Othering through blame: The EU as the blame target in the UK government’s post-Brexit rhetoric

Abstract

This article uniquely illustrates the intricate and complex dynamics between blame and the othering process. It does so by unearthing how the British Conservative government, led by Boris Johnson, systematically used blame to reproductively depict the EU, ex negativo, as the “other” to the British “self” between 1 January 2021 (the end of the transition period) and 6 September 2022 (the end of Johnson’s tenure as prime minister). The study works with a comprehensive dataset of the UK government’s official pronouncements on the EU and Brexit collected from Gov.uk (the official government website) and Hansard (the official resource documenting British parliamentary proceedings), as the very points of origin for mediation, which were then often disseminated, interpreted and amplified by the media. Drawing on Hansson’s typology of blame avoidance strategies and Krzyżanowski’s operationalisation of the discourse historical approach, due attention is paid to the topical structure of blame discourse and its underlying discursive strategies.