Performing Euroscepticism: The UK Press and Cameron’s Bloomberg Speech

Abstract

UK newspapers have exerted manifest structuring effects over Britain’s national debates about ‘Europe’. First, the UK newspaper market is dominated by various forms of Eurosceptical sentiment and since the Eurozone crisis in particular has expounded a form of ‘hard Euroscepticism’ (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2004), which extolls the merits of EU withdrawal. Second, Eurosceptical journalists have popularized a Eurosceptic discourse through which European integration is constructed both as ‘over there’ and as an implied or explicit threat to British sovereignty interests and national identity (Anderson and Weymouth 1998; Hawkins 2012). Chris Gifford has usefully described this ‘populist politics’ of Euroscepticism in his account of the ideological manifestations of Euroscepticism in the UK (Gifford 2014, p. 6). It draws on an obsession with past conflicts and the Second World War especially, which have provided British Eurosceptics with a range of linguistic weapons to keep their audiences in a ‘permanent state of discursive war’ (Daddow 2011, pp. 109–34) with a malign ‘other’ across the English Channel (Gifford 2006).