Voice and New Writing, 1997-2007

Articulating the Demos

M. Inchley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137432322
• eBook ISBN: 9781137432339
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

In New Labour's empathetic regime, how did diverse voices scrutinize its etiquettes of articulation and audibility? Using the voice as cultural evidence, Voice and New Writing explores what it means to 'have' a voice in mainstream theatre and for newly included voices to negotiate with the institutions that 'find' and 'represent' their identities.

1

New Labour, New Voicescapes, 1997–2007

In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher’s voice had seemed to carry an iron authority that had firmly kept political opponents in their place. Headlines in the popular Sun newspaper screamed of bashing the miners, routing the ‘Argies’ and smashing the Unions, and Thatcher’s tactic seemed to be to squash, silence and suppress. When she banned the direct voices of Sinn Fein politicians in the late 1980s however, the rich actor’s voice that spoke the words of Gerry Adams seemed to stoke more fascination for the muted voice of the political leader. As a North–South divide split the country, Yosser Hughes’ Liverpudlian mantra ‘Gizza job’ echoed through the age like a plaintive symptom of the unemployed man’s alienation.¹ Alternative voices in magazines Spare Rib and Marxism Today, or of the women of Greenham Common, seemed to be a part of this marginalised, but nevertheless substantial culture of dissent. Thatcher’s own infamously crafted voice, lowered in tone to downplay the semiotics of a feminine presence, spoke both of the social mobility of the educated conservative as well as of the ways she exercised her authority according to the male norms of the period. Her use of the Lincolnshire dialect word ‘frit’ in 1983 seemed to be designed not to remind the voters of her relatively humble background, but to scare the Opposition benches with the Boedecian credentials of the Iron Lady.² As the Prime Minister’s resoundingly decisive tones more than matched the belligerence of Barnsley Trade Unionist Arthur Scargill, the voices of political leaders seemed decisively linked to the fractious and oppositional political character of the times.

In the period succeeding Thatcher and preceding the accession of New Labour, the sounds and delivery of the voices of political leaders were perhaps more amenable, but arguably less effectual. Thatcher’s consummately monotone, less combative successor John Major, eschewed the idea of changing his vocal delivery in the interest of political image making.³ The Major paradigm – of an apparently ‘ordinary’ voice coupled with social mobility – pleased voters, but his failure to unite the party led to his resignation in 1995. His voluble Labour opponent, Neil Kinnock, was unhelpfully dubbed the ‘Welsh windbag’ by Private Eye magazine and the satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image, and following the Labour party’s unexpected defeat in 1992, Kinnock’s voice came to be associated with feeble and irrelevant rhetoric.⁴ His successor, John Smith, who succeeded in ending Trade Union block voting at Labour Party conferences in 1993, possessed a trustworthy Scottish accent (many years before the banking crisis), but died before the perception of his leadership potential could be tested with the electorate. It was not until Blair, with his apparently classless but carefully crafted accent and informal delivery, was elected Party leader that a Labour politician seemed to strike the right – or perhaps I should say central – chord with the electorate. Many were hopeful that a New Labour government would put an end to both the conflict of the Thatcher government and such affairs as the very damaging ‘Cash for Questions’ scandal that had undermined confidence in the integrity of Westminster.

A new political era seemed to be heralded by Tony Blair’s trust-inspiring tones. Smith’s reforms of Labour and introduction of the principle of one member one vote had already reduced the power of the collective unionised voice, giving the impression of a more ‘direct’ and ‘transparent’ relationship between party representatives and individual voters. Blair’s further reforms in the shape of a revision of Clause Four and the ditching of the Party’s commitment to common ownership in 1995 seemed to confirm his strong leadership potential and suggested a voice strong enough to see off any trouble with potentially recalcitrant Trade Union leaders. In a clever contrast, his voter-facing one-on-one ‘sofa style’ vocal delivery – said to be modelled on the informal and empathetic style of US President Bill Clinton – seemed to reflect the ‘promise of democracy’ elucidated by Giddens in The Transformation of Intimacy (1992), which advocated the necessity of the trust and intimacy of a sexual relationship in the national democratic process.⁵ Adapting his vocal style for television, at a time when interactivity online was in its very earliest stages, Blair seemed to be in intimate conversation with each individual, using his voice to suggest a transparent, trustworthy, but also reasonable and reciprocal relationship with voters.

This opening chapter will give a sense of a national voicescape, attending to the tensions between New Labour’s aspirations to an inclusive and diverse political model, and its attempts to manage the nation and its voices through ideology, legislation and policy. A tolerant and empathetic political tone linked with Blair’s political style and New Labour ideologies greeted the voices of the previously marginalised, and permeated through the nation’s institutions, including those of the arts. The chapter will show however how the tone of the nation’s voicescape dramatically changed over the decade corresponding to Blair’s period as Prime Minister, and how it was gravely affected both by fears over security, and by the crisis in confidence in his voice and the processes of democracy that came about after the Iraq war. A less consensual, more internally fractious voicescape emerged with reactionary and dissenting elements. By the end of the period, the public’s continuing investment in the ideals of transparency and inclusivity in the representative system seemed to articulate a collective and powerful fantasy, which damned it to disillusionment and betrayal.

Sounding different

A diverse and inclusive society was central to New Labour’s vision, replacing the systems of privilege, hierarchy and exclusiveness that had been perceived to be features of the outgoing government and an outmoded Britain. The 1997 Labour Manifesto explicitly stated the Party’s commitment to ‘the equal worth of all’ and to ‘fairness and justice’.⁶ Accordingly, when Blair came to power, Britain seemed to sound different. In the House of Commons, more women than ever became MPs, and the presence of the diverse tones of speaker Betty Boothroyd, and eminent ministers such as Claire Short, Baroness Amos, Trevor Phillips, Mo Mowlam, Ron Davies, John Prescott and David Blunkett seemed to suggest that the various parts of the nation were to be fairly included and represented.⁷ On a grand scale, devolution of power was introduced with the setting up of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, apparently supporting the Giddensian concept of ‘self-actualisation’ for the citizens of the constituent parts of the UK. During Blair’s first term, The Human Rights Act (1998) was introduced, asserting rights to freedom of thought and expression, and prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of sex, race or religion. In 2000 The Parekh Report recommended measures to ensure the ‘equal moral worth’ of all citizens through respect for cultural difference, and in 2001 the Race Relations Act made it law for all public bodies to promote equality of opportunity and good race relations.⁸ Repeal of Section 28 in 2003 removed a prohibition on the promotion of homosexuality, a measure that was widely believed to lead to the suppression of certain individual’s voices and self-censorship. In contrast to the previous top-down leadership style favoured by Thatcher, the use of focus groups and initiatives such as the Big Conversation Project, public voting for the awards of public subsidies, and new technologies such as interactive web pages began to suggest the dawn of a new era of political listening, public empathy and civil audibility.⁹ Despite the cynicism that has been expressed towards some of these developments, as initiatives they implied a remixing of the power within the nation’s voicescape, changing its dynamics and mechanisms with measures to support and empower the voices of all citizens as equally important individuals in rational dialogue with their political representatives.¹⁰

Along with these changes came broad shifts in cultural attitudes towards the way voices sounded. Regional accents were no longer only connected to the political dissent of the North–South rift of the Thatcher years, nor were immigrants’ accents and dialects simply parodied or considered inferior. Indeed they were often respected and enjoyed as signs of an individual’s cultural origins and identity. The popular BBC television show, The Kumars at Number 42, for example, celebrated the British Asian voice as a legitimate and colourful element of mainstream British culture.¹¹ Cumbrian broadcaster Melvyn Bragg’s radio series The Routes of English (1999), and Simon Elmes’ book Talking for Britain (2005), based on a BBC Voices survey, highlighted the contribution of dialect to the development of the English language. In the 2000s, both the BBC’s Your Voice project and the British Library’s Sounds Familiar website dedicated public resources to placing a wide range of regional accents and hybrid versions of English online.¹² In sociolinguistics, English was now ‘polycentric’, and the standard English voice one amongst many varieties rather than a standard against which others were measured.¹³ In keeping with the dominant political ideologies, Richard Watts and Peter Trudgill’s book Alternative Histories of English (2002) was predicated on the concept of ‘fairness’.¹⁴ Their approach suggested that all speakers, whatever their origin, were to be respected as legitimate, and had the right to individual expression within mainstream British culture. The British voice itself, it seemed, had become destandardised.¹⁵

The increasing aural tolerance of signs of vocal diversity in terms of region and race was countered with a tendency for voices to converge in terms of class. This was seen in the phenomenon of ‘accent levelling’ thought to accompany a flatter class structure.¹⁶ A variety of commentators pointed out the frequent use of the glottal stop, a characteristic seen as improper by the traditionally minded, by both Diana Spencer and the public school educated new prime minister. Even the Queen’s English drifted towards the Estuary, a shift that elicited both approving and censorious responses.¹⁷ Although a cultural premium associated with speaking well remained, a trace of a regional accent or ‘roughness’ in speech seemed to demonstrate that the speaker was in touch with the people. While John Prescott’s grammatical slips were affectionately parodied in the media, his regional working-class tones appeared to ground New Labour in worthy Northern grit. Indeed, Fairclough indicates a number of features of Blair’s voice, which, while remaining firmly middle class, included the judicious use of Northern pronunciation and colloquial vocabulary.¹⁸ By 2005, opposition leader David Cameron on the other hand was thought to be ‘hiding’ his public school accent by the Telegraph in order to downplay his privilege.¹⁹ In contrast to previous eras then, where an upper-class accent could be assured of respect, a more favourable response was elicited from voices that were perceived to be normal, straightforward or colloquial in style.

It was not only the way voices sounded that was symptomatic of the ideologies behind the new national voicescape. Their delivery changed too. In the vocal climate created by New Labour, an interactive rather than authoritative style gave the impression of the speakers’ approachability, honesty and accessibility. Rather than the rousing political rhetoric of war leaders Winston Churchill and Thatcher, politicians’ suitability for leadership was validated by a more informal style and tone that seemed more in keeping with the more peaceful times that characterised the beginning of Blair’s office.²⁰ The mixture of embarrassment and humility with which Blair managed to claim that the ‘hand of history’ was upon his shoulder at the 1998 Good Friday agreement press conference seemed to signal his role as facilitator of change rather than leader of men. Citizens of an interactive democracy did not require their elected representatives to speak from a position of institutionalised authority, but as one individual to another, sincerely, rationally and truthfully. Most significantly, these shifts appeared to locate the validation of the voice in the values of those by whom it was heard, rather than in the assumed and invested authority of the speaker – a development which seems linked to the ‘echoing of language’ and convergence of parties that began to occur in the 1990s, according to Turner.²¹ The more ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ a level to which the voice was pitched, the wider the range of people it seemed to appeal.

In terms of delivery, perhaps the most characteristic medium for the voices of politicians during the Blair years was television. Cultural theorist Paddy Scannell’s work on the amplification of the voice notes how sincerity in vocal delivery seems to challenge the privileges implied by the refined vocal qualities acquired by aesthetic training or educational background.²² Sincerity is not a quality that seems to require these kinds of investment. Of course, access to mediatised space and the paraphernalia of technology is a form of privilege too (especially before the era of digital cameras and YouTube), yet television’s intimate style was well suited to deliver Giddens’ ‘promise of democracy’. The apparently ‘natural’ way of speaking it makes possible seems to give millions of individuals intimate access to an untheatricalised inner self, speaking sincerely and honestly as if to a partner or lover. Unsurprisingly, television became the preferred medium, for politicians, princesses, celebrities and finally even the Queen during this period. As early as 1995 Princess Diana had ‘revealed all’ in an intimate TV interview with Martin Bashir, gaining considerable public sympathy. Not until the Queen appeared on television after her daughter-in-law’s death did the public seem satisfied by her response. Meanwhile, the combative delivery required by other forms of exchange in public space seemed to some to be anachronistic or less authentic. According to cultural theorist Bob Franklin, Prime Minister’s Questions was a ‘shop window’ for politicians ‘to present their leadership qualities’, its space corrupted by a sense of theatricality.²³ Early in his period as Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron distanced himself from the event, disapproving of its unruly, unempathetic style.²⁴

Not only was Blair a consummate TV performer, he displayed mastery of vocal delivery in different spaces and for different audiences. One of the first politicians to emerge from behind the podium, and famously able to speak without a script, Blair’s oratorical ability seemed to enable him to deliver the spontaneous, natural, interactive and unscripted speech that suggeste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Articulating the Demos
• 1 New Labour, New Voicescapes, 1997–2007
• 2 Giddensian Mediation: Voices in Writing, Representation and Actor Training
• 3 Migration and Materialism: David Greig, Gregory Burke and Sounding Scottish in Post-devolutionary Voicescapes
• 4 Vocalising Allegiance: Kwame Kwei-Armah, Roy Williams and debbie tucker green
• 5 Sending Up Citizenship: Young Voices in Tanika Gupta, Mark Ravenhill and Enda Walsh
• 6 Women Who Kill Children: Mistrusting Mothers in the Work of Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw, Beatrix Campbell and Judith Jones, and Dennis Kelly
• Conclusion: Betrayal and Beyond
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index