‘Language’, in the sense of the general human capacity for language, does not decay. What Orwell means, of course, is that it is the way politicians use language that had ‘decayed’, in the sense of no longer following certain ethical standards, such as telling the truth, giving information needed, giving answers when asked for them, being clear rather than ambiguous or obscure, and so on. To put it another way, the faculty of language decays when one’s brain decays, but the use of language, judged by some ethical norms, can ‘decay’ under particular social, political and cultural circumstances. And the relationship is reciprocal: the ethical ‘decay’ in language use also brings about the process of ongoing decline. The basic assumption is: language use is part and parcel of doing politics.

Orwell, as is well known, had the nightmare, written up in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, that a political regime could develop its own vocabulary and that political words could constrain and direct political thinking and acting – in Nineteen Eighty-Four this language was called ‘Newspeak’. Orwell was not trained in linguistics or the philosophical analysis of language, although he did contribute articles to the magazine Polemic, alongside the philosophers Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer. He was a journalist and novelist who insisted on truth and accuracy and persisted in opposing power. In language matters he was an astute observer of political abuses of language (but capable of being misled by the linguistic prescriptivism of his social class and Etonian education). While all journalists are necessarily embroiled in language, Orwell seems to have been particularly conscious of the fact that the practice of politics was inseparable from language use. He was able to stand back and make judgements about the effects and implications of words and what politicians were doing with them. He wielded no special tools of analysis – just the ordinary ability of the human mind to be linguistically vigilant and to apply ethical norms to acts of speech just as much as to any other social act. He was pessimistic about the extent of that ability.

When he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell, and his contemporaries, had witnessed decades of totalitarian propaganda and its effects. In the Soviet Union, millions were to do so for another forty years. Today still, mass indoctrination continues, and not only in the Soviet Union’s successor state. The term ‘propaganda’ is useful for referring to any abusive deployment of language by, or on behalf of an organisation, especially a political one that is targeting a mass audience. The prototypical example is that of totalitarian regimes, as was the case in Orwell’s day. In our own time, the developments in communication technology have gone far beyond the communication resources of Orwell’s day. Today’s technology has created the conditions for a new communicative culture and for a new kind of demagoguery. It is a kind of demagoguery that appears not only in the public forum and in the traditional press but also in social media and the dark web of extremists and disinformation activists.

The role played by the new social media channels has been of central importance in the spread of populist ideas and sentiments, and in the rise of the Brexit movement. Social media performed this role not just through the ideas and sentiments themselves, but through the dissemination of demagogic uses of language, images and other discourse devices. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, social media technologies have actually contributed to the erosion of democratic deliberation.Footnote ¹ Such communication systems are beyond Orwell’s imaginings and are capable of consolidating destructive ideas and forms of talk among citizens and politicians alike.

Brexit was in large part a product of these processes, but political language and communication emerge in contexts with a history. Brexit was a product of Britain’s problems of historical identity in a context where the world had changed structurally and was producing new national-populist ideologies. To grasp more clearly what happened around the UK’s European Union (EU) membership referendum of 2016, we need not only the analytical tools of history and political science but also those of language philosophy and the language sciences.

Brexitspeak

This book draws on a variety of academic perspectives in an attempt to understand Brexit, its historical roots, and the means by which it was brought about. The Orwellian perspective has its limitations but its central ideas point the way to an analysis. Political behaviour is largely a matter of using language in particular ways. The accumulation of political power is not only a matter of physical force, but of controlling public discourse and the means of public communication in order to control a population. That means attempting to use language, among other weapons, to control thoughts, behaviours and feelings. And it means getting round whatever critical watchfulness people may be exercising. Orwell’s linguistic dystopia – complete thought-control – may not be possible, precisely because of the potential of human vigilance. But effective propaganda can at the very least lay hold of public opinion and can produce turning points of historic significance – such as Brexit.

So this book will have a good deal to say about what certain influential and powerful political actors were saying and writing that led to the way people voted at the 2016 referendum. Brexit was an irrational decision and explaining it needs many different approaches. Economic, social and demographic explanations are certainly essential parts of the picture. But they leave out a key element. Given that there were indeed sections of British society who were economically and socially vulnerable, and susceptible to anti-EU rhetoric, we still need to explain the nature of the final shift in public opinion that produced the referendum result – by a narrow margin. Propaganda in favour of leaving the EU was decisive, especially in the final stages. In order to get to a more comprehensive understanding, and possibly an explanation of Brexit, not only is a macro-analysis of the contemporary context needed but also a micro-analysis of campaign propaganda.

Brexitspeak was a regular way of talking designed to direct people’s attention to the EU and infuse a negative stance towards membership of it. This was done by way of constant repetition of words and phrases that sought to constrain thoughts about Europe and the EU in the desired direction – Brexitthink. Seeking to influence ideas alone is insufficient. Brexitspeak sought to trigger emotions and to re-activate latent feelings and attitudes – it was also Brexitfeel. The easiest emotions to activate are fear, hostility and hatred, and the easiest way to stimulate them is to talk up alleged dangers and threats. Brexitspeak stirred up latent xenophobia, directing it towards immigrants, and blaming increased immigration on the EU.

Micro-analysis enters the explanatory framework in order to explain how Brexitspeak pushed Brexitthink and Brexitfeel to the point that it sufficiently influenced pro-Brexit voting behaviour. After all, doing politics of any kind is primarily a matter of linguistic activity. To advance this type of explanatory goal, the book focuses partly on existing patterns of thought and feeling that Brexiters could exploit, and partly on the micro-mechanisms of their deployment of language to influence political behaviour. The book therefore back-tracks in history, in order to trace the threads of discourse that produced the contexts of meaning in which Brexit was forged. And, in order to explore the details of pro-Brexit communication, I draw widely on the language sciences combined with related disciplines. Overall, the approach is interdisciplinary, crossing the boundaries of history, political science, philosophy and psychology. In particular, importing linguistics into political inquiry may be unfamiliar, even controversial. The risks involved in crossing disciplinary boundaries sometimes have to be taken, and the reasons for such risks lie in the nature of the complex questions that the extraordinary Brexit decision poses.

Brexit was not an isolated outburst peculiar to Britain but part of the ‘new populism’ that emerged in the 1990s and the early twenty-first century.Footnote ² Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States in 2016 is the most obvious example, but closer to hand geographically was the rise of far-right populist movements in Europe.Footnote ³ Their ideological emphasis was on identity, often involving the invention of a political ‘other’. Chapter 1 of the present book explores this identitarian context and how Europhobia and anti-immigrationism came to be combined. In effect, what the pro-Leave campaign did was project a new British identity. Chapter 2 examines how this was done linguistically by the Conservative Party’s prime minister, David Cameron, under political pressure both from the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and from the nationalist and populist right within his own party. Appeasing the Brexiters was not just a matter of announcing a referendum but of simultaneously adopting a degree of Brexitspeak, thus undermining Cameron’s own Remain stance. As the pro-Brexit movement grew in political strength, so its discourse developed an ideational coherence around the notion of ‘the people’, a notion that entailed a cluster of other words and political notions that were endlessly repeated in campaign propaganda. In a rough and ready way, and doubtless unwittingly, this put Brexitspeak in line with a long tradition of European political thought, which is considered in Chapter 3. But of course the populist ideas had to be spun out in a British context.

Chapter 4 therefore shows how the UK’s national identity problem arose, and how a ‘British people’ was assumed to exist and to express its ‘will’ in a supposedly incontrovertible ‘mandate’ to leave the EU. Anti-immigration attitudes, mixed in with racism, had been endemic in the UK, and their manifestations on the domestic scene continued into the post-imperial period after World War II. They were not always explicitly expressed in the public sphere but were capable of being brought into the open by demagogues when the time was ripe. Chapter 5 examines how Enoch Powell’s interventions in the 1960s persisted over time. Existing British ethnocentrism with a racist tinge was easily stoked up both before and during the pro-Brexit campaigns. Conservative Party policy became openly aggressive towards immigrants in the 2000s, and the Conservative-Liberal government set in motion the policy of ‘hostile environment’. The United Nations later stated that the policy was ‘entrenching racism’ in the UK. As Chapter 6 seeks to show, the ‘hostile environment’ fed into the Brexiters’ narrative. The Leave campaign propaganda pushed the idea that being hostile to immigrants was part and parcel of being hostile to the EU. The language became increasingly deceptive, and dishonest to the point of blatantly denying known facts. All of the political manoeuvres, the deceptions and distortions, the stoking up of negative emotions, and the efforts to arouse an ethnocentric patriotism – all this and more depended on demagogic communication that primarily, but not entirely, involved the strategic deployment of language. Is it really possible to use language in such a way that it affects the minds of voters and leads them in a desired direction? And what exactly are the mechanisms of such language? Chapter 7 approaches such fundamental questions by taking some of the most notorious examples of Brexitspeak and focusing in on their workings with instruments of linguistic analysis. It is by this kind of close investigation that one comes to see how words, and images too, were designed to sway a public that was in fact divided on the referendum question. This happened in the context of the new populism and by means of the devices of the new demagoguery.

Populism

Brexit – or Brexitism – was a manifestation of populism. The term ‘populism’ has had numerous uses and definitions. Various forms of populism have been the subject of attention since the 1960s and have been increasingly discussed by journalists and academics since the turn of the century. There is at least a family resemblance among the variations, and arguably a shared conceptual and attitudinal core. Although it is still argued by some that the term unhelpfully groups together very diverse kinds of political orientation,Footnote ⁴ I adopt the label ‘populism’ to refer to a recognisable historical phenomenon found across the Americas and Europe, one that is made up of internationally shared ideas, attitudes and emotions.Footnote ⁵ This does not mean that ‘populists’ always brand themselves with that label, though in some instances they do so in order to lay claim to a term that has been standardly used in a pejorative sense. Nor is populism typically formulated as an ideology, theory or philosophy, since rejection of such ‘elite’ discourse is one of its professed characteristics. An exception is the left-wing theorist Ernesto Laclau, who viewed populism as emancipatory.Footnote ⁶

There are several ways of characterising the new populist wave. The socio-economic approach to populism enquires primarily into the impact of economic conditions on vulnerable sectors of the population. It is therefore also concerned with the economic policies of governments. For instance, the term ‘macroeconomic populism’ has been used to refer to the economic policies pursued by some South American countries during the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁷ In general, this perspective focuses on the policies of large-scale spending, often followed by inflation, hyperinflation and subsequent austerity measures. This is sometimes called the ‘supply side’ approach since it concentrates on government seen as supplying economic resources to ‘the people’, whether to promote or appease demand. The economic term ‘supply side’ is also extended to the socio-political processes that produce populist actors who respond to demand. ‘Demand side’ approaches concentrate on the nature and sources of popular demand.Footnote ⁸ This includes examining socio-economic factors in the demand for populist policies, and the spread of attitudes such as xenophobia, ethnocentrism and disillusionment with established politics.

There is also an approach that treats populism as above all a ‘style’, what has been described as a ‘folkloric style’.Footnote ⁹ Populism’s ‘style’ tries to demonstrate solidarity with ‘ordinary people’ in order to mobilise a population or part of one. This ‘style’ may involve a maverick party politician or figure from outside established politics, and the adopting of untypical mannerisms, simplified diction and deliberately provocative turns of phrase. Talk of ‘style’ may give the impression that populism is no more than that and has no underlying set of ideas. However, the populists’ way of communicating does integrate ideas, ideas that are expressed repeatedly in their use of language.

Rather than applying the term ‘ideology’ to populism, it is more accurate to describe it as ‘discourse’. That is, discourse in the formal linguistic sense of cohesive communicative exchanges based on a common ground mutually accepted by participants as true. Populist discourse does not generally express clear and distinct ideas. The lack of conceptual precision and explicit formulation is actually one of populism’s chief defining characteristics. This does not mean that populist discourse does not communicate any ideas at all. Most of the ideas that get conveyed are simply vague or very general. Often they are not stated at all but conveyed indirectly. One of the properties of language is that it can communicate ideas without stating them explicitly – by presupposition, association, the triggering of particular conceptual frames, and other kinds of implication and hints. It does not matter if those being addressed do not attach any clear idea to the much-repeated phrases of populist discourse, including ‘the people’, ‘the will of the people’, and numerous others. In populist discourse it is the relations among these notions that are important, the most obvious one being antithesis – for example, the opposition between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, not to mention ‘the people’ and ‘Europe’. Conceptually, populist discourse deals predominantly with pairs of opposites.

In populism generally, the appeal to emotions outweighs appeal to reason and evidence. Brexitfeel dominates Brexitthink. Most of the key notions produced by populist discourse are essentially emotion triggers, and the emotions that are fired up have an overall negative force. However, there is one central idea that carries positive affect – identity. Conceptually, identity is binary: the Self is antithetical to an Other. This implies a border, separation, and more. The boundaries of personal identity have fundamental emotional aspects. In the social and political domains, individuals belong to groups, which are also conceptualised in terms of a containing boundary, insiders and outsiders. This conceptual structure carries both positive and negative affective force – insiders are good, outsiders bad. Positive feelings include desire for social homogeneity, collective belonging and bonding, and nostalgia for an imagined national greatness. Negative feelings include resentment and anger about perceived social and political exclusion, together with hostility and fear of the foreign, the outsider, the unfamiliar.Footnote ¹⁰

Populism cannot be thought about without an initial notion of democracy. This is the case both for analysts of populism and for populist discoursers themselves. Analysis of populist notions of democracy also carries value attitudes and preferences, which should be rationally justified.Footnote ¹¹ For populists, the understanding of the concept ‘democracy’ is characteristically binary. Their preferred form of democracy is simply the opposite of what ‘the elite’ or ‘the establishment’ accepts and practises, depending on the political culture they are operating in. When this is spelled out, what populism is rejecting is those institutions that are representative. Implicitly, it opposes theories of rational deliberative democracy, whether combined with representative democracy or not. Representative institutions and processes do not suit populists, because they are too indirect and provide no sense of personal control in a cultural environment that demands the immediate and the individualistic. This is not to say, of course, that supposedly representative governments do not have disadvantaged segments of the population.

An additional reason why democratic deliberation of any kind doesn’t suit populist politics is that deliberation and deliberative processes take time. Such processes are, at least in principle, rational and evidence-based, and they do not necessarily mobilise the emotions that populism favours. Furthermore, they require relevant information that can be trusted by the community, as well as some analytical insight and critical ability – capacities that need to be fostered by liberal civic education.Footnote ¹² If there is a lack of critical vigilance in the general population, there is plenty of opportunity for a demagogue-leader with personal charisma to emerge. If such an individual does turn up as a populist leader, as they frequently do, then so may an idea of the ‘embodiment’ of ‘the people’ in that individual – ‘the people’ identifying itself with a ‘man of the people’. This idea is able to yield yet another – that processes of representation and deliberation can be reduced or replaced, for example, by referendums. This is a path to placing a leader alone in the role of decision maker, as European history can demonstrate.

Demagoguery

The terms demagogue, demagogy and demagoguery are not much used in contemporary academic analysis of politics. But to fully understand the nature of populism the category of demagoguery is essential. From classical Athens to the Enlightenment authors of The Federalist Papers, legislators and philosophers have looked for both a satisfactory definition of demagoguery and constitutional solutions to democratically avoid it. The concept of the demagogue faded from academic attention in the nineteenth century and further in the twentieth-century era of ideologies. A notable exception was Theodor Adorno, who wrote about and analysed ‘fascist demagogues’.Footnote ¹³

However, several thinkers are bringing the category of demagoguery back into the serious study of politics. The historian Iván Berend has closely connected demagoguery with populism, and sketched the transition of demagogue to dictator and the destruction of democracy during the twentieth century. He also suggests this line is continued in the new populism of the present century – amply illustrated not only in Donald Trump, but across Europe in Silvio Berlusconi, Jörg Haider, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Viktor Orbán, Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński, Nigel Farage, and Boris Johnson.Footnote ¹⁴ The political theorist Nadia Urbinati rightly insists that demagoguery must be understood in its institutional context.Footnote ¹⁵ She notes that ‘[i]n ancient direct democracy, demagoguery had an immediate law-making impact because the assembly was the unmediated sovereign’.Footnote ¹⁶ Modern populist demagoguery, however, exploits the context of modern representative democracy, of which it is, to use Urbinati’s expression, a ‘disfigurement’.Footnote ¹⁷

Philosophers of language have again begun to examine the fine details of political speech and the ethical problems raised by it.Footnote ¹⁸ Jason Stanley uses the term ‘demagoguery’ as a label for kinds of propaganda that are problematic both politically and morally. Modern demagoguery goes well beyond the individual orator in the agora. It is generated by organisations as well as individuals, uses many different channels of mass communication, and thus includes propaganda. However, an abstract general definition of ‘demagoguery’ has proved difficult to formulate. A better approach is to view demagogues as exhibiting a set of traits, some subset of which qualifies an individual to be labelled ‘demagogue’, though further refinement is needed. Well-known traits of demagogues include the disposition to:

• exploit democratic institutions and freedom of expression

• present themselves as one of ‘the people’ and an ‘ordinary’ person, even if they are wealthy and expensively educated

• stir up fears of an oppressive Other that may be an ethnic out-group, an institution or another country

• emphasise supposedly superior characteristics of the in-group

• ignore evidence and counterargument, equivocate, and lie.

The list can be extended, but the essential criterion is that demagogues use language, and other signals, to manipulate feelings and thoughts. The overlap between the definition of populism and of demagoguery is significant, in theory and in practice.

Training in public speaking – rhetoric – became an important feature in the development of Athenian democracy, and probably a beneficial one in that it fostered deliberative modes of decision making in the assembly and in the courts. The required verbal skills were taught by individuals known as ‘sophists’ (wise persons), some of whom could command high fees. The driving motive behind the teaching and learning of persuasive techniques was to win one’s case. In this was the germ of rhetorical abuse and the modern pejorative meaning of the term ‘sophistry’. The Greek sophists can be seen, mutatis mutandis, as the forerunners of the modern public relations experts, the spin doctors and the political consultants who appeared and rose to great heights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today’s sophists have a huge range of technologies that include polling, data analytics of all kinds, including speech analytics, personal profiling, and lexical analysis of social media. In the Brexit context, as in all modern political campaigns, the rough equivalent of the sophists are not just the demagogic actors themselves, but the campaigning organisations behind them (especially Vote Leave and Leave.EU), along with their technical communications specialists and their wealthy backers.

Within city states, it was possible for political communication to be primarily face to face; in republics and empires, communicating with mass publics had to be done over long distances and by transcription. The medieval Christian Church used proxy preachers and scribal copying, and later the printing press; its highly organised Congregatio de propaganda fide, formed in 1622, was in many respects the forerunner of twentieth-century totalitarian propaganda machines. The twentieth century’s cinema, newsreel and subsequently television again extended and changed the nature of mass communication, demagoguery and propaganda. The emergence of electronic communication technology and the devices and practices that were developed with it were a change that produced radically new forms of interpersonal communication. At the same time the new technology transformed communication between organisations and individuals, including communication between the state and individuals. We have a pseudo-agora, with individuals appearing to be co-present and able to address one another directly. What we actually have is an entirely new communication reality, the implications of which are not yet fully understood.Footnote ¹⁹ The pro-Leave campaign was able to exploit this new demagogic potential, investing more financial resources than Remain in sophisticated – and sophistical – campaign techniques. One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate the specific workings of some of the linguistic mechanisms involved in the new forms of mass political communication.

Demagoguery is integral to the practice of democracy, because of the centrality of the principle of free speech. Originally, the terms demagogue, demagogy and demagoguery did not necessarily imply a critical stance on the part of the user of these words.Footnote ²⁰ Plato and later philosophers, especially Plutarch, wrote of ‘demagogues’ critically and used the term ‘statesman’ (politikos) as its normative opposite. In The Politics, Aristotle said that demagogues can bring about the type of direct democracy that would today be called populist – a type of democracy in which ‘the multitude is sovereign and not the law’.Footnote ²¹ He also understood demagoguery as a problem of language, or rather of the use of language in public communication, that is, rhetoric. It is a short step from a utilitarian view of rhetoric to a rhetoric that relativises truth or disregards it altogether. Post-truth politics is not a recent phenomenon; it has been inherent in demagoguery all along.

Post-truth Politics

Writers who were spurred into action by the election of Trump and the Brexit referendum in 2016 applied the label of ‘post-truth’ to a new era in politics.Footnote ²² It may well be the case that the intensity, extent and apparent acceptance of political deception of all sorts surged around 2016, but the basic phenomenon is not new, and neither is philosophical concern about it. In the post-World War II period, the scale of US government lies during its involvement in the Vietnam War was exposed by Daniel Ellsberg and various New York Times journalists. Hannah Arendt published the essays ‘Truth and politics’ in 1967 and ‘Lying in politics’ in 1971. After several decades of public deception at the top of government, the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt wrote On Bullshit (first published in 1986), which inspired James Ball’s account of politics around 2016, and has influenced continuing efforts by thinkers such as Quassim Reference CassamCassam (2019) to analyse the apparently increasing disregard of truth in political discourse.Footnote ²³

Frankfurt’s analysis of bullshit was one of the first to base the distinction between bullshit and simple lying on whether a speaker cares about the truth in the first place. Cassam develops this further, introducing the concept of ‘epistemic insouciance’ – a concept particularly suited to understanding the speech behaviour that seems to predominate in the political language culture of the Brexit campaign and beyond. Cassam analyses in detail some specifically relevant features of epistemic insouciance. Epistemic insouciance is a type of attitude that he calls a ‘posture’, rather than a deliberately adopted ‘stance’. A ‘posture’ in this classification is not deliberately selected, and, importantly, it has an affective element. This does not, I think, mean that such a posture with regard to truth is not used strategically in political discourse. Cassam says that: ‘[lack] of concern about what the evidence shows is one element of epistemic insouciance but another element in many cases is contempt. There is contempt for the truth, contempt for experts, and, in the case of politicians, contempt for the public.’Footnote ²⁴ Contempt in turn involves, as Cassam notes, feelings that include arrogance and superiority. But such feelings do not come from nowhere. The sense of superiority in question is the kind that comes from a generalised social sense of ‘being above’ that is simply, as it were, a given. Feelings of this sort are acquired from social conditioning and certain kinds of education – for example, from inherited wealth, and from the purchased conditioning provided by the so-called public schools of the UK. Such characteristics are manifest, as it happens, among some leaders and funders of the Brexit populism.

‘Post-truth’ can be considered a label for a phenomenon appearing in parts of Western society around the turn of the twentieth century. It covers the doubting of objective truth in general, and the blurring of fact and fiction, as well as dishonesty in public communication.Footnote ²⁵ A generalised epistemic indifference is capable of becoming a culture, or subculture, on lesser or larger scales. Its adoption by a governing elite implies also a calculation that it is widely shared by the public at large. It is intrinsic to the promotional commercial culture that grew and became normalised after World War II. Mass advertising did not concern itself with facts or fact-checking, and abandoned truthfulness.Footnote ²⁶ In parallel, and as a consequence of such cultural changes, there grew up an interpretation of the principle of free expression in which all opinions were equal, and in which evidence and rational argument were also simply treated as opinion. In such an environment, politicians are only too ready to woo their voters in the way that many of these voters expect. Politicians of a certain stripe just do not need to care whether their assertions are consistent with facts, evidence or reason. Alongside mass advertising, and intertwined with it, has been the rise of so-called ‘reality’ television, ‘infotainment’, and virtual reality devices in entertainment and in news reporting. Because these genres mix traditionally separated categories of factual reporting and fictional entertainment, some commentators argue that they adversely affect attitudes towards and performance of political behaviour. And it is possible, though again hard to demonstrate, that this cultural climate contributes to people’s distancing from established politics. Both alienation from politics, and cognitive instability around fact and fabrication, are promoted and exploited in populist demagoguery.

The concept of ‘post-truth’ raises philosophical questions centring on epistemological relativism. But the focus here is on the fact that being truthful or untruthful concerns language – or, more accurately, speech practices, which are rooted in the ethical norms of society, culture and politics. The truthfulness of a speaker or writer is often difficult to pin down, and this is because untruthfulness comes in various linguistic guises. These are not purely linguistic, but are tied up with states of mind, and perceptions of a speaker’s state of mind. Lying is an ethical-linguistic concept that varies, depending on what is individually or communally believed to be true. To tell a lie means that the speaker believes they know the truth but decides to make an explicit assertion that is counter to what they know. One cannot always know for sure what truths a speaker believes they know; nor can a speaker be sure they know what their hearer knows or does not know. To accuse someone of lying involves the same issues. In practice, statements about facts can generally be fact-checked, and a critic can reasonably estimate what a speaker is likely to know, and what they ought to know, given a particular context. There is no point in ignoring these complexities, for they are real. They can be exploited by demagogues. When it comes to the linguistic substance of untruthfulness, it is not just a matter of uttering an explicit proposition. An untruthful utterance may imply an untruth, by means of hints, dog whistling, and being economical with the truth – that is keeping quiet over awkward facts, and other devices. There is a lot more to this perspective, since untruths in political demagoguery are always accompanied by substitute narratives and other constructed realities, which have their own linguistic vehicles.Footnote ²⁷

A Closer Look at Language

Use of language is the stuff of politics. Without it humans would not have the societies and political behaviours that they do have. This why looking closely at language use is essential to understanding political institutions and political behaviours.

Brexitspeak is discourse. In this book, I use the term ‘discourse’ primarily in the way it is used in linguistics.Footnote ²⁸ Discourse is language in use in real situations, and sometimes it creates or changes situations. In form, it is a level of linguistic structure larger than the sentence. Discourse researchers are interested in the details of how sentences cohere to produce a larger coherent unit we can call a ‘text’, written or spoken – a conversation, a political manifesto, a speech, a newspaper article, a billboard, a message on the side of a bus, and so on. These are localised texts with their own internal coherence – grammatical links, relations between word meanings, repetitions, paraphrases, and so forth. Texts at this level can be called ‘micro-discourse’. How individual speakers and spokespersons set up their text can reveal a lot about what they are up to politically, including what they do not mention overtly.

Participating in a localised verbal exchange, written or spoken, means mentally processing utterances in real time for a limited time. There is an additional temporal dimension, however. Verbal events can relate back to earlier relevant verbal events, which may be recent or temporally remote, or passed on by hearsay (or ‘read-say’, so to speak). Present discourse therefore has multiple continuities, some of which can reach back over generations. This is why it is relevant to consider traditions of talk and thought – for example, the concept of ‘the people’ or ‘British’. As such historical chains are established, selections, modifications and misinterpretations occur. Importantly, present speakers are generally not aware of them.

Understanding any kind of text, written or spoken, involves much more than recognising individual words and somehow adding them up to make a whole. Linguistic cues do not just signal dictionary meanings. We know from neurolinguistic studies that understanding sentences involves partial processing, using salient word meanings, drawing on knowledge frames (‘cognitive frames’) stored in memory, and, above all, making inferences about the intended meaning.Footnote ²⁹ Consider a leaflet reading ‘Vote [name], Vote [name of political party]’. Its linguistic form conjures up a cognitive frame concerning political systems and the roles of politicians and voters, as well as the political ideologies involved. More abstractly, it rests on prior knowledge of the concept of democracy, even if this is only sketchy. Hearers make use of the triggered knowledge to infer a relevant meaning for the input discourse. Conversely, speakers produce discourse with the intention of affecting the hearer’s mind – perhaps to get the hearer to add new information to memory, to receive orders and act on them, or to prompt them to think in a certain way about some issue. The list is long.

Discourse is a form of action containing ‘speech acts’.Footnote ³⁰ An example that stands out is promises. In politics, ‘promises’, so-called ‘pledges’, and ‘commitments’ are notorious.Footnote ³¹ Speech acts of this type, in the theory developed by the language philosopher John Searle, are called ‘commissives’. They played a major role in Brexitspeak. All types of speech act have their own ‘felicity conditions’ – the ‘conditions under which words can be used properly to perform actions’.Footnote ³² In Searle’s theory, there are four kinds of condition that underpin speech acts: propositional content, preparatory conditions, sincerity conditions, and essential conditions. With regard to the speech act of promising, the first of these conditions is that an utterance predicates a future action by the speaker (propositional content). The second condition is that the speaker believes that the hearer prefers the promised action to be carried out, an action that neither party would have expected to be done as a matter of course (preparatory condition). The next two are particularly interesting for political contexts. The third condition is that the speaker does genuinely intend to carry out the action (sincerity condition). And the fourth condition is that the words of the utterance count as an undertaking to execute the promised action (essential condition). These formulations may sound moralistic, but the act of promising cannot work without them, and people are likely to be morally outraged if the conditions are infringed.

The different types of speech act encountered in language use can be put into five types:

• assertives make claims to truth

• directives try to get the hearer to do something (commands, requests, etc.)

• commissives commit the speaker to an action (promises, pledges, threats, etc.)

• expressives convey emotions and attitudes (regretting, apologising, blaming, etc.)

• declaratives bring about change in particular institutionalised settings (judging an accused person guilty, opening or proroguing a parliamentary session, etc.).

All these types of speech have their role in political discourse, but assertives, like commissives, play a particular role in Brexitspeak. In politics generally, they raise serious ethical problems if the felicity conditions for assertives are breached – the crucial one being the sincerity condition. This comes out even in discussions that are intended as purely theoretical:

However, there is also the theoretical possibility that there exist sincere asserters of presumed facts that are not believed by others. Using a different terminology, these would be ‘true believers’ who make ‘truth claims’ that they believe relative to some ideological or religious system of ideas. In Brexitspeak there are insincere asserters as well as asserters who are ‘true believers’ – it is often difficult to distinguish between them.

An extension of speech act theory involves the notion of ‘face-threatening acts’ – examples are speech acts like complaints, disagreements, criticisms, accusations, and insults.Footnote ³⁴ ‘Face’, one’s public self-image and private self-esteem, can be thought of as positive or negative. Positive face refers to the self’s (perceived) desire to be accepted within a social group. Negative face refers to an individual’s desire not to be imposed upon. Both kinds of face are ‘addressed’ by way of linguistic ‘politeness strategies’. In positive strategies, speakers make linguistic choices that reflect ‘common ground’. A politically important example, as will be seen in Chapter 2, is the pronoun we used inclusively. In negative politeness strategies, expressions are selected that ‘hedge’ intrusive or threatening speech acts such as commands and requests.

Inferencing is the principal way in which the brain makes sense of linguistic input. The hearer rapidly and unconsciously works out a relevant meaning, given the words and the context. This is the way language has evolved and it makes communication flexible and economical. But it also means speakers can insinuate ideas indirectly, the receiver processing them unconsciously. There are several ways in which language relies on inferred meanings. Some of these are set off more automatically than others.

Semantic presuppositions are a case in point. For example, in both the sentence ‘the people decided the result’ and the sentence ‘the people did not decide the result’, there is a presupposition that ‘the people’ exists.Footnote ³⁵ If the hearer does not already have the assumption that ‘the people’ is an existing entity, then they may be induced to add it to their memory bank of things that exist. Another common type of presupposition trigger is ‘factive verbs’. Take, for example, the verb realise in the sentence ‘John realises that there are too many immigrants in the country’ and in the sentence ‘John doesn’t realise that there are too many immigrants in the country’. There is a presupposition that there are in fact too many immigrants, whatever John thinks. Small words can trigger important presupposed meanings. In a phrase such as give back, the presupposition is that what is ‘given back’ was previously in the possession of the receiver. Semantic presuppositions can serve useful functions in communication. And despite being automatic, they can be cancelled, or suspended, in particular contexts. The hearer may have contrary information that they trust, or the hearer might be vigilant enough to question the presupposed content. But we can never be sure when we have the relevant information, or when we need to be on our guard, and in some situations any of us can be influenced by clever use of presupposition.

The type of inferencing necessitated by what is termed ‘implicature’ is fundamental in comprehending almost any use of language.Footnote ³⁶ The classic theory formulated by the philosopher Paul Grice, much discussed and developed since, seeks to explain how it is that a hearer spontaneously figures out a meaning from some utterance. Grice postulates a shared ‘cooperative principle’ as the basis of human communication.Footnote ³⁷ After all, linguistic communication could not work at all without this overarching assumption, even though some individuals might not be cooperative. Grice divided the cooperative principle into more detailed ‘maxims’ grouped under the terms Quality, Quantity, Relation and Manner:

• Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true – do not say what you believe to be false and do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

• Quantity: Be as informative as required in the context, and not more informative.

• Relation: Be relevant.

• Manner: Be perspicuous – avoid obscurity, avoid ambiguity, and aim for brevity and order.

These maxims may sound schoolmarmish, but something like them is logically required to account for various language phenomena. It is reasonable to assume that human communication does need this normative element for language to develop in the first place. Furthermore, most language users express moral objections if somebody breaks the Quality maxim, and may object also to the breaking of the other maxims, depending on the situation. Implicatures are enabled by the cooperative principle and its maxims, and implicatures are a basic ingredient of linguistic communication. We seem to have them because they make communication faster and easier. There is nothing inherently nefarious about them, but in social situations, especially in political ones, they are easily exploitable for individual purposes and advantage. Duplicitous communicators would not be able to operate unless everyone was expected to be communicatively cooperative in the first place. On that basis, we are all susceptible to manipulation.

Of course, given stereotypical politicians’ behaviour, Grice’s maxims are an almost comical list of the norms that are routinely infringed. There are two ways in which the maxims can be infringed. They can be ‘flouted’ or ‘violated’. In flouting a maxim, speakers and hearers are assuming the cooperative principle is in force, and if a speaker infringes a maxim, then the hearer will infer a relevant (to them) meaning. The meaning they come up with is an ‘implicature’. Suppose for example, that someone says, ‘The minister always tells the truth!’ If the assertion is contrary to shared background knowledge, but the speaker is nonetheless taken to be following the cooperative principle, then the speaker can be taken to be ‘flouting’ the Quality maxim, the hearer being intended to interpret the intention as an ironic negation of the sentence uttered.

In violating a maxim, one is violating the entire cooperative principle. A politician may violate one or more of the maxims knowingly, while taking it that the hearers are presuming they are following the expected cooperative principle. In that case, the politician will be lying.Footnote ³⁸ If the hearer is making the cooperative assumption, they will calculate an implicature and be taken in. If a hearer is on critical alert, they will still generate the implicated meaning but not accept it. If they proceed to challenge the implicated meaning, the political speaker knows the escape route. They will insist that ‘that was not what I actually said’. Despite the deniability of implicatures, they enable a political speaker to get a message across without accepting responsibility for it.

Manipulating linguistic interaction in the ways just outlined goes hand in hand with the manipulation of mental representations. Particular language choices on the part of a speaker can steer the way in which hearers mentally ‘view’ one and the same object, situation or process. Such choices can affect what the hearer focuses attention on, what they leave out, and what perspective they adopt. The terms ‘cognitive frame’ and ‘framing effects’ refer to these conceptualising phenomena.Footnote ³⁹

The structure of sentences in all languages reflects cognitive frames. For example, the transfer of an object from one individual to another is conveyed in the verb give, which calls up roles of giver, receiver and object, and foregrounds the giver as the agent. The verb take reverses the direction of the transfer, foregrounding the receiver as the agent. The verb donate seems at first sight to be a synonym of give. In the abstract, the role frame is the same. However, its semantic frame adds socio-cultural concepts over and above the basic frame for give. In the case of donate, the object donated may be either money or a valued object. In most contexts, the donor is likely to be a wealthy individual and the receiver to be an individual or institution perceived as relatively less wealthy. In a political situation at a particular historical moment, the donor frame might be closely linked with the frame for politics and political party. Some verbs and frames are even more detailed. For example, vote is highly culture- and context-specific. It minimally involves a voter, a person voted for, and an office or issue on or for which the voter is voting, within an institution of some kind. But this is far from everything in the relevant mental frame that socialised individuals acquire. When vote is used in real situations, it evokes knowledge not only concerning the individual voted for but also knowledge of a specific political culture. A cognitive frame like this can be very rich, and can include links to other frames, such as historical knowledge, political ideologies, concepts of democracy, values and wishes. This is in addition to fundamental spatial frames for places and related objects: voting booths, ballot papers, pencils, and so forth.

Apparently minor tweaking of a grammatical construction can create a framing effect by leaving a slot unfilled, which enables the speaker to suppress information. An instance might be: ‘the party received a donation’. Here the passive construction and the nominalised form donation makes it possible to avoid mention of the source of the donation. Frames are stored in memory, but they are flexible, can be adapted to context, and can be updated over time. This makes the more complex frames cognitively unstable, with the consequence that significant elements can be forgotten, overlooked, and manipulated. The concept referendum had details in its frame relating to the particular 2016 referendum on membership of the EU – for example, the proposal itself, voting age, and the advisory function of the vote. But speakers can deliberately fail to mention some part of the relevant knowledge frame, one that they themselves do know. Omissions may well not be noticed, and specific details can easily disappear from view. This is yet another way in which we are all vulnerable to being misled.

More stable than frames, and more fundamental, are ‘image schemas’, which play an important role in the meaning structure of many vocabulary items that have developed in human societies over time. Hardwired in the brain’s cognitive system, they are condensed representations of the bodily interaction of humans with their physical environments.Footnote ⁴⁰ Unsurprisingly, a body schema (conventionally written in small capitals) is fundamental in many linguistic expressions. Particular schemas deriving from bodily experience of the physical world include path, container and force. The path schema is present in linguistic expressions of direct motion from one point to another. container consists simply of a boundary (border), an inside and an outside. In discourse one’s perspective may be from the inside or the outside. The combination of path and container is behind the meaning of enter and exit, being in or out. Many different sorts of object, physical or not, can be represented as containing spaces – for example, states of mind, organisations and professions, not to mention sovereign nations and the EU. The force schema underlies everyday literal uses of words such as pressure, pressurise, stop, prevent, push, invade, and many others. In discourse, image schemas create coherence by repeatedly triggering particular schemas in ways that can shape meanings that depend on them. These were important elements in Brexit propaganda.

Image schemas play an important role in metaphorical expressions. In cognitive linguistics, a metaphor is defined as a transfer (or ‘mapping’) of elements from a ‘source domain’ to a ‘target domain’, consistent with the semantic characteristics of the target.Footnote ⁴¹ Metaphors can play a sometimes useful role in thinking about an abstract or complex target domain – for example, progress is a path, or a whole society is a container. In political thought, there are recurrent cases that offer metaphorical entailments as a way of reasoning about problematic entities.Footnote ⁴² An example is a country is a person (or a state is a person), which metaphorically entails that a country (or state) has a head, a body (body politic), and can behave and act in certain ways. Metaphor can be deployed for the purpose of influencing or consolidating the ways in which people think and feel about the social and political world.

The linguistic phenomena described so far, entirely normal and natural as they are, afford demagogues the means of disrupting cooperative group reasoning based on available evidence. Rational cogitation, however, is obviously not the only factor in any political discourse. An emotive element is essential to it. In the case of populist discourse in particular, and of Brexitspeak, the prime objective is to arouse emotions and to override evidence-based reasoning. This is done by focusing attention on simplified, emotion-laden concepts such as ‘the people’, and by encouraging antithetical thinking in terms of Self and Other.

Research in neurolinguistics, using brain-imaging techniques (PET, fMRI, etc.), is beginning to uncover the ways in which emotive language impacts human brain processes, particularly with regard to fear, anger and perception of threat. Attention has centred on the role of the amygdala, a crucial organ in the human brain’s emotion system (the limbic system). In both sides of the brain, it is involved in emotional responses to environmental triggers, including those provided via speech. Memory for perceived dangers, including threats from other humans, has been important in human evolution for the survival of social groups – hence the potential effectiveness of fearmongering in political behaviour.Footnote ⁴³ The neuroscientist Nancy Isenberg notes that imaging research suggests ‘conservation of phylogenetically older mechanisms of emotional evaluation in the context of more recently evolved linguistic function’. She points out also that ‘[f]ears that are simply imagined and anticipated […] have a profound impact on everyday behavior’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Although the brain reacts to emotive words even under laboratory conditions, in actual discourse both context and existing mental frames support more focused reactions. A fear response can be induced by isolated words that denote danger, and the surrounding context can be used to specify a source of that danger. Demagogues have an intuitive grasp of how to use language to perform such effects. Emotional responses are hard for subjects to resist. Moreover, they have the potential to interrupt rational processing of speech input. The processing of the perception of emotional stimuli is complex, however, and humans do have the ability to critically evaluate verbal as well as non-verbal stimuli.

‘Cheater detection mechanisms’ is a term used by experimental psychologists to refer to an evolved cognitive ability to detect cheaters in social exchanges. Without such an ability, the interaction needed to create societies could not have got off the ground.Footnote ⁴⁵ Linguistic communication itself is a kind of social exchange, so language also would be expected to be linked with a cheater detection mechanism. In this approach, both cooperative maxims and what has been called ‘epistemic vigilance’ would be safeguards against misinformation and misrepresentation, whether intended or not.Footnote ⁴⁶ But vigilance does not always seem to be activated. Why? One reason could be that vigilance is cognitively costly and will not be activated unless there is an obviously relevant benefit. Another reason could be that for social cohesion it is most efficient to rely on commitment to trust and trustworthiness. But a further possible reason is that, especially in political contexts, the very diverse techniques of language manipulation can get round epistemic vigilance and the detection of cheaters.