“The referendum result delivered a clear message”. Jeremy Corbyn’s populist discourse

This chapter analyses some of the discourse strategies at the core of Jeremy Corbyn’s policies in 2016–2017, a period that witnessed the EU membership referendum (23 June 2016) and the General Election (8 June 2017) called by UK Prime Minister Theresa May in a bid to capitalise on the results of the referendum. The chapter discusses how the language of the Labour leader in this period bore the signs of certain discursive patterns that are usually associated with populism and that, to a large extent, derived from the discourse surrounding the referendum itself. The first part of this chapter will look into the EU referendum in the context of the modern concept of populism. In a historical context in which referenda have become a favourite political tool for populists (Topalof, 2017), this section will summarise the root causes of the success of the Leave campaign and Corbyn’s own ambiguous position on Europe. The second part of the chapter will look at Corbyn’s speeches, newspapers articles written by him and official Labour statements from 2016–2017. It will specifically analyse the evolution of Corbyn’s discourse during the period between the referendum and the General Election, looking at how certain choices within his discourse may be related to populism. The key argument developed in the chapter is that in his discourse Corbyn responded to the wave of populist politics that caused the Leave victory in the EU referendum by using the key concept of populism and of rhetoric about the ‘people’ in a politically progressive manner.