THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT
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THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY
Brexit: The Legal Framework for Withdrawal from the EU or Renegotiation of EU Membership by Steve Peers
Brexit: What Happens Next by Steve Peers
Britannia’s Zealots: The Conservative Right from Empire to Brexit by N. C. Fleming
THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT
How Britain talked its way out of the European Union
STEVE BUCKLEDEE
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
CONTENTS
Introduction
1‘The EU isn’t much cop but . . .’. Remain supporters’ use of coordinative constructions
2Hedging and modality versus strident claims and apparent absence of doubt
3More to imperatives than meets the eye
4Inclusive we, the former City broker as champion of the common man, and good old Bojo: How the pro-Brexit press created the illusion of a classless alliance
5Democracy myths and facts: A double defeat for David Cameron
6‘Free’: A little word that did a big job for Brexit
7Nominalization, presupposition and naturalization
8The language of racism lite, and not so lite
9Comparison with the Scottish independence referendum of 2014: How Project Fear worked in 2014 but not in 2016
10Leave’s appointment with history and Remain’s another day at the office
11Little Englanders or reaching out to the world beyond Europe? Comparison with the 1975 referendum on remaining a member of the European Economic Community
12From ‘Up Yours Delors’ (1990) to ‘Stick it up your Juncker’ (2016). Was it The Sun wot won it once again?
13Dirty tricks: Lies, personal attacks and the Queen supports UKIP
14The Day After: How could this happen?
15The issue that would not go away: The general election of 2017
The Epilogue So Far
References
Index
Introduction
Language can invigorate or dismay, inspire people to commit heroic deeds or justify their most despicable acts, illuminate our successes or expose our self-inflicted wounds.
This book is about the power that language possesses. It investigates how the Brexit campaigners used language much more persuasively than their counterparts in the Remain camp in the build-up to the referendum of 23 June 2016, which was to decide whether the United Kingdom should continue to be a member of the European Union. It is, of course, difficult to sound impassioned and to employ coruscating rhetoric when your message is that, on balance, it is better to stick with the status quo and just leave things as they are. It is harder still if leaving things as they are means persevering with a historically uneasy relationship with an unloved and sometimes overbearing partner. If, in contrast, your message is an appeal to a love of liberty, a traditional sense of justice and national pride, then it naturally follows that urging people to have the courage to make a bid for freedom will involve more grandiloquent language, powerful metaphors and a rousing tone.
In a democracy, however, it is not automatically the case that whoever campaigns more vigorously will win, for in the privacy – and loneliness – of the voting booth, electors may lose their nerve and go for the boring but safe option rather than take the bold step towards an uncertain future. In the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, a majority of Scots decided it was better the devil they knew despite the fact that the Scottish National Party had campaigned energetically and effectively.
Two years later many of us chose not to stay up till dawn on 24 June to follow the referendum results as they came in because we expected something similar to the outcome in Scotland, that is, that a lot of people who had toyed with the idea of voting to leave the EU would nevertheless cast an unenthusiastic vote to stay in once they had the ballot paper in front of them. The news on breakfast TV soon informed us that the Remain camp’s complacency had been misplaced.
Inquests into the cause of the unexpected result have offered a number of hypotheses: it was an anti-establishment protest vote that proved to be more successful than the protesters themselves really intended; an underestimation of public concern over immigration from EU member states; too many pro-Remain young people were so confident of the outcome that they did not bother to vote; it was a genuine protest by those who perceived themselves as economic losers ignored by the decision makers; heavy rain on voting day deterred lackadaisical Remain supporters while their more committed adversaries splashed through puddles to get to the polling station.
The first half of this book concentrates primarily on the question of language, the highly effective linguistic strategies employed by the Brexit campaigners compared with the dispassionate, at times spiritless language used by pro-Remain supporters. It would be a gross exaggeration to claim that the language issue swung the vote in favour of Leave, but a case can be made that it was at least a contributing factor in what was, after all, a narrow 52–48 per cent victory for the side that expressed its message with greater force and conviction.
Chapters 9 to 15 relate language use to the wider sociopolitical and historical context since 1945, including Britain’s accession to the original European Economic Community (which was enthusiastically greeted by the same newspapers that were ferociously anti-EU in 2016), the souring of relations with Brussels during Margaret Thatcher’s long premiership, and the deep divisions in British society that were painfully exposed by Leave’s victory.
I began collecting data in January 2016 and continued to do so up to and including voting day on 23 June. The main sources of material were the official and unofficial websites devoted to the Remain and Leave campaigns, speeches and interviews involving mostly politicians but also economists and bankers, and editorials and articles from online newspapers.
The websites of the following political parties, pressure groups and individuals were regularly monitored:
REMAIN
•The Britain Stronger in Europe movement
•The pro-Remain Labour site
•Will Straw’s blog
LEAVE
•UK Independence Party (UKIP)
•The Vote Leave Movement
•Labour Leave
•Better Off Out
•Grassroots Out (GO)
•Leave EU
•Dominic Cummings’s blog
•Left Leave
Will Straw and Dominic Cummings were directors of the Britain Stronger in Europe and Vote Leave campaigns respectively.
While the lexical blend Brexit was quickly adopted by the media throughout Europe, Lexit (the fusion of Left and exit) did not acquire anything like as wide a currency. Because of the prominent roles of high-profile Conservatives like Boris Johnson, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove during the referendum campaign, in the eyes of many the pressure to leave the EU came primarily from the political right. In reality, the existence of the Labour Leave and Left Leave movements, and the strength of the Leave vote in areas in which the Labour Party is strong, attest to the fact that there was also a left-of-centre argument for leaving the EU, although the Lexit campaign did not enjoy the kind of funding that fuelled Brexit, and its leaders were mostly not as well known to the general public. In terms of language use, Brexit and Lexit were very different phenomena, and although the former will receive more attention in this work, the latter will not be entirely neglected.
The problem with websites and blogs is that posts may be taken down, and in this work I have endeavoured to cite materials that can still be accessed. Online newspapers, in contrast, have archives from which content is rarely if ever cancelled, and from a linguistic point of
view, a rich source of material was the articles written by journalists with decades of experience in using words to influence public opinion. The various papers were divided almost 50-50 during the referendum campaign: predictably, the right-wing Daily Express, The Telegraph and Daily Star campaigned for Leave, and The Sun maintained its long tradition of insulting Europe in general and France in particular, and it was equally predictable that The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent and Daily Mirror would take up the Remain cause. There were also surprises, however: The Times campaigned to stay in the EU while its sister newspaper, the Sunday Times, encouraged its readers to vote to leave, and the Daily Mail campaigned aggressively for Leave but the Mail on Sunday opted for Remain. The UK’s newest national daily, The i, adopts a centrist stance on many issues, although it did appear to be mildly in favour of staying in the EU. The low-circulation Morning Star was the only paper that featured Lexit editorials, although journalists promoting the Lexit case were given space in some of the pro-Remain newspapers, particularly The Guardian and the Daily Mirror.
Some of the issues discussed in this work really merit an entire volume rather than a chapter. That is certainly the case for the theme of immigration and border controls that featured so prominently in the EU debate, and the detection of explicit or implicit racism in linguistic strategies. At the time of writing, however; we do not yet know how the media will react to whatever sort of agreement London and Brussels reach on the question of borders and residence rights, so a lot of data still need to be collected.
Although this book concentrates on language, I hope that non-linguists, including people whose first language is not English, would also wish to read it. I have endeavoured to strike the right balance between accessibility and appropriate linguistic analysis, but if I fail at times, if colleagues feel that I sometimes do not quite get it right, I apologize.
Finally, readers are bound to wonder where I personally stand on an issue that divided the country of my birth, so I may as well come clean about it from the beginning. I am British but I have lived most of my adult life outside the UK. Because I am not resident in Britain, I could not vote in the referendum, but had I been able to do so, I would certainly have looked after my own interests, which would have meant voting to maintain my pension rights and access to medical care in the country in which I live. I have no great love for the European Union, however; my view of the EU is similar to that of the first two journalists quoted in Chapter 1.
1
‘The EU isn’t much cop but . . .’. Remain supporters’ use of coordinative constructions
On 24 June 2016, shortly after the full results of the referendum were known, the online edition of the Financial Times quoted the senior Labour MP, Margaret Hodge, attacking the leader of her own party, Jeremy Corbyn, over his allegedly inadequate campaign for Remain: ‘The EU referendum was a test of leadership and I think Jeremy failed that test. He came out too slowly. He was very halfhearted about his attempts to campaign and Labour voters simply didn’t get the message’ (Pickard et al. 2016). In the same article, Lord Mandelson, a key figure in Tony Blair’s government, is quoted as saying of Corbyn’s campaign, ‘At best his voice was curiously muted but when he did say anything, there were mixed messages.’ Over the next five days twenty-one members of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet resigned, all citing dissatisfaction with their leader’s lacklustre performance in the build-up to the referendum as a major reason for doing so, while the shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, displayed such disloyalty that he left Corbyn with little option but to sack him.
It is true that less than two weeks before voting day Jeremy Corbyn announced on Channel 4’s comedy show The Last Leg that his enthusiasm for remaining in the EU could be rated at ‘seven, or seven and a half out of ten’ (Jeremy Corbyn on the Last Leg 2016), but, as I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, he was hardly alone in damning the EU with faint praise. Although the Leave campaign had been expected to do well in certain parts of the country, Labour MPs were genuinely shocked when it emerged that the pro-Brexit vote had also been strong in Labour’s traditional heartlands in the north and midlands, but instead of asking themselves why their own constituents had ignored advice to vote to stay in, they made a somewhat disingenuous attempt to lay the entire blame at the party leader’s door. In reality, no individual could have swayed the result one way or the other, while Remain supporters of the right, left and centre have a certain collective responsibility for not employing language more convincingly.
This section begins by looking at a syntactic structure that recurred with remarkable frequency in written and spoken texts supporting the case for Remain, a construction that actually concedes that the Leave camp also have a credible argument themselves. Further investigations of grammatical and lexical features, conscious linguistic strategies and the sometimes fuzzy distinction between rhetoric and spin aim to show that on a series of fronts the Brexiteers won the language war. What is highly persuasive may not be highly truthful, however, and it could be argued that Remain campaigners were more honest in using language that acknowledged the complexity of the issue at stake. A referendum requires a binary choice while the European Union, an institution that encompasses twenty-eight nations (still, at the time of writing) and well over 500 million permanent residents, is such a complicated amalgam of the good, the bad and the perplexing that it is practically impossible to either love it or hate it unconditionally. If Leave won the language war they did so partly by simplifying matters in keeping with the essential in-or-out question on the ballot paper, while Remain paid the price of openly admitting that the EU was far from perfect.
There is no simple answer to the question of when (or whether) it may be justifiable to practise a certain judicious selection of truths in order to achieve greater exhortative efficacy, and it is probably fair to say that we demand different levels of sincerity from different writers or speakers: we want historians to favour impartiality and truth over ideological issues, hope but do not really expect journalists to do the same, and in the case of politicians, fully expect them to put a spin on what they are pleased to call facts. David Runciman (2010: 9) argues that since politicians have a series of conflicting loyalties – to their heterogeneous electorate, to their party and factions within it, to their principles but also to their assessment of what is feasible – they cannot possibly be 100 per cent truthful with all interlocutors at all times. However, the same author makes a provocative distinction between lying and hypocrisy:
A lie creates the immediate impression that one believes something that happens to be false, but that does not mean that one is not what one seems (indeed, people who have a well-deserved reputation for lying may by telling a lie be confirming exactly who they are). Hypocrisy turns on questions of character rather than simply coincidence with the truth.
If politicians who sincerely believed that leaving the EU would be an enormous mistake had ‘sexed up’ their message for the good of the cause, they would, by Runciman’s distinction, have been true to themselves, and therefore anything but hypocritical, even as they uttered half-truths and total lies. Indeed, the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has made no attempt to sue or even contradict journalists who have reported on his propensity to lie to achieve his political objectives (Jean-Claude Juncker’s most outrageous political quotations 2014). The primary aim of this work, however, is not to evaluate the honesty of those actively involved in the Brexit debate, but to consider the linguistic features that distinguished the Remain and Leave campaigners in order to gauge the relative efficacy of each side’s message.
The following three sentences provide the same information but with different syntactic constructions:
(i)I had done a first-class job but the boss did not thank me.
(ii)Although I had done a first-class job, the boss did not thank me.
(iii)Although the boss did not thank me, I had done a first-class job.
Sentence (i) is an exam
ple of coordination (sometimes referred to as parataxis) while sentences (ii) and (iii) are examples of subordination (or hypotaxis). Huddlestone (1984: 382) explains the difference with admiral conciseness: ‘In coordination the terms in the relationship are of equal syntactic status, in subordination they are not – one is subordinate, the other superordinate.’ Coordination creates syntactic parallelism: in (i) the two clauses on either side of the coordinating conjunction but have equal weight and each could stand alone as a short sentence in itself. Subordination creates syntactic hierarchy: in (ii) and (iii) the clauses containing the subordinating conjunction although could not be stand-alone sentences because they are clearly incomplete and need to be linked to a main or superordinate clause.
In sentence (ii) the fact that I had done a first-class job is expressed in a subordinate clause and is therefore assigned reduced importance, while the stressed information, the fact that the boss did not thank me, is placed in a main clause. The focus of the sentence is on the boss’s ingratitude. In sentence (iii) the situation is reversed: the boss’s refusal to thank me is less important and the main focus switches to the high quality of my work.
Assigning a piece of information greater importance by expressing it in a superordinate clause can be a double-edged sword, however. As Lesley Jeffries notes (2010: 86): ‘Putting something at a higher syntactic level may mean that it is more important, but it is also likely to make it more susceptible to questioning, so that text producers who wish their ideas not to be questioned too closely may well make something quite uncontentious the main proposition of their sentences.’ Sentence (iii) would probably not be uttered by someone who harboured doubts as to whether his/her claim to have produced top-quality work could really stand up to close scrutiny.