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Divining the UK’s national interest: MPs’ parliamentary discourse and the Brexit withdrawal process

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Abstract

This article tracks, investigates and explains the discursive deployment of ‘national interest’ by UK MPs in parliamentary debates during the Brexit withdrawal process. Whilst the concept of ‘national interest’ has variously been dismissed as meaningless or devoid of substantive content, the discursive practices and deliberative contestations as to its meaning have been central to the historic role and purpose of the national legislature. Yet, the 2016 Brexit referendum, with its avowed intent of delegating the determination of the UK’s national interest to the electorate, in many respects short-circuited this historic role. Through a qualitative content analysis of the text of 122 distinct parliamentary deliberative occurrences over the period from June 2016 to January 2020 this article examines how MPs sought to reconstitute and recycle the notion of ‘national interest’ during the Brexit withdrawal process. It does so by examining discursive competition over ‘national interest’ in the issue arenas of constitutional process, representational mode, inter-institutional mode, and substantive policy. ‘National interest’ was invoked 640 times in Brexit-related debates with the expression of positive or negative sentiment found to be associated significantly with: the personal voting pattern of major party MPs in the 2016 referendum; party differences in the articulation of individualistic or party representational modes to reach Brexit decisions; differences between frontbench ministers and non-ministers; and party differences in assessment of the UK government’s iterated withdrawal negotiations with the EU.

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Notes

  1. Where a debate extends across multiple days each daily Hansard record is treated as a discrete deliberative occurrence.

  2. Boris Johnson as prime minister shared the same sentiment in arguing that the ‘starting point’ in seeking ‘a new agreement with our European friends’ was that ‘the referendum must be respected’ (HC Debates 3 October 2019: col. 1383). Notably, however, in the period from July 2019 to January 2020, Johnson only referred to the ‘national interest’ on two occasions. The first was when he attempted to call an early general election ‘to serve the national interest by giving whoever is Prime Minister the strongest possible mandate to negotiate for our country’ and, when denied the opportunity to hold that election, to pledge that he would ‘strive to get an agreement in the national interest’ in negotiations with Brussels ‘no matter how many devices this Parliament invents to tie my hands’ (HC Debates 9 September 2019: cols. 616; 639). The second, during subsequent Brexit negotiations, was to express the hope that ‘the House can now come together in the national interest behind this new deal’ (HC Debates 3 October 2019: col. 1384).

  3. A secondary analysis of four major sectoral bills in the 2017–2019 parliament revealed only a further 15 deliberative instances referencing the national interest. Debates were examined at second reading, report stage and third reading (where completed) for the Agriculture Bill; Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Bill; Trade Bill; and the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Government and Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, G1 1XQ, UK

    David Judge

  2. School of Government and Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, G1 1XQ, UK

    Mark Shephard

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Correspondence to David Judge.

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Appendix 1

Appendix 1

Descriptive overview

  • The term ‘national interest’ was referenced by 178 different MPs in 640 deliberative instances during the period under study.

  • Positive sentiment (‘in the national interest’) was recorded in 436 (68%) of deliberative instances, and negative sentiment (‘not in the national interest’) was recorded in 204 (32%) of instances.

  • Nearly 80% (n = 511) of deliberative instances were focused upon the constitutional issues arising from, and the political processes associated with, the Brexit withdrawal process.

  • Only 20% (n = 129) of deliberative instances were coded as being primarily focused on the economic and societal/immigration ramifications of Brexit. In large part this reflects the delimited focus of the deliberative occasions coded in this study which were primarily concerned with the process of withdrawal, rather than with specific implementing legislation dealing with trade policy, agriculture, and customs and taxation etc.

Frequencies were produced for the deliberative instances of MPs when categorised by:

  • Political party: national interest was referred to in 377 deliberative instances recorded for Conservative MPs (59% of total instances), 204 (32%) for Labour MPs, and 59 (9.2%) for ‘Other’ MPs.

  • Executive position (frontbench government minister or not): 178 references to national interest (28% of total instances) were made by frontbench government ministers, with 81 instances recorded for Theresa May as PM (some 46% of the frontbench total) followed by David Davis as her first Brexit Secretary with 43 instances (some 24% of the frontbench total).

  • MP’s vote in the 2016 referendum (remain or leave): 485 deliberative instances of national interest (76% of total instances) were recorded for MPs who voted remain and 152 (24%) instances were recorded for leave voting MPs. This broadly reflected the split between the overall percentages of MPs declaring a remain vote (75%) and those declaring a vote to leave (25%).

  • Estimated or known percentage of the leave vote within an MP’s constituency: 329 instances of national interest were recorded for MPs representing a ‘leave constituency’ (51% of total instances), and 311 were recorded for MPs representing a ‘remain constituency’ (49% of total instances).

  • Periodisation: For the purposes of analysis the period from 27 June 2016 until 23 January 2020 was divided into six sub-periods. These correspond broadly to the parliamentary phases of the Brexit process identified by the Library Research Service of the House of Commons (for details see Walker 2020). In total 426 (82%) of all deliberative instances were to be found in just three of the six identified periods. Period four (July 2018 to mid-January 2019) accounted for 269 (42%) of deliberative instances. The compressed time frame of period five (21 January 2019 to 23 July 2019) accounted for a further 146 (23%) deliberative instances. And period one witnessed 111 instances (17%).

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Judge, D., Shephard, M. Divining the UK’s national interest: MPs’ parliamentary discourse and the Brexit withdrawal process. Br Polit 18, 579–602 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-022-00217-8

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