Abstract
In this article, I present an analysis of the discursive response of two British politicians – the Prime Minister David Cameron and the leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband – to the riots that took place in British cities in August 2011 and the Occupy protests of later in the same year. Considering this response as, following Van Leeuwen, recontextualisation of the events with which the two politicians are concerned, I suggest that in both cases a particular neoliberal discourse is employed that serves to moralise what is in actual fact material, class-based opposition. Cameron suggests that the riots are indicative of a ‘moral collapse’ in contemporary Britain, and Miliband, superficially aligning himself with the movement, suggests that the Occupy protests indicate a ‘value gap’. In both cases, I argue, the discursive response serves as an attempt to assert as hegemonic a substantively identical moralised neoliberal understanding of the inequalities of contemporary capitalism. This is an understanding – a discourse – that I suggest is both a contributor to these inequalities and a false representation of their true nature.
Keywords
Introduction
What happens when neoliberal discourse that denies the existence of class is forced to confront events of unmistakeable class character? In this article, I address this question through an analysis of the ways in which British politicians – David Cameron and Ed Miliband – recontextualise (Van Leeuwen, 2008) potentially threatening popular movements – Occupy London and the riots that took place across Britain in August 2011. 1 Both of these movements have a material class basis, but are recontextualised as being about ‘morals’ and ‘values’ in accordance with a dominant hegemonic tendency in neoliberal discourse towards the representation of social-material inequality as individual-moral difference (Levitas, 2005; Morris, 1994). Despite differences in who is represented as being the target of moral scorn, this moralising tendency is one that is shared by both politicians, a fact that I take to suggest a shared neoliberal political-discursive conception of class as moral in mainstream British politics.
Before presenting my analysis, which draws heavily on a slightly altered version of Van Leeuwen’s (2008) recontextualisation framework, I outline features of contemporary political discourse on class relevant to the British context (as well as to capitalist democracies around the world), briefly discuss the riots and the Occupy movement, and present how I see Van Leeuwen’s recontextualisation as a discursive phenomenon as being related to the broader political project of hegemony.
‘The strange death of class’ in British politics
The replacement of conceptions of class with individualised notions of lifestyle and subculture in public discourse in Britain and elsewhere over the past 50 years has been remarked on by many (Jones, 2011; Judt, 2010; Levitas, 2005). Milner calls this ‘the strange death of class’ (1999), given that the shift away from discourses of class has coincided with the widening of material inequalities both internationally and within Britain. But both of these phenomena – the material intensification of class and its discursive disappearance – can be related to the neoliberal turn in British politics that began in earnest with Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government of the 1980s (Harvey, 2005; Levitas, 2005). Thatcher ‘was determined’, Cannadine writes, ‘to drive the language of class … off the agenda of public discussion, and this was something she very successfully accomplished’ (2000: 175). It is a measure of her success that when the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman, in 2008, gave a speech to the Trades Union Congress in which she was scripted to say that ‘class’ was the most important factor in determining life chances – ‘What overarches [other social factors] is where you live, your family background, your wealth and social class’ – this passage was ultimately dropped from the speech, and Harman did not explicitly mention class at all. In the words of the then Shadow Leader of the Commons, Theresa May, Harman’s draft speech showed that she was ‘stuck in the class warfare rhetoric of 20 years ago’ (quoted in numerous newspapers, including The Independent, 11/09/2008). For The Telegraph, in a story based on the advance script of the speech, Harman was to end ‘a decade long cease-fire in the class war’ (09/09/2008). In 2008, with historically high inequality (Stewart and Hills, 2005) and in the midst of a crisis that would see many working-class people lose their homes and provide an opportunity for regressive cuts to public expenditure, it was taboo for a politician to mention class. This taboo reflects not only a general turn away from discourses of class, but also the specific concerns of British governments since Thatcher.
‘New’ Labour and Cameron’s conservatives
In 1997, the Labour Party, traditionally the party of Britain’s working-class voters, came to power rebranded as ‘New’ Labour under Tony Blair. The change that Tony Blair and the figures associated with him instigated was both a cosmetic and a substantive one. Rather than shifting Britain to the left after 14 years of Conservative rule, ‘New’ Labour largely picked up where Thatcher left off (Hall, 1998). As well as the removal of Clause 4 from the party’s constitution – which had previously at least symbolically committed the party to public ownership of the means of production – New Labour was characterised by a denial of structural inequalities (Lister, 2001) and influenced by the Moral Underclass Discourse of the New Right (Levitas, 2005), which views class as ‘as a matter of voluntarily adopted life-styles – good versus evil – essentially unconditioned by economic structure’ (Westergaard, 1995: 117). What New Labour itself presented as a shift from the ideological to the pragmatic in the face of changed political-economic circumstances (Fairclough, 2000), was actually a retreat from left-wing politics, a fundamentally ideological position that ignored systemic social problems, a regressive ‘replacement of policies by values’ (Bewes, 1997: 72).
Tony Blair resigned in 2007 and Labour lost the General Election that followed in 2010 to a coalition government lead by David Cameron’s Conservative Party. The Conservatives are the most right wing of Britain’s three main parties, and, in the late 1970s and 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher, were the party responsible for the neoliberalisation of Britain. However, following the changes that took place to the Labour Party under Blair, the differences between the Conservatives and Labour are much reduced. In relation to inequality, for example, Cameron’s ‘compassionate’ Conservatives – superficially more sympathetic to the poor than Thatcher’s Conservatives were – continue the New Labour denial of structural inequality, shifting responsibility for fighting poverty to the level of individual moral action. Kisby notes that Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ concept – ‘principally about citizens having a moral obligation to undertake voluntary activity in the community and to take responsibility for their own individual welfare needs’ – ‘does not represent a significant break with New Labour … so much as a continuation … [an] intensification’ (2010: 486). At the time of writing, this intensified abdication of political responsibility for inequality is particularly shocking as it goes hand in hand with ‘austerity’ measure policies certain to exacerbate inequality (see e.g. Family and Parenting Institute, 2012).
The current Labour Party, in opposition to the Conservative-led coalition, is led by Ed Miliband. Miliband was called ‘Red Ed’ by some in the right-wing press, has closely aligned himself with left-liberal institutions such as The Guardian newspaper and has described himself as a socialist – though Blair, too, did that – but there have been no signs of a genuine move to the left. Rather, Miliband’s party has continued in the neoliberal New Labour vein, failing to resist the dominant right-wing ‘austerity’ politics offered by Cameron’s Conservatives (Wintour, 2012). Discursively, however, Miliband is engaged in a project to differentiate himself from the Conservatives, with criticisms of ‘predatory capitalism’ and persistent expressions of support for a vaguely defined group of people he calls the ‘squeezed middle’. It is clear that though Miliband’s party is politically committed to much the same politics as Cameron’s, an attempt is being made discursively to differentiate the former as a man of the (centre) left.
Riots and Occupy – the events of late 2011
The recent banking crisis and the political response to it have served to exacerbate already high levels of inequality in Britain. It is difficult not to see the class dimension of banks making profits on repossessed homes or the uneven distribution of unemployment (internationally and within Britain) since the banking crisis. But in late 2011, I wish to suggest that two events forced British politicians to talk about class, and brought it into searing, ‘newsworthy’ focus. The first was the rioting in cities across Britain in August, and the second, the Occupy protest in the City of London.
The riots in British cities in August 2011, which began when police shot and killed Mark Duggan, a working-class young black man from North London, undeniably had a material class character. As Mason puts it, ‘the overwhelming social characteristic of those arrested was poverty’ (2011: 62). According to the Ministry of Justice (2011), of those who faced the courts in relation to the riots, 35% of working age were claiming out-of-work benefits (English population, 12%), 42% of young people received free school meals (English population, 16%) 2 and 64% lived in one of the 20% most deprived areas in England. Further research conducted by The Guardian newspaper and the London School of Economics into perceptions of the cause of the riots asked both rioters and a sample of the British public to identify the principal causes of the riots (Lewis et al., 2011). The most frequently ‘important’ or ‘very important’ factors, according to rioters, were ‘poverty’, ‘policing’, ‘government policy’, ‘unemployment’ and the ‘shooting of Mark Duggan’. Though the riots were not accompanied by any explicit class-focused discourse, their causes lie in the inequalities of a class society. That is not to say, of course, that there is not a great deal of further work to be done in determining more precisely the dynamics of these causes, and their intersection with other geographically and socially variable factors that may have lead to rioting across the UK.
The Occupy movement involved the occupation of space in a number of international cities, targeting financial districts – such as Wall Street in the USA and the City of London in the UK. Occupy London’s initial 10-point statement, written in October 2011, includes: ‘We want structural change towards authentic global equality. The world’s resources must go towards caring for people and the planet, not the military, corporate profits or the rich’ (Occupy London, 2011). It also expresses support for trade union action and criticism of the idea that cuts in public expenditure are inevitable and of the public bail-out of the banks. All of these are class issues, as was the most widely publicised discourse feature of the movement – the ‘we are the 99 per cent’ slogan. This distinction between the ‘99 per cent’ and the ‘1 per cent’, in the discourse of Occupy, was intended as ‘a statistic that expresses capitalism’s reliance on fundamental inequality’ (Dean, 2011: 88), and thus as a critique of capitalism as a political system.
Both Occupy and the riots pose a challenge to mainstream political power of the two main parties for two reasons. 3 First, they suggest a form of political action that bypasses democratic politics – neither politicians nor the national press were necessary participants in the riots or Occupy protests, so these events threatened democratic politics as practice. And second, especially in the case of the Occupy protests, they put forward representations of the world – discourses – that stood in a critical relation to the neoliberal discourses of contemporary British politics. Thus, the texts that I discuss in this article might be seen as reactions to these classed events, aimed at asserting as hegemonic (1) a conception of class as being about individual values, and (2) the role of mainstream politicians in the process of political change.
Hegemony and recontextualisation
The concept of hegemony is one that has been extensively employed in Critical Discourse Analysis and cultural and social studies more generally. Originating in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1971), it captures the ways in which the operation of power involves the co-option – rather than the direct domination – of oppositional forces, and is suggested to be central to the exercise of power in democratic capitalist societies (Eagleton, 1991). Hegemonic power is negotiated rather than enforced, and involves elites in making concessions to the less powerful in return for a power that is never fully achieved, always in the process of negotiation.
Though the response to the riots and to Occupy involved decidedly non-hegemonic, directly dominant state action (the physical power of the police, the legal power of the courts), the more subtle workings of hegemony also played their part. There were institutional elements to this hegemony, such as the establishment of LondonConnection, a group organised by the Church of England to encourage discussion between the protestors and City of London companies, but hegemony is also discursive, or semiotic, and that is my focus here. I want to suggest that Van Leeuwen’s (2008) concept of recontextualisation is a useful tool for understanding how semiotic hegemony operates. For Van Leeuwen, all discourse is recontextualisation of practice. The things that people do in the material world are reformulated as talk and text (and as images and sounds etc.). Recontextualisations are always selective, and here Kress’s notion of sign making is useful (1993, 2010). A recontextualisation of social practice as a sign, or as a set of signs, can be seen as motivated by both the actual properties of that practice and the point of view, or interests, of its recontextualiser(s) (1993: 173). Recontextualising means making something mean something from a certain point of view, but it is not a pure articulation of subjectivity – not a pure exercise in ideology; in discourse, we work with the materials of the world. 4 Thus, politicians attempting to assert hegemonic dominance over events outside their control must to some extent concede to the reality of those events, but might also be able to use the resources of discourse to recontextualise them in such ways as to support their own interests. Indeed, as in the cases of governments who have encouraged unionised industrial action in attempts to weaken the reputation of trade unions, it might be that oppositional material activity even provides an opportunity to strengthen discursive hegemony.
Though Van Leeuwen’s recontextualisation will be central to my analysis, I wish here to indicate one theoretical development that I feel it important to make. Van Leeuwen’s framework is essentially realist. It says there is a way the world is, that discourse is related to this way, but that this relation is always selective and partial. But Van Leeuwen’s conception of the-way-the-world-is is limited to what critical realists would call the ‘empirical’, that is ‘the domain of experience’ (Sayer, 2000: 12). Van Leeuwen’s list of the elements of social practice (2008: 6–12) includes no categories corresponding to structural or relational social forces, which means that things like class, race, ideology have to be seen as additions that happen at the recontextualisation stage – not as real phenomena, but as discursive additions.
So what Van Leeuwen’s approach might be seen as doing is answering one version of the question of how the world is recontextualised in discourse, a version that could perhaps be more specifically stated as ‘how does an individual transform his or her experience into discourse?’. 5 But another possible version of this question is ‘how is the world as it is transformed into discourse?’. The two questions are certainly not independent but the distinction is worth making, for if it is not we are left with a very limited notion of what really exists; one that does not include the real but only indirectly observable forces with which critical discourse analysts might well be centrally concerned. Perhaps answering only the first question might even serve an ultimately conservative function, making an analysis of how anything other than a ‘surface’ reality is recontextualised in discourse difficult. If critical discourse analysis (CDA) is to contribute to an attempt at grasping more than this, we need to develop this notion of what is real, perhaps to include what critical realists call ‘the actual’ and ‘the real’ (Fairclough et al., 2004; Sayer, 2000). It should be said that in this case, the properties and processes of the actual and real are far from clear, and further work on Occupy and the riots may help to determine this. Nonetheless, it seems undeniable that there is more to both than what is subjectively observable, and that an account of either must make some reference to class-based inequalities.
To summarise this section, I take class to be as real as any individual’s empirically observable activity, and thus not a discursive addition, but an element of the social world that discourse is forced to confront, to recontextualise. 6 And that is the challenge facing Cameron and Miliband in the texts I analyse: how to recontextualise events with a material class basis as something other than what they are; how to achieve hegemonic dominance over those whose words and actions bring the uncomfortable reality of class conflict into focus.
Data
Next, I present an analysis of two texts. One is a speech given by David Cameron on 16 August 2011 in response to the riots. The other is an article published in The Guardian newspaper on 5 November of the same year in Ed Miliband’s name. The two texts differ in terms of genre, and are immediately concerned with different events. My intention is not to present them here as two texts of the same kind, but to explore the similarities, despite differences in genre, immediate subject and ostensible political perspective; ultimately to suggest that a shared representation of the world – a similarity of discourse (Fairclough, 2003; Van Leeuwen, 2008) – underlies each, and to argue that this is a discourse that recontextualises class as moral or value based.
Each of these texts is viewed as recontextualisation of material phenomena and practices, including the discourse of others. I use Van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework to organise my analysis of the texts, aiming to uncover how they work as representations of social life. In my analysis, I discuss which recontextualising strategies each author adopts. What is altered, deleted and added in their discourse? Then, following Kress (1993), how does the practice of recontextualisation serve the interests of the authors?
At this stage, I want to comment briefly on the fact that Miliband’s article was published in The Guardian newspaper. The Guardian is the most left wing of Britain’s broadsheet newspapers. It has played its part in a number of recent oppositional movements, such as protests against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a context in which newspaper organisations might be seen as vendors of opinion (Conboy, 2007), The Guardian sells the mainstream opinion of the British liberal left. As the riots and Occupy sidestepped the mainstream media just as much as they did mainstream politics (perhaps relying more on forms of new media communication; Mason, 2011), The Guardian article can therefore be seen as an element of a hegemonic strategy on the part of the newspaper as well as for Miliband.
Analysis
I suggest that in both texts, response to opposition movements involves the following recontextualising strategies, and that these shared strategies, despite slight differences in realisation, constitute a shared – moralising – discourse.
The movements – the riots, Occupy – are evaluated as significant.
The significance is suggested to lie in their symptomatic relation to some state of affairs – they are suggested to be explained by this state of affairs.
The state of affairs is represented as a moral condition.
The moral condition is associated with a dangerous minority.
A ‘good’ majority ‘we’ is introduced in opposition to this ‘bad’ minority.
An expansion of the political into the private is posited as a solution to the problem established by strategies 1–5.
In what follows, I discuss each strategy in turn, with reference to extracts from both Cameron’s speech and Miliband’s article.
Significance
In both texts, the events are evaluated as being significant:
It is time for our country to take stock
Last week we saw some of the most sickening acts on our streets. St Paul’s protests have highlighted the biggest issue now: the gap between ordinary people’s values and the City’s.
Van Leeuwen notes that when practices are recontextualised in discourse, their recontextualisers are able to add evaluation (2008: 21), and the linguistic resources of evaluation have been subject to extensive study (e.g. Hunston and Thompson, 1999; Martin and White, 2005). Here, we have the riots and Occupy evaluated. For Cameron, the riots are very bad. For Miliband, the Occupy movement is very important. And this significance in both cases has a temporal dimension – these things are important now. This evaluation in terms of timeliness has its reflexive aspect, working to say something not only about the events, but about the politicians talking and writing about them, suggesting that they are ‘on the pulse’, that they know what is going on now. It should also be said that the very discursive practices that have worked to produce these texts are there to be read as a kind of evaluation – it is not everything that occasions a speech from the Prime Minister, or a newspaper article from the leader of the opposition. The very decision to speak here is a form of evaluation in terms of significance (and, indeed, the criticism that Cameron received in the British press for not speaking sooner – he was on holiday in Italy – and thus seeming to downplay the significance of the riots is testament to this).
Events as symptoms
However, the true significance of these events is suggested to lie not in the events themselves, but in their apparent causes. The riots and Occupy are thus recontextualised as symptoms, indexical of some more general state of affairs. For Miliband, the Occupy protests:
This recontextualisation move performs three functions. First, it posits values as the cause of the protests. Van Leeuwen’s framework provides the category of legitimation for such additions of ‘the “why” to … representations of social practice’ (2008: 20). This recontextualisation of Occupy as a symptom answers a ‘why’ question, but without the deontic justification implied by the word ‘legitimation’ – that is, it does not say ‘this is why the world should be this way’, but ‘this is why the world is this way’ – so we might call this simply an addition of explanation, a category not offered by Van Leeuwen. But this might also be seen as a substitution – a replacement of the material class cause of these events with an explanation based on individual ‘values’ (see Morals and values section). Second, this recontextualisation serves to shift the focus of the discourse from the material to the abstract, such that the focus becomes not material conditions and activities, but some purported underlying value system. Finally, it might be said that producers of indices – in this case the Occupy protestors – are in a relatively passive situation, that they have relatively little control over what those indices are taken to mean; thus the significance of an index/symptom is a kind of disempowered significance. Miliband reads the Occupy protests as meaning something, but what this something is is not under the control of the protestors themselves, bathetically ‘shivering on the steps of St Paul’s’. Their protests might have some significance, but not through any fault of their own; they are merely symptoms.
In Cameron’s speech, we find:
These riots were not about race: the perpetrators and the victims were white, black and Asian. These riots were not about government cuts: they were directed at high street stores, not Parliament. And these riots were not about poverty: that insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this.
No, this was about behaviour
people showing indifference to right and wrong
people with a twisted moral code
people with a complete absence of self-restraint.
Here, Cameron exploits the ambiguity of the ‘X was about Y’ construction, where he suggests that the riots ‘were not about’ phenomena. The material that follows construes this ‘aboutness’ as symbolic ‘aboutness’, whereas his final ‘this was about behaviour’ is to be understood as indexical ‘aboutness’, to borrow Peirce’s distinction between indices and symbols (1931). That is to say that Cameron denies that the rioters were themselves (symbolically) saying anything about ‘poverty’ or ‘government cuts’, but then says that we can see the riots as (indexically) saying something about ‘behaviour’. The riots say something about behaviour because they are represented as being caused by behaviour.
So, in both texts, though these events are evaluated as significant – as saying something about now, about the state of the nation – it is not up to them what they say; they are there to be read as symptoms, as having meaning but not as themselves determining what that meaning is.
Morals and values
The underlying state of affairs – this discursive explanation – is not about material conditions, but about personal dispositions, morals and values. In the case of Miliband, it is ‘the gap between ordinary people’s values and the City’s’ that is of concern:
the gap between their values and the way the country is run
…
Many of those who earn the most, exercise great power, enjoy enormous privilege – in the City and elsewhere – do so with values that are out of kilter with almost everyone else
… People feel let down by aspects of business, finance and politics which seem in touch with the richest 1% – but badly out of touch with the reality facing the other 99%. Most people never embraced these values but we were told they would help us, and Britain, to succeed. But too many thought they could do whatever they wanted, and pay themselves whatever they wanted.
Miliband articulates the difference between ‘right’ values and ‘wrong’ values. Cohesive ties are created between various values and their position in relation to the ‘gap’ in values. For example, in the following, ‘aspiration’ and ‘hard work’ are constructed as ‘right values’ in opposition to ‘wrong’ ones:
It is about rewarding the right values, not the wrong values, in our economy. Young people wanting to go to university fear being burdened down with debts of £50,000 when they leave. It makes no sense and does not reward aspiration and hard work.
And in the following, ‘hard work’, ‘contribution’ and ‘getting something out when you put something in’ are the ‘right values’:
And we should apply the right values in the rest of our economy. Our welfare system needs change to reflect not just the compassion of our country, but also the values of hard work, contribution and getting something out when you put something in.
Elsewhere in the article, the ‘powerful’ are ‘reckless’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘predatory’ and ‘everyone else’ is ‘productive’ and ‘responsible’. The groups of people with which these values are associated will be discussed in more detail later, but the distinction that Miliband makes is between the ‘right’ values of an aspirational work ethic and the ‘wrong’ values of irresponsible power.
Cameron’s recontextualisation of the riots as caused by values – or ‘morals’ – can be seen in the extracts reproduced in previous subsections. He further articulates what these morals are at various points in his speech, including the following:
Do we have the determination to confront the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations?
Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control.
Cameron’s listing establishes ties between these disparate phenomena, all of which are implied to be forms of ‘moral collapse’. These include personality traits, apparent ways of behaving, and institutional and social conditions. The implication is that all of these are equivalent – as moral conditions – and relations of causation between them are ignored; this is what Fairclough identifies in Tony Blair’s discourse as ‘the logic of appearances’ (2000: 28), a discourse feature that fails to explore causal relations between phenomena.
But Cameron’s speech in fact does provide further explanation for this ‘moral collapse’ itself. This indicates perhaps that the discursive shift from the symptom (the riots) to the condition (moral collapse) has been achieved to such an extent that the condition, which is itself a discursive explanation, is subject to further explanation. Wherein does the explanation for the moral collapse lie? In the overbearance of the welfare state, and in the moral relativity of liberal do-gooders.
Some of the worst aspects of human nature tolerated, indulged – sometimes even incentivised – by a state and its agencies that in parts have become literally de-moralised.
Here ‘the worst aspects of human nature’ stand in a superordinate semantic relation to the traits and behaviours listed above, thus Cameron gives the amoral state as explanation of these traits. Elsewhere, Cameron uses what Sperber and Wilson (1981) call ‘echoic mention’ to characterise the voice of ‘moral neutrality’:
In this risk-free ground of moral neutrality there are no bad choices, just different lifestyles. People aren’t the architects of their own problems, they are victims of circumstance. Live and let live becomes do what you please.
‘Standards or rules of behavior’ of dominant authorities, write Sperber and Wilson (1981: 312), ‘are culturally defined, commonly known, and frequently invoked; they are thus always available for echoic mention’. By employing echoic mention here, then, Cameron is able to position the voice of a supposed liberal relativism as an authority, and then position himself as opposing this authority. His politics is thus positioned not as a conservative defence of elite power, but as a progressive challenge to a dominant orthodoxy. The claim that it is morals that are important is metadiscursively evaluated as not a conservative claim but a radical one. (On issues of conservatism and progress in Cameron’s politics, see Seymour, 2010: Ch. 3; or Cameron’s own article in The Guardian: ‘Labour are now the reactionaries, we the radicals’, 08/04/2010.)
It has been implicit in my analysis so far that the values in each case are associated with different kinds of people. In both cases, the distinction between good and bad is a majority–minority distinction, and it is to this that I now turn.
Majority values
In Van Leeuwen’s terms, this strategy is to do with social actors (2008: 23–54) – who is it that is bad, and who is it that is good? Who are the people involved in Cameron’s collapse of morals? Between whom does Miliband’s value gap exist? In the two texts, it is different people who are the bad, but the good are very similar. Both politicians make use of what Fairclough, in his analysis of Blair’s discourse, calls the ‘one-nation’ ‘we’ (2000: 34–37; a feature which he relates back to Thatcher’s Conservatives). Fairclough notes that there exists ambivalence about who is and isn’t included in this ‘we’. In Van Leeuwen’s terms, social actors are collectivised, but there is ambivalence about who is included and who excluded from this collective. This ambivalence is not total, however; it is wide enough to include listeners, but not so wide as to include the morally bad minority; in both speeches, ‘we’ is generally used to refer to a moral majority.
But last week we didn’t just see the worst of the British people, we saw the best of them too
… Everywhere I’ve been this past week, in Salford, Manchester, Birmingham, Croydon, people of every background, colour and religion have shared the same moral outrage and hurt for our country. Because this is Britain. This is a country of good people. Those thugs we saw last week do not represent us, nor do they represent our young people – and they will not drag us down.
In this passage from the beginning of Cameron’s speech, the ‘we’ is positioned as ‘senser’ in what Halliday would call the mental process of perception – ‘saw’ (Halliday and Matthiesen, 2004). Of course, this is a notably polysemous word that does not necessarily mean anything literally to do with vision, but in all possible senses here we have a shared national perspective on a phenomenon, ‘we’ all ‘saw’ the same thing, and share the same moral evaluation of that phenomenon. So inclusive is this ‘we’ that it is easiest to say who it doesn’t include – the ‘thugs’.
Cameron also uses what might be called an inclusive ‘you’:
So you can’t say that marriage and commitment are good things – for fear of alienating single mothers. You don’t deal properly with children who repeatedly fail in school – because you’re worried about being accused of stigmatising them. You’re wary of talking about those who have never worked and never want to work – in case you’re charged with not getting it, being middle class and out of touch.
For Fairclough, such use of ‘you’ by Blair was a colloquialism that played its part in making Blair the ‘normal person’ (2000: 97–105). This may be part of its effect in Cameron’s discourse, but I think more important here is what might be seen as the alienating effect of the generic second person. One of the functions of the use of ‘you’ in second-person narratives such as Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City and David Peace’s 1983, is to alienate characters from their actions: ‘it manifests in narrative technique the notion that someone or something outside of yourself dictates your thoughts and actions’ (DelConte, 2003). I would like to suggest that this is likely to be part of its effect in this non-narrative text too. Cameron here has the moral majority acting in ways that they are not truly comfortable with – a collective alienation. You do this not because you really think it is right, but because you feel like you should. Again, this subtly attacks a constructed liberal authority that Cameron wants to challenge, and implies that moral condemnation of those not included in this inclusive ‘you’ – ‘single mothers’, ‘children who repeatedly fail at school’, ‘those who have never worked and never want to work’ – is not only morally right but also a kind of progressive freedom.
In Miliband’s article, the Occupy movement’s own device for making the majority–minority distinction is reformulated. On the one hand, we have the ‘99 per cent’ and on the other, the ‘1 per cent’:
People feel let down by aspects of business, finance and politics which seem in touch with the richest 1% – but badly out of touch with the reality facing the other 99%. Most people never embraced these values but we were told they would help us, and Britain, to succeed. But too many thought they could do whatever they wanted, and pay themselves whatever they wanted.
What is clear from this opposition is that the instruments of capitalism are by no means necessarily on the side of wrong, only ‘aspects’ of them. Most are on the ‘99%’:
The problem … is a system of irresponsible, predatory capitalism based on the short term, rather than productive responsible behaviour which benefits business and most people in the long term.
The co-ordination of ‘business’ and ‘most people’ here puts both on the side of ‘right’. And indeed, along with other vague collectivising references to ‘people’ or ‘most people’ on this side, we also find ‘entrepreneurs’ and even ‘our economy’. This is a striking recontextualisation of the Occupy protests: the economy not as a problem, but as being on the side of ‘right’. But it is a recontextualisation that can perhaps be seen as systematic in neoliberal discourse – ‘we’ are a nation of businesses (Fairclough, 2000: 30–31), here serving to recontextualise Occupy’s own discourse in such a way as to shift the concern from a capitalist-systemic inequality to a value-based one; as not being about capitalism per se, but as being about bad capitalists.
Minority values
For Miliband, it is the influence of the values of a powerful minority that are a danger. He refers to ‘predatory capitalism’, and writes:
When people at the top show such irresponsibility, it should not be a surprise to find it elsewhere in society too.
For Cameron, it is those at the bottom who are excluded from the morally sound ‘we’. The extracts reproduced above distinguish between the moral majority and ‘thugs’, ‘single mothers’, ‘children who repeatedly fail at school’ and ‘those who have never worked and never want to work’. Commentators on the idea of the underclass have suggested that a key difference between it and other conceptions of social class is that, though the underclass is represented as being numerically small, it is suggested to possess a moral danger beyond its numbers (Bauman, 1998; Levitas, 2005). Cameron’s minority seem quite clearly to be conceptualised in these terms, but this is also a feature of Miliband’s presentation of ‘the 1%’ – though they are powerful, the danger lies not in this powerful position itself, but in their values; their irresponsibility is implied to spread to ‘elsewhere in society too’.
So, Miliband’s dangerous minority is different from Cameron’s. For Miliband, it is some irresponsible bankers who are the problem. For Cameron, it is some irresponsible poor people. In both cases, a responsible majority is concerned by the dangerous values of a minority. Chomsky’s statement about politicians being like different brands of toothpaste seems relevant here (2005). If you dislike the poor, vote for Cameron. If you dislike the rich, vote for Miliband. But neither offers any real systemic change; each offers a different minority in the moral ‘baddie’ position. Perhaps Miliband and Cameron offer targeted versions of a substantively identical neoliberal discourse in the same way that, for example, Cosmopolitan magazine sells locally targeted versions of a substantively identical world view (Machin and Thornborrow, 2003).
Solution beyond politics
The strategies discussed so far serve to establish a problem – Miliband’s ‘value gap’ and Cameron’s ‘moral collapse’. But both politicians also offer solutions (Hoey, 2000: 123–138).
Miliband offers a number of solutions – cutting student tuition fees, and ‘break[ing] up the rigged market of the energy cartel’. These are material solutions to inequality, however peripheral to systemic issues. Such material solutions, though, are secondary to Miliband’s main concern, which is with the ‘value gap’:
But we can only win this debate with a movement which stretches beyond politics. That is why in the months and years ahead Labour is determined to construct and lead a coalition which includes business and civil society to make the case for a responsible economy, fairer society and a more just world.
There is a contradiction here. Performatively, Miliband’s article has to be seen as reinforcing the hegemonic power of the democratic political elite in the face of a threat from a movement that aims to sidestep democratic institutions (Dean, 2011; Hind, 2011). But here he suggests that what is needed is ‘a movement which stretches beyond politics’. This contradiction is, I suggest, itself a feature of neoliberal political discourse. On the one hand, it is up to politicians to frame appropriate action – and to frame it as being about values, about being ‘responsible’, ‘fairer’ and ‘more just’ – but, on the other hand, it is not up to them to actually act on inequality, not up to politicians or to state powers to take political action to tackle systemic inequalities. Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, discussed briefly above, is the clearest articulation of this principle (Kisby, 2010), and he, too, offers a solution in a shared moral response in his speech.
We must fight back against the attitudes and assumptions that have brought parts of our society to this shocking state.
And, elsewhere:
Do we have the determination to confront the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations?
The solution lies not in state action geared towards changing material circumstances, but in ‘we’ as a vaguely defined collective changing ‘attitudes’ and ‘assumptions’, in ‘confronting’ a ‘moral collapse’.
Discussion
What Cameron and Miliband do in these texts is to take events that threaten them both institutionally – by saying we don’t need you politicians – and ideologically – by bringing the existence of class struggle into sharp focus – and recontextualise them as events that can be understood in terms of values, of the right and wrong of individual activity. This is a hegemonic move, purporting to be addressing the concerns of the object while ultimately dominating it, transforming it into something that better suits the point of view of its recontextualisers.
Indeed, what we see here are two of the strategies identified by Jodi Dean in an essay about the political and media response to Occupy: ‘democratization’ and ‘moralization’. The first works to reformulate Occupy in terms of the very democratic institutions it opposes, to say ‘if you agree with these Occupy people, then vote for me’. The second seeks to present the movement as being about ‘morals’:
The true contribution of the movement is said to be its transformation of the common sense of what is just and what is unjust. This line of commentary emphasizes greed and corruption, commending the movement for opening our eyes to the need to get things in order, to clean house. . . . Rather than acknowledging the failure of the capitalist system, the contemporary collapse of its neoliberal form … moralization proceeds as if a couple of bad apples … let their greed get out of control. (Dean, 2011: 90)
I have tried to show how this moralization applies not just to Miliband’s recontextualisation of Occupy, but to Cameron’s response to the riots too, and how it dovetails with the existing discursive resources of neoliberalism. Rather than being an ad hoc response to opposition, this moralization is a longstanding feature of right-wing discourse; it is itself one of the forces – a hegemonic force – that we need to confront. It is a discursive feature that finds its place in both Cameron and Miliband’s discourse, though both are recontextualisations of different events from politicians who wish to align themselves with those events in different ways, and it is a longstanding feature of the ways in which (neo)liberal politicians have dealt with class, from concerns about ‘the undeserving poor’, to ‘the underclass’, to ‘chavs’ in contemporary Britain (Jones, 2011; Morris, 1994). Miliband, it should be said, seeks to differentiate himself from Cameron – his bad people are wealthy capitalists, not the poor. But the terms in which political struggle is understood are ultimately identical, and thus both politicians can be seen as drawing from the same set of discursive resources.
Van Leeuwen’s (2008) recontextualisation framework allows this to be seen, but my feeling is that it must allow for a broader conception of the real for this to be the case. Neoliberal discourse does not just offer one of many possible explanations of practice; by replacing class with values it obscures the reality of capitalist inequality. In terms of Kress’s sign making (1993), if signs (and the combination of signs in discourse) are to be seen as motivated by the properties of their objects and the interests of their users, then it is a property of the riots and Occupy that they have causes in the material conditions created by the very same neoliberal political system that has interests in discursively recontextualising them as being about morals and values.
Conclusion
This article has been concerned with just two texts, but I would like to suggest that they can be seen in terms of a much broader phenomenon – the process by which neoliberal institutions create conditions of intense inequality while democratic politicians present the public with a limited set of possibilities for dealing with these conditions, possibilities which fundamentally do not challenge the institutions of neoliberal capitalism. As others have noted, a key feature of neoliberal discourse is its emphasis on morals (Levitas, 2005), and in these texts both Cameron and Miliband use recontextualisations of potentially oppositional movements to attempt to assert as hegemonic a moralised reading of the riots and Occupy and to consolidate their own elite positions in the political process. In the case of Miliband, the leader of the supposedly centre-left Labour Party currently in opposition in the UK, this is perhaps particularly concerning. What might seem to be a critique of the power of a capitalist elite – ostensibly an alignment with the Occupy movement – is, I hope to have shown, in fact a superficial alteration to a dominant discourse shared with Cameron, and no doubt others.
From a critical, politically committed point of view, such differences of discourse are patently insufficient. We need to challenge such limited conceptions of political discursive difference, and to resist the regressive-presented-as-progressive move towards a personalised politics that deals in values rather than in policies, and in ideas rather than in materials. When we live with a political system that inflicts the constant violence of vast inequality on people whose response is then recontextualised as a ‘moral collapse’, as having its causes in a value system, we have to say that one of the features of neoliberal capitalism that needs challenging is the reach of this scheme of recontextualisation itself, and to resist the expansion of this discourse. This means not only critiquing the text in such a way as to uncover the underlying assumptions, scripts or frameworks, but also, I feel, taking the stance that these assumptions do not just work to assert elite power, but, by comparison with reality, are fundamentally incorrect; not just a representation of the world, but a misrepresentation.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.