On June 24, 2016, residents of the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe awoke to shocking news. The results of the Brexit Referendum delivered a surprise win for the Leave campaign. Later that day, Prime Minister David Cameron offered his resignation and set off a political firestorm that still grips his Conservative Party well into 2023. What was offered as an olive branch to the Eurosceptics had backfired, and Cameron, along with other pro-European Conservative Members of Parliament, would ultimately find themselves largely driven out of the party which had led the charge to integrate with Europe nearly 50 years before. What forces swayed millions of predominantly English voters away from Europe? This thesis will examine what academics have described as one of the most decisive factors, immigration (Ker-Lindsay, 2017). To do so, it will take advantage of Britain's famously partisan print media and use a discourse analysis of public opinion as seen through published letters to the editor to answer the following questions: were the audiences of Leave-supporting publications more hostile towards immigration in 2016 as compared to similar periods, and if so, did that hostility increase during the period of the Brexit referendum campaign?

Brexit itself was a massive populist victory. In Cas Mudde’s seminal “The Populist Zeitgeist,” he defines populism as a political ideology that splits the population into two antagonistic groups, the virtuous and homogenous “pure people” and the “corrupt elite.” (2004). This delineation occurs on both the left and right of the political spectrum, with the left defining the “people” along socioeconomic status with the right defining it along national, cultural, or ethnic groups (Mudde & Kaltwasser 2017). This right-wing definition was apparent throughout the campaign as Brexiteers repeatedly used the threat of the outsider as a driver of animus for those who considered the EU’s freedom of movement a threat to British security. Furthermore, the left-wing populism that initially kept the Labour movement from endorsing European integration persisted along its fringe. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s campaigning for Remain in 2016 is characterized as lackluster and considered a key factor behind Remain’s narrow loss due to Corbyn being “in his heart of hearts… a Brexiter” (Blewett, 2023).

Mudde also defines populist ideology as an expression of the volonté générale of the people (2004). This thin-centered description of populism was evident in the years after the referendum when a succession of Conservative Prime Ministers shed years of party orthodoxy due to the “will of the people,” which allowed the party to navigate the growing cleavage due to stalled negotiations and secure a significant electoral victory in 2019. While this reformation could be attributed to the Conservatives’ longstanding ability to modernize to reflect the nation's mood, this was a bottom-up approach, ultimately driven by a single mandate in 2016. While Prime Ministers Cameron and May attempted to square the peg of this will and their party’s policies regarding Europe, they failed due to increasing numbers of either Eurosceptic Conservative MPs or a critical mass of pro-European MPs acknowledging this popular will. Boris Johnson succeeded where his predecessors failed as he was willing to eject an MP from the party if he or she stood in, ostensibly, the people’s way. This purge of moderate Conservatives in the Fall of 2019 paved the way for an overwhelming pro-Brexit party in that year’s snap election.

This thin-centered rejection of expertise and the logic that the people’s will is to be respected at all costs was combined with a thick-centered ideology that is present throughout other Eurosceptic parties (Neuner & Wratil, 2020). This Euroscepticism converged with anti-immigrant rhetoric and nativist protectionism. Leaving the EU was presented as the answer to all of Britain’s ills. The various Leave campaigns successfully capitalized on longstanding British feelings of insecurity. While the official Vote Leave campaign focused on the economic benefits of increased sovereignty, such as the debunked claim that £350 Million that was sent to the EU could be spent at home, the second and third reasons listed on Vote Leave’s website and the dominant narrative throughout the campaign was immigration and border security (Vote Leave, 2016). Vote Leave also alluded to the specter of Turkey and other European nations with significant Muslim populations joining the EU, even when such possibilities were realistically decades away (ibid).
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Earlier research regarding Brexit and the media tends to treat Brexit as a singular moment of time, a blip on an otherwise increasingly progressive and inclusive arc, perhaps caused by a temporary global uptick in populist leaders. This thesis hopes to show Brexit in another light, resulting from a long trend of increasing hostility towards immigration in the UK. Politicians, media personalities, and a biased press used immigration as a tool to energize a base frightened about their nation's future. I believe this can be clearly shown by examining letters to the editor that various publications chose to print in the weeks and months leading up to the Brexit referendum. To test the theory that newspapers that supported Brexit used letters to the editor as an additional tool to reinforce their editorial stance, I will provide a brief history of Euroscepticism in the UK and show that anti-immigrant fears have played a role for decades preceding the UK joining what was then the European Economic Community. Next, I will outline how the unique British newspaper industry can provide insights into the psyche of the British voter. After that, I will review the existing research on the British media’s role in Brexit and identify gaps that I believe this paper fills. Finally, I will explain my hypothesis and the expected results, involving a discourse analysis of letters to the editor from four British newspapers during the Brexit campaign. While the bulk of this analysis will cover the period of the Brexit campaign in early to mid-2016, these data will be compared to the same periods in 2014 and 2018 to gauge the tone and salience of the issues surrounding immigration absent the media furor of Brexit. Finally, I will discuss the results and provide context and observations of the analyses.