THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT

by STEVE BUCKLEDEE

  As David Davis set off for Brussels for the start of talks, Britain did indeed have little cause to be arrogant.

  THE EPILOGUE SO FAR

  The Oxford English Reference Dictionary offers the following definitions of epilogue: the concluding part of a literary work; an appendix; a speech or poem addressed to the audience by an actor at the end of a play; a short piece at the end of a day’s broadcasting. Britain’s decades-long struggle to achieve a satisfactory relationship with Europe is, of course, neither a literary work nor a play, although it does share certain characteristics with a soap opera: it just goes on and on seemingly with no end scheduled, it has moments of melodrama and some of its protagonists risk coming over as caricatures. As things stand at the time of writing, at midnight on 29 March 2019 the UK will be out of the EU whether a deal has been thrashed out or not, but only the most blinkered of Brexiteers believe that that will be the end of it. Indeed, if there is one word we cannot use with reference to Britain and the EU it is end: there is no end in sight, nor the prospect of one, hence the oxymoron The Epilogue So Far.

  I had originally intended to end this work with the result of the referendum of 23 June 2016, and would certainly have done so had there been a victory for Remain. That would not have been the end of the story either – nothing less than a crushing defeat, which was never on the cards, would have persuaded UKIP and Tory Brexiteers to lay down their arms – but the issue would have faded into the background for a while, at least until David Cameron’s government had completed its five-year term in 2020. Instead the voters surprised us, although as Jay Elwes (2016) stated with admirable conciseness, what they sprung on us was more a start than an ending.

  The European Union referendum delivered a startling result – but not a conclusion. Having voted to leave the EU, Britain faces more questions and uncertainty than it has for a generation and the drive to find solutions to those challenges has only just begun.

  The state of our not very United Kingdom that the unexpected result laid bare, plus the national soul-searching that followed, made it impossible not to add one more chapter. Then Theresa May decided that she was not going to let David Cameron outdo her in the hubris stakes, and yet another chapter was required. A book, unlike the UK-EU soap, must, sooner or later, come to an end, and this one ends precisely when talks to decide what kind of Brexit emerges are just beginning. There is no right time to key in the final full-stop when further twists in the plot are sure to come, but not to do so at all would render the whole enterprise futile.

  Of the many variables responsible for the unpredictability of future developments, there are some that I cannot comment upon with any authority because I do not have access to the necessary information. These include the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing in both Westminster and Brussels, and the true health of the European Union given the level of indebtedness of certain member states, notably the one in which I live. Sticking to what I know, or can at least inform myself about, I’ll conclude this work with a look at demographic factors before returning to my comfort zone of language.

  YouGov figures quoted in Chapter 14 indicated that 71 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted Remain while 64 per cent of people aged 65 or over opted for Leave. If the vote in June 2017 had been a repeat referendum rather than a general election, the result might well have reversed that of June 2016 given that over the previous twelve months, hundreds of thousands of 18-year-olds had been added to the electoral register while a considerable number of over 65s had died. Just four months after 23 June 2016, thirteen post-referendum polls had been conducted, eleven of which indicated that a majority of the British population wanted to stay in the EU (Low 2016). The disparity between these polls and the referendum result can be attributed to the fact that among the 11.9 million people who did not turn out on the day, Remain supporters outnumbered Leavers by a ratio of two-to-one (ibid.). As we have seen, young people in particular did not exercise their democratic right, but in 2017 they turned out in much greater numbers to disconcert Theresa May, partly because university students were better informed, but also because of the Corbyn factor in combating apathy. That cannot change the injustice perpetrated on young people in 2016 since it is difficult to see how redress can be achieved with anything short of a second referendum, and at the time of writing such a proposal would provoke an apoplectic response from Leavers.

  That is not to say that the public mood will not shift in the months and years to come; if there is one constant in the British people’s attitudes towards Europe it is inconstancy. What is clear is that those Remainers who do not believe that the game is up – the Remoaners according to the right-wing tabloids – have demography on their side: with each month that passes mostly pro-EU 18-year-olds acquire the right to vote and replace the mostly Brexit-supporting elderly people who embark on their final journey. UK politicians will have to respond to that trend.

  The referendum result of 2016 was a triumph for The Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, and the general election result a year later was an unexpected defeat for the same three tabloids. What happened in the interim will be considered below, but first of all it needs to be stated that reports of the demise of Britain’s tabloid newspapers have not been exaggerated; they have been plain wrong. The Daily Mail still sells 1.5 million copies per day, but that figure is a million down from its peak in 2003. As a news provider, however, The Mail today reaches more people than at any time in its history because, far from being driven into irrelevance by the internet, it thrives thanks to the same technology. As Addison (2017: position 6072) notes:

  MailOnline is the most visited English-language newspaper website in the world, with around 15 million or so visitors a day. And it is starting to generate cash to cover the decline in profits from the company’s newspapers. Daily Mail content is now read by more people – more young people – than ever before. And it’s always hiring: the old newspaper has a shrinking editorial staff of around 330, fewer than half MailOnline’s ever-expanding total staff of over 800.

  Other newspapers have stayed in business by going digital, and as long as their websites make most content accessible without a paid subscription, they will continue to attract a great many visitors. While the paper editions still have faithful readers who have their favourite newspaper (one that reflects their own values and political views) delivered each day, the online versions do not command the same loyalty and their visitors sometimes disagree strongly enough with an editorial line to contribute feedback attacking not just a specific post, but sometimes the newspaper as an institution. When young people click on the websites of The Sun or The Express they might decide to share selected content on social media, not necessarily because they agree with it, but often to make its unpleasantness known to others. A decline in sales does not, therefore, mean a decline in readership and influence, which explains why most leading politicians still prefer to be on good terms with Rupert Murdoch and the editor of The Mail, Paul Dacre.

  As noted in Chapter 12 with reference to an article by Jane Martinson (2016), during the referendum campaign the right-wing tabloids tended to set the agenda, forcing more authoritative and impartial media – notably the BBC – to follow suit. So when Remain wanted to focus on the economic reasons for staying in the EU, the tabloids hammered away at the immigration question and did so with language that stopped just short of being actionable under Britain’s race relations legislation. Indeed, Tim Adams (2017) noted that on ‘the 23 weekdays before the referendum, the Mail led with this immigration narrative on 17 of them’. Of the six days when a different subject dominated the front page, one was 17 June when the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox was reported, and even then The Mail’s emphasis was on the killer’s mental illness and how the social services had failed him rather than his extreme nationalism. Similarly, the tabloids’ employment of metaphors of constraint – chains, shackles and the like – to attack the allegedly excessive regulation imposed by the EU was ridiculously over the top, but
by dint of constant repetition the naturalization process set in to the extent that Remainers tended to concede that something had to be done to slim down Brussels bureaucracy instead of pointing out that much of the so-called red tape protects the environment or consumers.

  Andy Beckett (2016) used the headline ‘Revenge of the tabloids’ to introduce a long article analysing the influence of the popular press over the decades, and specifically the clear evidence in recent years that the power of the tabloids is not diminishing as some commentators have claimed. Their success in the referendum followed the 2015 general election campaign in which The Sun, The Mail and The Express had launched daily attacks on the then Labour leader, Ed Milliband, and played a crucial role in a victory for the Conservatives that the polls, and probably the Tories themselves, had not expected. After the referendum Paul Dacre could also claim credit for Theresa May’s becoming prime minister instead of the popular favourite, Boris Johnson; he had for years been an admirer – he was not alone in having been taken in by her new-iron-maiden pretensions – and the Conservative Party has traditionally been willing to listen to a newspaper it considers a loyal and extremely useful ally. Writing in the autumn of 2016, Beckett saw the symbiotic relationship between the right-wing tabloids and the Tory Party as dictating the terms of debate in British politics.

  British politics now feels relentlessly tabloid-dominated. From the daily obsession with immigrants to the rubbishing of human rights lawyers, from the march towards a ‘hard Brexit’ to the smearing of liberal Britons as bad losers and elitists, the tabloids and the Conservative right are collaborating with a closeness and a swagger not seen since at least the early 90s.

  From a position of such strength, how did The Sun, The Mail and The Express contrive to get it so wrong just a few months later? Their attacks on Jeremy Corbyn as an unpatriotic communist and a friend of terrorists were brutal yet the Labour Party – which many commentators had believed to be moribund – did so much better than expected that coming a close second felt like a victory, and during the election campaign Corbyn’s personal approval ratings soared (albeit from a very low starting point). The headlines and leads to articles by Will Gore (2017) and Suzanne Moore (2017) for The Independent and The Guardian respectively, both published on 9 June 2017, contradict Beckett by stating boldly that the tabloids no longer exert great power over politics.

  The right-wing press no longer wields absolute power in modern Britain. This election proves it

  In this era of ever-greater media plurality, voters are better equipped to make political decisions because they can examine a range of views and sources

  The Sun and Mail tried to crush Corbyn. But their power over politics is broken

  Voters saw through the tabloids’ hysterical attacks on the Labour leader. Now their feared editors just look like strange angry blokes selling hate

  Will Gore draws a parallel between a referendum in which Remain overestimated the extent to which voters could be motivated by fear and an election in which the tabloids’ similarly monomaniacal insistence on Corbyn’s ghastliness overestimated the efficacy of what he overtly calls ‘the politics of hate’. His conclusion is that the tabloids have taken a beating, and in stating it he cheekily adopts a little Cockney slang in a way that we are used to reading in a certain newspaper’s punning headlines: ‘The Express is on the ropes. The Daily Mail is bruised. The “Currant Bun” is crumbling.’

  Suzanne Moore focuses on Labour’s ability to connect with the public thanks to their leader’s willingness to go out and talk to people, plus the old-fashioned canvassing work done by the party’s army of young volunteers. In contrast, the editors of the right-wing tabloids who ‘regularly boast about having their fingers on the populist pulse failed dramatically’. Moore’s conclusion is as emphatic as Gore’s: ‘In this one moment they are cut down to size: not fixers of government, not the high priests of the electorate but strange angry blokes selling seven varieties of hate while ranting to themselves.’

  The tabloids could not have gone from ‘a swagger not seen since at least the early 90s’ to being ‘on the ropes’, ‘bruised’ and ‘crumbling’ in just eight months, which suggests that either Beckett or Gore and Moore must be very wrong indeed. I suspect that Beckett is right to see the popular right-wing press as still a force to be reckoned with despite their tactical error in persevering with their character assassination of Jeremy Corbyn when there was growing evidence that it was no longer working. As early as October 2016 Beckett acknowledged that the Labour leader – apparently an absurdly easy target for the tabloids when he took over the party leadership – was proving to be something of an enigma. While one of his predecessors, Tony Blair, emulated the Tories in his determination not to provoke Rupert Murdoch, and others like Neil Kinnock and Gordon Brown clearly harboured a sense of grievance, Corbyn just serenely went on his way as if the tabloids did not exist.

  The Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is 14 months into an experiment in ignoring the tabloids. It may well be doomed; but his leadership has already lasted longer than the tabloids expected, and their ceaseless attacks on him, like their shouting down of anyone who doubts Brexit will be a success, have a small undertone of anxiety about them.

  By the final days of the election campaign, that undertone of anxiety had morphed into hysteria, but just as Remainers a year earlier had merely raised the volume of Project Fear instead of trying something different, so The Sun, The Express and The Mail simply intensified their accusations of sympathy for terrorists despite the fact that younger voters had no memory of IRA bombings and possibly did not know what the initials stood for. They are unlikely to make the same mistake again.

  At the time of writing the right-wing tabloids are untypically restrained, still licking their wounds after the predicted Tory landslide turned into an embarrassing own goal, and possibly feeling a little foolish about having thrown their weight behind a prime minister who will be burdened with the ‘weak and wobbly’ moniker for the rest of her career. They will be back, however, baying for blood as never before, because Labour’s radical agenda confronts their cherished neoliberal ideology head-on, and the public’s positive response to that programme in June 2017 terrifies them. How they choose to attack the opposition after the failure of the ‘apologists for terrorism’ strategy remains to be seen, but attack they most certainly will. The tactics and the language will change but the objective – the total destruction of Corbyn – will remain the same. As will his determination to ignore whatever they say about him.

  As noted in Chapter 14, it was only after their referendum defeat that the pro-EU 48 per cent began to use impassioned language. Young people who turned to social media to express their sense of betrayal in the strongest terms had contributed very little to the debate leading up to 23 June 2016. More mature commentators who had imbued their case for Remain with measured tones, hedging techniques and back-covering modality suddenly sounded strident and devoid of doubt, and the contrast between their pre- and post-referendum language made it easy for Brexiteers to dismiss the latter as the petulant tantrums of a sneering elite unused to not getting their own way. The novelist Julian Barnes (2017) sees the root of the problem as the fact that pro-EU politicians have always stressed the benefits for commerce and business of being part of a European association but have never promoted a vision of European unity as a great ideal and a triumph for civilized values.

  Politicians never tried to sell Europe to the British people as anything other than an advantageous commercial joint venture. Ours has been an entirely pragmatic membership, never an idealistic one. We never bought into Europe as a grand projet, or even as an expression of fraternity. All this makes it hard for many here to imagine that idealism about the EU still has breath and life within Europe. After the Brexit vote, many of my European friends expressed disbelief and astonishment. It seemed to them that we had run mad in the noonday sun.

  Barnes would doubtless encounter considerably less disbelief and astonis
hment if he spoke to office cleaners in Wolverhampton or unemployed former miners in Barnsley, but it is difficult to quarrel with his assessment of our entirely pragmatic membership of the EU. Idealism can be expressed in magniloquent language with soaring rhetoric and a poetic flourish; pragmatism is inevitably conveyed in reasonable and measured terms shorn of verbal pyrotechnics. The Brexit debate pitted pro-EU pragmatists against people striving – or claiming to strive – for the high ideals of freedom and democracy, and the language used by the two sides reflected that division.