The in-group and out-groups of the British National Party and the UK Independence Party (original) (raw)
Related papers
This dissertation interrogates immigration texts generated by political actors to establish how punitive immigration policy is legitimised in the UK. A critical discourse analysis is conducted which revealed interdiscursivity between immigration discourses and discourses of predominantly crime, but also war, conflict, and humanitarianism. In addition, the legitimisation techniques found, which were mostly ‘mythopoesis’, mimic those during New Labour’s ‘fairer, faster, firmer’ immigration campaign. This intertextuality suggests that both the Conservatives and New Labour adopted the same populist political strategy. It is concluded that the legitimisation of immigration control policy requires an alarmist context, negative constructions of immigrants, and discourses of humanitarianism. Finally, that the production of positive counter-narratives could have the potential to delegitimise the governments ‘hostile environment’ agenda.
Politics
The 2015 UK General Election campaign was mostly dominated by the issues of immigration, public debt, and income inequality. While most political parties adopted austerity-led programmes in order to reduce the level of public deficit, their stances on immigration vary significantly despite the two main parties converging on a welfare chauvinist frame. This article compares party positions to policy recommendations formulated by participants in a democratic forum as part of the ‘Welfare States Futures: Our Children’s Europe’ project in order to determine whether recent party pledges on immigration are being used by citizens in a large group discussion over the future of welfare policy in the United Kingdom. The analysis shows that while participants are committed to tougher policies in order to reduce existing levels of net migration, most of the policy priorities formulated do not match those of the two mainstream parties (i.e. the Conservative Party and the Labour Party) but rather...
Iperstoria - Journal of American and English Studies, 2022
Combining the theoretical background of Critical Discourse Studies (van Dijk 2015a, 2015b; van Leeuwen 2008; Wodak 2015a) with a corpus-assisted methodology (van Diik 2015a; 2015b), this paper contrastively investigates the discursive representation of migration and migrant people by leading British (Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn) and Italian politicians (Matteo Salvini, Matteo Renzi) in the years 2016-2018, starting from the examination of the collocational profile of such migration-related terms as immigration, immigrant, migrant, refugee and asylum seeker. The period is salient for the global upsurge of populism (Mudde 2004), the Brexit referendum, and the so-called 'refugee crisis,' which turned immigration into a hot topic in the political agenda of parties of different orientations. Our empirical analysis sheds light on two opposing views: the negative portrayal of migrants as a threat by right-wing populist politicians across countries (Lorenzetti 2020), while left-wing politicians display a more humanitarian attitude. Regardless of political stance or specific migrant terms, however, the representation of migrant groups as social actors is crucially founded on the strategies of aggregation, collectivisation and functionalisation (van Leeuwen 2008), which ultimately result in the perpetuation of stereotyped and partial depictions that overlook their features as individuals.
Hitit Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi / Journal of Divinity Faculty of Hitit University , 2020
United Kingdom’s relation with the European Union has been always distant. Nevertheless, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, socalled the Brexit decision, has been one of the shocking developments happening in 2016. Prima facia the referendum result shows the electorate’s historic decision to break away from the EU, however it is actually a product of a populist political discourse, which has been shaped by increasing antiimmigrant sentiments in the UK. In this paper, we argue that anti-immigrant discourses behind the Brexit campaign actually are a part of larger historical relations with the European Union. Following on from the literature, 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 leave the EU membership, but it resulted in racist and xenophobic attacks towards all “others” within society. In this process, discourses on the leave side contributed to anti-immigrant feelings and racism within society, although we cannot say this was the main aim. In this paper, we conduct the political discourse analysis developed by Teun van Dijk to examine the campaign of the United Kingdom Independence Party during the referendum process. Taken together, these aspects of the article show how the anti-immigration discourse has contributed to the racist and xenophobic actions, while the main aim has been to finalise the UK’s longstanding distance from the EU.
M igrants and issues around immigration in the UK have attracted increased press attention in the last fi fty years. In academia, ample studies have been carried out on immigration from the sociological, political, journalistic and of course, discourse analytical point of view. Immigration discourses and their representation in media need to be considered in the light of new political, economic and social developments in the world,, e.g. the shifts from a bipolar world order to what came to be known as new world order, the emergence of new north-south constellations along with (real and/or constructed) threats of terrorism. Recent economic crisis in the 'north', increased critique of multiculturalism model and tensions in reconciling economic imperatives and socio-political ideologies have contributed to a tendency in the political spectrum of various European countries to shift towards more conservative orientations, identity convergence and foregrounding market orders , van Dijk 1991 for the most recent overview). This, in
Introduction: The Politics of Immigration: UKIP and Beyond
The Political Quarterly, 2014
The UK Independence Party (UKIP)'s first-place finish in the May 2014 European elections, with 27.9 percent of the vote, is an unprecedented political earthquake which has transformed political conversation in Britain. Beneath the headlines, deeper questions remain over immigration and the challenge it poses to the future of Britain's main political parties. These challenges have been germinating for some time. Consider three related developments. First, the rise of immigration, since 2001, to first or second spot among the electorate's priorities. Second, the emergence of the British National Party (BNP) in the period to 2009, shattering the complacent belief that Britain was immune to far right advances of the European variety. Third, since 2009, the rise of UKIP in a European Parliament with a record number of far right contenders.
Calzada Pérez, María, 2023
This study examines migration representation in three parliamentary chambers: the Spanish Chamber, the European Parliament, and the British House of Commons. The time span of its analysis coincides with the eighth Legislature of Spain (2004-2008). The reasons for this decision are straightforward. If parliaments portray or construct ideological debates in democratic societies, it seems logical to turn our attention to them as a means of assessing the nature and quality of comparable but different multicultural environments in which migration is a major defining feature. Furthermore, this time span allows for an examination of such societies at different ideological phases, for example, Spain's conceptualisation of migration in the initial stages of parliamentary representation. The study expands the method of corpus-assisted analysis through a critical theoretical framework proposed by the sociopolitical scientist Zapata-Barrero. Data were obtained from the European Comparable and Parallel Corpus Archive of Parliamentary Speeches. Well-established tools in corpus linguistics, such as frequency and collocation, were employed, leading to an examination of Zapata-Barrero's reactive and proactive discourses. The quantitative methods used were especially in-depth, undertaking an exhaustive descriptive and statistical treatment and aiming to strengthen the validity of subsequent qualitative analyses. Consequently, a virtuous circle was achieved: the corpus linguistic procedures reached higher levels of theoretical abstraction, while Zapata-Barrero's framework gained robustness and more potential for generalisation. The study's originality, thus, lies in the mutual synergies activated by this theoretical and methodological combination.
Unpublished Paper
We present a lexical correspondence analysis supported by T-lab (Lancia, 2004) of the Italian parliamentary plenary debates on immigration (Turco-Napolitano and Bossi-Fini laws) held at the Italian Camera during two periods (1996-2001 and 2001-2006). The Turco-Napolitano draft bill was supported by the left-wing parties while the Bossi-Fini draft bill was supported by the right-wing parties. Our aim is to examine how "foreigners" are represented in the discourse of the Italian right and left-wing parties. We also analyzed how the issue of immigration is defined and what changes occur in the content of these representations between the two different periods. Lexical correspondence analysis presents a major difference between the positions expressed in the two different draft bills and, furthermore, identifies two specific discourses, that are referred to by the majorities who supported the laws. The results show that the discourse of the parliamentary right is characterized as being centered on emphasizing the ingroup-outgroup polarization and represents the "Other" as a "threat", while the left stresses the necessity for a more tolerant law focusing on the need for immigrants to increase the economic growth of Italian companies.