When Ministers Were Digging In For A Fight. Metaphors Of Liberal Common Sense During The Winter Of Discontent, 1978-1979.

Abstract

In order to make ‘sense’ of the outside world, categorization should take place. Among categorization devices, metaphorization is one of the more influential. Researchers in Critical Discourse Analysis are aware that ‘common sense’ is problematic as unthematized ideologies are at work in texts. In this respect, Charteris-Black (2004: 28) argues that metaphor analysis should be a central component of Critical Discourse Analysis. This article investigates how The Economist metaphorically frames certain specific target domains (trade unions, government spending) differently from the more ‘socialist’ oriented The Guardian, as typified by their contrastive responses to particular situations and particular ideas during the Winter of (industrial) Discontent, 1978-79. This dark page in British history marked the transition from Keynesian demand management to contentious monetarism, which would later become associated with Thatcherism, a vast political movement that urged for union reform and ‘small government’. Thatcherism promised to make a clean sweep with socialism, promoting ‘liberal common sense’ and sealing ‘freedom’ as the ‘master’ signifier in the 1980s. In addition, the psycholinguistic experiment “No pain, no gain in a free-market rhetoric: revisited with authentic materials” was set up to assess whether exposure to that choice of metaphors may have contributed to readers' endorsing the editors' ideology.