Anti-Immigration vs Anti-EU: Political Discourse Analysis of Brexit Decision of The UK

Abstract

United Kingdom’s relation with the European Union has been always distant. As literature mainly underlines, the UK has never been a full participant of certain policy areas; particularly in the area of ‘justice and home affair’ the UK showed limited enthusiasm to cooperate Nevertheless, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, so-called the Brexit decision, has been one of the shocking development happening in 2016 and both EU and member state leaders expressed their disappointment. The Brexit process is still ambiguous, but we have already witnessed the social consequences of the racist discourses of the referendum process. In this regard, the increases in racist attacks indicated in the official reports are worrying. The study has four main parts. After the introduction part, the historical relation between the EU and the UK has indicated and distant relationship between the parts is highlighted. Following on from this part, Euroscepticism in Britain is explained and its role behind Brexit's decision is clarified as part of the main argument of this study. After this historical explanation, the main analysis started. The study is conducted by relying on Political Discourse Analysis developed by Teun van Dijk. At this point, clarification of “discourse” is somewhat important. According to van Dijk, discourse is essential to control people’s minds, ideas, knowledge, opinions, and their personal and social representations. He also argues that discourses are significant to have power, dominance and the reproduction of racism within societies and political discourses tend to be future-oriented. The actors topicalise certain issues and use discourses to direct masses towards certain actions. During the referendum process, UKIP was not the only party supporting the leave campaign, Boris Johnson, for example, also encouraged the public to vote for Brexit. Nigel Farage allegedly persuaded more than 17 million people to vote to leave the EU In the analysis, we first pointed the ‘positive self-presentation’ in Farage’s discourses. Here, “WE” always represent the ‘more democratic and civilised’ one. Similar to this ‘others’ have negative meaning and correspond to threats to the coherence of the country. During the campaign, the party and the leader targeted immigrants and categorised their threat according to three aspects of life: the welfare system, the UK public’s security, and social norms. However, Farage never accepted that he was being ‘racist’, even he argued he supported refugees by emphasising bogus/real refugee distinction. In addition, Farage’s strategy was to justify his ‘firm and fair’ immigration control for the good of an inner circle, in other words in the interests of the British people. He tried to justify his actions by arguing they were the demands of British people. On top of all these, he indicated some real/unreal numbers to persuade masses. After discourse analysis, the article indicates how racism within society was reproduced. By showing hate crime reports that indicate attacks peaked in the post-referendum, this study underlines discourses are not inefficient tools, in fact they can pave the way for some dangerous results. Both the National Police and UN reports prove the increase in the number of racist hate crimes, especially in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. All in all, we argue that the role of the UK in the EU throughout the history of European integration has always been one of ‘British exceptionalism’. The immigration question, on the other hand, provided an important opportunity for following this exceptionalist policy and for leaving the EU membership, but it resulted in racist and xenophobic attacks towards all “others” within society. Without ignoring historical background, this study relied on data produced during the referendum process and post-referendum era and it aimed to contribute to both migration and Brexit studies literature. Since this article did not have room to account for the other parties’ discourses and the long-run effects of referendum, it would be interesting to enlarge the inquiry by adding different party discourses, describing their influence on the public and how migrants are affected today.