My research compares political and media discourse on the EU in the lead up to British membership referendum in 2016. More specifically, I am comparing what the pro-EU Guardian newspaper was writing about the EU with what the EU itself was talking about at the time. My Corpus Assisted Discourse Study identifies the term "crisis" as particularly significant, related to ongoing effects of the 2008 global financial crisis. Ultimately I argue that the Guardian's pro-EU stance is significantly undermined by a focus on these negative effects. Furthermore, a major contribution of the study is the development of a novel analytical framework for political discourse that focuses on the linguistic means of persuasion in political discourse conceptualise as a claim to what I term "voteworthiness".