Taking back control of the welfare state: Brexit, rational-imaginaries and welfare chauvinism

Abstract

Brexit is about more than the UK exiting the EU. For the Conservative Party, it is about reacting to the challenge from the radical right, both in terms of the electoral threat from UKIP and a long-term internal struggle between moderate Conservatives and the more radical Eurosceptic faction within the party. We ask to what extent Brexit could also be considered as the mobilisation of specific welfare chauvinist discourses and practices. Through a combination of Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of key speeches and documents from the official Leave campaign, we demonstrate that, rather than merely reinforcing deservingness along ethno-national lines, Brexit invokes social citizenship to delegitimize EU institutions. The referendum result catalyses a longer-term redrawing of the boundaries of social citizenship, and the ideas of membership that grants access to services and benefits. Brexit is discursively framed to mobilise people to consent to this redrawing of boundaries.

Keywords:

• Brexit
• British politics
• populism
• welfare chauvinism
• discursive frames

Acknowledgements

Early versions of this paper were presented at the ‘Populism 2.0’ workshop at Oxford Brookes University, 23 January 2018, at the 25th Conference of Europeanists in Chicago, 28–30 March 2018, at the ESPAnet conference in Vilnius, 30 August–1 September 2018 and at the ‘Whither Social Rights in (Post-) Brexit Europe’ workshop at the University of Oxford, 19–20 September 2019. We are grateful to Willem Maas, the audience members at these events for their valuable questions and comments. Errors that remain are ours alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 While the term ‘Brexit’ is ambiguous and inaccurate and refers to a phenomenon rather than event (for instance, the referendum result was only a decision on Brexit, not Brexit itself). However, in this article, we follow convention and use Brexit as an all-encompassing term that relates more widely to the process of Britain leaving the EU.

2 There were two prominent Leave campaigns. The Electoral Commission designated the Vote Leave campaign as the official campaign advocating for leaving the EU. It had cross-party support. Its chair was former Labour Party MP Gisela Stuart while other visible figures of the campaign included Boris Johnson and Michael Gove and the sole UKIP MP Douglas Carswell. The other significant Leave campaign group was the Leave. EU funded by businessman Arron Banks and endorsed by the UKIP Leader Nigel Farage and businessman Richard Tice that later became an MEP and Chairman of the Brexit Party.

3 We analysed a small number of materials associated with Nigel Farage, given his centrality to the historical movement on the UK to leave the EU.

4 Lynton Crosby in The Cameron Years, BBC One 2019.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Donoghue

Matthew Donoghue is Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in Social Policy, School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, University College Dublin. His interests include but are not limited to social citizenship and social rights, the discursive and ideological politics of policy(making), resilience and cohesion, and poverty and inequality. He has published in Political Studies, Journal of Social Policy, and The Sociological Review. He is the co-editor (with Mikko Kuisma) of Whither Social Rights in (Post-) Brexit Europe? (Social Europe Publishing and The Friedrich Ebert Foundation). [[email protected]]

Mikko Kuisma

Mikko Kuisma is Program Lead and Lecturer in Comparative Public Policy at the University of Tübingen. His research interests lie in the comparative politics and political economy of welfare, with a special interest in the role of ideas and identities, expressed in/through political discourse, in welfare capitalism. His work has appeared in, amongst others, New Political Economy, Public Administration, Policy and Society, Critical Social Policy, and Critical Policy Studies. [[email protected]]