The UK: Brexit and Competing Populism

Abstract

The chapter discusses the political context and political communication environment in the UK during the 2019 EP election. Particular attention is given to the role of Twitter in the UK’s political communication and populism in the party field during the twenty-first century. The empirical Twitter analysis focuses on 7296 tweets sent from 966 Twitter accounts by various political actors in May 2019. The 2019 election was the UK’s last participation in the EP elections before the country left the EU following the 2016 Brexit referendum. As the two major political parties, Conservatives and Labour, refrained from the 2019 EP election debates, smaller Europhilic parties (e.g., Liberal Democrats, Change UK, SNP, Green, Cymru) and Eurosceptic parties (e.g., UKIP, Brexit Party) dominated the Twittersphere. Brexit and the EU were popular themes in the British tweets alongside tweets encouraging supporters to vote and attacking rival political parties. Topic modelling shows differences in the debates on the EU, Brexit, the populist construction of ‘the people’ and media, as well as economic and environmental issues between regions and across the Europhilic and Eurosceptic parties. Network analysis demonstrates that the British Twittersphere was clustered into two antagonistic camps divided by their stance on Brexit. In this, the UK represented a clear case of competing populism.

1 Overview

The 2019 European Parliament (EP) election was held in the United Kingdom (UK) on 23 May 2019. This was the UK’s last participation in an EP election before the country left the European Union (EU) on 31 January 2020, following the 2016 Brexit referendum. The EU withdrawal negotiation process was challenging and deeply divisive. David Cameron, the Tory Prime Minister (PM) who proposed the Brexit referendum, resigned after the pro-Brexit won the referendum. In early 2019, his successor PM Theresa May formally began the UK-EU withdrawal negotiation processes. The withdrawal, originally scheduled for 29 March 2019 was postponed without reaching an agreement in the British Parliament. Amidst the great Brexit uncertainty, some media commentary portrayed the 2019 EP election as a proxy for a second Brexit referendum (Ash, 2019).

As many scholars have observed and critiqued, the rise of Euroscepticism and Brexit in the UK are intertwined with the fringe populist actors such as the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and Brexit Party, as well as mainstreaming of populism reflected in the Conservative party’s adoption of Eurosceptic agendas and the electoral rise of UKIP in the past few general elections (Norris & Inglehart, 2019; Usherwood, 2008). After the fringe and mainstream populism, British politics is witnessing competing populism between right-wing populists like the former UKIP leader Nigel Farage and left populist actors including the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and also between the pro- and anti-Brexiteers (Mouffe, 2018).

In this chapter, we explore the dynamics and networks of competing populism in the British EP discourse. Below, we briefly summarise the political and media system of the UK and the popular use of Twitter in British politics. We also discuss the history of the fringe and mainstream populism in British politics by explaining the history of the rising support for UKIP, Euroscepticism, and Brexit. Then, we move to discuss our Twitter data analysis using three methods: (a) frequency-based keyword thematic analysis; (b) topic modelling to contextualise the thematic analysis, and (c) network analysis to identify key actors in the 2019 British EP elections. Our keyword analysis, topic modelling and network analysis results highlight the presence and operation of competing populism in the UK, in which the pro- and anti-Brexiteers formed a chain of alliance networks.

2 Political Communication in the UK

The scholarly categorisation of the political and media system in the UK has been contested and changed over time. Historically, the civic culture in Britain was seen as ‘a model for other democracies’ (Almond & Verba, 1963). The predominant norms and values of British political norms endorse ‘the importance of parliamentary democracy, devolved assemblies¹ in the UK regions, a long tradition of free speech supported by a pluralistic and lively free press and an active civil society, rule of law through independent judiciary, professionalism in public section’ (Norris & Inglehart, 2019, pp. 394–395). However, the rise of Euroscepticism and the mainstreaming of reactionary populism are debilitating the traditional tolerance in British society, challenging the liberal consensus about the stability and unity of the UK (Norris & Inglehart, 2019, p. 395).

In Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) models of three media systems, the UK was originally classified as the North Atlantic/Liberal model, characterised by high levels of market-driven logic, commercialisation, journalistic professionalism, and independent broadcasting and regulation (Davis, 2007; Hallin & Mancini, 2017; Kuhn, 2011). However, as Hallin and Mancini (2004) stated, Britain differs from other countries in the North Atlantic/Liberal model and especially from the United States (US), given that the two countries have widely differing levels of political parallelism and state interventions.

More recently, Brüggemann et al. (2014) suggest revising Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) models by dividing the ‘state intervention’ category into three more precise sub-categories: press subsidies, public broadcasting, and ownership regulation. In this way, Britain is closer to some European countries than the US, particularly in terms of the role of public broadcasting and political parallelism in print media (Brüggemann et al., 2014). In Brüggemann et al.’s (2014) models, the UK belongs to a Central model along with Austria, Germany and Switzerland, characterised by ‘strong public broadcasting, strict ownership regulation, low press subsidies’ (Brüggemann et al., 2014, p. 1056).

The state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the largest news broadcaster in the country, its main competitor being the private actor ITV. Daddow (2012) notes that for several decades in the post-war era, political news coverage was largely controlled by these two corporations, but in recent years the media market has become more splintered.

British print media is generally more editorialised and partisan than the primary broadcast media companies (i.e., BBC, ITV) (Bijsmans, 2017; Daddow, 2012). While it may be true that British papers have over time disassociated themselves from political parties and tend towards being less predictable in terms of outright support for any given party, more recent research indicates rising levels of partisanship within print media, in particular with regards to European affairs (Bijsmans, 2017; Daddow, 2012; Wring & Ward, 2020). The readership of British print media follows partisan and polarised patterns. Readers of the Daily Telegraph tend to support the Conservative party more than readers of the Guardian (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, p. 212).

While there has been a centralistic tendency especially among quality papers, middle-market and mass-market papers appear to have witnessed a somewhat unilateral increase in polarisation, with greater circulation of right-wing newspapers in comparison to more left-wing papers (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, p. 214; Daddow, 2011, 2012). This may be in part due to the decades of promotion and normalisation of Blairite ‘third way’ Labour politics which was professed as politics above old left and right divisions. In doing so Labour politics and the discourse around left ideologies (e.g., redistribution) were eschewed (Mouffe, 2018). In recent decades, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership re-politicised traditional left-wing ideologies. The attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party and his recent leadership during the 2019 general election, from not just right-wing media but also more ostensibly left-wing papers such as the Guardian, could be seen as an indication that mainstream British print media at large remains suspicious (if not hostile) towards political causes to the left of the modern Labour party (Wring & Ward, 2020).

In the last couple of decades, the British tabloid press played a significant role in spreading Euroscepticism across the country. There has been a vast literature on Euroscepticism and media in the UK since the 1980s (Caiani & Guerra, 2017; Hix, 2008; Leconte, 2010). Even before the electoral success of UKIP, British tabloid media such as The Sun, Express, and Daily Mail published exaggerated and invented stories reflecting Euroscepticism and anti-establishmentism against Brussels regulations as well as their nationalist and anti-liberal attacks against feminism, racial tolerance, and pro-refugees and immigration discourse (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). Daddow (2012, p. 1236) argues that ‘tabloid outrage’ becomes a standard way of communicating Euroscepticism and European issues in the UK. Several studies find the trend in the British broadsheet media to report more on hard Euroscepticism compared to more moderate and softer Euroscepticist views (Auel, 2019; Bijsmans, 2017). Bijsmans (2017) analyses that hard Euroscepticism has become more prevalent in quality media like the Guardian between 2009 and 2014. Bijsmans (2017) also indicates that Eurosceptic perspectives outweigh Euro-alternative perspective in UK media.

3 Twitter in British Political Communication

In the UK, Twitter is one of the most prominent social media platforms, following Facebook and Whatsapp (Chadwick & Vaccari, 2019). More than half of the respondents (52%) in Chadwick and Vaccari (2019) used Twitter, with 26% saying they used it daily. While the platform is demographically less popular than Facebook in the country, Twitter is often considered as a major social media platform for political communication, playing a substantial role in information sharing, public discussions, and election campaigns in the ‘hybrid media system’ (Chadwick, 2017).

Twitter is one of the core election campaign and communication tools and real-time information channels for political and media elites. The number of British MPs using Twitter has skyrocketed from 8% in 2009 to nearly two-thirds having their Twitter accounts in 2013 (Graham et al., 2013). British parties and politicians adopt Twitter mostly for unidirectional, top-down election communications but some politicians use the platform also to foster a closer and more direct relationship between citizens and politicians (ibid.).

Twitter has been part of the British Euroscepticism and Brexit discourse as populist parties like UKIP are using the platform to promote Euroscepticism (Alonso-Muñoz & Casero-Ripollés, 2020; Wring & Ward, 2020). During the 2016 Brexit referendum, pro-Brexit politicians like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson contributed to the spread of misleading information about Brexit on Twitter (Höller, 2021).

4 British Political Parties and Populism

The mainstreaming of populism in the UK is closely associated with the rise of fringe populist actors and agendas such as the support for UKIP, Euroscepticism and the implications of Brexit. In this section, we briefly summarise the history of UKIP, its substantial influence in the recent Brexit referendum, and the role of mainstream media in the mainstreaming of reactionary populist politics. UKIP is a Eurosceptic, right-wing populist party in the UK, founded in 1993 by Alan Sked to secure British withdrawal from the EU. The party experienced many years of unexceptional performance in the general elections (Usherwood, 2008).

As a parliamentary democratic country, the UK holds general elections in a five-year cycle. The British election system uses the Single Member Plurality electoral system to elect Members of Parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons, the lower house of the Parliament of the UK (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). In a simple plurality system, voters cast a ballot for one candidate in their constituency and the candidate with the largest share wins the seat. This simple plurality system produces a two-party system in which Conservatives or Labour generally win a majority of the seats in parliament. In contrast, smaller minor parties like UKIP are penalised by the system; they often win no seats in parliament unless they win the largest votes in a given constituency even when they win large votes in the country as a whole (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). Table 8.1 demonstrates the strong two-party tendency in the British election systems.

Table 8.1 Proportion of the votes (%) per party in UK’s general elections of twenty-first century

Although disadvantaged in domestic elections, UKIP gained momentum in European Parliament elections. In 1999, the UK government changed the electoral system for the European Parliament from the Single Member Plurality system to Regional Party List Proportional Representation, in which a party gets seats roughly in proportion to its total national votes (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). This electoral reform helped UKIP gain a substantial number of seats in the European Parliament in the subsequent 2004 elections. In 2004 EP elections, UKIP got 16% of the national votes as a whole and these were translated into a delegation of 15% UKIP members to return to the European Parliament (ibid.) (see Table 8.2).

Table 8.2 Proportion of the votes (%) per party in UK’s EP elections of twenty-first century

In 2006, the election of Nigel Farage officially as a UKIP leader marked the start to ‘mainstream UKIP into British political life’ (Usherwood, 2008, p. 256), from a fringe populist actor to a somewhat mainstream actor, who can influence the broader agenda of British politics. Under Nigel Farage’s discretion, the party gained a wider policy platform by capitalising on concerns about rising immigration especially amongst the white British working class. UKIP’s primary political agenda emphasises Euroscepticism, calling for the UK to leave the EU (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). UKIP advocates for policies that are known as ‘welfare chauvinism’ or ‘exclusionary nationalism’ such as limiting free access to National Healthcare Service to legal residents as well as broader Islamophobic policies such as banning the burqa, outlawing sharia law, imposing a temporary moratorium on new Islamic schools as well as requiring annual checks against female genital mutilation for high-risk girls (ibid.).

Pushing the withdrawal from the EU as its main political agenda, UKIP had its best performance in the 2014 European elections. UKIP got more than a quarter of the national votes and one third of the seats in the European Parliament (Table 8.2). In terms of domestic elections, due to the simple plurality system, UKIP only won one seat in the House of Commons although they got 12.6% of the national votes in the 2015 general elections (Norris & Inglehart, 2019) (Table 8.1).

It is noteworthy to see the regional differences in the public support for UKIP: UKIP gained drastically increased support in England and Wales between 2010 and 2015, but the party gained little support in Scotland throughout the decades and also marginal support from Northern Ireland (Table 8.3). These regional differences explain the economic rationale behind the public attitudes for and against Euroscepticism and British withdrawal from the EU. Major cities in England and Wales are relatively more prosperous regions in the UK and they have long attracted waves of migrants, especially from Commonwealth countries as well as African countries (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). These prosperous regions did not see much benefit from staying in the EU and getting EU structural funds for its economy (Ford et al., 2012). In contrast, support for UKIP was weaker in the more economically deprived northern regions of England, and Celtic countries such as Scotland, whose populist discontent is rather placed on England and Westminster (ibid.).

Table 8.3 Proportion of the votes (%) for UKIP in general elections of twenty-first century across UK regions (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

The Conservative Party also partook in the mainstreaming of populism in the UK. With the rise of UKIP and Eurosceptic discourse in the country, the 2015 Conservative Party election manifesto promised, if they win the elections, to hold a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, letting the British people have their say (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). After being elected, Prime Minister David Cameron introduced the European Union Referendum Act 2015 to parliament, triggering the Brexit referendum on 23 June 2016. The Vote Leave (pro-Brexit) campaign emphasised the benefits of EU withdrawal which could channel more funds into the NHS, regaining sovereignty over British borders, control of immigration, and the ability of the UK to trade with the world more freely (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). The Vote Remain (anti-Brexit) side focused on the economic risks of the withdrawal such as in job market, prices, trades, and business (ibid.).

On 23 June 2016, a small majority of the electorate (51.9%) voted to leave the EU. Similar to the regional differences in the support for UKIP in domestic elections, the result of the Brexit referendum demonstrated deep divisions between different regions and communities. The Leave side won the majority of votes in England and Wales, while every council in Scotland had Remain majorities (BBC, 2016). The Leave majority regions in England were often the areas with economic disadvantages with many older, less educated, white voters such as in the Midlands, the North East, Yorkshire, and so forth, in contrast to the strongly Remain area such as metropolitan London (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). On the night of the Brexit referendum, the leader of UKIP, Nigel Farage, boasted that ‘This will be a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people’ (Guardian, 2016, emphasis added).

The referendum outcome was treated by parliament as decisive and binding rather than consultive (Norris & Inglehart, 2019, p. 375). Talking about a second referendum or about an attempt to remain in the EU was seen as a ‘betrayal’ and ‘tyrants to the people’ (Norris & Inglehart, 2019, p. 376, emphasis added). In March 2017, the British government formally began the withdrawal process and negotiations. Cameron, who had campaigned to Remain, resigned after the referendum and was succeeded by Theresa May. May resigned in 2019 after failing to get her Brexit agreement approved and was succeeded by Boris Johnson. Johnson declared that the UK would leave the EU in early 2020 and the Brexit transition period ended on 31 December 2020 (Guardian, 2020).

However, despite the rise of UKIP and its electoral success in EP elections, in the 2017 general election, voter support for UKIP fell to 1.8% with no parliamentary representatives (Norris & Inglehart, 2019) (Table 8.1). The drastic fall of UKIP can be explained ironically by the mainstreaming of populist politics. In recent years, the Conservative Party actively adopted UKIP’s Euroscepticism and anti-immigration stance in their election manifesto and campaigns (Cutts et al., 2017; Van Spanje, 2010). Theresa May’s Conservative Party (2016–19) endorsed EU withdrawal and tighter immigration restrictions on EU citizens. Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party said that it was ‘the only party that could get Brexit done’ (UK House of Commons Library, 2019). Small populist parties like UKIP are vulnerable when bigger parties absorb their signature policy issues (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). A lot of former UKIP supporters switched to the Conservatives (57%) in the 2017 local elections whereas only 20% of the 2015 UKIP voters remained faithful (ibid.).

Another noteworthy phenomenon was the rise of competing populism, such as the Labour Party’s absorption of former UKIP supporters. Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour attracted 18% of the former UKIP supporters in the 2017 elections (Dorey, 2017). This indicates that those who feel left behind by neoliberalism, globalisation, and economic insecurity (often blamed on EU migrant workers) were receptive to radical left-wing programmes such as anti-austerity, pro-public sector investment, and redistributive policies (ibid.). The confounding success of Corbyn’s Labour in the 2017 elections proves the future of a left populist strategy discussed in Mouffe’s (2018) works. Lastly, since Farage founded the Brexit Party with Catherine Blaiklock in November 2018, the populist votes for UKIP moved to the Brexit Party. In the 2019 EP elections, UKIP earned only 3.2% of the national votes in sharp contrast to 26.6% in 2014.

The 2019 EP elections featured two national parties: Brexit Party by Nigel Farage and Change UK set up by former Labour and Conservative MPs who wished to remain in the EU (UK House of Commons Library, 2019). The Brexit Party endorsed hard Euroscepticism and no-deal Brexit (BBC, 2019a). Change UK published manifestos supporting a People’s Vote, another referendum on proceeding with Brexit, along with other anti-Brexit political parties such as Liberal Democrats, Scottish National Party (SNP), Plaid Cymru, and the Green Party. Labour’s position was somewhat more ambiguous, saying that it would back a public vote if there was no agreement on the alternative for Brexit. Conservatives did not publish a manifesto, arguing that the party will get Brexit done (UK House of Commons Library, 2019).

The results of the 2019 EP elections show that Brexit Party won 32% of the national vote and earned most seats (29 seats) in most regions, and it polled highest especially in the Leave regions (UK House of Commons Library, 2019). However, the public support for the anti-Brexit parties totalled over 40% of the national votes in 2019. Liberal Democrats came second with 20% of the vote, with 16 seats. The Greens held seven seats, the biggest number of seats they have had (ibid.). The share of the national votes in the 2019 EP election also increased for these anti-Brexit parties. Liberal Democrats rose from 6.6% in 2014 to 19.6% in 2019. Greens earned 11.8% of the votes in 2019 in comparison to 6.9% in 2014. SNP and Plaid Cymru had a small increase from 2.4% to 3.5%, and from 0.7% to 1.0% respectively. Change UK earned 3.3% of the votes (Table 8.2).

Conservatives and Labour won the fewest seats since the UK joined the EU, four and ten seats respectively (UK House of Commons Library, 2019). Labour’s vote fell from 24.4% in 2014 to 13.7% in 2019 and Conservatives’ vote dropped from 23.1% in 2014 to 8.8% in 2019 (Table 8.2). Labour’s fall occurred in both Remain and Leave areas and Conservatives lost across the country but did the worst in Remain areas (BBC, 2019b). But the electoral failure of Conservatives and Labour was somewhat expected given that they did not actively partake in the 2019 EP election.

5 Twitter in the EP 2019 Elections

The UK Twitter data were collected from common hashtags sourced from our partners in the UK in spring 2019. #EP2019, the common hashtag in the European Election, was not included in the data collection since it yielded much data from other European countries. However, we did go over these data to find whether we have been missing certain user groups in the elections. Even this dataset reveals that the Tory tweeters were absent in the 2019 European Parliament Elections or at least did not use any of the conventional hashtags. For more detailed explanations of our data-gathering processes, see Chap. 1 of the book.

The UK dataset includes a total of 7296 tweets from 966 different accounts including political parties, party constituency accounts, MPs, and by party-affiliated news accounts. Europhilic parties (Change UK, Green, SNP, Alliance, Plaid Cymru) cover for 61.2% and Eurosceptic (Brexit Party, UKIP, and Conservatives) for 15.6% of the total number of accounts. Labour accounts, with its ambiguous party position on the Brexit issue, constitute 23.2% of the total accounts.

The proportions of tweets posted by each party reveal the dynamics of the 2019 EP elections in the British political context. 23.6% of the tweets were posted by Liberal Democrats-affiliated accounts; 16% were posted by Change UK affiliated accounts; 12.7% by the Brexit Party; 11.5% by the Green; 7.6% by Labour; 7.2% by UKIP; 6.8% by SNP; 2.7% by the Alliance; 0.34% by Plaid Cymru, and so on. Tweets by conservatives made up for only 0.04% of the entire data. Tweets by Europhilic parties account for 61% of the entire 2019 EP election discourse on British Twitter whereas tweets by Eurosceptic parties account for 19.9% – indicating the dominance of Europhilic tweeting activity in the British Twitter.

The Tory’s absence on Twitter from the 2019 EP elections discourse reflects that the party did not contest the 2019 EP elections, partly due to internal strife among the party over Brexit (Cooper & Cooper, 2020; Vasilopoulou, 2020). Their absence has been attributed to the failure of the then-Prime Minister Theresa May to pass a Brexit deal through parliament, public weariness with the Brexit processes, and a surge of the Brexit Party (Cooper & Cooper, 2020). The Conservative Party officials admitted that the party was likely to be punished in the pools, and some MPs admitted that they would not be campaigning, while others said they would not vote (Vasilopoulou, 2020, p. 83). Silence has been a strategic choice for the Tories to avoid the EU topic and keep the issue salience low.

Other parties made a clear presence in the 2019 EP election discussions on Twitter and gained prominence and seats for the remaining membership period for the UK. These party affiliations in the tweets reflect the EP election results to some extent that those who were active on Twitter campaigns gained electoral success. Liberal Democrats, who were most active on Twitter, gained 13.4% more votes than at the previous election and won 16 seats. The Brexit Party, which was the third most active party in their Twitter EP campaign, was the winner of the EP election, sweeping across the UK with 29 seats and 31.6% more vote shares (BBC, 2019a, b). However, there were some British political parties whose active participation on Twitter did not translate as their electoral success. Change UK accounted for 15.97% of the tweets but did not win any seat in the EP.

The top 10 most active Twitter accounts in the 2019 EP election were dominated by UKIP, Lib Dems, Change UK, Brexit Party, and Greens (Table 8.4). The UKIP news account was the most active account, generating a significant amount of tweets daily (343 tweets). Party constituency accounts such as East England Lib Dems (248 tweets), Change UK Eastbourne (170 tweets), and West Dorset Lib Dems (166 tweets) and party main accounts like The Green Party (142 tweets) were among the most active accounts in the 2019 EP election discourse. Individual politicians were also active in the discourse including Elizabeth Evenden-Kenyon (204 tweets), Matthew Green (180 tweets), Sarah Ludford (167 tweets), Martin Daubney (elected, 166 tweets), and James Wells (elected, 146 tweets).

Table 8.4 Top-10 individual tweeters in UK

In general, it is noteworthy that the top 10 most active accounts are dominated by anti-Brexit party accounts (Lib Dems, Change UK, Greens) compared to pro-Brexit party accounts (UKIP, Brexit Party), indicating the relative absence of the two mainstream parties such as Labour and Conservatives in the 2019 EP election discourse on Twitter.

Interestingly, the relative absence of Labour voices in terms of the size of original tweeting activities shown in Table 8.4 is not conspicuous when we look at the top 10 most retweeted tweets (see Table 8.5). Four out of ten most retweeted tweets were posed by Labour MPs and Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) such as former MEP Richard Corbett, former Labour Leader and MP Jeremy Corbyn, and MP Ben Bradshaw. The most retweeted tweet in the UK dataset was posted by Corbett (5087 retweets), attacking the Brexit Party leader Farage for his illegal use of office allowance to pay his wife and lack of professionalism.

Table 8.5 The 10 most retweeted tweets in UK

Following Labour, Brexit Party politicians got a lot of retweets. Three tweets out of the top 10 most retweeted tweets were by Brexit Party politicians such as former MEP Martin Daubney, party leader Nigel Farage, and former MEP Nathan Gill. The second most retweeted tweet in the UK data was posted by Daubney, announcing that the Electoral Commission did not find evidence of any impropriety with the Brexit Party’s funding system.

Some tweets by relatively smaller parties such as SNP, Green, and Lib Dem got substantial retweets as well. SNP MEP Joanna Cherry’s tweet got the fourth most retweets when she criticised the fact that EU citizens resident in the UK were denied their right to vote (3444 retweets). The Green Party’s tweet urging people to vote Green got 3029 retweets which is the fifth largest retweets in the UK data. Former Lib Dem party leader Vince Cable’s tweet got many retweets as well when he criticised the British government for not ensuring EU citizens’ right to vote (2428 retweets).

In a brief summary, tweets that talk about the allegations of impropriety of Farage and the Brexit Party got a high number of retweets (first and second most retweeted tweets; and also the fifth most retweeted tweet talked about alleged media bias for Farage). Tweets discussing the election system (e.g., right to vote for EU citizens resident in the UK; for Brits living in EU countries) got substantial retweets as well (fourth, eighth, and ninth most retweeted tweets). Also, pro-Brexit tweets with slogans like ‘Save our Brexit’ and ‘Change politics for good’ got many retweets (second, seventh and tenth most retweeted).

6 Themes in the EP 2019 Election Twitter Campaigns

To analyse the substance of the EP election discourse in the 2019 British politics, a word frequency analysis and thematic analysis was conducted on all 7,296 tweets. Common stop words were removed to focus the frequency analysis to semantic words that are meaningful to understand the themes of the 2019 EP election discourse. In total, we sieved out 22,393 words and 120,492 occurrences from the UK Twitter dataset. Then the analysis focused on the 1,000 most commonly used words by different political parties. Both automated and manual categorisation were conducted to identify themes frequently occurring in the dataset. These frequent words were clustered into 13 coherent themes and the popularity of the themes were ranked. The main themes identified in our frequency-based thematic analysis are presented in Table 8.6. The themes are in a descending order in terms of the overall popularity across the parties.

Table 8.6 Share of themes (%) and their ranking per political party in word frequency analysis (22,393 words and 120,492 occurrences)

Encouragements refer to tweets that encourage the public to vote for the party and to create a supportive and positive spirit around the elections (e.g., identified by words like please, vote, support). Own party refers to the tweets that mention their own party, party leader and MEP/MP candidates. Other parties refer to the tweets that mention the name of other parties, other party leaders, MEP/MP candidates. Encouragements and Own party are the two most popular themes across the parties. A small, noteworthy thing is, for the UKIP party, mentioning Other parties was a more popular theme than promoting their Own party. This was largely due to their frequent mentions of support for the Brexit Party and Nigel Farage.

In the British context, the 2019 EP election is intertwined with the discussions about the Brexit. Brexit and EU themes are also highly popular across all the British political parties.

Populism refers to tweets that mention the concept of populist politics or discuss the construction of the people (hardworking, ordinary people), the establishment, the external threats, and the concept of for the many (99% vs. 1% rhetoric). Populism gained similar amounts of popularity across the parties, but in particular by Plaid Cymru, demonstrating the ‘left-wing regionalist populism in the Celtic peripheries’ (Massetti, 2018, p. 937).

Furthermore, other themes gained similar issue prominence across the parties. Economy (identified by words such as job, business, market, trade), Media (journalism, media, news, broadcasting), and Youth (student, young) obtained similar rates of visibility in all parties, although less substantial salience in comparison to main themes such as EU and Brexit.

When the Media theme is discussed, competing populist parties from each side of the Brexit discourse framed and engaged with mainstream media starkly differently. Pro-Brexit actors such as Brexit Party politicians attacked the media for being ‘a tool for establishment’ and ‘against democracy and the people.’ Pro-Brexit actors positively engaged more with tabloid and alternative media platforms, praising them as giving them ‘fair media treatment outside the London bubble.’ In contrast, anti-Brexiteers often mentioned mainstream media and journalism to praise or to criticise their journalistic practices (e.g., ‘best summary of the election campaign’ or ‘UK media is parochial than other European broadcasters’), and to promote their interviews and public engagements with media. This contrast can be explained by the fact that the British mainstream media (print media in particular) are quite partisan and polarised, and that tabloid media (and also quality media) contributed to the spread of Euroscepticism (Bijsmans, 2017; Daddow, 2012; Wring & Ward, 2020).

There were also some unique themes that gained high issue salience in particular political parties. Devolution vs. independence theme refers to tweets that discuss the act of union between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This theme gained prominence in SNP and Cymru tweets given that the Scottish and Welsh independence were a main agenda for the main regionalist parties in Scotland and Wales (Massetti, 2018). UKIP accounts celebrated Britishness and argued for a restoration of the unity of the United Kingdom due to its ostensibly unionist stance against Scottish, Welsh, and Irish demands for independence (Hayton, 2016).

Welfare issues (identified by words like NHS, welfare, public service) got higher issue salience in Change UK and Labour election campaigns. Environment issues (climate change, energy, fossil fuel) were particularly discussed often by the Green Party. Interestingly, issues around Social tolerance and diversity (e.g., racism, immigration, refugee, LGBTQ+) were discussed more by Liberal Democrats and Labour during the 2019 European Elections in the UK.

7 Topic Modelling of the EP 2019 Tweets

To scale up and contextualise the findings in the word-frequency-based thematic analysis, we conducted topic modelling on our British Twitter dataset (see the Chap. 1). Topic modelling enables an automated categorisation of Twitter dataset into 100 topics that are mathematically calculated; hence, we can see what the most prominent themes are from each British political party’s EP election tweets. Topic modelling also allows researchers to map out the cross-party differences between different themes, and also changes in the timeline and trending of different topics. In this section, we mainly explain three dimensions of our topic modelling results: (1) change in the most popular topics before and after the voting day; (2) differences in the main topics favoured by different political actors; and (3) the populist construction of Us versus Them in the 2019 EP elections (Fig. 8.1).

Fig. 8.1

Election debates through topic peaks in May 2019 in the UK

On the election day (23 May), the topics around the vote for SNP and Plaid Cymru as well as the support for the Scottish and Welsh independence referendums gained the highest issue saliency, followed by discussions around the support for the Green Party and issues around climate change and environment issues. Tweets which encouraged people to vote were highly visible on election day as well. The most prominent post-election topics show the continued salience of environmental and climate change issues as well as discussions around the implications of the Brexit and 2019 EP election results, arguing that the Remain/anti-Brexit side won a clear majority of votes in total – although the Brexit Party was the winner of the EP election when it comes to the results for individual parties.

The Brexit Party, as expected, prioritised topics that were related to foreground the Brexit deals as the utmost important agenda for British future politics. Interestingly, the discussion of the pro-Brexit agenda is connected to the discussions about democracy. In the topics related to democracy, the Brexit Party connected support for the Brexit Party and Brexit to ‘change politics for good,’ ‘save our democracy,’ and ‘stand up for democracy’ – emphasising the ‘binding’ and ‘decisive’ values of the 2016 Brexit referendum results (Norris & Inglehart, 2019, p. 375). The topics indicate that the Brexit Party also prioritised to downplay the public anxieties and concerns over the implications of the no-deal Brexit as reflected in one of the keywords for this popular topic: ‘no deal no problem’ as well as to emphasise the positive outcomes from the no-deal Brexit such as ‘freedom’ and ‘independence.’

The Conservative Party did not have any particular topic they prioritised more than other actors, as expected since they did not actively partake in the 2019 EP elections while arguing that the Conservative Party is the only party which will promise and deliver the Brexit deal.

Popular topics from the anti-Brexit parties emphasised their position on Brexit. Lib Dems emphasised their anti-Brexit position through keywords such as ‘bollocks to Brexit,’ ‘demand better,’ and ‘Lib Dems fight back.’ Green’s most popular topic centred around the support for the transnational, European co-efforts to tackle the climate changes, reflected by keywords such as ‘climate emergency,’ ‘crisis,’ ‘planet,’ ‘environment’, ‘European greens’ and ‘tell Europe.’ SNP focused on provoking anti-Westminster sentiment in Celtic countries and call for an independence referendum, reflected in keywords such as ‘Scotland,’ ‘Scotland for Europe,’ ‘indyref,’ and ‘independence.’

In our UK dataset, we identified several topics that are associated with the populist construction of Us versus Them through a construction of the people versus the establishment. The Brexit Party and Lib Dems employed these topics slightly more than other parties. Both the Brexit Party and Lib Dems engaged in the discussions about the anger of the tens and thousands of British people who are denied of their democratic rights. These are reflected in the keywords such as ‘people,’ ‘working,’ ‘class,’ ‘citizens,’ ‘many,’ ‘millions,’ ‘thousands,’ ‘brits,’ ‘angry,’ ‘denied,’ ‘denied my vote’ – constructing the populist boundary between the real people (underdog) and the unrepresentative establishment (power) and conveying the notion that the elite establishment is denying the real hard-working British people’s collective decision and demands. These topics emphasise the ordinariness and the representativeness of the constructed collective identity, ‘the people’, by using keywords like ‘ordinary’, ‘decent’ people who ‘represent’ the ‘majority’ of the nation.

Labour tweets also employed competing populist topics, using a more traditional left-wing class struggle ideologies and languages. The most conspicuous topic by Labour emphasised the domestic and economic issues as indicated by keywords such as ‘austerity,’ ‘save the NHS,’ ‘social’ and ‘public’ ‘services.’ Labour tweets also invoked the traditional collective socialist identities by calling for ‘socialist’ ‘solidarity.’ Labour’s topics also highlighted the left-wing populist ideas, centring the idea of the 1% versus 99%, arguing for politics that is ‘for the many’ and ‘tax’ the ‘rich’ (Matthews, 2019).

It is also worth noting how different nationalities were interpellated by different parties and in different contexts. The Brexit Party and Lib Dems frequently interpellated Brits and British whereas topics favoured by SNP interpellated Scottish people as a group that is in contrast to England and Westminster, provoking Celtic nationalism and regionalist populism by foregrounding the distinction between being Scottish and British (Massetti, 2018).

In summary, our topic modelling results show the presence of competing populism: where different political party actors frame and engage with populist ideas (e.g., Us versus Them, anti-establishment, 1% vs. 99%) for their own right- and left-wing populist ideals.

8 Twitter Networks in the EP 2019 Elections

We conducted network analysis to see centrality and relationality between different British political parties and politicians in the 2019 EP election discourse on Twitter. Network analysis quantifies the number of engagements (sent and received messages) between two actors, which are called ‘nodes’ in network analysis, and measures ‘betweenness centrality’ – the degree to which those nodes act as a bridge between two other nodes, playing as key actors in passing information and building social networks (Brandes, 2001; Freeman, 1977).

The visualisation of the user social networks in the British Twitter dataset in Fig. 8.2 demonstrates that the most followed users were not necessarily the most important nodes in the 2019 EP election networks. The most followed political actor and party in the British Twitter are Jeremy Corbyn, with 1.9 million followers, and Labour Party, with more than 680 k followers, both of whom were ranked rather low in their betweenness centrality in the 2019 EP elections discourse. Corbyn has zero betweenness centrality in our dataset. Yet, it is noteworthy that although Corbyn did not actively engage in the 2019 EP elections discourse, his tweet was the third most retweeted tweet in the UK dataset (Table 8.5). Nigel Farage of the Brexit Party (1.3 million followers) and Nicola Sturgeon of SNP (973k followers), who have the second and third most followers in British political Twittersphere also ranked low in their betweenness centrality.

Fig. 8.2

Top 10 networks on Twitter during the 2019 EP elections in UK

Nor were the most active users necessarily the most influential actors in the 2019 EP election discourse networks. The most active users such as UKIP Trending News, East England Lib Dems and Elizabeth Evenden-Kenyon (Lib Dems candidate) had rather low or very low betweenness centrality. For instance, Evenden-Kenyon’s betweenness centrality was zero although she was the third most active account among the political parties and politicians, and the most active account among individual politician accounts. In short, it indicates that a large number of followers or tweets does not automatically mean these accounts have far reaching influence in Twitter discourse.

The most influential actors in the British Twitter network were political parties’ main Twitter accounts such as the Lib Dems, SNP, Green, Change UK, and Alliance Party. Lib Dems’ main account has the highest centrality and the Leader of Lib Dems Edward J Davey had the second highest centrality, visually represented by the bigger size of the nodes in Fig. 8.2. Lib Dem MP Drew Hendry also got the 5th highest betweenness centrality, indicating the dominance of Lib Dem actors in the 2019 EP election networks in British politics. Following the Lib Dem’s huge influence was SNP (3rd) and Green Party’s (4th) main party accounts. Individual politicians from smaller parties such as Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts (6th), the Leader of Alliance Party Naomi Long (9th), and Lib Dem politician Liz Webster (10th) had high betweenness centrality.

Unlike network analysis results in many other European countries, the social networks of British Twitter dataset highlight a large degree of inter-party engagements and intercommunications in the British EP election discourse. These strong inter-party networks in the UK data can be explained by the fact that the deep division along the Brexit issue created the two competing populist networks that collaborated within the network for the common cause of pro- and anti-Brexit, rather than each party distinctively advocating for the electoral success of their own party – which might be the case in general for other European countries’ 2019 EP election results. Plaid Cymru’s Saville Roberts’ node was linked to other party nodes such as Lib Dems, Green, and SNP politician Drew Hendry. Lib Dem’s party account had links with other political party and politician accounts such as Alliance Party, Plaid Cymru’s Saville Roberts, and Change UK’s Peters Field. The Brexit Party and UKIP had some degree of links, but compared to the stronger links between anti-Brexit actors, this pro-Brexit inter-party engagement was marginal in size.

To sum, the network analysis results substantiate the insights we identified earlier when we looked at the general composition of British Twitter dataset: the dominance of anti-Brexit political parties and politicians (including Lib Dems, Green, etc.) amongst the most active accounts (Table 8.4) and most retweeted tweets (Table 8.5). It is noteworthy that although Brexit Party and politician accounts were quite active in the 2019 EP election discourse in terms of the number of tweets they posted during the 2019 EP elections, their influence in terms of their betweenness centrality in the British EP election networks was limited. This Twitter dynamics somewhat reflects the 2019 EP election results in that although Brexit Party won most seats and most national votes (32%) per party, the anti-Brexit parties in total accumulated 40% of the votes – a rather convoluted picture, than a black and white picture for the clear victory of Euroscepticism.

9 Conclusion

Our analysis highlights that the 2019 EP election in the British context was intertwined with the presence of competing populism along the Euroscepticism and Brexit deals. In the past decades, Euroscepticism and fringe populist actors like UKIP gained their visibility and significance in mainstream politics. The Conservative Party actively adopted the Eurosceptic and anti-immigration stances of UKIP, and UKIP itself gained successes in several EPs in the past decades. Now, after the transition from fringe to mainstream populism, UK politics is witnessing another transition to competing populism.

The 2019 EP elections featured two competing populist sides along the Brexit cleavage: the Brexit Party and UKIP on the pro-Brexit side and Change UK, LibDems, SNP, Cymru, and the Green on the anti-Brexit side calling for a second referendum. Conservatives and Labour, the two main parties, rather avoided the EU and Brexit issues and kept their profiles low during the 2019 EP elections. The dynamics of the 2019 EP elections were in particular unevenly dominated by LibDems, Change UK, and Brexit Party – whose tweets accounted for more than 50% of the total tweets in our dataset. In terms of individual accounts, UKIP and LibDem affiliated accounts posted significant amounts of tweets daily, again demonstrating the uneven distribution of participation in the 2019 EP elections discourse.

The results of the frequency-based thematic analysis and topic modelling also demonstrate the importance of Brexit in the 2019 British EU elections. The Brexit theme was popularly employed across different parties (Table 8.6). The topic modelling results show the connection between the Brexit discourse and the populist logic: legitimating their own side as representing the people who are hardworking, ordinary, decent citizens, the anti-establishmentism, the logic of 1% versus 99%, as well as the return of classic class struggle language calling for socialist solidarity for economic justice and redistribution (cf., Mouffe, 2018). Our results also present the topical interests of each party as well: The Green Party emphasised the climate crisis; SNP and Plaid Cymru paid attention to their independence from the UK, and Labour emphasised economic redistribution and funding for public and social services (Table 8.6).

Our network analysis visualised the networks between different actors in the British Twittersphere by calculating ‘betweenness centrality’ to identify key actors who are connecting others, passing information and building networks (Brandes, 2001; Freeman, 1977). One noteworthy finding is that the centrality does not equate to those with the most followers nor those who are the most active in tweeting behaviours.

The most influential actors in the British Twitter networks are from Lib Dems, Change UK, SNP, and Green, those who are partaking in cross-party networking and engagements. The Lib Dems’ main party account and Edward J Davey, the leader of the Lib Dems had the highest centralities. Unlike network analysis results in other European contexts, we find a large degree of inter-party engagements and intercommunications. This is due to the collaborative networks of competing populist actors along the deeply divisive Brexit issue. Pro-Brexit actors (Brexit Party, UKIP) on one hand and anti-Brexit actors (Change UK, Lib Dems, SNP, Green, Plaid Cymru) on the other, these two networks competed for their construction of democracy, the people, and the establishment to win the vote of the British public. This network analysis results substantiate the observation we made in the thematic analysis and topic modelling that the 2019 British EP elections are deeply intertwined with the dynamics of competing populism in the post-Brexit UK.