THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT

by STEVE BUCKLEDEE

  12

  From ‘Up Yours Delors’ (1990) to ‘Stick it up your Juncker’ (2016). Was it The Sun wot won it once again?

  In a previous chapter it was noted that the Daily Mail today flaunts its patriotic credentials and makes frequent references to the armed services’ heroics during the Second World War, studiously avoiding any reminder of its owner’s admiration for Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. It is equally ironic that The Sun has for decades been a powerful voice for the right even though it began life in 1964 as a relaunch of the left-wing Daily Herald. The Daily Herald was originally only published intermittently to support strikers during periods of industrial action; then in 1922 it became the official newspaper of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and was published daily. It continued to support the Labour Party after the TUC sold 51 per cent of its stake to Odhams Press, and at its peak was the UK’s most popular newspaper, selling up to two million copies a day. In 1961 Odhams was taken over by Daily Mirror Newspapers Ltd, who then formed the International Publishing Group (IPC). In 1964 the TUC sold its 49 per cent, which gave IPC total control and allowed it to rebrand the newspaper as The Sun. The Sun originally aimed to be an independent, non-partisan paper, and it remained politically neutral for a few years after its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation Group in 1969 (although the switch to tabloid format was immediate, and the first page-3 girls appeared shortly afterwards).

  The real change came in the late 1970s when The Sun openly supported Margaret Thatcher and contributed to her first general election victory in 1979. The Sun approved of all aspects of Thatcherism, including the policy of confrontation with the unions, and during the long and bitter miners’ strike (March 1984 to March 1985) made no pretence of giving balanced reporting of the frequent clashes between pickets and the police. On 14 June 1984, the successor to the TUC’s Daily Herald attempted to use the punning headline ‘Mine Fuhrer’ above a photo of Arthur Scargill, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, as he waved to a group of strikers, a wave that was interpreted by The Sun as a Nazi salute. Neither the headline nor the photo were seen by the public because the newspaper’s unionized printers refused to handle them, but the front page article went ahead with the alternative, and untypically wordy, headline: ‘Members of all The Sun production chapels refused to handle the Arthur Scargill picture and major headline on our lead story. The Sun has decided, reluctantly, to print the paper without either’ (Montague 2012).

  During Thatcher’s eleven years and seven months in Downing Street, the circulation of The Sun was around the four million mark, so its influence on public opinion was much appreciated by the prime minister. Her successor, John Major, unexpectedly won the 1992 general election with a majority of just twenty-one seats. The Sun had no doubt about its own role in tipping the balance sufficiently to secure Major’s narrow victory; on the day after the election its front page boasted ‘It’s the Sun wot won it’, a headline that twenty years later even Rupert Murdoch admitted was ‘tasteless and wrong’ and for which the News Corporation boss gave his editor at the time, Kelvin MacKenzie, ‘a hell of a bollocking’ (Dowell 2012). Tasteless and wrong it may have been but it also proved to be memorable, and variations upon it were still in use in analyses of The Sun’s influence on David Cameron’s victory in the general election of 2015. It exhibits two typical features of Sun headlines: simple, monosyllabic vocabulary plus slang and/or deliberately ungrammatical English intended to present Britain’s best-selling tabloid as the voice of ordinary working people.

  Puns are another characteristic of Sun headlines and Thatcher’s confrontation with the president of the European Commission, particularly her hostility towards the ECU (European Currency Unit) as a key step in the direction of monetary union, inspired a play on the surname Delors that has also entered the annals of tabloid journalism. In November 1990 the president of the European Commission was told ‘UP YOURS DELORS’ and treated to a photo of two raised fingers, a front page that an unrepentant Sun republished twenty-five years later (Parsons 2015) and in April 2016 updated on its website when the referendum campaign was heating up. Many Britons no longer in their first flush of youth remember the infamous headline, but the offensiveness and explicit racism of the lead and the article itself may not be so readily recalled. In the lines quoted below, the graphological features of the original text have been retained.

  UP YOURS DELORS

  At midday tomorrow Sun readers are urged to tell the French fool where to stuff his ECU

  The Sun today calls on its patriotic family of readers to tell the feelthy French to FROG OFF!

  They INSULT us, BURN our lambs, FLOOD our country with dodgy food and PLOT to abolish the dear old pound.

  Now it’s your turn to kick THEM in the Gauls.

  We want you to tell Froggie Common Market chief Jacques Delors exactly what you think of him and his countrymen.

  At the stroke of noon tomorrow, we invite all true blue Brits to face France and yell ‘Up Yours, Delors.’

  The ear-bashing from our millions of readers will wake the EC President up to the fact that he will NEVER run our country.

  Racial slurs for Delors and the entire population of France include the traditional insults frog and froggie, feelthy as a derisive imitation of French speakers’ pronunciation of English vowels (in contrast, mispronouncing the name Delors to produce the rhyme in the headline is all right), and the crude pun associating Gauls with balls. Later in the article a pun on bastards and Bastille is used to warn us that after completion of the Channel Tunnel ‘the garlic-breathed bastilles will be here in droves’.

  Two of the four words printed in bold capitals in the second paragraph require some explanation: burn is a reference to a demonstration by French farmers against imported British livestock in which a lorry transporting lambs from the UK was torched; flood exaggerates the quantity of unpasteurized French cheese exported to Britain, some of which had been found to contain listeria bacteria (Belam 2007). Naturally, The Sun also goes much further back into history to include the obligatory references to Waterloo and the France that surrendered in the Second World War ‘when we stood firm’.

  Many would say that the article amounts to incitement to racial hatred. Twenty-five years later, however, Parsons (2015) is anything but apologetic and states that the 1990 front page could just as easily have been headlined ‘Frog Off’. He argues that history has shown that Jacques Delors was utterly wrong while Margaret Thatcher ‘was right too soon’ in that she had correctly seen that the European Community was heading for disaster long before the less presentient cabinet colleagues who plotted her downfall.

  Delors won his feud with Thatcher but the ultimate Little European has, in the end, lost the argument. Like many bad ideas, the European Union has been found to be a running sore on the face of humanity.

  Obviously the description of Delors as ‘the ultimate Little European’ seeks to turn on its head the Little Englander jibe frequently aimed at Brexit supporters. Parsons concludes by informing us that the 90-year-old Delors ‘is still a familiar face at swanky Paris restaurants and clubs’ whose think-tank, the Jacques Delors Institute, ‘is gobbling up vast sums of public money’.

  Marwick (1996: 487) reports that on 6 June 1994, the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, a Sun leader entitled We’re Still Fighting in Europe presented Britain’s relationship with Europe as a continuation of the war-time struggle to preserve our independence and democracy:

  Our role in Europe in 1994 may not be as it was in 1944.

  But we are still fighting dictators – the Eurocrats who want us to bow to their laws and life-styles.

  Your vote in Thursday’s Euro elections is a blow in the battle to keep our country British.

  Not a suburb of Brussels.

  Over four decades racial abuse aimed at French politicians, and by extension all of France, has not only been prompted by Britain’s uneasy relationship with the European Community/Union. The Sun supported George W. Bush’s deci
sion to invade Iraq in 2003 and praised the British prime minister, Tony Blair, for having committed British troops to the ‘coalition of the willing’. President Jacques Chirac’s strong opposition to this military intervention led The Sun to produce a special edition with a front page in French bearing the headline ‘CHIRAC EST UN VER’ along with a photomontage of the French president’s head superimposed upon the body of a giant worm (Byrne 2003). Two thousand copies of this special edition were distributed in Paris on 20 February 2003, so that Parisians could read, in their own language, what The Sun claimed was the opinion of the British people:

  Greetings to the people of Paris from the Sun newspaper, which is read by 10 million people every day.

  We think your president, Jacques Chirac, is a disgrace to Europe by constantly threatening to veto military action to enforce the will of the UN against Iraq.

  British people feel M Chirac, who in the UK is known as the ‘worm’, is arrogantly strutting about trying to make France seem more important than it really is.

  On behalf of our ten million readers, we say to you today: are you not ashamed of your president?

  That President Chirac was ever nicknamed the worm in the UK will come as a surprise to all British residents other than those directly involved in designing the provocative front page distributed on 20 February 2003. Having coined the moniker, however, The Sun went on to use it forty-nine times over the following twelve months (Chovanec 2010). Less surprising is the reference to Chirac’s ‘arrogantly strutting about’, arrogance being one of the character traits traditionally ascribed to the French according to the negative stereotype constantly recycled by all of Britain’s right-wing tabloids. To claim that the president wants to make France seem more important than it is in reality is breathtakingly hypocritical coming from a paper that frequently evokes the UK’s finest hour and sees Britain as having lasting clout on the world stage by virtue of its involvement in US-led military operations. The sheer effrontery of The Sun’s headline is matched only by its counterproductivity; the insult prompted French people who had not voted for Chirac to rally to his defence.

  Although Rupert Murdoch’s Sun became a right-wing, anti-Brussels newspaper that adored Margaret Thatcher, it also supported Labour’s pro-Europe Tony Labour during his ten years as prime minister. This was partly because Murdoch likes to back winners, and after Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 it was clear that he was likely to be in power for a considerable time. In addition, his strongly pro-Washington foreign policy and his business-friendly economic strategy meant that he was anything but a socialist. The main consideration, however, was the fact that Tony Blair, having seen the way The Sun had demonized the Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock in 1992, had no intention of antagonizing Rupert Murdoch or any other newspaper proprietor. Labour’s 1992 election manifesto included the promise to trigger an investigation into media concentration by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission; Tony Blair made sure that his party did not go into the 1997 campaign handicapped by a manifesto commitment that was sure to provoke the hostility of the head of News Corporation (Freedman 2015).

  The ‘Calais Jungle’ gave The Sun the opportunity to attack the incompetent French and their ‘soft’ president (François Hollande this time), laud the vastly superior law enforcement measures on the British side of the Channel and join the other right-wing tabloids in talking up the danger posed by migrants hoping to find a way to enter the UK. In a piece first published in 2015 but updated in April 2016 for the referendum campaign, Matt Wilkinson sees French ineptitude as a threat to Britain’s security. Naturally, the headline contains a pun: an allusion to the invented word Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, the title of a song written by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman for the 1964 film Mary Poppins.

  Softy Calais goes ballistic . . . Frenchies are atrocious

  MIGRANT CRISIS: Call to send in our Army

  A Police boss last night called for the British Army to be sent in to halt the flood of migrants trying to swarm through the Channel Tunnel at Calais.

  It came as the French government, led by Francois Hollande, was accused of going soft on thousands who have laid siege to the train terminal, breaking through fences and fighting running battles with police.

  An extra 150 riot police were drafted in as the Home Secretary Theresa May met her French counterpart and held a Cobra meeting to discuss the crisis, which saw a migrant killed beneath a truck on Tuesday.

  But police in France have been accused of driving captured migrants a mile from the terminal and freeing them for new border assaults.

  As more illegal immigrants massed last night, Kevin Hurley – the police and crime commissioner for Surrey – called for Gurkha soldiers based at Folkestone’s Shorncliffe barracks to be sent in.

  Mr Hurley, whose area includes a services where he claims 100 migrants recently tried to get off lorries, said: ‘The Gurkhas are a highly respected and competent force and just around the corner. They could help to ensure that our border is not breached.’

  Reactions to the puns used by The Sun are necessarily subjective and the headline to this article might draw a smile even from people who despise the paper’s portrayal of the Calais migrants. The humour is not extended beyond the headline, however, as in the first two sentences of the article we have the usual image of natural disaster (‘flood of migrants’), the dehumanizing of the asylum-seekers (‘swarms’) and quasi-military terms (‘laid siege’, ‘running battles’). The main target of Wilkinson’s attack is, of course, the incompetence of the ‘Frenchies’, whose government is accused of ‘going soft’ and whose police are presented as weak. The solution proposed by Kevin Hurley – the deployment of British troops on foreign soil – would be little short of an act of war, and to a moderately reflective reader the fact that a senior police officer could say something so ridiculous is more worrying than the alleged shortcomings of law enforcers in France.

  While always quick to draw attention to French inadequacy, The Sun has never neglected the danger within, and in November 2015, days after coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris killed 130 people and injured many others, the threat represented by British Muslims was announced by the headline 1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis. The article has since been taken down from The Sun’s site after an investigation by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) found that it was based on wilful misinterpretation of poll findings (Worley 2016). The newspaper was instructed to publish IPSO’s adjudication, which it duly did in March 2016. It is unlikely that the editor of The Sun was particularly bothered about having to do this; as we noted with Matt Wilkinson’s article on the Calais Jungle, The Sun sometimes updated an article published in 2015 or earlier if it was relevant to the 2016 referendum campaign, so IPSO’s ruling, which was widely reported in other newspapers and on various websites with an image of the original front page, meant that the November 2015 article received a second airing just as the Brexit debate was becoming intense. For a newspaper that thrives on notoriety and controversy, it is often – though not quite always – the case that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

  Jean-Claude Juncker ticks most of the boxes to be a prime target for The Sun except for the fact that he is not French, although as a French-speaking Luxembourger he is the next best – or next worst – thing. In June 2014 Emily Ashton used the headline Stick it up your Juncker, an obvious pun on the idiomatic expression stick it up your jumper in which jumper substitutes for a more vulgar term. The occasion was the need to choose a successor to José Manuel Barroso as president of the European Commission and Angela Merkel’s backing of Juncker’s candidature. Ashton writes: ‘Eurocrat Mr Juncker is viewed as the heir to Jacques Delors – who infuriated Margaret Thatcher by trying to force closer EU integration, inspiring our famous 1990 headline “Up Yours Delors!”.’ In addition she gives an unflattering summary of Juncker’s record as prime minister of Luxembourg, notes his declared preference for secret talks rather than public debates and ci
tes rumours about his heavy drinking. David Cameron strongly believed that making Juncker president of the European Commission would weaken his own position and, according to Ashton, issued a warning to the German chancellor that turned out to be prophetic.

  Mr Cameron is said to have told the German leader Angela Merkel last week that it would force him to bring forward his in-out referendum from 2017 to calm his Eurosceptic MPs.

  This would likely lead to Britain voting No to EU membership as the PM would not have had time to show he can reform Brussels from within.

  Ashton’s article was updated on The Sun’s site in April 2016 and its headline was immediately taken up by Leave campaigners, was used by other Brexit-supporting newspapers and frequently reused by The Sun, and became the caption to a poster showing Cameron and Juncker with their arms raised as if about to come to blows. Jean-Claude Juncker had indeed become the heir to Jacques Delors as The Sun’s favourite target.

  So was it The Sun wot won it in 2016 as it claimed to have done for John Major in 1992? As soon as the result was known Jane Martinson (2016) for The Guardian addressed this question, noting that a similarity between the two votes was a relatively high turnout of over 70 per cent. During the long referendum campaign there had been a lively debate, though necessarily an ill-informed one given the complexity of many of the issues involved. The pro-Leave press sometimes distorted the facts, particularly with regard to EU regulations – indeed the European Commission set up and still maintains its Euromyths website to set the record straight – and Martinson cites a survey showing that British readers trust their newspapers much less than their European counterparts do. However, she also refers to evidence that the newspapers still tend to set the agenda and other media then respond: ‘Where the newspapers lead on issues, far more trusted broadcasters follow.’ Remain campaigners wanted to focus on the economy and the benefits of tariff-free trade, but the pro-Brexit press were successful in keeping immigration high on the agenda, thus ensuring that the subject had to be discussed on television. Martinson quotes David Deacon, professor of communication and media analysis at Loughborough University, neatly summarizing the impact of the press and television on how people vote: ‘The media has more influence in telling people what to think about than in what to think.’ The Sun set out to make sure that people gave considerable thought to Britain’s history of fighting to preserve liberty, the democratic deficit in the EU, allegedly excessive regulation, the danger represented by both the Calais Jungle and British Muslims, and, of course, the nefarious ways of the French.