ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the representations of austerity measures and anti-austerity protests in the British national press between 2011 and 2015, in order to identify some of the underlying attitudes that produced the UK's 'Brexit' vote of 2016. Based on the content and discourse analysis of a selection of news articles covering a variety of events, particular attention is devoted to the ways in which Britishness and the strength of the British state are depicted in relation to the discursive construction of 'austerity' as a concept, anti-austerity politics as a practice, and Brexit as a political phenomenon. The chapter discovers five distinct themes that were circulated in the press at this time: a tendency to emphasise 'foreign' rather than British dissent; references to 'Britishness' as a value; a conflict between the impulse to generate objective material and the routine reproduction of nationalistic discourses; narratives of national decline; and reports of suicide directly caused by austerity.
