British Political Discourse Research Articles

The Politics of Time

This article traces the uses of zeitgeist in early nineteenth-century European political discourse. To explain the concept's explosive takeoff in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, two perspectives are combined. On the one hand, the concept is shown to be a key element in the new, “temporalized” discourses of cultural reflection emerging during this time. On the other, its pragmatic value as a linguistic tool in concrete political constellations is outlined on the basis of case studies from French, British, and German political discourse. Developing this two-sided perspective, the article sheds light on an important aspect of early nineteenth-century political discourse while also pointing to some general considerations concerning the relationship between the semantic and pragmatic analysis of historical language use.

Introduction: The Legacy of Anne Mellor

NOAH COMET Introduction: The Legacy ofAnne Mellor NNE MELLOR HAS CHANGED WHAT AND HOW WE READ AS SCHOLARS OF TARomanticism. As we reflect on her retirement, we honor her with new scholarship inspired by hers and in the spirit of her cheer and camaraderie in print, at conferences, and in the classroom. The essays here—by those who have known Anne as a friend, as a teacher and professional mentor, as an in­ tellectual influence, and as a devoted colleague or collaborator—draw upon the resources and energy of her work and project a future from which her influence sees no retirement. Some of these essays were previewed at a Clark Library conference held in Anne’s honor over two fun and stimulat­ ing days in October 2012. Anne’s scholarly adventurousness and her critical commitments have taught us so much about so many things, including Blake’s evolution as an artist, the paradigm of “English romantic irony,” the “genders” ofRoman­ ticism, the feminist uses of historicism, and innovations in pedagogy. Her groundbreaking work on women writers, especially, has been a major force in transforming Romantic studies over the last quarter century. For re­ searchers of my generation, whose professional lives began in the aftermath of Romanticism & Gender (1992), Mellor’s Romanticism is and has always been our Romanticism, seeded in the pioneering anthology, Romanticism and Feminism (1988). Nevertheless, we still feel the transformative power of her work every time we confront earlier scholarship that ignored what she subsequently made so un-ignorable. Between the introduction to Romanticism & Gender and the postscript to Mothers ofthe Nation (2000), we witness Romanticism made simultaneously whole and new again. Anne flings open the doors of a room too long inhabited only by six men, and demonstrates just how the conversations of and about Romanticism change once women reenter. Many women writers of the period, she explains at the outset of Romanticism & Gender, “insisted on the fundamental equality of women and men,” basing their moral systems on “an ethic ofcare which insists on the primacy ofthe fam­ ily or the community.”’ This ethic, “cooperative rather than possessive,” 1. Romanticism & Gender, 2. SiR, 53 (Fall 2014) 291 292 NOAH COMET extended “the values of domesticity into the public realm.” Mothers of the Nation focuses our attention on that public realm, tracing women’s engage­ ments with English political discourse from 1780 to 1830. In summarizing the myriad questions that those women raised about themselves and about civil society, Anne concludes with a wish whose fulfillment is already at work in her own project: “the women writers of the Romantic era should at the very least be credited with intelligently formulating [key] questions and entering them into the forum of open rational debate, into the discur­ sive public sphere.”2 Anne’s career itself adds a chapter to the story she tells of women in Romanticism. In her distinctly spirited and memorable collegiality with her peers, through her mentorship of graduate students, through her NEH seminars, and through the foundation of her longstanding Southern Cali­ fornia Romantic Studies Group, she has embodied a community—an egal­ itarian family—energized by an ethic of care and a just political purpose.3 And there is no better instance of the intervention of key questions and reasoned public debate about Romantic women writers than Anne’s own career of publication, lecturing, and teaching. Her peers agree. Anne’s UCLA colleague Felicity Nussbaum notes, “Like the women writers she studies, including especially Mary Wollstonecraft , Anne has published revolutionary thought while affirming the princi­ ples of reason and the value of deep feeling.”4 And Cliff Siskin, who along with Anne co-edits a Palgrave series that has now issued more than forty books, relates her career to intellectual sociability in the best tradition. Like Francis Bacon, he remarks, “Anne sees knowledge as an act of engagement—of nature, the world, and others. That’s why she travels so much, and that’s why every minute of that travel is spent taking up every opportunity for engagement that travel affords: every sight, on every stage, on every night, and with all forms ofhuman endeavor. To spend time with Anne is to...

A journey to citizenship: Constructions of citizenship and identity in the British Citizenship Test

The British Citizenship Test was introduced in 2005 as one of a raft of new procedures aimed at addressing the perceived problems of integration and social cohesion in migrant communities. In this study, we argue that this new citizenship procedure signals a shift in British political discourse about citizenship - particularly, the institutionalization of a common British citizen identity that is intended to draw citizens together in a new form of political/national community. In line with this, we examine the British Citizenship Test from a social psychological perspective to interrogate the ways in which the test constitutes identity, constitutes citizenship, and constitutes citizenship-as-identity. Analysis of the test and its associated documents highlights three ways in which Britishness-as-identity is constituted, that is, as a collective identity, as a superordinate and national identity, and finally as both a destination and a journey. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for models of citizenship and models of identity.

Lost in translation? The framing and implementation of David Cameron’s Big Society agenda

David Cameron was personally responsible to introducing the term “Big Society” into English political discourse. The concept has roots in Conservative social policies and draws on some classic texts. However, he has had difficulty both in defining what it actually means and on how to put it into practice. Despite a failure to communicate its significance successfully to the electorate, the Coalition government committed itself after the inconclusive 2010 General Election to implementation. However, there is no single master plan, rather a series of disparate initiatives conducted at different levels in government - a modest programme of financial support and promotion of volunteering based in the Cabinet Office and wider political initiatives sometimes branded as “Big Society”, involving the engagement of voluntary bodies and volunteers in service delivery - for example, the promotion of localism, reform of government, changes in the NHS. The future of the project remains uncertain but it will continue in some form as long as David Cameron remains committed.

Re-Reading Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Against the Grain: Toward a Dialectical Theory of Responsible Party Discourse

This essay represents the author's attempt to grapple with number of tensions inspired and enriched by Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This author's interest in history and historical context first engendered skepticism regarding Habermas's surprising discovery of the of the bourgeois public sphere (hereafter BPS) within the far less than context of eighteenth-century English politics and political discourse. Habermas critics have long noted that Structural Transformation often ignored many of the dreadful realties of the context of eighteenth-century political discourse (Calhoun, 1992, pp. 33, 239). There can be little doubt that the reality of politics and political discourse, at least in the English BPS, was antithetical to Habermas's ideal. According to Craig Calhoun (1992), for Habermas: The importance of the public sphere lies in its potential as mode of societal integration. Public discourse ... is possible mode of coordination of human life, as are state power and market economies. But money and power are non-discursive modes of coordination ... they offer no intrinsic openings to the identification of reason and will, and they suffer from tendencies toward domination and reification. (p. 6) In fact, public discourse of the period associated with the English BPS was thoroughly inundated with the influences of money and power. This period saw the rise and consolidation of modern financial institutions like the Bank of England and stock markets. And this timeframe also saw important developments in the growth of English political institutions--particularly political parties--that also exercised influence over policy outcomes and social coordination. In sum, the Structural Transformation may be said excessively to downplay the extent to which the power of emerging financial and political institutions, rather than the power of the better argument, shaped and guided English political discourse and policy--even during the time at which the BPS was allegedly in its prime. But alongside this longstanding unease with the manner in which Habermas may be said to have neglected historical accuracy in the service of his efforts to recover a valuable critical ideal (Calhoun, 1992, p. 29) from the BPS, my current ruminations on Habermas's Structural Transformation are informed not just by history, but by concerns about the hyperpartisan context of early twenty-first century political discourse in the United States. As corrective both to Habermas's downplaying of party and partisanship in the English BPS, as well as the seemingly unchecked partisanship of current political discourse, this essay uses Habermas's Structural Transformation as springboard for developing contextually based strategies for argument evaluation that view political parties and partisan discourse, not exclusively as distortions of rationality or culprits in the decay of an idealized BPS, but rather as potential agents of rational deliberation and discourse. Although Habermas (1989) maintained that the rise of modern interest-based political parties was contributing factor in the decline of the BPS (pp. 203-5), he recognized nevertheless that the rational critical debate of the English BPS was itself somehow structured by discursive tension between Robert Walpole's government and Bolingbroke's opposition. The English BPS, Habermas contends, resulted largely from the parliamentary opposition's attempt to influence the state by recourse to the umpire of public opinion. Opposition papers achieved the status of fourth estate; and the public sphere developed in confrontation between the press and the state: From 1727 on, under the impact of the Craftsman, systematic opposition arose which ... until 1742, via literature and press, informed the public at large about the political controversies in Parliament (Habermas, 1989, pp. 63-64). Habermas (1989) continues, through the critical debate of the public, it [political opposition] took the form of permanent controversy between the governing party and the opposition . …

FEAR AND LOATHING: THE POLITICAL DISCOURSE IN RELATION TO MUSLIMS AND ISLAM IN THE BRITISH CONTEMPORARY SETTING

Following the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001 (‘9/11’), the Los Angeles Times wrote that the ‘next big thing’ was likely to be fear. This paper seeks to consider how the notion of fear and threat has influenced and shaped British political discourse in relation to Muslims and Islam – especially ‘home-grown’ Muslims and Islam - over the past decade or so. Considering the broad spectrum of British politics, including both mainstream and fringe, this paper begins with a consideration of the British National Party (BNP) and the way in which it has grown and gained electoral success on the back of overtly anti-Muslim, anti-Islamic campaigns. Considering the influence of this on the establishment and development of the English Defence League, the discourse of other political actors including the New Labour Government is explored to highlight the closing of difference between the left and right wings of British political discourse. To conclude, Martin Barker’s theories of ‘new racism’ are explored as a means of understanding the changes in the British political spaces before conclusions are drawn that highlight what might be evidence of a hardening of ideas and attitudes about Muslims and Islam more widely

Terrorism in Media Political Discourse: from Metaphorical Expressions to Cognitive Models

This study aims at analysing metaphorical expressions and reconstructing TERRORISM metaphors in British and Lithuanian media political discourse in the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics and political philosophy (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, Johnson 1993, Elshtain 2004, Fairclough 2001, Spencer 2006, Turner 2002, etc.). For that purpose, thirty-six analytical articles, searched by the key word ‘terrorism (En.) / terorizmas (Lith.)’ were collected from the online archives of The Economist and www.politika.lt. The method applied to investigate the collected data is that of qualitative analysis in the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics and conceptual metaphor theory (Чудинов 2001, Fauconnier and Turner 2002, Kövecses 2002, Lakoff 2001, 2002, etc.). The findings reveal that despite different time patterns of the collected data sources (i. e. English 2010; Lithuanian 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) the analogous metaphors of WAR, CRIME and HEALTH have been reconstructed. Their analysis shows the prevalence of pragmatic political morality to TERRORISM governed by the concepts of STRENGTH, ORDER and CONTROL. Even more, their use spreads fear of terrorism by exploiting the image of terrifying war scenes, serious criminal activities and the deadly virus rapidly contaminating social order.

Theory, Ideology, Rhetoric: Ideas in Politics and the Case of ‘Community’ in Recent Political Discourse

The article develops and applies a framework for examining the way in which ideas figure and re-figure in political discourse. The framework identifies three ‘levels’ of discourse: theory, ideology and rhetoric. These are distinguished by reference to the differing performative conditions pertaining at each level, which in turn explain differing styles and modalities. The framework allows a multilayered examination of political ideas, employing an analysis at one level in order to illuminate another. The framework is then applied to the case of the idea of community as it has figured in recent British political discourse and allows an elucidation of the ideological adaptations and rhetorical strategies in which the idea has featured. The analysis reveals the discursive complexities attaching to the use of ideas in politics.

Non-acceptances in context

The communicative act of non-acceptance expresses the speaker's intention to deny, reject or disagree with a communicative act. Regarding its sequential status, a non-acceptance is a responsive act par excellence, and from an interpersonal perspective it can be assigned the status of a face-threatening act. While its responsive format does not seem to cause any severe communicative problems in intercultural communication, its face-threatening potential makes it a prime candidate for intercultural miscommunication. The goal of this paper is to systematize the contextual constraints and requirements of a non-acceptance in a dialogue frame of reference based on the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim (Fetzer 2002, 2004), which is anchored to the Gricean cooperative principle (Grice 1975), Habermas' theory of communicative action (Habermas 1987), and Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness (Brown & Levinson 1987). The pragmatic premises of intentionality, rationality, and cooperation are supplemented by the interactional-sociolinguistic universal of contextualization (Gumperz 1996). The dialogue framework allows for a comprehensive examination of culture-preferential modes for the realization and contextualization of nonacceptances and possible perlocutionary effects, illustrated by excerpts from German, British and intercultural German-British political discourse.

Britų politikos vertinimas: konceptualiosios moralės metaforos analizė

Šio straipsnio tikslas – atskleisti, kokia pagrindinė konceptualioji metafora vyrauja šiuolaikiniame britų politiniame diskurse ir kokie jos struktūriniai elementai sudaro bendro moralinio vertinimo pagrindą. Tyrimui buvo pasirinkta trisdešimt analitinių politinių straipsnių iš The Economist elektroninio archyvo. Straipsniai analizuojami remiantis kognityvinės lingvistikos principais bei kokybiniu analizės metodu, kurie leidžia atskleisti kalbiniuose pasakymuose (linguistic expressions) glūdinčias konceptualiąsias metaforas. Nustatyta, kad Britų politikos moralinis vertinimas yra grindžiamas konceptualiąja metafora POLITINIS GYVENIMAS KAIP KELIONĖ. Išanalizavus šios metaforos kalbinę raišką, paaiškėjo, kad straipsniuose vyrauja neigiamas britų politikos vertinimas, atsispindintis konceptualiosios metaforos POLITINIS GYVENIMAS YRA KELIONĖ elementų kalbinėje raiškoje, kai politikos veikėjai (1) vaizduojami kaip „dėmėtos reputacijos“ klajūnai, (2) keliaujantys be tikslo, (3) peržengiantys nustatytas ribas, (4) nesugebantys apeiti/įveikti kelyje pasitaikančių kliūčių ir t.t.

The racialization of language in British political discourse

In the summer of 2001 there were violent disturbances on the streets of towns and cities in the north of England. These disturbances, popularly described in the British media as ‘race riots’, principally involved young British Asian men, young White British men, and the police. In November 2002 the Nationality, Immigration, and Asylum Act was granted Royal Assent, and passed into British law, introducing legislation which required spouses of British citizens to demonstrate their proficiency in English when applying for British citizenship. This paper provides an analysis of the racialization of language in political discourse which linked the violence on the streets of northern England with the argument for extended citizenship language testing. The paper concludes that this discourse is recontextualized and transformed in increasingly legitimate contexts, gaining authority as it travels, until it is enshrined in the least negotiable domain of all – the law.

Mapping adversative coherence relations in English and French

An approach to contrastive analysis is discussed that combines semantic mapping with analysis of comparable corpus data. Such an approach can help elucidate the many-to-many relationships between expressions or constructions of two languages. In turn, contrastive analysis is what enables us to represent the conceptual space that forms the basis for semantic mapping. The approach is illustrated with examples of expressions of adversative coherence relations from English and French political discourse.

From the Editors: Politics of Language and Politics of Meaning

16 From the Editors, Politics of Language and Politics of Meaning From the EDITORS As part of the intellectual project “New Imperial History,” the editors of Ab Imperio decided to address the problem of the conceptual apparatus that the empires’ contemporaries and historians of empire had at their disposal. We entitled this annual program “Languages of Self-Description in Empire and Multiethnic State.” Our “linguistic turn” is founded upon an increasing understanding that empires, while indeed pre-modern forms of political, social, and economic organization, were nevertheless engaged in the processes of modernization. Scholars of modern Europe have emphasized the concept of “nation” as a key block in the construction of political and social space. Modern humanities and social sciences, as we know today, emerged and matured within this normative framework. Empires, in contrast, left virtually no rationalizing and complex self-description that we can compare with the discourse of modern nationalism, that is, no self-description profoundly different from the “nationalizing” mode of modern social thought. In order to understand to what extent nation-centered historical analysis influences our perceptions of “empire,” we invited the contributors to this issue of Ab Imperio to reconstruct the possible languages of imperial selfdescription in scholarship, art, geopolitics, law, dynastic myth, religion, etc. We are also interested in the evolution of these languages under the impact of the encounter between pre-modern concepts (e.g., “dynasty” or “estate”) and modern ones (“state” or “class”). Among other directions POLITICS OF LANGUAGE AND POLITICS OF MEANING 17 Ab Imperio, 2/2005 in New Imperial History, our search is for signs of collusion between the autochthonous realities of empires and the ideas and practices borrowed from the modern nation-state. For this issue of Ab Imperio, we have decided to focus on the problem of political language and language policies in the multiethnic and culturally heterogeneous continental empires. Realpolitik, as a sequence of documented and rationally founded actions , is among the most obvious subjects for a narrative of imperial self-description. On the other hand, the internal dynamics of the imperial space are revealed through the functioning of languages of those ethnic and confessional groups that were incorporated into empires (that is, “language” in the direct sense of the word). In this case, scholars have focused either on the specific situation of language contacts in imperial settings or on the dominance of the “imperial nation” and regional cultural centers, while language policies in the empire have been viewed as the authentic language of self-description of empire as a polity. The main problem with the study of politics as an imperial metalanguage (of which language policies constitute a part) is stipulated by the fact that in the past decades research on the phenomenon of the political and of language developed along colliding trajectories. Such developments of the late 20th century as the anthropological and linguistic “turns,” postcolonial studies, and new political history ensured that “language” and “politics” came to be defined and studied interdependently and even tautologically: language contacts are ever more theorized in terms of political conflict, whereas political acts are analyzed in linguistic categories (such as “grammar” or “syntax”). The introduction of such a binary model as “language-politics” into imperial studies can lead to confusion due to the many subjects of politics and the polyglossy of imperial space. Hence we see the task of this issue as de-coupling the traditional formula “language-politics” and as searching for ways to overcome the tautological analyses of these two key phenomena. First, in our methodological section, we address the experience of nuanced studies of language and politics in imperial contexts. The rubric opens with an article by Andrew Thompson, who explores the semantics of “empire” in British political discourse at the turn of the 20th century. Despite widely held opinions about the fundamental difference between overseas-modern empires and continental-archaic ones, Thompson’s method of analysis and his conclusions appear extremely relevant to the study of the Russian Empire. Thompson demonstrates the heterogeneity 18 From the Editors, Politics of Language and Politics of Meaning and many meanings of British political language and shows that the interests and intellectual horizons of political actors defined it...

Defining Christians, Making Britons: Rammohun Roy and the Unitarians

genders. The Indian reformer was presented to King William IV and seated among the foreign ambassadors at William's coronation. He attended London plays in the company of nobility, was introduced to the House of Lords, and flirted with a popular actress with aristocratic male friends. Religious and political thinkers sought him out to engage in spirited discussions, and Dissenting and Anglican clergymen vied with each other for the honor of his presence at their services. Prominent middle-class reformers were constantly at his side, their daughters or unmarried sisters often especially attentive to him. And, while in Manchester, a crowd of factory workers followed Rammohun about on his tour, the men and women insisting on shaking his hand or embracing him. As a contemporary noted, Rammohun was clearly the lion of the season (Bentinck 658-59). Rammohun's celebrity owed much to his remarkable accomplishments. A noted reformer, he had campaigned in Bengal for religious reform, western education, and the diffusion of modern knowledge. Learned in several languages and conversant with the intellectual traditions of western Europe and South Asia, Rammohun was a prominent religious controversialist who used Sanskritic texts and the Bible to confound pandits and missionaries, respectively. The technologies of modernity were facile tools in his hands as well: a pioneer of Indian journalism, Rammohun used the power of the printing press to influence governments and public opinion in both Bengal and Britain. He was also a modernizer in politics, employing his command of English and the conventions of British political discourse to lead Bengali opposition to colonial policies and to craft brilliant memorials to the British authorities. With additional contributions to the development of Bengali prose and

Godwin, Provocation, and the Plot of Anger

I was angry with my friend I told my wrath my wrath did end I was angry with my foe I told it not my wrath did grow --Blake, A Poison Tree WILLIAM BLAKE'S A POISON TREE SUGGESTS THAT ACTING UPON ANGER puts an end to plot; whether we tell or wreak our wrath, its expression is antithetical to calculated narratives. As Philip Fisher says, anger is a fundamentally rash emotion precisely at odds with the world of plots.(1) On the other hand, the same poem presents the cultivation of angry passions as dependent upon the secret plotting of the speaker, whose hunger for vengeance grows in proportion to the narrative's deferral of satisfaction. In other words, in Blake's poem, anger both requires plots and disables them. This double vision is symptomatic of a broader, historically-specific oscillation in British conceptions of anger during the 1790s, due primarily to the influence of the French Revolution and the ways it was discussed. In English political, medical, and legal discourse of the period, we find a remarkable alignment of changing attitudes towards rage in the wake of the Revolution, as if the fear of popular anger washed over the entire culture and altered the landscape of the mind. As revolutionary anger was being demonized as irrational, destructive rage in conservative political discourse, inflammation (of the body and body politic) was being reconceptualized as a dangerous disease in metaphorical and medical terms.(2) To this extent, the plot of anger was being written as a blind and rash trajectory--the arc of shrapnel in the explosion. On the other hand, a parallel discourse depicted the radical leaders as pursuing a conscious, calculating program of wrath against the state, a plot of anger as sharply directed as a knife in the back. Furthermore, it remained a question of some importance to the revolution debates whether British subjects were discontented (i.e., angry) because of rational causes, such as their lack of representation in parliament, or because they had been inflamed by radical rhetoric that blinded them to their best interests. Was their anger a rational exercise of the will to advance the nation towards reform, or a mindless response to demagoguery, one that followed only a trajectory of destruction? These questions underlie much of the rhetoric surrounding the issue of reform in England during this period, and answers to them overspill the bounds of political debate into other disciplinary arenas. More specifically, and for our purposes here, changes in the way English courts judged cases of provocation follow the contours of the debate, suggesting a large-scale shift in national consciousness. As Jeremy Horder has shown, a new legal situation at the end of the eighteenth century had its basis in a changing conception of anger: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the law ceased to describe anger in terms of outrage, the conception of anger in which reason plays the dominant role in guiding action. The law instead described it in terms of a loss of self-control ... according to which passions overwhelm the power of reason, leaving people at the mercy of their desires for retaliatory suffering.(3) As a result, defendants who could establish that they killed in anger were assumed to have been out of control and thus not fully culpable for their actions. Just as medical doctors were redefining inflammation from curative symptom to irrational disease, lawyers and judges were rethinking outbursts of anger as fits of madness rather than exercises of the will. In this account, anger's narrative logic--a perceived injury followed by a desire for retaliation and an expression of that desire--becomes an automatic reaction that usually thwarts one's larger interests, rather than a rationally-pursued path in keeping with the self and its desires: the angry man kills his best friend; the British worker pulls down the political structures that have sustained him. …

TOURNAI AND THE ENGLISH CROWN, 1513–1519

The English occupation of Tournai has recently generated far-reaching claims about its importance; allegedly Tournai provided a foretaste of certain developments of the Henrician Reformation. This article argues that Tournai was treated as an integral part of Henry VIII's ‘kingdom of France’ and its status consistently distinguished from that of the English kingdom. It was not, as has been suggested, granted representation in the English parliament. The argument that advanced ideas of ‘sovereignty’ derived from fifteenth-century French thought entered into English political discourse through Tournai is also countered. Important jurisdictional points were raised, notably over the administration of the bishopric, involving three powers, England, France, and the Habsburg government of Flanders. But Henry's insistence on his rights as a sovereign prince were directed against France, not, as has been claimed, against the papacy. Nothing in Henry's dealings with Tournai transcended well-established English doctrine and practice about the relationship between the political authority and the church. Nor did Henry's treatment of the conquered town evoke novel doctrines of royal power; it followed closely precedents set by Henry V. The conquest of Tournai increased the self-confidence of Henry VIII's government in both domestic and international affairs; but largely through Henry's belief that he was successfully emulating the military achievement of Henry V, not through any input of novel political doctrine.

William III'sDeclaration of Reasonsand the Glorious Revolution

ABSTRACTThe paper considers reactions to William III'sDeclaration of reasons,the manifesto issued by the prince of Orange on the eve of his invasion of England in 1688. It questions recent historiography, which has argued for the importance of this document in William's success by claiming that it achieved a virtual hegemony of English political discourse in the period of the Glorious Revolution. The paper first shows that James II's supporters mounted an effective challenge to the OrangeDeclarationby reversing its claim that liberties were in danger under the existing regime. It then suggests that William lost control of his manifesto over the winter of 1688–9 by making moves to secure power and authority which were unadvertised in the document. Once this had happened, various groups opposed to Orange ambition were able to adopt the rhetoric of theDeclarationand quote it back at the prince in attempts to block his advance. The paper concludes with the irony that the ubiquity of the Declaration in 1688 may have been a result of its failure as publicity for the Orange cause; and by suggesting that scholars should look in places other than the manifesto for an effective Williamite propaganda.

British Racial Discourse: A Study of British Political Discourse about Race and Race-Related Matters

This book, first published in 1983, examines why people prefer to talk about immigrants or ethnic minorities when they are referring to differences marked not by the migratory process of ethnicity, but by skin colour. How, without mentioning racial criteria, have politicians managed to introduce immigration controls deliberately aimed at reducing the number of black migrants? This book identifies a central feature of British political life: the ability to justify racially discriminatory behaviour without recourse to explicit racist language. It gives an account of British racial ideology as it is practically experienced in the form of political discourse and helps to provide a theoretical understanding of its relationship to the social structure as a whole and in particular its relationship to inter- and intra-class divisions. The author argues that traditional class-based ideologies are perfectly capable of supporting racially oppressive institutions and have far better 'protective' properties than expressions of overt racism. As a result, the objective structures of British race relations are obscured by a facade of 'deracialised ideology'.

Reviews

The hidden language of race in British politics Frank Reeves, British Racial Discourse: A Study of British Political Discourse about Race and Race‐Related Matters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. viii +287pp. Appends. Bibl. Inds. £22.50. Fascism on the periphery: ineffectual and insignificant John D. Brewer, Mosley's Men: The British Union of Fascists in the West Midlands. London: Gower, 1984. xii+159pp. Notes. Bibl. Ind. £13.50. Intellectual ‘angst’ of the powerless Stanley Diamond (ed.), ‘The Jewish Question’. A special issue of Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 8, nos. 1 & 2, October 1983.

Narrative Time

Narrative Time