Britain affected by EU enlargement (and other) policies

The legal power of the EU (and its responsibility for the increasing rate of immigration to the UK on the basis of freedom of movement laws) is also prominently correlated with its enlargement policies, both in the past, towards the Central and Eastern Europe A8 and A2 countries (in 2004 and 2008), and in the future, towards Albania, Serbia and, allegedly, Turkey.¹³ This move connects the Brexit context, construed in terms of the extreme pressure put by incoming immigrants on British public services and other resources, with a past record of immigration mismanagement under EU policies and with a future trajectory that will take the current state of affairs from worse to intolerable:

• (10) ‘AS many as 100,000 Turkish nationals could head to the UK every year if the country joins the EU, the vice chair of Migration Watch has warned’.
• (Barnes, 2016, The Express)

Beyond additional pressure on services and welfare benefits and increase in regular crime, the future uncertainty and risk from the integration of Turkey and Albania revolve around fears of Islamic terrorism (unsurprisingly, given recent attacks in Europe), subsumed to the multicultural project that tears at the fibre of traditional British communities (examples 5 and 11). Within it, Islamisation is occasionally and usually indirectly identified as a source of major concern, and, in this respect, it could trigger associations with the ‘Eurabia’ or ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theories for readers that entertain such beliefs (see Bergmann, Gualda and Onnerfors in this volume), even though the conspiracies are not named as such. Example 11 emphasises the consequences to local neighbourhoods and communities by focusing on values, specifically those related to the cultural pluralism brought about by immigration and, overall, by globalisation processes (legitimising thus a rejection of continued EU membership):

(11) ‘MASS immigration is damaging our social cohesion just as much as our economy ... Nothing exemplifies that dangerous trend more than the separatist attitude of too many Muslims who reject our values’.

The author continues to blame this mentality for having ‘allowed jihadism to flourish in our midst, as shown by the relentless string of home-grown terror plots uncovered by security forces’ (McKinstry, 2016b, The Express). Such claims regarding non-integration and undesirable political values are similarly made about Eastern European migrants (especially Romanians and Poles), who are associated with the space of the uncivilised Balkans and the former communist dictatorships (see Madroane, 2014a, 2014b).

Returning to internal responsibility, PM David Cameron and the other Remain politicians in the Conservative Government, as well as the Labour politicians, are established as continuators of past policies (former Prime

Ministers Edward Heath, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown are grouped together as setting the course for Britain’s ever-deepening integration into the EU). The figure of Tony Blair emerges symbolically (especially from opinion articles) as the chief mastermind behind the Europeanisation of Britain and behind its changing face under multiculturalism. Blair’s ‘managed migration’ policy and the controversial decision not to impose restrictions on economic immigrants from the A8 countries in 2004 (Geddes & Scholten, 2016) are blamed for the accelerated growth in immigration numbers and for a design to dramatically change the structure of British society, to the benefit of Labour and generally of pro-EU politicians (the ‘social engineering’ plan in example 5 refers to Tony Blair’s policies, while David Cameron is symbolically represented as his successor). The scapegoating of the pro-EU British politicians for the dissolution of British communities and traditional values, evident in the case of Tony Blair, further positions them as internal ‘enemies of the people’, and is likely to foster conspiracy thinking when mentions of or allusions to secret plots are made.

Against this historical background, expert projections of population growth are cited to establish the unacceptability of future consequences for the native British (white) population, should the trends be allowed to continue. Such expertise is used strategically to criticise and undermine Tony Blair’s migration policies. The scenario can be related to the ‘Neather-gate’ theory, and, possibly, further, to the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory (Gaston & Uscinski, 2018; see also Bergmann, Gualda and Onnerfors in this volume). Andrew Neather was an adviser and speechwriter in the New Labour government, alleged to have claimed there was a plot behind the government’s multiculturalism policies, which he later debunked (Neather, 2009). The excerpt below (see also example 5) demonstrates that his claim has nonetheless become a point of reference in the Leave argument(s) on EU immigration, and continues to be reproduced in the public debate:

• (12) ‘According to Blair aide Andrew Neather, one of the aims of the New Labour policy of opening up the UK to mass immigration was to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’, promoting permanent ethnic change to the permanent electoral advantage of Labour.
• (Coleman, 2016, The Daily Mail)

Concerning Britain’s future ethnic composition, another excerpt outlines a dim prediction:

(13) ‘I made a projection in 2010 ... Taking [it] to a more uncertain distance, the White British population would cease to be the majority in the UK by the late 2060s. [...] Some people would welcome a brave new experiment, pioneering a wider world future. Others, though, might say “Finis Britanniae’”.

Most mentions of Turkey or Albania in the corpus analysed do not make a specific link to a conspiracy multiculturalism project and they often do not mention terrorism, either, focusing instead only on large influxes of migrants and pressure on public services. However, as I noted earlier, readers who are familiar with conspiracy theories from those newspaper articles that directly refer to such aspects or from elsewhere, or who are susceptible to this type of thinking, may supply additional premises to this effect (AND ‘Turkey is a source of [undesirable] multiculturalism’ AND ‘Turkey is a source of terrorism’ AND ‘The accession of Turkey will change the structure of the British population’), so as to make the arguments (more) relevant to their cognitive environments.

Survey findings in the post-referendum period indicate that ‘58 per cent of Britons ... believe their government is hiding the true cost of immigration to taxpayers and society’ and fifty-one per cent believe that it ‘has deliberately tried to make society more ethnically diverse through its immigration policy’, while ‘Leave voters and UKIP voters are the most likely to agree that the Government is involved in a conspiracy around immigration policy, and that outspoken voices against immigration have been silenced’ (Gaston & Uscinski, 2018: 5). These findings cannot be correlated directly with the coverage of the three pro-Brexit newspapers, as voters take their information from various other sources (political communication, social media, etc.), but they give substance to the claim that the framing strategies discussed here are likely to have had (some) resonance during the Brexit referendum.