THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT

by STEVE BUCKLEDEE

  The Sun certainly believed that it had played a crucial role in securing a no vote in the referendum and drew a parallel with the defeat of Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party in 1992 that had prompted the original claim that it was The Sun wot won it. In January 2017, after the German newspaper Die Welt had used the English headline ‘Little Britain’ in its reaction to a speech by Theresa May on her government’s Brexit strategy, The Sun, somewhat illogically addressing Angela Merkel rather than Die Welt, produced a special front page and hand-delivered it to the German Embassy in London (Gysin 2017).

  A MESSAGE TO MERKEL Little Britain? We’ve got a simple message for the critics who ridiculed the 17.4 million of you who voted Leave for daring to dump the EU

  Would the last country to leave the EU please turn out the lights

  The Sun last night turned the tables on the Germans who dubbed our great nation ‘Little Britain’.

  In a remake of one of our most famous front pages we ask: ‘Would the last country to leave the EU please turn out the lights’.

  And to drum the message home, Sun man Patrick Gysin went to the German Embassy in central London to deliver a personalised front page.

  The message to Merkel includes the image of a light bulb with an unflattering photo of the German chancellor inside it. The original front page from 9 April 1992 is reprinted, with its image of an unflattering shot of Neil Kinnock inside a light bulb and its message to voters: ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights’. Neil Kinnock, the favourite according to the polls, did not win that day, and twenty-four hours later The Sun proudly and ungrammatically claimed credit for having engineered his defeat. Although The Sun’s circulation is now less than half what it was in the early 1990s, it is difficult to believe that its relentless attacks on EU institutions and leading figures, along with its stoking of anti-French sentiments, did not exert some influence on voters in 2016.

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  Dirty tricks: Lies, personal attacks and the Queen supports UKIP

  For Oxford Dictionaries the Word of the Year 2016 was post-truth, defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. Coined in 1992 by the Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in his reflections upon the Iran-Contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War, it was chosen as the Word of 2016 because two events of that year – the US presidential campaign and the Brexit debate in Britain – led to a huge increase in frequency of use, particularly in the months from May to October. Among the shortlisted contenders for Word of the Year that post-truth fought off was the term Brexiteer (Midgley 2016).

  As noted previously, only a very small percentage of the electorate possessed the knowledge and expertise to make an informed evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of EU membership, so ‘appeals to emotion and personal belief’ were bound to have more impact on voters than facts and technical details that were beyond the grasp of most people. That does not justify, however, Leave’s biggest lie that the UK gives the EU £350 million each week since it is quite simply dishonest accountancy to quote one side of the balance sheet and disregard the other. Similarly, Remain’s dodgiest dossier of all, the White Paper entitled The long-term economic impact of EU membership and the alternatives, which stated that leaving the European Union would cost every British household £4,300 a year, was put together by Treasury officials and approved by the chancellor of the exchequer, so it was hardly a case of errors committed in good faith by the insufficiently informed (Congdon 2016).

  In addition to the truth-checking charity Full Fact, The UK in a changing Europe project and the European Commission’s site dedicated to correcting inaccurate claims promulgated in the media – all of which are mentioned earlier in this work – individual journalists also attempted to verify the credibility of assertions boldly made by both sides in the Brexit debate. John Rentoul (2016) for The Independent considered Remain to be more wrong than right in warning that Brexit would mean holidaymakers having to get a visa to go to Spain or claiming that outside the EU Britain would still have to absorb just as many immigrants as before, but was correct in stating that British exports would be subject to tariffs; ex-mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was correct to say that two of our EU partners have delayed the introduction of safer tipper trucks that pose less of a risk to cyclists, but was wrong to claim that German demands had held up the construction of Crossrail tunnels.

  Lies often have a core of veracity in them but that truth is obscured by selective omissions or excessive emphases, exaggeration or understatement. In an interview with The Telegraph, Boris Johnson, never a man to avoid hyperbole, began with the reasonable observation that since the collapse of the Roman Empire the history of Europe has been characterized by attempts to unify the continent under a single government. He then threw caution to the winds with a comparison between would-be unifiers of the past and the EU’s current vision of ever greater integration (Ross 2016).

  Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods. But fundamentally what is lacking is the eternal problem, which is that there is no underlying loyalty to the idea of Europe. There is no single authority that anybody respects or understands. That is causing this massive democratic void.

  In the early chapters of this book it was argued that Remain campaigners tended to hedge and use modality, and generally present their case more timidly than their Leave counterparts. Two days after Johnson’s controversial interview – which was dismissed by many in Britain as just typical Johnson bombast but was viewed more seriously in Brussels – David Cameron attempted to match his old friend’s rhetoric by stating that a vote to leave the EU would be welcomed by Vladimir Putin, Isis and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (Cooper and Wright 2016). Not for the first time Cameron had shot himself in the foot as attention was diverted from Johnson’s histrionic remarks to his own no less preposterous thesis that Islamist terrorists were following the Brexit debate and rooting for Nigel Farage.

  The InFacts website does not claim to be neutral on the EU question; during the referendum campaign its writers aimed to present the fact-based case for Britain’s remaining in the EU and after the vote maintained the same approach in describing the damaging consequences of a hard Brexit. To take just one example, with the campaign in full swing the InFacts editor-in-chief, Hugo Dixon (2016), published a very short but persuasive piece countering Leave’s insistence that the City of London would continue to thrive outside the EU, and the Mythbust and Fake News pages of the site seek to expose misleading or plainly false claims made by Brexiteers. In the final weeks of the campaign The Guardian twice allowed Dixon and Luke Lythgoe (2016) to reach a wider readership, first in a piece about the eight ‘most toxic tales’ in The Telegraph, The Mail and The Express that InFacts had reported to IPSO, then two weeks later in a follow-up article about six more claims unsupported by hard facts. In the second piece the offending articles were: a story in The Times, and repeated in The Mail and The Express, about secret plans to set up an EU army, a claim that was refuted by the Ministry of Defence; misquotation in The Express from a report by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy to make it appear that a £10 billion shortfall in the National Health Service budget was the consequence of immigration; a Daily Mail front page in which an EU recommendation concerning Britain’s housing policy is converted into a demand; The Sun’s manipulation of statistics to claim that in 2014 ‘4 in 5 British jobs went to foreign nationals’ when the true figure was 17.5 per cent; The Telegraph’s misquotation of a Home Office official to make the entirely false claim that Brexit would result in the deportation of three million EU citizens; misuse of the term ‘migrant children’ in The Express to denounce the soaring costs of educating ‘700,000’ such pupils, when the figure of 700,000 actually included children born in the UK who had at least one parent from a European Economic Ar
ea (EEA) country (like Nigel Farage’s offspring by his German wife).

  From the above it appears that the pro-Brexit newspapers were far more likely to play fast and loose with the facts than their pro-Remain counterparts, and when it came to unequivocal falsehoods the Leave-supporting press was indeed more culpable. Project Fear, the dodgy dossiers and the dire warnings issued by political figures like Lord Mandelson and Tony Blair generally involved not outright lies but an exclusive focus on worst-case scenarios, outcomes that were conceivable but by no means probable. That is not the same thing as wilfully misquoting a report or misinterpreting statistics.

  IPSO is not without its critics. On its website it describes itself as ‘the independent regulator for the newspaper and magazine industry in the UK’ and sees its mission as ‘to support those who feel wronged by the press, to uphold the highest professional standards in the UK press, to determine whether standards have been breached and provide redress if so’. Redress typically comes in the form of obliging errant newspapers to publish corrections or adjudications. A criticism sometimes levelled at IPSO, particularly by the press campaign group Hacked Off, is that since it is financed by member publications, that is, by the very papers and magazines it regulates, it tends to be too tolerant of misconduct. Indeed, shortly after Leave’s victory an unsigned article entitled Brexit and the newspapers – where was IPSO? (2016) on the Hacked Off website reported on a number of offensive pieces in the right-wing press that were not investigated by IPSO, and noted that even readers of The Sun and Daily Mail had complained that their own newspapers had misled them.

  There is no doubt that the pro-EU press, while not impeccable, behaved much better during the campaign. However, it should also be noted that three pro-Remain newspapers – The Independent, The Guardian and the Financial Times – could not be reported to IPSO anyway because they had not signed up to be regulated by that organization.

  Turning our attention to personal attacks, we find that here Remain supporters did not comport themselves significantly better than their adversaries. Indeed, because they directed their attacks not just at politicians and public figures who expect to be subject to rough treatment in the media, but also at the ordinary men and women who intended to vote to leave the EU, it could be argued that they were nastier.

  Images, whether traditional posters or .jpg files posted on the internet, featured prominently in both sides’ personal attacks. Leave tended to target Juncker and other leading figures in the Brussels establishment, sometimes naming them, often referring only to their roles. Remain preferred to attack the leading Brexiteers, evoking the disquieting prospect of a Britain in the hands of such (usually) men and (very occasionally) women. Both sides portrayed their adversaries as the kind of people you’d rather not have anything to do with.

  Ironically, The Sun, by frequently reusing its ‘Stick it up your Juncker’ jibe in the run-up to the referendum, probably did far more than the Remain camp to make the president of the European Commission known to the British public. His name rarely appeared without premodification, recurrent epithets being unelected, arrogant, Brussels bigwig, chief Eurocrat, EU boss and heavy drinking.

  The website of the Leave.EU movement, on the other hand, refers merely to the ‘Belgian immigration minister’ rather than Theo Francken in a downloadable poster that asks ‘Do you really want to be a part of this club?’. The rhetorical question follows a quotation by Mr Francken which, given the ministry he heads, is particularly insensitive towards an EU partner that is doing more than its fair share to deal with a problem that involves the whole continent: ‘The Greeks now need to bear the consequences of being unable to stop the migrant flow.’

  Tim Martin, chairman of the J D Wetherspoon pub chain and an active Brexit supporter, addresses by name Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, in an open letter published not in a poster but in a form more in keeping with the nature of his business, that is, on a beer mat. Martin distances himself from The Sun’s approach by beginning with a respectful ‘Dear Madame Lagarde’ and the polite preamble ‘At Wetherspoon, we sincerely respect and admire the French people and your country’, but then notes that she is due to stand trial on corruption charges, her predecessor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, resigned in disgrace, then asks her directly why anyone should trust the IMF. The implicature is that before Madame Lagarde’s trial begins, she is already as good as convicted and sentenced, and that she is in any case guilty by association with her predecessor. On the other side of the beermat more direct questions culminate in a not unreasonable enquiry as to whether the IMF thought to inform the EU that no currency in history has survived without a single government. Given that there are nearly 1,000 Wetherspoon pubs in Britain, plus the fact that beer drinkers rarely have other reading material with them, Martin’s chosen medium has its merits.

  Most British people can name very few European heads of government but Chancellor Merkel has held power for so long, and her country has become so dominant, that she has entered the public consciousness as no other EU leader has managed to do since Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga days. Precisely because she is so recognizable, she too was targeted in poster attacks. In 2015, when the referendum was still expected to be held in 2017, thus giving David Cameron time to convince the public that his renegotiations with Brussels had addressed Eurosceptics’ concerns, UKIP asked supporters to distribute a poster featuring a stern-faced Angela Merkel and the question ‘What EU concessions will David Cameron win for Britain?’, followed by the answer ‘Whatever Angela Merkel lets him have’. Thus, with one image and fifteen words the poster presents the British prime minister as totally devoid of influence and the German chancellor as totally in command. Cameron is weak and self-deluded, Merkel strong and dictatorial.

  One of the most effective images used by Remain first appeared with an article by Brian Reade (2016) for The Mirror, and was then downloaded from The Mirror’s site and widely reposted. It is a mock-up of a poster promoting Quentin Tarantino’s Western movie The Hateful Eight with the heads of eight leading Brexiteers superimposed upon the bodies of the film’s main characters. The new hateful eight are the UKIP leader Nigel Farage, the Conservative MPs Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Iain Duncan Smith, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Chris Grayling and Priti Patel (the only woman of the odious octad), and the Labour maverick George Galloway. Reade notes that the day after the referendum, 24 June, will be the hundredth anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme in the First World War in which ‘420,000 of our troops were sent over top to be slaughtered’. Picking up on Boris Johnson’s suggestion that if Leave win 24 June should be known as UK Independence Day, he feigns agreement, writing that it ‘would be a perfect day to celebrate yet another occasion when this country let donkeys blindly lead lions into No Man’s Land’. Thus far thus fair in that professional politicians expect to face heavy criticism and all eight of the ‘Tarantino-esque’ figures have been called worse things than donkeys in their time. But Reade also imagines the nature of Independence Day celebrations and evokes an image of xenophobic drunks causing mayhem.

  What better than a new national holiday, kicked off with a Full English Brexit, before getting tanked up on Taunton cider and rampaging all the way to Dover, tossing Colman’s mustard jars through tapas bar windows and then holding a massive two-fingered salute towards France?

  In The Independent Paul Beaumont (2016) explicitly linked Brexit sentiments with football hooliganism. The UEFA Euro 2016 football championship was held in France from 10 June to 10 July of that year, and after England’s first match against Russia, English fans clashed with riot police in Marseille. He argues that both football and the Brexit debate are about tribalism and anger, and sees the referendum as ‘designed to help us choose between the Big Tribe of Europe and Little Britain’. He concludes his article as follows:

  Football gives us something to fight over, an environment in which to experience triumph and tragedy, without actually fighting; without actually going to war. Bu
t it’s the same emotion that is fuelling the Brexit debate. No wonder, then, that it is boiling over into violence on the streets of Marseille.

  What is interesting is the readers’ feedback to Beaumont’s article. One reader says The Independent’s linking of practically everything with Brexit is ‘laughable’, another states that the paper is ‘beyond the pale now, akin to the Daily Mail but with your blind prejudices in reverse’, a female reader objects to the notion that she and friends intending to vote out are like hooligans, and another states that the pro-EU Independent and Guardian are just as ‘entrenched when it comes to their own ideological agenda’ as The Sun, with the aggravating circumstance that their views come with ‘a special odour of snobbery’.