Immigration, Elites and the European Union: How UKIP Frames its Populist Discourse

Though populism in the United Kingdom is not only confined to the UK Independence Party, by all means UKIP is its most representative and successful instance in Britain. To a reasonable extent, the rise of British populism can be linked, directly or indirectly, to the increasingly effective agency of the party after 2010 under the leadership of Nigel Farage. This paper starts by clarifying the relationship between populism and the ideology of UKIP, which exhibits unequivocal anti-elite and anti-immigration stances. It then goes on to provide a thorough overview of the literature, with the aim to recall the arguments that have been advanced to explain the rising performances of UKIP: the ones that take into account macro-level factors such as globalization and immigration, the ones focusing on nation-specific aspects like English discontent or the parliamentary expenses scandal, and the ones dealing with populist framing fostered by UKIP before the British electorate. In this latter perspective, that we may regard as a "strategic constructivist" approach, one informed understanding contends that the key to the appeal of UKIP is the successful blending of criticism of the European Union, concern against mass immigration, and hostility towards the distant elites in Westminster and Brussels. In the light of this insight, and with a view to empirically assess how instances of populism emerge from the discourse of UKIP, we analyse the five speeches delivered by Farage at the party conference in 2011-2015. These speeches, marked by a same "rhetorical situation", are arguably best suited to reflect the rhetorical stance of the party. In turn, the categories we use - mainly drawn from Critical Discourse Analysis - allow us to understand which representations of other actors, populist arguments and implicit presuppositions characterize the five discourses, representing the wider discourse of UKIP.