“Enemies of the People”? Diverging Discourses of Sovereignty in Media Coverage of Brexit

In November 2016, The Daily Mail ran a cover story with the, by now infamous, title “Enemies of the People” placed above the photos of three judges of the High Court of England and Wales. The judges had provoked the newspaper’s ire by ruling that the Government needed the consent of Parliament to give notice of Brexit. This is only one of many cases in which British media interfered directly in the highly politicized debates on sovereignty surrounding the Brexit referendum. Considering that sovereignty was one of the main reasons citizens voted for Leave and that the press played a crucial role in the Brexit campaign, this paper explores how the concept was represented and instrumentalized in British media from the official start of the Referendum campaign on April 15, 2016 to UK’s General Election on December 12, 2020. The discussion is based on qualitative content analysis of editorials on Brexit in The Daily Mail (right-wing pro-Leave), Financial Times (right-wing pro-Remain), The Guardian (left-wing pro-Remain), and The Morning Star (left-wing pro-Leave). The analysis shows that the left-right divide mattered greatly for how sovereignty was portrayed in Leave media but not in Remain media. Media coverage of Brexit was marked by a conflict between national and supranational sovereignty but also by an increasingly important conflict between popular and parliamentary sovereignty, especially in the aftermath of the referendum vote. Indeed, important changes in discourse over time suggest newspapers instrumentalized concepts of popular and parliamentary sovereignty to promote their agenda. Different political positions were far from equally represented - the most famous left-wing pro-Leave newspaper – The Morning Star - reached significantly less people than any of the other three newspapers. This matters because debates on sovereignty were not only reflected on the pages of media but often also steered by them as political players with their own editorial stance and agenda.