“Enemies of the people”? Diverging discourses on sovereignty in media coverage of Brexit

Abstract

In November 2016, The Daily Mail ran a cover story with the now infamous title “Enemies of the People” attacking the three judges of the High Court of England and Wales who had ruled that the UK Government needed Parliament’s consent to give notice of Brexit. Debates on sovereignty were not only reflected on the pages of the print media but were often also steered by them as political players with their own agenda. This paper explores how the topic of sovereignty was represented by the British media using a qualitative content analysis of the most shared online articles on Brexit and a narrower subset of editorials in right-wing and left-wing newspapers. The paper shows that the left–right divide mattered greatly for how sovereignty was portrayed in pro-Leave media, but not at all in the pro-Remain media. While in the period before the referendum coverage of Brexit was marked by a conflict between national and supranational sovereignty, after the referendum the conflict between popular and parliamentary sovereignty became more prominent. Changes in the frames deployed over time suggest that newspapers instrumentalized some concepts of sovereignty to promote their agenda. Finally, the fact that some positions (such as the left-wing pro-Leave defence of democratic sovereignty) were almost absent in media discourse had important consequences for the public debate on the topic.