Europhobes and Europhiles,Eurospats and Eurojibes. Revisiting Britain’s EU debate, 2000–2016

This paper is an examination in three parts of the UK’s debate on membership of the European Union, before and immediately after the so-called ‘Brexit’ Referendum. The first part takes its cue from an article by Wolfgang Teubert which has exercised considerable influence in the field of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), namely, his examination of the language of EUscepticism in the UK (Teubert 2001). The aim of the CADS approach is the uncovering, in the discourse type under study, of non-obvious meanings and patterns of meanings, that is, meanings which might not be readily available to naked-eye perusal. Teubert’s paper was an inspiring example of these procedures.1 In the second part, a para-replication of Teubert’s work, we revisit attitudes to the EU as represented in sections of the UK press in 2013 (the year the British Prime Minister announced an “in-out” referendum on EU membership). The third section examines the themes debated immediately before and immediately after the referendum vote in June 2016. We also reflect on how the much-invoked notion of negative representation needs to be employed with care, particularly with regard to media discourses.