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This paper investigates how Brexit was de/legitimised by different Labour actors in a corpus of texts published after the referendum (2016–2020). It thus contributes an intra-party perspective to understanding discursive dynamics of European (dis)integration by building on the notorious 'European question' historically debated inside Labour and on the polysemy of Brexit constructed by/reflected in such discourses. The analysis, conducted at lexical-semantic and discursive-pragmatic levels, points to distinct strategic, ideological and ambivalent forms of de/legitimation of Brexit in the discourses of Labour. While strategic and ambivalent de/legitimation point to the Brexit debate being mainly driven by political communication logics, ideological de/legitimation highlights a deeper struggle inside Labour over EU-rope, especially in relation to international vs. national conceptualisations of socialism. While EU-rope was de/legitimised (and Brexit legitimised) by advocates of 'socialism in one country', reverse stances tended to be adopted by supporters of 'international socialism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consistent with a populist script, evoking the people has been a nodal point in the discursive unfolding of Brexit and its legitimation. This paper focuses on the mediatization of the Brexit referendum campaign in a corpus of online British tabloids to address the critical question of how the people in whose name Brexit was (de)legitimised were discursively constructed and mobilized. The argument put forward is that the legitimation of Brexit was achieved through exclusionary definitions of the people and through strategies of fear, resentment and empowerment. This discursive framing points to the wider question of the instrumental role that a large section of the British tabloid press has had not simply in the contingency of referendum but also in the longer-term legitimation chain of Brexit and in its institutionalization and more generally in the historical priming of their readership with negative coverage of the UK/EU relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hence, we focus on the interplay between socio-political contexts as well as, therein, on various patterns of discursive work of both mediatisation and politicisation of Brexit, both before and after the UK 2016 EU Referendum. Although the Brexit juncture is still in the making, the contributions in this issue have highlighted some overarching themes and pointed to how Brexit has been discursively consolidating around a number of intersecting ideologically-anchored trajectories. As we have shown, the Brexit debate was typically framed in antagonistic terms, whether through representations of "us" and "them", "cosmopolitan" vs. "rural", "ordinary people" vs. the "elite", "Europe" vs. "Britain" and so on (see contributions by Tolson, [23]; Ruzza & Pejovic, [22]). At the time of writing many uncertainties are still surrounding the so called "end state" of Brexit, including the final shape of the trade relationship between Britain and the EU, the status of EU citizens in Britain and that of British citizens in the EU as well as the thorny issue of the Irish border, or indeed whether Brexit will occur at all. [Extracted from the article]