The Discursive Construction of Economic Inequality

CADS Approaches to the British Media

Eva M. Gomez-Jimenez, Michael Toolan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350111301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística histórica y comparativa

This book analyses diverse public discourses to investigate how wealth inequality has been portrayed in the British media from the time of the Second World War to the present day. Using a variety of corpus-assisted methods of discourse analysis, chapters present an historicized perspective on how the mass media have helped to make sharply increased wealth inequality seem perfectly normal. Print, radio and online media sources are interrogated using methodologies grounded in critical discourse analysis, critical stylistics and corpus linguistics in order to examine the influence of the media on the British electorate, who have passively consented to the emergence of an even less egalitarian Britain. Covering topics such as Second World War propaganda, the 'Change4Life' anti-obesity campaign and newspaper, parliamentary and TV news programme attitudes to poverty and austerity, this book will be of value to all those interested in the mass media's contribution to the entrenched inequality in modern Britain.

1

Poverty and social exclusion in Britain

A corpus-assisted discourse study of Labour and Conservative Party leaders’ speeches, 1900–2014

Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Sadiq Almaged

1.1 Introduction

The impact of poverty and social exclusion (PSE) reaches beyond insufficient financial income to meet individuals’ basic needs such as nutrition and shelter. As the World Bank Organization (2006) reminds us, PSE also concerns women, men and children feeling uncertain about their future, not having access to education and employment and surviving from day to day. The rise of PSE levels across a number of countries is concerning, and the UK, on which this study is based, is no exception. According to a June 2019 report by the UK Office for National Statistics, approximately 4.7 million people in the UK (7.8 per cent of its population) lived in persistent poverty in 2017 – with persistent poverty being defined as that which affects individuals whose ‘disposable income falls below 60 per cent of the national median’ in the year being measured and ‘at least two out of the three preceding years’ (UK Office for National Statistics 2019). The same report states that the UK’s poverty rate in 2017 affected approximately 2.4 million working people. This resonates with Toolan’s (2018: 221) statement that ‘[t]wenty and more years ago, people in poverty were mostly unemployed, whereas today they are more often in work, but lowly paid’. Further evidence of rising levels of PSE in the UK comes from 2014 to 2017 figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which situate the UK within the top ten countries in the world for wealth inequality – the top 20 per cent of the country’s population earn six times as much as the bottom 20 per cent (OECD 2019). In addition, a 2018 report published by the British think tank E3G highlights that more than 3,000 people are ‘needlessly’ dying each year in the UK because of ‘fuel poverty’; that is, they cannot afford to heat their homes properly (E3G 2018).

Given the above, it is perhaps unsurprising that PSE have become the focus of political attention over time. O’Connor (2001) describes this as a ‘politicization’ of PSE, whereby political party agendas have come to play a progressively more influential role in determining PSE causes, measures and effects. There has also been a considerable rise in academic interest in PSE, in particular within the fields of politics, economy and sociology (see, for example Heath et al. 2013; Lansley 2012; Townsend and Gordon 2002; Westergaard 2012). An important body of discourse analytic scholarship into PSE has emerged over time, too, which has primarily examined the semiotic practices that individuals and groups deploy to represent PSE (see Section 1.2). Within this scholarship, however, there are some comparatively under-researched areas, which this study aims to address, specifically the discursive construction of PSE by political elites across time. Using the UK as a case study, this chapter examines the discursive means by which the leaders of the country’s two main political parties – Conservative and Labour – have represented PSE across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in their party conference speeches.

The chapter is structured as follows. Sections 1.2 and 1.3, respectively, review the relevant literature into PSE from a discourse analysis perspective and provide a brief overview of the ideology of the Conservative and Labour Parties, focusing on the political events to be examined in this paper, namely their annual party conferences between 1900 and 2014. Section 1.4 introduces the data and methodological approach adopted in our study, namely corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). Section 1.5 reports our key results, identifying similarities and differences in the discursive construction of PSE by political party and across time. In Section 1.6, we pull together these results, noting the relevance of British political leaders’ discursive representations of PSE.

1.2 Representing poverty and social exclusion in discourse

Research into PSE within the field of linguistics, and specifically discourse analysis, has focused on how these issues are semiotically represented across a range of institutional contexts, especially the mass media. This research broadly agrees that representations of individuals and groups living in PSE are primarily negative, often involving some form of stereotyping (see, for example, De Melo Resende (2016), Garcia da Silva (2008), Lacerda (2015) in the context of Brazil, Pardo (2013) in Argentina, Pardo-Abril (2008) in Colombia, Summers (2006) in New Zealand, Fairclough (2005) in Romania and Toft (2014) in the United States). Within the UK media,¹ the first – to our knowledge – book-length treatment of the discursive representation of poverty in the UK is the edited collection by Meinhof and Richardson (1994), titled Text, Discourse and Context: Representations of Poverty in Britain. Only one chapter in this book examines media representations of ‘home’ (as opposed to ‘Third World’) poverty by the British med ia (Street 1994). The analysis reveals that, while regularly using ‘supposedly comparable empirical data from other countries in order to highlight features of the home society’, the British media mainly downplay poverty as a sociopolitical issue in the UK (Street 1994: 50).

More recently, several studies have been published that integrate corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis (CDA) in order to find recurring patterns in the language used to represent PSE across UK media. Baker and McEnery (2015a), for instance, analyse Twitter responses to the British television show Benefits Street. These cluster around three main discourses: the idle poor, the poor as victims and the rich get richer. Van der Bom et al.’s (2018) analysis of Twitter responses to the same television show also reveals that benefits claimants are regularly constructed as social parasites and as morally inadequate and members of a flawed underclass. Focusing on a particular type of state-backed benefit in the UK (i.e. maternity leave), Gómez-Jiménez (2018) shows how representations of maternity leave became monetarized by the British press (the Times and Daily Mail) in the last thirty years or so of the twentieth century (1971–2001). Two main discourses (or ‘macrostructures’) emerged during that time: one saw mothers-to-be as facing numerous problems; the other regarded changes in maternity leave policy (three during the period examined) as leading to negative consequences for British society.

Two further corpus and discourse studies of PSE in the UK media across time of direct relevance are Toolan (2016, 2018). In Toolan (2016) the focus is on representations of wealth inequality and social class within television programme reviews published by the Daily Mail in 1971 (reviews by Peter Black) and in 2013 (reviews by Christopher Steven). Highlight findings include a disappearance of discussions about class and wealth inequality in the 2013 reviews, when compared to the 1971 reviews. Toolan (2016) warns that the absence of such discussion may become naturalized. In Toolan (2018) a comprehensive analysis of the representation of inequality in the UK media (primarily the Times and Daily Mail) over a forty-five-year period (1971–2016) is offered. In addition to confirming stigmatizing portrayals of those who experience some form of PSE, this analysis confirms the naturalization of wealth inequality, which is constructed as inevitable. As a result, Toolan (2018: 224) further argues, ‘The rejection of egalitarian policies and redistribution as unreasonable and unjustified became considerably more discursively entrenched’ over the forty-five-year period examined. Toolan (2018) continues to call for CDAs of wealth inequality to gain centrality within an otherwise prolific research agenda focused on other forms of inequality and discrimination.

Analysis of the representation of PSE in British political (rather than media) discourse is comparatively scarce. This is somewhat surprising, considering that politics is the main social field in which decisions regarding policy, including PSE-related policy, are made and that those decisions are articulated in and through discourse (e.g. Chilton 2004). Within this literature, several studies are particularly relevant to the work covered in this chapter. Koller and Davidson (2008), for instance, examine the discursive mechanisms used in 2017 UK policy documents about social exclusion and also the 2005 speeches by the then Labour Party leader Ed Miliband. Their analysis shows recurring use of conceptual and grammatical metaphors that portray British society as a physical space offering warmth and shelter to those who are socially excluded. Watt (2008) examines images of benefit claimants in a council housing campaign in the UK. The findings, which show them to be visually rendered as ordinary people, contrast with those from stigmatizing media portrayals of benefits claimants. For their part, Lorenzo-Dus and Marsh (2012) analyse representations of poverty in UK (as well as US and EU) National Security Strategies over a nine-year period (1997–2006). Their analysis finds discursive evidence to support the International Relations thesis that poverty has undergone a process of ‘securitization’ (Balzacq 2005; Wæver 1995), whereby poverty/the poor are constructed as a security threat in high-level policy documents. This discursive evidence includes, among other, recurrent use of semantic-discursive categories, particularly post 2001, that link poverty to tyranny, terrorism, insecurity, security threat and security challenges.

For their part, McEnery and Baker (2017) use CADS to examine representations of PSE across time – in their case, throughout the seventeenth century – in England. Drawing upon a one billion word corpus of literary texts and examining the at-the-time commonly used terms ‘beggars and vagrants’, the study reveals the individuals thus labelled being systematically evaluated in hostile terms, including as being idle and fools. The study also shows a lack of compassion towards these individuals, whose social circumstances are not taken into consideration. Instead, a strong sense of personal responsibility and, therefore, personal blame, specifically of blaming beggars and vagrants for their own condition, characterizes their literary representation at that point in time.

Last, but not least, one must note the double-edged sword around the grammar of the noun ‘poverty’ in the English language. As Kress (1994: 29) puts it, in English ‘poverty is something that you can be in, or get yourself into’. Poverty happens to individuals – it is grammatically a state of being beyond their control. The corollary of this non-agentive grammar is that individuals may fall into poverty accidentally, rather than intentionally. Yet, ‘poverty itself can act agentively – poverty can drive us into despair, poverty causes the breakup of families, and so on’ (1994: 29). This may conveniently support the causal connections often drawn in elite discourses of PSE whereby the poor are represented as both passive (idle) and agentive (blameworthy) – something that may enable the ‘seeds for demonising poverty and the poor [to be] sown’ while supposedly freeing political institutions from any agentive responsibility (Lorenzo-Dus and Marsh 2012: 278).

1.3 The British political party system: A focus on the Conservative and the Labour Parties

Although the birth o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: The Discursive Construction of Economic Inequality in the UK
• 1 Poverty and social exclusion in Britain: A corpus-assisted discourse study of Labour and Conservative Party leaders’ speeches, 1900–2014
• 2 Inequality and ‘the language of leadership’ in the Second World War
• 3 Revisiting the welfare state through the decades: Investigating the discursive construction of the welfare state in the Times from 1940 to 2009
• 4 What can be done about child poverty? What the Times said then and what it says now
• 5 Inequality, accountability and responsibility in UK Press reporting on corporate fraud (2004–14) and modern slavery (2000–16)
• 6 Health inequality and the representation of ‘risky’ working-class identities in obesity policy
• 7 We are NOT all in this together: A corpus-assisted critical stylistics analysis of Austerity in Print News Media 2009–10 and 2016–17
• 8 More inequality, but less coverage: How and why TV news avoided ‘The Great Debate’ either side of the financial crisis 2008–14
• 9 The democracy we live in: Can there be democracy without equality?
• Afterword
• References
• Index
• Copyright