Pull up the drawbridge? Conventionality and creativity in British political discourse

The paper investigates a metaphor which is recently being widely employed in relation to two of the main issues of the moment, i.e. im¬migration and Brexit: pull up the drawbridge. The public discussions about the EU and immigration are couched, like all political discourse, in metaphors, and this paper corroborates the assumption that today the new political divide is no longer left versus right but drawbridge up ver¬sus drawbridge down, and the contest that matters now is mostly open against closed. Indeed, politicians have always relied on the conceptual metaphor of ‘England as a fortress’, with a drawbridge which could be pulled up, if necessary. Immigration is regarded as one of the main caus¬es that pushed Britain toward Brexit, and even though the migration pan¬ic has been shaking Europe for more than a decade, recent events show that politicians are turning the ‘cosmic fear’ that is haunting the Western world into ‘official fear’: fear of losing control, fear of losing borders and national sovereignty, fear of the EU, of ‘an ever closer Union’, and now after the Brexit outcome, fear of a leap into the unknown, and of this one-way ticket to no clear destination. The only way out of this crisis of humanity and out of the anxiety we experience in the face of uncertainty is ‘pull up the drawbridge and retreat from the world’. The study relies on a large corpus of politicians’ speeches from Tony Blair’s to Theresa May’s government and is an attempt to analyse how conventional or how creative are the linguistic techniques they use to refer to them.