Brexitspeak : Demagoguery and the Decline of Democracy

This critical investigation explores Brexit in the context of the nationalist populist wave in Europe, arguing that manipulative rhetoric was a key factor in the 2016 referendum result. It probes Brexiter propaganda through the lens of linguistics and cognitive science, showing how ethnocentric attitudes and emotions were mobilised.

Were we talked into Brexit? And who is ''we''? It''s impossible to do politics without words and a context to use them in. And it''s impossible to make sense of the phenomenon of Brexit without understanding how language was used – and misused – in the historical context that produced the 2016 referendum result. This interdisciplinary book shows how the particular idea of ''the British people'' was maintained through text and talk at different levels of society over the years following World War II, and mobilised by Brexit propagandists in a socially, economically and culturally divided polity. The author argues that we need the well-defined tools of linguistics and language philosophy, tied in with a political science framework, to understand a serious, modern concept of demagoguery. Written in an accessible manner, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to probe the social, political and ideational contexts that generated Brexit.