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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 18:5 (2019) ► pp.651–670

“Immigration, that’s what everyone’s thinking about …”

The 2016 British EU referendum seen in the eyes of the beholder

ORCID logo | University of Leicester

This article examines the 2016 British EU referendum and the domestic debates through citizens’ voices in the media, specifically on the emotions and narratives, on The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Express, the week before the referendum. British citizens felt, in their words, “bullied because of [their] political correctness” and pointed their anger and dissatisfaction against the EU (and Merkel’s) “obsession for open borders”. The analysis underlines that these emotions and narratives, combining immigration and sovereignty, have remained embedded in the post-Brexit days, and go back not just to Billig’s banal nationalism (1995), but show that voting Leave represented respect towards true British values, the “core country” as conceptualised by Taggart (2000). Powellism (Hampshire 2018) and Wright’s “encroanchment” of Englishness (2017), and the analysis on the immigration narrative explain how anti-immigration and sovereignty discourse is persisting and is influencing the social and political relation of Britain with Europe.

Keywords: Britain, content analysis, Eurosceptic narrative, immigration, sovereignty
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Britain, the EU and the British (print media) Eurosphere
  • 3.Collective identity and the other
  • 4.Research design
  • 5.“If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea”
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 19 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.19022.gue
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