Break-point for Brexit? How UKIP's image of 'hate' set race discourse reeling back decades.

Citation

Morrison J (2016) Break-point for Brexit? How UKIP's image of 'hate' set race discourse reeling back decades.. electionanalysis.uk [Blog post] 27.06.2016. https://www.referendumanalysis.uk/eu-referendum-analysis-2016/section-5-campaign-and-political-communication/break-point-for-brexit-how-ukips-image-of-hate-set-race-discourse-reeling-back-decades/

Abstract
First paragraph: There are many lines in Policing the Crisis – the seminal account of a flap about an invented 1970s wave of mob violence supposedly orchestrated by black youths – that might have been written as a critique of Grassroots Out’s “Breaking Point” poster (or, indeed, the Brexit campaign generally). In one of numerous memorable passages, the late Stuart Hall and his co-authors decried the “incalculable harm” done by politicians’, law-enforcers’ and the news media’s repeated claims about a racially tinged “mugging” epidemic – accusing them of “raising the wrong things into sensational focus” and “hiding and mystifying the deeper causes” of genuine, but far more nuanced, social problems. All of which brings us back to that poster: an image of invading “orientals” so laced with distortion, alarm and misrepresentation that it can only be viewed as a weapon of wilfully fomented moral panic.

People

Dr James Morrison

Associate Prof. in Journalism, Communications, Media and Culture