Séminaires sur le Monde anglophone
Thématique 2024 : La dérive autoritaire des régimes politiques contemporains.
From the UK Independence party (UKIP) to Reform UK (including under its original name, the Brexit party), Nigel Farage and his successive political parties have been major agents of disruption of the British political order. This is an inherent part of their nature as populist parties, aiming to lead an anti-establishment revolt and uproot the status quo. This is reinforced by what Moffitt describes as another core feature of contemporary populism, “the performance of crisis”, which refers to populist actors' ability to inject and propagate a sense of crisis and urgency in their message, allowing them to pit the people against the elite. This performance of crisis is key to justifying the disruption they advocate. This presentation will focus on Reform UK, exploring the party’s instrumentalisation of crisis as a pivotal element of its disruptive approach. The analysis will be based on a study of the party’s discourse and communication strategy, particularly its use of social media. The aim is to examine how these strategies operate and assess their impact on the British political stage.
Séminaire "The Erosion of Scottish Autonomy since the Brexit Process" avec Nathalie Duclos (Professeure de civilisation Britannique, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès), jeudi 5 décembre 2024, 16h30, campus de Jacob-Bellecombette.
After an introduction which will present both the rise of Scottish autonomy within the UK and the rise of the Scottish independence movement in the years 1999-2017, this seminar will examine the different ways in which recent Conservative UK Governments have tried to roll back on Scotland’s autonomy ever since the Brexit process. This is vividly illustrated by the fact that Scotland has been repeatedly refused the right to organise a new independence referendum. However, the Brexit process has also been used as a way for the UK Government to strenghten its powers through the ‘repatriation’ to London of powers that should have gone from Brussels to Edinburgh. At the same time, there have also been unprecedented attacks on ‘devolution’ and on Scotland’s existing legislative autonomy, as for instance evidenced by the fact that a bill on trans rights voted by the Scottish Parliament in 2022 was the first ever to be blocked from becoming a law by the UK Government.