ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses Nigel Farage’s contributions to the referendum campaign. It focuses on the unique aspects of Farage’s discourse, and identifies the similarities which existed between this and the Vote Leave discourse. It is important to emphasise the centrality of Nigel Farage to Leave.EU. Farage’s interventions reproduce and reinforce the social logics evident in the Vote Leave discourse and in longer-term Eurosceptic discourses. It is in terms of the political logics of the leave discourse that Farage’s contribution is most important. The equivalential chain which Farage seeks to construct is based around the idea of ‘ordinary decent people’ in opposition to the elite. Farage’s invocation of the people here mirrors the Vote Leave discourses in identifying leaving the European Union as an act of rebellion leading to the potential glory of independence. As such they replicate both the beatific and horrific dimensions of the fantasmatic logics of the Vote Leave discourse.
