‘The referendum result delivered a clear message’

Demata, Massimiliano

doi:10.4324/9781351041867-8

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…The examples cited in the previous section have shown that the Brexit debate was from the start characterised by a strong tendency of hyperbolic rhetoric, due to the pro-Brexit side depicting the political choice as a matter of complete victory (liberation from the EU) or utter defeat (continued and irreversible enslavement). This extreme argumentation pattern seems to have been at least reinforced, if not caused, by D. Cameron's decision to conduct and formulate a highly polarising referendum (Demata 2019). Within this highly charged public debate, the discourse-historical development of the have/eat cake phrase exemplifies the transformation of Brexit from a foreign policy option (among other options) into an all-or-nothing, triumphor-catastrophe dichotomy.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can political rhetoric ever be “too persuasive”?

Мусолфф

2020

Jezikoslovlje (Online)

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Can the use of linguistic devices to achieve persuasion, such as metaphor, irony and hyperbole, ever be “too persuasive”, i.e., overshoot its rhetorical aim? More specifically, can the combination of such devices be “too much of a good thing” in that it commits speakers (and approving hearers) to actions that they were not part of their persuasion intentions? This paper investigates the semantic and pragmatic development of the Brexit-related applications of the metaphorical proverb, You cannot have your cake and eat it, during 2016–2019 in British public discourse. At the start of that period, the proverb’s reversal into the assertion “We can have our cake and eat it!” by the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and other “Brexiteers” became a highly prominent endorsement of Brexit and its supposed benefits for the UK; it even temporarily set the agenda for the public perception of UK–EU negotiations. Over time it became an object of hyperbolic praise as well as derision and recently seems to have lost much of its persuasive force. The paper argues that the proverb’s new reversed application by Johnson was initially successful in reviving its metaphorical meaning and framing it in a hyperbolic rhetorical context but that it also pushed Brexit proponents to an “all-or-nothing” outcome of the conflict narrative, both vis-à-vis the EU and within the British political debate. Thus, rhetorical success can lead to argumentative (and political) commitments that may have been not foreseen by the speaker and may run counter to their persuasive interests.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can political rhetoric ever be “too persuasive”?

Мусолфф

2020

Jezikoslovlje (Online)

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“…By contrast, the Leavers' communicative style was less formal and plainer, foregrounding a simple and easily understandable, rather than complex, story (Spencer and Oppermann 2020: 667). As others have highlighted (see Spencer and Oppermann 2020;Demata 2019;Buckledee 2018), speakers for the Leave campaign routinely employed a highly emotional language. Invoking a sense of unified national identity vis-à-vis the EU, the UK was systematically presented as a distant outgroup, antithetical to the European integration and constructed in opposition to the EU by means of the othering concept (see Spiering 2015;Malmborg and Stråth 2002;Daddow 2015).…”

Section: Empirical Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The people, the 'obstinately practical, rigorously down to earth, natural debunkers' (Cameron 2016d), were discursively constructed as a unitary, monolithic entity with no internal divisions (see Taggart 2000: 92). Out of the prominent Remainers, the most articulate (re)productions of populist discourses were to be found in Jeremy Corbyn's rhetoric (Corbyn 2016a;; see also Demata 2019). Apart from that, it was also David Cameron (2016a; who foregrounded populist stylisation of political messaging in his discursive portrayal of the EU, using several rhetorical devices that signified (re)connecting with the people and redistributing power to them (Alexandre-Collier, 2016: 119; see also Smith 2020).…”

Section: Populist Narrative Of the Will Of The Peoplementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Second, this study contributes to an ever-growing body of research seeking to document the discourses of/in Brexit (Zappettini 2019a(Zappettini , 2019bZappavigna 2019;Krzyżanowski 2019;Kopf 2019;Koller, Kopf and Miglbauer 2019;Buckledee 2018). Yet, whilst populist discourses in Brexit have been often commented on (Zappettini and Krzyżanowski 2019;Spencer and Oppermann 2020;Ruzza and Pejovic 2019;Demata 2019;Browning 2018), not much has been written on technocratic discourses in Brexit. It is in this sense that the article helps fill an important research gap.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The EU as a Choice: Populist and Technocratic Narratives of the EU in the Brexit Referendum Campaign

Meislová¹

2021

JCER

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The article investigates the main populist and technocratic narratives employed in the campaign in the run-up to the 2016 British EU referendum. Based on a qualitative dataset comprising 40 selected speeches, interviews and other public interventions by prominent Leave and Remain protagonists and adopting the general orientation of the Discourse Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper discusses how the language of the Remain and Leave camps bore signs of both populist and technocratic discourses. The key argument developed in this article is that while, at the most general level, the populist rhetoric was discursively appropriated by the Leave campaign (with the key narratives of the EU as a failure, EU as an oppressor and of anti-establishment fury) and the technocratic rhetoric by the Remain campaign (with the key narratives of the EU as a tool, the single market benefits and the withdrawal economic effects), the Remain side displayed a lower degree of narrative consistency.

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“…However, as with Reagan and Thatcher before, their coalitions were underpinned by a desire to secure and shore up political power rather than build formally encompassing cross‐societal accommodations (Krieger, 1986; Moran, 1998). Trump's vocal antielitism was taken by followers as a rejection of both social and economic liberalism (Oliver and Rahn, 2017); the same is true for Boris Johnson (Demata, 2019).…”

Section: Trump Brexit and Downward Pressures In Hrmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human resource management practices in the context of rising right‐wing populism

Cumming

Wood

Zahra

2020

Human Res Mgmt Journal

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We review the relationship between the causes and impact of rising right-wing populism and human resource management practice, drawing on the recent experiences of the United States and the United Kingdom. Specifically, we explore the links between right-wing populism and firms and their HRM practices. Although the links between declining standards of work, employment, and populism may be indirect and spatially uneven, each impacts the other in a manner that reinforces existing trends. We pay particular attention to migration and labour mobility, pay dispersion, and job and occupational security. At the level of the workplace, the populist turn undermines workforce diversity and makes transnational mobility more difficult. At the same time, structural pressures mitigating against a greater commitment to employees and their development and well-being contribute to a general climate of insecurity, which, in turn, reinforces populism.

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‘The referendum result delivered a clear message’

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Can political rhetoric ever be “too persuasive”?

Can political rhetoric ever be “too persuasive”?

The EU as a Choice: Populist and Technocratic Narratives of the EU in the Brexit Referendum Campaign

Human resource management practices in the context of rising right‐wing populism

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