UK Parliamentary Debates Research Articles

‘Nesting Dragon, Soldier, Spy’: Shaping the Narrative on China Through Huawei in UK Parliamentary Debates

ABSTRACT This article examines the controversy surrounding 5G in the United Kingdom preceding the decision to remove Huawei from the UK network. We analyse UK parliamentary debates from 2012–2020 against the backdrop of tensions between the United States and China in the race for global leadership in 5G technology. We identify four principal themes in the UK parliamentary discourse: Huawei as innovator and collaborator; a threat to national security; as undermining UK relations with its allies; and embodying opposing values. We argue that the narrative shifts in the UK government’s position towards Huawei correspond to Conservative Party internal conflicts on how to navigate the UK’s relationship with Huawei in response to geopolitical pressures. We situate this changing narrative within a political sinologism that is used to shape a negative view of Huawei and China.

Speaking security to (de)politicise: a study of UK parliamentary debates on Huawei 5G

ABSTRACT Using UK-Huawei 5G as a case, this paper maps the securitisation dynamics in the co-occurrence of (de)politicisation. Drawing links between macro/niche-securitisation and (de)politicisation, this paper argues that macro-securitisation can potentially politicise an issue whereas niche-securitisation can potentially depoliticise it. This analysis focuses on the ‘concern-solution’ framing within UK parliamentary debates on Huawei 5G from 2019 to 2020, examining the security narratives of both parliamentarians and ministers. Although both groups addressed national security concerns, parliamentarians macro-securitised Huawei 5G by highlighting the ‘Huawei-China’ linkage and framing it as an ‘Us-Them’ identity issue, portraying it as a threat to the UK’s ideology, values and identity. In contrast, ministers employed niche-securitisation, confining the issue to the telecoms sector and emphasising the overall networks rather than singling out Huawei or China. The parliamentarians’ macro-securitisation potentially rendered Huawei 5G louder and noisier, leading to calls for an outright ban and stricter legislation. Conversely, the government’s niche-securitisation potentially shifted focus towards diversifying the telecoms supply chain, thereby discursively delegating this issue to experts and market and legitimising its abnormal decision-makings on Huawei 5G.

A pragmatic Analysis of Effective Political Communication from a Relevance-Theoretic Perspective

A substantial aim of political communication is to engage specific groups of citizens through pragmatic policies and various media channels to convey messages and gain the audience’s acceptance effectively. This study investigates political communication as a form of discourse that occurs within political contexts, which involves the exchange of messages among political actors to address and resolve political issues. It is an interdisciplinary field encompassing aspects of psychology, economics, culture, society, and linguistics. This paper aims to give a satisfactory explanation for the question concerning effective communication characteristics: how might politicians utilize them in their speech to be more effective? This pragmatic study in discourse is devoted to analyzing the various effective syntactic structures that arise within political interactions according to Sperber and Wilson’s Theory of Relevance. The contribution of this study is evident as guidelines for further understanding the correlation between language and cognition. The researchers find that politicians seek to cognitively take advantage of the tendency of the audience to strive for relevance. In this way, expectations and attitudes are to be recognized and met by either interlocutors. The focal point of the study is the linguistic and inferential aspects of communication (verbal and non-verbal forms), represented in explicatures and implicatures. The study’s findings exhibit the politicians’ efforts in crafting their utterances optimally to meet the audience’s expectations of relevance, which could be used as an influential method for further studies concerning discourse and communication. This research paper aims to pragmatically exploit the effectiveness of the political interactions (extracts) in the House of Commons (UK parliamentary debates).

Understanding ‘NHS privatisation’: from competition to integration and beyond in the English NHS

References to National Health Service (NHS) ‘privatisation’ can be found in UK parliamentary debates since the early 1980s, but it remains not well understood as a concept and can certainly be distinguished from the standard definition of ‘privatisation’, meaning taking into private ownership. Nevertheless, it is possible to say that the characteristics of ‘NHS privatisation’ include clear links with the evolving interaction between the NHS and private healthcare, a relationship which can be traced back to the inception of the NHS in 1948.By juxtaposing primarily the debates of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 (HSCA 2012) and the Health and Care Act 2022 (HCA 2022), it becomes possible to gain at least two insights into ‘NHS privatisation’ in the English NHS. Firstly, it enables us to understand whether, and if so, how, ‘NHS privatisation’ may be changing with the reversal of the controversial HSCA 2012 competition reforms by the shift to integration now enshrined by the HCA 2022. Secondly, we gain a greater understanding of how ‘NHS privatisation’ has developed as a criticism capable of being invoked by diverse political parties and thus able to shape the development and implementation of NHS reforms. Thirdly, ‘NHS privatisation’ may operate to inhibit more radical NHS reform in opposing directions by reference to the NHS Bill and the NHS (Co-funding and Co-payment) Bill. Finally, ‘NHS privatisation’ can be understood in terms of questions of accountability and the dynamic between market and state.

What is the problem? Representations of gender and violence towards politicians in UK parliamentary debates

Recent research demonstrates that there are important gendered dimensions in politicians’ experiences of violence. Less scholarship has examined the phenomenon’s political impacts, including how violence is represented as a policy problem by political actors themselves. This article applies feminist frame analysis to theories of gender and political violence to explore how UK members of Parliament frame their experiences of violence (including abuse, harassment and intimidation) in the eight House of Commons debates specifically on the topic between 2010 and 2021. Violence towards politicians, including an increasing focus on the experiences of women and social media abuse, has been politicised over time as a normative policy problem, being framed as an attack on the public good of democracy. This article develops theories of gender and political violence by demonstrating that the problem of gendered political violence can and should be conceptualised not only as a unique phenomenon but also as a policy problem.

Native and non-native variation in adverbial and adjectival intensification: A corpus-based study of UK and Ghanaian parliamentary debates

Studies on the use of adverbs and adjectives by nonnative speakers of English have largely focused on learner corpus. Using Hansards of British and Ghanaian parliamentary debates as data, this paper attempts to partly fill this gap by comparatively examining the use of adverbs and adjectives as intensifiers by British parliamentarians as first/native speakers of English and Ghanaian parliamentarians as second language/non-native speakers of English. Parliamentarians’ use of adverbial and adjectival intensification is consequent on parliamentary debates being truth and validity judgement, which includes speaker involvement and commitment. While both groups of MPs employ intensifiers to strengthen their convictions and arguments, it leads to exaggeration. However, the British parliamentarians use more complex adverbs and adjectives than their Ghanaian counterparts, who use simpler forms. The paper has implications for second language teaching and learning, the theory of nativisation and the characterisation of Ghanaian English.

Is someone’s mercenary another’s contractor? American, British, and Russian private security companies in US and UK parliamentary debates

Scholars disagree on whether an anti-mercenary norm exists, whether today’s private military and security companies (PMSCs) fall under its scope, and whether the privatization of security erode parliamentary control over the use of force. We contribute to these debates by conducting a content analysis of parliamentary debates on PMSCs in the UK and US (2001–2019). Our results show that American and British politicians engage in a vehement, bipartisan criticism of Russian PMSCs, whose employees are consistently stigmatized as ruthless mercenaries irrespective of the activities they perform. Criticism of their own government’s use of PMSCs, by contrast, is more nuanced and largely made by liberal and social democratic politicians only. These findings support the argument that an anti-mercenary norm narrowly focused on for-profit providers of combat still exists, but also highlights that its interpretation is biased by nationalism and politico-economic preferences, which shape the frequency and nature of politicians’ stigmatization of private security providers

The politics of LGBT+ suicide and suicide prevention in the UK: risk, responsibility and rhetoric

Suicide is a major public health concern, patterned by systematic inequalities, with lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT+) people being one example of a minoritised group that is more likely to think about and attempt suicide worldwide. To address this, UK national suicide prevention policies have suggested that LGBT+ people should be prioritised in prevention activities. However, there is little research seeking to understand how LGBT+ suicide is re/presented in political and policy spheres. In this article, we critically analyse all mentions of LGBT+ suicide in UK parliamentary debates between 2009 and 2019 and in the eight suicide prevention policies in use during this period. We argue that LGBT+ suicide is understood in two contrasting ways: firstly, as a pathological ‘problem’, positioning LGBT+ people either as risks or as at risk and in need of mental health support. Alternatively, suicide can be seen as externally attributable to perpetrators of homophobic, biphobic and transphobic hate, requiring anti-hate activities as part of suicide prevention. In response, we argue that although these explanations may appear oppositional; they both draw on reductive explanations of LGBT+ suicide, failing to consider the complexity of suicidal distress, thus constraining understandings of suicide and suicide prevention.

Language matters: representations of ‘heart failure’ in English discourse—a large-scale linguistic study

AimsHeart failure (HF) has a lower public profile compared with other serious health conditions, notably cancer. This discourse analysis study investigates the extent to which HF is discussed in general...

No Longer Conforming to Stereotypes? Gender, Political Style and Parliamentary Debate in the UK

AbstractResearch on political style suggests that where women make arguments that are more emotional, empathetic and positive, men use language that is more analytical, aggressive and complex. However, existing work does not consider how gendered patterns of style vary over time. Focusing on the UK, we argue that pressures for female politicians to conform to stereotypically ‘feminine’ styles have diminished in recent years. To test this argument, we describe novel quantitative text-analysis approaches for measuring a diverse set of styles at scale in political speech data. Analysing UK parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019, we show that the debating styles of female MPs have changed substantially over time, as women in Parliament have increasingly adopted stylistic traits that are typically associated with ‘masculine’ stereotypes of communication. Our findings imply that prominent gender-based stereotypes of politicians' behaviour are significantly worse descriptors of empirical reality now than they were in the past.

Fighting talk

Abstract Analyses on news media data in Conceptual Metaphor Theory have highlighted several frequent metaphors used to understand climate change including climate change is conflict. This article analyses the frequency of that conceptual metaphor in a corpus of UK parliamentary debates on climate change. The language of political decision-makers is important to scrutinise because this group have the social and legislative power needed to deal with the issue. Our analysis shows the conceptual metaphor itself, and all three of its most frequent linguistic realisations (‘challenge,’ ‘impact,’ ‘tackle’), increased in use between 2015 and 2019. Additionally, three notable semantic and pragmatic trends were observed: first, apparently little recognition of human behaviour as a cause of climate change; second, a narrative of Us/People vs Climate Change; and third, that political decision-makers are taking climate change increasingly seriously. Some of these findings challenge existing knowledge and thus beg questions that require future research efforts.

Energy democracy, dissent and discourse in the party politics of shale gas in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT Drawing from an extensive content analysis of the UK parliamentary debate over shale gas, we use the UK shale gas case to explore how energy democracy themes are used and countered in the framing strategies of discourse coalitions in national political sites. Furthermore, we explore the extent to which these national political sites and discursive strategies are effective as institutions and practices through which to achieve energy democracy. We achieve this through an analysis of the success of the UK anti- and pro-shale gas development discourse coalitions in recruiting national political figures and influencing thinking and decision-making in parliament. In doing so, we bring together the literatures on discourse coalitions and energy democracy. We conclude with implications for both national policy as well as critical inquiry into environmental politics.

Anger in action: Socio-pragmatic analysis of verbal exchanges in UK parliamentary debates

Abstract This article is an attempt to investigate theoretically and empirically how the emotion of anger is used in political discourse. The descriptive analysis is centred around the conversational analysis of anger, as present in the verbal exchanges in the UK parliamentary debates, correlated with the variables of power (P), social distance (D), and the concept of valence. The key idea underbracing this article is that affect permeates social communication. The central claims of this study focus on explaining how the socio-pragmatic variables of (P) and (D) weave the fabric of conflict talk and how they constitute the springboard for structuring the affective message in a tangible framework of social practice. The questions that inspire the current paper are the following: (1) How does anger determine the relationships of power and distance? (2) What is the reaction of the Offender and Defender in anger-driven interaction? (3) Are the roles of the ‘Emoter’ and ‘Receiver’ of anger evenly distributed in verbal communication? (4) Are valence and its strength indicators of anger experience? The paper concentrates on three theoretical problems including: (1) anger as an intrinsically threatening emotion, (2) anger as a constituent of context, and (3) anger as a gradable emotion. In addition, this study aims to explore how threats to positive face value in the form of unambiguous literal meaning that convey evaluative load (accusations, criticism, insult, irony, imposition etc.), explicitly provide information on P and D shifts in anger-driven discursive action.

Great expectations: ambitions for family carers in UK parliamentary debates on the Care Bill

The Care Act 2014 amended legislation relating to government responsibilities for adults with care needs. It set out new statutory responsibilities for the support of family or informal carers. As part of a study investigating the impact of the Care Act 2014 on family carers in England, we undertook a contextual literature review, focusing on parliamentary debates available online from Hansard. We describe the content of debates seeking to amend the law relating to carers and aspirations for the proposed reforms. We highlight the role of parliamentary carer champions, as well as carer-related themes and the lack of controversy over this subject.

Making Politics Visible: Discourses on Gender and Race in the Problematisation of Sex-Selective Abortion

This paper examines the problematisation of sex-selective abortion (SSA) in UK parliamentary debates on Fiona Bruce's Abortion (Sex-Selection) Bill 2014–15 and on the subsequent proposed amendment to the Serious Crime Bill 2014–15. On the basis of close textual analysis, we argue that a discursive framing of SSA as a form of cultural oppression of minority women in need of protection underpinned Bruce's Bill; in contrast, by highlighting issues more commonly articulated in defence of women's reproductive rights, the second set of debates displaced this framing in favour of a broader understanding, drawing on postcolonial feminist critiques, of how socio-economic factors constrain all women in this regard. We argue that the problematisation of SSA explains the original cross-party support for, and subsequent defeat of, the policies proposed to restrict SSA. Our analysis also highlights the central role of ideology in the policy process, thus making politics visible in policymaking.

It's about people: identifying the focus of parliamentary debates through a corpus-driven approach

The aim of this paper is two-fold: (1) to demonstrate the usefulness of corpus-driven methods in determining a research focus, and (2) to show that ‘people’-focussing is a key feature of UK and Ghanaian parliamentary debates. Identifying one's research focus in discourse analysis after collecting a large amount of data can be challenging. It is relatively easier to pinpoint the items and focus of the research when the researcher employs a corpus-based method, since he or she normally has a theory to validate, refute or refine. However, when the researcher has assembled his or her data without having in advance specific theories, features, themes and concepts relating to the discourse that he or she intends to study, it becomes difficult to identify the essential issues on which to concentrate and explore. Perhaps this is even more challenging when dealing with parliamentary debates data given the wide-ranging subjects and alternative courses of action deliberated by parliamentarians. In such a situation, a corpus-driven method can be highly useful. As part of a major study of parliamentary discourse, this paper demonstrates how a corpus-driven method can help in determining one's research focus in the study of parliamentary debates.

SPECIFICS OF THE INTEGRATION TACTICS REALIZATION IN THE POLITICAL DISCOURSE OF THE UK PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES

This article concentrates on the peculiarities of the irony tactics realization in the UK parliamentary debates. Political discourse of the parliamentary debates is a communicative situation that involves interaction between the participants of the political communication. It is characterized by the constant interchange of information massages to discredit opponents in the debated. The paper defines such linguistic phenomena as irony and its specific type, as well as communicative strategy and tactics stipulating its realization as well as the correlation between these linguistic notions. The paper analyses specific language means such as intensifying evaluative, expressive and emotive language units expressing negative attitude towards the opponents in the political communication, idioms etc. Here the stylistic means used by the debates’ participants to discredit opponents during the meetings of the UK House of Commons in the post-Thatcher period are also represented. These stylistic means include antithesis, aposiopesis and parallelism that help to give additional positive connotation to the communicants’ interactions. It also specifies the speech acts and communicative moves involved in expressing critical opinions between the opponents of the political communication aimed at ruining their image in the eyes of the potential electorate.

Preaching to the Converted: Parliament and the Proscription Ritual

This article explores UK Parliamentary debate around the proscription – or banning – of terrorist organisations. It argues that these debates are usefully conceptualised as a form of political ritual organised around a core script, established participant roles, a shared respect for the performance of democracy and a predictable outcome. Taking these ritualistic aspects seriously extends research on proscription by highlighting the importance of the procedures through which such organisations are produced as requiring exclusion from the UK’s body politic. The article therefore makes three contributions. First, it provides a sustained empirical analysis of data from every relevant UK Parliamentary debate on proscription between 2001 and 2014. Second, it moves academic debate on proscription beyond questions of the power’s effectiveness and legitimacy. And, third, it contributes to contemporary work on political ritual by offering a new heuristic for the analysis thereof centred on four dimensions: orchestration, constitutivity, sedimentation and performativity.

Talking security and rights

AbstractThis article addresses the question of how draconian counter-terrorism policies are legitimized in long-established democracies. Being the heartland of liberal rights, the UK comes to the fore as a striking case where some of the most controversial security policies have been enacted. The study undertakes a systematic frame analysis of UK parliamentary debates with the help of ATLAS.ti, which allows the analyst to trace and map out recurrent concepts, themes, and arguments as well as their overall distribution. While demonstrating the workings of securitization in the formulation of key counter-terrorism legislation, the study unearths how the security narrative in the UK context evidently relies on the language of rights in invoking legitimacy. The study suggests that far from negating the indispensable status of human rights, security narrative resorts to the latter’s moral power and mimics rights language, heralding the weight of these international norms even in hard-core security matters.

The Humanisation of Refugees: A Discourse Analysis of UK Parliamentary Debates on the European Refugee ‘Crisis’

AbstractPrevious research has explored the ‘othering’ and dehumanisation of asylum seekers and refugees, yet comparatively little research has explored the opposite process: the humanisation of refugees. This article applies discursive psychological analysis to the transcripts of five UK Parliamentary debates on the European refugee ‘crisis’ from September 2015 to January 2016, examining an explicit form of humanisation: categorising refugees as ‘human beings’. The analysis focuses on the nature and function of such categorisations to explore the social functions of the discourse. It illustrates how politicians draw on the human qualities of both refugees and ‘us’ to make the government and nation morally accountable for protecting refugees. Moreover, it shows how the humanisation or dehumanisation of others implicates or denies the self as morally responsible. This highlights how research on dehumanisation—and the opposite process of humanisation—needs to attend to the rhetorical, relational and dialogical aspects of discourse. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.