We’ll be in charge of our borders
In a world with so many new threats, it’s safer to control our own borders and decide for ourselves who can come into this country, not be overruled by EU judges.
We can control immigration and have a fairer system which welcomes people to the UK based on the skills they have, not the passport they hold
We’ll be free to trade with the whole world
The EU stops us signing our own trade deals with key allies like Australia or New Zealand, and growing economies like India, China or Brazil. We’ll be free to seize new opportunities which means more jobs.
We can make our own laws
Our laws should be made by people we can elect and kick out – that’s more democratic.
If we vote to stay in the EU
The EU is expanding
Turkey is one of five new countries joining the EU
. . .
The EU will cost us more and more
The EU already costs us £350 million a week – enough to build a new NHS hospital every week. We get less than half of this back, and have no say over how it’s spent.
Immigration will continue to be out of control
Nearly 2 million people came to the UK from the EU over the last ten years. Imagine what it will be like in future decades when new, poorer countries join.
We’ll have to keep bailing out the €
The countries that use the Euro already have a built-in majority, meaning they can always outvote us. You will be paying the bill for the Euro’s failure.
The European Court will still be in charge of our laws
It already overrules us on everything from how much tax we pay, to who we can let in and out of the country, and on what terms.
This work is primarily concerned with the use of language rather than the semiotic significance of graphical and layout choices or the use of photos and cartoons. To reproduce the full content of the relevant part of the site in question would occupy several pages of the traditional book format. However, in this case some mention should be made of certain aspects of visual communication, particularly in the light of Machin and Mayr’s observation that, just as words can denote one thing and connote another, so images can depict physical reality – people, places or things – and at the same time evoke abstract concepts, ideas and values (2012: 49).
The text is neatly divided into two parts: following the condition ‘If we vote to leave the EU’ there are five positive consequences beginning with the pronoun We; in the second part we have the condition ‘If we vote to stay in the EU’ followed by five negative consequences. Much of the text in the first part is of a soft shade of blue while the second part uses red, the colour traditionally associated with danger.
Some of the images are neither original nor particularly persuasive (the white cliffs of Dover, a blindfolded Lady Justice with her balance and sword etc.), but two merit some discussion. Beside the positive consequence ‘We can make our own laws’ there is an image of a large Union Jack in the background and in the foreground twenty-three hands raised, presumably in support of the national flag. What is significant is the fact that eleven of those hands are black or brown, evidently a choice made to counter the accusation of scarcely concealed racism frequently aimed at Leave supporters.
The second powerful image accompanies the warning that ‘The EU is expanding’. A map shows Europe plus Turkey, with Britain coloured blue and Turkey red. Additional text informs us that the population of Turkey is seventy-six million and a broad red arrow indicates the direct route from that country to the heart of England. That Turkey has a large population is underlined by a circle at the base of the arrow containing a number of the man and woman icons found on the doors of public toilets, but there are more male than female icons. There are no words to tell us that expansion of the EU will result in Britain having to absorb great numbers of Turkish migrants, but the image used depicts precisely that scenario while also invoking concerns about trying to assimilate men coming from a society where attitudes towards gender issues are very different from those in the UK.
To return to language use, the most striking feature is the recurrent choice of the modal verb will to indicate the certain outcome of a vote for or against leaving the EU, a stark contrast with the hypotheses and uncertainty signalled by Remain supporters’ repeated use of may, might or could. When, as in text (vii), the modal verb can refers to ability of some kind, it does not fall neatly into one of the categories of epistemic or deontic modality, and in such cases it is sometimes described as representing dynamic modality. However, it suggests a definite ability comparable with that indicated by the expression will be able to, and therefore conveys a sense of self-confidence.
The outcomes of either a yes or a no vote described in text (vii) are not in themselves any more likely to come about than those offered in the Leave camp’s predictions and hypotheses described above. Indeed, all of them can be and were hotly contested, especially the claim that leaving the EU would save Britain £350 million a week. While it is true that the UK was, and at the time of writing, still is one of the major contributors to the EU budget, the figure of £350 million is quite simply a lie. Member states are normally required to pay 1 per cent of their GDP but Britain has been contributing less than that since 1984 when Mrs Thatcher negotiated a rebate. When that rebate is taken into account, the weekly sum drops to £248 million, but that is a gross figure that does not consider the money that returns to the UK in the form of aid to economically deprived areas like South Wales and Cornwall, agricultural subsidies and the funding of research programmes such as Horizon 2020. Once all the receipts from Brussels are included in the calculation, the UK’s net contribution to the EU budget is found to be £136 million a week, which is still a lot of money but is less than 40 per cent of the figure claimed by the Leave campaign throughout the referendum campaign (Henley 2016). Later in text (vii) there is in fact a rather oblique reference to finance received from the EU but it is described as ‘less than half’ of the £350 million allegedly sent to Brussels each week when an accurate calculation would show it to be 61 per cent.
In text (vii), and indeed in practically all Leave propaganda during the referendum campaign, the issues of immigration and border controls were discussed in terms of certainties or confident predictions, usually with the modal verbs can and will, and without hedging strategies. The question of whether Brexit would be hard or soft did not fully emerge until after the vote, although some Leave campaigners were effectively touting the soft variety by reassuring their supporters that leaving the EU would not damage the British economy because the government could opt for the Norway-solution of negotiating a deal to retain access to the single market. This conveniently overlooked the fact that Brussels had made it abundantly clear that maintaining free movement of labour was a non-negotiable condition of tariff-free trade with the single market. It was not made sufficiently clear that taking back control of immigration policy, and also of breaking free from the European Court, could only be achieved through hard Brexit, a prospect that might well have deterred some voters.
Other confident claims in text (vii) that were challenged during the campaign are the conviction that an independent UK would be able to negotiate favourable trade deals with rapidly growing economic powers like China and Brazil, and the fear that Britain would have to keep ‘bailing out’ a failing euro. It is not at all clear why China would cut a deal with Britain when it has not done so with the much larger market of the EU, while in today’s interconnected world it is difficult to see how any trading nation or bloc could be unaffected by a crisis in the eurozone. The only point made in text (vii) that cannot be contested is the typically Lexit argument concerning the desirability of laws made by people ‘we can elect and kick out’; it is undeniable that the European Commission is unelected and that throughout the period of the referendum campaign was involved in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations with the Un
ited States that citizens of the member states were not allowed to know anything about.
Texts (viii) and (ix) do not require detailed comment; both are further examples of the use of will and other expressions of epistemic modality to present certainties rather than possibilities or hypotheses.
(viii) BREXIT FACTOR 10 reasons why choosing Brexit on June 23 is a vote for a stronger, better Britain.
Leaving the EU will save our sovereignty, rein in migration and boost our economy
(Lord Green et al. 2016)
(ix) [omissis] The eurozone crisis isn’t just economic – devastating as it is. It’s also going to be political and will spread beyond the eurozone, convulsing the EU in ways we have not yet even come close to seeing. As EU members we would be part of this, even outside the eurozone.
. . .
We have already seen low-level rioting in Greece – it will surely get much worse as voters’ impotence becomes ever more intolerable. But if voters cannot change direction through the ballot box the lure of extremists is bound to increase as it has already with the rise of Golden Dawn in Greece and other fascist parties elsewhere.
. . .
So the issue we have to address before June 23 is whether we want to remain tied to the EU and the chaos that is bound to engulf it. Inside the EU, as the eurozone collapses and the politicians attempt to rescue it and their precious European project, there will be no escape. We will suffer the consequences of a currency we never joined and a political union we never wanted. Or we can get out now and leave them to it.
It’s not really much of a dilemma, is it?
(Pollard 2016)
Text (viii) shows the headline and lead of an article from The Sun online on the eve of voting day. The article itself – which is surprisingly long for The Sun – contains the modal verb will thirty-four times, while the combined total for can, would, should, could and must is twenty-eight. Would appears thirteen times, usually in second conditional constructions concerning the hypothesis of a victory for Remain.
Stephen Pollard’s article in The Express online (text ix) is closely based on the book The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Baron King of Lothbury who, when he was plain Mervyn King, was governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2013. The book’s contents are wide-ranging but Pollard homes in on those parts that predict tough times ahead for the eurozone. The journalist writes of the collapse of the eurozone as a certain outcome: apart from the modal verb will that is used four times in the sentences cited above, there is also an instance of the going to future form, which is an even stronger indicator of certainty. In addition, epistemic modality is also expressed through the adverb surely and two instances of the form is bound to, which conveys a sense of inevitability. At no point do we find even the slightest concession to the notion that the euro might not be doomed after all.
Both the Brexit and the Lexit campaigns drew attention to the lack of democratic accountability in the EU but there were also significant differences in their programmes that convinced most Lexit supporters that it was prudent not to be seen alongside high-profile Brexit figures. Conservative MPs like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove had no problem with the EU’s neoliberal agenda, including the privatization of public services and the prohibition of state aid to industry, while Lexit supporters argued that European laws made it impossible for a future Labour government to implement its election manifesto, notably the promise to renationalize the railways, a proposal that had, and still has, considerable support in the country. Similarly, a key element of the Brexit platform, the need to reintroduce border controls and reduce the numbers of EU migrants coming into the UK, was largely ignored by Lexit proponents, who feared accusations of barely disguised racism if they were seen as sharing UKIP’s highlighting of public concern about migration levels (although a notable exception was the MP Gisella Stuart, herself an immigrant from West Germany, who served as chair of the Vote Leave campaign and on her blog – Gisela Stuart and Team Gisela – and in interviews made it clear that she thought Labour was committing a tactical error in not addressing the legitimate concerns expressed particularly by second and third generation British Asians).
Texts (x), (xi) and (xii) give the Lexit point of view. They are respectively the final part of an unsigned editorial entitled ‘Why the Morning Star supports a Leave vote’ (2016) in the radical left-wing newspaper the Morning Star, the headline, lead and opening paragraphs of an article by Brendan Chilton (2016), the chair of Labour Leave, published, rather surprisingly, in the right-wing Daily Express (a common enemy creates strange bedfellows), and the headline and conclusion to an article by Suzanne Moore (2016) in The Guardian that turned out to be prophetic.
(x) Falling wages, mass unemployment and battered public services are feeding the resentment that gives birth to fascism. And the EU’s commitment to endless austerity contributes to that.
Nor is the EU’s record on racism good. A deal with Turkey widely condemned as illegal has allowed it to wash its hands of desperate refugees. In Ukraine it supported a fascist-backed coup against an elected government. When France decided to deport tens of thousands of Roma in 2009–10, the EU looked the other way.
There is no evidence that a Remain vote would help defeat the far right. The struggle against racism and intolerance is one we will have to wage anyway.
Since the beginning of the neoliberal era in the 1980s, we have seen corporate power strengthened at the expense of democracy again and again.
The ‘big bang’ deregulated the banks, putting big finance beyond our control. Independence for the Bank of England removed our ability to set interest rates. Global trade treaties are giving private companies the right to enter new markets whatever the people think about that, and increasingly the right to sue governments if they don’t like their policies.
The EU is part and parcel of all this. A vote to Leave today will not bring about socialism. But it would be a step towards restoring democratic control of our economy, and would remove an obstacle to progress.
The Morning Star advise you to take that step.
(xi) EU does NOTHING for working people, says Labour Leave’s BRENDAN CHILTON
MAKE no bones about it: the EU is anti-democratic
It is fundamentally against the interests of working people here in the UK and across Europe. The EU referendum is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for working people to take back control of our country from the unelected and unaccountable institutions of Brussels.
Millions of Labour supporters should vote to leave the EU on June 23 because it is the only progressive option in this referendum campaign. We are told by the international elite that we must remain a member of the European Union because it has brought democracy, peace and progress to the member states. What utter nonsense!
The EU is not a benevolent institution that protects people and guides social progress. Instead it is an institution that ruthlessly crushes all who oppose it and has caused many of the social inequalities which are rife in Europe today.
(xii) Voters will stick two fingers up to those lecturing about Brexit’s dangers
Every discussion of the referendum assumes that a Labour government is an impossibilty, so the left case for Brexit is a nonstarter. Instead, hope must be invested in ‘young people’, who it is assumed all think the same thing and go to Glastonbury.
So, we are told that this is a hugely important vote and that one must vote with head not heart, as though we have already lost. Somehow the EU will be reformed. We just don’t know how.
But surely once the leave camp feels its strength, it will keep pushing? This matter won’t be settled. The complete lack of credibility among the main players (Cameron, Corbyn and Johnson may all be arguing the opposite case to the ones closest to their hearts and histories) is ridiculous. The public senses this but, again, we keep being told that what this is really all about is immigration, the democratic deficit or sovereignty. Or ‘I’d like to teach the world
to sing’ Eurovision. Maybe it’s about all those things. Meanwhile, the complete loss of nerve by the left means that the low paid, the bottom 10%, are deemed worthy of sacrifice for some greater good.
I share this loss of nerve because of the company I would be in: the apocalypse of Borisconi. But I sense that, for many, a strange game is being played out whereby voting leave is not seen as such an enormous gamble. Much of England is ready to roll that dice; this part of England, so often despised, demonised and disrespected by those who claim to represent it, does need to be spoken for. This England will not do as it is told. This England may not be London and may not be subsumed into the fantasy of Great Britain, whichever side is selling it. When government, opposition and businesses are speaking with one voice, many feel there is not much of an actual choice here.
In the first two paragraphs of text (x) the indicative mood is employed to describe the nefariousness of the EU in a series of factual assertions that are not softened by any hedging devices at all. Epistemic modality is avoided and value-loaded lexis – facism, racism, facist-backed coup, desperate refugees, deport – underscores the strength of the accusations.
The modal verbs will and would both appear in the third paragraph, the former with reference to a certainty – the war against racism that socialists will have to wage irrespective of the referendum result – and the latter to refer to the consequences of a victory for Remain, an inexpedient outcome for the anonymous author who, in texturing his/her self-identity, chooses a verb that renders a vote to stay in the EU a mere hypothesis.
The third and fourth paragraphs return to direct, hard-hitting attacks on the EU’s past and present policies, before the modals will and would reappear in the sixth. The article was posted on 22 June when most opinion polls were predicting a narrow victory for Remain, so the author uses a conditional construction with would to refer to two highly desirable gains resulting from an unexpected vote to quit the EU, but will for the rather obvious observation that there is no causal link between a victory for Leave and the creation of a socialist society.
THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT Page 4
