Abstract
Designing the welfare state: Selected building metaphors of the welfare state across the British press
Highlights
Discourse-historical approach to discourse analysis This paper is informed by the discourse-historical approach (DHA) to discourse analysis, and so Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which views ‘language as social practice’ (Fairclough and Wodak 1997)
There are instances across the corpus of metaphors highlighting the planning of the welfare state which do not function within this topos, such as the following excerpt from a Telegraph column on the broader shape of social security by a Labour MP, Frank Field: (6) Arguably, our current welfare system is more aligned to what was available pre-Beveridge, this despite Beveridge being still actively acknowledged as the architect of the modern welfare state. (...) Beveridge's proposals, which Clement Attlee, the prime minister, endorsed, were value-driven. (Field, Telegraph 2012)
Concluding remarks While not all metaphorical expressions in the ‘planning’ category cooccur with references to Beveridge, he is clearly a looming figure in the passages above. This is likely because he is a convenient vehicle to channel conservative criticism of the welfare state, having expressed such criticism himself, and at the same time a figure cherished on the Left as a founder of the welfare state
Summary
This contradiction is what makes the study of the concept, as reflected in the use of the term, so interesting, and the present paper sets out to analyse selected metaphors of the welfare state in the British press. Charteris-Black (2004: 69-85) finds it one of the most productive source domains in his corpus of Conservative and Labour election manifestos, with the conceptual metaphors (that he refers to as ‘underlying’) formulated as SOCIETY/COUNTRY IS A BUILDING and WORTHWHILE ACTIVITY IS BUILDING prominent in his sample of political discourse.
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