the vote in their favour. They observe that immigration had strong ‘emotional resonance’, especially amongst voters who lived in communities altered by higher levels of immigration. As we have seen, ‘taking back control’ was largely about reducing immigration and associated with ant-migrant sentiments. Immigration was a prominent keyword in the pre-EU Referendum corpus (36th most key, with more than 29,760 entries) and it collocates with words like stop, reduce, cut, control, and concerns and is frequently mass and/or illegal. Immigration is a very frequent collocate of Brexit , demonstrating that for the Leave campaign, this was a crucial plank in the argument. In the corpus as a whole, we find migration (8241), immigrant(s/’s) (7989), and migrant(s) (13,639). The Twitter corpus (30 March–23 June 2016) has 12,797 occurrences of migrants(s), 7663 of which occurred in the period 1–23 June 2016, and 5100 in the period 1–31 May 2016, so references to migrant(s) were ramping up as the Referendum approached. There is also likely to have been an effect from the publication of Farage’s ‘Breaking Point’ poster on 16th June. This most notorious and memorable visual representation of the moral panic around immigration pictured a long queue of migrants supposedly coming to the UK and said ‘We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders’. The powerful visual rhetoric of this image combined with its caption made this a memorable and highly effective propaganda tool for Leave.EU. It later emerged that the photo was of mainly Syrian refugees walking into Slovenia at the height of the migrant crisis in 2015, and so, was extremely misleading, but by then, the poster had already hit its mark, and the voting audience had drawn its own conclusions. Virdee and McGeever (2018: 1807) point to evidence that the Leave.EU campaign gained traction by suggesting migrants posed economic threats to UK working-class people and security threats to the nation. They argue that the campaign was able to tap into negative racial representations of ‘the Muslim’. What the campaign successfully managed was, in most cases, to side-step accusations of racism by carefully detaching vilification of (EU) migrants from the migrant history of the UK but simultaneously ‘reactivating latent racism via appropriately coded language’. The Twitter corpus contained many migrant+ terms, many of which were used as hashtags, suggesting topic salience. E.g. #MIGRATION, #MIGRATIONWATCH, MIGRATIONCRISIS.

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Duffy and Rowden (2005) argue that newspapers have a strong impact on public attitudes towards race and immigration. As might be expected, the right wing Daily Mail focused more on migrant (s ) and migration than other newspapers—at 0.09% of the total word count, the percentage frequency of migrant (s ) was nearly double the 0.05% found in the UK newspaper corpus as a whole; a similar pattern applies to migration: 0.08% in the Daily Mail compared to 0.05% in the UK newspaper corpus as a whole. At 0.04%, the concentration on immigration by this newspaper was also noticeable. In the Daily Mail, migrants are: illegal, economic (i.e. are migrating for economic advantage rather than ‘real need’), and many are unskilled and/or jobless. There is considerable focus on the numbers involved—thousands, millions —and they are not only coming, crossing and settling in the UK, but flocking, crippling, sneaking, massing and pouring (See also Buckledee 2018: 98). The surrounding semantic prosody is overwhelmingly negative. These trends are analogous with the patterns observed by Gabrielatos and Baker (2008). Migration is mass, uncontrolled, illegal, and a crisis. Immigration has similar collocational tendencies. It is a focus for argument, anger, concern, failure, worry and needs to be controlled, cut, curbed, limited, and tackled. Racism and racist (s ) are mentioned much less frequently (approx. 10% of the occurrences of migrants, migration and immigration) and these are frequently portrayed as unfair slurs on people’s characters or attempts to distract attention from the real issues. As anticipated, the leftwing Guardian presents migrants very differently. In the Guardian, there is critique of anti-migrant viewpoints and those espousing them such as Nigel Farage and his infamous poster campaign, more discussion of migrants as skilled and/or workers, of them being children, parents and families, and some consideration of the attacks and anti-migrant sentiment they might face. Interestingly, some of these migrants are also lexicalised as refugees , a word with rather different and much less negative connotations in the present day (see Gabrielatos and Baker (2008: 16, Fig. 2) for more on definitions and usage of RASIM terms —i.e. refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants ). In the newspaper corpus as a whole, refugee(s) are presented much more sympathetically than migrants. They are fleeing, trudging, displaced and may be at risk from smugglers or terrorism. However, the, albeit infrequent, collocational pairing of genuine with refugee(s ) suggests that some refugees are felt not to be genuine—a case of overlexicalisation indicating underlying ideology. In the Guardian, illegal migrants does not surface as a

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salient collocational pairing. Similar patterns are found in the Guardian around immigrants . Moore and Ramsey (2017a: 83) found that ‘there was frequent elision in news coverage of migrants with asylum seekers and refugees, and at times the terms appear to be used interchangeably’. Although the overall focus on migrant (s ) and immigration was quantitatively roughly the same north and south of the border in the pre-EU Referendum corpus, with the same relative frequencies found in the Scottish and UK titles subcorpora, it is noticeable that there is only one occurrence of the collocation illegal migrant in the Scottish newspapers. In the pre-EU Referendum corpus as a whole, there were 13,650 occurrences of migrant(s) (4% of the corpus), and 135 occurrences of the collocational pairing illegal migrant(s). In this corpus, migrants are associated with negative semantic prosody in left-hand collocates such as: attacks, riots, hundreds, mass, more, record, million(s), jobless, sex, stop and in right-hand collocates such as arrive, come, coming, taking, cripple, where once again progressive aspect forms of the verb help create a sense of impending and ongoing threat. Specific migrant groups are singled out: economic, Albanian, European, Turkish and Muslim. Tong and Zuo (2019: 447) describe the perceived threat from migrants and asylum seekers in British newspapers as threefold: a physical threat, an economic threat, and a threat to identity and Britishness’. The pre-EU Referendum corpus evidence seems to bear this out. Tong and Zuo (2019) also argue that since the 1990s, migrants have been especially associated with Muslims and terrorism. Their research shows that in the run-up to the EU Referendum, EU migrants were increasingly ‘othered’ by the UK press, being portrayed as a threat to national security and economic prosperity. Baker found that RASIMs tended to be discussed in terms of: ‘1) Provenance /transit/ destination, 2) Number, 3) Entry, 4) Economic problems, 5) Residence, 6) Return/repatriation, 7) Legality, 8) Plight’ (Baker 2007: 26). Baker (2007) also found that RASIM terms tended to share the same collocates, were often conflated or used interchangeably, and one in five were used alongside quantification. The pre-EU Referendum corpus shows similar patterns. The most commonly occurring collocates of illegal in the pre-EU Referendum corpus are immigrants (241), immigration (156) and migrants (118) and examination of the R1 collocates (i.e. the nouns that illegal premodifies) tell the same story: (im)migrant(s), (im)migration, war(s), alien(s), invaders, invasion, Muslims. There are some similarities with the collocational patterns surrounding migrant(s) in the indyref corpus with a focus

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on the numbers of people involved, but the overall representation is less positive in the pre-EU Referendum corpus. The indyref corpus talks about attracting migrants, the opportunities this offers, and deals with questions of citizenship and naturalisation that are conspicuously absent here. As suspected, the focus on (im)migrants and (im)migration is much higher in the pre-EU Referendum corpus than in the indyref corpus. Migration was a key issue in the run-up to the EU Referendum, and the corpus evidence bears this out. It was also viewed much more negatively in the EU Referendum than during indyref, though as we have seen in Chapter 5, some of the public discourses around indyref had an unexpected and negative focus on matters of race, ethnicity and religion. Certainly the 2016 EU Referendum discourses were much more preoccupied with these matters, but the evidence suggests that the indyref debates in 2014 were not immune and, in some quarters, latent racism could be observed there also. There are 4208 occurrences of refugee( s) in the pre-EU Referendum corpus compared with only 427 in the indyref corpus. The indyref corpus is nearly twice as large as the pre-EU Referendum corpus, but the latter has nearly ten times as many references to refugees, and the collocates are frequently negative or alarmist, including: austerity, threaten, more, growth, control, quotas alongside (Vote)Leave and specific groups (Syrian, Muslim) are singled out. There are also dedicated Twitter hashtags: refugeeswelcome and refugeesnotwelcome. There are 808 occurrences of asylum in the pre-EU Referendum corpus (compared with 417 in the indyref corpus), with asylum seeker(s) being the most common collocational pairing, so again the frequencies are comparatively higher (approximately 4 times). Official figures show an increase in the number of people claiming asylum in the UK between 2014 and 2016 (32,344–39,968) and different parts of the UK had varying levels of asylum seekers and settled refugees (Migration Observatory 2019), but these differences are not enough to account for the differences noted between the indyref and EU corpora. Asylum seekers made up 5% of the migrants to the UK in 2018 and approximately 30,000 applications were made that year (so numbers are down since the EU Referendum); the number of refugees in the UK is unknown as official data are not routinely collected (House of Commons Library 2019). The official definitions of ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘refugees’ used by the UK government are as follows:

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‘Asylum’ is protection given by a country to someone fleeing from persecution in their own country. An ‘asylum seeker’ is someone who has applied for asylum and is awaiting a decision on whether they will be granted refugee status. A refugee is someone who, owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country. (House of Commons Library 2019)

However, usage of these terms outside official documents is rather looser and, in public, media and political discourses, asylum seeker especially seems to be undergoing a process of pejoration, by association with negative collocational prosody. The same happened previously over time with the term immigrant. In the present day, immigrant is often perceived as a term tinged with overtones of racism, and migrant is therefore usually the preferred term. These changing semantic patterns can be observed in political discourse by examining diachronic corpora such as the Hansard record of UK parliamentary debates. Using the Hansard website’s builtin search tool, it is possible to chart the frequency of usage of specific words in the UK Parliament over time, and so to gain insights into political language as used in official parliamentary discourse (Fig. 6.8 and 6.9). During the 1970s, the term immigrant was in frequent use but except for a spike in 2016 (as noted in the pre-EU Referendum corpus), it had largely fallen out of favour in recent years. These Hansard usage plots

Fig. 6.8 Immigrant in Hansard corpus (1945–2020)

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Fig. 6.9 Migrant in Hansard corpus (1945–2020)

show the replacement of the semantic space previously occupied by immigrant by the term migrant , but also show an increasing parliamentary preoccupation with these people in the last 15 years, and most especially around the time of the Brexit debates. The emergence of the relatively new term economic migrant has muddied the waters still further, conferring deliberate and self-interested agency on those migrating, and leading to comparisons being made between economic migrants and ‘genuine’ asylum seekers. If we compare the collocational patterns of asylum in the pre-EU Referendum corpus with that of the indyref corpus in Chapter 5, it is clear that the portrayal of asylum seekers is much more sympathetic in the indyref corpus, with words like humane, compassionate, destitute, support, protection and treatment plus a concern for the approach to and policies surrounding asylum seekers and their claims, alongside focus on practical considerations like the reception they get and their accommodation needs. In the EU corpus, there is much more focus on penalties, control, rules, and taking charge alongside the VoteLeave agenda.

Race and Religion As noted above, migrants are frequently collocated with Muslim, and there is a particular focus on Turkish and Albanian migrants, many of whom would be Muslim. According to Moore and Ramsey (2017a), Turks, Albanians, Romanians and Poles were particularly singled out as problematic immigrants in media coverage of the Referendum campaign, and migrants generally were blamed for social and economic

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problems. In the corpus, Islam has 2396 and Islamic 1192 entries, and Muslim(s) 5107—0.02% of whole corpus. Muslims are described as flooding/saturating/overrunning/ínvading Britain/Europe; there are hordes/thousands/millions of them; and they are strongly associated with (im)migration (Fig. 6.10). The majority of the discussion of Muslim( s) is found in the large Twitter corpus. Only 140 or so of the 5100 + entries are found in the newspapers or elsewhere in the corpus, and a fair proportion of this is focused on Donald Trump’s attempts to ban Muslims from entering the US. Comments on the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who was described by David Cameron as ‘a proud Muslim and proud Brit’ (the syntactic pairing pattern potentially suggesting that this combination of identities may be less than usual or compatible) at the launch of the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign bus on 30 May 2016 figure quite prominently in the Twitter corpus, and many are personal comments on the perceived desirability (or otherwise) of having a Muslim mayor of London, which suggests that the situation is noteworthy and negative. From these and other tweets, it is clear that racist comment is alive and well on Twitter. Research carried out for the Channel 4 Dispatches programme ‘Racist Britain’ found similar patterns with a significant proportion of the Tweets relating to the EU campaign focusing on immigration, migrant(s), immigrant(s) and refugee(s), and many Tweets were Islamophobic, antiIslamic or derogatory to Islam or Muslims (Miller et al. 2016). Their observation that Twitter tends to be used by those who are ‘younger, more socio-economically privileged and more urban’ and that the those who are ‘the poorest, most marginalised and most vulnerable’ are the least represented on Twitter raises interesting and disturbing questions about the prevalence and social distribution of racism and xenophobia in our society. In his study of the language of Brexit, Buckledee (2018: 98) says of newspaper readers’ comments: ‘their identities hidden behind a nickname, have no need to be cautious, and it is here that we find openly racist and Islamophobic attitudes expressed in strong, sometimes vulgar terms.’ To some extent, we have already seen this in the indyref corpus, and a similar argument might be said to apply to Twitter posts. Online media seem to encourage the use of xenophobic language. In the pre-EU Referendum corpus, the word vermin was used 74 times to describe specific social groups. When compared with the indyref corpus (with figures normalised to per million words to take account of the differently sized corpora), it is

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THE BREXIT TO REFERENDUM IN IS UNLESS OF EU AND LEAVE BIG UK FOR VOTE ON AMP EUROPE WILL YOU IT ARE THEY WE BE WITH THAT CO OUT NO THIS MUSLIM LIKE BRITAIN WANT

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THE BREXIT DAVID TO IN WE EU IS OF AND FOR UK WILL YOU THAT BE WITH AMP ON ARE IT BRITAIN OUT NOT LEAVE CAMERON THEY IF REFERENDUM LONDON EUROPE CO MUSLIM FROM HIS

BREXIT CAMERON TO THE OF EU CURB IS AND IN FOR WILL WITH UK BY ARE YOU AMP IT BE NOT AS ON VOTE WE THAT OVER THIS LONDON BRITAIN ABOUT EUROPE IF THEY ALL

L3 HAILS TO BREXIT OF THE LABOUR'S AND UKIP FOR WITH IS EU EUROPE IN LONDON ON BY ALL BE NOT MILLIONS AMP NO UK FROM ARE OVER WILL IT ABOUT IF VOTELEAVE THAT HAVE MILLION

L2 THE OF PROUD BY WITH BRITISH BREXIT MAINSTAY MORE ISLAM TO NON ALL ANTI AND FOR STOP AMP MILLION UK ON FROM BE RADICAL ABOUT MANY IS FIRST THIS ARE TURKISH MIGRANTS MASS IN AGAINST

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Centre MUSLIM MUSLIMS

R1 MAYOR SADIQ IN BREXIT VOTE ARE MIGRANTS IMMIGRATION TO AND INVASION REFUGEES FLOODING RAMADAN WILL IMMIGRANTS COUNTRY AMP ISLAM MEN SHOULD WHO FOR FROM MIGRANT COUNTRIES MIGRATION INVADERS OUT AS ON CHILD RAPE TERRORIST THE

Fig. 6.10 Collocates of Muslim(s) in pre-EU Referendum corpus

N BREXIT THE KHAN IN TO OF IS AND CIVIL WILL ON VOTE UK ARE BE EU WHO HTTPS AS THEN NOT BRITAIN AMP THIS FOR VIA EUROPE VOTELEAVE HAVE WE RAPIST IF THEIR MAYOR INTO

R2 BREXIT THE TO IN IS EUROPE EU WAR UK OF AND LONDON THEY FOR AMP ON WILL BRITAIN THAT OUR IT WHAT YOU CAMERON NOT ARE GANGS BE CIVIL THEIR VIA HAS REMAIN HAVE IF

R3 BREXIT THE TO IN IS OF EU AND LOOMS UK YOU AMP FOR REMAIN WILL CO NOT ON THEY BE ARE WAR VOTELEAVE VOTE THAT LONDON WE WHAT WOMEN NEWS MUSLIM PEOPLE WHY EUREF THIS

R4 BREXIT THE IN TO LONDONISTAN OF ARE IS UK EU AND FOR YOU REFERENDUM VOTE ON AMP WILL EUROPE THIS NOT HTTPS THEY THAT BE ALL IT VOTELEAVE WHAT LOOMS SO WE IF OUT FROM

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Fig. 6.11 Racial/religious terms in indyref and pre-EU Referendum corpora

clear that the pre-EU Referendum corpus has much more focus on racial/religious terms and groups, with Muslim(s), Asians and Islam* especially prominent (see Fig. 6.11). Racist has 7626 entries (0.2% of the corpus)—so is mentioned more than 3 times more frequently in the preEU Referendum corpus than in the indyref one. There was also, albeit infrequent, usage of the taboo terms P**i(s) (57) and a few variants of n****r. Turks and Poles were singled out as problematic, with the latter being variously described as Polish people, immigrants, migrants, builders, plumbers, workers or even rapists. The anti-migrant and racist discourses promulgated by certain parts of the Leave campaign are reflected in preEU Referendum discourse. They were especially prominent in Twitter posts.

(Far) Right Wing Populism Discourse Practices Wodak (2003: 133) talks about the ‘rhetoric of exclusion’ as a feature of such discourses—a preoccupation with making divisions between ‘us’ (good) and ‘them’ (bad), positive self-presentation and negative other presentation, the latter including scapegoating, xenophobia, blaming the victim and making them the perpetrator in order to justify political measures such as restricting immigration. Further characteristics are

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anti-establishment or anti-elitist statements; ‘anti-intellectual sentiments’, ‘simplistic narratives of the past’ whereby other nations, ethnicities, etc. are portrayed as agents of victimisation; ‘contradicting new opinions’ whereby ‘what was said yesterday has no meaning anymore the next day’; and statements which have inbuilt ‘calculated ambivalence’ and can be interpreted in more than one way (Wodak 2003: 141–142; Reisgl and Wodak 2001). The pre-EU Referendum corpus contains some discussion (mainly on Twitter) of abusive, emotive, foul, inflammatory, racist and xenophobic language but it is noticeable that the discussion is much less frequent than the exercise of these types of language. Language appears 1575 times in the corpus, but there are fewer than 50 occurrences of the types of collocates listed above. Rhetoric (1751 entries) is more frequently criticised, and can be: ugly, immigrant/immigration, xenophobic, racist, negative, empty, migrant, inflammatory, nationalist, divisive, meaningless, populist but fewer than 100 occurrences are an explicitly negative critique of the types of rhetoric being used. Traitor( s) appears 2740 times (397 of the Twitter posts date from after 16th June) and L1 collocate patterns (in Fig. 6.12) give some impression of the tone and vehemence of the Brexit debates. As previously noted, World War II and anti-German sentiment was sometimes invoked in anti-EU discourse. Conceptual metaphors of WAR were embedded in the Brexit debates with defend* (3168) used to describe politicians defending Brexit, their campaigns, and democracy. The 9228 occurrences of attack*, however, were mostly literal rather than metaphorical usages—the most frequent L1 collocate being sex (attack), with terror and terrorist attack(s) also very frequent. Attempts were being made to link EU migration and asylum seekers to sex attacks and terrorism. There were also 15,067 occurrences of war, with common trigrams of lead to war; World War 3, descending into war, war in Europe, etc. Charteris-Black (2019) noted the prominence of both ‘War and Invasion’, and ‘Distrust and Betrayal’ metaphors in Brexit discourses. There is also talk of saving us, your country, Britain, UK, yourself/yourselves and democracy. The evidence from the corpus validates assertions about ‘how toxic and divisive the discourses used around Brexit, Brexiters, and Remainers’ were (Meredith and Richardson 2019: 51) and that it was the ‘most divisive, hostile, negative and fear-provoking of the twenty-first Century’ (Moore and Ramsay 2017b: n.p.). Brexit was a war of words.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

L5

BREXIT CAMERON EXPOSED VOTE DAVID WITH REMAIN THIS THEY WHAT KNOW WILL YOUR LEAVE BRITAIN HAVE THAT STRONGERIN SHOULD VOTELEAVE BUSINESS REFERENDUM MORE VOTEREMAIN PEOPLE OSBORNE IT'S YOU'RE DON'T BRITISH WHEN

L4

BREXIT CAMERON DAVID WITH THIS VOTE THEY WHAT REMAIN LEAVE LIKE HTTPS ABOUT YOUR FROM THAT VOTELEAVE PEOPLE SHOULD REFERENDUM MORE COUNTRY WILL REMEMBER SAYS EUREF TIME THEN SUPPORTERS WOULD FAILURE

L3 BREXIT CAMERON DAVID THIS DON'T LIAR REMAIN THAT YOUR MAKE THEN MERKEL VOTE THEY STRONGERIN VOTELEAVE CALL MORE LABOUR COWARD LEAVE COUNTRY WILL WITH FREEDOM OSBORNE THESE EUREFERENDUM EUREF YOU'RE ANOTHER

L2 BREXIT WHAT CAMERON HE'S REMAIN THEY LIAR YOU'RE DAVID THIS DEATH BEING FIRST THESE CALLED FROM LYING ONLY PAYS THAN YOUR SELF LIKE LEAVE WITH ANOTHER CALLED COWARD SUCH EUROPE FUCK

L1 BREXIT THESE THIS LYING ANOTHER REMAIN CAMERON CLASS FUCKING STRONGERIN BIGGEST LI AR BLOODY THAT CORRUPT COWARDLY LEAVE SLIMY THEM COUNTRY DISGUSTING BRITISH BOTH SPINELESS OTHER NATION THOSE GLOBALIST LITTLE PEOPLE BEING

Centre TRAITOR TRAITORS

R1 BREXIT CAMERON VOTELEAVE DAVID LIKE HTTPS WILL GATE FREEDOM THEY VOTELEAVE THAT THIS HAVE WOULD LEAVE LIAR DAVE WHAT SHOULD DISGUSTING POLITICIANS AFTER REMAIN JUST MERKEL MAJOR TRYING WITH THAT'S EUREF

Fig. 6.12 Collocates of traitor(s) in pre-EU Referendum corpus

N

R2 BREXIT VOTELEAVE CAMERON BRITAIN YOUR THIS WILL LEAVEU HTTPS THEIR BRITISH LEAVEU HAVE VOTELEAVE CHIEF SHOULD GREAT WANT EUREF NIGEL THAT NOTOEU THEY LIKE EUROTRASH DAVID SIGNED WOULD FARAGE SOLD REFERENDUM

R3 BREXIT COUNTRY BRITAIN HTTPS PEOPLE VOTELEAVE LEAVE BRITISH REFERENDUM CAMERON W I LL VOTELEAVE WITH REMAIN WOULD THEM THIS THAT FARAGE CAMERONOUT WORKING TERRORIST HAVE STRONGERIN CROWN WHAT QUEEN SOVEREIGNTY BORISJOHNSON GIVE HOMELAND

R4 BREXIT PEOPLE COUNTRY VOTELEAVE HTTPS VOTELEAVE REFERENDUM THAT REMAIN WILL WHAT LEAVE EUREFERENDUM THIS HAVE WOULD THEY WITH THE, DAVID LEAVEEU ABOUT YOUR BRITIAN MAYOR LIKE BRITISH CAMERON OSBORNE SHOULD FARAGE

R5 BREXIT VOTELEAVE WILL HTTPS CAMERON LEAVE VOTELEAVE COUNTRY WHAT THIS REMAIN ABOUT THAT WITH LEAVEEU MORE FROM THEY BRITAIN WOULD OVER WOULD REFERENDUM MAKE BAK BRITISH YOUR EUREF THESE THEIR JUST

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References Ancarno, C. (2018). Inter disciplinary approaches in corpus linguistics and CADS. In C. Taylor & A. Marchi (Ed.), Corpus approaches to discourse: A critical review (pp. 130–156). London: Routledge. Baker, J.P. (2007). Discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press, 1996–2006: Full Research Report. ESRC end of award report, RES-000-221381. Swindon: ESRC. Bastos, M.T., & Mercea, D. (2019). The Brexit botnet and user-Generated hyperpartisan News. Social Science Computer Review, 37 (1), 38–54. Bechhofer, F., & McCrone, D. (2012). Imagining the nation: Symbols of national culture in England and Scotland. Ethnicities, 13(5), 544–564. Berry, M. (2016). Understanding the role of the mass media in the EU Referendum. LSE European Politics and Policy (EUROPP) Blog. Bouko, C., & Garcia, D. (2019). Citizens’ reactions to Brexit on Twitter: A content and discourse analysis. In V. Koller, S. Kopf, & M. Miglbauer. (Ed.), Discourses of Brexit (pp. 171–190). London: Routledge. Buckledee, S. (2018). The language of Brexit: How Britain talked its way out of the European Union. London: Bloomsbury. Cap, P. (2019). ‘Britain is full to bursting point’: Immigration themes in the Brexit discourse of the UK Independence Party. In V. Koller, S. Kopf, & M. Miglbauer (Ed.), Discourses of Brexit (pp. 69–85). London: Routledge. Charteris-Black, J. (2019). Metaphors of Brexit: No cherries on the cake? Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, S. (1972). Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the mods and rockers. Oxon: Routledge. Deacon, D., Downey, J., Harmer, E., Stanyer, J., & Wring, D. (2016). The narrow agenda: How the news media covered the Referendum. EU Referendum Analysis 2016, 34–35. Duffy, B., & Rowden, L. (2005). You are what you read? How newspaper readership is related to views. London: Mori Social Research Institute. Fontaine, L. (2017). The early semantics of the neologism BREXIT: A lexicogrammatical approach. Functional Linguistics, 4(1), 1–15. Gabrielatos, C., & Baker, P. (2008). Fleeing, sneaking, flooding: A corpus analysis of discursive constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press, 1996–2005. Journal of English linguistics, 36(1), 5–38. Goodwin, M., & Milazzo, C. (2017). Taking back control? Investigating the role of immigration in the 2016 vote for Brexit. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 19(3), 450–464. Hänska, M., & Bauchowitz, S. (2017). Tweeting for Brexit: How social media influenced the referendum. In J. Mair, T. Clark, N. Fowler, R. Snoddy, & R. Tait (Ed.) Brexit, Trump and the media (pp. 31–35). Bury St Edmunds: Abramis Academic Publishing.

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House of Commons Library. (2019, March 18). Migration statistics: How many asylum seekers and refugees are there in the UK. https://commonslibrary. parliament.uk/insights/migration-statistics-how-many-asylum-seekers-and-ref ugees-are-there-in-th-uk/. Accessed 20 July 2020. Johnson, B. (2016, June 26). I cannot stress too much that Britain is part of Europe and always will be. The Telegraph. Kumar, K. (2003). The making of English national identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levy, D.A., Aslan, B., & Bironzo, D. (2016). UK press coverage of the EU referendum. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://reutersinstitute. politics.ox.ac.uk/our-research/uk-press-coverage-eu-referendum. Accessed 29 March 2020. Llewellyn, C., & Cram, L. (2016). The results are in and the UK will# Brexit: What did social media tell us about the UK’s EU referendum. EU Referendum Analysis, 90–91. McCrone, D., & Bechhofer, F. (2010). Claiming national identity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(6), 921–948. McEnery, T. (2005). Swearing in English: Bad language, purity and power from 1586 to the present. Routledge: London. Meredith, J., & Richardson, E. (2019). The use of the political categories of Brexiter and remainer in online comments about the EU Referendum. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 29(1), 43–55. Miller, C., Arcostanzo, F., Smith, J., Krasodomski-Jones, A., Wiedlitzka, S., Jamali, R., & Dale, J. (2016). From Brussels to Brexit: Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism and reports of hateful incidents on Twitter. DEMOS. https:// demos.co.uk/. Accessed 15 June 2020. Moore, M., & Ramsey, G. (2017a). UK media coverage of the 2016 EU referendum campaign. Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power: King’s College London. Moore, M. & Ramsey, G. (2017b, May 16). Acrimonious and divisive: The role the media played in Brexit. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2017/05/16/acr imonious-and-divisive-the-role-the-media-played-in-brexit/ Accessed 21 July 2020. Prosser, C., Mellon, J., & Green, J. (2016, July 11). What mattered most to you when deciding how to vote in the EU referendum? British Election Study News. Available at: http://www.britishelectionstudy.com/. Accessed 31 August 2020. Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2001). Discourse and discrimination. London: Routledge. Ross, T. (2016a, May 14). Boris Johnson interview: We can be the ‘heroes of Europe’ by voting to Leave. The Telegraph.

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CHAPTER 7

Brexit and Beyond

Abstract This chapter compares the language of the post-Brexit period (based on a 50 million words corpus) with that of the run-up to the EU Referendum and the Scottish Independence Referendum to identify diachronic trends. It finds a noticeable drop-off in racist discourse postEU Referendum and concerns about immigration alongside changes in the representation of migrants and migration, and articulation of worries about racism. It finds a shift in focus from sovereignty to discussion of democracy and independence. The three corpora track the rise of nationalism from indyref to Brexit, and the development of increasingly divisive and sometimes incendiary language in Parliamentary discourse and elsewhere. The chapter concludes by considering the destructive consequences of using such language and argues that the language we use matters. Keywords Diachronic trends · Immigration · Treachery & betrayal · Consequences

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this chapter (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67384-0_7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 F. M. Douglas, Political, Public and Media Discourses from Indyref to Brexit, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67384-0_7

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Introduction The immediate aftermath of the EU Referendum vote was characterised by shock, confusion and, depending on individual viewpoint, jubilation, disbelief or despair. Website monitoring tools showed a 50% increase in visits to online news and media sites, and top online searches focused on questions such as ‘What will happen to EU citizens in the UK?’ and, more worryingly, ‘What is Brexit?’ and ‘What is the EU?’ (Hitwise 2016). Unsurprisingly, many of these searches were characterised by uncertainty about the future, and there was an emphasis on the fate of the pound. In the weeks running up to the vote, concerns around ‘immigrants’ and ‘expats’ were those most commonly searched for; in the immediate aftermath, the possibility of a ‘second referendum’ quickly materialised as a frequent search item (Hitwise 2016). Any hopes that the Referendum result would resolve and calm the debate proved to be ill-founded. A 2016 online petition to the Government calling for a second Referendum reached over 4 million signatures. In 2018, a petition asking the government to revoke Article 50 garnered more than 6 million signatures, with constituencies in Scotland, the heart of England and the South showing the highest percentages. Given that the Remain vote in 2016 was just over 16 million, these figures indicate high engagement with the topic well after the electorate’s decision had been made. Nearly three years on, a 2019 petition asking for parliament not to be prorogued gained 1.7 million signatures (UK Government and Parliament Petitions). The deep-seated divisions that had become so evident in the debates remained and, in some cases, the arguments seemed even more bitter and entrenched. Domestic and European political arguments rumbled on and the ending of one Union looks increasingly likely to lead to the demise of the other, with growing calls for a second independence Referendum for Scotland. This chapter considers the post-Brexit period—both the immediate aftermath of the vote and the years following it. It compares pre- and post-Brexit discourses, and draws together trends noted across the three corpora, from indyref to Brexit and beyond. It considers the language of unity and disunity, how people signal their allegiances, and the powerful linguistic construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

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The Post-Brexit Corpus The post-Brexit corpus is 50 million words, and is comprised of newspaper articles, debates and speeches from the UK Houses of Parliament, interviews with key political figures on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, political speeches, reports, letters, statements and Twitter posts between 24 June 2016 and 12 March 2018. It therefore picks up the story straight after the pre-EU Referendum corpus and is the latter’s twin in terms of composition, enabling direct comparisons to be made between pre- and post-Referendum day language in media, political and public discourses. In addition, a more focused contrastive Twitter corpus (23 days before and 23 days after the EU Referendum) was compiled to facilitate closer analysis of similarities and differences. Where there were particularly important texts or events in the narrative after these dates (e.g. key speeches by political leaders), these have also been drawn on in the following discussion, and some further longitudinal analysis of UK parliamentary discourse augments the picture. The chapter closes by asking what we can learn about the power of language to unite and divide and the potential consequences of language that seeks to disunite.

Twitter Pre- and Post- EU Referendum Comparison We begin by focusing on the last weeks of the run-up to, and the immediate aftermath of, the vote on 23rd June 2016 by exploring the contrastive Twitter corpus. Re-examination of the semantic clusters identified in Chapter 6 revealed interesting trends (see Fig. 7.1) that give insights into patterns in the corpus overall. Pre-Referendum, the most frequent Tweeters were the self-explanatory pro-Leave account LeavetheEU and UKIPNFKN (UKIP, Nigel Farage & Kipper Nonsense), which describes itself as ‘curated news and blogs about #UKIP, the #FarRight and forthcoming EU referendum. #Political comments, debates and discussions’, and was listed as the 16th in a list of ‘top connectors’ in week ending 26 March 2016 (Swain 2016) and is clearly anti-UKIP and anti-Brexit. Social media is thought to have a substantial influence on voting activity, and although Twitter’s UK user base is around 15 million users, it is followed and used by journalists, and so may have a secondary effect that is evidenced in the mainstream media. Some of the tweets in the Twitter corpus were bot-generated and bot activity was not limited to before the Referendum. The most frequent

PreRef23days PostRef23days

Fig. 7.1 Pre- and post-Referendum semantic clusters on Twitter

0

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Bri sh Brits Britons Scots Irish immigra on immigrants migrant migra on Turkey racist racism borders trade trading economy markets stocks Euro prices recession sterling investors economists Treasury austerity pensions democracy sovereignty independence freedom warn warning fear hope lies claims threat scare scaremongering worries crisis propaganda panic NHS jobs risk uncertainty happen amid hit affect

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post-Referendum bot posting was by KimKligonian. Post-Referendum, SecondPetition and brexitmarch also came to the fore. The data show little evidence of the suspected interference by Russian website bots. Post-Referendum, people took to Twitter to discuss (and, in many cases, to rant about) the reasons for the outcome. Economic worries came to the fore in the aftermath, with noticeable increases in Tweets mentioning trade, trading, the economy, markets, stocks, Euro, prices, recession, sterling, investors and austerity. Unsurprisingly, language associated with risk (warn(ing ), fear, claims, threat , scare(mongering ) and risk decreased now that the result was known, though references to panic over Brexit had increased by 92%, uncertainty (+130%), happen (+109%), affect (+107%) and it was clear that many felt Brexit had precipitated a crisis (+230%). Worries (−1%) remained at similar levels preand post-Referendum. References to nationality increased markedly postReferendum: British (+72%); Brits (+63%); Scots (+124%); Irish (+103%). As discussed in Chapter 2, the vote was unevenly distributed across different parts of the United Kingdom, with Scotland and Northern Ireland voting to stay in the EU, and England and Wales voting to leave. In both Scotland and Northern Ireland, but particularly in Scotland, politicians and others complained loudly about being taken out of the European Union without their consent, and old resentments about being dictated to by their larger English neighbour started to re-emerge. Realisation of the potential future consequences of the split vote for the future of the United Kingdom was starting to dawn, and nationalist separatist discourses were on the increase. Conversely, references to immigration and migration were down (−24 and −56%, respectively) in the 23 days following the vote, though references to immigrants and migrants increased (+31 and + 30%). Criticisms of racist( s) and racism also showed marked increases (+142 and +416%, respectively). (We return to this strand of the analysis below). Pre-Referendum, much of the discussion (especially in the Leave campaign) had focused on sovereignty. Post-Referendum, this was down by 30%, and the focus had moved to democracy (+69%) and independence (+150%). Analysis of trigrams in the Twitter data throws up some interesting findings. In the run-up to the Referendum, the most frequently occurring trigrams included: freedom and democracy/democracy and freedom; sovereignty and democracy/democracy and sovereignty; lack of democracy; our democracy back; vote for democracy—all of which suggest a

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pro-Leave bias in the use of the positively inflected word democracy. PostReferendum, there was a noticeable shift in the democracy trigrams. We find: argument against democracy; contempt for democracy; democracy being subvert[ed]; and trigrams such as how democracy works; it’s called democracy; too much democracy; not democracy please; a post-factual democracy; democracy in action; direct democracy; don’t like democracy; victory for democracy; this is democracy—many of which suggest a much less positive semantic prosody. Democracy itself had become a site of conflict, rhetorically speaking, at least.

Cross-Corpus Comparison We can compare the core preoccupations of the different corpora (indyref , pre-EU ref and post-Brexit corpora) by examining keywords analysis to see if it is possible to ascertain any trends across time, as well as between Referendums and Unions. In total, these corpora amount to over 140 million words drawn from a whole range of different text types, so they allow us to draw some robust comparisons, and to make some predictions about where the language of (dis)union might be heading. Figures have been normalised to per million words throughout to allow for differently sized corpora. When the post-Brexit and pre-EU Referendum corpora are compared, the following positive keywords (i.e. more frequent than expected) emerge: Britain, union, people, market(s), economy, policy, Trump(s), States, president (i.e. these are terms which when the corpora are compared, appear with comparatively higher frequencies in the post-Brexit corpus). When the post-Brexit and EU preReferendum corpora are compared with the BNC, the patterns become even more obvious (see Figs. 7.2 and 7.3). In the post-Brexit corpus, there is a concentration on the global and European consequences of the vote, and more emphasis on the economy, trade and markets than there was previously. Fears and warn[ing]s about the future have been replaced by impact, independence and uncertainty concerns and there is a much stronger Trump influence, so this mirrors what was happening in the 46-day Twitter corpus. England and Scotland are mentioned separately—inevitable given the way the voting patterns fell out but also reflecting an increased focus on the potential for the future break-up of the United Kingdom following its departure from the European Union. Most noticeably of all, immigration is less than half as salient as it was previously. Given the

7

Fig. 7.2 Pre-EU Referendum keywords

N

Key word 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

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BREXIT EU REFERENDUM VOTE UK LEAVE REMAIN CO T CAMERON VIA BRITAIN Â NEWS VOTING FARAGE DEBATE CAMPAIGN EUROPE DAVID POLL POLLS BORIS IMMIGRATION VOTERS OSBORNE BBC U TRUMP UKIP STAY WARNS SAYS WHY NIGEL GOVE PRO POST VOTES PM NHS BRITISH EUROPEAN BRITS JOHNSON TORY LATEST TODAY ECONOMY FEARS VOTED DEMOCRACY EURO REGISTER STOCKS PLEASE GUARDIAN CORBYN ANTI POLLING MARKETS

Freq. 1,466,324 550,458 273,709 288,538 197,509 172,965 150,697 139,139 141,931 88,056 74,155 73,868 41,908 65,805 47,438 35,405 48,116 49,688 54,744 51,830 34,985 30,872 29,622 29,761 30,801 26,271 32,950 33,336 23,366 20,843 38,330 22,279 58,999 64,605 24,417 16,702 18,474 28,966 21,316 18,469 19,467 48,524 36,296 13,960 18,447 19,543 22,778 35,985 25,650 18,094 16,382 18,845 13,167 16,754 14,450 26,656 14,899 10,637 11,496 11,723 18,922

% 4.34 1.63 0.81 0.85 0.59 0.51 0.45 0.41 0.42 0.26 0.22 0.22 0.12 0.19 0.14 0.10 0.14 0.15 0.16 0.15 0.10 0.09 0.09 0.09 0.09 0.08 0.10 0.10 0.07 0.06 0.11 0.07 0.17 0.19 0.07 0.05 0.05 0.09 0.06 0.05 0.06 0.14 0.11 0.04 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.11 0.08 0.05 0.05 0.06 0.04 0.05 0.04 0.08 0.04 0.03 0.03 0.03 0.06

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Fig. 7.3 Post-Brexit keywords

N

Key word 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

BREXIT EU UK VOTE REFERENDUM CO POST TRUMP LEAVE NEWS BRITAIN VOTED Â U FARAGE AFTER BORIS REMAIN CAMERON LATEST VOTERS EUROPE PM THERESA GLOBAL EUROPEAN ECONOMY ENGLAND BRITISH SCOTLAND MARKETS IMPACT NIGEL UKIP BBC CORBYN JOHNSON SAYS DAILY EXIT IMMIGRATION ANTI ARTICLE WHY EURO LONDON DEMOCRACY POLITICS UK'S VOTING CAMPAIGN TRADE INDEPENDENCE UNCERTAINTY DONALD LEADER BUSINESS PRO TWITTER VOTES MARKET

Freq. 2,305,029 370,229 287,853 223,130 175,619 156,983 117,394 82,126 116,718 105,392 101,343 64,797 54,659 65,223 47,730 185,712 45,363 59,826 39,543 47,717 36,578 60,958 32,144 28,190 36,332 59,632 46,455 60,144 75,506 47,806 38,232 40,360 31,068 22,397 31,548 21,710 28,224 71,532 35,269 22,637 21,326 18,728 29,890 72,027 17,798 57,132 24,439 28,836 17,277 19,902 29,570 41,126 22,600 18,700 16,955 28,385 54,413 15,774 12,422 19,162 48,507

% 4.56 0.73 0.57 0.44 0.35 0.31 0.23 0.16 0.23 0.21 0.20 0.13 0.11 0.13 0.09 0.37 0.09 0.12 0.08 0.09 0.07 0.12 0.06 0.06 0.07 0.12 0.09 0.12 0.15 0.09 0.08 0.08 0.06 0.04 0.06 0.04 0.06 0.14 0.07 0.04 0.04 0.04 0.06 0.14 0.04 0.11 0.05 0.06 0.03 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.04 0.04 0.03 0.06 0.11 0.03 0.02 0.04 0.10

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significance of debates on immigration during the EU Referendum buildup and its high profile in the arguments made by the Leave campaign, this sudden drop-off was unexpected. According to ONS figures, there was a noticeable increase in migration to the United Kingdom between 2012 and 2014 (this may explain some of the tactics around immigration employed by the Leave campaign) but following a dip in the immediate run-up to and aftermath of the EU Referendum, figures have remained largely stable since the end of 2016. Patterns for EU and non-EU migrants have followed different trends and have different driving forces (mainly work and study, respectively). ‘EU net migration has fallen following peak levels in 2015 and 2016. Since 2013, non-EU net migration has gradually increased and, as at the year ending December 2019, is at the highest level since International Passenger Survey (IPS) records for this group began in 1975’ (ONS May 2020). The largest decreases in EU migration have been in the numbers of people from EU8 countries (those which joined the EU in 2004), such as Poland. The increases in non-EU migration have come primarily from China and India. Hix et al’s (2017) study found that British voters, regardless of age or social class, preferred EU to non-EU migrants, though many would prefer lower immigration levels across the board. As Hix et al. point out, this is the striking fact that is not being talked about. Parts of the Leave campaign focused on anti-EU migrant arguments but given that between 1991 and 2013 non-EU migration was substantially higher than EU migration, and that this seems to be the type of migration that worries the electorate more, this seems somewhat anomalous. Why was this the case? Hix et al. (2017: 2) quote the Labour MP Frank Field: ‘The truth is, I wasn’t brave enough to raise it [immigration] as an issue – though I thought it was an issue for yonks – until we were talking about white people coming in. And even then the anger that this was racist was something one had to face’. UKIP and Brexit Leave discourses were able to tap into community fears about (non-white and/or Muslim) migration without necessarily explicitly saying so, and thus risking being accused of racism or of being aligned with the far-right—a political movement that has historically gained little mainstream traction in the United Kingdom. (Indeed, politicians went to considerable lengths to argue that they were defending the jobs of resident ethnic minorities.) These were the deep-seated fears and emotional responses that Farage’s Breaking Point poster was able to tap

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into. Kaufmann’s (2017) study found that rapid changes in the ethnic make-up of local communities during the 2000s (especially increases in BAME) were more likely to make individuals in those communities vote for UKIP, whereas those communities with longer established ethnic minorities had reduced opposition to immigration and longer term exposure to increased diversity reduced the level of perceived threat. So, the Brexit vote was as much about race and ethnicity, and the perceived ‘other’ (within as well as without), as it was about EU immigration and sovereignty, and the corpus evidence bears this out. The unspoken discourses and the emotional responses triggered arguably held as much sway as the spoken ones. Figure 7.4 shows the marked differences in levels of concentration on (im)migrants and (im)migration between the indyref , pre-EU Referendum and post-Brexit corpora. These items were present in relatively low frequencies in the indyref campaigns, but spiked noticeably in the pre-EU Referendum corpus discourses, only to fall away again in the post-Brexit aftermath. The collocates of immigration, migrant( s) and immigrants also show some interesting contrasts. In the post-Brexit corpus, collocates of immigration such as mass, control(s), (un)controlled, controlling, fears , concern, illegal and Muslim still show the now familiar pre-Brexit discourses. 1000 900 800

Per million words

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pre-Eu Ref migrant(s)

migraon

immigrant(s)

Post-Brexit immigraon

Fig. 7.4 (Im)migrant( s) and (im)migration from indyref to post-Brexit

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Migrant( s) also continues to attract negative collocates; there is still an emphasis on numbers, quotas, surges and singling out of migrants based on country of origin or religion: Hungarian, Polish, French, Muslim, African, Syrian. However, the potentially more negative term immigrant(s) shows some signs of sympathy for these people and an awareness of the toxicity of the Brexit rhetoric, with consideration of anti, blaming, hate, racism, racist , refugees , rhetoric, scapegoat , sentiment and solidarity. These issues were not frequently represented in the pre-EU Referendum corpus; immigrants were not portrayed at all sympathetically there. The quantitative and qualitative corpus evidence bears out Duffy et al.’s (2019: 8) claim that immigration, ‘one of the key drivers of division in the referendum – has since declined significantly in salience, and perceptions of the impact of immigration have actually become more positive, with a narrowing of the gap in opinion between Leavers and Remainers’; see also results from Ipsos Mori survey (2019) on attitudes towards immigration.

Race and Religion A three-way corpus comparison shows marked increases in the frequencies of racism and racist following the EU Referendum in the post-Brexit corpus (see Fig. 7.5). Is this because racism was on the increase, or was something else going on? In the post-Brexit corpus, racist has a split semantic distribution. There are adjectival uses of it to describe abuse, attacks, comments, hate, incidents, rhetoric, taunts, tirade and views, but it is also used as an othering or name-calling term (mostly on Twitter) to describe Leavers and their ideology: racist bigots/scum/xenophobes who are emboldened, ignorant, stupid and vile. Examples from the post-Brexit corpus give a flavour of these posts: ‘Funny how those who called us racists, xenophobes, bigots & Little Englanders wonder why we are goading them. Because we won! HA!’ ‘one thing brexit taught me is, ppl are’nt affected by being called racists/xenophobes anymore… the left has exhausted them’

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450 400

Per million words

350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 indyref

pre-Eu Ref

racist(s)

racism

Post-Brexit

racial

Fig. 7.5 Racist(s), racism and racial from indyref to Brexit

As an article in the Times ‘Brexit tribes are tearing our country in two’ argues: When you catch a group of people in the net of a name like “Leaver” or Remainer” something happens. Individual personalities and nuanced opinions recede and the group identity becomes paramount. … Leaver” and “Remainer” have stuck us simplistically in two tribes, each reduced to stereotype … Leavers are characterised as racist, ignorant, nostalgic, selfish; Remainers as snobby, out of touch, pretentious, disloyal. (Foges 2017)

Duffy et al. (2019: 8) characterise this as ‘affective polarisation’: ‘people on both sides of the Brexit vote dislike the opposing side intensely even though they don’t necessarily disagree with their positions on salient issues’. Post-Brexit, accusing someone of racism or of being a racist may, in many cases, be knee-jerk tribal name-calling and deliberate ‘othering’ rather than principled condemnation of a specific viewpoint or behaviour. Over time, the connotations accreting to this word tend to weaken its semantic force. Of course, that is not so say that racism itself has necessarily lessened. A three-way examination of the use of racial and religious

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terms across the indyref , pre-EU ref and post-Brexit corpora highlights the much greater focus on these groups and markers in the Brexit than indyref debates, but also shows that Muslim( s), Asian(s) and Islam(ic) are still the majority focus, though being Turkish (and therefore potentially Muslim) or Polish are still highly salient categorisations. As we saw in Chapter 2, religion and nation were key points of contestation in the formation of the United Kingdom. Three centuries on, it seems they are still relevant today, with race and ethnicity added to the mix. Figure 7.6 shows that across all three corpora there is antipathy towards foreigners and those who are perceived as ‘other’. Although the indyref corpus has considerably less focus on specific racial or religious groups, as we saw in Chapter 5, it shares the pre- and post-Brexit corpora hostility towards those who can be categorised as coming from elsewhere. So, there is some validity to the frequently made assertion that Brexit discourses, and the Leave campaign especially, simply tapped into existing prejudices and fears, ramping them up and exploiting them to achieve specific political goals. Project Fear is not new, but it is gaining momentum. Turkish Polish Pakistani

Axis Title

Asian Muslim(s) Jewish Jew(s) Islamic Islam foreigners 0

50

100

150

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Per million words indyref

pre-EU Ref

post-Brexit

Fig. 7.6 Racial and religious terms from indyref to post-Brexit

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The Rise of Nationalism from Indyref to Brexit and Beyond We can track the rise of nationalism in the United Kingdom across the last two decades by focusing on the growth of Scottish and English nationalism (see Chapter 3). This increase in nationalist sentiment has played out in voting patterns in parliamentary and General Elections, and in the Scottish Independence and EU Referendums. There have been five Scottish parliamentary elections since the Scottish Parliament was reinstated in 1999. A Referendum on independence was pledged by the SNP in their 2007 and 2011 Scottish parliamentary election manifestos, and the SNP gained a parliamentary majority in 2011 with a total of 69 seats. In 2016, the SNP won 63 seats (a loss of 6 and their parliamentary majority), and Labour was pushed into third place behind the Scottish Conservatives who (with 31 seats) had their best electoral performance in Scotland since 1992. Since the reinstatement of the Scottish parliament in 1999, Scottish Labour has continued to lose seats: their 1999 total of 47 seats and overall majority was nearly halved to 24 seats in 2016. 7th May 2015 saw the UK’s first General Election since the Scottish Independence Referendum. The SNP had a landslide victory, gaining 56 of the possible 59 seats, a result that resonated both within and furth of Scotland. Commenting on the victory, former SNP Leader, Alex Salmond, said: ‘There’s going to be a lion roaring tonight, a Scottish lion, and it’s going to roar with a voice that no government of whatever political complexion is going to be able to ignore’. The roaring was somewhat quieter in 2017, with the SNP losing 21 seats, but their fortunes revived in 2019, with a gain of 13 seats taking them to 48 seats. Scottish Labour, meanwhile, gained only one seat in Scotland—the fewest of any of the main political parties and trailing behind the Scottish Conservatives. Eighteen years previously, Labour had been the main political party in Scotland and looked unassailable. In the United Kingdom, Labour has lost ground to the Conservatives in the last four General Elections, particularly in their former heartlands. In Scotland, they now look to be on the verge of obsolescence. Even traditional party politics may be in decline; Duffy et al. (2019: 7) argue that ‘the number of people who strongly identify with a political party has declined significantly, and is now far exceeded by the number who strongly identify with their side of the Brexit vote’. As can be seen from Figs. 7.7, 7.8, and 7.9, the SNP has dominated Scottish politics since 2011, but the Scottish electorate votes

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450 400 350

Seats

300 250 200 150 100 50 0 2001 Conserva ve

2005 Labour

2010 Lib Dems

2015 SNP

2017

Plaid Cymru

UKIP

2019 Brexit Party

Fig. 7.7 UK General Election results (2001–2019) 60 50

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2017 Lib Dems

Fig. 7.8 UK General Election results in Scotland (2001–2019)

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80 70 60

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2003 SNP

Conserva ve

2007 Labour

2011

2016

Lib Dems

Fig. 7.9 Scottish Parliamentary election results (1999–2016)

slightly differently in UK and Scottish parliamentary elections. Its closest comparator politically speaking (Plaid Cymru also advocates independence from the United Kingdom) has not seen similar levels of success in either UK or Welsh Assembly elections, where the two main UK political parties (Conservative and Labour) have continued to dominate (Mann and Fenton 2017). The Brexit party (established by Nigel Farage in April 2019 with the main aim of ensuring the UK left the EU) made a stronger percentage showing in Wales in the 2019 General Election than in any other part of the United Kingdom. So, nationalism and independence have rather different flavours across the United Kingdom. In Scotland, the last five years have seen the UK political parties (or their Scottish outposts) all but obliterated in General Election results in Scotland, arguably removing their mandate to govern. Given that the majority of Scottish MPs in Westminster are now Scottish Nationalists and the importance of a surge in English nationalism in the Brexit vote and in returning Boris Johnson’s electoral victory, a head-on collision seems inevitable. Add in the impending reality of Scotland (and Northern Ireland) being taken out of the European Union against the will of the Scots and Northern Irish, repeated calls for another Scottish Independence Referendum, and the threats to the continuation of the not-so United Kingdom are self-evident. In 2015, Nigel Farage then leader of UKIP, accused the SNP of antiEnglish racism, a comment that was picked up by many of the London

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newspapers and media outlets. In some cases, consideration of Scottish and English nationalism in the London media before the 2015 General Election was extrapolated to ‘SNP = nationalism = UKIP’ with inbuilt implicit or explicit moral condemnation of all three (Blain 2016: 231). Blain (2016: 231) goes on to cite examples of emotional and outspoken anti-Scottish (nationalist) sentiment in the London press in the runup to the 2015 election, focused on depictions of Scottish ‘dislike for, and ingratitude toward, England and the English’, and evoking violent imagery e.g. Allan Massie (himself a Scot)’s article in the Mail on Sunday (8 March 2015) which makes intertextual reference to the infamous 1968 Enoch Powell anti-immigration ‘rivers of blood’ speech: ‘if Scotland rules England, I can foresee the Thames foaming with much blood’, and thus situates Scottish nationalism within discourses of racism. As we saw in Chapter 3, the establishing of UKIP and then the Brexit Party (both associated at various times with Nigel Farage (see below) tapped into and fuelled further a rise in English nationalism. Although their General Election results have been inconsequential, both parties have had enormous influence in shaping public perceptions of the European Union and the ‘other’. Kaufmann (2017: 68) claims that ‘the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) has been the most disruptive development in British party politics for a generation, arguably helping mobilise the Brexit vote’. Writing in the Guardian on 19th June 2016, Fintan O’Toole (columnist for the Irish Times ) claimed ‘when you strip away the rhetoric, Brexit is an English Nationalist movement’. Many of his predictions on the vote turned out to be accurate, but it is his assertion that England is heading towards ‘accidental [rather than deliberate and deliberated] independence’ that is most interesting for this study. Heath and Richards (2018) found that exclusively English identities were associated with preference for a hard Brexit, and worries about retention of sovereignty, free movement, EU budgetary contributions and the freedom to make independent trade deals. They also found that people espousing an English only identity were likely to be ‘nativist’, ‘ethnocentric’ and more blatantly racist than other groups, and to believe in ancestry as a criterion for belonging.

The Language of Political Leaders Duffy et al. (2019: 10) claim that polarising politics of the type we saw in the Brexit campaigns have wider societal effects whereby ‘a hostile

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culture of “othering” political rivals can spill over into social relations’ and spread to the electorate. They argue that voters take their cues from political leaders, and that the ways in which politicians use language can significantly affect public opinion. In this section we take a longitudinal look at the language of UK parliamentary debate, as evidenced in the Hansard corpus, and at the linguistic habits of key politicians: Nicola Sturgeon, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson each of whom has argued for independence from Union. As we saw in Chapter 6, metaphors around WAR and INVASION, ARGUMENT/POLITICS IS WAR, BREXIT IS WAR, DISTRUST and BETRAYAL conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; CharterisBlack 2019) were used frequently in Brexit discourses. We can track usage of these metaphors across time in Westminster parliamentary discourse via the Hansard corpus. A search on ‘surrender’, as expected, showed peaks in 1900 (re the second Boer War) and around the climaxes of World Wars I and II. What was much less expected were the even higher peaks in 2000 and 2019. In 2000, the usages relate to the surrender of passports and the road traffic act re surrender of driving licences, so are a false positive for this study. In 2019, the usages cluster around the September debates, are much more metaphorical, and are frequently tied to Brexit and the emotive terminology of surrender Bill/Act being used by Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg in the House of Commons. ‘Traitor’ (see Fig. 7.10) has a non-metaphorical peak in 1980 (generated by the revelation that Anthony Blunt, the Queen’s former art

Fig. 7.10 Traitor in Hansard corpus (2000–2020)

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Fig. 7.11 Betrayal in Hansard corpus (1900–2020)

curator, had been a Soviet spy at the heart of the British establishment for many years). It becomes prominent again, but this time in a metaphorical sense, during the Brexit debates in 2018-19. ‘Betrayal’ is also noticeably prominent in 2019 (see Fig. 7.11), being used 170 times across the year, so the observations that the language around Brexit is inflammatory and possibly also toxic are borne out by the data. This focus on ‘Distrust and Betrayal’ was also noted by Charteris-Black (2019) in his analysis of the 2016–2018 debates, but what is interesting to note is that usages of ‘traitor’ and ‘betrayal’ have increased still further in subsequent years. November 2018 saw a spike in uses of betrayal with 11 usages, but January 2019 had 15 occurrences; with few exceptions, the matter under discussion was leaving the EU. In some respects, the language around Brexit is becoming more, not less, hostile and highly emotionally charged. Analysis of the Hansard corpus reveals 2665 occurrences of take back control between 23 June 2016 and 15 Feb 2020, so again, in Westminster parliamentary discourse, this phrase was more frequently used after the Referendum than it was in the run-up to the vote, with particular peaks in Dec 2018 and Jan 2019, when the deal then PM Theresa May had brokered with the EU was being debated and ultimately rejected (see Chapter 6 for discussion of this slogan in pre-EU Referendum discourse). Another three-word, three stresses slogan—Get Brexit Done—was used by Boris Johnson in his successful December 2019 election campaign. Not only did it appeal to Leavers, but it also appealed to people of all viewpoints who were fed up with the ongoing wrangling over Brexit.

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Even Johnson’s rather unorthodox publicity stunt of driving a JCB digger bearing this slogan through a Styrofoam ‘wall’ emblazoned with the word ‘Gridlock’ seemed to work. Like ‘Take Back Control’, it is an effective and memorable imperative that is difficult to argue with. (It is thought that both were coined by Dominic Cummings.) To these we can add the somewhat impenetrable, but nevertheless effective slogans: ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and ‘Leave means Leave’. Catchy jingoistic political slogans are effective—yet more evidence that the language used matters, even if the meaning is sometimes obscured.

Nigel Farage’s Rhetoric One of the most influential and divisive figures in the Brexit debates has been Nigel Farage, former leader of UKIP and then leader of the Brexit Party. His own website (Farage 2020) describes him as ‘a champion of ideas and transformative change’, and quotes Nick Cohen from the Guardian: ‘Nigel Farage remains the most significant politician since Margaret Thatcher, his influence everywhere’. He had his own Radio and YouTube show four nights a week on LBC (Leading Britain’s Conversation) between 2017 and June 2020 (he was axed from the station after comparing Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd and the removal of statues of slave traders to the Taliban’s destruction of cultural artefacts), and also contributes to the American TV network Fox News. He received public support from President Trump, support which he reciprocated in supporting Trump’s presidential candidacy. Interestingly, both men present themselves as an anti-elite establishment ‘man of the people’ and as a natural spokesperson for the needs and concerns of the ‘ordinary, decent people’ and the socioeconomically disadvantaged, despite neither having first-hand experience of economic deprivation. Both promised to reduce immigration, and both pledged to restore their country’s power, influence and pride: make Britain/America great again (Wilson 2017). A comparison of the language Johnson and Farage employ in their speeches yields some suggestive similarities. Johnson’s speeches on the case to vote Leave (9 May 2016), Uniting for a Great Brexit (14 Feb 2018), General Election victory speech (13 Dec 2019), address to the nation on Brexit leaving day (31 Jan 2020) and his Greenwich speech (2 Feb 2020) bear no small resemblance to Farage’s speech to the European Parliament (28 June 2016) after Britain voted to leave the

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European Union, and his speech about the Brexit party not contesting Conservative-held seats (Hartlepool, 11 November 2019). Using CFL Lexical Feature Marker’s core vocabulary function (a list of the most commonly used content words in current English), it is notable that the same keywords crop up in the speeches given by both politicians: people, country, trade, change, need, want. Whilst the first two are common in the speeches of most politicians, the latter four are especially prominent in Farage and Johnson’s discourse. The Andrew Marr interviews allow us to make comparisons between the different political players. Analysis of trigrams reveals some interesting linguistic habits and the preoccupations of each of the leaders. Nicola Sturgeon’s most frequent trigrams included: protect Scotland’s interests; people in Scotland; Scotland voted to; the Scottish government; in unchartered territory; to seek to; I’m trying to; of the EU; of the UK; a UK government; voted to remain; voted to leave; get back in; to stay in. Boris Johnson’s featured: take back control; taking back control; in our country; and I think; we’re not going; we want to; we’re going to; think most people; the will of; the truth. Nigel Farage’s most frequent trigrams included: (do) you respect the; voted for us; believe in democracy; do you want; do you think; you would have; you’re not going; you want us; you think there; you know the. A keywords analysis of the language used in a selection of Nicola Sturgeon’s post-Brexit speeches reveals some interesting differences from the overall corpus trends. As anticipated, EU, UK, Scotland, Scottish, Referendum, government and independence are all positively key. However, other less obvious but keywords in the Scottish context are choice, choose, future, compromise, deal, interests, powers, debate, challenges, membership and also immigration and migration. By comparison, Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit speeches had trade, remainers, free, and friends.

Friend or Foe? Friends is used in distinctive ways in the post-Brexit corpus. Although ostensibly an ingroup identifier, in many cases friends seems to be used as an outgroup identifier. Boris Johnson’s comments to his ‘remainer friends’ are at pains to point out the gulf between his position and theirs, and the United Kingdom and Europe.

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‘We now have arrangements of such complexity and obscurity that I ask even my most diehard of remainer friends if they can explain their Spitzenkandidaten process – which has genuinely delighted the MEPs in Strasbourg but has mystified us in the UK.’ (Johnson, 14 February 2018) ‘And so I say to my remaining Remainer friends – actually quite a numerous bunch – more people voted Brexit than have ever voted for anything in the history of this country.’ (Johnson, 14 February 2018) (my emphases)

Although the most frequent collocate in the corpus is British friends, the next most frequent friends in the corpus are European, American, then Brexit and English friends, and friends in/across Europe, across the pond. Polish, French and German friends are marginally more frequent than Scottish friends. Both Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage talk about European friends and our friends in Europe in ways that suggest that friendship means those at arms’ length—i.e. that these ‘friends’ are distal rather than proximal, and that their deictic centre is far removed from that of the UK. For example, Johnson talks about: ‘People fear the disruption they associate with change, and that our friends and partners in the EU may make life difficult for us.’ (14 February 2018) ‘Not because we want to detract from anything done by our EU friends.’ (31 Jan 2020)(my emphases)

For Nicola Sturgeon, the friends referred to in her speeches are mostly within the United Kingdom, with less frequent reference to friends across Europe, perhaps suggesting that she sees Scotland as being at a greater distance from the rest of the United Kingdom than from Europe. Analysis of her trigrams shows a First Minister of Scotland at pains to point out where they and their fellow Scottish voters differ from the UK government. In his much criticised and rather belligerent speech to the European Parliament on 28 June 2016, Nigel Farage began with comments like ‘well … you’re not laughing now, are you?’; ‘you are in denial’; ‘you have by stealth and deception, and without telling the truth … you have imposed …you simply ignored them’, moved on to asking that they

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‘negotiate a different relationship’, insulted his fellow MEPs with statements like ‘I know that virtually none of you have ever done a proper job in your lives’ and ended by inviting them to ‘be grown up, pragmatic, sensible, realistic’ to ‘cut a sensible tariff-free deal’ and ‘thereafter recognise that the United Kingdom will be your friend, that we will trade with you, cooperate with you, we will be your best friends in the world’ as long as ‘[you] allow us to go off and pursue our global plans and ambition’. These examples highlight the negative prosody associated with friends in political discourse and illustrate that friends can be firmly positioned in the outgroup rather than ingroup—i.e. distal from the speaker/writers’ and audiences’ deictic centre.

Threats to Identity and Fear of the ‘Other’ As we have noted in this and preceding chapters, ingroup and outgroup membership, and most especially suspicion of or fear of the ‘other’ underpin much of the conflict in the EU Referendum debates and were also present in some of the indyref discourses. Fundamentally, these are identity conflicts because they centre on who is the ‘us’ and what happens when the demographic of the ‘we’ alters or is challenged by social change such as migration, socio-economic advantage or decline, or political events. These are not new conflicts, but they have been heightened and brought into much sharper focus in recent years (Sobolewska and Ford 2020). Evans and Menon (2017: 71) argue that ‘above all, the Referendum revealed a country divided. Divided over values, divided by class, by generation, education and geography. And these divisions will continue to shape our politics for the foreseeable future’. As discussed in Chapter 3, identities can be simultaneously inclusive and exclusive, offering membership to the ingroup but also furthering the segregation and marginalisation of outgroups. Dual identities, and which pairings are considered desirable or allowable or incongruent and by whom (e.g. patriotic anti-nationalist Scot; BAME British not English; equally Scottish and British; more English than British; Northern Irish non-Unionist; British not European) are further sites of contestation. Although tensions over immigration seem to have subsided since the EU Referendum, those around ethnic diversity, visibility, representation and equality have not, as has been evidenced in the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations and reactions to them.

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Language Matters Throughout this book, we have seen that language matters. The social constructionist approach ‘emphasises the role of language and discourse in constructing knowledge about the social world, for example, the categories we use to make sense of the world, such as “us” and “them”, “nationals” and “foreigners”’ and this makes prejudice something that we ‘do’ rather than ‘have’ (Andreouli et al. 2020: 310). As we saw in the previous chapter, although ostensibly ‘pushing an agenda for free trade and sovereignty, the Brexit Leave imperative to “take control” became discursively mobilised in favour of arguments that […] problematised immigration’ (Zappettini 2019: 413) and ‘engendered and legitimised a new toxic (inter)national logic of Brexit’ (Zappettini 2019: 403). Summer 2016 saw a spike in hate crimes towards immigrants and ethnic minorities (Evans and Menon 2017). Komaromi (2016) notes 6000 + hate crimes reported to the NPCC (National Police Chiefs Council) in the four weeks immediately following the Referendum. The violence and abuse were directed, apparently indiscriminately, at non-white UK citizens and white European migrants such as Polish workers, with both groups being classed as ‘outsiders’ (Virdee and McGeever 2018: 1808). Hate crime figures have continued to increase year on year since the Referendum. In 2018–2019, there were 78,991 racial hate crimes recorded in England and Wales, and 8566 religious hate crimes, of which 47% were targeted against Muslims and 18% against Jews (Home Office Statistics 2019). Boris Johnson’s (then Foreign Secretary) 2018 description of Muslim women wearing burkas as resembling ‘letter boxes’ in his Telegraph column was widely criticised as fuelling Islamophobia, and was blamed for a 375% increase in Islamophobic incidents, many of which directly referenced Johnson or the language he used (Dearden 2019). Writing in the Guardian (29 September 2019), Andrew Rawnsley comments that ‘there are now some clear connections between incendiary political language and physical violence’.

Jo Cox and the Consequences of Inflammatory Language On 16 June 2016, one week before the EU Referendum vote, Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen, was stabbed and shot in the street by Tommy Mair, a man with links to the far-right group ‘Britain First’.

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She died at the scene. Campaigning on both sides was briefly suspended. At the time, there were calls for the increasingly inflammatory, brutal and toxic language used by campaigners, the media and the public to be moderated. During tributes paid to the murdered MP, Stephen Kinnock told the House of Commons: ‘Jo understood that rhetoric has consequences. When insecurity, fear and anger are used to light a fuse, then an explosion is inevitable’ (Peck 2016). But as we have seen, little seems to have changed in the intervening years. Three years on in July 2019, her sister, Kim Leadbetter, wrote an article in the Yorkshire Post arguing that ‘language matters’, and appealing to the new PM, Boris Johnson, to tone down the political rhetoric (Leadbetter 2019). On 25 September 2019, Paula Sherriff (MP) made a speech in the House of Commons asking the Prime Minister to stop using words like ‘surrender’, ‘traitor’ and ‘betrayal’ with reference to Brexit, a plea that was dismissed by Johnson as ‘humbug’. Sherriff reminded the House that the far-right supporter who had murdered Jo Cox shouted ‘Death to traitors’ in court. In the course of the same debate, Johnson told another Labour MP, Tracy Brabin, that the best way to honour Jo Cox’s memory was to ‘get Brexit done’, a statement that was later criticised by his own sister, Rachel Johnson, as inappropriate and ‘tasteless’ given Jo Cox’s record in campaigning for the European Union. Amber Rudd accused the Prime Minister of using ‘the sort of language people think legitimises a more aggressive approach and sometimes violence’ (BBC 2019). Higgins (2019) draws attention to descriptions of Brexit as a vehicle for ‘hypermasculine displaying’ and ‘toxic masculinity’. The PM was also criticised by Justin King (European Commissioner): ‘Crass and dangerous. If you think extreme language doesn’t fuel political violence across Europe, including UK, then you’re not paying attention’, whilst Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament Brexit’s coordinator, described it as ‘the language of Europe’s dark past’, which ‘implies Britain’s European allies and neighbours are enemies’ (Stone 2019).

Post-script The seemingly never-ending political furore and media focus on Brexit came abruptly to a halt in March 2020 when the United Kingdom entered a state of lockdown in response to the global Coronavirus pandemic. At the time of writing, 31 December 2020 and the end of the UK’s transition period in leaving the EU are looming; the option

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to extend the transitional period by the end of June 2020 was declined; and yet everything is eerily quiet. The focus has been, quite rightly, on dealing with an unprecedented emergency and saving lives. But scratch beneath the surface and some of the old tensions and rhetoric begin to re-emerge. There seemed to be a renewed suspicion of Europe and a belief that what had happened there could not possibly happen in the United Kingdom. UK partner nations went their own ways in responding to the crisis; though matters of health, education, the economy, transport and justice are devolved to individual nations, the resulting differences in the easing of lockdown and rules around travel, leisure, meeting other people, reopening the economy and schools and even the wearing of facemasks were tangible evidence of increased UK fragmentation. At one point, there was media speculation as to whether Nicola Sturgeon would close the border with England, and the extent to which such a border existed. Meanwhile, the Brexit ship has been sailing silently onwards— its destination certainly no Yeatsian Byzantium. The endpoint is set, the outcome unknown. Only time will tell ‘…of what is past, or passing, or to come…’.

References Andreouli, E., Greenland, K., & Figgou, L. (2020). Lay discourses about Brexit and prejudice: “Ideological creativity” and its limits in Brexit debates. European Journal of Social Psychology, 50(2), 309–322. BBC. (2019, September 27). Amber Rudd accuses Number 10 of language that ‘incites violence’. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-498 54569. Accessed 31 August 2020. Blain, N. (2016). Afterword: Reimagining Scotland in a new political landscape. In N. Blain & D. Hutcheson (Eds.) (with G. Hassan), Scotland’s Referendum and the media: National and international perspectives (pp. 228–241). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Charteris-Black, J. (2019). Metaphors of Brexit: No cherries on the cake? Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Dearden, L. (2019, September 2). Islamophobic incidents rose 375% after Boris Johnson compared Muslim women to ‘letterboxes’, figures show. Independent. Duffy, B., Hewlett, K., McCrae, J., & Hall, J. (2019). Divided Britain?: Polarisation and fragmentation trends in the UK. The Policy Institute, King’s College London. Evans, G., & Menon, A. (2017). Brexit and British politics. Cambridge: Polity.

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Farage, N. (2020). Nigel Farage: A champion of ideas and transformative change. https://www.nfarage.com/. Accessed 3 September 2020. Foges, C. (2017, December 4). Brexit tribes are tearing our country in two. The Times. Heath, A., & Richards, L. (2018). Nationalism, racism and identity: What connects Englishness to a preference for a hard Brexit. London School of Economics. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/englishness-racismbrexit/. Accessed 31 August 2020. Higgins, M. (2019). Political masculinities and Brexit: Men of war. Journal of Language and Politics, 19(1), 1–18. Hitwise. (2016, June 27). How did Britons react in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote? https://www.hitwise.com/en/2016/06/27/howdid-britons-react-in-the-immediate-aftermath-of-the-brexit-vote-2/. Accessed 25 June 2020. Hix, S., Kaufmann, E., & Leeper, T.J. (2017). UK voters, including Leavers, care more about reducing non-EU than EU migration. British Politics and Policy at LSE. Home Office Statistics (2019). Hate crime, England and Wales, 2018 to 2019. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hate-crime-england-andwales-2018-to-2019. Accessed 15 January 2020. Ipsos Mori. (2019, March 23). Britons are more positive than negative about immigration’s impact on Britain. https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/enuk/britons-are-more-positive-negative-about-immigrations-impact-britain. Accessed 20 June 2020. Kaufmann, E. (2017). Levels or changes?: Ethnic context, immigration and the UK Independence Party vote. Electoral Studies, 48, 57–69. Komaromi, P. (2016). Post-referendum racism and xenophobia: The role of social media activism in challenging the normalisation of xenoracist narratives. http://www.irr.org.uk/news/post-referendum-racism-andthe-importance-of-social-activism/. Accessed 31 August 2020. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Leadbetter, K. (2019, July 24). My appeal to Boris Johnson to embrace my late sister Jo Cox’s ‘more in common’ mission. Yorkshire Post. Mann, R., & Fenton, S. (2017). Nation, class and resentment: The politics of national identity in England, Scotland and Wales. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Massie, A. (2015, March 8). To borrow the most incendiary saying of all: if Scotland rules England, I can foresee the Thames foaming with much blood. Mail on Sunday. Office for National Statistics (2020, May). Migration statistics quarterly report. https://www.ons.gov.uk/. Accessed 24 June 2020.

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O’Toole, F. (2016, June 19). Brexit is being driven by English nationalism. And it will end in self-rule. The Guardian. Peck, T. (2016, June 20). Jo Cox remembered in Parliament tributes: ‘Jo understood that rhetoric has consequences’. Independent. Rawnsley, A. (2019, September 29). Boris Johnson seeks to divide and conquer with his incendiary rhetoric. Guardian. Sobolewska, M., & Ford, R. (2020). Brexit and Britain’s Culture Wars. Political Insight, 11(1), 4–7. Stone, J. (2019, September 26). Boris Johnson’s ‘crass and dangerous’ rhetoric will fuel violence on UK’s streets, warns EU Commissioner. Independent. Swain, J. (2016). Brexit debate on Twitter week ending March 27th . Medium. https://medium.com/neo4j/brexit-debate-on-twitter-week–ending-march27th-2a18cf442878. Accessed 15 January 2020. Virdee, S., & McGeever, B. (2018). Racism, crisis, Brexit. Ethnic and racial studies, 41(10), 1802–1819. Wilson, G.K. (2017). Brexit, Trump and the special relationship. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 19(3), 543–557. Zappettini, F. (2019). The Brexit referendum: How trade and immigration in the discourses of the official campaigns have legitimised a toxic (inter)national logic. Critical Discourse Studies, 16(4), 403–419.

Index

A Accent, 17, 27, 78, 79 Agency, 43, 94 Albanian, 119 Anti-German sentiment, 113 Article 50, 130 Aspect, 48 progressive, 107, 110, 116 Asylum seekers., 116, 117, 119, 123. See also Refugee(s); RASIM

B Backstop (Northern Ireland), 12 Better Together campaign (indyref), 54, 61, 66, 75, 105, 111 Breaking Point poster, 36, 47, 114, 137 Brexit, 2, 12, 13, 19, 93, 94, 133 Brexit Party, 21, 105, 144, 145, 148 British National Party (BNP), 35 Brown, Gordon, 17, 56, 75–77, 105

C Calman Commission, 16 Cameron, David, 2, 17, 20, 56, 75, 76, 78, 88, 91, 98, 105, 120 Clegg, Nick, 17, 75, 78 Collocational analysis, 43, 44, 59, 61, 65, 68, 87, 93, 110, 111, 115–119, 123, 138, 150 Conservatives, 13, 20, 21 Scottish Conservatives, 142 Constitution Reform Group, 20 Corbyn, Jeremy, 88, 91 Corpus linguistics, 41, 42 Cox, Jo, 152 Critical discourse analysis (CDA), 41 Cummings, Dominic, 95, 96

D Deictic centre, 48, 49, 57, 60, 65, 76, 150, 151 Democracy, 107, 112, 133, 134 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), 11, 21

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 F. M. Douglas, Political, Public and Media Discourses from Indyref to Brexit, Rhetoric, Politics and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67384-0

157

158

INDEX

Devolution, 8, 10, 14, 15, 17, 29, 31, 54, 106

Hate crimes, 152

E Economy, 56, 87, 91, 95, 98, 99, 104, 106, 107, 109, 133, 134 EEC Referendum, 18 England, 19 Ethnicity, 27, 36, 69, 72, 123, 138, 141 European identity, 28, 30, 33, 34, 151 European Union, 12, 18, 20, 21 European Union Referendum, 2, 19, 33, 70, 86, 130 Euroscepticism, 20, 33

I Identity(ies), 3, 25, 86 dual, 28, 151 ethnic, 3, 25, 34 language and, 2, 26 national.. See also National identity(ies) political, 25, 32 racial, 3, 25, 34 social (class), 3, 25, 32 supranational., 25, 28, 32, 33. See also European identity threats to, 151 Imagined community(ies), 28, 49, 57, 63 Immigrant(s)., 117, 120, 130, 133, 138. See also Migrant(s); RASIM Immigration., 36, 70, 91, 95, 96, 99, 101, 106, 107, 110, 113, 115–117, 120, 134, 138, 139. See also Migration Independence, 9, 16, 29, 80, 86, 104–106, 133, 144 Irish, 10 Scottish, 22, 58 Welsh, 6 Indyref, 2, 16, 54. See also Scottish Independence Referendum Indyref corpus, 2, 55, 103 Ingroup., 26, 27, 63, 79, 149, 151. See also Outgroup Ireland, 9 Irish Language Act , 12

F Farage, Nigel, 32, 88, 91, 105, 113, 144, 145, 148–150 Far-right, 137 Fear, 61, 79, 91, 110, 123, 133, 134, 137, 138, 151 Flag(s), 35, 63, 104 Saltire, 62–64, 104 St George, 104 Union Jack, 104 Freedom, 111, 133 breaking free of EU, 114 freedom of movement, 19, 71, 112, 145 free speech, 112 free trade, 112, 152 Friends, 149–151 G Gove, Michael, 88, 91, 94, 95, 107 H Hashtags (#), 87–89

J Johnson, Boris, 2, 20, 21, 88, 91, 95, 113, 144, 147–150, 152, 153

INDEX

K Keywords, 44, 65, 90, 134–136, 149 negative, 44 positive, 44 L Labour, 12, 15, 17, 18, 21 Scottish Labour, 15, 142 Language, 12, 86, 146, 153 and identity, 26 divides us from them, 26, 27 English, 7, 8 Irish, 11, 12 Scots, 14, 79 Ulster Scots, 11 Welsh, 7 Leave campaign (EU ref), 19, 21, 32, 86, 88, 93–95, 103, 137 take back control, 33, 96, 107 ‘taking back control’ (mantra), 147 Vote Leave, 95, 96, 110 Leave EU campaign (EU ref), 91 Liberal Democrats, 21 M May, Theresa, 2, 12, 20, 113 Metaphor(s), 45, 49, 61 betrayal, 147, 153 building, 49, 76, 78 conceptual, 49, 76, 123, 146 container, 49, 62 distrust and betrayal, 123, 146 divorce, 62 family, 49, 61, 76 fluids, 62 natural disaster, 62 surrender, 146, 153 traitor(s), 112, 123, 146, 153 visual.. See also Multimodal discourse war, 123

159

argument/politics is war, 146 war and invasion, 123, 146 Migrant(s)., 71, 101, 114–116, 119, 120, 133, 137–139, 152. See also Asylum seekers; Immigrant(s); RASIM; Refugee(s) economic, 119 Migration., 35, 71, 87, 106, 110, 137. See also Immigration Miliband, Ed, 17, 75, 78 Modality, 44, 96, 102 modal auxiliary verbs, 89, 102, 110 Moral panic, 91, 99, 100, 101. See also Othering fear(s).. See also Fear scapegoating, 122, 139 scaremongering , 101 scaremongering, 61, 133 threat(s).. See also Threats warn, 101 Multiculturalism, 34 Multimodal discourse, 47, 110

N Name calling, 66 National Assembly for Wales, 22 National identity(ies), 25, 27–29, 32, 104 British, 28–31, 35, 104, 151 English, 29–31, 35, 145, 151 Irish, 28 Northern Irish, 29 Scottish, 28–30, 32, 78, 151 Welsh, 7, 28 Nationalism, 9, 14, 18, 29–32, 58, 61, 73, 86, 103, 104, 142, 144, 145 banal, 28, 57, 60 British, 104 English, 104 Scottish, 104

160

INDEX

Welsh, 9 Nationalist(s), 3, 7, 9, 10, 13, 31, 59, 60, 103, 107, 133, 145 Nationality, 70, 91 Newspaper(s), 55, 92, 120 English, 55, 60 Scottish, 55, 57–59, 61, 65, 86, 105, 116 UK (English), 86, 94, 105, 115 US, 86 N-grams, 44, 65, 89 bigrams, 63, 89 trigrams, 89, 104, 123, 133, 134, 149 Northern Ireland, 19 Northern Ireland Assembly, 2, 11–13, 22 O Osborne, George, 88, 91, 98, 105 Othering, 26, 34, 36, 53, 66, 67, 72, 100, 116, 138, 140, 146, 151. See also Outgroup Outgroup., 26, 27, 63, 79, 149, 151. See also Ingroup P Party political discourse, 74 Plaid Cymru, 9, 31, 144 Poland, 137 Poles, 119, 122 Polish, 139, 141, 152 Populism, 93 (far) right-wing populism, 94, 122 populist, 33 Post-Brexit corpus, 2, 131 Pre-EU Referendum corpus, 2, 86, 103, 105 Project Fear., 99. See also Remain campaign (EU ref); Scottish Independence Referendum

Pronouns, 43

R Race, 36, 69, 72, 91, 110, 115, 119, 138, 139, 141 Racism, 66, 70, 73, 103, 110, 117, 120, 133, 137, 139–141, 144 Racist, 73, 103, 122, 133, 139, 140, 145 discourse, 69 RASIM, 115 Refugee(s)., 115, 117, 139. See also Asylum seekers Religion, 7, 11, 14, 119, 139, 141 Catholic(ism), 7, 9, 11, 28 Islam, 120, 122, 141 Jewish, 72 Muslim(s), 36, 119, 120, 122, 137–139, 141, 152 Protestant(ism), 7, 11, 14, 28 religious minorities, 101 Remain campaign (EU ref), 86, 88, 93, 94, 98 Better Together (slogan), 95 Britain Stronger in Europe, 98, 111 Stronger In, 95 Rhetoric, 40, 41, 45, 77, 122, 139, 153 anti-rhetoric, 47 dispositio, 46 elocutio, 46 ethos , 46, 78 inventio, 46 kairos , 46, 77 logos , 46, 78 memoria, 46, 78 pathos , 46, 78 pronunciatio, 46 visual rhetoric.. See also Multimodal discourse Risk(s), 133

INDEX

accusations of, 110 benefits vs., 98 focus on, 99 from unknown, 91 language of, 101

S Salmond, Alex, 16, 55, 79, 93, 142 Scotland, 13, 19 vs. England, 65, 66 Scottish Independence Referendum, 2, 3, 14, 16, 19, 32, 54, 75. See also Indyref Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), 15, 21, 31, 79, 142 Scottish Parliament, 8, 15, 17, 21, 58, 80, 142 Sinn Féin, 11–13 Slogan(s), 62, 95, 96, 98, 101, 107, 110, 111, 147 Sovereignty, 7, 31, 86, 87, 91, 98, 104–107, 109, 133 Speeches, 76, 77, 79, 80 Sturgeon, Nicola, 19, 93, 105, 106, 149, 150 Symbolism, 104 nationalist/cultural symbols., 104. See also Flag(s) symbolic communities, 58 symbolic functions, 26 symbolic nationalism, 62 Syrian, 114, 139

T Tense, 48, 102 Threats, 100, 110, 114, 116, 133 Trade, 13, 106, 133, 134

161

Trump, Donald, 62, 92, 120, 134, 148 Turkey, 95 Turkish, 119, 141 Turks, 119, 122 Twitter, 86, 87, 90, 92, 120, 131, 139 U UK Independence Party (UKIP), 21, 31, 32, 69, 73, 105, 137, 138, 144, 145, 148 Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), 10, 12 Union, 56, 58, 59, 134 Act of Kingly Title, 9 Act of Union (Irish), 9, 10 Act of Union (Welsh), 6, 7 Act(s) of Union, 6, 20 contexts of, 6, 54 Treaty of Union, 14 Union of the Crowns, 13 Unionism, 58 Unionist(s), 3, 13, 31, 57, 60, 103 W Wales, 6, 19 Welsh Language Acts , 7 Welsh National Assembly, 8 X Xenophobia, 74, 103, 113, 120, 122, 139 Y Yes Scotland campaign (indyref), 54, 61, 63, 66, 80