All English speakers know what we means, at least in the abstract. Its full meaning only emerges in particular acts of communication, though not always unambiguously. One of the uses of the word we is to arouse sentiments of collective bonding and it played a key role in the national-populist talk and text that surrounded Brexit. The reason for this was that the question of leaving the EU was deeply intertwined with British national identity – the question of who we is. Brexit is in many ways a crisis of identity, a crisis that played itself out on the ground in terms of the Leaver we-group and the Remainer we-group.

So how does the word we work? All languages have a small subgroup of words, known as deictics, whose referential meaning can only be decided when used in situ, and by taking account of non-linguistic clues. Examples are words like here and there, now and then, and of course we. In context, the relevant meaning of we has to be inferred by the hearer(s). Essentially, using the word we concerns which group and group boundaries are being indicated. Ideological uses of we involve more mental processing – the calling up of a relevant mental frame. In the case of a national we, the frame can be quite detailed. Frequent repetition in particular contexts can build up a specific association between the self and a particular social or political group.

Central to the various meanings of we, and central to the theme of this chapter, is what linguists call ‘clusivity’. The term refers to the fact that in English we is ambiguous. It can have an inclusionary meaning: ‘I the speaker and you the hearer(s)’. Or it can have an exclusionary meaning: ‘I and you the hearer(s)’ but not some other ‘you’ and not ‘them’. In some languages of the world there are different words to mark this distinction. In English and languages that do not mark the distinction, the intended we-group is often unclear – a fact that can be exploited rhetorically.Footnote ¹ Manipulating the national we is one of the key features of Brexitspeak, almost always associated with national identity, competition between political parties and campaign organisations, and their respective mindsets.

Monolingual We

The complaint that foreign languages were increasingly being spoken on the streets of the UK was heard frequently among UKIP supporters and others in the run-up to the referendum of 2016. At the UKIP spring conference on 28 February 2014, Nigel Farage declared:

He was telling his audience what they wanted to hear. In a press conference afterwards, he recounted his experience of travelling on a commuter train on which he could hear no English spoken, adding, ‘Does that make me feel slightly awkward? Yes it does.’ And, asked why he minded people speaking in foreign languages, he replied: ‘I don’t understand them … I don’t feel very comfortable in that situation and I don’t think the majority of British people do.’Footnote ³

Although UKIP did not make language policy a prominent part of their anti-EU campaign, Britain’s longstanding monolingualism meant that people could easily be persuaded to focus on the speaking of languages other than English. Most of Farage’s supporters would have taken it for granted that it is normal and natural to speak one and only one language, and that in the UK, that language must be English. The people Farage overheard speaking another language may well have been bilingual or multilingual, a perfectly natural state of affairs. It is true, all the same, that in many societies divisions can be fomented by political actors who link language with identity, nationhood and social divisions.

On the day the UK formally left the EU, 31 January 2020, a resident of a block of flats in Norwich reported that posters displaying the text shown in Figure 2.1 had been found attached to the fire doors on all fifteen floors.Footnote ⁴

Figure 2.1 Nationalist monolingualism post-Brexit.

Source: Photograph posted anonymously on Twitter/X and reposted numerous times. Author’s verbatim transcription.

This is a rich example of Brexitspeak, one that should not be dismissed as ‘extremist’, or not representative of mainstream Brexit discourse. In fact, the xenophobic and racist ideas in it are implicit in much if not all of Brexitspeak. This short text states explicitly a string of ideas and attitudes that in more public utterances are only hinted at, so that accusations of racism can be denied. Its explicitness illustrates the way in which far-right culture was beginning to openly assert itself. The poster, we may guess, comes from the milieu of the marginalised, the economically deprived and the unqualified – people who were likely to believe national-populist propaganda promoting exit from the EU. It is angry, frustrated and it seeks a ‘voice’, within a narrow community.Footnote ⁵

The linguistic details of the notice are worth a closer look. The text imitates the style of official notices written in standard formal English, presumably to give legitimacy to an extreme form of xenophobic nationalism. Apparently the tower block residents were not fooled, since the next day saw demonstrations against whoever posted the notice. Unsurprisingly, the poster writer deploys the word we. Clear contextual cues mean it can only be understood as exclusive of ‘you’, the intended addressees. The underlying racism is not expressed in so many words but is unmistakeably implied via the powerful metaphor present in the one word ‘infected’. The infectious disease metaphor works well ideologically because it is conceptually linked with the ‘body politic’ metaphor, a state is a human body. If states are bodies, they can become ‘infected’ – by ’parasites’ is a potential metaphorical extension. In the same vein, a 2010 election poster of the Hungarian far-right party Jobbik featured an insect trapped in a ‘no entry’ sign.Footnote ⁶ Political bodies have boundaries that are best kept closed, according to the discourse of the right and the extreme right.Footnote ⁷ By way of the phrase ‘evolve or leave’ the poster indirectly conveys another racist (indeed Nazi) idea – that the intended addressees are subhuman. Overall, the text of the poster blends racist xenophobia with national-populist monolingualism. As Markus Rheindorf and Ruth Wodak have shown, the suppression of ‘foreign’ languages has frequently been implemented by national-populist governments.Footnote ⁸

In 2001, a report by the Labour Party’s Community Cohesion Review Team stated the need for a list of national values that included ‘a universal acceptance of the English language’ and ‘expectations’ regarding the use of English, with increased government support.Footnote ⁹ The following year, the Foreign Policy CentreFootnote ¹⁰ published a set of essays with the title Reclaiming Britishness. The Labour Home Secretary of the time, David Blunkett, contributed to it an essay, ‘What does citizenship mean today?’, which was also published separately by The Guardian.Footnote ¹¹ Unwittingly perhaps, Blunkett’s presentation of the problem of immigration fed the monolingual strand in identitarian discourse, including that of UKIP and Conservative Party Brexiters in the 2010s. One passage runs:

Mild though Blunkett’s words were by comparison with Farage’s words quoted earlier, and certainly by comparison with the Norwich poster, they were nonetheless on the same continuum.

The implied claim that schizophrenia is caused by multilingualism is scientifically baseless.Footnote ¹² In fact multilingual people function perfectly in societies across the world and such societies are common and normal. But Blunkett’s remark shows how entrenched are false ideas about the superiority of being monolingual. The truth is that such pronouncements are ideological. Promoting national language monolingualism has serious social and political implications. In 1930s Germany, the Nazis regarded bilinguals as inferior and dangerous. The underlying assumption is that if people have two languages they have different identities and allegiances.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, language diversity linked to migration became a political issue across Europe. In the years before the UK’s Brexit referendum, calls for monolingual policy were common among right-wing and far-right leaders in several other countries. ‘In Rotterdam spreken we Nederlands’ (‘In Rotterdam we speak Dutch’) was a campaign poster of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy in 2014.Footnote ¹³ Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front national in France, declared: ‘Je ne parle pas anglais, moi. Je suis française.’Footnote ¹⁴ In Germany, the conservative CSU (Christlich-Soziale Union) made proposals in 2014 to require all migrants to speak German both within the family and in public. This line was followed by other conservative politicians, generally with the claim to be furthering social integration. Official language requirements were enforced in some countries as legal obstacles to migration. In the UK, similar ideas had been voiced on the left, as we have seen. But ten years on, they were the property of the right and the national-populist far right.

In 2011, about a year after Farage had become party leader and made UKIP look more politically challenging, David Cameron gave a speech on immigration that contained the following:

Cameron casually evokes the supposedly divisive effect of speaking a language other than English, combined with a certain degree of xenophobic scaremongering. The prompting of fears of divisiveness were in all probability driven by the need for his party to compete with UKIP.

In 2011 – a time when UKIP was picking up support – a UK national census included, for the first time, a question about language and language proficiency. This may have reflected growing national-populist interest in the speaking of English, an issue often brought up in the popular press. The Census found that 92 per cent of the responding individuals spoke English as their ‘main language’. Of the relatively small subset (8 per cent) of individual residents of the UK whose ‘main language’ was not English, 79.3 per cent reported speaking English ‘well’ or ‘very well’. The Census also looked at households as units, and it found the following:

These data suggest a high level of language cohesion in the UK. However, the media reports on the Census fixated on the finding of 4 per cent of households where no resident had English as a ‘main language’, and proceeded to misinterpret (or misrepresent) what that phrase indicated.Footnote ¹⁷ The Guardian (20 December 2012) had to correct its initial reporting of the Census figures as showing that in England and Wales there were ‘around a million households that speak no English’. Such mistakes rest on unquestioned assumptions about identity, national languages, and the human language faculty itself:

For some minds, not speaking English as one’s main language is tantamount to not being really British. The assumption that the British nation state is, or ought to be monolingual seems to be pervasive and to subsist alongside inaccurate assumptions about bilingualism and multilingualism, as the Blunkett examples had implied ten years earlier. The press reports of the 2011 Census, and the public comments of some politicians, presented the speaking of one or more languages in addition to English in a solely negative light.

Thus, the Daily Express, for example, writes darkly:

Readers are left to make sense of this (‘why should I remember this? why profound?’), by drawing on background knowledge using the usual principle of contextual relevance. Such background knowledge will in all probability come from public utterances taken to be authoritative regarding supposed disadvantages, or even dangers, of not speaking English as your ‘main’ language. The background premise is that it is wrong not to have English as your ‘main’ language, and even that speaking other languages in addition is wrong. A hardening of anglocentric monolingualism has been reported for the years around the Brexit referendum.Footnote ²⁰ In some instances, the implication that British people ought to have only English as their first language is clear, as in the Daily Mail:

The Mail did not consider whether such pupils may be completely competent in English. Yet fears that children with English as an additional language will succeed at the expense of native English-speaking children are also articulated in the press:

This assertion, and other examples examined in this section, either state openly or presume that being British means speaking English only. It is tantamount to saying: a person who is not exclusively anglophone is not one of us.

Cameron: British We

On 23 January 2013, David Cameron, then in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, gave a landmark speech at the London headquarters of Bloomberg L.P., a financial and media company based in Manhattan. Politically he was under pressure from inside his party as well as from outside it. His right-wing MPs, notably the ERG (European Research Group), were pushing an extreme Eurosceptic line, and UKIP was increasingly attractive to the electorate, including traditionally Conservative voters. Cameron, who supported the UK remaining in the EU, sought to ward off these forces by raising the possibility of a referendum on EU membership. A close look at the text of the Bloomberg speech shows that he was also seeking to buy them off rhetorically – that is by adopting their national identitarian narrative.Footnote ²³ At the centre of the speech was the question ‘who are we?’ As things turned out, the Bloomberg speech did not still the Eurosceptic voices, but reinforced the discourse of Brexit national populism.

Using we in an inclusive sense, as Cameron did, necessarily entails an out-group, though it is not always tactically useful to focus on or name such a group. Here, however, it is plain from the context that the other is the EU: it is referred to in the third person, as it or as they.Footnote ²⁴ Associated with we and they are mental representations containing the imagined attributes of the in-group and the out-group. Such linguistically triggered representations of the in-group and out-group are important not only for the ongoing speech event in the immediate assembly but also for those who will read it in reported form in the media. Cameron lays out explicitly the purported attributes of the British national we, using traditional myths.Footnote ²⁵ Since a large number of the population already have these national we frames in their long-term memories, hearing Cameron’s catalogue of characteristics would reinforce such frames and consolidate their association with we in political contexts. The fact that Cameron was doing this would not have been relevant had there not been generalised uncertainty about what the national identity was, an uncertainty that was already exploited by the national-populist right.

The Bloomberg speech made many truth claims, some quite overt, others less so, about the attributes of the we-group. There was little if any substance to the claims. Yet they would appear coherent and plausible to we-group hearers:

What claims exactly were Cameron’s words making about the UK? According to him, the United Kingdom, treated as if it were a single person, is ‘argumentative and rather strong-minded’ in the perception of other European nations, apparently intending these attributes as virtues and exclusively British. Other Europeans might have said stubborn and unreasonable. In the same sentence he implicitly asserts that the UK is ‘a member of the family of European nations’, not mentioning the EU itself but only a collection of ‘nations’. A lot of ideological claims can be packed into such sentences.

Further, Cameron produces the claim – that ‘our psychology’ is caused by living on an island, ‘our geography’. The supposed effect of this supposed cause is that ‘we have the character of an island nation’.Footnote ²⁶ Cameron builds up the idea that what is really a political decision (whether or not to be a fully participating member of the EU) is a wholly natural and unavoidable consequence of living on an island. It is the insularity of the Eurosceptic pro-Brexit mindset that Cameron is pandering to, dressing it up as scientific fact. But he is also of course conjuring up an entrenched British myth, with all its Churchillian echoes. Another reason the ‘island’ idea worked for Brexit supporters is that its use activates the cognitive container schema. It is effective because its structure derives from the physical experience of bounded spaces that cut off their contents from their surroundings. Boundaries and the distinction between inside and outside are central to the Eurosceptic nationalist mindset. As for the supposed attributes of British island-dwellers, Cameron trots out the notion that ‘we’ are somehow uniquely endowed with independent-mindedness, forthrightness and a passion for defending ‘our’ sovereignty. The culminating item in the list of exceptional attributes is the supposed practicality of the British – spelled out by Cameron’s entirely instrumental view of Europe as ‘a means to an end – not an end in itself’. In context, this amounts to a refusal to cooperate with the European project, and in particular with any idea of the pooling of sovereignty.

The Bloomberg speech was somewhat conflicted. While Cameron wanted to Remain in the EU on some terms, in order to neutralise the Eurosceptics he had to foreground national identity and national sovereignty. So he had to lay claim to being in some sense ‘European’. He did so by directly and indirectly asserting Britain’s historical, but long past status as a ‘great power’ in Europe, not omitting to simultaneously evoke Britain’s role as an imperial global power:

There follows a selective summary of Britain’s historical role in Europe:

The exclusionary use of the pronouns is important here – they distance ‘us’ from Europe. Not only that, but they omit an important part of the historical facts about the EU – that in the aftermath of World War II, the purpose of the forerunners of the EU was to leave behind Europe’s war-torn past.

The frequent activation of the container schema to evoke inclusion and exclusion, boundedness and difference does not mean that reversal and denial of that schema are not also deployed. It was used, for instance, to underpin a claim that was to become a staple of Brexit discourse – that is the claim to global outward-looking openness. Cameron says of British history:

Thus ‘openness’ is made into an attribute of the British we. In practice, however, the hardline Brexit view excluded the EU, making Britain’s global openness another kind of ideological container. There is a fundamental cognitive dissonance in Brexit discourse that was to manifest itself in its post-Brexit legacy.

After the long section about the supposed British ‘character’, which insistently uses the exclusionary we, there is a slight shift in the use of we towards an inclusive interpretation. Why is this? Cameron starts off his new section making a demand directed at the EU. Addressing his invited audience, which included representatives from EU member states, as well as Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan, one of the founders of the Vote Leave campaign organisation:

This constitutes what linguistic discourse analysts call a ‘face-threatening act’. In verbal exchanges, speakers frequently mitigate their utterance to ‘save the face of’ the other person. In this instance, Cameron uses, among other devices, an inclusive we. In its context this has to be understood as referring not only to the UK but to all members of the EU. The switch to inclusive we is partial. Sometimes it is inclusive, sometimes it refers exclusively to the UK, sometimes it is ambiguous:

The inclusive understanding is signalled indirectly via surrounding context. It is particularly clear when he uses the form we all/us all, as he does a little later in his outlining of the changes he wants. In the passage quoted above, the context suggests a we that includes Britain and the EU, though there is some possible ambiguity, since the we and the us here follow ‘and for Britain’. When he moves on to say ‘if we don’t address these challenges’, the ambiguity is still present – committed Eurosceptics might prefer the exclusive reading that refers only to Britain, while his pro-EU hearers might interpret the we as including the EU. It could also be referring to members of the audience. The linguistic context of Cameron’s next use of we (‘keep us in’) can only be understood as exclusively referring to Britain. However, the following two occurrences of we (‘… challenges we face’) have the potential to be understood as inclusive of both parties.

Once Cameron has laid out his ‘challenges’ or criticisms of the EU, followed by an equally face-threatening ‘vision’ for it, he moves on to what they ‘mean for Britain’. There is a new rhetorical turn at this point in the speech, one which enacts the most risk-laden political speech act for Cameron and for the country. Cameron’s strategy, at least at this juncture, was to demand extreme fundamental changes to the European Treaty, which he apparently believed he could obtain, and then put this ‘new settlement’ to the British electorate in a referendum. Apparently in the belief that it would quieten his domestic critics, he made a statement about a referendum that was more like a threat than an announcement.

He prepares the way oratorically by rehearsing key themes advanced by his backbench Eurosceptics. His rhetorical list includes the ‘public disillusionment with the EU’, not knowing ‘what the point of it all is’, wanting simply the ‘common market’, disliking the European Court of Human Rights, and ‘heading for a level of political integration that is far outside Britain’s comfort zone’. The implicit claim is that these complaints come from ‘the British people’, a phrase repeated again and again in Brexit discourse. The list continues, making ‘the (British) people’ the actors in a string of sentences:

From this supposed evidence, Cameron drew a supposed conclusion, presumably believing that his words would help silence his political opponents: ‘The result is that democratic consent for the EU in Britain is now wafer thin.’ This kind of statement, however, was more likely to encourage Brexiters inside and outside the Conservative Party, and to ensure that such issues became live in the public media. In fact, neither the EU nor a referendum had been in the forefront of public debate in the preceding years. It was not the case that the general public, ‘the British people’, had come together to formulate the specific criticisms of the EU that Cameron develops in this speech.Footnote ²⁷ Nonetheless, the speech put into circulation the perception that Cameron had called for a referendum in response to demand by the ‘British people’ as a whole.

Farage: British We

Two months after Cameron’s Bloomberg oration, Farage gave the leader’s speech at UKIP’s spring conference speech (23 March 2013).Footnote ²⁸ A look at Farage’s speeches of this period demonstrates the extent to which Cameron had come into line. It is not that Cameron was influencing Farage. Rather, it was the reverse: Farage and UKIP had already been exerting political pressure on Cameron’s discourse. Although there are verbal similarities in this respect, the rhetorical functions of we were slightly different in the two speeches. The differences have to do with the different types of speech context and the different party situations of the two leaders. Nonetheless, as far as political conceptions and policies are concerned, it is easy to see the convergences. But we should keep in mind that both leaders were engaged in staking claims to ownership of the ideological ground.

While Cameron’s Bloomberg event was planned as a high-profile national and international event, with a varied audience both present and virtual, Farage’s gathering was a party conference attended by the party faithful. But it was also intended to be heard by the three mainstream British parties and above all by the Conservative Party, as Farage makes abundantly clear. His use of we is crucial. Almost all of its occurrences have to be understood as referring to the addressed audience in the hall, as well as to absent members of UKIP. There are few occurrences of a national we in this particular Farage speech. When they do occur, they are often ambiguous between a national reference and a party reference. There is throughout a we–they antithesis, where they is overtly linked to what Farage calls the ‘Lib Lab Con’ mainstream, the allegedly corrupt, ‘careerist’, socially and culturally biased liberal-minded ‘elite’. This pattern seems to reflect the circumstantial goals of a somewhat marginalised but expanding populist party. There is another notable characteristic, one that is often central in populist verbal performance. All political orators want to interact with their audiences in a way that generates applause and signals of approval. This type of interaction works with ‘clap traps’ – linguistic features such as contrasts, groups of three and the use of we, integrated with para-linguistic features such as rhythmic desk-slapping, hand and arm gestures, voice volume and pitch contour.Footnote ²⁹

In this March 2013 speech, for example, Farage opens with ‘Let’s hear the Eastleigh roar!’, with its colloquial inclusive we (in ‘let’s’). This was an allusion to UKIP outstripping the Conservative vote in the Eastleigh by-election of the preceding year. The us in ‘let’s’, referring to the UKIP audience is repeated in sentences that claim political distinctiveness, especially in connection with UKIP’s anti-immigration stance and nationalism. Farage claims ‘we are the party that are putting forward positive alternative policies that would make this country a better and prouder place’. In the following, there is a strategic sliding between UKIP we and national we:

In this extract ‘our message’ would naturally be understood by hearers as being a UKIP we. The second we (‘we are not against …’) and the third (‘we wish …’) are conceivably ambiguous between a party-member we and a national we – which would suit UKIP’s claims. But the ‘us’ in ‘it cannot make sense for us’ has to be processed, in the context, as indexing the national collective we. Among other similar instances of referential blurring between the party we and the national we, the instances in the following passage were the most politically resonant:

As the sentence proceeds, it moves from a clear UKIP we to a we that could index either UKIP or the nation or both. Cameron, in his 2013 Bloomberg speech, was not asking for a ‘divorce’, but he was making the same point about signing up solely to a free trade arrangement.

By the time of UKIP’s autumn conference (19 September 2013), with the May 2014 European Parliament elections coming into view, Farage was promoting the party with increased vigour. His pronouncements about national identity became louder. This was part of a thread of discourse that Cameron’s Bloomberg speech had reinforced. At the same time Eurosceptics were emboldened to step up the volume.Footnote ³¹ One was the MP Bill Cash, leader of the opponents of the Maastricht Treaty (the so-called ‘Maastricht rebels’). Another was Gordon Henderson, an admirer of Farage who had threatened to defect to UKIP. They echoed Cameron’s national myth-making, but they were turning it against him in his stance on the EU.

UKIP had become a threatening force for the Conservatives. But emergent political parties have to establish an identity by rhetorically constructing one within the current political structure. They can do this by establishing an inclusive we differentiated from a they, that is, the rival parties.Footnote ³² When the UKIP conference came along, on 19 September 2013, Farage was still riding high on the by-election gains at Eastleigh in February 2013, as well as some increases at the South Shields by-election of May 2013, both of which had followed gains in the Rotherham and Middlesbrough by-elections at the end of the preceding year. Farage started his leader’s speech in the same way as his spring conference – with a rousing inclusive we: ‘Well, here we are.’Footnote ³³ The remainder of the speech is put together in the same way as the March speech and other speeches. It does not consist of clearly signalled sections and topics, nor does it include patterns of argument. Rather, it consists of bursts of interaction with the audience, rapid concept and emotion triggers, generally in the form of slogans. There are three related fixations – the identity of UKIP, the national identity of the UK, and immigration. While numerous policy issues are mentioned, most effort appears to go into fusing anti-immigration sentiment and anti-EU sentiment, both of which involve appeal to a collective national we identity. As Hawkins and colleagues observe: ‘Unlike traditional ideologies or issue positions that are consciously developed and communicated in a few words, populist ideas tend to be latent and diffuse within a given text.’Footnote ³⁴

This is the technique by means of which Farage picks up on the British history thread that had been a prominent element of Cameron’s Bloomberg speech. When he turns to the question of British historical identity, his first move is to engage his hearers in a claim about UKIP’s identity:

He goes on to answer his own question with a list of attributes. There are positive personality traits attributed to party adherents, such as being ‘free’ and ‘open’ in debating topics such as immigration. And there are negative traits ascribed to the various others who are despised, such as alleged evasiveness and dishonesty. The notion of ‘openness’, also used by Cameron in his speech, is now grafted on to the national we. Farage summons up a British identity portrayed by opposition to (‘outside of’) the EU and rooted in a mythologised past. There are several lexical similarities to Cameron’s speech:

In this extract, the we initially refers to UKIP, but it then merges with a national we in ‘that’s us’. And the we/us is associated contextually with the container schema. The latter is triggered insistently, in a claim that focuses on Britain’s supposedly exceptional ‘openness’. This supposed national character trait is opposed to the EU by evoking notions of EU constraints upon, and limitation of, the UK: ‘[we] are hemmed in by the European Union’. The collective emotion among those present may be connected with patriotic affect as well as the immediate group affect. In the following section of the speech, several topics are interwoven as before. In common with other Eurosceptics and Brexiters, Farage insists on the superiority of British Common Law and contraposes it, in oversimplified terms, to the civil law systems derived from the Roman legal code. Freedom of speech, too, is presented as exceptionally English:

Farage then inserts a vivid narration of the case of Andrew Symeou, a British national who was falsely accused and extradited in 2009 to Greece, where he was seriously mistreated while awaiting trial. He had been detained under the European Arrest Warrant (EAW). Notwithstanding the drift of Farage’s speech, it was the Greek court that acquitted Symeou and after widespread criticism, the application of the EAW has undergone numerous revisions. In 2014 Farage publicly clashed over the case with deputy prime minister Clegg, who rebutted his claims.Footnote ³⁵ But Farage’s aim in his speech is to contrast the EU with ‘us’. His clear implication is that the British are uniquely concerned about freedom, free speech and justice:

This second repetition of ‘that’s us’ can be interpreted by hearers in two ways: as referring to UKIP members, or as an inclusive national we. Or perhaps both at the same time. It is another example of Farage’s merging of the party we and national we. The initial mental response may be to identify ‘us’ with UKIP, as that reference has been primed by the preceding uses, but as the sentence unfolds the referent ‘England’ is prompted. The mind is processing rapidly and beneath conscious reflection, and that is why such cognitive mergers are likely to be effective in such an audience.

Though different in its details, Farage’s speech sustains Cameron’s historical narrative of national identity. Farage simply prompts well-known and simplistic historical frames, verbally entwining these with disparaging attacks on continental tradition, again in relation to law. He warns:

In fact, it was UKIP’s obsessive invocation of ‘the people’ that was fundamentally bound up with nationalism. Furthermore, he claims:

These words contain, by implication, the nonsensical but rhetorically effective idea that continental Europeans are not ‘true Europeans’. There is a half-hidden hint that European nations are not democratic. Unsurprisingly, this is immediately followed by a diatribe against laws, directives and regulations that ‘come from Brussels’ – not mentioning that democratically elected representatives of the UK participated in formulating those provisions. This is followed by more historical narrative, centred yet again around the legal system:

The national we is in large part defined in populist discourse by opposition to – not merely by difference from, as in Cameron’s speech – some alien other, pointed to by the pronoun ‘they’. Thus our civil rights are opposed to their Human Rights charter, without evidence or argument.

There are interesting similarities between Cameron’s Bloomberg we and the way we is used by Farage, allowing for the differences in setting and purpose. Cameron’s Bloomberg speech was not delivered at a party conference, and his we primarily focuses on the nation and the EU. Like the leaders of other parties and organisations, he used a UKIP we to rouse solidarity. Although the Conservative Party already had a nationalist streak that could be activated to varying degrees, Farage’s UKIP and nationalist we seems to be rhetorically more explicit and focused. In Farage’s and UKIP’s discourse generally, there is an overtly ethnocentric we – indeed a racist we, particularly in the context of immigration. This same use does not appear in Conservative discourse. The main point to make is that Cameron’s speech, allowing for differences in setting, did come much closer to UKIP’s national-populist discourse. In some minds it would have legitimised and normalised it.