The burst of Brexit bubble
By Kang Fu, Wanting Li, Shanci Li, Runke Zhou
Background
Brexit (a portmanteau of "British exit") is the withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) at 23:00 GMT on 31 January 2020 (00:00 CET). Actually, the United Kindom considers exiting the EU ever since 2016. After several referendums and negotiations between UK-EU, they finally exit the EU in early January, 2020. And the withdrawl aggrement finally came into force on 31 January 2020.
Shortly afterwards, the post-brexit scenario has raised concerns about regional integration and economic security both in the UK and the EU in recent years. Hereby we look forward to shed some light on these current issues by a full retrospect of Brexit. We'll dive into 95808 quotations talking about the Brexit from 2016 to 2020, summarize characteristics of relevant speakers, extract underlying top topics behind Brexit, and further analyze the attitudes of UK people throughout the whole process.
Speakers talking about Brexit most frequently
Let's first catch a glimpse of the top 20 speakers talking about Brexit most frequently. Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage……Looks familiar? Bingo, they’re all influential figures politically active over the last decade.
Hereafter we focus on the four most frequent speakers, highlighting their positions and relations with Brexit.
Theresa May : the most frequent speaker.
-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2016 to 2019.
-Leader of the Conservative Party from 2016 to 2019.
Being the leader committed to delivering Brexit, Theresa May started her premiership dealing with Brexit and also ended with it. The outcome of Brexit’s referendum was politically binding on Theresa May despite her having campaigned against leaving the EU. Faced with uncertainty and chaos indirectly caused by David Cameron’s miscalculation, Theresa May had been in the whirl of Brexit, grappling with a number of challenges.
Nationalities of speakers talking about Brexit
It's also very interesting to analyze where speakers talking about the Brexit come from. This gives us information on people from which country cares about the Brexit.
After visualizing the top 20 nations talking about the Brexit, it is obvious that most of speakers talking about the Brexit came from developed countries in the world, for example, the United Kindom, the United States of America, Australia and so on. As this event, Brexit, was mostly about the European situation, we can observe that most countries in the top 20 nations talking about the Brexit were from the Europe, which shows that people care about the Brexit are mostly from the Europe.
Distribution of the Gender of speakers talking about Brexit
Now we are going to analyze the gender of speakers talking about the Brexit.
After analyzing the distribution of quotations based on different genders, it's obvious that most speakers pay attention to the Brexit are male. This comforms with the common sense that most people willing to talk about this kind of political event, like the Brexit.
Occupations of speakers talking about Brexit
Let's first have a look at who are the speakers talking about the Brexit most frequently.
Here you can see the distribution of the number of quotes based on different occupations. The result is obvious that politicians are the kind of people who talks most about the Brexit. This result is not surprising as this event is basically a political event, thus politicians always need to express their opinions to persuade their supporters. Other occupations, for example, journalist, writer, economist and blogger, are also occupations that are highly related with the politics. This explains why these groups of people would like to talk about the Brexit.
Age ranges of speakers talking about Brexit
Let's analyze the distriution of speakers' age ranges who talk about the Brexit.
Here we can make the conclusion from the above plot that most people caring about the Brexit are in the range between 40 years old to above 70 years old. This can be explained by following two reasons. Firstly, most politicians or people from related fields are in this age range from 40 years old to above 70 years old. What's more, people in this age range are also more concerned about political events than younger people. As you can see, there is a very limited number of quotations come from people youger than 29 years old.
What are people talking about?
The Brexit was not decided and finished in one moment. It has been last for 4 years. There are numerous issues to discuss and negotiate during the procedure. We are curious about the content of quotations so that we can gain more insight of what the British people care most about Brexit. Here we apply topic detection techniques to get the topic of these quotations. First, we build the tf-idf matrix of the quotations shown in the newspapers and visualize the most frequent ones as below:
To further analyze the content of the quotations related to the Brexit, we perform the LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) topic detection model. Through the analysis, the model achieves highest coherence when the assigned topic number is 4. The outputs of the algorithm is a distribution among the words in the topic, which means we represent a topic by a distribution of frequent words. This is very useful in recommendation system or information retrieval when we want to calculate the similarity and relation among different quotations. But it can not summarize a topic in a sentence or several meaningful phrases. So we observe the outputs of topic and summarize a topic manually.
By sliding to adjust relevance metric and observing the Top-30 most relevant terms inside each topic, we can summarize each topic and analysis the most significant concerns when people talking about Brexit.
The first topic covers 29.5% of tokens in the reported quotations. The most meaingful keywords in the topic distribution are: EU, scotland, northern ireland, agreement, border, option, soft, extension, priority, discussion, certainty, relationship, withdrawal agreement, farmer, recognise, law, disastrous, transition period. Therefore, we suspect this topic is mainly about the way how Ireland and Scotland would act during the Brexit.
The second topic covers 28.4% of tokens and is mainly related to politics. The most meaingful keywords in the topic distribution are: party, election, parliament, labour, leave, tory, boris_johnson, prime_minister, government, referendum, conservative, campaign, british, general election, boris and chance. Therefore, we suspect this topic is about the different attitudes of the all kinds of parties in the UK.
The third topic covers 23.6% of tokens. The most meaingful keywords in the topic distribution are: business, market, delay, company, challenge, opportunity, industry, uncertainty, investment, work, london, economy. Therefore, we suspect this topic is mainly the concerns about business and economy after Brexit.
The forth topic covers 18.5% of tokens. The most meaingful keywords in the topic distribution are: uncertainty, risk, economy, impact, market, concern, economic, growth, cost, trade, pound, price, business, rise, demand, chaos, worry, sterling. Therefore, we suspect this topic is mainly the concerns about chaos after Brexit.
External resource:
For Ireland, the main discussion is on the soft or the hard border with the EU. The impact of Brexit on the Irish border and its adjacent polities involves changes in trade, customs, immigration checks, local economies, services, recognition of qualifications, medical cooperation, and other matters, now that it is the only external EU land border between the United Kingdom and the European Union. After the UK Parliament voted to leave the European Union, all parties said that they want to avoid a hard border in Ireland, due particularly to the border's historically sensitive nature. Border issues were one of three areas of focused negotiation in the Withdrawal Agreement. Following the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union on 31 January 2020, this border is also the frontier between the EU and an external country. The Northern Ireland Protocol of the Brexit withdrawal agreement commits the UK and the EU to maintaining an open border in Ireland, so that (in many respects) the de facto frontier is the Irish Sea border between the two islands. This requires the continued application of the Common Travel Area as well as free trade of goods (including electricity) between Ireland and Northern Ireland. The latter requires the UK to follow EU law in Northern Ireland with respect to these areas, with jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in the interpretation of the law.
For Scotland, after the Brexit referendum, the Scottish Government – led by the Scottish National Party (SNP) – planned another independence referendum because Scotland voted to remain in the EU while England and Wales voted to leave. It had suggested this before the Brexit referendum. The First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, requested a referendum be held before the UK's withdrawal, but the British Prime Minister rejected this timing.At the referendum in 2014, 55% of voters had decided to remain in the UK, but the referendum on Britain's withdrawal from the EU was held in 2016, with 62% of Scottish voters against it. In 2017, if Northern Ireland remained associated with the EU – for example, by remaining in the Customs Union, some analysts argued Scotland would also insist on special treatment. However, in the event, the only part of the United Kingdom which received unique treatment was Northern Ireland.
Do UK people regret Brexit?
Brexit has been a truth since 2020. We have come up with an interesting question: do they regret to make the decision of Brexit? We will investigate if there is a altitude shift between 2016 and 2020. Sentiment analysis has been applied to the quotations from UK people using pretrained model. The output is binary including positive and negative about Brexit.