Rhetoric in British Politics and Society

J. Atkins, A. Finlayson, J. Martin, N. Turnbull, J. Atkins, A. Finlayson, J. Martin, N. Turnbull

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137325532
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Although the art of rhetoric is central to the practice of politics it also plays an important role in civic and private life. Using Aristotelian notions of ethos, pathos and logos, this collection offers engaging discussions on everything from Prime Minister's Questions and Welsh devolution to political satire and the rhetoric of cultural racism.

Part I

Politics and Leadership

1

The Rhetoric of Rhetoric – Political Rhetoric as Function and Dysfunction

Nicholas O’Shaughnessy

‘Rhetoric’ has the contradictory distinctions of being both an ancient and highly regarded component of an elite education, and a vernacular term of reproof, as when we dismiss something as ‘rhetorical’ (significantly, both Marx and Freud studied rhetoric at school; Patterson, 1990). And today there is a renewal of interest in rhetoric and its study, as with the scholarship of Chaïm Perelman (1982) and Brian Vickers (1988), amongst others. Rhetoric in history is not a trivial instrument or a decorative motif, but a primordial force. Yet rhetoric has always carried with it connotations of manipulation and even deceit, and the concept comes with the most urgent warnings from the ancient world. Plato was its first and greatest critic, rebuking orators for advocating belief rather than knowledge. In ancient Greece rhetoricians were admired but also feared; speech which ‘delights and persuades a large crowd because it is written with skill but not spoken with truth’ (Emlyn-Jones, 1987). Rhetoric was power. Thus in the Gorgias the spell of rhetoric is seen to affect Helen as much as a potent narcotic. Rhetoric was pseudoreason, presenting a façade of rationality. Hence the disdain: advocacy had come to exist in its own right detached from any notion of objectivity, making no distinction between truth and falsehood. For Aristotle, rhetoric synthesised both rationality and emotion: its realm was not knowledge (episteme) but opinion (doxa). Rhetorical persuasion comprised ethos (credibility, as manifest, for example, in the erudition of the argument); logos (rational content); and pathos (emotional appeals). Today the practice of rhetoric has apparently come to focus on just one of Aristotle’s triad, pathos, and the public concept of rhetoric has become intimately bound up with the idea of emotional persuasion.

Some, of course, perceive modern rhetoric as an infantilised form of persuasion and invoke a more remote era, of Edmund Burke’s elegiac lament for Queen Marie Antoinette, for example: ‘I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever’ (Goodrich, 1884). Classic era rhetoric is part of our perception of Heritage Britain. However, eloquence is only a branch of rhetoric, not its definitive attribute, and most rhetoric, both now and in history, has embraced a much more journeyman function. Simple phrases simply expressed seek to capture the evanescent public mood of the moment: rhetoric distinguished by its brevity. Even an essentially pedestrian image, like Prime Minister Macmillan’s Winds of Change, can somehow catch on, as for example with Aneurin Bevan’s (2012) ‘Naked into the conference chamber’.

The era of rhetorical governments?

The major theme of this chapter is that there has been a revival of rhetoric and renewed significance of rhetoric in politics. While there are various explanations for this – the rise of an interrogative media, the 24-hour news cycle, and so on – it is certainly the case that a number of important political leaders in recent history have made significant and powerful recourse to rhetoric such that their governments might be described as primarily rhetorical governments – the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and following on from this the presidency of Bill Clinton and the Prime Ministership of Tony Blair. What is distinctive was the extent to which those regimes identified rhetoric as central to their performance and the self-conscious search for the right rhetorical formula. And never, ever, was this merely a process of phrasemaking: the dramatic arts of the leader undergirded the projection of the rhetoric. In a sense this reversed earlier concepts of governing, for words now spoke louder than actions. Jo Moore’s famous advice as the Twin Towers collapsed – ‘A good day to bury bad news’ (Telegraph, 2001) – was revelatory as an open window into the prevailing culture of rhetorical government (the ‘bad news’ in question being so trivial that it has since been forgotten). Thus Labour’s first year in power saw 24 of the 44 heads and deputy heads of ministry information departments replaced, changing the definition from ‘information’ to proselytisation (O’Shaughnessy, 2003).

Here was a leadership style which was pro-actively rhetorical, the leadership of the state as public theatre, public office as a stage. Tony Blair himself was master of the condensed epigrammatic form of rhetorical address. I have called his ‘People’s Princess’ trope a sobriquet of genius, capturing in its vulgarity and concision exactly the maudlin sentimentality, the fleeting essence, of the moment and its need for ventilation (O’Shaughnessy, 2010). And it occurred within a broader ecology of rhetorical government, viz;

the constant assertion of progress in all things, the cult of statistical ‘proof’, symbolic actions and subjects of attack, hyperbolic language, obfuscation via quantificatory obscurity . . . . ; acute sensitivity to generated imagery and its deft management; on occasion, the manufacture of enemies/targets of derision; and of course spin, the affixing of a plausible interpretation onto a fluid situation.

(O’Shaughnessy, 2004, p. 174)

Thus the activities of government were calibrated by phrase manufacture: ‘Labour’s coming home’, ‘Stakeholder society’, ‘It’s time for a change’ (and who could disagree) (Draper, 1997). Pithy, publicity savvy, ad-man’s vocabulary salted and peppered all they did (for example, ‘Sirs for Sirs’, the idea of knighting distinguished head-teachers, or the title of E-Envoy [1999–2004] invented by the Blair government). New Labour’s strength was its ability to create the ‘right’ (that is, exerting broad populist appeal) rhetorical patina.

Under New Labour in particular rhetoric became strategic, serial phrases and buzzwords which were the standard formulaic of its public self-expression. Here was a regime with a mission to explain and that self-consciously defined its public persona, clothed its public self, in oratory, and to a degree previously inconceivable. These were not ‘great’ phrases (that is, eloquent) but they did have an impact. I have argued (O’Shaughnessy, 2004, p. 177):

The functionaries of the British state had to jettison their old bureaucratic language for a new hyperbole, but reading it – as in this example – we are perhaps no wiser than before: ‘Mr Milburn will be creating a top-level NHS modernization board to drive through the changes in the NHS. In a move designed to overturn traditional Whitehall bureaucracy and hierarchy, board membership will include the brightest and best modernisers in the health service. The changes signal a vote of confidence in frontline clinicians and managers who are consistently trail-blazing new ideas. These are the people at the rock face with the experience and enthusiasm to drive home the modernisation programme’ (The Times, 23rd February 2001). And thus ‘In this case, the illustration uses some favourite New Labour buzzwords, for example the word “modernise” is used three times: dynamic metaphors are constantly employed such as drive-through, overturn, trailblaze, people at the rockface, drive home. And an enemy is created for all this energy to struggle against – hierarchy, traditional Whitehall bureaucracy, against whom are opposed the forces of virtue. This was not a special announcement, but a typical ministry bulletin to the press. Yet it acquires the character of self-parody. In one brief period Tony Blair made 53 speeches and employed the word “modernization” eighty-seven times.’

(O’Shaughnessy, 2004, p. 177)

Rhetorical determinism?

The argument is that the rise in rhetoric has tangible political consequences for public policy choices. Hence the further concern of this chapter lies in the idea of rhetorical determinism, that rhetoric, which had evolved to ‘sell’ government policy – that is, a consequence – now preceded it, that is, a cause. This amalgam of rhetorical success and operational failure may well be the legacy of the previous Labour government, that is to say the problem was the internal determinism of the rhetoric.

Rhetoric conjures mirages in the desert. Hence, one of Bush’s advisers chided the writer Ron Susskind: ‘we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality’ (Susskind, 2004). There are of course many examples from history of rhetorically created, rhetorically driven policy. Reagan’s Star Wars programme was not based on any scientific study but was the emanation of the rhetorical imagination of Reagan himself, with its notion of extraterrestrial military defences of the US; it began, not with an idea, not with science, but with a rhetorical phrase. And then there was the rhetoric of Lebensraum, ‘living space’, of the Nazis. This is an example of, in Schiller’s phrase, ‘language which thinks for you’: it implanted the myth that Germany’s problem was insufficient territory for its people. Thus ideas may too easily emerge not via research into what is desirable or because they are a felt answer to a public need, but because they sound plausible. Thus rhetoric may become a substitute for governing, since it offers the chance of addressing problems purely at the verbal rather than the operational level. There was never, of course a time when this was not a criticism of rhetoric. But in our own era this problem has become far more acute, rhetoric ceasing to be merely the means of selling policy and becoming rather the process through which policy in itself is created.

Ideas are thus self-propelled into the public policy arena via sheer rhetorical velocity, such that government can often find itself confounded by the incubus of rhetorical success but operational failure. The idea of a rhetorically driven government was not invented by New Labour; the ‘rhetorical vision’ was a recognised concept well before Blair. Dowling (1989) defines a Rhetorical Vision as a coherent, dramatical explanation of reality, with character, setting and action themes and a sanctioning agent to justify acceptance and promulgation. We prefer a looser conceptualisation, but with the focus more on the content of the description of the evoked state. That is, the summoning of some utopian panacea to ‘solve’ some crisis or social ill, with notions of ‘fix’ (the social problem is a piece of machinery gone wrong) and finality (it can be sorted in perpetuity by the prescribed action). But the rhetorical vision must have some implicit notion of agency, transcendence even, of getting us to a better place than where we are now.

And even where a policy is indeed a failure, success may be achieved in the larger sense of impressing public perception because the rhetoric is effective even if the policy energised by the rhetoric has been a disaster. A good example of this is one of the genuinely great pieces of 20th-century rhetoric, Ronald Reagan’s speech on the occasion of the Challenger disaster, when he spoke of the enterprise ‘touching the face of God’ and identified the project with key national myths, in particular, the conquest of the West. He referred to the deaths of the astronauts only obliquely (Lule, 1990). Thus he turned defeat into victory, but crucially, he eluded responsibility for incompetent planning and other political/managerial factors by clothing the event in a sheen of rhetorical uplift and bogus religiosity.

Cases in rhetorical determinism

In more recent times governments of major parties have sponsored numerous policies whose intuitive appeal is rhetorical, and we will now consider some representative policies of the Blair era as case studies in rhetorical determinism. The argument is that the labels befuddled the implementation; labels mystify, actively so. It does not follow, however, that these policies were utopian or misconceived – for example, the (Thatcher-era) ‘care in the community’ process was not innately wrong, rather the issue lay in a pre-determinate rhetoric which took the focus away from the very real problems inherent in the application of this rhetorical idea, the rigorous implementation. Examples from the world of higher education over the past decade maybe familiar to many of us – from the fate of the Individual Learning Accounts to the e-University to the Centres of Learning and Teaching Excellence. Such ideas resonated rhetorically but they were not therefore doomed ab initio; they were neither irrelevant nor uncreative. Their failures were failures of operationalisation.

An obvious example is the e-University, which cost about £62 million for just 900 sign-ups when the programme was terminated (BBC News Channel, 2004). There is logic in the concept of the e-University as a way of making higher education more generally available at low cost. Properly done, it might have met many social needs, but the problems lay in the coordination and the commitment of the universities which signed up to it, in the technology, in the leadership. Similarly with the Individual Learning Accounts which had cost £268 million at termination (BBC News, 2002). This idea was to enable ordinary citizens to enhance their cognitive and technical competencies as a way of surviving and thriving in employment, of raising the low general level of the skill-set of the UK workforce. Again the idea failed, partly because many of the companies which signed up to deliver the skills were dishonest (one of these frauds could have amounted to £16 million; BBC, 2002). Another example is the Centres for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CETLS); again the idea was a good one: to raise the standard of teaching in British higher education. But the problem was that the target market – universities and their teachers – did not buy into it; they asked what it was really delivering which could not be delivered in some other, less bureaucratic, less centralised way. This obvious and fundamental weakness was never thought through by the government sponsoring the programme, and so there was ‘little to show for £315 million’ (Times Higher Education, 2012). In all of these case studies, the rhetorical vision failed because it was precisely that, and was not embedded in some kind of applied process which would actually make the policy function.

The thesis is thus that some of the excesses of government today can actually be attributed to their rhetorical strategies. For example, the Big Society moniker of the coalition government evaporated precisely because it was rhetorical: it has the great strength of being able to mean anything to anybody but therein also lies the source of its weakness, for in no way can it illuminate some kind of operational policy programme. Nobody can possibly believe in a ‘little society’, or a society of fragments, so in that sense this rhetoric is a nullity; it has no meaning, although it sounds as if it has. The public became cynical about this sobriquet and it was dismissed by Sir Steve Bubb of the Association of Voluntary Organisations as a ‘damaged brand’ (Baines et al., 2013).

The rise of anti-rhetoric

There is perhaps a tendency to see rhetoric as a limited activity, a flourish to a speech perhaps, or a soundbite encapsulated in a press release. But this is to endorse a very narrow idea. Rhetoric is much more than this and, importantly, it is invisible as well as visible. Its purpose is to obfuscate as well as advertise. A more sophisticated view would perceive rhetoric, and the strategic intent underlying it, as the tactical use of language to persuade and therefore invoking the use of grey, muted tones as well as colour, a language of introversion as well as extroversion. Rhetoric fulfils of course many different purposes in ...