Abstract
This article aims to demonstrate that the transition from the mainstream narrative to the interactional history of concepts promises tangible benefits for scholars of social time in general and temporal comparisons in particular. It is shown that the traditionally close alignment of narration with the production of historical consciousness at various levels hinders the study of time as a semantic variable perpetually contested, amended and upheld across society. Alternatively, the references to time made in public settings, allowing for more or less instant reactions (turn-taking) as well as expression of dissenting opinions (stance-taking), offer a much more representative palette of temporal semantics and pragmatics in a given sociopolitical environment. In a particularly intriguing case, the essentially deliberative venue where contestation is supported by both institutional arrangements and political reasons (British House of Commons) is put to test under circumstances commonly known as ‘the post-war consensus’ – the unspoken convention directing opposing political parties to suspend stance-taking regarding the past actions of the government during WWII, its immediate aftermath and its future prospects. As a reliable indicator of this arrangement, the contestation of temporal comparisons between relevant pasts and futures is tested in oppositions reflecting party allegiances (Conservatives vs. Labour vs. Liberals) and executive functions (government vs. opposition) between 1946 and 1952. It is shown that, notwithstanding the prevalence of non-contested statements aimed at preserving interactional coherence and pragmatic functionality of the setting, the moderately active contestation of the adversary’s temporal comparisons in the House of Commons at that time helped all parties, albeit to a different degree, to shape their own political and institutional roles as well as to delegitimize their respective adversaries.
Keywords
Temporal concepts between narration and interaction
Why study the semantics of temporal comparisons in interaction? Why take a topic safely belonging to the time-honoured narrative tradition of conceptual history research into uncharted territory on the crossroads of history, sociology and communication studies? Perhaps the most urgent reason for trying to reshape historical semantics is its relative lack of interest to the dialogical foundations of human communication (Buber, 1954; Schegloff, 2006), lamented before but hardly questioned up to date (Busse, 1987: 304; Knobloch, 1992: 12–13). The generally held assumption of speech as a joint accomplishment involving cooperation of interacting parties could have inspired historical semantics to look for such contexts where the cooperative production of meaning could be easily tracked (Thornborrow, 2002: 39). However, to our knowledge, this has not yet happened. The following observations are arguably the first attempt to close this gap and make a credible case for the interactional study of temporal (and other) concepts in historical semantics (Mead, 1930: 83; Berlo, 1960: 131; Owen, 1980: 33; Postoutenko, 2016: 203).
To be sure, the traditional hermeneutic analysis of temporal concepts is not without its merits (see, for instance, Koselleck (1989); Fernández Sebastián (2006)): as long as the unity of textual semantics is acknowledged, the study of conceptual semantics in the context of a single (written or spoken) message becomes a worthwhile alternative to the small-scale interpretation limiting the context of observation to a single sentence, or another ‘relevant’ part (De Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981). The downside of this approach is the pervasive conflation of the object of research (temporal concepts) and its medium (narration) informed by the image of time as a linear function of textual development. Thus, when Condorcet suggests that progress never moves back (jamais elle ne sera retrograde), he joins the cohort of thinkers deriving their historical teleologies from the directionality of verbal code (1793: 81; Flusser, 1993: 44): roughly speaking, not only the information transmitted to its prospective reader but also the progressiveness of human civilization is said to steadily grow from the beginning to the end of his treatise.
The interest in universalization and apriorization of such notions as ‘progress’ or ‘decay’ from the 18th century onwards has largely deflected attention from negotiation of their meanings which had allowed for such an impressive consolidation (Koselleck, 2010: 161; see also Koselleck, 1989: 211–212). This lack of curiosity reflects the genuine difficulty stemming from the domination of non-interactive (print) media in the data analysed: unless one subscribes to the naive intertextual belief that texts somehow read and quote each other (Genette, 1982), it is hard to reconstruct the semantic cooperation – or confrontation – between the authors not sharing the same interactional setting. Indeed, the whole business of identifying and interpreting conceptual allusions remains hypothetical at best.
A viable alternative to this conjectural approach is the study of environment where the cooperation on semantics of temporal concepts occurs in real time. Fortunately, parliaments and other deliberative institutions furnish researchers with a handy context for studying conceptual interaction step by step within really existing and directly observable socio-communicative environments. The distributed, collaborative production of both consensual and dissenting meaning in the course of ‘face-to-face interaction’ reveals competition and mutual adjustment of various time frames depending on political affiliations or roles in the government (Kieserling, 1999; Lasslett, 1963).
The importance of interaction in parliamentary settings for the latter’s historical semantics could seem self-explanatory. Nevertheless, not only has the conceptual history of parliamentarianism so far glossed over its conversational specifics (Palonen, 2019), but many political sociologists keep regarding parliamentarianism as little more than a civilizational technique aimed at preventing the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes (Luhmann, 2000: 94–95). At variance with these views and approaches, we tend to see parliaments as ‘interactional engines’ par excellence (Levinson, 2006: 40–41), enabling injection of information into heavily centralized political systems with otherwise weak feedback channels (Doyle, 1987: 58).
This process is thoroughly organized by means of several partially overlapping distinctions enabling efficient cooperation in a crowded and antagonistic setting (Mergel, 2012: 230). Supported and reinforced by written and unwritten rules, customs and hands-on management of a designated chairperson (Ilie, 2010a: 8), the universal interactional practice of turn-taking allows for smooth delivery and intake of messages (one speaker at a time), accumulation of information from multiple sources (swapping of interactional roles between all participants) and relevance control (discouraging off-topic speaking – see Levinson, 2006: 45–46). Furthermore, the necessity of stance-taking (stating difference between own and others’ opinions) for political survival in a competitive environment keeps the ratio information/noise high (Edelman, 1977: 7; Keisanen, 2007; Ilie, 2010b: 56). Last but not least, the aggregation of individual deputies-interlocutors into one privative (‘government’ vs. ‘opposition’) and at least one equipollent (‘party X’ vs. ‘party Y’) opposition cuts coordination and transmission costs: as long as individual deputies serve as ‘animators’ of the respective group-‘principals’ (Goffman, 1981: 144; Pappert, 2017), their stance-taking is strategically coupled – and negatively correlated – with the position of the collective adversary. Taken together, turn-taking, stance-taking and the two afore-mentioned sets of divisions within parliament ensure the steady production of semantic distinctions in the course of parliamentary activity, which allows for tracing the meanings of temporal references in general, and temporal comparisons as their special case, at the crossroads of political agendas, rhetorical strategies and discursive arsenals.
Post-war consensus?
Before one proceeds to the specific methods and sources, it is pertinent to cast a glance at the specificity of the parliamentary environment under observation and also explain the importance of temporal comparisons for this particular place and state of affairs. According to the popular, if debatable, opinion, the normal mechanics of stance-taking in the British Parliament was suspended in regard to the certain pivotal period in the recent past of the United Kingdom: whatever was achieved in the social sphere during WWII was ostensibly exempt from partisan contestation in the national parliament. In his monograph The Road to 1945, Paul Addison articulated the hypothesis of the political consensus in British politics from 1940s to 1970s. In Addison’s (1994) view, the foundations of consensus were laid out by the work of coalition government on social reform during the Second World War. This thesis, running counter to the prevailing political customs (Palonen, 2019: 45–46), was subject to much historical debate: historians, political scientists and economists tried to test it by comparing ideological convictions and particular political decisions of the main parties, paying close attention to the parties’ epistemological beliefs (Blackburn, 2018) and also defining several time periods in which the ‘consensus’ ostensibly existed (Lowe, 1990: 152–154). In a later edition of his book, Addison qualified his thesis by renaming it ‘the Whitehall consensus’ (1994: 281). Ben Pimlott, in his turn, considered ‘post-war consensus’ to be little more than historiographical myth (1988: 135), lambasting the vagueness of the term (1988: 141) and pointing at its decidedly non-consensual usage by British politicians of the period (1988: 137). More recently, Richard Toye remarked on the same occasion that ‘consensus was something that could exist only at the level of language or ideas’ (2012: 7). Alternatively, Brian Harrison stressed the importance of political consensus before 1940 and after 1979 as well as the presence of dissent in the 1940s (1999: 308, 313). None of these studies suggests any methodology to confirm or disprove the existence of consensus, nor is it clear what kind of material could best furnish the raw data.
Based on the considerations outlined in the preceding section, we singled out parliamentary debates as the setting where the formation of consensus between parties and institutional actors (if any) could be, so to speak, caught on the spot. In particular, it was decided to turn to the debates on social policies in the British House of Commons, which presumably were the crucial point of the consensus (Gladstone, 1999: 52; Pimlott, 1988: 133–134), and place the particular emphasis on the discussion of the welfare state in general and the National Health Service in particular. Like no other reform, the establishment of the NHS directly affected the whole society, upholding the continuity of social reforms from WWII to the post-war politics (Harris, 2011: 365). Furthermore, the involvement of three political parties (Liberals, Conservatives and Labour) in the formulation, discussion and implementation of the plan for comprehensive social reform conceived by William Beveridge in 1941/42 is by itself the testament to the possibility of cooperation on significant issues across party lines. The National Health Service in the post-war time was the expression of ‘generally shared’ beliefs (Van Dijk, 1998: 121), which could not be rejected by the MPs without discrediting their own image. Its status and the history of successful cross-party collaboration on it (see above) make the debate the likely candidate for the search of interactional consensus in Parliament.
However, the ways of agreeing or disagreeing upon this bill are manifold, and not all of the possible speech acts could be reasonably tracked down and classified. For that reason, the emphasis was put on just one significant category of speech acts related to the past activity of the government – the temporal comparisons – and its embedment in both turn- and stance-taking. Comparison-performing sentences are the essential type of speech acts in political, and particularly in parliamentarian, language which is characterized by alignment between argumentation and decision-making. According to Chaïm Perelman, argumentation in general can hardly avoid the use of comparisons ‘where several objects are considered in order to evaluate them through their relations to each other’ (1958: 242). The role of argumentation in our case study is not to provide causality needed for decisions. Rather, the comparisons discussed below are aimed at justifying actions in the minds of those who are relevant to the judgement (Rieke & Sillars, 1975: 25). By variously relating the shared – and allegedly incontestable – past to the previous and subsequent periods of time, parliamentarians are capable of retaining their diverging positions while avoiding politically risky direct confrontation in the semantic domain of presumed national unity.
Method and sources
Specifically, this study is based on post-war social policy debates in the House of Commons about the National Health Service (NHS) in the years 1946–1952. 1 It is in this period that the NHS was actually founded, and the essential debates around it continued until its legal and financial frames had been set and the recurrent changes of Health Ministers in 1951 and 1952 stopped (Lindner, 2004: 55). During this period, the two main political parties (Labour and Conservative) in Great Britain switched between government and opposition. Thus, the usual process of stance-taking in the parliament was complicated by institutional turn-taking sending both parties from the government offices to opposition benches and back.
The specific material chosen for analysis consists of two debates during the Labour government – 1946 (110,913 words) and 1951 (42,445 words) as well as one during the first stint of Conservatives in power after WWII in 1952 (48,555 words). The first debate in 1946 concerns the fundamental implementation of the NHS project and displays the standard conflicts alongside party lines about the functions of the state and changes to the traditional health system. It should be noted that the first debate occurred against the background of the Labour party scooping up, for the first time, the majority of 61% of the seats in the House of Commons. This success not only allowed for devising and implementing some targeted social policies but also resulted in a massive nationalization programme. Over the course of the following years, the fundamental conflict regarding the role of the state and the overall costs of the NHS remained and put Labour, in their subsequent governmental term with the reduced majority, on the defence. Hence, the debates on a specific issue were also a sounding board for the all-out discussion of Labour social policies. The Amendment Bill discussed in 1951 put a brake on the full free service availability at the NHS, undermining its initial philosophy. Having obtained a razor-thin majority in Westminster in 1951 despite losing the popular vote, Conservatives kept pressing ahead with rolling back NHS benefits, curiously legitimizing their actions with references to the activities of the previous Labour government.
Whereas the investigation is centred upon the three comprehensive debates in the House of Commons on NHS Bills, its fundamental implementation and changes to both the Bill and the National Health Service Act, several short debates on minor changes in the NHS are not taken into account. The gap between 1946 and 1951 is due to the fact that extensive debates about major policies do not take place every year.
Having declared above that we are interested in the use of temporal comparisons in parliamentary debates, it seems pertinent to indicate (1) how we actually define such comparisons and (2) what sorts of their deployment in parliamentary rhetoric we have in mind. On the first count, the limitations of traditional historical semantics dealing with single terms are unmistakable: merely fishing for the single-word traces of temporal comparison from stand-alone temporality markers (‘improvement’, ‘deterioration’, etc.) to second-order references (‘comparison’, ‘analogy’, etc.) yields few results and ignores the deliberative nature of parliaments as adversary interactional settings (Steinmetz, 2002: 90–92). Instead, we advocate the view of comparisons – temporal or other – as comparative utterances (Götzelmann et al., 2021). On the one hand, many temporal comparisons could not be expressed in single words (see below). On the other, individual words taken out of immediate speech context could not be seen as utterances in their own right and therefore ignored, agreed or disagreed with (Searle, 1978, 16), which renders them unusable for the consensus-tracing. Inversely, comparisons involving meta-references to comparative processes (*I am now comparing the year X to the year Y), displaying the outcomes of the cross-investigation (*the year X was worse than year Y) or leaving it up to the recipient to complete the juxtaposition of explicit comparata with the tacitly implied tertia (*the year X was successful and the year Y was not) provide ample opportunities for interactional affiliation including contestation, inattention or ratification (Davy et al., 2019: 15–16).
Accordingly, the temporal utterances made in Parliament are classified in the study in accordance with their interactional status as (1) contested, (2) uncontested and (3) ratified. The broad definition of contestation adopted in this study reflected not only the general competitive nature of political semantics (Gallie, 1956; Freeden, 2003: 71) but also the specificity of conversational collaboration in deliberative settings bent on self-regulation in the absence of proscribed adversarial roles (courts) or pre-set hierarchies (doctor–patient or teacher–pupil exchanges – see Foucault, 1971: 65; Lasswell, 1971: 282; Burton, 1981: 62–64; Heath, 1984: 247; Newmeyer, 1990: 244–245; Drew and Heritage, 1992: 5–6; Linell, 2001: 83; Thornborrow, 2002: 43; Philips, 2006: 479–480; Hanks, 2006: 301; Ladegaard, 2009; Junge, 2011: 29; Raymond et al., 2019). To be sure, outright rejections and contestations of comparisons did occur in the House of Commons during the period observed; however, the need to balance competition and coordination in the process of sustaining interactional routine led the members of the House of Commons to explore various mitigation strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1978: 40; Fraser, 1980; Leach, 1983: 108; Caffi, 1999), such as modifying, questioning and otherwise qualifying temporal comparisons of their interlocutors. In its turn, non-contestation encompassed not only the absence of immediate reaction to a particular temporal comparison but also the deviation from the suggested topic – for example, asking questions unrelated to the comparison just made by the previous speaker. Lastly, ratification – by far the rarest reaction to temporal comparisons made by the member of the opposite party/institution – constituted the active explicit agreement, usually expressed by a slight variation of the adversary’s thesis without any dissenting evaluations or connotations. Evidently, this is the only reaction to a temporal comparison in which turn-taking is not accompanied by stance-taking.
Results (1): The overall data
Contestation of temporal comparisons along party lines (1946–1952).
Contestation of temporal comparisons made by government and opposition (1946–1952).
Contestation of temporal comparisons in institutional and political roles (1946).
Contestation of temporal comparisons in institutional and political roles (1951).
Contestation of temporal comparisons in institutional and political roles (1952).
The first conclusion to be drawn from the tables is the general dominance of non-contested comparisons across the board attesting to the salience of conversational collaboration even in a hotly contested interactional setting. Furthermore, the number and percentage of contested temporal comparisons made by Conservatives are the highest among the three parties, even though Labour spent more time in the government. These data may present Conservatives as the least confrontational force in the House of Commons with the smallest proclivity to stance-taking. However, this finding should be treated with caution because the higher overall number of temporal comparisons made by Labour makes statistical generalizations problematic. The same problem marks the evaluation of the contestation totals in Table 2: the differences between contestation performed by parties in opposition and government are hardly discernible, but the time spent by the two major parties in power is all but identical. Because of these complications making generalization across the time span only marginally useful, it was decided to additionally evaluate the contestation of temporal comparisons year by year (Tables 3–5).
Results (2): The 1946 debate
Interestingly, the opening debates on the NHS in 1946 feature the widest use of temporal comparisons in the whole series. One major explanation could lie in the explication of a completely new policy, which required comparative flashbacks to its antecedents as well as forecasts of its possible impact. In theory, both of these mechanisms should work for opposition and government in a related way, with the positive connotations (government) mirroring the negative ones (opposition), or vice versa. However, the distribution of respective utterances between the government and the opposition parties in absolute numbers turns out to be very similar (60 and 62). Still, the relative numbers of contested comparisons are much higher for opposition in general and its mainstay – the Conservative party – in particular. To interpret these figures, one has to take a closer look at the semantics and pragmatics of contested comparisons. No less than 16 of 19 contestations address the government’s measures envisioned in the Bill and their prospective consequences. Here is an example: ‘I feel that under this Bill as it now stands, the public in many respects will not be better served but rather they will be worse served’ (Wavell Wakefield (CON), HC Deb (02 May 1946) vol. 422, col. 367). The current and future state of the medical profession was also a big part of criticism: ‘In our view it means that even if, by a combination of threats and bribes, the Minister persuades all the medical profession to work under him in making this Bill effective, the doctors of the future will not be as good as the doctors of today’ (Richard Law (CON), HC Deb (30 April 1946) vol. 422 col. 81). Having this in mind, the contestation of those and similar statements by the Labour government comes naturally as the defence of its own policies.
One important factor limiting contestation is the custom of refraining from criticism of a new MP’s ‘maiden speech’ attesting to the collaborative dimension of Parliament (Toye, 2014: 281). As the Labour MP Louis Comyns argued in his maiden speech in the first debate on the NHS, it was also expected of the speaker to be conciliatory: I am grateful indeed for this opportunity to address the House for the first time, upon a subject in which I am deeply interested. For all that, I confess that I complain of the usual symptoms of nervousness perhaps common to most maiden speakers, and I ask the House for a generous dose of the indulgence which it customarily gives on such occasions. For my part, I promise to be as brief and as non-controversial as I possibly can be in the circumstances. (Louis Comyns (LAB), HC Deb (30 April 1946) vol 422 col. 82)
The Conservative MP Ralph Glyn, too, stressed the expectation of uncontroversial maiden speeches given by new MPs. He reacted to the speech of Anthony Greenwood (LAB) as followed: ‘I think, as a very old Member of the House, I may say that his speech, as a maiden speech, went very near the line of controversy, but that does not matter, because it was obvious to all hon. Members that he was so convinced of all he said, and what this House wants is sincerity and not humbug’ (Ralph Glyn (CON), HC Deb (30 April 1946) vol 422 col. 122).
Nevertheless, this unwritten rule was broken in the case of Freda Corbet who draws parallels between the preparation of dentist assistants in the wartime past and the future: The Teviot Committee advocates the training of such workers to assist dentists, and I hope we shall push ahead with this. A training period of two years is suggested, but they were used in the Royal Air Force after a very short period of training—a few months—and were quite satisfactory.” (Freda Corbet (LAB), HC Deb (01 May 1946) vol. 422, col. 269)
The observation was followed by a highly unusual contestation made by an MP from the same party (!): ‘I do not like to criticise a maiden speech, but her remarks should not go unchallenged’ (John Baird (LAB), HC Deb (01 May The same problem…' Please confirm.1946) vol. 422, col. 310). Following this admission of the open role conflict, a senior party member stepped in with a conciliatory statement. Remarkably, the opportunity of upholding the challenged custom without missing the chance of stance-taking was seized by a Conservative politician who offered indirect support to the newcomer by pointedly refusing to contest Corbet’s statement while mildly reproaching her critic: ‘I noticed that many Members were a little alarmed by her exposé of the state of mind of the dentist. In my own particular case, that left me cold because I know that the field for his future operations is now strictly limited’ (Harold Webbe (CON), HC Deb (01 May 1946) vol. 422, col. 270).
As for the Liberal party, its comparatively frequent use of temporal comparisons in the 1946 debate appears to aim at retroactively legitimizing its past policies and thus claiming some credit for the currently planned breakthrough. All 12 temporal comparisons made by the Liberal faction in the House of Commons in the 1946 debate were animated by just two MPs – Henry Morris-Jones from the National Liberal Party and Clement Davies, the Liberal’s leader who were also two of three speakers from the Liberal party in the first debate. Taking this into account, the usage of temporal comparisons seems to occupy central place in the arguments of the liberal MPs. While Morris-Jones’ comparisons regarding the bill were contested by Labour politicians, Clement Davies struck a reconciliatory note, discussing the advantages of the NHS in conjunction with the role of his party in the establishment of these policies: ‘That is one of the greatest steps forward that we have taken’ (Clement Davies (LIB), HC Deb (01 May 1946) vol. 422, col. 248). This agreement, exposing the lineage of the current Labour policies in a way favourable for Liberals, was reiterated by Davies at every opportunity: ‘Let me remind him and some of his hon. Friends that this Amendment is almost exactly in the same terms as those which were moved against the Third Reading of the National Insurance Bill of 1911, which was the predecessor of this Bill’ (Clement Davies (LIB), HC Deb (01 May 1946) vol. 422, col. 249); ‘Exactly as this Amendment is today, so it was then. They could not say “Yes” and they did not dare to say “No,” so they invented a sort of new, middle Conservative way of trying to get the best of both worlds’ (Clement Davies (LIB), HC Deb (01 May 1946) vol. 422, col. 249).
As we can see, the exceptional behaviour of massively supporting the government from the opposition benches was fully rational, since the benefits of securing the stake in the popular policy appeared to outweigh the costs of missing the opportunity of stance-taking. All in all, the 1946 debate generally confirms the interactional cleavages government/Labour versus opposition/Conservatives. However, the examples of maiden speech contestation and the Liberal party supporting Labour government from the opposition complicate this picture. Indeed, political expediency or the need to protect the cross-party consensual interactional arrangements could lead to suspension of such unwritten laws of parliamentary interaction as stance-taking or subordination of animators to principals.
Results (3): The 1951 debate
The NHS debate of 1951 was outstanding in many ways. This time, the government used more temporal comparisons than the opposition which could be explained by the necessity of using time references in outlining the bill’s implementation in the future. The other big difference from the years 1946 and 1952 lay in the share of contested comparisons which were almost identical for the government and the opposition. (This superficial similarity calls for a more detailed inquiry.) In 1950, Labour won the general election with a small majority, which led to the new elections in 1951. Therefore, the debate of 1951 was characterized by the strong clash between self-legitimization claims made by the governing party and the other delegitimization rebuttals deployed by opposition (Chilton, 2004: 46–47). In this vein, Labour’s contested comparisons were oriented on positive self-representation regarding the implementation of its central social policy, which was at that point NHS: ‘In particular, we are making greater provision for the treatment of tuberculosis. In 1945 there were in England and Wales 24,000 deaths from tuberculosis. In 1949 the figure had fallen to 20,000. The figure for 1950 is not yet known with complete accuracy, but I can provisionally estimate it at 16,000’ (Hilary Marquand (LAB), HC Deb (24 April 1951) vol. 232, col. 234). As the correlation between this decrease of lethality and the development of the NHS could not be easily disputed, the Conservative party came up with the alternative tetrium comparationis for contrasting now and then. The drop in mortality was presented as insignificant compared to the longer waiting lists at the medical offices: ‘We have always said that this disease was disappointingly intractable to improved methods of diagnosis and improved methods of treatment. As the right hon. Gentleman said, there has been some slight improvement—not great—in the mortality rate. Unfortunately, however, there has, if anything, been a lengthening of the waiting lists for treatment’ (Hugh Lucas-Tooth (CON), HC Deb (24 April 1951) vol. 232, col. 251).
Parallel to this relocation of battleground to the more convenient terrain, the frontal attacks on the correctness of numerical data supplied by the opponent were not ruled out. In fact, the very same Hugh Lucas-Tooth got on the favourite hobby horse of fiscal conservatives, relating the improvement of the health service with the unaccounted for spending hike: ‘The estimate for the current year which the Minister has mentioned is £398 million, making a further increase of some £5 or £6 million, although it should, of course, on the same comparable basis as the other figures I have given, have been £30 million’ (Hugh Lucas-Tooth (CON), HC Deb (24 April 1951) vol. 232, col. 246). The popularity of this move is hardly surprising: the quantitative comparisons by means of numbers are generally seen as a very efficient tool because of their persuasiveness and ability to promote acceptance in communication (Heintz, 2010: 170). Furthermore, the ‘numerical difference’ helps bringing discussions to a close because numeric signs are considered self-explanatory and universal (2010: 172–174). Nevertheless, as could be seen before, shifting the ground of quantitative comparisons from one aspect of historical changes to another could keep contestation running for quite a long time, particularly as the bill under discussions gets more and more detailed and the new figures keep popping up.
As a collaborative correlate to these competitive stance-taking, in 1951, Labour introduced a bill limiting the free services offered by NHS. The bill was generally supported by the Conservatives, which in some cases transpired into explicit ratification: ‘I think that we had from the Minister of Health this afternoon the most realistic speech on health matters that the House has heard since 1945’ (Iain Macleod (CON), HC Deb (24 April 1951) vol. 232, col. 302). Made in a similar way, the sole statement of the Liberal party in the debate animated by MP Jo Grimond enjoyed wide cross-party approval: out of the three temporal comparisons made in the statement, one remained uncontested and two were explicitly ratified. Grimond made no secret of the reasons behind his (party’s) sympathy to the bill, publicizing the Liberal’s part in the formation of the NHS: ‘Without claiming too much, we might perhaps say that we had some share in founding the Welfare State now existing, and we may even claim, through Lord Beveridge, some slight share in the promotion of the National Health Service itself’ (Jo Grimond (LIB), HC Deb (24 April 1951) vol. 232, col. 257). At the same time, citing the changes from the last to the current year as the seemingly objective causes for supporting the government on the increase of military expenditures, Grimond was careful enough to sneak a subtle stance-taking qualification into his overall endorsement: What I think is unquestionable is that, whatever the situation was a year ago, it is quite different today. (…) It is because we are engaged already in fighting a war, and because we are engaged in a rearmament programme which we admit, for the sake of peace, entails that every individual in this country must undertake some restriction of his freedom, which we dislike, and should make some sacrifices for the Commonwealth as a whole. (Jo Grimond (LIB), HC Deb (24 April 1951) vol. 232, col. 258).
As we can see, the combination of tactical behaviour and observance of tacit interactional rules in a parliamentary setting could lead to non-contestation even in the atmosphere of intense political competition. That said, the relinquishment of stance-taking in political debates incurred political costs of donating part of the political capital to the adversary and losing political recognizability as a result. To prevent this from happening, the dissenting ‘we’-statements, made on the margins of shared temporal differentiations, allowed for saving face in discussions of crucial issues (such as personal freedom) without jeopardizing the politically opportune consensus.
Results (4): The 1952 debate
In the last table, the most interesting results concern the distribution of contested comparisons between the governing and the oppositional party, which shows the biggest disparity for the whole period of observation: from 1946 to 1952, the contestation of the government statements steadily rises, whereas the percentage of contested utterances of the opposition drops accordingly. Labour’s particular proclivity to contesting comparisons may well be a part of the explanation but could hardly be the whole of it since the gap between contested temporal comparisons performed by Conservative and Labour deputies was actually larger in 1946 than in 1952.
The reason why Labour was less persistent in challenging the Conservative party in 1952 than it was in 1946 could be the long shadow of cross-party compromises essential for getting NHS legislation done. For instance, facing financial constraints, Labour earlier agreed to some paid services as a part of the NHS legislation – the policy continued by the Conservatives in their 1952 governmental turn. The strong opposition to the Conservative stance on medical fees was tantamount for Labour to delegitimising its own political actions, playing into the hands of its political adversary. At the same time, missing too many chances for stance-taking would have been suicidal for the main oppositional party. Therefore, contestation of temporal comparisons made by Conservatives involved a substantial degree of hair-splitting: The difference between us is that we came frankly to the House and said that the complications of making the necessary exemptions, which humanity, decency and a concern for the health of this country demand, are so many that we could not proceed with that charge. But the Minister of Health and his hon. Friends come tonight to say, "We know there are difficulties, we know there are these complications consequent upon exemptions, we know from the volume of study that has been done that they exist, but, nevertheless, despite your example and advice, we are going on with this. (Hector McNeil (LAB), HC Deb (27 March 1952) vol. 498, col. 970)
As might be expected, this nuanced statement remained uncontested, since its fine wording provided each party with a fair share of legitimacy without obliterating the differences essential for their political self-identification.
An arguably more important reason of antagonistic polarization along the government/opposition divide may lie in the growing clout of the parliament which was now expected to fulfil both legislative and executive functions, with the parties able and willing ‘to promise detailed policies and then deliver their implementation’ (Toye, 2014: 274, 297). The necessity of competitive and thorough self-profiling for both government and opposition under the new conditions could have increased the need for contesting programmatic statements of the respective adversary and offered less room for conciliatory nuances than it was the case in 1946 and 1951. Incidentally, the growing polarization led to the virtual exclusion of the smaller Liberal party from the mutual contestation of temporal comparisons: as a matter of fact, the only extensive Liberal statement in the debate (made by the MP Arthur Holt) was the result of the motion on the point of order addressed by Labour deputies (Archibald Manuel and James Carmichael) to the Speaker (HC Deb (27 March 1952) vol. 498, col. 993–994).
Overall, the actual success of the NHS project in 1950–1952 could have aggravated the contestation of the past among its participants. As soon as the joint project of several successive governments and oppositions was merely a good political investment promising good returns, the glimpses of the post-war consensus were detectible in the skilful interplay of contestations, abstentions and ratifications regarding the comparisons between the past and the future. By the time of the last debate, however, the relative harmony came to an end, and the division of the spoils of victory appeared to the parliamentary as the more attractive strategy than its joint celebration. Unlike before, the differences between past and present of the NHS were consensually deemed positive and therefore unworthy of contestation, as manifest in the rather angry remark of the Labour MP John Baird addressed to his Conservative opponent: ‘He also knows that a large proportion of the children today are being treated by the ordinary dentist in his surgery and the health of the schoolchildren today is higher than it was before’ (John Baird (LAB), HC Deb (27 March 1952) vol. 498, col. 895). Consequently, the focus of the contestation shifted from evaluating to expropriating the opponent’s share in the joint advancement of the health services. Since Conservatives could not privatize the successful implementation of the NHS, they chose to belittle the involvement of their opponents by dissolving the specific medical progress of the last years presided by Labour in the overall social progress of humanity. This attempt is manifest in the words of Ian MacLeod, MP and the future Minister of Health: ‘Of course the health of the schoolchildren is higher today - [HON. MEMBERS: "Dentally."] - Dentally, medically and in every other way. So it was last year and the year before and throughout the century’ (Ian MacLeod (CON), ibid). All in all, the statistics on the 1952 debates confirms the correlation between dissensus and the reinforcement of the adversarial political roles (Ihalainen, 2014: 424).
Conclusion
This article was arguably the first attempt at practicing a small-scale historical semantics in an interactional setting applied to the study of temporal comparisons. Whereas the narrative history of temporal concepts generally deals with linear concepts such as ‘progress’ or ‘decay’, which semantics in a given text projects the particular writer’s world view to the consecutively developed piece of writing, its interactional counterpart is an essentially non-linear phenomenon jointly constructed in real-time interactions.
It was hypothesized that the gap between turn-taking (speaking after someone) and stance-taking (speaking against someone) could be strategically used by parliamentary parties (Labour, Conservatives and Liberals) and administrative roles (government and opposition) to maintain the balance between cooperation and competition essential for the functioning of parliamentary machinery in the British House of Commons. Since the traditional function of parliaments has been to provide independent opinion to the government (including, but not limited to, dissent), it was further hypothesized that drawing the line between the (right) opinion of the own party and the (wrong) opinion of the other party, that is, performing contestation, would provide the main strategy of self-legitimization and, by the same token, other-delegitimization. Conversely, abstaining from this delimitation (non-contestation) or even rejecting it outright (ratification) would boost the collaborative strength of institutional setting needed for getting legislation done and providing for its future execution. Accordingly, the various choices made between contestation, non-contestation and ratification by parties and administrative roles would indicate the preferential modi operandi and establish differences and similarities between parties, roles and historical epochs.
This methodology was applied to the speech acts in form of temporal comparisons in the speeches of deputies in the British House of Commons during the so-called post-war consensus. It turned out that no such consensus existed in parliamentary practice, with all kinds of temporal comparisons available for debate and contestation regardless of political and institutional roles: throughout the whole period observed, the stance-taking appeared to be an accepted unwritten rule of a parliamentary debate. Whenever non-contestation or even ratification of the opponent’s temporal comparisons stemmed from the jointly constructed and consensually agreed upon past actions (e.g. bills or amendments with cross-party support), less salient temporal contestation points were often chosen as a replacement.
At the same time, the general statistical prevalence of non-contested comparisons in the debates at the House of Commons attests to the substantial share of non-antagonistic moves in the institutional interaction: although it was obviously favourable for political parties, governments and oppositions to seize opportunities for self-legitimization and other delegitimisation by attacking the opponents’ temporal comparisons, most of such opportunities remained unused: overall, contestation of temporal comparisons was usually deployed in relation to specific bill details and their consequences, and only insofar as bipartisan unspoken interactional rules (the ‘maiden speech’ custom) did not apply. At the end of the day, the ‘post-war consensus’ was probably business as usual with the collaborative dimension of parliamentary interaction receiving oversized attention at the expense of the competitive one.
As a point of further development, in this study we did not detect and classify the specific kinds of temporal comparisons used in parliamentary debates altogether, let alone in specific circumstances. For this, a more extensive empirical research, possibly helped by the methods of digital humanities, is needed (Götzelmann et al., 2021). In this respect, as in many others, interactional historical semantics is still in its infancy.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by 10.13039/501100001659, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, SFB 1288.
