Politicians and Rhetoric by Jonathan Charteris-Black

Author:Jonathan Charteris-Black
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

The rose I am wearing is the rose of England. (10 October 1986)

Ironically, it was the red rose that was later taken up as the symbol of New Labour. The advantage of a metaphor model based on notions of national identity is that it can readily be invoked to identify the Conservative Party with national ‘insider’ interests that are opposed to foreign ‘outsider’ interests such as the European Union:

We were elected with a clear commitment to the European Community and to fight tenaciously for British interests within it. We have honoured that commitment. We have both fought for our interests and extended our influence. But we are not half-hearted members of the Community. We are in, and we are in to stay. And I look forward to another famous victory in the European elections next June. (14 October 1983)

Or against the internal enemy that threatens national survival which, from Thatcher’s perspective, included supporters of unilateral disarmament:

It was Labour’s Hugh Gaitskell who promised the country to fight, fight and fight again against the unilateral disarmers in his own party. That fight was continued by his successors. Today the fight is over. (10 October 1986)

However, perhaps the clearest manifestation of the POLITICS IS CONFLICT conceptual metaphor in relation to ideological struggle is her extensive and pervasive use of figurative language in relation to socialism. There are in fact two stages to this representation; the first is to create a metonym in which the Labour Party stands for socialism. In the second stage she draws on a rich conceptual framework to employ metaphor to demonise socialism. The evaluative and persuasive force of conflict metaphors originates in an association between socialism, immorality and evil that I will explore further in the next section.

7.2.4 Summary of Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric

From the point of view of the hearer – in this case the political audience – there is a cumulative effect of figures of speech in which different metaphor targets are all explained with reference to the domain of conflict. By using the conceptual frame of conflict to describe all types of opponent – whether they are social and economic problems, trade unions, political opponents or actual ideologies such as socialism – the negative associations evoked by metaphors evaluating any one of these apply to all the others. The metaphor frame therefore sets up relations of equivalence through which she is able to create a subliminal association between social problems, economic problems, political opponents and ideologies and one that implies causal relations between them. We saw this in Chapter 1, where an association with the social outcome of crime, partially attributable to unemployment, was linked with Labour housing policies; inflation is equated with Labour economic policies and the implication is that it is caused by them. The conflict metaphor frame therefore encourages a transfer of evaluations between everything that is labelled as an opponent: this erodes the ability to identify rational explanations of social and economic problems – because emotionally they have already been explained.

Thatcher’s use of

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