Brexit and Blame Avoidance: Cutting Through Officeholders’ Strategies for Evading Accountability

In modern democracies, governments increasingly engage in blame avoiding behaviour when they initiate loss-imposing policies that hurt the interests of some groups. The recent decision of the British government to leave the European Union is a case in point. As nearly half of the voters said they wanted to remain, and millions of people were left deeply concerned about the adverse effects of leaving, the government had to deal with an acute blame risk. In this paper, I uncover blame avoidance related forms of deception on the part of the UK government by combining analytical tools and insights from discourse-historical studies into political behaviour and the recent literature on government blame games. I identify the discursive strategies by which the officeholders who lead the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU try to get away with advancing their divisive policy. In particular, I show how they use language strategically to minimise the perceived agency of the government, downplay the contentiousness and harmfulness of their policy, present the UK in a positive and the EU in a negative light, and deal with potential charges of inconsistency. My empirical study supports a broader emancipatory goal: it helps citizens cut through officeholders’ unethical rhetoric and advance new ways of holding policy makers to account, thereby enhancing the quality of democratic debate in society.