The Post-Referendum Reconfigurations of Party cleavages around Black and Asian Minority Ethnic Conservative MPs

Autor: Alexandre-Collier, Agnès
Přispěvatelé: Centre Interlangues : texte, image, langage [Dijon] (TIL), Université de Bourgogne (UB)-Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté [COMUE] (UBFC)
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of Contemporary European Studies
Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2020, ⟨10.1080/14782804.2020.1745161⟩
ISSN: 1478-2804
DOI: 10.1080/14782804.2020.1745161⟩
Popis: International audience; At the level of the Conservative parliamentary party, one of the main effects of Brexit has been a realignment of party cleavages. While the old cleavage between Europhiles and Eurosceptics is no longer relevant and a new cleavage has appeared between soft and hard Brexiteers, this political upheaval has thus restructured Conservative ideological pluralism in the parliamentary party. Following a study of the 2015 intake of MPs who were supposedly ‘less stale, male and pale’ and their attitudes to the 2016 British referendum on the EU, this article will take a specific interest in all Conservative Black and Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) MPs who turned out to be more active on the ‘leave’ side of the referendum campaign. They arguably embody a new feature of Conservative pluralism by operating a synthesis between inclusive modernisation and hard Brexit. Although the party should capitalise on this group of MPs to rid itself of its persistent image of a ‘nasty’ party pervaded with anti-immigration sentiment and hard Eurosceptic populism – an expression used by Theresa May in 2002 -, the strategy of ‘detoxifying’ the Brexit brand did not seem to have ever been part of her priorities as Prime Minister.
Databáze: OpenAIRE