On November 10, 2015 Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron held a keynote speech at the Chatham House, launching his proposals for the reform of the European Union - a preliminary step and condition to the referendum on Britain’s stay in the Union, which will be held by 2017.
Cameron’s renegotiation proposal revolves around four political issues - corresponding to the main points of his Chatham House speech: granting equal power to Eurozone and non-Eurozone member states in EU decision-making processes; reversing the objective of an ‘ever closer Union’, written in the treaties; making the European single market more competitive; finally, easing off intra-EU migration flows.
Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, we have analysed reactions to Cameron’s speech on the micro-blogging platform Twitter. We have focused, in particular, on the issue of intra-EU migration - Cameron’s fourth point - which is arguably the most politically sensitive and prominent in the current Brexit debate. Our objective was to see, first, if Cameron’s stance on the migration issue triggered a reaction and discussion on Twitter, and second whether such discussion was structured along clear lines of conflict.
