Description
Post-Brexit relationship between the UK and the EU has been marred by serious tensions, extraordinary uncertainty and the lack of trust, not least in terms of the fallout from the Northern Ireland Protocol. According to some, it might take a generation until the strained relationship heals. It is against this background that the article investigates and interprets the extent to which, and the particular ways in which, the UK government has conveyed, interpreted and evaluated blame of the EU in the context of post-Brexit strains. Working with a comprehensive dataset of UK Government official pronouncements vis-à-vis the EU and Brexit in the 2020-2022 period, the study surveys the blame patters during two key post-withdrawal phases of 1) the transition period (2020) and 2) the post-transition period (since 2021), thereby allowing for temporal comparisons. In so doing, the article draws on the insights of the discursive institutionalism theory (Schmidt 2008, 2020) as well as Hansson’s (2015, 2018, 2019) typology of blame avoidance strategies and adopts the general orientation of the Discourse Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough and Wodak 1997; Reisigl & Wodak 2001; Wodak 2011).
