Abstract
This book looks at how the notion of New Labour (NL), introduced as a discourse tactic by Tony Blair’s team, helped reshape the British Labour Party (LP)’s identity and reform its policies, so that in 1997 it could rise to power and stay there for over a decade. For her in-depth analysis of NL discourse between 1994 and 2007, L’Hôte relies on the ‘methodological synergy’ (p. 42) of an approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methods. A strong emphasis is placed on the kind of empirical data corpus linguistics yields, such as statistics, word frequency, keyness, collocates and concordances. Positioning herself not too far from critical discourse analysis (CDA), the author sets out to explore an analytic strategy that combines corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics, stressing the importance of linguistic textual evidence and input from cognitive concepts like Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Mental Space Theory and Blending Theory.
L’Hôte makes the general claim that ‘newness’ and ‘change’ are keywords and key concepts in a strategy allowing NL to distance itself from a discursively constructed older version of itself, pre-1994 Labour or Old Labour (OL), and at the same time from the Conservative Party (CP), its opponent. She pinpoints two identity building counter-strategies, reciprocation and appropriation, supposed to thwart negative stereotypes formerly attached to the LP. In appropriation, useful parts of the opponent’s policies are being incorporated into one’s own programme. Reciprocation consists mainly in disconnecting NL from typical ‘Labour pathologies’ (such as economic incompetence or softness in matters of defence and security) that it then transfers to the construct of OL. Through the use of metaphors and a strategically created narrative of change and progress, NL achieves implicit and explicit discursive effects of continuity or distance as they suit its campaign needs.
Interestingly, L’Hôte’s analyses show that NL is often closer (especially quantitatively speaking) to Conservative discourse than to OL discourse. L’Hôte sees this as proof of the appropriation hypothesis as it illustrates NL’s shift to the political centre and away from some of its socialist roots. It indicates a blurring of traditional party lines that were common in Western societies between the political right and left. Challenging Lakoff’s (2002) morality-in-politics metaphor, L’Hôte points out that NL adopted traits of the ‘strict father’ model, which is usually associated with Conservative politics, while letting go of parts of the more liberal ‘nurturant parent’ model. However, the very existence in the British political landscape of this complex metaphorical model imported from a US context is a claim that might have benefited from more generalised statistical evidence of its main roles and relations.
In the second part of the book, L’Hôte presents internal and external change as two major themes in NL. Internal change would be man-made, controlled and carried by internal agents (the British government, the LP and the country). L’Hôte shows that the conceptual metaphor politics is a journey presents NL’s move forward (in time and space) and away from the demonised past as progress. Globalisation then is construed metaphorically as an external agent, an irresistible force that inevitably brings about change. This strategy is supposed to recast actions as no-alternative choices, thus helping NL in legitimising difficult policy choices and diluting the party’s responsibility.
L’Hôte uses the online software tool WMatrix to work on her main three political corpora. Her primary corpus is the NL corpus and the secondary corpora are the pre-1994 LP corpus and the CP. While the NL and LP corpora allow for a diachronic comparison between Labour’s past and present/future, the compared genres are quite varied, and only party conference speeches and manifestos compose the former. A synchronic analysis is made possible by the comparison of NL with CP, the latter presenting the politically opposite view. This comparison meets the challenge of a difference in speaker roles, as in NL the speaker role is uniformly occupied by Tony Blair.
L’Hôte builds her research design so as to avoid the ideological point of view that CDA (p. 20) brings along. Ideology theory, however, holds that ideology starts with the subject itself. Discursive effects, such as the constructed continuity and distance or the no-alternative choice strategy L’Hôte found to exist in NL, could be seen as examples of the most basic ideological effects of naturalisation and misrecognition.
As far as the link between cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics is concerned, the author mainly uses the former as a tool for semantic description of what has been proven statistically significant. Hypothesis construction thus relies not so much on cognitive linguistics as on insights from political science theory. The book most importantly brings empirical proof and detailed semantic, pragmatic and cognitive description to the rhetorical media campaign of ‘New Labour’ that strategists such as Alastair Campbell developed.
The theoretical part, one feels, has been curtailed for the benefit of this detailed empirical account. This means that knowledge of the basic theories is a definite plus for any reader. Even though there is a very useful step-by-step description of the complex research design, a glossary might have been a useful tool to navigate amid the large number of theories, concepts, methods and technical terms that cover everything from statistical calculations to a detailed account of cognitive mental space constructions. The wealth of technical terms and tags might prove challenging to non-initiated readers.
Given its overall didactic baseline and innovative cross-disciplinary approach, this book, which is based on L’Hôte’s PhD, will be of interest to students and experts, linguists and non-linguists alike. L’Hôte skillfully balances quantitative data and semantic (pragmatic) as well as cognitive phenomena. It is an empirically well backed-up and insightfully argued analysis.