This article studies the interactional functions of racism discourse in mobilizing support for right‐wing populism. The analysis focuses on the controversy surrounding UKIP's “Breaking Point” poster campaign, which launched days before the historic British EU referendum. We focus on the development of “tripolar relations” between the UKIP party leadership, mainstream political elites, and ordinary citizens. Using thematic discourse analysis, we show how the poster was depicted as racist and the UKIP leader Nigel Farage was accused of scaremongering and stoking racism by means of propaganda. This criticism becomes the grounds for mobilization as Farage defended the campaign against the charge of racism and his supporters rose to his side. We conclude by showing how arguments about the nature of racism are identity performances that can reproduce or challenge existing social relations. This article thus identifies the rhetorical “collaboration” that exists between critics and defenders of racism and the inadvertent political outcome of this interaction.
In this article, we develop a mobilization analysis of contemporary antagonism to immigrants. We argue that such antagonism does not arise spontaneously from the cognitions of ordinary people but is mobilized by political actors. This leads us to ask why politicians mobilize such antagonisms and how they do so. Our analysis, illustrated by set piece speeches on immigration by the four main U.K. party political leaders in the period prior to the 2015 elections, suggests (1) that while these speeches are ostensibly about an intergroup issue, they equally serve intragroup dynamics, notably demonstrating how the speaker serves national interests and hence qualifies to serve as a national representative; (2) the way that speakers mobilize antagonism to immigrants is through construing a variety of forms of threat: spatial threat, economic threat, security threat, and diversity threat. We focus particularly on the last of these because of the ways in which it invokes social psychological arguments and hence speaks in our name. We conclude by raising issues of accountability-both of politicians and social psychologists-regarding the way we talk about immigration.
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