Constructing the Welfare State in the British Press: Boundaries and Metaphors in Political Discourse 9781350125315, 9781350202528, 9781350125346, 9781350125322

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Constructing the Welfare State in the British Press

Bloomsbury Advances in Critical Discourse Studies Series Editors: Michal Krzyzanowski, David Machin and John Richardson Bloomsbury Advances in Critical Discourse Studies is a series that looks at exciting, cutting-edge work in critical discourse studies, in terms of its multidisciplinarity of method, theory and topic of analysis. The series explores how critical discourse studies engage with the social, political and ideological landscapes of the modern world, and how these contexts are reflected, (re)produced and mediated through language and other modes of communication. Titles published in the series: Critical Discourse Studies and Technology, Ian Roderick Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse, Sam Bennett Discourses of Men’s Suicide Notes, Dariusz Galasinski European Identities in Discourse, Franco Zappettini Popular Music and Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies, Lyndon C. S. Way The Politics and Rhetoric of Commemoration, Michael Billig and Cristina Marinho

Constructing the Welfare State in the British Press Boundaries and Metaphors in Political Discourse Małgorzata Paprota

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Małgorzata Paprota, 2021 Małgorzata Paprota has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Rebecca Heselton Image © Bnghn / Alamy Stock Vector All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-2531-5 ePDF: 978-1-3501-2532-2 eBook: 978-1-3501-2533-9 Series: Bloomsbury Advances in Critical Discourse Studies Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Tables  Acknowledgements  Introduction: What we talk about when we talk about the British welfare state  1. The contexts, the corpus and the assumptions in this study  1.1  The field of action: The welfare state 1.2 Critical discourse studies and conceptual metaphor theory: Essential background 1.3 Theoretical and methodological assumptions and procedures in this study 1.4  The British press 1.5  Overview of the corpus 2. Boundaries of the welfare state  2.1  Reform: Which reforms are welfare state reforms? 2.2  Coming up short: The problematic welfare state 2.3  The welfare state and political identities 2.4  Boundaries of the welfare state: Summary of findings 3. What the welfare state is: Figurative models of the welfare state  3.1  Figurative models 3.2  Rescue devices: Safety net 3.3  Lifesavers: Other rescue devices 3.4  Moving up: Devices aiding ascent 3.5  Looking after us: Carers 3.6  For a rainy day: Resource 3.7  Reprehensible: Fraud and abuse 3.8  Downright evil: Harm 3.9  Models of the welfare state: Summary of findings 4. What the welfare state is: Other metaphors of the welfare state  4.1  Objects: The welfare state as a thing 4.2  Beings: The welfare state as a person

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1 7

7 23 27 35 39 43

46 76 86 97 101

101 103 121 126 128 132 134 136 137 143 144 173

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Contents



4.3 Conventional metaphors of the welfare state: Summary of findings Conclusions: Constructing the welfare state – a safety net versus public services  Notes  References  Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text  Index 

180 183 189 193 205 221

Tables 1 Modified repository of DHA strategies, based on Wodak (2001a:73)   32 2 Perceived political affiliation (%), excludes don’t knows (Smith 2017)   35 3 Average circulations in January 2008 (Press Gazette 2008) and 2015 (Turvill 2015b)   36 4 Size of the subcorpora  40 5 Texts per year  40 6 Model metaphors of the welfare state  138 7 Highly conventional metaphors of the welfare state  180

Acknowledgements The corpus analysed in this study comes from the LexisNexis database. All rights remain with the original copyright holders. For the numbered excerpts of the texts analysed here, and the shorter quotations not numbered in the main text, these holders are identified in the copyright list for the extended passages and other quotations. The list follows the References sections. A shorter version of Chapter  2 was published as Paprota, M.  (2018). Not the party of the welfare state: The boundaries of the concept of the welfare state in the construction of political identities across the British press. Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literatures 42(2), 46–65.

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I am deeply grateful to Małgorzata Fabiszak, Adam Głaz and above all Zbigniew Mazur for their insights, wisdom and support with this project. I  am equally grateful to my husband and best friend Bartosz, as well as to my mother and other allies (human and canine alike) for their love and support.

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Introduction: What we talk about when we talk about the British welfare state

The elusive (British) welfare state Whether full of ‘imperial pageantry’ (Hatherley 2017:44) or other displays of grandeur, opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games do not tend to feature hordes of young children jumping on beds. Yet, this brief tribute to the British National Health Service (NHS) and the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital during the 2012 ceremony in London attracted more than a little attention. This was partly because, as an expression of affection directed at an element of the host country’s sociopolitical system, the tribute chimed in with popular sentiment: the NHS was famously described by Nigel Lawson as ‘the closest thing the English have to a religion’ (Timmins 2017:451). More importantly, the Olympics took place at a time when cuts in public spending and extensive reform of public services perhaps put the future of the NHS in doubt in the minds of many. It would later emerge that, as reported by the director of the ceremony, Danny Boyle, there was ‘political pressure’ from the government to drop the segment from the festivities (Willgress 2016). But at the time, its inclusion was much praised, with chair of the GP Committee of the British Medical Association commenting that ‘it just show[ed] how synonymous [the NHS] is with Britain’ (Naughton 2012). It would also be the closest the British welfare state – seventy years after the publication of the Beveridge Report, considered its founding document  – got as a celebration of its existence. That it was not described as such is highly significant. In his history of the British welfare state, Lowe (2005:175) writes that, after its foundation in the 1940s, ‘so dominant a position did the NHS come to command in popular perceptions of the welfare state that the two terms were commonly regarded as synonymous’. At present, the NHS is as likely as not to be specifically disconnected from the welfare state in popular discourse. The reason

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is that the welfare state has come to be among the most unstable concepts in contemporary political discourse. Not only is its evaluation disputed, but what it actually comprises is hardly a truth universally acknowledged. The slim volume on the welfare state in the Very Short Introductions series by Oxford University (Garland 2016) makes the point that as a term, ‘welfare state’ is a misnomer in that the components of the term invite misunderstandings as to what the concept is. Worse still, Flora and Heidenheimer [1981a:5] declare that the terms ‘welfare’ and ‘state’ ‘are among the most ambiguously employed terms in contemporary English political dictionary’, all the more so since meaning of the latter in particular keeps evolving (and was discussed by Raymond Williams as one of his keywords, see Williams 1988). In general history or political science textbooks on the UK, the welfare state amounts to an interventionist government, a comprehensive system of social insurance and a number of social services (see e.g. Marr 2008:44; Coxall, Robins and Leach 2003:37). In more specialized literature, however, an acknowledgement of the elusiveness of the welfare state appears almost ritual (see Chapter 1, or Brown 1995, Timmins 2017, Torfing 1998). There is therefore a substantial amount of discord as to what the welfare state actually means. One way of establishing this meaning is to trace the use of the term in a sample of discourse. For the British welfare state, a productive context to that end is the British print media. It is part of the public sphere, accessible to most anyone, reflecting and shaping the public opinion. The print media is a business, but arguably one that relies on a non-business image for its business model. It is operated by politically involved actors and received by a diverse audience. It is, in a nutshell, a battlefield and a political player of its own. The impact of the British press on politics is popularly held to be substantial (see Chapter 1): famously, the Sun claimed it influenced the 1992 election result in favour of the Conservatives with a defiantly non-standard headline ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’. Though that claim is debatable (Curtice 1999), it is stating the obvious to say that media representations are neither neutral nor innocent. They reflect the interests of their various stakeholders and do have an impact on what people think: it would be difficult to accept that the media focus on benefit fraud in the United Kingdom has not contributed to the general public hugely overestimating fraudulent claims.1

The welfare state as an object of research As an object of research, the welfare state is the focus of much interest in historiography or social policy studies. General overviews aside, much of the

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body of work in social and/or policy studies is part of the discursive turn in social studies. Relatively few studies focus on the very concept of the welfare state. Those that do include Torfing (1998), which uses the (Danish) welfare state as a testing ground for the author’s post-structuralist theory of capitalist regulation. It defines discourse as ‘a relational “totality” of signifying sequences’, which includes ‘all sorts of meaningful practices’ (1998:87), and does not contain linguistic analysis. Another interesting example is Seltzer et  al. (2017), with a slightly broader focus on the Nordic welfare states. It comprises analyses of spoken interactions between participants of the welfare state (clients and service providers), examined from a variety of methodological perspectives, finding a frequent mismatch between intended and achieved objectives of the welfare state. Finally, a study with a perspective closer to that of the present project but also with a different focus is Lunt (2008), which traces a diachronic change in New Zealand political discourse, whereby a shift away from the terms ‘welfare’ and ‘welfare state’ towards ‘social development’ accompanies a shift in policies and attitudes, coinciding with the impact of neoliberalism and consistent with the neoliberal and conservative critiques of the welfare state (see Chapter  1). Some phenomena are similar to those noted in the present study – notably, the residualization of support and the stigmatization of its recipients  – but Lunt (2008) has a primarily diachronic focus, encompassing decades (1940s–1990s) of policy documents and political speeches, with a corpus much more sizeable and generically diverse than the one used here. More common are analyses, positioned within critical discourse or policy studies, where the welfare state is the context for another analysed factor, or those that focus on the participants of the welfare state. Among the former, where the welfare state is an important context but not the main subject, the most relevant are those that focus on the reform of the social security system. Fairclough (2010) analyses the (New Labour) discourse of welfare reform as evidenced in the 1998 Green Paper on welfare reform. His insights  – the noting of New Labour’s combination of market-based and ethical discourses; its view of work as a moral obligation in the discourse of welfare reform; the construction of work and ‘welfare’ as mutually exclusive; the acceptance of benefit dependency as factual – are crucial to the present study, but the focus of Fairclough is on the constructions of ‘welfare’ and its recipients rather than the welfare state. Crisp (2008) trains his sight on the second spate of New Labour’s welfare reform during Gordon Brown’s government of 2007–10; he examines the rationale behind these reforms, which point to individual rather than structural, and moral rather than economic, causes for unemployment. Again, the focus

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here is not on the welfare state itself, and the study is not a linguistic analysis. Donoghue (2013) analyses the relations between New Labour’s welfare policies and community cohesion with recourse to some constructs of the Essex school of discourse analysis, and is able to show the contradictions and connections between the two. In these and similar studies, the concept of the welfare state is not examined, although they do point to concepts and axiologies relevant to the welfare state and as such are important contexts for the present study. Analyses focusing on the participants of the welfare state, though not always described as such, have often focused on the stigma associated with the receipt of benefits. One important analysis (Baumberg et al. 2012) is a report commissioned by a charity to gauge the pervasiveness of the idea that the receipt of benefits is shameful. It comprises a public opinion survey conducted for the purpose; reanalyses of existing surveys; interviews with focus groups; and an extensive corpus analysis of press material (1995–2011). It has overwhelmingly confirmed the existence of said stigma and a widespread view of benefit recipients as undeserving of support, producing evidence that links this view to the impact of the media. In the corpus analysis, it found that the overall evaluation of benefit recipients veers towards the negative, although this depends on the specific newspaper, and finds the 2010–11 levels of this negative coverage very high and comparable to similarly high levels in the late 1990s, although no straightforward increase is noted. Paterson, Coffey-Glower and Peplow (2016) analyse audience responses  – evident among others’ nomination strategies or transitivity patterns – to televisual representations of benefit claimants, finding that these representations resulted in overwhelmingly negative evaluations of benefit recipients in focus groups. Though this is not her main point, Pykett (2014) references the role such media representations can have in fostering public attitudes to benefit claimants. These studies converge with diagnoses on the stigmatization of claimants from cultural studies, such as Tyler (2013) or Skeggs (2004). Less conventionally, there are studies that argue for the inclusion of other participants, such as the middle class (Barbehön and Haus 2015), into analyses of the welfare state. Finally, extensive studies of the British press have so far focused on other subjects, typically involving groups: such as representations of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers (the RASIM project, see KhosraviNik 2010); of Islam (Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery 2013); of the suffrage movement (Gupta 2016); or of Polish migrants to the United Kingdom (Wawrzyczek, Mazur and Szewczyk 2010). It thus seems that an analysis of how a dynamic concept is constructed across the British press is timely, especially with a concept as important and as

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debated as the welfare state at a time of austerity that followed the 2008 financial crisis in the UK.

How this book proceeds To address this gap, this book conducts a qualitative analysis of the discursive constructions of the welfare state in four British newspapers: the conservative Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, the left-leaning Guardian and the Daily Mirror and their Sunday sister papers, in the timeframe marked by the onset of the political crisis in 2008 and closing with the 2015 general election. The study adopts the perspective of critical discourse studies (specifically, the discourse-historical approach to discourse analysis) and complements it with that of conceptual metaphor theory. Why (and how) we talk of some things, while the ‘thingness’ of others never registers, is very much of interest to the former framework, especially when the ‘things’ concern elements of the social reality. Both approaches  – which have been combined before (see e.g. Koller 2004, Musolff 2016b) – examine how some of these ‘things’ become obvious to the point of imperceptibility and so are well-suited to the study of persuasive representations at the interplay of language, thought and society. In the text that follows, Chapter 1 outlines some of the essential context for the analysis. This includes an account of the welfare state, particularly in the UK, highlighting the near-protean character of the concept. Relevant developments in British politics are then discussed, in particular the establishment of the welfare state and selected early-twenty-first-century policies, making for the evolution of the British welfare state from an expression of social solidarity to a more contractual form. A contextualization of the key analytical categories used in subsequent chapters then follows, briefly outlining the principal assumptions in the two fields of study  – the discourse-historical approach to discourse analysis and conceptual metaphor theory. Finally, the chapter sets out the specific approach adopted in this analysis and gives an overview of the corpus and its sources. The general research question, ‘How is the British welfare state constructed in the material analysed?’, is answered in three analytical chapters 2, 3 and 4. Chapter 2 uses the modified repository of analytical categories drawn up in the discourse-historical approach to discourse analysis and attempts to answer the question that could be expressed as ‘What is the welfare state?’. In other words, it shows how the boundaries of the welfare state are established in the key themes of discourse in the corpus. The particular delineations of these boundaries are

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related to the argumentative structures used in the conservative and left-leaning newspapers to legitimize and undermine the welfare state and its reform, and the analysis seeks to describe the relation, paying attention to contextual factors. The question that Chapters 3 and 4 set out to answer is how the welfare state is figuratively conceptualized in the material analysed. The focus of Chapter 3 is on figurative models of the welfare state, which are those metaphors of the welfare state that have the potential to model its functioning. Thus, if Chapter 2 focuses on the structural definition of the welfare state, Chapter 3 may be viewed as providing its functional definition mediated through its figurative conceptualizations. In turn, Chapter  4 gives an overview of other, more conventional metaphors of the welfare state, revealing well-entrenched assumptions about this complex concept. Both chapters also trace the argumentative functions of metaphors on the two sides of the political spectrum, pointing to contextual factors where relevant. These factors are given particular attention in the chapter that follows.

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The contexts, the corpus and the assumptions in this study

In accordance with the spirit of critical discourse studies, this chapter provides essential contexts for the analysis in the subsequent chapters. It opens with a section on the welfare state, which discusses the welfare state in general before moving on to outline the British welfare state and its discourses at two important stages: its foundation in the 1940s and the developments in the early-twenty-first century. The chapter then discusses the key theoretical concepts, the corpus, procedures and the major assumptions adopted in this study.

1.1  The field of action: The welfare state 1.1.1. The welfare state: The term and some definitions The term ‘welfare state’ was most likely inspired by the German Wohlfahrtsstaat (Lowe 2005, Cousins 2005). In the 1920s, it was used to denote a state that was willing to include social welfare in its responsibilities, in addition to the traditional remit of policing and upholding the law and order, and alongside another new addition, culture (Cousins 2005, after Hong 1998). By the 1930s, Wohlfahrtsstaat had taken on a negative meaning:  in 1932 it was deployed to ridicule the Weimar Republic for taking on social tasks it was unable to handle (Flora and Heidenheimer [1981b]). But its use to describe Britain, attested since the 1930s (Cousins 2005), appears to have been far from derogatory. In a book by Archbishop William Temple,1 it underscored the contrast between the Nazi Germany’s self-explanatory ‘warfare state’ and the ‘welfare state’ of Britain, the latter commendably putting the state apparatus to work in order to uphold the welfare of its citizens (Lowe 2005). The term was subsequently popularized in the UK and from there internationally by the late 1940s and early 1950s (Flora and Heidenheimer [1981b], Hill 2013). Its uptake reflected, as Lowe (2005)

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points out, the increased acceptance of social responsibilities of the state. The welfare state thus comes into being as an expression of social solidarity, of which the state is an instrument. Establishing the meaning of the term ‘welfare state’ is notably more difficult than tracing its origin. This difficulty is well established in specialized literature and often commented on explicitly (see e.g. Briggs 1961, Lowe 2005, Timmins 2017, Cousins 2005, Beech 2012, Hill 2013, Garland 2016). It can be accounted for by the discrepancies in the usage of the term as well as the diversity in existing welfare states. At its most general – though of course individual definitions vary in detail and emphasis – the welfare state has been described as a response of the state to the problems experienced by a society that arise from the operation of the market economy, where the function of the response is to mitigate these problems (see e.g., Flora and Heidenheimer [1981b], Mau 2003, Lowe 2005, Hayward 2012). This response can be understood in a broad or a narrow manner (see EspingAndersen 1990, Cousins 2005, Lowe 2005, Øverbye 2010, Kuhlmann 2019). In the broader sense, a welfare state is a state that is involved in the management of the economy, and the concept thus subsumes issues like the fiscal regime up to the overall macroeconomic policy (Esping-Andersen 1990, Garland 2016). In a similar vein, Lowe describes the welfare state as a type of post-1940s society where the government ‘actively accepts responsibility for the welfare (broadly defined) of all its citizens’ (2005:16), in addition to providing or funding certain core universal services, such as health or education. These services are to be provided ‘at a standard well above the barest minimum’ (2005:18), which in turn necessarily impacts the economy. The ‘minimum’ is a reference to the classic definition of the welfare state by Briggs (1961), which specifies that the modification of the impact of market forces should occur not only by ‘guaranteeing families and individuals a minimum income irrespective of the market value of their work or property’ and by protecting them from ‘social contingencies’ (such as illness) but also by ‘ensuring that all citizens without distinction of status or class are offered the best standards available in relation to a certain agreed range of social services’ (Briggs 1961:228). This last point is, according to Briggs, the ‘distinctive direction’ of the welfare state, which thus goes beyond ensuring mere survival of less successful groups and encompasses universal provision of social services at what he calls an ‘optimum’ level. Lowe (2005) accepts this argument, with the commonsensical reservation that ‘optimum’ standards at a universal level are necessarily a compromise on what would be technically achievable in individual cases.



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Pierson (2006), who too applies the term ‘welfare state’ to a type of society (and notes that it may also denote a type of state or polity), similarly stresses the objective of state intervention in economic processes, which is to ‘reallocate life chances between individuals and/or classes’ (Pierson 2006:10). This ‘normative’ (see Cousins 2005) aspect of the welfare state, whereby the state specifically sets out to achieve (or to seek to achieve) specific redistributive or emancipatory objectives, is sometimes considered a necessary condition to qualify a polity as a welfare state. Such a condition leads to questions of degree of ‘welfare statehood’ (i.e. what kind of policies or institutions are sufficient for a state to qualify, see Hill 2013) and historical difficulties (i.e. whether a major change in policy means a state no longer qualifies as a welfare state). Some studies (such as Cousins 2005) therefore adopt a narrower understanding of the concept, restricting it to social policy measures taken by the state, or, as Pierson (2006:10) puts it, ‘state measures for meeting key welfare needs’. These he lists as typically restricted to ‘health, education, housing, income maintenance, and personal social services’. Similarly, Esping-Andersen describes the narrowly defined welfare state as social services and income transfers, regarded as ‘the traditional terrain of social amelioration’ (1990:1). Less usual but useful is the delineation of the welfare state in the short compendium by Garland (2016). Garland (2016:7–8) outlines what he calls three ‘conceptions’ of the welfare state that should be viewed not as mutually exclusive but as ‘concentric circles of welfare state government’ (8). The inner one, which he labels ‘welfare state for the poor’ (6), is limited to support which is based on need, is means-tested and does not depend on a person’s previous National Insurance or other contributions. The second of these concentric circles is the view of the welfare state typically adopted in social policy studies, which includes ‘social insurance, social rights, and social services’ (7) within the welfare state. In this way, Garland subdivides the welfare state defined above as ‘narrow’ into two layers. The third and outermost layer in his classification is that of the welfare state as ‘a mode of government’ (6), where the government is active in shaping the economy via its ‘regulatory, fiscal, monetary, and labourmarket policies’ (8). This corresponds to the broader view of the welfare state as defined above. In all these definitions, the welfare state denotes primarily institutions and policies with a broadly specified aim. It should, however, be noted that there are also other conceptualizations (or operationalizations) of the welfare state.

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A  relatively straightforward example is one used in Hills (2015:xiv):  ‘public spending on and provision for’ public services and social security. Another is the view of the welfare state as a set of rights, which builds on T. H. Marshall’s concept of social rights (positive rights to e.g. healthcare or education) existing alongside civil and political rights (see White 2010). In this framework, social rights enable individuals to fully participate in civil society and are ‘constitutive of modern citizenship’, since in practice the exercise of other rights is contingent on social rights (Daguerre and Etherington 2014:10). These, however, do not typically filter outside of specialist discourse, unlike the institutional/policybased conceptualization. Usefully, Kuhlmann (2019) points out that the welfare state is perhaps best viewed as a dynamic concept, necessarily informed by the context in which it emerged or is analysed.

1.1.2.  Typologies and critiques of the welfare state Welfare states in the broad sense show a substantial diversity and have been variously classified. An early typology, whose terminology continues to recur in the British political discourse, is by Titmuss (1974). It distinguishes three models of social policy (a term interpretable as the welfare state). The first is the residual model, where state intervention is a temporary emergency measure accorded to an individual when the two primary channels of support  – the family and the market  – are ineffective. The second is the model described as ‘industrial achievement and performance’. As clarified by Midgley (1996), the objective of social programmes in this model is to stimulate the economy, to which they thus serve as a ‘handmaiden’ (Titmuss 1974:31). The model is concerned with the preservation of status differences rather than with redistribution, as welfare measures are tied to experience and performance at work. The third and final is the institutional redistributive model, which integrates social policy measures in the institutions of the society. In this model, social services are universal and provided outside of the market. These three models broadly correspond to the most influential to date typology of welfare states by Esping-Andersen (1990).2 His description of welfare states is based on three important parameters, shaped by historical and political developments in various areas of the world. One is the level of decommodification of services, or the degree to which social rights are accorded ‘on the basis of citizenship rather than performance’ (Esping-Andersen 1990:21), and public services are provided outside of the market. Another is the interaction of the activities of the state with those of the family and the market, described as



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the ‘public-private mix’ (Arts and Gelissen 2010:570): the different regimes are set apart ‘by their institutional logic for assigning welfare functions to the state, the market, and the family’ (Myles and Quadagno 2002:39). The third is the level of social stratification resulting from the above factors, reflected by the extent to which ‘one’s status as citizen will compete with, or even replace, one’s class position’ (Esping-Andersen 1990:21). Based on these factors, Esping-Andersen’s typology identifies three main clusters or types of welfare state regimes: liberal, conservative-corporatist and social democratic. The liberal welfare state is one where the market forces are the main factor impacting social security, and state intervention is not only modest but also based on need and so temporary. Accordingly, social support is not generous or easily accessible, and the provision of services is largely private, resulting in highly stratified societies. Anglo-Saxon New World democracies are listed as typical examples. The second model, the conservative-corporatist welfare state, is described by Esping-Andersen as typical of Germany, Austria and generally continental Europe. Here, the stability of social and family structure is considered paramount. This type of the welfare state does not strongly emphasize redistribution, as social rights are tied to class and status. In contrast, the level of decommodification of services is substantial, which does have some redistributive effect. The third type is the social democratic welfare state, which emerged in the Nordic countries. Equality-oriented (and so redistributive), this model offers high-level universal services and benefits. It has a high degree of decommodification and stipulates full employment, in part due to the high cost of running this model. In functional terms, welfare states may be viewed as ‘mechanisms for the satisfaction of basic needs’ (White 2010:20). In the various types of welfare states, the scope of the needs considered to be basic varies, from merely providing food and shelter to definitions taking into account those needs that stem from membership of a society. One example referenced by White (2010:20)  – after Amartya Sen, who in turn quotes Adam Smith – is that of a decent linen shirt, which would have been indispensable to an eighteenth-century craftsman, though it clearly does not qualify as basic sustenance. White notes that liberal welfare states, such as that of the UK, are mostly concerned with achieving this goal, while other types of welfare states have other ethical motivations, such as fostering egalitarianism. Whether oriented at ensuring survival or at fostering equality, though admittedly more so in the latter case, the welfare state has been exposed to recurrent criticism. On the one hand, its functioning is hardly ever described as

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satisfactory. Timmins sarcastically sums this up with a list of failures repeatedly ascribed to the various services in the UK: It is quite important to know that virtually every day since 1948 the NHS has been said to be in crisis, and that for the last seventy-five years morale within it has invariably never been lower. It is worth understanding that every time unemployment rises significantly, there is, like a bad dog that has its day, a spell when the unemployed are blamed as work-shy scroungers before unemployment settles on a new plateau. It is worth knowing that in education, yesterday has almost always been better than today. Timmins (2017:2)

On the other hand, the impact of the welfare state and the rationale for its existence have long been critiqued on more principled grounds. A  summary in King and Ross (2010) lists criticisms from different points of the political spectrum. Those advanced by exponents of classical liberalism (as well as neoliberalism) object to the interventionist state in general as incompatible with freedom, both in the economic and political sense, crowded out by the expanding government. Economic interventions are viewed as producing adverse outcomes such as inflation, with deregulation and low taxation held up as economically beneficial. Poverty is here seen as caused by individual behaviour and cannot be remedied by state action; as Offe (2006) points out, such state action is thus considered unnecessarily burdensome. As such, it can be, and often is, viewed as morally wrong. White (2010) references critiques of the welfare state on the grounds of liberty, also associated with classical (and neo)liberalism. At their simplest, such critiques object to the (negative) liberty of citizens, or freedom from forcible or coercive intervention, being impinged by what White (2010:27) terms ‘coercive “redistribution” ’3 as a result of the welfare state. Conservative critiques of the welfare state, as King and Ross (2010) further point out, can converge with those above, but a distinct conservative rather than liberal charge is that a centralized welfare state replaces and is destructive of civil society in particular. This critique is not limited to specific political parties, however, as the relation between state provision of services and civil society has long been held problematic even within the Labour party in the UK. Conservative thinkers – King and Ross (2010) single out Charles Murray and Lawrence Mead – have also accused the welfare state of discouraging individual responsibility and in this way creating a ‘dependency culture’4 that could stretch across generations. Murray in particular views the welfare state as incentivizing what he considers irresponsible behaviour, such as women having children out of



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wedlock. He proposes to curb such behaviour by removing said incentive (Jones and Lowe 2002). The welfare state is thus accepted to be socially destructive, contributing to the creation of an ‘underclass’ (Murray 1996, see also Burden 2005 or Tyler 2013). Finally, as outlined in King and Ross (2010), Third Way critiques of the welfare state underpinning New Labour reforms of the social security system in the late 1990s and early 2000s very closely track the liberal ones, with a similar emphasis on the state’s excessive role and the need to restore individual responsibility. Giddens in particular (1998:112) calls the welfare state ‘essentially undemocratic’. On a less negative note, he seeks to encourage positive behaviour (rather than punishing what is undesirable) by ‘investment in human capital’, proposing a ‘social investment state’ (1998:117). Critiques from the more traditional left include, according to Castles et al. (2010:10), those that point out the paradox of the welfare state enabling the existence of capitalism by making it acceptable or indeed capable of functioning, while at the same time ‘undermin[ing] the logic of capitalist accumulation’. Offe (2006) also notes that criticism from the Left points out the often intrusive and repressive character of welfare state intervention, which is accompanied by a moral assessment of its beneficiaries. These critiques have resonated differently in different political cultures  – the United States has been highly receptive to critiques invoking the notion of freedom, whereas in the UK, at least as far as evidence from the discourse analysed here is concerned, conservative critiques are much more common despite some (highly arguable, see Castles 2010) similarities in the variant of the welfare state.

1.1.3.  The welfare state in the UK: A snapshot overview The position of the British welfare state in Esping-Andersen’s typology is a matter of some debate (see Esping-Andersen 1990, Castles et  al. 2010, Beech 2012), partly because this position has shifted with the evolution of the welfare state in the UK (see the following section) and partly because analysts have applied disparate criteria. There is agreement, however, that the British welfare state starts off in the social democratic group (Cousins 2005, Esping-Andersen 1990), along with several Nordic welfare states. The reason for this classification is primarily the high degree of decommodification of services following the reforms of the Attlee government:  as Cousins (2005) emphasizes, public services in the UK were unequalled in the 1950s as far as decommodification is concerned.

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In contrast, modern-day UK appears to belong in the liberal group, having gradually fallen out of the social democratic group in the late 1980s (Cousins 2005). This assignment is not uncontroversial, however (see Lowe 2005, Hayward 2012). Though he positions the British welfare state as a borderline exemplar, Esping-Andersen (1990) classifies the UK as having a liberal welfare state, on the grounds that individualism and personal self-reliance are foregrounded, and support is largely residual. Lowe (2005) largely concurs with Esping-Andersen and rightly points out that the welfare state in the UK came to be ‘one of the least generous of all’ in the mid-1970s, to the point that  – as he posits  – the economy may have been negatively affected. Castles (2010) strongly disputes Esping-Andersen’s placement, arguing that the redistributive measures in the UK are in fact substantial if attenuated by the equally substantial market-induced inequality. Nonetheless, because these measures include primarily targeted benefits and means testing, this does detract from the universality of the UK welfare state, supporting the argument for its position in the liberal group. Typological difficulties notwithstanding, the British welfare state in the early twenty-first century can be briefly outlined, after Lowe (1990:155, quoted in Beech 2012), as comprising the following ‘core’ services:  social security, the health service, education, housing and personal social services. These are usually free at the point of use and often, though increasingly less so, provided by the state. Social security comprises a (complex and evolving) system of cash benefits, some contributory (funded from the National Insurance contributions) and other tax-financed, and  – in another classification  – some universal and other means-tested (or targeted). Social security is often held to also include elements of the fiscal regime (especially tax credits) and some services (such as job search services). The National Health Service (NHS) and education are largely self-explanatory. Housing is less tangible and usually denotes housing policy, the pool of public housing and the method of its allocation, and housing subsidies such as the housing benefit. Personal social services ‘provide for extraordinary individual need’ (Lowe 2005:273), focusing on vulnerable groups such as children, the elderly, persons with disabilities and ‘problem’ families in need of assistance. Unlike in the classic period, employment policy is typically no longer discussed as a ‘core’ part of the welfare state. Nonetheless, beyond the ‘core’ services, other policies or services may be considered part of the welfare state: tax allowances and transport policy could be cited as essentially redistributive and consistent with the objective of ‘increasing the sum of individual well-being’ (Lowe 1990:155, quoted in Beech 2012:86), which again bears out the dynamic nature of the concept of the welfare state. With its



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evolution from a highly decommodified model to one where contractualism is strongly emphasized, the British welfare state is a case in point of this dynamic nature. Below, there follows an outline of two points in this evolution that are of particular importance for contextualizing the debates analysed in Chapters 2, 3 and 4: the creation of the British welfare state and the developments in the earlytwenty-first century.

1.1.4.  Beginnings of the British welfare state: A solidarity revolution Given that it has no clear definition, it is not surprising that the welfare state in the UK has several starting points. Its prehistory is usually traced to the Tudor system of poor relief following the dissolution of monasteries (see Flora and Heidenheimer [1981b], Garland 2016, Olsen and Benjaminsen 2019). Garland (2016) goes even further back to early instances of economic regulation in England in the mid-fourteenth century, in the decades following the Black Death. More commonly, however, the origin of the welfare state in Britain (and in general5) is usually located in the profound transformations of economy, society and politics that occurred in nineteenth-century Europe following the Industrial Revolution and the beginnings of mass democracy (Castles et al. 2010, Harris 2004, Fraser 2009). The interrelated growth of capitalism, industry, cities and population rendered traditional modes of support obsolete, while institutional and ideological developments (such as a growing trade unions movement reacting to unfettered laissez-faire capitalism) then facilitated the acceptance of more widespread state support as an expression of solidarity. In the UK, the earliest pieces of legislation recognizable as relevant to the welfare state were enacted by Liberal governments between 1906 and 1911, with David Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer much of the time. Pierson and Leimgruber (2010:37) point out that the liberalism of this government, usually premodified as ‘social’ or ‘new’, was concerned with providing ‘the best possible conditions for human flourishing’, as opposed to economic liberalism. The reforms they list include free meals and medical inspections in schools, compulsory health insurance for low-earning workers, modest old-age pensions, as well as the so-called People’s Budget of 1909 to fund these. While not insignificant, the impact of these reforms was far weaker than it might appear. School meals, for instance, were optional. The old-age pension was not only difficult to obtain but was payable at the age of 70, beyond the life expectancy at the time, and remained below subsistence level. It would be during the Second

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World War that both the term ‘welfare state’ and what is considered its founding document in the UK would gain traction – though how much impact the war, or the feelings of social solidarity it engendered, actually had on the reform programme that followed is the subject of some debate.6 The document was Social Insurance and Allied Services (Beveridge 1942), popularly known as the Beveridge Report after William Beveridge, the civil servant commissioned to prepare it. The report recommended social insurance to ensure ‘income security’; social security was to be achieved through ‘cooperation between the State and the individual’, where the State should offer security for services and contributions’, with the stipulation that a minimum degree of support should be provided with no means test (Beveridge 1942:6– 7). Importantly, the report does not stop at identifying poverty as a key social problem to be eradicated: Social insurance fully developed may provide income security; it is an attack upon Want. But Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction, and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Beveridge (1942:6)

Social security, therefore, works only as part of a system that includes healthcare (addressing Disease), education (Ignorance), housing and town planning (Squalor) and full employment (Idleness). Such a system, as Timmins comments, expressed ‘much of post-war aspiration’ (2017:24). Crucial to the recommended approach was its combination of collectivism and individualism, regarded as ‘historic compromise’ (Lowe 2005:147), even if the specific solutions were neither completely novel nor – at least in other Western countries – universally applicable (Lowe 2005). On its release in December 1942, the report became a bestseller: Timmins repeatedly describes the reaction of the public as ecstatic. The politicians, slower and less enthusiastic to react than the general public, had their reservations – chiefly on the grounds of cost and feasibility but also their personal dislike of Beveridge. The report was eventually adopted by both Labour and (reluctantly) the Conservatives, to be implemented after the war and a general election; an Education Act was passed by the Conservative government in 1944, before the war ended. The report – as Timmins points out – proved useful as a propaganda tool for use abroad, to the extent that notes declaring the report to be ‘superior to the current German social insurance in almost all points’ (Timmins 2017:25) were present in Hitler’s bunker. After Labour unexpectedly won the 1945



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election, the government of Clement Attlee drew on the Beveridge Report, in addition to Labour’s pre-war ideas on social services, as a template for its programme of social reforms (Beech 2012). The programme, later described by commentators as the creation of ‘a new Jerusalem’ (after the William Blake poem), came into being between 1945 and 1948. It included provisions for social security designed as universal, adequate and comprehensive (Lowe 2005). This was operationalized as a combination of contributory (National Insurance-based) and tax-financed benefits, few of which were means-tested. Free at the point of use, the NHS went into operation on the Appointed Day of 5 July 1948 – marking yet another starting point of the welfare state – and soon overtook social security benefits as the most appreciated service. Education, following the reforms introduced by the 1944 Education Act, was now free and compulsory at the secondary level, and, as Lowe (2005) points out, was initially better funded than the NHS. The dire shortage of housing was to be addressed with the construction of public and (especially after 1951) private housing stock. Town and country planning laws were introduced. Key parts of the economy such as railways or coal mining went into public ownership. Perhaps most importantly, the Attlee government committed to Keynesian demand management and promised to maintain full employment: this would decrease the cost of social security, while tax revenue would provide the means to fund other services. What resulted was a system in which ‘the Attlee governments infused Beveridge’s liberal vision with ethical socialist ideas’: a ‘welfare capitalist’ rather than a democratic socialist society (Beech 2012:90). Lowe (2005) makes the important point that the social security in which one was entitled to subsistencelevel support (and so essentially freedom from poverty) was regarded as a prerequisite of personal responsibility rather than a factor that impeded it. At the same time, the welfare state was not reducible to measures that mitigated deprivation. Rather, it was a settlement that afforded mutual cooperation and support and promised a more egalitarian society. These shifts reflect what Lowe (2005:136) calls a ‘revolution in values and in the role of government’. Though it was not the founding principle of the welfare state, ‘the creation of a more equal and altruistic society’ (Lowe 2005:293) was increasingly perceived as its key objective. Lowe (2005) points out that in the period between 1945 and 1975, which he terms the classic welfare state, the UK was able to achieve substantial redistribution of both power and status (though of course some social groups, in particular women and ethnic minorities, were less able to partake of this). Much of this achievement was due to the full employment, which was

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sustained into the 1960s. But an important factor were universal services such as the NHS and education, which, though not explicitly redistributive, had a significant impact on average living standards. The classic welfare state could not, however, cope with the crises of the 1970s and started to falter in the slowing to negative economic growth, inflation and rising unemployment. The Callaghan Labour government retreated from Keynesian economics. The Conservatives, who took power in 1979, had by then embraced monetarism. As ‘welfare capitalism’ gave way to neoliberalism, retrenchment of the welfare state followed. The reforms7 included structural changes in many services that introduced internal markets, leading to the retention of public funding but not provision, as well as the residualization of social security (and an increasing stigmatization of its recipients, see Hayward 2012, Taylor-Gooby 2016). Spending on social security and public services was not substantially reduced, however (see Lowe 2005, Timmins 2017): this was difficult since even maintaining provision at earlier levels would have required increased spending. The welfare state was thus reduced, in Timmins’ terms, ‘in scope’ but not ‘in scale’ (2017:502). A  larger proportion of tax revenue now came from indirect taxation. These changes compounded the inequality engendered primarily by the market, which grew to levels Lowe (2005:435) calls ‘exceptional’.8

1.1.5.  Early-twenty-first-century welfare state in the UK: Towards contractuality By the time it took power following its 1997 victory, (New) Labour had embraced a ‘Middle Way’ between neoliberalism and its social democratic traditions, a duality reflected in the title of the chapter on New Labour’s welfare state in Timmins (2017:493), ‘Retreat or Renewal?’ The liberal tradition informed New Labour’s approach to economy, dubbed as ‘supply-side fundamentalism’ (Peck and Theodore 2000, quoted in Grover 2007). This was at variance with the mixed and regulated economy preferred in the traditional social democratic view (Beech 2017). In areas directly relevant to the welfare state, the liberal approach was expressed primarily in the reliance on private financing and competition in public services (Jessop 2007, Beech 2017), along with the targets and league tables that markets entail. After 2007, the planned involvement of the private sector and charities in the provision of social security (e.g. by assessing work capability or finding job placements) was met with some scepticism by principled supporters of state provision (Beech 2017). Finally, indirect rather



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than direct taxes came to account for an increasingly large proportion of tax revenue, reducing the progressiveness of the fiscal system (Lowe 1999). Despite these, it has been argued that New Labour’s welfare policies could be regarded as social democratic in spirit (see Atkins 2010, Beech 2017, Timmins 2017). State interventionism, evident in public policy and public spending, was a hallmark of New Labour governance (see Beech 2017, Timmins 2017). Spending on the NHS, education and social security benefits rose significantly and brought about improved outcomes. Further, to counteract the effects of tax system, the Exchequer used fiscal policy, in particular tax credits, to effect substantial redistribution (Beech 2017, Timmins 2017). An increasingly complex system of social security benefits served the same purpose. Beech (2017) further stresses that a key motivation behind New Labour’s interventionism and redistribution was social justice, setting it apart from neoliberal and classical liberal political agendas. More difficult to classify are the reforms of the benefits system by the Blair and Brown governments. The early Blair years saw the introduction of a series of welfare-to-work ‘New Deal’ programmes. Targeting different groups (initially those in receipt of Jobseekers’ Allowance, most notably the long-term unemployed under 25), these programmes offered support and training side by side with an increased conditionality of benefits. They are often considered successful (see Driver 2009, Timmins 2017), though Driver (2009) makes the point that success in such cases is not untypical in a buoyant economy. Lowe (2005) expresses a similar scepticism. From 2007 onwards, the focus shifted from reducing the unemployment rate to the more challenging rate of inactivity, in particular the relatively large numbers of those receiving incapacity benefit (Driver 2009). Over two years, several major documents were produced on welfare reform: the 2007 report by banker David Freud, the 2007 Welfare Reform Act, the 2007 White Paper and the 2008 Green Paper. While equality of opportunity (‘equal chances for all’) was an important objective of these plans (Driver 2009), these documents set out a punitive rather than empowering tack:  sanctions, including the cessation of benefits, were being proposed for those not meeting the increased requirements. Eligibility for benefits would decrease, as claimants would face an assessment for their capacity to work. Workfare – the requirement to perform some work in exchange for benefits – was to be introduced. Atkins (2010) accepts such proposals as social democratic in their objective (which was increased employment) even if not in means, though one has to ask if this is at all possible. In contrast, Beech (2017) notes that such changes constitute a move away from the concept of welfare as a citizenship right and as such were rejected by some social democrats within Labour.

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Further, even if the overall spirit of the Blair and Brown welfare state is accepted as social democratic, much of the discourse cannot be described as such. Theorizing the Middle Way welfare state, Giddens borrowed the jargon of finance to describe its goal – not the welfare state but the ‘social investment state’ (Jones and Lowe 1992:40), which empowers its enterprising citizens to compete in a knowledge-based economy. The reforms of the benefit system were communicated as a return to ‘rights and responsibilities’, easily identifiable as harking back to the – admittedly social – liberalism of Beveridge (see Lowe 1999). The concept of work in these reforms is narrowly patriarchal (Grover 2007) and firmly neoliberal (Fairclough 2010). Fitzpatrick (2017:215) does not mince words in describing Blair’s and Brown’s Labour as ‘indulging in hysterical rhetoric of dependency, benefit fraud, underclass values and undeservingness’. And though the redistribution achieved by the Blair and Brown governments was substantial, it was not substantially communicated, to the extent that ‘redistribution by stealth’ has been called ‘[a]‌distinctive [feature] of New Labour in office’ (Jackson 2008, see also Timmins 2017). These communicative choices appear particularly interesting when examined against the backdrop of public attitudes to poverty and redistribution. Analysing British Social Attitudes surveys, Sefton (2009) finds that New Labour’s time in office largely coincides with a substantial drop in the support for redistribution, evident since the mid-1990s. He also notes an increased acceptance of inequality and a growing prevalence of the belief that the causes of poverty are individual (such as lack of self-discipline or sheer laziness) rather than structural, both trends reversing the attitudes from the 1980s or even earlier. A related finding is the waning of resentment towards the very wealthy, accompanied by an intensification of such attitudes towards the recipients of social security. These shifts correlate with the growing perception of Labour as the party of the rich, in stark contrast to its traditional image. Sefton (2009) speculates that a contributing factor in this change of attitudes may have been Labour’s move away from the Left, not least in terms of its discourse on work and welfare. He hypothesizes that this discourse – with its ‘focus on rights and responsibilities’ and fixation on benefit fraud – ‘may have … unwittingly encouraged’ (Sefton 2009:239) the loosening of collective solidarity. The scarcity of such solidarity was evidenced by the reaction to comments by a Labour minister, who expressed the view that the welfare state should not raise a single parent or a disabled person above the relative poverty line:  his words, as Timmins (2017:647) puts it, ‘would have caused a riot [in 1997]. In 2007 … they caused barely a stir’.



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With Labour’s overall more contractual or even disciplinarian approach to the benefit system, as well as its readiness to depart from state provision in social security, Labour and Conservative policies on welfare reform had largely converged by 2009 (Driver 2009, Bryson and Fisher 2011), to the point that a new consensus on welfare was spoken of (Bochel and Defty 2007). But this was overshadowed by the difference in responses of the two parties to the ongoing financial crisis, which in turn impacted their choices on the welfare state around the 2010 election. Labour’s approach was, as Timmins (2017:650; see also Beech 2012) describes it, ‘essentially Keynesian’, in that it maintained high levels of public spending up until the election to mitigate the impact of the crisis and was seeking to halve the deficit (following the bailout of the banking sector) over the next parliament if elected. In contrast, the Conservatives prioritized deficit reduction, promising to complete it within a parliament. After the 2010 election, the strategy the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition government adopted to achieve that target was tax reform and the reduction of the welfare state, primarily of the social security system (Taylor-Gooby 2016, Lupton et al. 2015). This was outlined in the 2012 Welfare Reform Act and implemented in 2013, much of the changes going into force in April 2013 (see Wintour 2013). The Coalition also substantially reformed other areas of the welfare state, both for efficiency and ideological reasons. The tax reform raised the VAT rate and capital gains tax but cut the corporation tax and lowered the top tier of income tax (the latter from 2013). As a result, indirect taxes became the largest source of tax revenue. This made the fiscal system more regressive, as the less well-off bore the brunt of the reform (Lupton et al. 2015, Taylor-Gooby 2016). The retrenchment of the social security system was effected by further restrictions on eligibility (e.g. the introduction of means testing for child benefit or the extension of Work Capability Assessment for those previously deemed unfit to work), a greater use of sanctions (extending up to 10 per cent of all claimants, see Taylor-Gooby 2016), as well as the extension of the workfare programme. Further, a number of changes reduced the benefits themselves. These changes included the benefit cap (a ceiling on the amount a household could receive in cash benefits), a virtual freeze to uprating benefits, and what was popularly referred to as the bedroom tax – a reduction in the rate of housing benefit payable to those tenants in social housing whose dwelling was deemed too large (see Lupton et  al. 2015 for a detailed overview). These measures targeted primarily working-age out-of-work benefits, as pensioners were  – like in the Labour years  – protected from the cuts. The retrenchment

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was in effect an intensification of Labour’s reforms (Daguerre and Etherington 2014, Taylor-Gooby 2016), and for the most part, Labour did not energetically contest it. The Coalition reforms elsewhere in the welfare state have also been described as largely consistent with Labour’s emphasis on competition in services (see Timmins 2017). Though funding for the NHS and schools was ring-fenced by the Coalition government, they underwent deep transformations. In the NHS, the reforms embedded internal markets in the system to the point that, as Timmins (2018) describes it, the purchaser-provider split became ‘not just a way of managing the system but … the way of running it’, and the service resembled ‘an ecosystem’ rather than an organization (Timmins 2017:687). In education, the diversity of providers was effected by an increase in academies (directly funded and exempt from local authority control) and free schools, the latter of which could be established by parents, charities or companies. The withdrawal of the government from extending the pool of social housing continued, with the number of tenants in privately rented accommodation exceeding that in social housing (Timmins 2017). Beyond the belief in the efficiency of the private sector and the market, much of it shared with Labour, the Coalition reforms were informed by a vision of the state largely shared by the Coalition partners. In this view, where conservative and liberal critiques of the welfare states converge (Beech 2012), the interventionist state crowds out civil society, and social security is at best ineffective, and at worst detrimental. This vision is evident in the Big Society programme of public service reform, which promised to bring in private and voluntary providers for a number of services. It is also evident in the Coalition’s discourse of welfare reform, where, according to Daguerre and Etherington (2014), the concepts of an underclass dependent on welfare and of benefits as an unfair advantage provide a rationale for retrenchment. Though Daguerre and Etherington (2014) describe these as a discontinuity from Labour, whose discourse was overall more supportive of claimants, it is perhaps more appropriate to see the shift as a matter of scale rather than a major qualitative change. This also concerns the willingness to extend the range of providers beyond the state, evident already in welfare reform under Brown. While Lupton et  al. (2015) point out it is too early to evaluate the impact of Coalition health and education reforms,9 it does appear they continue what Hayward (2012:14) describes as a ‘retreat from the public service ethic’. This, arguably, is likely to erode support for the welfare state in the long run. In turn, the impact of cuts is easier to gauge. The overall cuts to the welfare state were



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as deep as one-third in those services that were not ring-fenced (Lupton et al. 2015) and went deeper and faster than those in other countries (Hayward 2012). The Coalition austerity has been described as ‘the longest, deepest, sustained period of cuts to public services spending at least since the Second World War’ (Timmins 2017:662). Cuts to local government budgets severely impeded their ability to provide local services. Timmins (2017) estimates that the Coalition reversed what redistribution and reduction in child poverty Labour had been able to achieve but remains cautiously optimistic as to its future. This cautious optimism may not be justified. Whether claiming the high moral ground or seeking to reduce the cost of the welfare state, reformists in the UK do not overall call for its abolition. Such calls are rare, rarely serious and rarely taken seriously. It is nonetheless clear that the original solidarity motivating the revolution in values has not been rebuilt in the early-twenty-first century. The breakdown of this solidarity is evident in the analysis that follows. The theoretical and methodological approach used in the analysis merges elements of critical discourse studies (CDS) and the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). The choice of the frameworks has been motivated by the research questions and the research material: the discourse-historical approach to discourse analysis stresses the importance of context and facilitates an examination of the role of representation in argumentative structures. The fact that the welfare state is spoken of in terms of other things across the corpus has in turn motivated the recourse to CMT. A brief overview of key concepts in these frameworks is therefore given in the subsequent section with the intention of contextualizing the analytical categories.

1.2  Critical discourse studies and conceptual metaphor theory: Essential background 1.2.1.  Critical discourse studies: Language and the social An approach (or indeed an array of approaches) rather than a unified theory or methodology,10 CDS goes back to the 1970s:11 Hodge (2012) pins its origin to a 1974 paper he co-authored with Kress, which articulated the need for a study of language that would not be divorced from the study of thought or of society. The need was at least partly answered by the publication in the late 1970s of Halliday’s Language as Social Semiotic (1978) and of Language and Control by Fowler et al. (1979). The former work foregrounds the social aspect of language in its titular description and in the definition of it as ‘a shared meaning potential’ (1978:1). Paraphrasing

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Bernstein, Halliday notes ‘language is controlled by the social structure, and the social structure is maintained and transmitted through language’ (1978:98), giving a dialectical view of the relation between the two. The latter work, Fowler et  al. (1979), set out a form of enquiry in which the scrutiny of language use sought to uncover or ‘demystify’ (1979:196) the implicit social meaning. The various approaches within CDS share a number of assumptions and concerns. Wodak (2001b:1–2) lists these as: a shared view of language as social practice; the treatment of the context of language use as highly significant; the examination of the relations between language and power. The diverse theories and methodologies  – although the prominence of the Hallidayan systemic-functional grammar is evident – are therefore united by a common critical perspective, understood more traditionally in the vein of the Frankfurt school, or more generally as denoting an interest in elucidating causal or other connections that are not readily apparent. Wodak (2001b:2) defines the objective of critical discourse analysis as ‘to investigate critically social inequality as it is expressed, signalled, constituted, legitimized and so on by language use (or in discourse)’. Xenophobic and discriminatory discourses remain an important area of analysis (see Hart 2010, KhosraviNik 2014), but there is a wide array of issues where power is at work, whether in the construction of group identities, both contemporary and historical (see Koller 2011, Gupta 2016), in specific areas of communication (see Merkl-Davies and Koller 2012 on business discourse), or in concepts such as European identity (see Krzyżanowski 2010).

1.2.2.  The discourse-historical approach DHA, on which this study draws, goes back to the 1980s. Much of its early work concerned xenophobia and national identity, with a focus on the discursive construction of ingroups and outgroups, as exemplified by the study by Ruth Wodak and other scholars of anti-Semitic discourse in Austria (see list in Wodak 2015). Wodak (2001a), Wodak (2015) or Reisigl and Wodak (2016) offer extensive overviews of the approach and lay out key concepts. The discourse-historical approach has adopted an extended definition of discourse that sees it as connected to a macro-topic and stresses the importance of context and argumentation, as well as noting the presence of multiple perspectives in a discourse (see Reisigl and Wodak 2016). The historical situatedness of discourses is explored, which can involve diachronic analyses, and triangulation – such as using another perspective on the data from other disciplines  – is



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encouraged. It should be stressed, however, that task-oriented methodologies are the norm across CDS, and so individual studies often combine constructs or perspectives from different approaches. Whatever constructs are used, and regardless of whether the process is deductive or inductive, the stipulation is that the analysis and interpretation should link micro-level linguistic or more broadly semiotic phenomena with what is referred to as the meso-level  – that of the situated interaction – and the macro-level, or the social (see Hart and Cap 2014). What also sets DHA apart within CDS is the specific inclusion of historical context as one of the four levels of context to consider, in addition to the co-text; the intertextual/interdiscursive relations and the ‘context of situation’ that sheds light on social variables (Wodak 2001a:67). The definition of ideology as laid out in the 2016 edition is somewhat distinct from that espoused in van Dijk (1998). Instead, it is ‘a perspective (often one-sided), that is a worldview and a system composed of related mental representations, convictions, opinions, attitudes, values and evaluations, which is shared by members of a specific social group’, where ‘fully formed ideologies’ are tantamount to grand narratives (Reisigl and Wodak 2016:25); ideologies are thus not neutral but not necessarily negative phenomena. The understanding of the ‘critical’ aspect of the approach is not substantially different from that in other approaches, however, and may be realized at the level of text or discourse by noting slippage such as inconsistencies or contradictions within it; uncovering what is termed ‘possibly persuasive or “manipulative” character of discursive practices’ by going beyond the textual level to contextualize these in ‘a wider frame of social and political relations, processes and circumstances’; and finally taking action to influence suboptimal practices (Wodak 2001a:65).

1.2.3.  Conceptual metaphor theory: Thought and embodied experience The metaphor theory that occasionally cohabits with CDS is CMT. Laid out by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and much discussed since (the literature is too extensive to list here), it bears much responsibility for bringing about a widespread, perhaps even popular, recognition of the pervasiveness of metaphor. It should be noted, however, that metaphor had long been recognized not only as a powerful instrument in politics, with Aristotle the usual early reference point (Semino 2008:4), but as a phenomenon with what Semino describes as ‘cognitive implications’ (2008:9). Indeed, a frequent criticism of Lakoff and Johnson’s work has been that it emphasizes its discontinuity from previous metaphor research,

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and many recent publications that discuss or apply CMT seek to correct this misconstruction with accounts of earlier scholarship ‘treating metaphor seriously’ (Musolff 2016a:310; see for instance Cameron 2003 or Musolff 2016a for accounts of Aristotle’s treatment of metaphor) and/or overviews of studies that point out predecessors of Lakoff and Johnson’s approach, whether in a concise or more comprehensive format (for the former, see Semino 2008 or Kövecses 2010; Fabiszak 2007 has a more extensive outline). These ‘cognitive implications’ of metaphor are central to CMT as formulated by Lakoff and Johnson. It holds that language is metaphorical because thought is metaphorical: ‘the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:5, emphasis original), as abstract concepts are systematically structured by ones that are more concrete and often based on embodied experience. The example that opens their argument is a handful of expressions such as ‘He attacked every weak point in my argument’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:4), which lead them to posit the conceptual metaphor argument is war.12 A conceptual metaphor is understood to comprise systematic correspondences, or mappings, between the source and target domains, where a domain is ‘any coherent organization of experience’ (Kövecses 2010:4). The conceptual metaphor argument is war thus comprises a number of mappings from the source domain of war to the target one of argument, as interlocutors correspond to enemies and arguments to weapons or missiles. Entailments, a concept akin, as Musolff (2016a:310) points out, to Aristotle’s enthymemes, are what can be inferred from the metaphor, such as the hostility that underlies an argument, or – an example used by Musolff – the construal of a temporary setback in a quest for a long-term outcome as losing a battle to win a war (2016b:7–8). Many of the most common mappings are related to the embodied experience, an insight that Semino (2008) believes fundamental to the originality and importance of CMT. Importantly, the notion of embodied experience has been broadened to include cultural and social factors so that ‘experiential structures depend on culturally and socially embodied processes’ (Fusaroli and Morgagni 2013:1, emphasis original).

1.2.4.  Conceptual mappings: Posited structure If Lakoff and Johnson (1980) posit that mapping takes place between conceptual domains, Lakoff (1993), as noted above, accepts that some mappings occur at the more abstract level of image schemas. Semino (2005, 2008) and Musolff (2006, 2016b) make use of scenarios or scenes, another posited group of mental



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representations, operating at a level below, and so more specific than, the domain. Musolff (2006) links the scenario to other sub-domain cognitive linguistic constructs, such as Fillmore’s scene. His understanding of scenarios emphasizes the naturalization of a conclusion within the entailed narrative (2016a:312). Semino (2008:220) defines scenarios more generally as ‘smaller and more specific [in comparison to conceptual domains] mental representations that relate to particular situations and the settings, entities, actions and goals associated with those situations’; scenarios in her (as well as presumably Musolff ’s) approach are embedded in source domains and in image schemas, as evidenced by mountain climbing (2008:2–3), a source scenario embedded in the path image schema and the journey source domain, utilized to figuratively describe difficulties and achievements (‘A mountain has been climbed only to reveal higher peaks on the other side … But let’s also look down on the valley from where we’ve come’). The hierarchy image schema-domain-scenario partly corresponds to that posited more recently by Kövecses (2017). Kövecses postulates that conceptual metaphors be viewed as engaging four conceptual units at four different levels of schematicity (defined after Langacker as precision of specification) at the same time: the image schema; the domain; the frame and the mental space (2017:323). The concept of frames, or ‘formal structures used to model situations, scenarios or events’ (Sullivan 2013:10), is co-opted from frame semantics and refers to a level more specific than the source domain. The least schematic construct, mental spaces, is used after Fauconnier and Turner (2002); functioning as ‘online representations of our understanding in working memory’ (in contrast to the other three, which are mental representations stored in long-term memory), they ‘borrow their structure from frames, but the generic structure from frames are further elaborated by specific information from the context’ (Kövecses 2017:326). Kövecses notes a correspondence between his use of the mental space and Musolff ’s of scenario, perhaps partly motivated by the latter’s description of scenarios as ‘emergent’ and ‘context-specific’ though sometimes resulting in long-term representations (2016a:312).

1.3  Theoretical and methodological assumptions and procedures in this study Given the Hallidayan roots of CDS (and so of the discourse-historical approach), this study accepts that language is constitutive of and constitutes social relations, and that language is a system of choices which are motivated (whether or not

28

Constructing the Welfare State in the British Press

they are conscious). Alternatives therefore matter, and so does paradigmatic analysis. This study is an analysis of the constructions of the welfare state in a sample of discourse, examining first the boundaries of the concept and then the metaphors of the welfare state. In this way, it tries to establish ‘what is the welfare state’ as well as ‘what the welfare state is’, and so is concerned with the ideational function of language, or ‘what language is about’ (Halliday 1978:112). The motivations behind the different arrangement of boundaries and choice of metaphors can be speculated on, and their implications, such as the evaluation of the welfare state, can potentially have material consequences on the political system. In turn, this system itself contributes to shaping these boundaries, metaphors and evaluations, in a dialectical relation between discourses and the social – the lifeworld. The definition of discourse I adopt is that of (uncountable) discourse as, after Fairclough and Wodak (1997:258), simply ‘language use in speech and writing’, while – for this analysis – it is sufficient to understand (countable) discourses as simply indicating topic and stance (see Koller 2011 for a similar definition). Premodification of the term normally indicates the source of the discourse (or discourse community): ‘the conservative discourse of welfare reform’ thus defines the origin (the conservative part of the political spectrum) and topic/ stance, in that it indicates a negative evaluation of the welfare state and its participants as justification for the said reform. The ‘critical’ aspect of this study is admittedly not substantially activist. Instead, it consists in, first the choice of the subject of analysis: my belief, briefly, is that in capitalist societies the welfare state significantly contributes to a better quality of life for most people. It is a precondition of making capitalism a liveable system, and its abolition would constitute one of Fairclough’s ‘social wrongs’ (2010:11) that CDS ought to address. Garland (2016) gives a succinct overview of the value of the welfare state: To be ‘for’ the welfare state in the 1940 was not  – nor is it today  – to be on the side of the angels. It was to be in favour of the social control of economic processes (with all the political conflict and administrative challenges which that involves) rather than in favour of entrusting these processes to the private choices of individual entrepreneurs, multi national corporations, or financial speculators. Garland (2016:42)

My advocacy for the welfare state consists in seeking to trace the work of ideologies, evident as naturalization, in the representations and construals of



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the welfare state in newspaper discourse. (This, admittedly, means that this study is more limited than the default CDS approach recommends, although I believe it does constitute an essential step.) I understand ideologies as shared ‘mental frameworks’, as van Dijk (1998:8–9) briefly puts it. Van Dijk quotes an extended definition by Stuart Hall: By ideology I  mean the mental frameworks  – the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation  – which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, figure out and render intelligible the way society works. Hall (1996:26), quoted in van Dijk (1998:9)

Van Dijk proposes to supplement this with the function ideologies have of regulating social practices. Thus complemented, this definition would fit this study, also in not defining ideologies as negative but as perspectivizing phenomena. Their operation is evident especially in the justifications for claims of value which are accepted as self-evidently right or wrong without further evidence. In Chapter 2, the analysis examines a number of what Wodak (2001a) calls ‘discursive strategies’ relevant to the welfare state in the key themes of discourse. The specific strategies are modified13 to suit the research material:  the main focus of DHA has long been on analyses of identity construction in discourses that evince xenophobia, racism or other types of group-based prejudice. Analyses of concepts require a modification of this framework to suit their different focus, which again may differ depending on the specific nature of the concept under analysis. A  solution proposed by Krzyżanowski (2013, 2016) is to integrate DHA with concept history (as expounded by Koselleck) to be able to critically reflect on what he calls ‘the increasing conceptual nature of discourse’ or the representations of actions by individuals and groups as abstract concepts (2016:309). This proposal is more suited to abstract concepts, however. The welfare state is a dynamic concept, with unclear boundaries and disputed evaluation, but is not abstract. I therefore borrow the notions of ‘sister concepts’ and ‘counter-concepts’ from Krzyżanowski’s account of concept history but primarily rely on a modified list of discursive strategies outlined in Wodak (2001a) or Reisigl and Wodak (2016). The list of discursive strategies for textual analysis as presented in Wodak (2001a:73) comprises referential or nomination strategies, predication, argumentation, perspectivation and intensification or mitigation. In analyses of discourses where groups can be referred to in diverse ways, nomination is not only a productive but an essential category to consider. This

30

Constructing the Welfare State in the British Press

study, however, aims to trace the use of the term ‘welfare state’, and so the key concept is invariably referenced as ‘welfare state’. Instead, what is essential is the examination of what the welfare state comprises. I therefore propose the term ‘delineation strategies’ to describe the ways the boundaries of the concept of the welfare state are constructed in discourse (in other words, the different referents of the term ‘welfare state’ that can be recovered from the text). This can be done by analysing larger chunks of texts, focusing on anaphora and coreference chains, relations of opposition or equivalence, parallel structures, elaboration and apposition. In principle, metaphor and/or collocation analysis could also be used to that end, although this is not done for this study. A caveat should be made at this point that the use of the term ‘strategy’ for an act that might not be fully intentional (but simply reflect a person’s understanding of the concept) may be viewed as problematic. Wodak’s definition of strategies as ‘more or less intentional’ does allow for some ambiguity, however. It is also clear from the table that the framework all but equates predication with evaluation. Predication can be understood more broadly, however: whether analysing identity or concept construction, it would appear reasonable to consider what actions are assigned to the participant/s in question. This indeed is how KhosraviNik (2010) interprets this strategy. Here, the actions assigned to the welfare state are not the primary focus but are noted where relevant to delineation or evaluation. Further, it is clear that nomination strategies can carry evaluation. Delineation, in contrast, does not so much carry evaluation itself but can (and often does) facilitate it, at least as far as the welfare state is concerned. It is perhaps DHA’s understanding of argumentation strategies that has received the most critical attention. These have been defined as establishing a basic positive or negative evaluation of an action or actor in relation to a checklist of topoi, where topoi are understood as follows: [Topoi] can be described as parts of argumentation which belong to the obligatory, either explicit or inferable premises. They are the content-related warrants or ‘conclusion rules’ which connect the argument or arguments with the conclusion, the claim. As such, they justify the transition from the argument or arguments to conclusion (Kienpointner 1992:194). Wodak (2001a:74)

Reisigl (2014) paraphrases this understanding of a topos as a simplified version of Toulmin’s argument scheme. In brief, Toulmin’s model (see Žagar 2010 for a more detailed description) is only slightly more extensive and uses a different



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terminology:  the claim is what is being proposed, the grounds or evidence provide the intended basis for the proposal, and the warrant is what connects the grounds with the claim (i.e. what in fact justifies the conclusion). Wodak’s take on the topos has been criticized by among others Žagar (2010). His rationale is, among others, that it diverges from the classical rhetorical definition of a topos in treating topoi not as general rules (if X, then Y) in an argument, but in that specific contents, such as that of name or help, are assigned to the topoi, which therefore resemble literary devices. Reisigl (2014) defends this content-related use of the term but accepts Žagar’s more serious criticism of the ‘checklist’ use of topoi in some studies, accepting that the specific claims evident in the discourse under analysis should be, if possible, unpacked. For this study, I  retain the content-related understanding of a topos (along with Reisigl), which I believe is useful especially when understood after Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou and Wodak (2009) as specific ‘structures of arguments’ which are linguistically ‘realized’ through argumentative strategies leading  – quasi as ‘short-cut’ (frequently without providing data and warrants)  – to a particular (logical and intentional) conclusion. Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou and Wodak (2009:9)

A topos can thus mean a mental short-cut14 – an argument made from a premise (or, in Toulmin’s terms, a claim justified with a warrant) that is not always articulated because it is well-rehearsed, or considered self-evidently correct (or incorrect, mutatis mutandis). A  topos can be regarded as a compressed argument: at times, it need only be signalled to be comprehensible within a given discourse community. The association with literary devices, a criticism raised by Žagar, is in fact useful in reflecting the familiarity of specific topoi within specific discourse communities. Thus understood, topoi are likely to be ideological (in the van Dijk sense defined in Chapter 1), and so it is reasonable to include them in the analysis. It should also be noted that both nomination/ delineation and predication strategies can, and indeed often do, have an argumentative function. Finally, though perspectivation or perspectivization can potentially be understood very broadly (see e.g. Graumann and Kallmeyer 2002), this study most typically indicates reported speech or any discourse ex mente aliena. This may but need not have a bearing on whether such discourse is endorsed or undermined, however, especially given the abundance of reported speech in

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Constructing the Welfare State in the British Press

newspapers. Intensification (or amplification) and mitigation can, clearly, be expressed in a number of ways; these strategies are noted when relevant. Table 1 outlines the strategies as understood in this study. Beyond textual analysis, the elements of the context I consider relevant are provided in the overview of the British welfare state and press in this chapter, providing much of the institutional context, with both the welfare state and the press comprising bundles of social practices. Other contextual elements include intertextual or interdiscursive connections, specific political events and elements of the broader sociopolitical settlement, as these relate to why the welfare state is delineated or construed in certain ways and not others. For this study, I integrate elements of CMT with CDS. The two frameworks have been used jointly before (see especially Koller 2004); in particular, as I argue elsewhere (see Paprota 2020), the topos and the figurative scenario are an interesting point of convergence between the two. I adopt the broad definition of metaphor as speaking of one thing (including concepts) in terms of another. I also accept that linguistic metaphors may reflect the existence of conceptual metaphors. As appears to be the consensus, I  do not consider every posited mapping in the conceptual structure a conceptual metaphor. For the sake of Table 1  Modified repository of DHA strategies, based on Wodak (2001a:73) Strategy

Objectives

Delineation

Establishing boundaries of Anaphora and coreference concepts chains; relations of opposition or equivalence; parallel structures, elaboration, apposition; metaphor analysis; collocation analysis Assigning positively or Stereotypical, evaluative negatively evaluated attributions of negative or predicates to actors or positive traits; implicit and concepts explicit predicates Justification for positive or Topoi used to justify political negative attributions action Expressing involvement Reporting, description, Positioning speaker’s point narration or quotation of events of view and utterances, especially speech ex mente aliena; genre Modifying the epistemic Intensifying or mitigating the status of a proposition illocutionary force of utterances

Predication

Argumentation Perspectivation, framing or discourse representation Intensification, mitigation Modifications in italics.

Devices



Contexts, Corpus and Assumptions

33

simplicity, the conceptual structure accepted as the working model is that used in Semino (2008), which is image schema-domain-scenario, rather than the one in Kövecses (2017). I also accept, after Hart (2010), that metaphor can be – and often is – both strategic and ideological, a point I also make in Paprota (2020). The ideological side of metaphor is particularly evident in the choice (where this choice is possible) of what the welfare state is construed as, and in the role metaphor has in justifications of claims of value or policy concerning the welfare state. Chapter  3 analyses ‘model metaphors’ of the welfare state. By this, I understand those metaphors of the welfare state where the source concept is overtly indicated in the text and does not need to be inferred contextually. The linguistic expression and the conceptual mapping are thus broadly the same, usually following the ‘A is B’ form. Further, these are metaphors that illustrate the perceived function or impact of the welfare state and as such arguably have the potential to become explanatory if not constitutive. I  propose that model metaphors be viewed as related to, and perhaps a subset of, what Steen et  al. (2010) define as direct metaphors. In Steen et al. (2010:38–40), direct metaphors are ones where the presence of metaphorical mapping is explicitly indicated by lexis functioning as ‘metaphor flags’: markers of similes or analogies (‘like’, ‘as’, ‘comparatively’, etc.), as well as what is referred to as ‘complex mental conception markers’ (‘regard as’, ‘imagine’, ‘as if ’, etc.); signals of indirectness such as ‘kind of ’ are excluded, however (2010:40–1). Thus defined direct metaphors largely comprise what is conventionally thought of as metaphorical similes or analogies, though metaphor flags include also words such as ‘literally’, which do not indicate a simile; lists of metaphorical markers are also available in other studies such as Goatly (1997) or Partington (2006); a detailed overview is available in Skorczyńska and Ahrens (2015:361–4). Under the criteria listed by Steen et al., the classic ‘A is B’ form of metaphor is not treated as direct. This exclusion is implied in Chapter 5 of their analysis, where the example ‘marriage was a trap’ is referred to as ‘a – relatively unique – classic A is B metaphor’ (2010:90) and is included in the section ‘Straightforward applications of MIP’ rather than ‘Directly expressed metaphors’ which it immediately precedes. Interestingly, however, at least one study (Perrez and Reauchamp 2014) drawing on Steen et al. does in fact treat ‘A is B’ metaphors as direct, and it would not seem unreasonable to see them as related: if Skorczyńska and Ahrens (2015), after Goatly (1997), include the conditional (could, would, may) as a metaphor signal despite the amount of noise it is likely to generate in a corpus analysis, the copular ‘be’ might not appear that much different in

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Constructing the Welfare State in the British Press

this respect. Further, in this corpus, there appears to be much overlap between the Vehicles functioning in ‘A is B’ metaphors and those in direct metaphors as delineated by Steen et al. Nonetheless, to convey the potentially constitutive character of ‘A is B’ metaphors for the welfare state, this study uses the designation ‘model metaphors’, which include direct metaphors as outlined by Steen et al. The designation of ‘model’ is inspired by Steen (2011), where the term is used to describe conceptual mappings that are broadly recognized and so function in discourse as largely constitutive or explanatory, somewhat analogous to what Cameron (2011:28) calls ‘framing metaphors’ or more broadly ‘lexico-conceptual pacts’. Steen’s use of the notion serves to highlight the social dimension of metaphors in addition to those of language and thought, and he notes four categories of models – official, contested, implicit and emerging, of which the second is a useful label for this study. It should be reiterated, however, that the understanding of model metaphors in this study means that the linguistic realization directly indicates the source concept, and so the notion of ‘model’ is not limited to what Steen calls the level of thought (i.e. it is here used about the linguistic expressions as well as the conceptual structures). Further, it needs to be emphasized that the explanatory potential of some model metaphors may be substantial but not actualized in broader discourse (which is not analysed in this study), and so the broader social dynamics of these metaphors are not discussed here. The metaphors of the welfare state, established with recourse to MIPVU (Metaphor Identification Procedure – Vrije Universiteit), an altered version of the original Metaphor Identification Procedure developed by the Pragglejaz group (see Steen et al. 2010 for an overview of both), are then grouped by theme in Chapter 3 and by source domain or scenario in Chapter 4, and their role in argumentation is analysed. As in the previous chapter, I also indicate relevant elements of the context, similarly defined. In the metaphor section, the terms ‘Topic’ and ‘Vehicle’ denote the linguistic realizations of the target and source concepts, respectively. There are, inevitably, some interesting issues that have been omitted from the analysis. One is the identification and representation of social actors other than the welfare state:  while this is a potentially fruitful area of study, and one where discourses have very material consequences in the form of the stigmatization of benefit claimants, preliminary studies on a smaller corpus (Paprota 2015) indicate that the task merits a separate study. Another is genre, and the interpersonal function of language generally: genre is here somewhat complicated by the composition of the corpus and by newspaper discourse



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in general, as both opinion and news texts are what Koller (2004:24) terms, after Foucault, ‘secondary discourse’, which reflects and mediates the primary discourse of what is being reported or commented on. The rationale behind these omissions is to retain a relatively tight focus of the study on the concept of the welfare state itself as conveyed in the corpus. The corpus and its immediate context – the British press – are briefly profiled below.

1.4  The British press 1.4.1.  General points Though a detailed overview of the UK press would be out of place here, especially given that such overviews (Temple 2008, Franklin 2008, Bingham and Conboy 2015) are widely available, several aspects of the press in the UK should be highlighted. First, the press in the UK is diverse in some ways but not others. The diversity is in part about geography, with a wide array of local, regional and nationwide newspapers, published daily and on Sundays. It is also about politics:  nationwide newspapers tend to have political leanings which are easily ascertained. While most main points on the political spectrum are represented, it should be noted that the British press market in general veers very strongly towards the right (see Curtice 1999 for traditional allegiance or Smith 2017, and Table 2, for perceived allegiance). The diversity also extends to what Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery (2013:4) tactfully call ‘style’, or the place of a newspaper on the broadsheet-tabloid spectrum, the former end representing ‘serious’ newspapers offering chiefly news and analysis, with the latter, ‘popular’ newspapers mostly focusing on light entertainment and national if any news. Table 2  Perceived political affiliation (%), excludes don’t knows (Smith 2017)

Very left-wing Fairly left-wing Slightly left-of-centre Centrist Slightly right-of-centre Fairly right-wing Very right-wing

Telegraph

Mail

Guardian

Mirror

0 4 7 14 20 32 21

3 3 6 6 11 26 44

11 30 25 11 7 7 5

11 30 26 9 7 11 6

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Constructing the Welfare State in the British Press

This correlates to some degree with the readership of a given newspaper within the different social classes. In turn, the lack of diversity is reflected in the concentrated ownership of the press, with only a handful of players running the market (eight for the national market, see House of Lords 2008:160; four for the regional and local newspapers, see Franklin 2008). Although this does not substantially depart from European standards, it has been listed as a point of concern in an ‘audit’ of UK democracy by a research unit at the London School of Economics (Wilks-Heeg, Blick and Crone 2012). Second, journalists in the UK are not a diverse group overall: a Reuters Institute report (Thurman, Kunert and Cornia 2016) has found that there are very few ethnic minority journalists in the UK press; that women in senior roles are underrepresented; that most journalists have university degrees, which likely correlates with a middle-class background and that while junior journalists are more likely to have left-leaning or centrist views, the proportion of right-leaning views increases in the upper ranks of the profession. Third, the press in the UK is, and is believed to be, influential. One reason is the high readership of newspapers (see Table 3 for the four newspapers under analysis, and Franklin 2008 for historical data). This has led some newspapers, which traditionally declare their support ahead of a general election, to claim they can influence election results, a claim that has not been ascertained conclusively:  Curtice (1999:23) finds only a ‘marginal’ impact of newspapers since 1992; a later study (Reeves, McKee and Stuckler, 2016) finds a possible impact the Sun might have had in the 2010 election but not in 1997, with no conclusive results overall. Nonetheless, Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery (2013) list research confirming that newspapers do have an influence, incremental with increased exposure, on beliefs and attitudes of their readers (although the influence is clearly bidirectional), and politicians are normally careful not to antagonize at least the more powerful newspapers, sometimes actively courting their editors: the close relation between Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch, owner Table 3  Average circulations in January 2008 (Press Gazette 2008) and 2015 (Turvill 2015b)

Daily Mail Daily Mirror Daily Telegraph The Guardian

January 2008

January 2015

2,313,908 1,512,599 890,086 378,394

1,688,727 922,235 494,675 185,429



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37

of the Sun and the Times among other media, was much noted. At a more general level, the historical and present impact of newspapers on the creation of national identities is well-recognized (see Conboy 2006, Anderson 2006). Overall, if power is understood ‘in terms of capability and resources, which include the discursive power to promote and impose concepts as the basis of preferred policies’ (Chilton 1996:6, quoted in Semino 2008:85), newspapers clearly have power, especially since they also – sometimes – have their preferred policies: Brexit, strongly supported by all of the conservative British press, is a recent example. Lastly, the press in the UK is a business, and newspapers survive on sales and advertising revenues. The need to lock in revenue clearly has some bearing on how a newspaper perceives its role, although this influence need not be straightforward. Franklin (2008) quotes the then Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, writing on what the latter believed newspapers are for. Rusbridger lists three objectives: primarily to tell society about itself, to act as a pollinator of information. To be a conduit between subjects and rulers, citizens and legislators, legislators and citizens, citizens and citizens …; … to entertain …. And they were also there to challenge power – to hold it to account. Franklin (2008:4)

Most likely, the business model of the press is contingent on how well audiences perceive those tasks to be accomplished by newspapers. It should be noted, however, that it is selling newspapers which is the primary objective of newspapers, as aptly summed up by Jay Rayner, a Guardian journalist and food critic: But the key thing is this: mine is a writing job not an eating job. I am there to sell newspapers or the digital equivalent thereof. If, as a result of my lack of anonymity fewer and fewer people believe what I write, I will lose my job. It is up to me to write in as convincing a manner as possible so that never happens. Clark (2017)

Business entanglements can have less obvious effects, however: one example was the move of Peter Oborne, a Telegraph columnist, to the Mail in 2015, after he apparently disapproved of the lack of critical coverage in the Telegraph of its major sponsor, the bank HSBC (see Turvill 2015a); Oborne had moved in the other direction in 2010.

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Writing in 2007, Franklin (2008) describes newspaper business as profitable, with increasing revenues and sales. This trend has not lasted, however (see Table  1):  with the shift to online, dropping sales of print newspapers (see Greenslade 2016) and so decreasing revenue, the future of newspapers is far from secure, and the pressure to remain relevant is intense.

1.4.2.  The newspapers under analysis Four newspapers – the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Guardian and the Daily Mirror  – along with their Sunday sister newspapers, respectively, the Sunday Telegraph, the Mail on Sunday, the Observer and the Sunday Mirror, have been selected for this study. The aim was to choose newspapers that would be representative of both ends of the political spectrum as well as the broadsheettabloid continuum: the Telegraph and the Mail self-identify as conservative and have frequently expressed support of Conservative and Coalition governments; they are also – as shown in Table 2 – perceived as such by the general public. In contrast, the Guardian/Observer and the Mirror are left-leaning, with the former perhaps better described as liberal. Importantly, the choice of two conservative and two left-leaning newspapers is not representative of the political affiliation of the British press, which – as noted above – leans towards the right. There are only two other left-leaning newspapers:  the Independent, no longer issued in print, and the Morning Star, with a minuscule circulation. Equally importantly, the general political affiliation of a newspaper does not predetermine the message of every single article: quite the contrary, it is common for newspapers to have one or more columnists who regularly express a point of view at odds with that of the usual audience (examples include Mary Riddell in the Telegraph, Matthew d’Ancona in the Guardian or Suzanne Moore in the Mail); journalists often move between newspapers (such as the move of Peter Oborne mentioned above; Simon Heffer moved in the opposite directions around the same time), and – to state the obvious – a perception that audiences would always simply absorb the viewpoint present in a given text would be astoundingly naive. Also relevant to the selection of the newspapers was their ‘style’, with the Telegraph and the Guardian considered classic broadsheet, or quality papers. The Daily Mirror is unquestionably a tabloid, while the position of the Daily Mail as a tabloid has sometimes been questioned, chiefly owing to its frequent focus on politics; some publications (Tunstall 1996) call it ‘mid-market’, but others, including Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery (2013), as well as the present study, classify it as a tabloid nonetheless.



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The final criterion was the high reach of each newspaper: during the timeframe analysed, the Telegraph was the best-selling quality paper in the UK; the Guardian, despite relatively low print sales, reached high audiences online, as did the Daily Mail, though its print sales were high; the Mirror had long been UK’s best-selling newspaper and remains in the top half of the tabloids. Further, all newspapers could be accessed online with no charge for much of the timeframe (the Telegraph introduced a metered paywall in 2013, but it was easily bypassed), and this easy access further boosted readership to the point that the publishers of the four newspapers together reached around 65 per cent of the market share in print and online in 2015, according to a report by Media Reform Coalition using National Readership Survey data (Media Reform Coalition 2015).

1.5  Overview of the corpus The corpus was compiled from the LexisNexis database, a commercial repository of legal and journalistic texts and comprises texts from the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Guardian and the Daily Mirror as well as their Sunday sister papers in which the search term ‘welfare state’ (which also catches plurals) occurs twice. The texts were saved in four subcorpora, one for each pair of newspapers, as the differences between the dailies and their Sunday sisters are negligible for the purposes of this study. The overall size of the subcorpora (the count of texts, the overall number of tokens in each subcorpus and the average count of tokens per text) is as set out in Table 4. Table 5 gives the distribution of the texts by years. As evident from the data, the conservative newspapers show a generally steady level of interest in the welfare state that rarely exceeds five texts a month, although the 2010 government change does appear to coincide with an overall upward trend, better marked in the year-on-year data rather than the monthly plot. The exceptions are a slight spike in the text count just ahead of the 2010 general election and a significant one in April 2013. Three developments coincided that month, corresponding to their own topics of discourse, that account for this spike: changes to the benefit system, specifically the introduction of a reform popularly known as the ‘bedroom tax’, which effectively reduced the amount of housing benefit for tenants of council housing if their house was deemed too large, and a change in benefits received by those living with disabilities; the conviction of Mike Philpott, an unemployed man sentenced for setting his house on fire and causing the deaths

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Constructing the Welfare State in the British Press

Table 4  Size of the subcorpora Subcorpus

Number of texts

Tokens in SketchEngine

Tokens per text

Telegraph Mail Guardian Mirror

161 126 402 61

179,236 138,288 449,149 37,653

1,113 1,098 1,117 617

Table 5  Texts per year Subcorpus

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015*

Telegraph Mail Guardian Mirror

10 14 18 2**

16 12 25 0

19 24 75 16

20 15 71 5

23 14 62 4

40 32 90 15

23 11 44 13

10 4 17 6

*2015 until end of April. ** Almost entirely a duplicate (only headline varies).

of six of his children; and finally the death of Margaret Thatcher, whose impact on the welfare state continues to be a matter of political disagreement. With the left-leaning subcorpora, the Guardian obviously stands out in terms of text count, accounting for more than half of the entire corpus. The text count is much lower for the Mirror, with some months, including the entire year 2009, with no texts at all. This could be accounted for by its being a more typical tabloid than the Mail in that its focus is much less political overall or could be down to the Mirror not using the term ‘welfare state’ when referring to issues related to the concept. The Independent, which was initially considered for analysis, showed a pattern much more similar to the Mirror than the Guardian, however; if the welfare state would intuitively appear to be a partisan issue, this is not evident from the text counts in this corpus. There is a similar rising trend after the 2010 general election with both subcorpora, but the Guardian shows a much more dramatic increase in October 2010, when the Spending Review announced cuts to the benefits system, and the difference in the pre- and post-2010 election parts of the subcorpus is more sustained than in the conservative subcorpora. The April 2013 spike occurs both in the Mirror and the Guardian.



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Genre is not a central part of this study, and the texts were not specifically coded for it. It should be noted, however, that a vast majority of texts in this corpus are not hard news but opinion or analysis: news – as much as ‘hard’ news is possible in tabloids – constitute about 22 per cent of the Telegraph texts; about 21 per cent of the texts in the Mail, 16 per cent in the Guardian and 15 per cent in the Mirror subcorpora. Where it appears relevant, genre is noted in the course of the analysis. While the initial intention was to carry out a qualitative and a corpus-assisted analysis of how the term ‘welfare state’ is used, this turned out impractical for this corpus. One reason is its relatively small size for a corpus analysis, given that an important aim of this study is to note similarities and differences between the two sides of political spectrum, if not between the newspapers themselves, which necessitates the preservation of distinct subcorpora. The second is what might be called the insufficient topicality of the corpus, as even texts with two occurrences of the search term have sometimes turned out to only mention the welfare state tangentially. Finally, technical problems could not be feasibly remedied: while encoding errors in LexisNexis output are common and can normally be easily corrected, at least two years’ worth of texts in the Guardian subcorpus was found to have had hyperlinked text simply deleted, with deletions ranging from individual words to entire sentences. Remedying this for individual fragments in qualitative analysis was feasible but would likely necessitate a manual download of all the years affected from the Guardian website for a corpus analysis, which was deemed impractical. For this reason, the analysis of concept boundaries and metaphors, carried out with the use of the analytical categories outlined in Sections 1.2 and 1.3, proceeds in the qualitative fashion. Each chapter adopts a slightly different procedure (described in the relevant chapters) to get a grip on the data. The analysis begins with an attempt to establish the basics:  the boundaries of the welfare state.

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2

Boundaries of the welfare state

This chapter seeks to outline how the boundaries of the concept of the welfare state are drawn in the discourse under analysis. It discusses the key delineations of the welfare state in the main themes of discourse: reform of social security and public services; problems and scandals; and political identities. It analyses the main delineations of the welfare state in those themes, indicating their role in argumentation structures and evaluations of the welfare state.

The welfare state, as shown in Chapter 1, is a dynamic concept in political thought at large, and this is also the case in the corpus analysed in this study. The present chapter traces the boundaries of this concept within selected key themes of discourse. In other words, it sets out to establish what elements of reality are designated as the welfare state within these themes and then to analyse what bearing this has on argumentative strategies in debates concerning the welfare state and on its resulting evaluation. To analyse a concept, especially one whose boundaries are not stable, but which is invariably referred to in the same manner, the repository of strategies scrutinized in the discourse-historical approach would benefit from some modification. This consists in replacing nomination with delineation, as discussed in Chapter 1. The modified repository of strategies used in this chapter is shown previously in Table 1 on p. 32. To downsample for this chapter, the corpus was restricted to those texts where the referent of the term ‘welfare state’  – and so the boundaries of the concept – could be reasonably established from the co-text. The co-text window was initially set (after a sample analysis) as within three sentences from that in which the term occurred. This, however, was treated as a guideline rather than a fixed rule:  occasionally, the narrative indicated that a broader window was necessary (e.g. because a parallel structure continued outside of the original window); typically, the headline was also considered.

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The main themes of discourse were then identified for this downsampled corpus. These can be expressed in general terms as reform, including the reform of the social security system and reform of other public services; problems and scandalous events concerning the welfare state; political identities; the financial aspect of the welfare state; social attitudes; immigration; media representations and other minor themes. This chapter discusses three main themes where more than one delineation can be distinguished. One minor reservation to make at this stage is that the understanding of a theme/topic in this study1 diverges from that in van Dijk (2001), where a topic is essentially a proposition that summarizes a text or part of a text. Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou and Wodak (2009) use the term ‘theme’ as synonymous to ‘topic’ (see ‘key themes/topics of the text’, 2009:9). This study uses ‘theme’ to avoid confusion with the term ‘topos’ and adopts a simplified interpretation of a ‘theme’ as the issue about which a proposition would be made, were the text summarized. After downsampling, three broad delineations of the welfare state could be identified. The least frequent is also the most general, where the welfare state is identifiable as a form of economic governance, in practice reducible to redistribution or an interventionist state. This delineation is only marginally present in the corpus, however. Typically, the welfare state is delineated in one of the two ways: one where the welfare state is restricted to social security, in particular the benefit system, and another where the welfare state is tantamount to public services or their provision. Both are ‘narrow’ definitions of the welfare state as outlined in Chapter  1, and Garland’s ‘concentric circles’ (2016:8) metaphor is helpful in distinguishing between them. In this metaphor, the former delineation (social security) would comprise the innermost circle, while the latter (public social services) would correspond to the middle layer:  it is typically inclusive rather than exclusive of social security. Here, I call the former the benefits welfare state, and the latter services welfare state. The benefits welfare state obtains where the analysis of anaphora or co-reference chains, or other delineation strategies, indicates the relation of identity or close synonymy between the welfare state and the social security system. The benefits welfare state has also been identified where the social security system – in particular, benefits – is the sole salient component of the welfare state referred to in the text. The relation of synonymy is perhaps more difficult to argue in the latter case. Nonetheless, the prevalence of cases where benefits are the only element of the welfare state mentioned in the text does, I believe, reflect a strong association between these concepts.



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It should also be noted that ‘benefits’ (or, even less so, ‘welfare’) are not entirely stable concepts themselves. Though ‘welfare’ is broadly interpretable as public assistance or state support, the definitions of what constitutes ‘welfare budget’ vary. Some are restricted to benefits spending, while others include the cost of their provision and other factors, a disparity which partly accounts for the different estimates of ‘welfare spending’ both in the corpus and outside it (see Full Fact 2015). Similarly, the term ‘benefits’, restricted to payments (which include child and tax credits as well as council tax benefits) for the purposes of this study, is interpretable in some texts as including services, such as higher education. Further, while the social security benefits system is a closed if evolving set, some of its elements are routinely highlighted while others glossed over, depending on the context and the argumentative purpose at hand. The delineation strategy whereby the welfare state is defined as, or at least includes, the provision of public services (or as the services themselves) is here termed the services welfare state. The services in question can be public services in general. If specified, they typically include the National Health Service (NHS), education and less frequently mentioned services such as legal aid or even libraries and personal social services (though this is a targeted service and so often treated as a borderline case). While the social security system does qualify as a service, it is relatively rarely referenced as such. Unlike the benefits welfare state, which hinges on the exclusion of other components, the services variant of the concept tends to be textually expressed in a fairly straightforward way, such as a list of constituent elements or a presupposition. Importantly, individual texts often explicitly name only one service, or varying combinations of services, within the welfare state. The services welfare state is thus even more amorphous as a concept than its benefits-based variant. This fluidity is underscored by the fact that virtually any service stated to be a component of the services welfare state in one text is represented elsewhere in a given subcorpus as remaining beyond the bounds of welfare state, often as a related (‘sister’) concept (see Krzyżanowski 2016). This chapter attempts to show that the delineation of the welfare state as limited to the benefits system or as constituted by network of services (optionally inclusive of the benefits system) impacts the argumentative strategies evident across the corpus, whether working to legitimize/delegitimize the welfare state or serving other goals. Accordingly, the chapter outlines the delineation strategies

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within the main themes of discourse across the subcorpora, identifying and interpreting the possible topoi or arguments incorporating these strategies.

2.1  Reform: Which reforms are welfare state reforms? Reform of the welfare state is by far the best-represented theme across the corpus, largely because reforms carried out or announced within the timeframe analysed were substantial and aroused much debate in the media. Notably, while a number of reforms between 2008 and 2015 affected some components of the welfare state, only reforms of the social security system are described as such in the discourse analysed. This section therefore begins with the constructions of what is referred to as ‘welfare reform’ in the four newspapers, analysed in two subsections:  one spanning the tail end of Gordon Brown’s premiership (2008 to April 2010), exemplified by the coverage of the 2008 Green Paper on welfare reform (see Chapter  1), and the other covering the Coalition government. Where possible, parallel coverage has been analysed.

2.1.1.  Labour welfare reforms: Creating enterprising selves The Brown government’s reform of the benefits system was announced in the 2008 Green Paper ‘No one written off: Reforming welfare to reward responsibility’ (Department for Work and Pensions 2008), a White Paper that followed in December 2008, and was enacted in the passage of the Act itself in 2009. In the corpus, the most referenced of these is the Green Paper, announced by James Purnell, Secretary for Work and Pensions, in February 2008. This, interestingly, was the month when the bank Northern Rock was nationalized, a milestone event of the economic crisis in the UK. The reform introduced measures to decrease eligibility for benefits and included disincentives for claiming some inactive benefits. It is present in three of the four newspapers under analysis (it is absent from the Mirror). Overall, most relevant texts, whether news or opinion, across the political spectrum delineate the welfare state as benefits-based in the coverage of the reform. One example is a Telegraph news report announcing the imminent publication of the Green Paper, excerpted below: (2.1) MILLIONS of benefit claimants will be forced back to work in the biggest shake-up of the welfare state for 60 years, ministers will announce tomorrow.



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Large parts of the benefits system are to be privatised, with companies hired to find jobs for the unemployed, The Daily Telegraph can disclose. Private firms will be given incentives of up to pounds 50,000 each to get people back to work and reduce the country’s pounds 12 billion annual incapacity benefit bill. Porter, Telegraph2 2008

The text opens by designating the reform of the welfare state as one affecting ‘millions of benefit claimants’, establishing at the very least a strong association between benefits and the welfare state. This strong association helps clarify the following sentence where the presupposition seems to be that – contrary to its default understanding  – the benefits system is responsible for finding jobs for the unemployed. The presupposition is triggered by the prepositional circumstantial clause in the second sentence (‘with companies hired …’), which can be interpreted as specifying the opening clause rather than adding another point. Job placements for the unemployed, the part of the system to be contracted out to the private sector, are within the remit of social security (as a residual public service) rather than the benefits system proper. Here, this service is subsumed under benefits. This would then be an extension of what the benefits system normally entails and would only be possible because of a strong association, if not equivalence, between the benefits system and the welfare state. A similar association is present in passage (2.2), excerpted from an interview with David Freud. An investment banker turned welfare consultant, Freud produced a report on the system of social security, which was the foundation of the Paper. (2.2) In the dying days of the last regime [Blair], the Freud Report  – which called for large sections of the welfare state to be privatised – became a political football …. This week, however, Mr Freud was hired by James Purnell, the new Work and Pensions Secretary, as an adviser and asked to help implement nothing less than a revolution in the welfare state. There has, he believes, been a sea change in Labour’s thinking about the benefits system. Thomson and Sylvester, Telegraph 2008

The passage refers to extensive changes (privatization in the first excerpted sentence, ‘revolution’ in the second) to the welfare state considered by Labour

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after a period of reluctance. The stronger the association between the benefits system (referenced in the third sentence) and the welfare state, the more coherent the passage appears: if the benefits system is interpreted as only a part of the welfare state, Labour’s change of heart about a part of the system would then indicate a reform of its entirety. The Mail’s reporting also shows this strong association  – although not without some ambiguity – in a column by Purnell, accompanying the Paper’s publication: (2.3) THE welfare state is a vital part of the fabric of our country. It’s something in which we should take pride, a way in which we come together as a nation to support those who are vulnerable and in need of help. But our welfare system has not always kept pace with the changes in our society. Even worse, it has at times lost touch with the vision of its founding fathers more than 60 years ago. Purnell, Mail 2008

The ambiguity rests on the evaluative contrast between the welfare state and the welfare system evident in the excerpted paragraph. The contrast can be interpreted as an instance of incongruity between a positively evaluated whole (the welfare state) and a negatively marked part (the benefits system). In this case the welfare system would be represented as the sole salient component of the welfare state. Alternatively, the contrast may be read as one between theory and practice, with the two terms deployed as stylistic variants. This second reading appears to be corroborated by the essence of the welfare state in the second sentence, which is solidarity with the vulnerable: this group is directly helped by the benefits system. It is also supported by the broader co-text, which names the entity that strayed from the ‘ideals of its founders’ as the welfare state. In turn, the opening paragraph above states it was the welfare system which has diverged from ‘the vision of its founding fathers’. This creates what appears a parallel structure of textual synonyms, where the welfare state and the welfare system are stylistic variants. A similar relation can be noted in an excerpt from a Mail editorial on the Paper, published a couple of days later: (2.4) IT is a great paradox of our age: the welfare state, founded to help the poor, has become the chief cause of poverty and social breakdown in modern Britain. In whole communities, government handouts have crushed the incentive to work, condemning millions to idleness and dependency.



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At the same time, they have undermined the family, the most effective welfare system known to man, by encouraging feckless parents to believe the state will shoulder their responsibilities. Mail 2008

The general opening statement is elaborated in the subsequent sentences to specify just how the welfare state causes poverty and social breakdown. In both cases, agency is directly ascribed to benefits (‘government handouts’) and is expressed forcefully, with a material process verb (‘have crushed’) in the second sentence. Here, benefits are at the very least the sole salient component of the welfare state, but the pattern of agency suggests a stronger relation of equivalence, as would the contrast with the ‘welfare system’ of the family. Further, the Mail editorial goes on to quote the same description of the reform as the Telegraph in (2.1) above, but the words are attributed to Purnell, who ‘maintains’ that this is ‘the biggest shakeup of the modern welfare state since the Beveridge Report’, and then undermined by the authorial comment ‘Hardly’. The reporting verb indicates authorial distance, which perspectivizes the assessment of the reform. But what is being undermined by the perspectivization is the reported scale of the reform, criticized in the text as insufficient. In theory, one could criticize a reform being described as ‘the biggest shakeup of the modern welfare state’ because it affects only some of it; this, however, is manifestly not the case here. Outside of the conservative newspapers, the reform is referenced in the Guardian subcorpus. Headlined ‘Drug users set to lose benefits if they refuse treatment’, the Guardian news report on the Green Paper’s publication goes on to list the groups affected by the reform (drug addicts; the long-term unemployed; unemployed single parents of young children) before quoting the minister for work and pensions in the excerpted passage: (2.5) The controversial reforms, hailed by the work and pensions secretary, James Purnell, as the biggest shake-up of the modern welfare state since the Beveridge Report of the 1940s, received the backing of the Conservative leader, David Cameron. But the government faces a challenge from some of its own backbench MPs over the radical measures, which seek to stop individuals spending ‘a life on benefits’. The consultative document proposes abolishing incapacity benefit by 2013 and scrap [sic] income support. Guardian 2008

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The headline firmly establishes the focus of the reform, which is benefits. This is then amplified by the list of the affected groups, all presumed to be in receipt of benefits. The description of the reform (which, to reiterate, affects only benefits) as ‘the biggest shakeup of the welfare state’ is attributed to the minister, and its status as reform of the welfare state rather than one of the benefits systems is left unquestioned, unlike its evaluation. Benefits are in this way represented as the sole salient component of the welfare state, although the fairly straightforward equivalence between it and the benefits system which exists in the coverage of the Green Paper in the Mail passage in (2.4) is not as appreciable. Nonetheless, the benefits-based welfare state is still evident in the passage. In contrast, the association is much weaker in a letter by trade unions and non-governmental organizations activists concerning the same proposals, published by the Observer in November: (2.6) The government wants more of the welfare state to be handed over to the private sector. It is wrong to profit from the sick and unemployed. Lawson et al., Guardian 2008

The pattern in the letter is that of listing reforms before explaining why authors oppose the specific changes. The profit-making opportunities mentioned in the letter are job placements for the unemployed, a residual social service (clearly part of social security). The phrasing here stands in contrast to that in the Telegraph, which named the entity to be part privatized as the benefits system, strongly associated in that passage with the welfare state. The letter does not use the term ‘benefits system’ at all, although the list of groups affected (which precedes the passage) indicates they are recipients of benefits. The welfare state constructed in this passage is therefore residual, targeting those in need of help, rather than universal (offering public services for all). However, the lexical choices do not indicate a synonymy between the welfare state and the benefits system in this text. This is perhaps because in the (liberal and left-leaning) Observer, the choice of the welfare state (rather than the benefit system) as the entity affected is more likely to evoke objections in the readers, and the letter openly seeks to evoke such a reaction. The non-news texts in the conservative newspapers (2.2, 2.3, 2.4), though strongly critical of the welfare state, do not dismiss it altogether. A clear example is the column by Purnell, a Labour minister, which describes the welfare state as – in principle at least – commendable as an expression of solidarity (‘the way we come together’) and of help (‘to support those who are vulnerable’). Both of



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these are positioned as self-evidently right, and it could thus be stated that the positive evaluation of the principle behind the welfare state is due to the topoi of help and of solidarity. The column excerpted in (2.4) omits the solidarity but references the help. Nonetheless, the actual welfare state is represented as problematic in that it is not just failing at its task, but having a positively detrimental impact. Purnell’s column (2.3) specifies this impact as ‘a terrible waste of potential’, and ‘scarred’ families and communities. What has scarred these families and communities is ‘poverty and dependency’ directly attributable to incapacity benefits. The indictment of the benefits welfare state in (2.4) as ‘the chief cause of poverty’ is even stronger, as noted above. A Telegraph column offers a similar judgement: (2.7) As a result [of not reforming welfare in 1998] we have had a further decade of entrenchment of a welfare state that traps people in dependency rather than offering them a means out of it, that wastes precious resources that could be put to productive use, and that has helped leave us so ill-prepared for the wind from economic Siberia that is about to visit us. Heffer, Telegraph 2008

Such charges reiterate a long-standing New Right (and more generally conservative, see Chapter 1) ‘jeopardy’ or ‘dependency’ critique of the welfare state. In this critique, the benefits welfare state is viewed as encouraging worklessness:  by removing an incentive to earn an income, it precludes the development of self-reliance and so economic initiative. Individuals who receive such support are believed to consider themselves better off receiving benefits with no effort and so remain in poverty rather than take up paid employment. An underlying assumption is also that individuals are lazy and must be motivated by the threat of poverty to act in their self-interest. References to dependency normally leave unspoken this chain of reasoning, and so the topos of dependency or self-reliance3 can be posited – regardless of whether its truth value is accepted (Hayward 2012 and Fraser and Gordon 1994 strongly argue against it, see Chapter 1). This compressed argumentative structure also leaves out the fact that low pay is a key contributor to individuals being better off on benefits, and this is very much the case in the UK at the turn of the centuries (see Lowe 2005 or Timmins 2017). Nonetheless, the argument from dependency does not extend to calls – whether to employees or the government as regulator – for better remuneration but rather seeks to limit the mitigating impact of the welfare state.

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An attenuated version of this topos can perhaps be noted in another excerpt from Telegraph’s extended interview with Purnell (see 2.4): (2.8) Labour MPs and activists will hate the idea of ‘privatising’ the Welfare State but the adviser says:  ‘The system we have at the moment sends 2.64  million people into a form of economic house arrest and encourages them to stay at home and watch daytime TV. We’re doing nothing for these people.’ Thomson and Sylvester, Telegraph 2008

The passage is interesting in that it presents a rationale for the reform which is not the cost of the benefits system, although it is mentioned in Telegraph’s news reports, but its efficiency. The desire to help claimants of incapacity benefit (expressed as ‘We’re doing nothing for these people’) provides the grounds, and the help has the form of placing them in paid employment with the help of the private sector and restricting their benefits. The latter is not intuitively interpretable as helping someone, but this is how it is presented here: the impact of the benefits system is compared to house arrest, from which the reform will release the claimants. The passage thus reiterates the construction of welfare and work as mutually exclusive, a hallmark of Labour’s discourse of welfare reform (see Fairclough 2010). Here, the benefits-based welfare state is incompatible with what Fairclough (1992:132) terms the enterprising self – a self-reliant individual integrated into enterprise culture. The coverage of this particular reform shows a strong convergence between the conservative subcorpora, with the political colouring of the newspapers evident in the evaluation of the welfare state. Delineation strategies concerning the welfare state are similar in all news reports echoing government discourse and in conservative opinion texts. The letter in the Guardian subcorpus stands out as an exception, with other texts showing parallels between the discourse of welfare reform produced by the Labour government and the conservative newspapers under analysis. While the news reports excerpted above do not overtly express argumentative structures, they are fully consistent with them: the restriction of the concept of the welfare state to the benefits system, evident in all the news reports above, facilitates its construction as problematic.

2.1.2.  Coalition reforms of social security: The fairness debate Texts from the period after the 2010 election account for the bulk of the reform theme as the Coalition set out to implement its austerity programme. Its



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culmination was the 2012 Welfare Reform Act, but the reforms were debated in the press as early as around the election and the 2010 autumn statement, and a substantial debate surrounded the publication of the Act in 2011 as well as the coming into force of the raft of reforms in 2013. Most importantly, the reforms that affected social security included the introduction of means testing for child benefit in January and the benefits cap, Universal Credit, bedroom tax and Personal Independence Payment (PIP)4 in April (see Chapter 1), resulting in a 2013 peak in the corpus. The debate over these reforms and their impact, as well as proposals of reforms made by the shadow government, continued until the end of the 2015 election campaign. Deficit reduction was a priority for the Coalition government, and it sought to achieve that primarily by cutting spending and with only a slight rise in taxation. A general overview of planned reforms is provided in a 2010 Telegraph feature reporting the results of a survey of ‘25 top economists’ on how the deficit should be reduced. Excerpted below, the text exemplifies a common preconception on the welfare state: (2.9) The issue of how to cut back the welfare state echoed throughout the responses …. All the statistics and studies suggest that Britain’s welfare state is fast becoming unaffordable. Gerard Lyons, chief economist at Standard Chartered, said: ‘The benefits system needs an overhaul of draconian proportions. Money needs to be allocated to areas that benefit the economy, particularly the hard infrastructure, such as roads and rail, and the soft infrastructure that boosts skills, such as apprenticeships and sufficient university places.’ Conway, Telegraph 2010

A benefits welfare state is established in the passage: the unaffordability of the welfare state in the second sentence summarizes the phrasing in the quotation that follows, where the benefits system is in need of ‘an overhaul of draconian proportions’. The co-text discusses spending on the NHS separately, which also suggests the benefits welfare state, as does the explicit exclusion of education from the welfare state in the quotation. This delineation strategy facilitates the construction of the welfare state as not benefitting the economy via the implicit contrast between it and infrastructure or education, and so as not deserving of the substantial funding it receives. Argument from authority, though acutely non-specific (‘all the statistics and studies’), reinforces this evaluation. Interestingly, the evaluation is presumed before that argument is made. In the opening sentence of the second excerpted paragraph (‘The issue of how to cut

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back …’), the key question is how rather than whether the welfare state should be reduced. This construction of the welfare state as unproductive, costly and thus undesirable can be referred to as the topos of burden. Its status as topos is merited by its frequent recurrence, as well as by assumptions as to what is worthy of investment, which are often implied or presumed rather than overtly expressed. The unaffordability of the benefits-based welfare state is thus naturalized as commonsensical within this topos.

2.1.2.1.  Government discourse: Fairness, effectiveness and Beveridge The assumption that the welfare state is unaffordable was only part of the motivation behind Coalition’s reforms aimed at reducing the deficit as well as reshaping public services (see Beech 2012). There are several texts on reforms by government officials in the corpus. Among these, a February 2011 column in the Telegraph by Iain Duncan Smith (Minister for Work and Pensions) introduces the Welfare Reform Bill, and a December 2012 column by the same author introduces the Universal Credit. Two texts from the peak month of April 2013 – a Telegraph column penned jointly by George Osborne and Duncan Smith, and a Guardian column by Esther McVey (Minister for Disabled People) – outline and justify the April reforms package (see Chapter  1). These texts (the April columns in particular) encapsulate argumentation that typifies the Coalition’s discourse of welfare reform, where the welfare state, consistently synonymous to the social security system, is deficient and needs to be reformed on specific economic and moral grounds besides its cost: effectiveness and fairness. The opening sentence of the joint 2013 Telegraph column identifies the object of the reform as ‘our tax and benefits system’. A reference chain connects ‘fixing the benefits system’ in the title, ‘fixing the welfare system’, and ‘restoring the original principles to the welfare state’. The last of these specifies the impact of the intervention, and so a strong association is created between social security and the welfare state. Welfare reform, seeking to address the deficiency of the system, is the focus of the first half of the article; other entities to be reformed are somewhat less defined and include banks as well as the fiscal system. The deficiency of thus-constructed welfare state consists primarily in that it is unfair: there is only a perfunctory reference to dependency on benefits and the need to help claimants into work, and the savings resulting from the reforms are estimated but not devoted much space. The references to fairness as the primary rationale for the reforms recur, however, and are both explicit and implicit. The



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latter is evident in the first excerpted sentence in (2.10) below, which gives an example of a manifestly unfair arrangement without describing it as such: (2.10) Too often under the last government those who worked hard and did the right thing were punished  – while those who did the wrong thing were rewarded. Instead, in the coming days, we’re doing three big things to back working families. … Our changes will ensure that the welfare state offers the right help to those who need it, and is fair to those who pay for it. Osborne and Duncan Smith, Telegraph April 2013

In the passage, and consistently across the text, fairness is construed as the adequacy of consequences. The welfare state (and, in the passage above, the tax system) is represented as interfering with this adequacy. The text specifies several ways in which this occurs and positions reforms as remedial measures. The first problem is some claimants receiving more in benefits than the average family income (to be remedied by the benefit cap). The second is the possibility that benefits may rise faster than pay (to be remedied by slower uprating). The third is not clearly signalled but appears to be the possession of a bedroom deemed ‘spare’ in social housing (to be remedied by the bedroom tax, referred to in the text as ‘ending the spare-room subsidy’). All three have been shown to be either counterfactual (the rationale for the benefit cap) or are beyond the control of the claimant (the pay stagnation, see Lowe 2005, or the shortage of smaller flats or houses in social housing, see Timmins 2017). Nonetheless, the remedies are construed as removing unfairly held advantages5 from those who – it may be presumed – are not in work (excepting the disabled and pensioners) and so are not making the effort that would merit the reward. Rewarding those doing ‘the wrong thing’ is self-evidently wrong, and so the reforms are rendered morally right within what might be described as the topos of fairness. There are, however, some references to fairness not accounted for by this reasoning. One example is the reward of some kind that appears to be promised to ‘working families’ in the second excerpted sentence. If fairness is conceived as the adequacy of consequences, and the welfare state impedes such adequacy by withholding the reward for virtuous actions and the punishment for ‘doing the wrong thing’, the exact nature of the reward is interesting. On the one hand, fiscal reforms detailed in the closing paragraphs (an increased tax-free personal allowance) are interpretable as such. On the other hand, however, the recurrent assurances that ‘a life on benefits must not be more attractive than working’

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appear to indicate that the punitive effect of the reform on claimants may well constitute a reward in itself, in that ‘doing the wrong thing’ would actually be punished. This implication could be referred to as the topos of ‘just deserts’ to elucidate this elided part of argumentation. Such reasoning relies on heavy polarization between those who deserve to be rewarded and those who do not, which is predicated on their employment status. This is of course a false divide in many ways, in that many benefit recipients are in fact in work, and work is not equal to paid employment (see e.g. Glover 2007, Fairclough 2010, Bryson and Fisher 2011). Nonetheless, it often appears almost commonsensical, as in the other April text by a minister, the Guardian column by McVey. McVey’s column has a tighter focus than the Telegraph text: it discusses only the reform of social security. Other than that, it strongly resembles the Telegraph text, using very similar or indeed identical phrasing, such as the rationale for the benefit cap. Like the Telegraph text, it implies a benefits-based welfare state: ‘a fair welfare state’ results from ‘the government’s benefit shake-up’ in the title, which is echoed in the text as ‘rebalancing the welfare state’. The foregrounding of fairness is another similarity, clearly a deliberate communicative choice on the part of the policymakers. Here, too, fairness co-occurs with polarization between two groups construed as claimants and taxpayers or ‘hard-working people’. It is particularly clear in the extended justification of the benefit cap, where McVey makes the following point: (2.11) [T]‌he proposed cap of £26,000 a year is the equivalent of a salary of £35,000 – and it is simply wrong that people who don’t work can get substantially more money from the state than many working people earn. McVey, Guardian 2013

This reiterates the mutually exclusive construction of benefit claimants and people in paid employment, with benefits an undeserved reward enjoyed by the former. Culpability, however, is laid at the door of the welfare state – with ‘four and a half million people of working age trapped in out-of-work benefits’ – rather than claimants. The construction of benefits as an undeserved reward and a trap is compounded by a greater than in the Telegraph column emphasis on the cost of the benefits system, and in particular, of disability benefits. Despite the assertion that spending on persons with disabilities is morally right, it is also represented as substantial both in absolute (£50bn a year) and relative (much higher than



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EU average) terms, medically dubious (‘without any additional corroborating medical evidence’ for around half of the claims) and unsustainable in the long run. As such, it is clearly constructed as a burden, borne by those represented as ‘hard-working people’ in the opening sentence and later as ‘low-earning taxpayers who have had to meet this enormous cost’ in the closing paragraphs. The column thus exemplifies the same argumentative structures as the Telegraph text but operates primarily within the topos of burden, which the references to fairness help emphasize. The December 2012 column by Duncan Smith does not invoke fairness but provides an example of two claims recurrent in justifications for reform:  one is that the benefits welfare state is damaging to society, the other concerns the superiority of the ‘Beveridge model’ of the welfare state. The focus of the column is the decision to replace the highly complex benefit system with a simplified Universal Credit,6 a choice geared at improving the efficiency of the welfare state. The benefit system is textually synonymous to the welfare state: the headline reference to ‘tak[ing] the benefit system back to Beveridge’s original vision’ is echoed by the description of Coalition reforms as ‘taking the welfare state back to Beveridge’ further in the text, with the two clearly functioning as stylistic variants. The detrimental impact of the welfare state is referenced in the excerpted sentences below: (2.12) Beveridge warned against a benefits system that stifled incentive, opportunity, and responsibility. This describes the benefits system we have today  – a system that actively discourages people from returning to work and promotes dependency on benefits. Duncan Smith, Telegraph 2012

The material process verb ‘stifled’ clearly indicates the agency of the welfare state, as does the adverb ‘actively’ in the next excerpted sentence. The benefits welfare state is thus responsible for benefit dependency, either directly or as a contributing factor (‘promotes dependency on benefits’). Co-textually, the specific cause of dependency is identified as the excessive complexity of the system, which leads claimants to choose the familiar (benefits) rather than risk losing out while moving into employment. Rather unusually, dependency is not due to the welfare state at large (as is often the case, see below), is not the result of a disposition specific to claimants and can be solved by simplifying the system

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by the introduction of the Universal Credit. Notably, this compressed argument makes no mention of other factors – such as low pay or zero-hours contracts – that might make moving into work difficult. At the same time, because criticism is directed at the present-day form of the welfare state, a model often held up in conservative discourses as more viable is that of the 1940s welfare state. This is based on the Beveridge Report (see Chapter  1) and often metonymically referred to simply as ‘Beveridge’. The exact superiority of Beveridge’s blueprint is often underspecified. Here, it appears to consist in its supposed clarity, making it easier to understand and so to move into employment. It is also implied that it offered only temporary support to the unemployed, making it necessary to eventually find other means of support or paid employment. The reference to Beveridge functions as a way of legitimizing criticism of the welfare state: Beveridge was notably unhappy with the shape of the classical welfare state, preferring among others a more contractual approach which emphasized the mutual character of obligations (see Timmins 2017).

2.1.2.2.  Echoing and amplifying the government: Fairness and just deserts in Conservative newspapers Coalition reforms set out in these texts are a major presence in opinion and, to a lesser extent, news texts in all four newspapers. The theme is more difficult to isolate, however, largely because the coverage of the April 2013 reforms partly overlaps with reactions to the conclusion of the Philpott case (see the following section) and often concerns political identities (see Section 3). The newspaper whose coverage converges most closely with the thrust of government discourse on reform is the Daily Mail, and this is the case for both news reports and opinion texts. News texts reproduce government discourse as a matter of course, but they perspectivize it as well, and the Mail’s perspective on welfare reform can be more radical than that of the government. One example, a February 2011 report by James Chapman, coincides with the publication of the Welfare Reform Bill and its accompanying media appearances of government officials. Reporting on a speech by David Cameron and an interview by Duncan Smith, the text paraphrases the key points of the changes and moves on to the case for reform as made by the two politicians. The scope of the reforms outlined in the text is limited to the benefit system, and their designation in the opening sentence as ‘the most fundamental reform of the welfare state for 60  years’ establishes a benefits welfare state.



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Thus-constructed welfare state is textually represented as problematic primarily by the attribution of agency. The action verbs conveying what it does, either directly (‘reward the workshy’ in the lead) or via taxpayers on whose unwitting behalf it acts (‘encouraging idleness’, ‘creating a jobless “underclass” ’ and precipitating ‘mass immigration’ in an indirect quotation from Duncan Smith), represent the benefits welfare state as responsible for large-scale unemployment and immigration and so harmful to society. There is, however, some inconsistency as to who or what is ultimately at fault. On the one hand, the lead – where the welfare state is a ‘system that rewards the workshy’ – portrays claimants as lazy, in this case a moral shortcoming. Less directly, a fragment of Cameron’s speech eulogizes a past ‘culture of responsibility’ that has now largely dissipated: (2.13) Mr Cameron will say that when the welfare system was created, there was a ‘collective culture of responsibility’. People’s self-image was determined by ‘what sort of citizen they were; whether they did the decent thing’. Personal responsibility ‘acted as a brake on abuse of the system’. Chapman, Mail 2011

The personal responsibility, then, was what used to prevent excessive reliance on the benefits system. It is contrasted with Cameron’s description of presentday attitudes exemplified by people refusing to take up jobs or ‘go[ing] off sick when they could work’. Not doing ‘the decent thing’ is therefore at least partly attributable to individuals and their moral standards. On the other hand, another quotation from Cameron’s speech clearly assigns blame to the system: (2.14) The Prime Minister will say that he refuses to believe ‘there are five million people who are inherently lazy and have no interest in bettering themselves and their families.’ The fault lies with a ‘benefit system that has created a benefit culture’. Chapman, Mail 2011

In a clear reference to the dependency argument, the alternative explanation to inherent laziness is the structural impact of the welfare state – an example of an either/or fallacy. This structural impact is also emphasized in Duncan Smith’s comment on creating an ‘underclass’ quoted above. Either alternative in fact underscores the polarizing distinction between taxpayers, funding the system, and claimants, whether those taking advantage of the system or those

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damaged by it. For both eventualities work to make the moral case for reform, the former within the topos of fairness, the latter within that of dependency. The perspectivation evident in the text  – chiefly in the lead, more polarizing than any of the reported discourse, and the title (‘War on Sicknote Britain’) – is interpretable as an attempt to strengthen that case. An April 2013 news report with the same byline foregrounds rather than intensifies the government’s case for welfare reform, although here that case is presented in a very expressive way. The text reports on a speech given by the Chancellor of the Exchequer defending the April package of reforms. The entity reformed is the benefit system, interpretable as synonymous to the welfare state due to the scope of the reforms and the parallel in the way the benefits system and the welfare state malfunction, justifying the reforms. The systemic malfunction (the welfare state not working ‘properly’) consists in benefits ‘trap[ping] people in poverty’ and in making people ‘better off ’ than if they were in work. The first of these is noted in passing, but the latter is elaborated on at length and with the use of vivid examples, such as that in the following passage: (2.15) He [Osborne] conceded the shake-up would mean welfare claimants having to make choices such as ‘living in a less expensive house, to live in a house without a spare bedroom unless they can afford it, to get by on the average family income’. But he insisted: ‘These are the realities of life for working people. They should be the reality for everyone else too. I’m proud of what we’re doing.’ Chapman, Mail 2013

Osborne’s comments reported in the passage indicate the presupposition that claimants in fact do live in (more) expensive houses or houses with spare bedrooms, which are constructed as unmerited rewards enjoyed by claimants but not by ‘working people’. The reforms will remove these unmerited rewards in what might be termed an act of ‘levelling down’. They are therefore justified within the fairness argument, which veers into the topos of just deserts. Osborne’s comment almost verbatim repeating the statement about the welfare state reversing the punishment and reward is quoted further in the text, further corroborating this interpretation. The polarization between claimants and ‘working people’ is deepened by the reference in Osborne’s comments to the substantial cost of (working age) benefits, borne by ‘working people like you’. Reforms are thus further justified



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by the representation of the welfare state as burdensome, which compounds the unfairness exemplified above, the implication being that those paying in are not the same as those who benefit. The case for the reform is made by the emphatically negative representation of the welfare state and claimants, and the perspectivation in the report is consistent with this representation. It is evident most obviously in the title, where Osborne dismisses criticism of the reform as ‘rubbish’, and in the choice of the opening sentence, which contains the summary of Osborne’s point about the reform bringing claimants in line with ‘working families’. Further in the text, sentences unattributed to Osborne (positioned between the extensive summary of his speech and brief quotations containing criticism) provide a description of the reforms. In this brief description, claimants subjected to the bedroom tax are described as ‘council tenants who insist on a spare room’. This represents them as taking action (if only by means of a verbal process) deemed unreasonable, which is at least consistent with the polarization in Osborne’s speech as outlined above. The Telegraph subcorpus, which has the greatest share of articles by persons speaking for the government, also fairly consistently reproduces the Coalition discourse of welfare reform across news and opinion texts. In the former, the delineation is always the benefits welfare state, and  – in concert with the Coalition perspective, which is often foregrounded (there are only two reports where discourse critical to reforms is in focus) – this welfare state is represented as problematic. Like in the Mail, fairness is often a key issue, as in an October 2010 news report (Porter, Telegraph 2010)7 covering the announcement of the benefit cap at the first post-election party conference. The benefits welfare state is established via a list of reforms that exclusively concern the benefit system described as reform of the welfare state, with no reference to other possible components. In a quoted statement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the benefits welfare state is implied to be unfair, and the reforms seek to restore the adequacy of rewards (‘no family should get more from living on benefits than the average family gets from going out to work’). The lack of fairness is compounded by a list of benefits that can be received by a single family, which ‘in some cases’ could include up to six distinct payments that add up to £800 a week. In another report (Ross, Telegraph 2014), focusing on senior Conservatives’ rebuttal of criticism of reforms by a Roman Catholic archbishop, the emphasis on fairness is even stronger. The lack of fairness resulting from the welfare state, consisting in the fact that ‘people could earn more on benefits than in work’, is evaluated as

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‘morally wrong’ by a Conservative politician quoted in the text, with the reforms exemplifying the correct approach to morality. The cost of the welfare state is another prominent issue, as in a 2015 report on the slowing of spending on benefits. The benefits welfare state is established through a reference chain, as in the passage below: (2.16) THE welfare state is growing at its slowest rate since 1948, official figures show …. [Iain Duncan Smith] will say a new Government analysis shows that since 2010, benefits spending has grown at the slowest rate per year in real terms – 0.5 per cent – since the modern welfare state was created. Dominczak, Telegraph 2015

The opening sentence is effectively paraphrased in the one that follows:  the slower growth of the welfare state is specified as the slower growth on spending on benefits. The welfare state thus corresponds to (spending on) benefits: this relation can be viewed metonymically, as it would be in a balance sheet (spending on X for X), or as an instance of the rare conceptualization of the welfare state as spending, which in this case would be restricted to the benefits bill. The cost of thus-constructed welfare state is the primary problem in the report, and the reforms are legitimized as a means of decreasing it. The cost of the welfare state is often explicitly represented as a burden on taxpayers, but in this text the emphasis is on limiting spending as the responsible thing to do. This ties in with what might be termed the topos of restraint – the assumption, common in discourses of austerity, that social spending is an instance of profligacy and as such irresponsible (unlike spending on infrastructure or defence). The Labour criticism briefly cited in the report is consistent with this presumption: a Labour MP is reported as claiming the reforms would make the welfare state more expensive, rather than treat such expenditure as justified. Interestingly, this criticism is rejected in the report as ‘a move that will be undermined by Mr Duncan Smith’s analysis’, a clear instance of convergence between the editorial perspective and that of the Coalition. A greater diversity is evident in Telegraph opinion texts in the corpus, although a similar convergence can overall be noted. An interesting exception in delineation is a column by Janet Daley motivated by the 2013 reforms package, in particular by the approval of the benefits cap and the introduction of means testing for child benefit. In much of the column, a benefits welfare state appears to be the delineated variant, as in the following excerpt:



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(2.17) The model we actually have of the welfare state as an all-embracing system that offers benefits to every member of society for at least some part of his life was established by the post-war Labour government, which wished to use it as a form of socialist wealth-redistribution. Daley, Telegraph 2013

The welfare state as defined here is co-referential with other terms used across the text:  ‘comprehensive payment structure’, ‘benefits’ and ‘welfare’, and the welfare state is something you partake of (by receiving benefits) and pay into (by means of tax and NI contributions). What renders the delineation somewhat ambiguous is a tangential point made in the closing paragraphs of the column on the desirability of ‘top-up’ private insurance to supplement NHS treatment, a solution not proposed in the Coalition reform package. This would ‘break the state monopoly of provision’ and empower patients and other service users. The column ends with the conclusion that perhaps the loss of ‘the universal monolithic welfare state’ is a good thing. In this context, it is not clear whether the ‘universal monolithic welfare state’ extends to services, and therefore its end would also mean the end of ‘state monopoly of provision’, or whether the monolith is restricted to universal benefits and the diversification of services is another – though related – process. Nonetheless, it is clear that the column is overall critical of the universal welfare state, which it describes as fraught with economic, social and moral perils. These, according to the columnist, consist in the high cost of universal benefits and especially its impact on the low-paid, the crowding out of mutual aid and solidarity by state support and in ‘resentments’ between benefit claimants and net contributors. The second of these harks back to a liberal critique of the welfare state, which sees state action and individual initiative, especially where support is concerned, as mutually exclusive. This is intensified by a criticism of the universal scope of benefits, defined as ‘a national unifying programme that would bind all members of society into a network of interdependence’. Here, interdependence is implied to be an induced state rather than a default condition. The use of the verb ‘bind’ indicates that it is also not a favourable one:  the restricted mobility it connotes is undesirable in a liberal or libertarian outlook. Interestingly, solidarity thus appears to be contrasted with interdependence. One explanation might be that the underlying vision of society is one that comprises self-reliant ‘enterprising selves’ (see Fairclough 1992), and solidarity counts as such when it is not institutionalized and so may be withheld at any time. The recognition of interdependence as a desirable state, which Fraser and

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Gordon (1994) argue for in their analysis of ‘dependency’, is emphatically not the case here. It thus appears that the column is an attempt to recontextualize solidarity, often cited as a hallmark of the social-democratic (in EspingAndersen’s typology) or institutional-redistributive (in Titmuss’ nomenclature) welfare state, as a feature solely of the residual model, indicated in the column as preferable. Because Coalition reforms are represented as a return to this model, they are legitimized on similar – economic, social and moral – grounds. Coalition reforms are praised more directly, and with recourse to recurrent topoi, in a 2013 Telegraph column by Bruce Anderson. The column establishes a strong association between benefits and the welfare state. There is no reference chain that would directly connect the two; in fact, the opening paragraphs praise the idealism behind the Beveridge Report and list the five giants mentioned therein. But the focus then moves on to social security benefits, and indeed the welfare state appears to address only one of the five giants, ‘the dragon of idleness’. However, the welfare state is described as failing at that task, and its adverse impact is evident in the passage below: (2.18) Abetted by broken families and daytime television, the welfare state has created a problem that goes well beyond unemployment. We now have anemployment. The difference is similar to the one between immoral and amoral. … The anemployed man lives in a different moral world. … It would never occur to [him] to look for work. Anderson, Telegraph 2013

The welfare is here represented as directly causing a major social problem  – people who are permanently unemployed and perhaps unemployable, believing in their ‘hereditary right to lifelong unemployment benefit’. This condition is not only problematic in itself but is accompanied by a host of attendant ills: (2.19) The anemployed, who probably number hundreds of thousands, are a drain on the public finances and there is every likelihood that their offspring will be the same, whether as dole junkies or as criminals. The anemployed do not usually lead happy lives. Anderson, Telegraph 2013

This construction of the welfare state relates to the idea that the welfare state provides a perverse incentive, as unemployment benefit is more attractive (and, here, addictive) than paid employment. In this way, the welfare state is not only expensive but believed to be perpetuating unemployment and so aggravating



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the problems it purports to solve, an assumption Hayward (2012:7) describes as an ‘anti-welfare-state myth’ of perversity. Here, the impact of the welfare state is represented as even more harmful – it encourages behaviour that is downright immoral to the point of criminality. The exact manner in which this occurs is not laid out here, and the assumption can be described as the topos of vice, strongly indicting the welfare state and making reform imperative. Though the cost of the benefits system is also a rationale for reform in the text, it is the moral motivation that is given more weight. The reform is further vindicated by the reaction of the general public, as the April package of reforms is represented as in line with the popular sense of fairness: (2.20) ‘About time, too,’ most voters responded:  ‘Those scrounging so-andsos had it coming.’ Anderson, Telegraph 2013

It is evident that the reforms are understood as punitive, and that this punishment is represented as fitting. This is one of the most explicit articulation of the topos of just deserts in the corpus. The intensified polarization reflected in the use of the premodifier ‘scrounging’ is not universal in the subcorpus, however, and is more reminiscent of that in the Mail. The Telegraph subcorpus has only one instance of a column expressing some criticism of the April reforms and in which the polarized construction of claimants is substantially mitigated. The column explicitly defines the welfare state as benefits-based: (2.21) Mr Duncan Smith’s reforms, far from being a decisive break with the past, are merely the last staging post in the welfare state’s long transformation from a system of social insurance to one of straight state handouts, universally applied regardless of contribution. … Mr Duncan Smith can therefore reasonably be regarded as more the heir of Gordon Brown than William Beveridge. Warner, Telegraph 2013

The transformation referred to in the excerpt concerns merely the manner of allocating social security benefits, from a system where individual contributions are reflected in the benefits drawn to one where they are not materially important. The failure to return to the contributory principle is the primary reason for criticism in the column: the criticized result is that ‘[b]‌oth recipients and donors are left with no discernible stake in the system’. There is an implicit appeal to the

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fairness topos here, as such a stake would consist in being rewarded for virtuous actions (i.e. amassing contributions). Nonetheless, the polarizing potential of this argument is not materialized. Further, though the column accepts the existence of welfare dependency and the high cost of the welfare state, it also contains explicit criticism of the bedroom tax (‘unashamed piece of claimant bashing’) and acknowledges the impact of structural factors (demographic change and the private rental market) for some substantial social security expenses. These effectively mitigate the potential for polarization while still representing the benefits welfare state as problematic.

2.1.3. Recontextualizing fairness, defending the welfare state: Left-leaning newspapers In the Guardian subcorpus, comprising both Guardian and Observer texts, reaction to the Coalition reforms constitutes the bulk of the occurrences of the benefits welfare state. The overall range of opinions is broader than in the Telegraph, and the subcorpus affords an insight into a wide variety of voices on welfare reform, including government (and shadow government) discourse. Passage (2.11) above analysed a column by Minister for Disabled People in the Guardian. A  2012 column by Liam Byrne, a member of the (Labour) shadow cabinet, which sets out Labour’s vision for welfare reform, and the news report on it (Wintour, Guardian 2012) show interesting convergences between Labour and Coalition. The delineation of the welfare state as benefits is an obvious similarity. The column establishes a strong association between the welfare state and the benefits system by restricting any reforms discussed to benefits. The association is strengthened by one of many references to Beveridge in the report. The way Beveridge referred to ‘his’ system in the excerpt below provides a justification for the emphasis on contribution in Labour’s vision of welfare reform: (2.22) Beveridge called his system social insurance. (He didn’t like the term welfare state.) I think Beveridge would have looked aghast at the government’s plans to axe [contributory disability benefits]. The idea that cancer patients, still in chemotherapy, could lose the support of a benefit financed in this way would simply fail his moral code. Byrne, Guardian 2012

The terms ‘welfare state’ and ‘social insurance’ appear co-referential here, and social insurance in the co-text is limited to social security benefits  – it is not



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clear whether childcare services referenced in the text are indeed part of it. The effect is much more obvious in the opening paragraph of the news report that paraphrases the column: (2.23) Labour is calling for a radical rethink of the welfare state, arguing that the benefits system has betrayed its founding principles and ‘skewed social behaviour’. Wintour, Guardian 2012

Given that ‘the benefits system’ is the antecedent of the pronoun ‘its’, and that a reference to founding the benefits system would be unusual, the benefits system and the welfare state must be considered co-referential. The second similarity is the use of Beveridge as a point of reference. The seventieth anniversary of the Beveridge Report in 2012 was in all likelihood a factor, but numerous references to Beveridge in Coalition discourse (particularly as articulated by Duncan Smith in the columns analysed above) predate the anniversary. Rather, it appears that the Beveridge Report is a benchmark for contractuality and the presence of mutual obligations, and that – as noted above – Beveridge’s own criticism of the welfare state is often used as a legitimizing strategy by those who wish to effect a residual/liberal welfare state. Byrne’s column, however, appears to second-guess Beveridge’s intentions and preferences. These are represented as still binding, and fulfilling these intentions appears an aim in itself, in what I have called the topos of original intention (see Paprota 2017). Rather than make the point that a reform withholding benefits from chemotherapy patients is morally wrong in and of itself, the column uses the presumed disapproval of Beveridge to delegitimize it. Another point of convergence is the acceptance of the argument that the welfare state fails in that it ‘skews social behaviour’, as the news report notes in the opening sentence. By providing ‘unearned support’, the welfare state can be inferred to preclude extensive effort on the part of the unemployed to change their status and so encourages irresponsible behaviour. This comes close to the dependency argument, accepted as factual in Coalition discourse. The column further refers to responsibility as a desirable trait of both the government and the ‘workforce’, and  – in a point on political identities  – positions Labour as ‘on the side of ’ hard workers behaving responsibly. It thus does not completely eschew polarization but rather leaves one part of the divide (those behaving responsibly and those receiving ‘unearned support’) unarticulated at this point.

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Finally, the text makes a brief if implicit reference to fairness, which is missing from the welfare state. The emphasis is not on punitive measures, however, but rather on rewarding decent or responsible behaviour, which the welfare state fails to do. It therefore mitigates the polarization to some extent. Fairness is an issue that is also prominent in other columns in the subcorpus. They consistently delineate the welfare state as benefits and have a broader overall range of opinions than in the Telegraph but typically dismiss or at least query the reforms. One example is a column by Will Hutton, an Observer columnist and economist (who was at the time co-opted as a ‘consultant’ by the Coalition government). The scope of the reform of the welfare state in the column is restricted to benefits, establishing a benefits-based welfare state. The text addresses fairness in the welfare state and the stigmatization of claimants in Coalition discourse, the latter referenced in the title as ‘vendetta against the poor’. The column denounces the stigmatization, which results in the creation of ‘a new class of undeserving poor’, before conceding the following point: (2.24) Yet maybe the Conservatives have a point about fairness. The welfare state was not set up to support vast families or single mothers in inter-generational welfare dependency. It was set up to keep need and hunger at bay for the unlucky disadvantaged on universal principles while offering the means for selfimprovement. The coalition has stumbled on political gold; using fairness to create new categories of the deserving and undeserving. Hutton, Guardian 2010

While the text is broadly critical of reforms, the excerpted passage accepts at least some of their rationale. The existence of ‘inter-generational welfare dependency’ affecting single mothers and the hyperbolic ‘vast families’ appears to be accepted as factual, indicating the topos of dependency and its attendant evaluation of the welfare state as detrimental. Another accepted rationale for reform is the original design of the welfare state: the fact that it was established with a specific objective in mind. This is amplified by a reference to Beveridge, which follows the excerpt above: (2.25) Legitimacy, [Beveridge] knew, required that the principles and practice of his system respected a basic human instinct; that you should be rewarded in some degree to your contribution  – hence his conception of national insurance. Hutton, Guardian 2010



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The contributory principle, to which the passage refers, is legitimated not just by the fact that it is concordant with ‘basic human instinct’ but also by the fact that the designer of the welfare state was aware of it and took it into account. This is an instance of the topos of original intention, eliding as it does social change, the changing reasons for poverty and the possibility that the original design may have been problematic in the first place. The column thus combines the topos of original intention and argument from dependency (the latter facilitated by the benefits-based welfare state) to underscore the rationale for reform. Its aim would be to emulate the ‘original’ welfare state, established to help those in need rather than unfairly provide for those not deserving. Nonetheless, as indicated by the use of the phrase ‘political gold’ in (2.24), this division works to make a point about divisive and exploitative discourse rather than about the morality of the welfare state. Importantly, the column makes a point that fairness need not be limited to ‘due desert’, or the adequacy of consequences both in reward and punishment, but should also consist in offsetting ‘the good luck of birth and the bad luck of circumstance’. This is interpretable as an attempt to recontextualize fairness to incorporate the topos of help: in Coalition discourse, this reasoning is typically not adopted. A column expressing strong criticism of the 2013 reform package (Silver, Guardian 2013)  recontextualizes fairness in yet another way. Like the Hutton column, it too has a benefits welfare state, which is implied by the reform of benefits being designated a ‘transformation’ of or an ‘assault’ on the welfare state. The reforms are criticized for their projected impact: a rise in childhood poverty and the possibility of claimants becoming destitute. This effect, negative in itself, is aggravated by the lack of adequacy of consequences, as expressed in the passage below: (2.26) The injustice of people in poverty suffering for a financial crisis that they did not cause becomes visceral when contrasted to Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan’s recent announcement of profits that defied all expectations. For some, this will result in a record bonus season, yet perversely it is people living in poverty who are portrayed as scroungers taking advantage of the system. Silver, Guardian 2013

The passage touches upon the responsibility for the financial crisis, the key cause of the budget deficit which set off the Coalition policy of austerity. This responsibility is emphatically laid at the door of the banking sector.

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The Coalition reforms of the welfare state have thus resulted in a reversal of consequences, where the harmful actions of the financial elite have in fact been rewarded, and those who bear no responsibility for the deficit are stigmatized. This is an interesting reversal of the usual scapegoats in the topos of just deserts. Here, it leads to reforms being deemed morally wrong, while the welfare state is represented as problematic only in that it reflects ‘[t]‌he logic of financial capitalism’, consistent with some left-wing criticisms of the welfare state. A critical attitude towards the Coalition welfare reforms is also evident in the Mirror subcorpus. Government discourse is vigorously contested in almost all cases, in news reports and columns alike. One example is the following excerpt from a text commenting on the announced withdrawal of benefits from those under 25: (2.27) [Cameron and Osborne] think this assault on the welfare state will help win the election. Note that they always talk about ‘welfare’, never ‘the welfare state’ because very few want to dismantle this great achievement of Labour’s post-war social reforms. Routledge, Mirror 2013

There is a clear synonymy between the welfare state and benefits, as the ‘assault’ in the excerpt corresponds to the substantial savings (in practice interpretable as cuts) in benefit payments referenced just before the passage. The broader co-text gives a strongly positive evaluation of thus-constructed welfare state as a means of helping the vulnerable, which invokes the topos of help. This in turn undermines the reforms as morally wrong. The passage is interesting in that it notes the masking of this synonymy via the avoidance of the term ‘welfare state’ by ‘them’ (presumably Cameron and Osborne, or perhaps the Coalition). The passage notes that the substitution of ‘welfare state’ with ‘welfare’ (a move stronger than simply delineating the welfare state as benefits-based, as it avoids using the term ‘welfare state’ altogether) obscures any positive connotations of the former. Instead, this act of turning ‘welfare into a dirty word’ facilitates the vilification of its users, with the Conservatives indicated in the co-text as those culpable for the manipulation. The indictment of the Conservatives is even stronger in a 2015 passage hypothesizing on the results of a Conservative win:



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(2.28) GOODBYE Welfare State. Hello Sellfare State. That’ll be Britain if the Three Masscuteers – Cameros, Osbornos and D’Uncangnan – get their evil way. They’re putting the benefits system to the sword. Routledge, Mirror 2015

The passage plays on the metaphor of cuts to the welfare system, which is intensified by conceptualizing the cuts as an execution and later as assault. The benefits system – the victim to be dispatched – is positioned as a synonym to the welfare state, to which the writer bids farewell in the opening line (the passage would otherwise lose coherence, as bidding farewell to someone other than the person about to be executed would make no sense). The choice of the benefitsbased welfare state as the victim allows the presentation of the Conservatives as Musketeers turned villains. The presumably privatized ‘Sellfare State’ is axiologically contrasted (as a counter concept, see Krzyżanowski 2016) with the Attlee settlement referenced in the co-text, positioning the cuts as morally wrong. The benefits-based welfare state occurs also in texts that do not disagree with the thrust of Coalition reforms, however. One example is the following passage excerpted from an extended feature on proposed reforms, explaining why the writer is not enthusiastic about child benefit: (2.29) Because child benefit was always the cherry on the cake of the welfare state. And in a time when the disabled, the unemployed and the old are all being asked to tighten their belts, its very existence is ludicrous. Parsons, Mirror 2010

The child benefit is quite clearly stated to be a component of the welfare state, but one that is marginal in importance. The benefits welfare state is confirmed in the last sentence of the excerpt, listing what must be presumed to be its beneficiaries: ‘the disabled, the unemployed, and the old’. These groups clearly receive benefits, and since a list of three items implies completeness (see Jeffries 2010) at least at a symbolic level, this indicates the welfare state as restricted to benefits. Yet  although the preceding section of the text defends universal benefits as fair and easy to distribute, child benefit is represented as nice but redundant. This is done by means of the ‘cherry on the cake’ metaphor and by the list of the hypothetical trivial purchases of sentimental pop music and cigarettes (‘Humperdinck records and Woodbines’) the author’s mother would have made with the money. In the context of spending cuts and the greater needs of others, the expenditure on child benefit is thus represented as burdensome. It

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is thus morally wrong within the topos of burden, expressing clear support for the reform. The evaluation of the Coalition reforms in the texts under analysis largely depends on the political affiliation of the newspaper, although if opposition to them is here confined to the left-leaning newspapers, some degree of support is articulated across the (downsampled) corpus. What is not questioned is the equivalence between the reform of the benefits system and the reform of the welfare state. This is the case across the timeframe, with the only development being an increasing prevalence of the benefits welfare state in the left-wing subcorpora. It should be noted, however, that while the benefits system and the welfare state can often be interpreted as synonyms, as seen in the examples above, there is some difference in what actions are attributed to them. The benefits system is more frequently positioned as Actor of material process verbs and associated with actions that have a stronger negative evaluation. Clearly, the benefits welfare state as a delineation strategy is not tantamount to support for welfare reform. However, the topoi evident in the negative evaluation of the welfare state, which typically justifies reform – in particular the topoi of vice, dependency and fairness or just deserts – heavily depend on this referential strategy. Further, it seems notable that although it was the structural deficit deepened by the credit crunch that motivated the spending cuts, the rationale for reform is overall not expressed solely in financial terms but can be posed exclusively in moral categories, a defining feature of the discourse of welfare reform.

2.1.4. Reform of public services: The welfare state as defence Both the Labour and the Coalition governments embarked on extensive reforms of public services in their time in office. Outlined in Chapter 1, they included most notably NHS and education reforms (though in the case of Labour they fall outside of the period analysed here). It is therefore highly significant that these reforms are almost entirely absent from this corpus:  since it was compiled on the basis of the occurrences of the term ‘welfare state’ in the text, it must be concluded that these reforms were not, or at least not substantially, communicated as reforms of the welfare state at all. Instead, references to the welfare state in the context of reform of public services other than social security occur almost exclusively in the left-leaning newspapers. Reform of legal aid, both by Labour and Coalition governments, provides one context, as exemplified in the following passages:



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(2.30) It’s a scandalous saga of how an ideologically-driven marketisation of a crucial part of the welfare state [legal aid] is going to end up penalising the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. Bunting, Guardian 2008 (2.31) It begins with the animating idea that underpinned the establishment of legal aid after the war: that a true welfare state should provide universal access not only to education and health but to justice. Equality before the law has to mean equal access to the law. … Do [cuts to legal aid] erode this pillar of the welfare state? Freedland, Guardian 2010

Legal aid is not typically described as part of the welfare. Yet, in the corpus, within the context of being curtailed, it is on all occasions represented as not merely one of several components of the welfare state but one central to it. This is either done explicitly, such as in (2.30), or figuratively with recourse to building metaphors: both texts (Bunting outside the excerpted passage) call legal aid a ‘pillar’ of the welfare state, while another text (Robins, Guardian 2011) describes it as ‘a building block in the architecture of the post-war welfare state’. The passages are a reaction to reforms proposed by the different governments, but the metaphors are stable within the timeframe. The reasoning behind the opposition to legal aid cuts is slightly different, however. In 2.30, the grounds on which to oppose the cuts are, first, the adverse impact of the reform on those who are already vulnerable: the reform is thus an act of harm. Second, it appears that merely designating something as a part of the welfare state, especially one that is ‘crucial’, is interpretable as a legitimizing strategy. This strategy is clearer when no other rationale is given, when it clearly hinges on the positive evaluation of the welfare state in a given discourse community  – and this is the case with the Guardian. The second excerpted passage implies that justice, like education or health, should be universal, and so lies within the remit of the ‘true’ welfare state. This positions justice (and so access to it) as a positive right, which is reminiscent of the Marshallian concepts of citizenship rights (see Chapter 1). The evaluation of the welfare state in this framework is unquestionably positive. The reasoning in the first excerpted passage is simpler: it appears that the very act of nominating something an important part of the welfare state is sufficient to legitimize it. In the left-leaning newspapers, the reference to the welfare state to express opposition to government reforms intensifies during the Coalition years. One

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example is an excerpt from a text by a student union activist, laying out their rationale for opposing the increase in tuition fees to a maximum of £9,000 a year: (2.32) The major lesson of the fight over fees and the white paper is that user contributions – the privatisation of income streams – lead directly to structural privatisation. Either you believe in public services or you don’t  – and the challenge of defending education has become the challenge of defending the concept of the welfare state. Chessum, Guardian 2011

The increased tuition fees met substantial opposition when they were introduced, although Timmins (2017) believes the increase was in practice responsible for ensuring funding for tertiary education when public spending was being cut. In the passage, the increase is represented as a first step in privatizing education – a key public service. This, the text states, is incompatible with the acceptance of public services, equivalent in the passage to the welfare state. The privatization is a figurative attack, and it appears that the defence of the welfare state does not need further justification. This is a clearer case of reasoning similar to that in 2.31 above and could be referred to as the topos of the good welfare state. Opposition to the ‘Big Society’ package of Coalition reforms of public services is expressed in similar terms. Big Society (see Norman 2010, Alcock 2014) is a name briefly adopted by Cameron to describe a proposed model of public services which purported to revive the civic society by involving actors other than the state (ideally charities and community organizations, but also businesses) in their provision. It has been interpreted as an attempt to claim political centre ground by adopting policies described in the article as progressive (Alcock 2014). The concept is construed in the corpus as the opposite of the welfare state both on the right and on the left, although for different reasons. The Guardian text by Seumas Milne (a Guardian journalist at the time) from which the passage below has been excerpted is highly critical of the Big Society, to which it refers in the title as ‘people power fraud’: (2.33) But if the Conservatives come to power, we can now be in no doubt it will mean the deepest cuts since the 1930s, lower taxes for the wealthy and mass privatisation of public services. Cameron’s Britain won’t be a state of the little platoons, but the big corporations – and people power will provide cover for the breakup of the welfare state. Milne, Guardian 2010



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The text, published ahead of the 2010 election, dismisses Big Society as an attempt to covertly privatize the (state-run) public services under the guise of a civic takeover of their provision. This is paraphrased as breaking up the welfare state, making it textually synonymous to public services (inclusive of education and healthcare, listed as prime candidates for privatization). The criticism of Big Society is summarized in the closing sentence of the text (excerpted above), which forecasts Britain’s future as privatized and run by ‘big corporations’ rather than the flourishing civic society of voluntary associations indicated by the Burkean phrase ‘little platoons’. In turn, ‘people power’ brings to mind a stock Leftist slogan. These two intertextual references underscore (though, in the case of the latter, not without a quantum of sarcasm) the civic engagement promised by Cameron in the Big Society programme. However, the projected outcome of this engagement – ‘the breakup of the welfare state’ – is self-evidently undesirable in the text. The welfare state is presumed to be a positive good, and the designation of the programme as a threat to its existence is therefore a delegitimizing move, exemplifying the topos of the good welfare state. The fact that progressive, civic-centred slogans are associated with a regressive outcome therefore undermines Cameron’s progressive credentials. The Big Society reforms have a marginal presence in the Mirror, but the reasoning is similar. In a 2011 news report (McTague, Mirror 2011) the reforms are referred to as ‘plans to sell off Britain’s public services’ and are called ‘an all-out attack on’ and ‘tearing up’ the welfare state. The welfare state is thus understood as state-provided public services. Government reforms are described as a threat to thus-constructed welfare state. It appears that this alone is sufficient to oppose the reforms, indicating that the topos of the good welfare state is in operation. The axiology behind such opposition is amplified by the violence in the figurative action verbs describing the effect on the welfare state (tearing up, rip apart, bust open), construing the reform as a violent physical attack. This is a figurative construal of austerity and constitutes a predication strategy with an intensifying and emotively coercive effect (see Paprota 2020). The news report also quotes the Prime Minister’s defence of reforms, which is interesting in that it reveals an inconsistency in the delineation of the welfare state. This defence is as follows:  he invokes the dependency argument by describing the welfare state as a trap. The reforms will improve this by ‘busting open state control’ and ‘giving people direct control over the services they use’. The delineation of the welfare state in the description of the problem (the welfare state has failed) is benefits, since the ‘trap’ argument only functions with the social security system. This is not the same as the delineation in the conclusion

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(state control over public services should be abolished), which is much broader – the text specifies public services such as schools or social care. The solution therefore is not entirely adequate to the problem. The use of the topos of the good welfare state to oppose government reforms – primarily those of the Coalition, but the case of legal aid covers also New Labour – is notable particularly in the Guardian subcorpus. As noted above, it is interesting that this is done to reforms which are never originally presented as reforms of the welfare state but are communicated as changes affecting some or all of public services. Clearly, the persuasive potential of this topos depends on the pre-existing evaluation of the welfare state, and it is therefore likely to be limited to the left-leaning newspapers.

2.2  Coming up short: The problematic welfare state This theme comprises texts outside of the immediate context of welfare or services reform where the welfare state is represented as problematic. The thematic range is broad and includes events represented as scandalous (the Philpott case is one example where parallel coverage could be analysed), as well as problems that arise from the principle of the welfare state or from the circumstances in which it functions. The delineation of the welfare state varies, but most instances concern the benefits welfare state. The tabloid subcorpora are typically the context.

2.2.1.  The Philpott case: A welfare state scandal April 2013, the month when Coalition reforms to the benefit system came into force, was also when the sentence was passed in the Mick Philpott case. Philpott was convicted for setting fire to his council house and causing the death of six of his seventeen children by two different mothers. A  comment made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer linked the crime to the welfare state. The comment, made on 5 April in response to a question about Philpott, can be heard on the BBC News website and is as follows: Philpott is responsible for these absolutely horrendous crimes, these are crimes that have shocked the nation. The courts are responsible for sentencing. But I  think there is a question for Government and for society about the welfare state, and the taxpayers who pay for the welfare state, subsidising lifestyles like that. And I think that debate needs to be had. Mick Philpott case (2013)



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While emphasizing individual culpability, the statement implies a causal link between the welfare state, the only salient component of which are benefits, and Philpott’s crime. This is evident in the prepositional clause (‘about the welfare state, and the taxpayers …’) which implies that because the welfare state provided the benefits on which Philpott lived, it was a contributing factor to his actions. The link is, however, attenuated by the ambiguity of the ‘question’: the prepositional phrase gives a general indication of its contents (i.e. a question about something) rather than state exactly the contents of said question. Yet – as evident from reports  – it is invariably interpreted as ‘should the welfare state be subsidising lifestyles like that’. The implied causation is amplified by the recontextualization of Philpott’s act as ‘lifestyles’, which renders it not only habitual but also plural and so shared by others. The equating of the welfare state and the benefits system can be discerned in newspaper coverage of the events in question across the corpus, while the causal relation in question is less uniformly accepted. The Telegraph’s news report of 5 April opens with a paraphrase of Osborne’s comments (an inexact transcript is provided at the end of the report): (2.34) GEORGE OSBORNE suggested last night that the conviction of Mick Philpott, who killed six of his own children, raised fundamental questions about the welfare system. … The shocking details of his benefit-funded lifestyle, which emerged during the court case, have led to allegations that Philpott sought to manipulate the welfare system by forcing women to have his children to receive state handouts. Dominczak and Winnett, Telegraph 2013

The originally used term ‘welfare state’ is paraphrased in the lead as ‘the welfare system’, confirming the synonymy between the concepts. The second excerpted sentence ascribes culpability to Philpott by stressing his manipulation rather than assign blame to the system itself. Nonetheless, the reference to his conduct as a ‘benefit-funded lifestyle’ does not appear to be simply a transparent statement of the fact that he was in receipt of benefits, which itself would arguably be in violation of the Gricean maxim of quantity at this point in the text. Instead, the use of the term ‘lifestyle’ echoes, as does Osborne’s original comment, the phrase ‘lifestyle choice’ describing the receipt of benefits across the conservative subcorpora, positioning it as a consumer choice rather than a necessity. At the very least, this represents the welfare state as burdensome.

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It is only the second of Telegraph’s news reports, published on 6 April, that provides an exact transcript of Osborne’s words. The clause introducing the quotation also paraphrases the welfare state as ‘Britain’s benefits system’ (Hope and Mason, Telegraph 2013), and this synonymy recurs across the report. The text itself focuses on the reactions of politicians from across the spectrum to Osborne’s words, with Liberal Democrat and Labour politicians rebutting the culpability of the benefits-based welfare state and the Conservatives asserting it. The assertion of culpability is made even clearer in Telegraph and Mail columns of 7 and 6 April: (2.35) But with the passage of more than half a century, this moral danger embedded at the heart of the noble idea of a welfare state has become a serious matter. Just as Beveridge feared, the benefits system has started to reward fecklessness and irresponsibility. It has distorted decision-making (Mick Philpott’s habit of fathering children so as to pocket state benefits is a grotesque example) and prevented people from taking responsibility for themselves. Oborne, Telegraph 2013 (2.36) The Left have affected outrage that Mr Osborne, or indeed anyone else, could suggest that the behaviour of Philpott with his 17 children by five women was facilitated by the welfare state. However, it was and if Labour wishes to lose the next election, then it should carry on banging that drum. Mick Philpott was blatantly and disgustingly exploiting a generous benefits system that is intended as a safety net for the genuinely disadvantaged. Heffer, Mail 2013

Both passages indicate a benefits welfare state. The elaboration relation between the first two sentences in the Telegraph excerpt indicates a relation of synonymy between the terms ‘welfare state’ and ‘benefits system’, as does the parallel between the attendant ‘moral danger’ of the former and the immoral behaviour encouraged by the latter. The culpability of the welfare state, indicating the topos of vice, is expressed in strong terms by the use of the immaterial action verb ‘reward’ and by treating the case of Philpott not as an anomaly but an outcome of the system. The Mail column asserts the causal link as factual in a very straightforward way (‘it was’), although the Philpott case is presented as an instance of abuse, rather than an outcome, of the benefits welfare state. The Guardian coverage tends to focus on the debate around the causal link in the news reports and rebut said link in columns but preserves the equivalence



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between welfare state and the benefits system in so doing. An example is the following excerpt from an Observer editorial, which perspectivizes government discourse: (2.37) Philpott, runs the argument, was party to the manslaughter of his children. He was also a benefit claimant who bred children as sources of income provided by an unreformed welfare state. Therefore, both the benefit system and its claimants are as morally corrupt as Philpott and the coalition’s decision to reshape welfare, notably capping claimants’ income at £26,000, is wise and in tune with the people’s instincts. Guardian 2013

The passage paraphrases the reasoning hinted at by Osborne, and the exaggeration of its conclusion on moral corruption is in fact in line with some expressions of the discourse of welfare reform in conservative newspapers. The benefits welfare state is established by the cohesive chain comprising the following three elements:  an unreformed welfare state  – the corrupt benefit system  – welfare that needs to reshaped. This argument is dismissed in the editorial as an act of ‘mendacious stigmatization’ or, at best, incomplete truth. Interestingly, the Philpott case coincided with an announcement of a Labour welfare reform proposal and was mentioned in the related Observer news report, excerpted below: (2.38) A  radical shakeup of the welfare state … is being considered by the Labour party. … After a week in which Labour has been accused of defending benefit lifestyles such as that of convicted child killer Mick Philpott, party sources said the far-reaching reform would not only introduce greater fairness, but also build stronger incentives to work into the welfare system. Helm and Boffey, Guardian 2013

Like in the reports of 2008 reform across the corpus, the benefit cuts and changes in eligibility are represented as a significant ‘shakeup’ of the welfare state, with no other components but the welfare system affected. The similarity in the proposed reforms, including the reference to fairness, almost certainly stems from the convergence of views on the social security system among the main political parties. It is also reflected in the description of the background for the policy proposal in the second excerpted sentence: the clause ‘benefit lifestyles such as

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that of convicted child killer Mick Philpott’ closely echoes the phrasing in the Telegraph and Mail, reproducing the same causation and what might be termed multiplication (the morphing of a single criminal into ‘lifestyles’). It is also deeply embedded, and it is not clear that the verb ‘accused’ has a perspectivizing function (which might have been indicated by scare quotes). This would suggest that the label of benefit lifestyles has been naturalized (i.e. unquestioningly accepted), contributing to the construction of the benefits-based welfare state as detrimental, which is consistent with the topos of vice. The Mirror corpus has only two texts mentioning the Philpott case:  an April news report on Osborne’s comments and an October text on an initiative showcasing ‘deserving’ benefit claimants. The news report (Mirror, 5 April 2013) highlights voices critical of the case being used to justify Coalition reforms by stigmatizing claimants, calling it an act of cynical exploitation. The column (Routledge, Mirror 2013)  focuses on support provided by the welfare state to ‘deserving cases’ such as a family with four children and a low-paid father, who are ‘lumped … in with the likes of child-murderer Mick Philpott’. This recovers the positive evaluation of the benefits welfare state in the topos of help.

2.2.2.  Other welfare scandals: Benefit abuse and shortcomings of the welfare state In the tabloid subcorpora, scandalous events relevant to the benefits-based welfare state most typically involve abuses, whether actual or perceived, of the social security system. Most such stories, appearing both in the Mail and in the Mirror, resemble that of the Philpott case, where irresponsible behaviour (typically related to family size) is connected to the receipt of benefits and is represented as evidence of their corrupting influence. In the Mirror, an added charge in such cases is the impact on the evaluation of the welfare state. One example is a 2015 column on a man who fathered forty children and does not contribute to their upbringing: (2.39) It’s [people who deserve help] who hate the likes of Mike Holpin more than anyone because he’s not just trashed Nye Bevan’s dream of a welfare state – he’s peed all over it and stuck two fingers up at everyone who wants to work and believes their families are their responsibility. Malone, Mirror 2015

Here, benefits are the sole salient component of the welfare state, figuratively vandalized by the irresponsible behaviour of Holpin. Like Philpott, Holpin is



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then subject to pluralization, becoming ‘[t]‌he Holpins of this world’, indicating a perception that his choices are not individual but shared by others. In this way, he becomes a representative of ‘feckless’ claimants. His behaviour facilitates an assessment of the benefits welfare state – within the topos of vice – as causing social problems, likely to be used as rationale for reform. The passage thus shows the awareness of how the stigma arises but does not counter the benefits variant of the welfare state which facilitates it. Another subset of scandalous events in the Mirror is cases of individuals wronged by the system. One example is a 2014 text on a disabled woman who is being evicted and has problems finding a place to live: (2.40) The two-bedroom flat Samantha has been renting has increased in value by around 5% since last year – and is worth around £200,000. She, however, is awaiting the bailiffs with a little boy who can’t understand why half his life is packed up into boxes. The social protection on housing, a key part of the welfare state, is no longer a safety net. When Samantha and Max are evicted this weekend, we should all be disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. Wynne-Jones, Mirror 2014

The shortage of social housing (compounded by the unwillingness of private landlords to accept housing benefit tenants) is the key problem mentioned in the passage, which justifies the negation of the safety net metaphor. The role of the state in the provision of such housing (‘the social protection on housing’) is explicitly named a part of the welfare state. This indicates a services welfare state (housing being considered a separate public service) but explicitly inclusive of social security (as housing benefit is prominent in the co-text). Its designation as a central part of the welfare state is a legitimizing move, consistent with the topos of the good welfare state. Here, it perhaps implies that this ‘key’ status is not sufficiently recognized. This would be consistent with the exhortation to join in the disapproval (‘we should all be disgusted’) in the closing sentence of the excerpt: were it already considered central, no such exhortation would be necessary. In the Mail, among the scandalous events causally attributed to the welfare state are the London riots of summer 2011. The following is an excerpt from an August 2011 editorial: (2.41) Many years ago it was possible to argue that an all-embracing welfare state would lead to peace and contentment. Now it is clear that it has not done so and

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The contrast between what is represented as a positively evaluated past vision of the welfare state and its present emanation is based on the strong association between the welfare state and welfare. The impact of the benefits welfare state is only slightly ambiguous: in the first part of the excerpted passage, it is arguably not the welfare state as ‘too much’ welfare that engenders social problems, including crime. The restriction of the welfare state to benefits facilitates this construction.

2.2.3.  Services: The problematic state Overwhelmingly, it is the benefits welfare state that is represented as problematic in the corpus. There are, however, individual instances of the services or economic governance welfare state represented as such. These typically tie in with the preferred vision of the state in conservative and classical liberal outlooks, where the scope for state activity is fairly restricted, and the state is constructed as problematic. The following text from the Telegraph subcorpus, promoting a book on the welfare states of the world, is an example: (2.42) In all these areas [the NHS, state pensions, state education, housing] and more, our welfare state – the biggest part of government – is in enormous difficulty. And that is why, four years ago, I embarked on a world tour to see how other welfare states approach these areas and what we could learn from them. Is there a better way to run healthcare, education, housing and so on? Bartholomew, Telegraph 2015

The text equates the welfare state with public services, as indicated by the antecedent of ‘these areas’ in square brackets. The performance of those that are state-run is assessed in the text as unsatisfactory. The recommended solutions tend to involve a diminished role for the government in the running of public services, whether by introducing private insurance in healthcare or privately run free schools in education. The warrant here is that the market, with its attendant choice competition, is superior to state-run institutions:  the text



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quotes the example of people who argued the choice of a school is a ‘human right’, as opposed to ‘just having the government allocate their child to one of its schools’. The focus is on criticizing the insistence on state provision in the UK, and neither the inefficiency of the state nor the superiority of the market is explicitly articulated in the text itself. The shortcomings of the welfare state are thus explicable by the role of the state in its provision, consistent with a classical liberal or a neoliberal outlook. The role of the welfare state as part of state is also problematic in the Mail subcorpus. One illustration, which (exceptionally) concerns the NHS, is a reaction of the Mail to the so-called Mid Staffordshire scandal, where poor hospital care resulted in neglect of patients and an unspecified number of deaths at Stafford hospital. A Melanie Phillips column occasioned by the conclusion of an inquiry into the matter is excerpted below: (2.43) The notion that state-run services are the only way to ensure compassion is totally wrong. Altruism is a moral concept and it is morality which has gone missing here. Far from engendering altruism, the Welfare State has all but destroyed it. Altruism comes from acting against one’s own self-interest in a spirit of vocation. But the Welfare State has created a culture of entitlement. In the NHS, this has fostered an attitude among many staff that patients should be grateful for what they get. That, in turn, has encouraged a resentment which dehumanises those whose needs are seen as overwhelming. Phillips, Mail 2013

The text attempts a moral analysis of the scandal, acknowledged in the report as a failure of the NHS, in particular the Mid Staffordshire Trust. The extract establishes a causal link between the welfare state, understood as state-run services (specified in the co-text as health and social care), and the indifference ascribed to the staff responsible. This is done by applying the notion of ‘entitlement’ to providers rather than recipients of a public service while preserving its attendant connotations of laziness and selfishness. The relation is explicable if the NHS staff are reimagined, or recontextualized, as they appear to be in the extract, primarily not as providers of a service but as recipients of secure employment in the public sector. The reference to ‘self-interest’ understood as contradictory to a vocation reliant on altruism appears to confirm this. A logical implication of this reasoning is the impossibility of humane public services run by the state, since these would inevitably lack thusly defined

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altruism. Indeed, the passage constructs the scandal in question as a systemic consequence of the welfare state (rather than an aberration), consistent with the topos of vice. The placing of the NHS within the bounds of the welfare state allows the writer to include it in a more extensive critique of the welfare state:  in particular, the construction of individuals as ‘entitled’  – in the sense of inappropriately demanding what they wrongly believe to be entitled to  – normally functions in the context of benefits and would perhaps not appear, were the NHS viewed as a separate institution. In the Guardian subcorpus, many problematic aspects of the servicesbased welfare state arise from the circumstances in which it functions rather than from its principle. The main such shortcoming is insufficient funding combined with ideological resistance, as indicated in the following passage from a text discussing the declining support for the welfare state in public opinion surveys: (2.44) In part, it is likely to be because of practical experience. The welfare state has been run down and increasingly is experienced as either a bureaucratic nightmare (the job centre), or as a viciously competitive struggle for scarce resources (state schools). Thanks to neoliberalism, moreover, people experience more of everyday life through markets, and more of their relationships with others on the basis of competition. The material basis for solidarity is greatly diminished. Seymour, Guardian 2013

The excerpt exemplifies the welfare state as social security (exemplified by job centres) and as state education, the former a nightmare, the latter a struggle. The bureaucracy of the former ties in with the view of the state as an inefficient manager in classical and neoliberal discourses, while the latter is a hostile environment perhaps reminiscent of social Darwinist competition. Importantly, neither relates to the self-evidently valuable solidarity in the last excerpted sentence. The negative experience in both cases is fairly explicitly accounted for by the shortage of funding, with culpability thus affixed to governments. The ideological explanation for the waning support of the welfare state, which the passage goes on to provide, appears to constitute a distinct point. The sentence adverb ‘moreover’ signals addition rather than elaboration, despite the parallel in the competitiveness of both the market and the state education system as represented here. The market is thus represented as a counter concept to the welfare state. A broadly similar positioning occurs in the following 2010 passage, conveying heavy criticism of the Baby Boomer generation:



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(2.45) The welfare state is starved of money, and struggling under the weight of great, bullying, bureaucratic initiatives designed to give it the appearance of a market, because nothing that does not look like a market is acceptable in the Britain that the baby boomers built. Most capital expenditure for education and health no longer comes from the present-day taxpayer, but from the next generation, because the baby boomers are too stingy to pay for it. Beckett, Guardian 2010

The services welfare state is exemplified by health and education, two services historically considered especially important and popular (see Lowe 2005). The preference for the market as a way of organizing social life is here attributed to a personal, or rather generational, trait of stinginess and presumably to the political decisions which it drives. Notably, the text inverts the topos of burden as used in conservative press, where the welfare state is delegitimized as an undue burden on the people. Here, it is the welfare state, represented as useful and popular through the reference to the two services, which is figuratively represented as a victim of insufficient funding and colonization by the market. Interestingly, the latter concept is fused with rather than opposed to bureaucracy, a reversal of the attribution of bureaucratic features to the state in neoliberal discourses of the market and the state. Nonetheless, both passages (2.44 and 2.45) appear to underplay the significance of ideological factors: the former by not connecting them to ones which are less obviously related, the latter by simplifying the relation as down to a personality trait, mitigating the political impact of the passages. The theme of scandalous events shows a strong political divide in the corpus, with texts in the conservative subcorpus again making a moral case against the benefits-based welfare state, and the Mirror pointing to the individual reasons in such cases. Both the Philpott coverage and the stories of welfare abuse show that the scandalous events tend to be represented as systemic outcomes of the benefits-based welfare state in the conservative subcorpora. This is an interesting reversal of stereotypical positions on agency and structure in right-leaning outlooks, with individual agency typically stressed by those on the Right, and structural explanations associated with those on the other end of the political spectrum. Similarly, the political divide across the corpus coincides with a systemic and a circumstantial explanation for the faults of the services-based welfare state.

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2.3  The welfare state and political identities The next most salient theme of discourse, which again partly overlaps with those above, concerns political identities. In the corpus, polarized constructions of political identities make use of the welfare state not just as a reference point but as a boundary marker: a factor that separates ‘us’ from ‘them’. With a handful of exceptions, these identities in this corpus are expressed as British party political identities, often in the context of an election or a major policy proposal. The bulk of attention is devoted to Labour, the default party of the welfare state; the Conservatives are a matter of interest primarily for the Mirror, while Liberal Democrats are only mentioned in passing.

2.3.1.  Foolish, irresponsible, evil: Labour in the conservative newspapers The boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is particularly consistent in the conservative newspapers. Here, the welfare state in this theme is overwhelmingly the benefits variant, and Labour is the party of the (negatively evaluated) welfare state. This negative evaluation is often stark:  Labour is not just wrong but harmful or malevolent. One example is the following Telegraph passage from a column conveying extensive criticism of Blairite Labour as an impossible project just ahead of the 2010 general election: (2.46) Reconciling the new commitment to individualism with the traditional class loyalties of the Left turned out to be very expensive indeed:  only by extending the welfare state to cover everyone could you abolish the distinctions between the poor, who were dependent on the state, and the ‘privileged’, who were free and self-determining. Anthony Giddens, in his seminal New Labour treatise The Third Way, wrote: ‘There will never be a common morality of the citizenship until a majority of the population benefits from the welfare state.’ Daley, Telegraph 2010

The passage delineates a benefits welfare state:  it does not explicitly mention social security or other benefits, but it is difficult to conceive of another potential component of the welfare state that would be counterfactually universal and have the specified openly redistributive quality. Similarly, the quotation from Giddens is difficult to interpret unless the ‘benefiting’ of most people from the



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welfare state is read as receipt of some form of – most likely – cash benefits: as it is, arguably most people in the UK already benefit from the services of the NHS or the education system. It is only when these advantages are discounted, and the welfare state restricted to the social security system, that the temporal clause becomes counterfactual. Further, the extension of the welfare state by New Labour referenced in the passage can only be interpreted as factually correct if the welfare state is understood as the benefits system. Thus-constructed welfare state, the means of achieving Labour’s aim of equality, is denounced in the co-text. This is done on the grounds of the substantial cost of universal benefits. But the column also has a stronger criticism of Labour’s emphasis on equality: the party, in its paternalism, ‘never actually saw the inherent moral worth of allowing people to aspire, to succeed on their own terms and to live by their own values’. Labour’s paternalism is expressed in the welfare state, represented as stunting freedom and aspiration: the ‘free and self-determining’ are those who need not have recourse to it. This argument is consistent with the topos of dependency, which clarifies how Labour’s aim of achieving a ‘common morality’ based on the shared access to the system of benefits can be described in the co-text as ‘sinister’. Labour, the party of the welfare state, is thus established to be morally wrong. An even starker condemnation of the welfare state and Labour in the Telegraph can be found in a column by Peter Oborne on the Philpott scandal (see Section 2.2.1). The column departs from a discussion of the rationale for welfare reform to make a point on political identities: (2.47) The last government deliberately encouraged some of this. Gordon Brown extended the scope of the benefits system way beyond anything Beveridge envisaged. After 13 years of New Labour, people earning well over the national average wage were dependent on state benefits. Gordon Brown, in an act of great wickedness, had taken Beveridge’s welfare state and used it to create what was effectively an enormous client base for the Labour Party. Oborne, Telegraph 2013

The restriction of the welfare state to the benefits system is signalled by the textual synonymy between the terms ‘benefits system’, ‘state benefits’ and ‘welfare state’, with the last of these premodified as ‘Beveridge’s’ to underscore the temporal and conceptual difference. The co-text refers to ‘the welfare state and the National Health Service’ as parts of the ‘Attlee inheritance’ along with Keynesian economic policy, again indicating the synonymy of the welfare state to the benefits system.

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Thus delineated welfare state is represented as having a clearly detrimental social impact, causing immoral behaviour  – exemplified by the Philpott case – rather than solving social problems. The social problems engendered or aggravated by the welfare state are partly attributed to the agency of Labour, who ‘deliberately encouraged some of this’. The charge against Brown’s Labour is that, aware of the social ills caused by the welfare state (at least within the dependency argument), it extended the provision of benefits in order to establish a ‘client base’ of faithful Labour voters, in what might be termed a ‘votes for dole’ exchange. This view recurs in several columns in the conservative newspapers and constitutes what might be called the topos of clientship. If restricted to the benefits system, the welfare state within this topos closely resembles a bribe, with Brown’s Labour – its operator – strongly condemned. The Mail texts are similarly critical of Labour as the party of the welfare state. One example is the following extract from a column – also by Peter Oborne, who, as noted in Chapter 1, wrote for the Mail before his move to the Telegraph in 2010 – where the cost of the welfare state is an opportunity to make a point about political identity: (2.48) As a result, the welfare state bill has soared. In 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, it stood at £20 billion. It is now around £140billion – and rising fast. Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Labour deliberately encouraged this dependency culture, creating tax regimes that heavily penalised marriage and encouraged single parenthood and a life spent on the dole. Oborne, Mail 2009

The benefits welfare state is delineated by the reference to the unemployment benefit (‘dole’) and to single parents, a group associated with the receipt of state support, to the exclusion of other components of the welfare state. The passage also mentions fiscal policy, which might be indicative of the broadest delineation of the welfare state  – economic governance. Nonetheless, with either variant, the cost of the welfare state is clearly a burden (signalled by the reference to unemployment benefits). Further, the actions of the welfare state as represented here engender unemployment and single parenthood, viewed as reprehensible in conservative discourses and suggestive of the topos of vice. The role of Labour, whose agency is emphasized, is again that of a villain, deliberately causing social problems. Notably, neither the passage nor the broader co-text indicates possible reasons for Labour’s actions. This may well be due to the existence of an intertextual argumentative structure  – the



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clientship topos, where the motivation is to obtain the support of voters – that can be filled in by readers. Less than honourable intentions are also ascribed to Labour in an April 2013 Mail column, coinciding with the major reform package discussed above (see Section 2.1.2): (2.49) … the real welfare dependency problem is with politicians on the Left. They rely on the distribution of handouts to their client state to remain in power. They were the ones shouting loudest when the Government announced tests for disability claimants. They fight to secure more benefits, not fewer. In simple terms, they see the welfare state as a means of redistributing income from the rich and comfortably off to the less comfortably off and the poor. … Without their dependence on fomenting class warfare by demonising the well-off and sentimentalising the poor, why would politicians of the Left exist? McKay, Mail 2013

The benefits welfare state is established as early as in the opening paragraphs of the column (not excerpted here), which refer to ‘extending the welfare state’ and elaborate this as extending the provision of benefits. The benefits variant is evident also in the excerpted passage:  the welfare state is defined as a redistributive mechanism, and the system of benefits is the obvious way of achieving redistribution. It appears that redistribution itself is considered reprehensible, while the reduction of benefits is self-evidently desirable:  the description of Labour as ‘fight[ing] to secure more benefits’ is perhaps best interpreted as a criticism and would be unlikely in a left-leaning newspaper. The negative assessment of the welfare state is also indicated by the reference to individuals being unable to work because they have grown to rely on state support, indicating the dependency argument. Thus-constructed welfare state is strongly associated with the Left, specified as Labour in the subheadline (‘Labour’s addiction to welfare hurts us all’) and by the references to individual politicians in the co-text. Further, as is consistent with the topos of clientship, an ulterior motive  – perpetuating class warfare which provides the rationale for its existence – is ascribed to Labour’s support of the welfare state. In contrast, outside the excerpted passage, the Conservatives are allocated a higher moral ground by opposing what is represented as excessive provision. This representation of Labour as the party of the welfare state is very consistent in the conservative part of the (downsampled) corpus but is not without exceptions. These exceptions are texts where the evaluation of the

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welfare state is not overly negative, even with the benefit delineation. The ‘ownership’ of the welfare state then typically passes to Beveridge in the topos of the original intention (see Section 2.1.2), as in a Telegraph column where Labour’s acceptance of austerity is tantamount to a concession that ‘something has gone horribly wrong with William Beveridge’s brainchild, which is in need of urgent surgery’ (Oborne, Telegraph 2012). The one case that departs from this pattern is a 2011 Mail column attacking the teenager Rory Weal, who expressed his gratitude to the welfare state at a Labour Party conference. The column asserts that even if the welfare state indeed saved the teenager from poverty, it ‘has been lavishly supported by all major parties since the Thirties, and has never been the sole property of Labour’ (Hitchens, Mail 2011). The comment thus seeks to strip Labour of the credit for the welfare state and is a rare example of the presumption that such credit is in fact due.

2.3.2.  A liability or an axiological bonus? Labour’s welfare state in left-leaning newspapers Such a presumption is, predictably, present in the left-leaning part of the corpus, especially the Guardian, where there is a presupposition that Labour is indeed the party of the welfare state. It holds for both the benefits and the services variant of the welfare state, as social security, universal provision and state-run public services are normally acknowledged as part of the defining package of left-wing views. This presupposition is evidenced in statements like that in a 2013 Guardian column by John Harris on the universal provision of some benefits, which has the benefits variant of the welfare state. The column expresses concern over a change in attitudes among some in Labour, who are becoming more accepting of means testing. The reference in the headline to ‘even some on the left calling for an end to winter fuel payments and the like’ expresses the presupposition that the Left will not be doing so. This underscores the unexpectedness of this shift, described as going against the ‘first principles’ of the party (and the Left in general). The idea that Labour is the ‘natural’ party of the welfare state is not just presumed in the Guardian subcorpus: it is also openly examined. An example is a Guardian column from April 2013 by Tim Bale, which comments on what it calls ‘Labour’s problematic relation with the welfare state’. The column establishes a services welfare state via a reference to health and social security



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as the key components of the welfare state, whose importance is summarized in the excerpt below: (2.50) In the 1950s the welfare state provided an otherwise divided party with one of the few flags it could rally round. It was also a useful stick with which to beat the Tories. But it was never going to be enough to win an election: as long as the Conservatives retained their reputation for competence, that would always trump caring. Bale, Guardian 2013

As evident from the passage, the importance of the welfare state to Labour was historically both a matter of identity (as a defining issue and an axiologically marked asset) and strategy (as a point of difference from the Conservatives). The text accounts for the problematic character of the former aspect in 2013: the negative perception of social security benefits (‘readers of some tabloids could be forgiven for thinking that almost everybody claiming benefits is either a foreigner or a fraudster who’s busy breeding, then killing, their own kids’) means the loss of its ‘axiological bonus’. As the topos of help recedes, and the dependency argument is naturalized, the close identification between Labour and the welfare state may now be an electoral liability. This shift in attitudes also accounts for the Guardian and Mirror texts where Labour’s association with the welfare state is outright contested. A particularly interesting if unique example is a Guardian profile by Amelia Gentleman of Rachel Reeves, a Labour MP and the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions at the time. The profile made waves in the media, as Reeves was reported to have declared that Labour was not the party of the welfare state: (2.51) However, Reeves said Labour did not want to be seen to be the party of the welfare state. ‘We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work,’ she said. ‘Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people.’ Gentleman, Guardian 2015

The passage follows a section where Reeves criticizes what she perceives as excessive use of benefit sanctions by the Coalition-run Department for Work and Pensions but not of sanctions in general. The excerpt has two quotations from Reeves preceded by an introductory sentence, a pattern normally interpretable as a question and answer turn or a summary of a point which is then elaborated in detail. There is therefore an expectation that any lack of co-reference between

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key terms used would be signalled in the discourse. Here, no such signal can be discerned. The phrase ‘people on benefits’ in the quotation must therefore be interpreted as a metonymic reference to the welfare state in the introductory sentence. The result is that the welfare state is textually synonymous to the system of (specifically out-of-work) benefits. The fact that Reeves is attempting to distance Labour from thus-constructed welfare state is likely a reaction to its pervasive negative, either within the topos of dependency or more broadly in the New Labour and Coalition discourses of welfare reform, which evaluates recourse to benefits and lack of paid employment as largely immoral. It could also be – as indicated by the references to the unemployed – a reaction to an equivalence between the benefits welfare state and its beneficiaries, often represented as undeserving.8 Responding to concerns about Reeves’ words being taken out of context, Gentleman published the relevant fragment of the transcript on Twitter and in reader comments under the interview,9 affording a rare insight into text production: ‘Is it a problem if Labour is seen as the party of the welfare state?’ ‘Yes of course, but we’re not. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work. Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people – the clue is in the name. We are the Labour party  – we are not the party of people on benefits. But the welfare state was always supposed to be there to protect people in times of need, whether that was because they lost their job, or they became disabled, or they had a child who is disabled, to help with the cost of childcare, to help you when you are no longer earning because you are retired. That’s what the welfare state was created for. I want to ensure that the welfare state is there for my children and their children in the future.’ AmeliaGentleman [username] 2015

The transcript confirms that the phrasing used by the journalist did not alter the substance of what Reeves actually said, although the support for the welfare state which she goes on to express did not make it to the published paragraph. The restriction of the welfare state to the system of social security benefits is even more evident in the positive examples Reeves gives, listing cases when state support is provided to deserving individuals. It is notable that the treatment of the benefits system as the sole referent of the term ‘welfare state’, reflecting the prevalent delineation strategy in the (arguably hegemonic) discourse of



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conservative press, is not challenged either by a member of the Labour shadow cabinet or by the journalist herself. It is also notable that if Reeves’ comment is indeed a reaction to the association between the welfare state and undeserving claimants, her statement does not deny this association and instead rejects the existence of one between (thusconstructed) welfare state and Labour, foregrounding political party identity (Labour as the party of working people, not the welfare state). It thus appears she chooses to defend the party rather than the welfare state, which could have been done by broadening the boundaries of the concept. Less unique are those texts where Labour is criticized for not being the party of the welfare state. Examples occur in both the Guardian and Mirror subcorpora. In the former, a 2013 column co-authored by director Ken Loach (Loach et al., Guardian 2013) calls for the establishment of a new political party, on the grounds that ‘the promise of opportunity, dignity, health and work, fulfilled by Labour’s welfare state after 1945, is not to be one that we can look to today’s Labour party for’. The delineation of the welfare state is not clear: the list comprising health and work appears to indicate the services variant. Yet another paragraph itemizes ‘Labour’s past achievements’ as ‘the welfare state, the NHS; a redistributive economy making unprecedented levels of health and education possible’, listing the NHS and the welfare state separately. It is nonetheless clear that these are sister concepts, and their evaluation is unequivocally positive. Contemporary Labour is therefore denounced for reneging on this heritage – as no longer the party of the welfare state, it does not deserve the support of progressive voters. Similarly, in the Mirror, a 2012 column by Kevin Maguire (Maguire, Mirror 2012) is scathingly critical of Labour’s proposal of welfare reforms. The column counters the discourse of welfare reform by pointing out structural rather than moral reasons for unemployment (the lack of suitable jobs rather than ‘fecklessness’) and by asserting that tax avoidance by the wealthy is a greater burden on the state finances than social security. In its acceptance of the ‘claimantbashing’ agenda of the Coalition, Labour is denounced as ‘in danger of doing the Tories’ dirty work, undermining the welfare state’, and the columnist confesses to fantasizing about ‘the day when Labour’s leading lights kick the tax-avoiding wealthy harder than the poor’. The reform of the benefits welfare state (which is here co-textually identified as such by the reference to unemployment benefits and to ‘the poor’ presumed to be receiving them) is here denied the moral basis it has in the discourse of welfare reform. Instead, moral censure is reserved for

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Labour politicians who do not defend thus-constructed welfare state, and the similarity between their policies and those of the Conservatives is criticized. A rare instance of a text on political identities outside of the British context is a 2009 Guardian text on the immediate impact of the financial crisis on Iceland. Here, the political identity of the Left is given a strong axiological grounding: (2.52) Furious at enforced cuts across the welfare state, [Iceland’s health minister] accused the IMF of acting only in the interest of international creditors. As a leftwing politician, when it comes to prioritising the rights of property owners or those who own nothing, I tend to side with the latter group … People are really ashamed of what we did, but do you make cuts at a cancer ward in Reykjavik to honour those international debts? Would you rather lose £10,000 in a bank deposit or see a bed removed from your mother’s care home? Bowers, Guardian 2009

In the passage, the threat to the services-based welfare state comes from the elites, specifically the financial sector, rather than political conservatives. The Left is established as a defender of the welfare state, which is given an emotional dimension by the example of the health service and the specific images of a cancer ward and a bed in a care home being affected by the cuts. These images are likely to have particular emotional resonance:  cancer can be expected to elicit a strong affective response and so perhaps reader sympathy, while the interviewer/reader is directed to imagine the care home impacted by the cuts as one housing his or her mother. One identifiable topos is that of help, and the elderly and cancer patients are designated as in greater need of it than creditors. Support for the welfare state is thus a matter of morality. The Left, in whose territory the services-based welfare state is positioned, is therefore represented as morally superior, providing an interesting counterpoint to the statement by Rachel Reeves on Labour not being the party of the welfare state quoted in (2.51) above.

2.3.3.  Enemies of the welfare state: Coalition in the left-leaning newspapers British parties other than Labour are much less likely defined with reference to the welfare state. The few exceptions – in the left-leaning newspapers – concern mostly Conservatives, who are defined by their adversarial relation to the welfare state. Most typically, this is the case in the Mirror. A 2013 column on plans to freeze the uprating of benefits is a representative example:



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(2.53) … Brown introduced tax credits to help millions of the working poor out of poverty. … But the Tories hate welfare. And the state. So the welfare state is absolute anathema, and they’ll do their best to dismantle it before the next election. Routledge, Mirror 2013

The benefits welfare state is here established via a reinterpretation of the term ‘welfare state’ as a composite of ‘welfare’ and ‘state’, with ‘welfare’ a common synonym of ‘social security benefits’. Tax credits introduced by Gordon Brown are here a positive example of the functioning of the welfare state, with their goal praised as ‘help[ing] millions’. The emphasis on the working poor ensures that the recipients of state support are not judged as undeserving, which is typically the case in the discourse of welfare reform. Though restricted to benefits, the welfare state is represented as helping those in need and thus self-evidently good, in the topos of help. The Conservative opposition to this welfare state is expressed not in terms of rational arguments, but emotion and delegitimized as such. The Mirror pattern is very similar when the welfare state is delineated as the services variant, as in a column summing up the first 100 days of the Coalition government: (2.54) Reform should be carried out when the pressure is off, as Labour’s reinvigoration of the NHS after years of Tory cuts would attest. Mr Cameron seeks to destroy our Welfare State by slashing and burning essential public services using the two-pronged argument of government reform and deficit hysteria. Mirror 2010

The welfare state is here textually synonymous to public services, specified in the co-text as health, education and welfare, and designated as ‘essential’ and therefore self-evidently good. The timing of the announced reforms is criticized as motivated by ideologically driven opposition to the welfare state on the part of the Conservatives. In the co-text, this is described as ‘same old Tory hatred of welfare and public spending’: permanent (‘same old’) and irrational (‘hatred’). The predicted result of the reforms is the destruction of the welfare state, which is sufficient to delegitimize them. Political identities of the main parties are thus re-affirmed with recourse to the welfare state, with Labour deemed a good caretaker and the Conservatives the enemy of the welfare state. The Liberal Democrats, the other Coalition party, tend to be glossed over across the corpus in general, and the welfare state is rarely mentioned as related

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to their political identity. A  Guardian column mentions ‘the woolly Liberal heritage of middle class do-gooders’ (Jones, Guardian 2010) without elaborating on their present attitude to the welfare state and a letter in the Guardian (Davies, Guardian 2011) accuses the Liberal Democrats of having ‘connived in the most ferocious attack on the welfare state since its inception’. This absence might be reflective of their role as a junior Coalition partner, but it might well be an outcome of the polarization of political identities in the discourse analysed, which does not readily admit arrangements more complex than a simple binary opposition.

2.3.4.  The welfare state, unaffiliated: A Guardian exception Against the overall pattern, there are individual texts (only in the Guardian) that highlight the potential of disarticulating concepts from political identities. One example is excerpted from a column by economist Ha-Joon Chang: (2.55) If he accepts what the Conservatives define as the left, [Labour leader Ed Miliband] and his party will always remain on the back foot. To take the initiative and set a new tone in the debate, he should redefine what is left and what is right and reclaim territory from the other parties. Take the issues of fairness and social cohesion, which the Labour party tends to see as ‘leftwing’ turf. It is wrong to think no one on the right cares about these things. Don’t forget that it was the arch-conservative Otto von Bismarck who introduced the world’s first welfare state policies …. Chang, Guardian 2010

The text hypothesizes a reversal of the axiological claim posited in (2.51) above, noting that if the Left is considered undesirable, so are its associated concepts. The services-based welfare state serves as an example of a concept whose components, as exemplified in the text, have origins cutting across political divides, allowing the possibility of consensus on what matters in the face of tribalism. Nonetheless, this is an exception in the corpus, and most Guardian and all Mirror texts in this theme of discourse work to reinforce the connection between Labour and the positively evaluated services-based welfare state, in axiological and emotional categories. The presence of political identities as a theme of discourse is perhaps not surprising, given that three of the newspapers analysed are easily identifiable as strongly partisan, and the one that is open to a greater variety of opinions – the



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Guardian – also has a clear liberal or left-leaning slant. The benefits welfare state as a delineation strategy facilitates (if not enables) the argumentative strategies that achieve a specific evaluation of the welfare state, often via its recipients. The passages from the conservative newspapers are strongly critical of the benefits welfare state and represent it as a detrimental or even sinister outcome of Labour policies. This section has shown that this stigma transcends the political boundaries, although it is still being called out and examined in the left-leaning newspapers. The passages from the left-leaning newspapers are less generalizable, which is representative of more complex constructions of the concept in that part of the corpus. The services welfare state in this theme is, notably, almost completely restricted to the left-leaning newspapers, likely because its negative evaluation is less easy to achieve, and a more complex approach is inconsistent with the purposes of campaigning political discourse.

2.4  Boundaries of the welfare state: Summary of findings This chapter has analysed two delineation strategies of the welfare state – the benefits-based and the services-based welfare state – which have been inferred from parallel structures, paraphrases and simple lists in the discourse under analysis. The benefits welfare state is one where the welfare state is practically restricted to the system of social security benefits, with the terms ‘welfare state’ and ‘benefits/welfare system’ clearly co-referential in some cases and strongly associated in others. The services welfare state is one where the concept of the welfare state includes the provision of public services; the inclusion of the benefits system within thus-constructed welfare state, while formally true (see Chapter 1), is normally not signalled. Based on the analysis, the benefits variant can be confidently stated to be prominent in the Mail and Telegraph subcorpora, with the Guardian and Mirror subcorpora more ambiguous and showing a substantial presence of the services variant in the discourse examined. It should be reiterated, however, that texts – not analysed here for the sake of brevity – where services are specifically excluded from the concept of the welfare state (by means of phrasings such as ‘the welfare state and the NHS’ or ‘education and the welfare state’) occur within all themes; social security benefits are very rarely excluded from the welfare state in this way. Thus, if not default, the benefits welfare state certainly appears the prevalent variant of the concept.

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The chapter has found that the benefits welfare state is particularly evident in the theme of welfare reform, which is practically tantamount to the reform of the welfare state in the discourse analysed. The discourse of welfare reform, which provides chiefly moral rationale for the reform of the benefits system, is attested in both conservative and left-leaning subcorpora. In contrast, the reform of public services is virtually never referred to as the reform of the welfare state in the conservative subcorpora. These reforms are, interestingly, opposed in the left-leaning corpora as threatening the services welfare state, within what has been called the topos of the good welfare state, almost entirely restricted to the left-leaning newspapers. Some overlap, however, has been found in the themes of discourse where the two delineation strategies occur. This is perhaps most notable in the theme of political identities:  the conservative newspapers stress the association of Labour with the benefits welfare state presented as problematic within the topoi of self-reliance, vice or fairness/just deserts. In the left-leaning newspapers, the welfare state, whether benefits- or services-based, tends to be utilized as a marker of a left-wing identity, typically within the topoi of help or solidarity, by activists and journalists rather than politicians themselves. The broadly defined problems concerning the welfare state is another theme where both delineations of the welfare state are referenced. This ties in with the prevalent evaluation of each variant: the benefits welfare state tends to be evaluated negatively in the conservative newspapers, with the left-leaning newspapers offering a less clear assessment; the services welfare state tends to carry a positive evaluation, though exceptions – especially in the conservative newspapers – do occur. It is also clear from the analysis that some topoi hinge on or are at least facilitated by the delineation strategies. The topos of help, for instance, is more obvious with the benefits welfare state, the protective function of which is easily relatable to the benefits system. Further, the topos of the good welfare state co-occurs with the services variant, which – at least in the discourse analysed – clearly facilitates the necessary positive evaluation. The topoi associated with negative evaluations of the welfare state have been found to co-occur chiefly with the benefits-based variant: while the topoi of dependency, vice or fairness/just deserts can occur with the services-based welfare state, this co-occurrence is practically restricted to the debates on social care, and the remaining instances concern the benefits-based welfare state. With these topoi, the negative evaluation of the welfare state is enabled by a negative assessment of its participants, much easier to achieve with the benefitsbased variant occurring in the morally charged discourse of welfare reform.



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In contrast, the topos of the state as inefficient manager, implying a similarly negative evaluation, is less relevant to the benefits welfare state and co-occurs with the services variant, exploiting what has been called ‘anti-state sentiments’ (Alcock 2014:306). Perhaps surprisingly, however, the topos of burden is not restricted to the benefits-based welfare state or the conservative subcorpora, although its presence in the left-leaning newspapers is not prominent. Finally, the analysis has found an asymmetry in the delineation strategies and the ensuing evaluations of the welfare state between the two sides of the political spectrum, with the left-leaning subcorpora showing a greater presence of both the services welfare state and the positive evaluations of the concept of the welfare state, however delineated. Nonetheless, there is a strong presence of the benefits welfare state in these subcorpora, which is only partly accounted for by reporting government discourse; similarly, negative evaluations of the welfare state are not as scarce on the Left as positive ones are on the Right, which likely indicates a naturalization of the discourse of welfare reform across the corpus.

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3

What the welfare state is: Figurative models of the welfare state

This chapter analyses the figurative models of the welfare state or metaphors that have the potential to explicate its functioning. The bulk of these is the safety net model, whose different evaluations and argumentative functions the chapter outlines. It then discusses the ways in which this model is expanded and contested, before moving to one-off models of the welfare state.

The instability of the concept of the welfare state is evident not only in the divergence of concept boundaries shown in Chapter  2, with no agreement in the discourse as to what is and what is not the welfare state. It can also be gleaned from what the welfare state is stated or implied to be. Thus, if Chapter 2 can be read as an outline of what can be interpreted as the literal meaning of the welfare state  – a part of the political system with shifting boundaries  – Chapters 3 and 4 outline the figurative conceptualizations of the welfare state. The two chapters focus, respectively, on figurative models and other metaphors of the welfare state. In Chapter 3, they are arranged thematically. Their function in argumentative structures is also noted; other discursive strategies listed in Chapter 2 are referenced as relevant.

3.1  Figurative models Across the corpus, the welfare state is – on a number of occasions – expressly articulated in terms of other things, whether objects or concepts. Metaphors can establish a perspective from which to regard a concept, especially a contested one such as the welfare state. They can also encourage a change of perspective on the concept (Charteris-Black 2004; Burgers, Konijn and Steen 2016), an effect that Lakoff (1996, 2004) calls ‘shifting the frame’, although the reservation needs to be made that this effect can be overstated. While the debate on whether the

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establishing or the change of perspective has lasting effects, or indeed occurs at all, is ongoing (see e.g. Thibodeau and Boroditsky 2011, 2013; Steen et  al. 2014, O’Halloran 2007), it has been suggested that metaphors of highly abstract notions or ones requiring specialist knowledge – such as malware as a virus – are particularly important, as they become explanatory or even constitutive at least for non-specialized audiences (O’Halloran 2007). The welfare state is not as opaque a concept as malware but is clearly contested, and its figurative models, while not numerous, arguably have the potential to effect a change of perspective. This section therefore focuses on what I call model metaphors of the welfare state in each subcorpus. To reiterate, as noted in Chapter 1, model metaphors of the welfare state are ones where the source concept is overtly indicated in the text and does not need to be inferred contextually. The linguistic expression and the conceptual mapping are thus broadly the same, usually following the ‘A is B’ form. Further, these are metaphors that illustrate the perceived function or impact of the welfare state and as such arguably have the potential to become explanatory if not constitutive. The model metaphors outlined in this chapter have the following forms: ‘A is B’ metaphorical expressions; metaphorical similes along the lines of ‘A is like B’; and statements expressing similarity, whether in qualities or functions performed, such as ‘A resembles B’ or ‘A acts as or like B’, where the term ‘welfare state’ is the topic. Candidate expressions to examine for metaphoricity were obtained from a manual analysis of concordance lines in the SketchEngine software (Kilgarriff et  al. 2014) containing the term ‘welfare state’ as well as one of the following items within a ten-token window to the right of the search term: the lemmas ‘be’, ‘become’, ‘remain’, ‘transform’, ‘resemble’, ‘regard’, ‘perceive’, ‘function’, ‘act’; the terms ‘as’, ‘like’, ‘literally’; and the colon and the dash, which were added to the list as they were found to occasionally substitute the lemma ‘be’. A separate search for the phrase ‘of the welfare state’ preceded by nouns was carried out to locate head as epithet constructions (such as ‘the safety net of the welfare state’). The concordance lines were then examined to confirm if the words from the above list do indeed refer to the welfare state, and those found relevant were subsequently analysed for metaphoricity under the Metaphor Identification Procedure – Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU) protocol. The corpus was then searched again for thus-obtained metaphorical expressions to see if they also occur in isolation (i.e. without the term ‘welfare state’ in the immediate co-text); if they did, and occurred at least once in the ‘A is B’ form in the given subcorpus, they were retained for analysis.



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The contestability of the concept of the welfare state might pose a problem in establishing meanings which are figurative. For this study, in accordance with the findings of Chapter  2, expressions identifying the welfare state with an institution, part of the political system, a system of (social security) benefits or public services are not taken as metaphorical (although ‘system’ can be metaphorical under MIPVU where non-material things are concerned, as noted in a sample analysis in Steen et al. 2010:50–1). Thus defined explanatory models vary from heavily conventionalized to oneoff mappings. There are relatively few of them, and all are covered in this chapter. Their occurrence in each subcorpus, along with their argumentative functions, is analysed below.

3.2  Rescue devices: Safety net The safety net model accounts for the bulk of the ‘rescue devices’ category, and indeed of all model metaphors of the welfare state across the corpus. The first part of this section outlines the safety net as an uncontested model of the welfare state. The second focuses on texts where this model is contested and alternatives are put forward and analyses the alternatives proposed in the texts, thus going beyond the safety net. The basic meaning of ‘safety net’ is a net that breaks a fall, evoking perhaps a general falling scenario rather than a specific set of circumstances. The few non-figurative uses in the British National Corpus (BNC)1 indicate the context as high-risk activities such as tightrope-walking, high-speed skiing, climbing (in the surreal scenery of a library) and circus acrobatics. Outside of the corpus, this figurative expression has a heavily conventionalized sense – as indicated by the scarcity of literal uses in the BNC – of protective or precautionary measures. In the corpus, like other models in this group, it almost always denotes the system of social security benefits. These benefits provide aid to individuals in difficult material circumstances. As such, they correspond to the safety net as a device that arrests downward movement and thereby averts a potentially fatal crash, and the onset of difficult material circumstances corresponds to a fall. The mapping ‘Welfare State is a Safety Net’ is thus related to the primary metaphors assistance is physical support (noted in other contexts in Semino 2005, 2008) and poverty is down, which entails the mapping Becoming Poor Is Falling. These are based on the up-down image schema rooted in embodied experience, which is also axiologically marked as good is up.

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3.2.1.  The default model: The safety net The safety net model is the only one that occurs across the entire corpus. One context that is noted in all for newspapers is the 2011 Labour Party Conference. A speech given by Rory Weal, a teenager who expressed his gratitude for the help of the welfare state after the repossession of his family home, was reported by all four newspapers. The Mail and the Mirror give the most extended excerpt, quoted below: (3.1) ‘I owe my entire wellbeing and that of my family to the welfare state. That is why I joined the Labour Party, but that very same welfare state is being ruthlessly ripped apart by a vicious and Right-wing Tory-led government. ‘I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for that system, that safety net. So I take this opportunity to plead with the Government to reconsider their measures.’ Greenhill, Fagge and Groves, Mail 2011; Beattie, Mirror 2011

The Telegraph premodifies ‘system’ with an inserted ‘welfare’ in square brackets, while the Guardian has only the first of the excerpted paragraphs. In the passage, ‘that safety net’ refers back to ‘that system’, the referent of which is the welfare state in the preceding sentence. The topos of help normally evoked by the safety net model is amplified by the conditional ‘if it wasn’t for that system’, which clearly attributes the speaker’s presence at the conference to the beneficial influence of the welfare state. The protective function of the welfare state foregrounded by the model is thus represented as actualized. Another metaphorical expression relevant to the welfare state, ‘is being ripped apart’, is broadly compatible with the safety net as the source concept and so can be interpreted as extending and de-conventionalizing the metaphor. The verb has the welfare state as Goal, and so a victim of violent action, with the largely Conservative government as Actor. This, combined with the positive evaluation of the welfare state, works to delegitimize government reforms. Contained in a stretch of direct speech, this model is clearly perspectivized – that is presented as embedded in the quoted speaker’s perspective, in all four subcorpora. However, a particularly striking instance of perspectivization can be noted in the Mail, where the following passage describes the teenager: (3.2) But Labour leader Ed Miliband may be surprised to know he was not so hard-up after all. For it turns out he is the privileged son of a millionaire property developer who sent Rory to a private school until his business went bust. Greenhill, Fagge and Groves, Mail 2011



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Two phrases, ‘after all’ and ‘it turns out that’, intertextually denote unexpected turns of action and perhaps interdiscursively recall investigative journalism to create the impression of exposing a secret, which is the affluence of the family. The passage thus seeks to undermine Weal’s credibility by implying he is concealing his middle-class status, casting doubt on the usefulness of the welfare state. Other instances of the safety net as an uncontested explanatory model occur primarily in the left-leaning subcorpora, mostly in the post-election part. The Guardian has texts where the model is accepted as apt with regard to presentday welfare state. In some, it represents the functions of the welfare state in a fairly straightforward way, activating the topos of help. More often, however, the model highlights the shortcomings of the welfare state. The former group includes the following excerpt of a mock obituary of the personified welfare state (also discussed in Chapter 4) published after the introduction of means testing for the child benefit: (3.3) The Welfare State’s huge appeal lay in its combination of simplicity and assurance. A safety net to catch those fallen on hard times, come rain or shine, boom or bust, it would be there for all those who had paid in. Such universality allowed people to project on to it whatever they wished. Welfare State’s father, the Liberal William Beveridge, described his offspring as ‘an attack on Want’, one of the five evil giants that had to be slain in postwar Britain. Chakrabortty, Guardian 2013

The passage has several more or less figurative descriptions of the functions of the welfare state. The safety net, present in the second excerpted sentence (‘A safety net to catch …’) is a straightforward description of the function of the welfare state, and the reference to ‘catch[ing] those fallen on hard times’ calls up the broader conceptual metaphor poverty is down and the mapping Becoming Poor Is Falling, in which the safety net is entailed. The following paragraph outlines what is designated as projections of the welfare state:  ‘an attack on Want’ attributed to William Beveridge, and – outside of the excerpted passage  – ‘socialism’ to Clement Attlee, with the latter assuming equivalence between social security and the welfare state. That the safety net is not included among these projections is significant: it appears to be completely naturalized, representing what the welfare state is rather than what it is projected as being. The safety net thus functions as a true explanatory metaphor in this passage, elucidating the meaning of an abstract or vague concept.

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Another example is a column commenting on the need to argue for the welfare state in view of negative coverage in the media: (3.4) But the bigger point to all this (…) is whether the actual end goal of such discourse is getting rid of the welfare state entirely. If you have been any place where there is no safety net, you will have seen people who appear prematurely aged, or severely obese with no teeth, or those with disabilities out begging on the streets. Some of these people will be vacantly staring into space or scavenging on rubbish heaps. Not everyone who is now unemployed can work. Moore, Guardian 2014

The passage visualizes ill health and poverty, which co-occur with (and, it may be presumed, are consequences of) the absence of the welfare state, which is thus evaluated positively not just within the topos of help (as providing aid to those in need) but also as preventing social problems. The term ‘safety net’ in the second excerpted sentence appears to be a stylistic synonym to ‘welfare state’ in the first, perhaps evoking a more strongly positive evaluation, but is not extended or de-conventionalized in any way in the passage, as nothing in the description of the streets relates to the source concept. The safety net as the source concept is, however, elaborated or extended in a number of texts using it to foreground problems affecting the welfare state. This is the case in the two passages below commenting on the increasing use of food banks, one excerpted from a letter by a Labour MP, another a column: (3.5) News that councils are to fund food banks is an indictment of government policy and surely shames us all. Since 1945, the welfare state has protected us from falling below an essential threshold of decency due to age, infirmity or circumstances. Austerity is tearing holes in that safety net. Green, Guardian 2012 (3.6) People who need emergency help often face a grim choice between a payday loan, a food bank or a loan shark. The safety net supposed to stop people going hungry is now a weak and tangled web which is failing to catch the people who need help. Butler, Guardian 2014

Both passages call up the conceptual metaphor poverty is down, and the Becoming Poor is Falling mapping, entailed in the safety net model: 3.5 explicitly references falling, while 3.6 mentions the intended purpose of the welfare state as ‘catch[ing] the people who need help’. The second passage is interesting in that it



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incongruously, or metonymically, assigns a (more) literal function (‘stop people going hungry’) to the safety net; the metonymy here can be described as effect for cause, as cash benefits handed out by the welfare state are indeed used to purchase provisions. The source concept is then extended, as the current form of the safety net is described – congruously – as ‘a weak and tangled web’, reflecting the insufficient (‘weak’) or overly complex (‘tangled’) provision of benefits and explaining the failure to fulfil its function. Similarly, in 3.5, the violent action of tearing holes corresponds to the government drastically reducing the benefit system. This in turn is tantamount to the destruction of the safety net, the protective function of which has been emphasized within the topos of help. In both passages, government policy (mentioned as austerity in 3.5, evident from the broader co-text in 3.6) is represented as affecting the physical properties of the safety net as the Vehicle. The extended model provides an expressive criticism of welfare reform. Problematic aspects of the safety net model of the welfare state are also, of course, expressed in terms not wholly consistent with the source concept, interpretable as mixed metaphors. This appears to be the case in the passages below, both of which are excerpted from profiles of charities (Salvation Army and the Trussell Trust) that supplement the protective function of the welfare state: (3.7) What intrigues me is how the army’s care for society’s most vulnerable and excluded works in a welfare-state Britain which, one would have thought, is very different from the one that confronted the Booths in the second half of the 19th century. Is Britain’s welfare state so porous a safety net that we still need organisations such as the Salvation Army to catch those who fall through? Jeffries, Guardian 2008 (3.8) The growth of Trussell food banks also shines an uncomfortable light on the state’s retreat from welfare, and the failures and cruelty of the parts of the safety net that remain. The charity’s data shows that its expanding client base is increasingly low-paid working families who can’t make ends meet. They are people impoverished by benefit delays and sanctions, or those refused crisis loans. There is a surge in demand during school holidays, when free school meals are not available. Butler, Guardian 2012

In (3.7), the protective function of the welfare state represented by the safety net model is evaluated positively, but the evaluation extends to the principle rather than the practice. The passage, like those above, calls up the falling

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scenario:  insufficient aid is expressed as allowing people to become destitute, mapped as ‘fall[ing] through’ a net which is not fine enough. This quality, however, is expressed as porousness, which is prototypically ascribed to solid bodies, and so not entirely compatible with the source concept. The second passage – by the same author and indeed on the same issue as (3.6) above – assigns the prototypically human trait of cruelty to the safety net or more precisely its parts. This indicates an evaluative clash (see Partington 2017), where the evaluation of the trait starkly contrasts with the positive evaluation the safety net normally has as a Vehicle: evaluative harmony would mean the conventionalization of the safety net metaphor is so heavy that evaluation is negligible. Whether ‘safety net’ is conventionalized or not, however, the welfare state fails in its function in both passages, as the safety net is represented as not meeting its purpose. In the Mirror subcorpus, when the safety net is an uncontested explanatory model of the welfare state, it is typically represented as adversely affected by austerity. The stigmatization of claimants and the restriction of child benefit are represented as an attack on the welfare state in an editorial on reforms announced by the Coalition (Mirror, 5 October 2010). The government actions are summed up as ‘cutting gaping holes in the safety net and, if unchecked, will let millions fall through’. Like in the Guardian passages (3.5 and 3.6), the example calls up the falling scenario by the reference to millions ‘fall[ing] through’ the net, which reiterates the protective function of the net and amplifies the topos of help that the model evokes. The description also resembles the Guardian examples in that the impact of austerity policies on the welfare state is described in figurative terms (‘cutting gaping holes in the safety net’) compatible with the physical properties of the Vehicle. This figurative description not only extends the ‘safety net’ metaphor; it is also consistent with the figurative use of ‘cut’ to denote spending reductions, part of the austerity policies criticized in the editorial. This pattern recurs in the subcorpus, as the government is stated to have ‘slashed the net away’ (Beattie and Buckland, Mirror 2013), or a call is made for a budget ‘that repairs the safety net’ by reversing the cuts (Monroe, Mirror 2014). These extensions make the criticism of austerity policies more expressive. In the conservative newspapers, the safety net as an uncontested model of the welfare state is marginal:  the straightforward ‘A is B’ expression does not occur in this context. Instead, there are a handful of instances of the safety net metaphor in which the identification between it and the welfare state is much weaker. Possibly the closest relation is in a 2012 column by Duncan Smith (Duncan Smith, Telegraph 2012). It states that ‘the safety net has widened’ to denote increased scope of benefits and expenditure on welfare, and the safety net



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refers back to the welfare state mentioned in the opening sentence of the column. In the other instances, the welfare provides a safety net – as is the case in a 2013 news report (Dominczak and Carter, Telegraph 2013), which reports Duncan Smith as saying that ‘the welfare state rightly provides a safety net’ but those who receive support must meet certain conditions. It is debatable whether ‘providing’ a safety net is qualitatively different from constituting a safety net: one effect is perhaps the attenuation of the identity between the welfare state and benefits. As an uncontested explanatory model of the welfare state, the safety net functions in practice only in the left-leaning corpora. The model is often used to visualize the negative impact of austerity policies. The criticism is particularly effective rhetorically when an extended metaphor consistent with the Vehicle is used; austerity policies are then mapped as acts of destruction. In most cases, however, the welfare state is emphatically not a safety net.

3.2.2.  Not a safety net: The most contested model Across the corpus, there are instances where the safety net model is brought up but its explanatory value in relation to the welfare state is undermined. These include cases where the text states or implies welfare state is (or is no longer) a safety net and typically occur in the conservative newspapers. One example of such a declaration is a 2014 Telegraph column stating: ‘[w]‌e have lost connection with the founding principles of welfare: as a safety net to help people when they are down on their luck or stricken by ill health,’ (Pemberton, Telegraph 2014). This invokes the topos of original intention to position the safety net model as desirable, though no longer applicable. A Mail column on the Philpott scandal (see Chapter 2) exemplifies the model being implicitly undermined: (3.9) Mick Philpott was blatantly and disgustingly exploiting a generous benefits system that is intended as a safety net for the genuinely disadvantaged. Heffer, Mail, 2013

Here, the implication is that Philpott’s recourse to the system violated its intended function. As he was not ‘genuinely disadvantaged’, the safety model missed its purpose. There are also two interesting cases in the Guardian subcorpus when the safety net is a counterfactual model. However, the counterfactuality does not stem from the fact that the welfare state has departed from its original design. Rather, the current welfare state is implied to be broader than the safety net. This is the case in the two passages below, one from a column on the imminent move

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away from the universal provision of the child benefit, the other from a liveblog of a speech by the prime minister: (3.10) [The end of universal provision] is a deeply strategic move, one designed to set in train the gradual transformation of the welfare state into an Americanstyle safety net. If progressives do not challenge those who attack universal provision as unaffordable, we will concede by default an argument that could profoundly shape our society for decades to come. Horton, Guardian 2010 (3.11) But [his policy proposals] are bold. Cameron does seem to have a new vision of the welfare state. He wants benefits to be a safety net – and nothing more; less Scandinavia, and more USA. Sparrow, Guardian 2012

In both excerpts, the Vehicle appears to be conventionalized, with no reference to the properties or functioning of the net. More interesting is the argumentative context of thus-construed welfare state: in both passages, the safety net model is a policy goal of the Coalition government, positioned in transitional opposition (see Davies 2012) to the present-day welfare state. This prospective safety net has a smaller scope – whether by covering fewer people or offering less help – than the present welfare state in the UK and is a specifically residual, last-resort welfare state typical of the United States. This prospective reduction of the welfare state to a (basic) safety net is criticized in the broader co-text in both texts, especially the Horton column, which argues for universal provision of benefits on the grounds that they engender a sense of solidarity and community rather than just help the weak and that solidarity provides a stronger basis for a positive evaluation of the welfare state (a frequent argument in support of universal provision). The topos of help associated with the safety net model is thus deemed insufficient to ensure a positive evaluation of the welfare state. Further, both texts validate the lesser eligibility of the safety net model by associating it with the United States, whose minimalist welfare state is intertextually interpretable in this subcorpus as self-evidently undesirable. This is perhaps to do with the topos of the good welfare state, occasionally noted in the Guardian subcorpus. However, even in the conservative subcorpora, the residual safety net model is typically legitimized with recourse to the topos of original intention, that is to the intentions of Beveridge and other creators of the welfare state, rather than by association with the United States. Notably,



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in either text there is no suggestion that such minimalist safety net would malfunction – it is the limited provision offered within the model itself that is deemed problematic, since this minimalist version weakens associations with the self-evidently morally right function of helping those in need. Often, however, the safety net model co-occurs with another figurative model, usually one whose explanatory value is deemed to exceed that of the safety net, resulting in a change of perspective on the welfare state, or reframing (see Lakoff 1996, 2004). Most instances of these alternative models fit into three themes:  that of indulgence, restraint and habit, outlined below. Several other alternative models are generalizable into themes, which recur across the corpus on their own, and so only the instances that contest the safety net are discussed in this section. It should also be noted that while other models of the welfare state can be and indeed are contested across the corpus, the safety net is the only one where this is done consistently.

3.2.2.1. Indulgence The theme of indulgence is present in the conservative subcorpora and the Mirror, where some texts represent the function of the welfare state as pampering rather than protection. The Vehicles in this group – the mattress and the sofa – are novel and arguably highly creative (unlike the conventionalized safety net) and appear to have a conceptual connection with the safety net, which gives them substantial expressive power. The Telegraph example comes from a 2014 column reacting to Channel 4’s documentary Benefits Street, which depicts benefit recipients as largely undeserving of support: (3.12) How have we got to the state whereby for some, the welfare state is no longer a safety net, but a feather-filled mattress on which to recline while playing your Xbox? I am tired of seeing fit and healthy people who choose not to work, while there are poor, needy and desperate individuals working hard but struggling to pay basic bills. Pemberton, Telegraph 2014

The first sentence is almost verbatim present also in the Mail subcorpus, as the Mail carries a 2014 column (dated three days after the Telegraph text) by the same author: (3.13) But I fear we now have a welfare state that is no longer a safety net, but rather a feather-filled mattress on which to recline while playing your Xbox.

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Every day my colleagues and I, and those we work closely with in social services and employment agencies, are confronted by people who have never worked and who think it is their right to receive state benefits. Pemberton, Mail 2014

The feather-filled mattress as a proposed model of the welfare state is in transitional opposition to the safety net, deemed ‘no longer’ apt. The safety net model, as well as the poverty is down conceptual metaphor, is based on the up-down image schema, where the down position corresponds to poverty. The mattress model retains the image schema, as well as the horizontal position of the human body, which is also implicitly present in the safety net but reinterprets the schema from rich (or comfortable)–poor to active–inactive. The precarious conditions implicit in the falling scenario are replaced with comfort and affluence, evident in the description of the mattress as ‘feather-filled’ as well as the activity of playing video games. With this, the motivation for the horizontal position shifts. The topos of help normally set off by the safety net model is thus invalidated:  the welfare state is represented as an undeserved reward, and so morally wrong, activating the topos of burden and violating that of fairness. The scope of this transformation is limited to ‘some’ beneficiaries in the Telegraph passage (echoing ‘a proportion’ of claimants in the preceding sentence, not excerpted here), a reservation that is absent from the Mail text. Nonetheless, the contrast in the subsequent sentences of the Telegraph excerpt between the undeserving recipients of aid and those who are in dire need but poorly served by the welfare state underscores the parallel failures of the welfare state, denying the validity of the safety net model and reinforcing the mattress one. Although neither text openly calls for reform, focusing instead on the shortcomings of welfare state, the use of explanatory models to provide rationale for reform is consistent with texts that do. A Mirror column on a man who fathered a large number of children uses a similar model. It dates from 2010 and so precedes both Pemberton texts, but the parallels are clear, as evident from the passage excerpted below: (3.14) Keith Macdonald is a symbol of all that went wrong with the welfare state. It was meant to be a safety net for the vulnerable. And it has become a comfy sofa for the lazy, the feckless and the kind of people who put lager on their cornflakes. Parsons, Mirror 2010

The text resembles the Telegraph and Mail columns in its use of a novel Vehicle, here ‘a comfy sofa’, to represent the pampering function of the welfare state; in



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the transitional opposition between it and the safety net model and finally in the representation of beneficiaries as undeserving of support. The connections between the safety net and the sofa are parallel to those outlined above. One slight difference is that the sofa implies a typically sedentary rather than a horizontal position of the human body (although the latter is not impossible), although this is clearly secondary to the associations of inactivity and leisure. Another difference is the lack of attributes of wealth, and the clear class undertone in the representation of the undeserving – the broader context makes clear that lager for breakfast is not a hyperbole but a habit of the irresponsible father, and the reprehensibility of this habit to the writer is unquestionable. More importantly, the beneficiary of thus-construed welfare state is represented in more starkly negative terms, clearly conveying class prejudice. More than in the excerpted passage, this is at its most extreme in the description of Macdonald as ‘Brad Pitt of the bus stop’ and his sperm as ‘rat-faced’. Further, if the Pemberton texts restrict the transformation of the welfare state to ‘some’ undeserving beneficiaries, the Mirror passage does not make such a reservation. In this way, while it does not state that all beneficiaries are undeserving of support, the model is depicted as catering to the undeserving and works to delegitimize the form of the welfare state it represents. In all three cases, the axiology of the safety net model contrasts starkly with that of its alternatives, which is likely why they are deployed. Feather mattresses or comfy sofas are not problematic in themselves. But when the protective function of the welfare state, figuratively represented by the safety net model, is transformed into one that ensures comfortable leisure for those who typically do not work, the welfare state becomes an unearned reward rather than a means of rescue: burdensome, unfair and morally wrong. The ‘indulgence’ models thus entail a strong criticism of its beneficiaries, more pronounced in the Mirror text.

3.2.2.2.  Immobilizing device Another alternative to the safety net across the corpus is that of an immobilizing device, where the welfare state is represented as a means of restraining motion. A  conceptual connection between models in this theme and the safety net, though weaker than in the examples above, can arguably be posited. The difference is that a safety net counteracts gravity and so arrests specifically downward movement; restraining devices tend to stop free motion in general. The metaphors are based on what appears to be the Motion is Agency mapping. The Vehicles range from ones that are conventional to novel ones conveying a similar meaning.

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A Telegraph text uses a conventional Vehicle, ‘trap’, to represent the welfare state in an excerpt from a column about the attitudes to reform of the benefitsbased welfare state: (3.15) So, all you well-to-do campaigners for welfarism, there is no need to be bemused by the poor’s indifference to your battle. For what you love about welfarism – that it insulates the so-called ‘vulnerable’ from the chaotic, often unfair world of the market and struggle  – is precisely what the poor hate about it. And what you hate about IDS’s cuts – that they remove the ‘safety net’ that many experience as a trap  – might just be what the poor admire in them. O’Neill, Telegraph 2013

‘Trap’ has a conventional figurative sense of a problematic situation difficult to escape from (discussed as such in Steen et al. 2010:91) and usually refers to the system of benefits in the conservative subcorpora. This is partly the case in the above extract, where the benefits system – referred to as the safety net – is contextually synonymous to the welfare state. The restrained movement corresponds to the agency of beneficiaries, curtailed by the receipt of state support which purportedly discourages individual initiative and so is evaluated negatively within the dependency argument. Interestingly, both models in the excerpt appear to be undermined. The trap model is limited in scope: it is not posited in a straightforward ‘A is B’ form but is placed in an embedded clause. Its participant role is perhaps best classified as Role of the Phenomenon (see Halliday and Matthiessen 2014:344) and shifted to the realm of perceived rather than objective reality. Nonetheless, in a text concerning attitudes, such a shift does not arguably invalidate the model, already designated as shared by ‘many’. The safety net, in turn, is placed in scare quotes, as is the adjective ‘vulnerable’. This inserts a distance between these expressions and the authorial voice, especially since the passage appears to directly (‘all you’) address a community where both references to a ‘safety net’ and protection of the ‘vulnerable’ are stock elements of political discourse.2 The sarcastic reference to middle-class defenders of this model of the welfare state further dismisses both the model and the topos of help it entails. The result is that the validity of trap appears greater than that of the safety net in this passage, underscoring the rationale for reform. A Mail news report, summarizing a column by a government aide on the plans to limit child benefit to the first two children, uses a novel Vehicle in an alternative model consistent with the restraint theme:



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(3.16) Benefits reforms are vital to save taxpayers money, says Mr Zahawi in an article in today’s Mail on Sunday. The welfare state was set up in the 1940s as a last resort, not a lifestyle choice, he writes. But over the years, the safety net became a straitjacket, trapping people into a life of dependency on the state – at someone else’s expense. Walters, Mail 2013

The passage posits the transformation of the safety net welfare state, positioned as consistent with the intentions of its 1940s creators and as such evaluated positively within the topos of original intention, into one construed as a restraining device – a straitjacket, and the conceptual connection between the models consists in the protective function the straitjacket is normally intended to perform. Like in (3.15) above, the depletion of agency in the beneficiaries corresponds to the restricted range of motion afforded by a straitjacket, perhaps even more vividly so than with the trap, which merely prevents escape. This clearly results in a strong negative evaluation of the transformed welfare state, as the freedom to move is a basic prerogative of individuals, and only extreme circumstances justify the withholding of it. The reference to the expense incurred by this welfare state levels additional criticism at it within the topos of burden, further underscoring the rationale for reform. The Guardian also has instances where the safety net model is contested within this theme. A 2008 column, published at the onset of the financial crisis and outlining the perceived shortcomings of the welfare state, uses a novel metaphor to express the alternative model (the elided paragraphs list several cases of problematic or non-existent provision of benefits): (3.17) [T]‌he government is lagging behind the public who, in the face of recession, are likely to be asking tough questions about who exactly benefits from the welfare state, [and] what the results of its spending are. . . . No one who was designing a public safety net would look at outcomes like these and want to reproduce them. What we and current ministers have inherited is more like a set of shackles on long chains. Those brought up in cultures of dependence often lack the confidence, resilience or education to be attractive to employers. . . . Russell, Guardian 2008

The welfare state is construed as ‘a public safety net’, as the impact of the latter in the second excerpted sentence answers the questions posed in the opening one, indicating textual synonymy. There is no suggestion that the safety net

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denotes a residual, last-resort welfare state, as it does in (3.16) above, or that this residual quality is what the positive evaluation of the model hinges upon, which also appears to be the case in (3.16). In light of its outcomes, however, the aptness of the safety net as a model is questioned. The ‘set of shackles on long chains’ is thus posited as an alternative model within a metaphorical simile, or what Steen et  al. (2010) consider direct metaphor. The shackles resemble the straitjacket in the mapped restriction on physical movement (as well as the topoi invoked), although the ‘long chains’ presumably allow slightly more freedom, and the purpose of the restriction entailed in the model is punitive rather than protective. The topos of help in the original safety net model is thus perhaps even more strongly invalidated, as the welfare state is interpretable as punishing rather than helping. Less uncertain is the presence of the dependency argument, as the outcome of the shackles model is illustrated by the reference to ‘cultures of dependence’. This is invoked in conservative discourse to criticize what is perceived as a disempowering impact of the welfare state, which discourages self-reliance or indeed agency. A slightly less novel alternative is used in a column outlining the views of a self-proclaimed Red Tory, Philip Blond, instrumental in creating the soon-to-be Coalition’s view of the welfare state: (3.18) It was the welfare state that destroyed ‘vivid communal life of the urbanised working class’. Instead of providing a safety net, it became a ceiling, trapping the working class in a benefits culture. Bunting, Guardian 2010

Here, the safety net is not strictly a model of the welfare state but of the support it – crucially – should be, though is not, providing. The alternative, that of a ceiling, is expressed as a model metaphor of the welfare state. While not a restraining device as such, it nonetheless fulfils a similar function as it defines the limit of upward movement, which figuratively represents social mobility on the basis of the up-down image schema underlining the concept of social hierarchy. In this way, the welfare state places a limit on upward motion corresponding to upward social mobility, whereas a safety net counteracts the effects of gravity, which provides yet another contrast. The limitation signalled by the ceiling is amplified by the figurative use of ‘trap’. The figurative location the beneficiaries are trapped in – ‘a benefits culture’ – echoes the ‘cultures of dependence’ from the Russell passage above, expressing the habituality of what should be emergency support and so further contradicting the validity of the safety net model.



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The passages above imply that the safety net corresponds to a social securitycentred but not necessarily strictly residual welfare state. But the stricter interpretation of the safety net also occurs in the Guardian subcorpus, whether in reports of government discourse or when such discourse is produced directly for the paper, as in the subsequent example excerpted from a column by the Coalition minister Esther McVey (see also 2.11): (3.19) William Beveridge’s vision of the welfare state was a safety net – a system that prevented people from falling into poverty at times of difficulty. But for too long the welfare bill has increased, trapping people in poverty and preventing them from making the move into work. McVey, Guardian 2013

The passage calls up the falling scenario to illustrate the intended protective function of the safety net model of the welfare state. Positively evaluated within the topos of help in this way, it is explicitly designated for ‘times of difficulty’ and so clearly recognizable as residual. It is also recognizable as counterfactual primarily due to its actual impact, which the second excerpted sentence explains as disempowering; the fact that the relational clause (‘William Beveridge’s vision of the welfare state was a safety net’) identifies not the welfare state but Beveridge’s vision of it as a safety net indicates the topos of original intention rather than counterfactuality, an inference confirmed by the indicative mood in ‘prevented’. The aptness of the safety net model is thus questioned, and an alternative model of a restraint, consistent with those analysed above in the mapping of agency onto motion, can be gleaned – untypically – from the figuratively used verb ‘trapping’ rather than a nominal model. The Actor of the verb, however, is ‘the welfare bill’, incongruous if read literally (or even metonymically as the cost of the welfare state), perhaps simply a clumsy turn of phrase. Incongruity notwithstanding, it introduces the topos of burden, adding to a negative evaluation of the current form of the welfare state within the dependency argument, contrasting with a positive assessment of the safety net. The construal of the welfare state as an immobilizing device corresponds to well-rehearsed neoliberal arguments against the welfare state as stifling agency and preventing self-reliance. More remotely, it recalls conservative criticisms of the welfare state as incompatible with civic society, though this depends less on the enterprising self so important to the former. This correspondence likely accounts for the use of conventionalized Vehicles in this theme. Like the theme of indulgence, it can provide expressive criticism of the welfare state. But one

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important difference is that the negative evaluation of the model is entailed in the model itself rather than the judgement of the beneficiaries, positioning them as victims rather than free-riders. Interestingly, though the Vehicles can be highly creative, the metaphors are not extended or elaborated, and though one can speculate on the entailments – such as what exactly constitutes the chains or the shackles – these are not called up in the passages.

3.2.2.3.  A matter of habit The last theme of alternatives to the safety net, that of habit – where the recourse to benefits is represented as habitual – recurs in the conservative subcorpora. It has little conceptual connection with the safety net and indeed is borderline figurative. Typically, just one conventionalized Vehicle – ‘way of life’ – is used, as in the passage below excerpted from a Telegraph column3 by Duncan Smith on the imminent introduction of the ever-postponed Universal Credit: (3.20) It’s impossible to imagine that when Beveridge set about designing a system to tackle his five giant evils (…) he envisaged a situation where claimants were better off on benefits than in work. (…) In fact, what we are doing is returning the welfare state to what it was meant to be – a safety net, not a way of life. Duncan Smith, Telegraph 2014

‘Way of life’ is itself a conventional figurative expression denoting patterns of behaviour and is based on the life is a journey conceptual metaphor. As a model of the welfare state, it is interpretable as metonymically4 construing the welfare state as the receipt of benefits, which is rendered habitual in the expression. The tenuous conceptual connection consists not in shared mappings but in the contrast between the occasional, emergency-only recourse to support entailed in the safety net model, whose validity if not aptness is underscored within the topos of original intention (i.e. as consistent with the intentions of Beveridge) – and the habituality of a way of life. In the excerpt, it is the implied generosity of support (‘better off on benefits than in work’) rather than other potential factors such as low pay that is at the heart of the problem. More broadly, prolonged recourse to benefits is here represented as an outcome of individual irresponsibility or ineptness and as such is both undeserved and selfperpetuating (see the welfare state as a ‘lifestyle choice’ in the Philpott case; the references to a ‘culture’ of benefits therein appear to have a similar function). The habituality theme thus combines the topos of dependency with that of burden,



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called up by the long-term nature of support. It therefore also co-occurs with a strongly negative evaluation of the beneficiaries of the welfare state.

3.2.2.4.  Other alternative models An even stronger negative evaluation of both the welfare state and its beneficiaries is evident in the theme of fraud. The theme recurs in the corpus on its own in conservative subcorpora (see below), but one figurative model, that of a racket, is posited as an alternative to the safety net in a Mail feature article alleging abuse of the benefit by polygamous ethnic-minority families: (3.21) Behind the creation of the modern welfare state lay a noble ideal. The post-war generation of politicians and civil servants were motivated by the desire to protect the vulnerable, the sick and those in genuine poverty. Tragically, over recent decades, the system has become corrupted. It might have once been a safety net for those in real difficulties but, today, parts of the benefits structure have become a lucrative racket for claimants who lack any sense of social responsibility. Flather, Mail 2011

The system identified as the safety net is the benefits-based welfare state, but the identification is reluctant (as indicated by the concessive context of ‘might’) and restricted to the past. The model is thus clearly represented as no longer valid. The passage posits another model, that of a racket, in a transformative opposition to the safety net, although the transformation is stated to affect only ‘parts of ’ the system. If treated as figurative, the model can be analysed as primarily metonymic, as fraudulent recourse of some beneficiaries to the benefits-based welfare state is here an attribute of the welfare state itself (and vulnerability to abuse is reconceptualized as abuse). The conceptual connection, like in the habit theme, is limited to the contrast in the functions of the welfare state as highlighted by the models: protection in the safety net and exploitation in the racket. The latter indicates the topos of burden, while the criminal connotations of the racket call up the topos of vice, where the welfare state encourages reprehensible behaviour. Both topoi work to strongly delegitimize the welfare state and negatively evaluate its beneficiaries. This and other passages analysed above typically position the safety net as a model less apt or valid than its alternatives, but one preferable to them, and so a benchmark for the function of the welfare state. One text in the Mail subcorpus, however, has the safety net as a less desirable model. The context is a

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news report on welfare reforms in general, which notes former Labour minister David Blunkett joining a Conservative-affiliated think-tank (and the ‘Tory war on dole cheats’, as the headline has it). Blunkett’s words as quoted in the report are excerpted below: (3.22) The welfare state of the 21st Century will not simply be a safety net but an enabler – a ladder out of poverty. It must embody the mutual acceptance of selfresponsibility and the acceptance of responsibility for the well-being of others. Walters, Mail 2010

The quotation refers to a prospective welfare state rather than its present form; neither model is thus deemed factual. The safety net is premodified by ‘simply’, suggesting the protective function is a minimum of what is expected of the welfare state; in this, the passage somewhat resembles the Guardian excerpts (3.10) and (3.11) analysed above, where the safety net represents a residual and thus unsatisfactory model of the welfare state. Here, another model is represented as preferable  – that of a ladder. This is a conventional metaphor for a system allowing advancement, which functions as a stock metaphor of allowing upward social mobility. A  strong conceptual connection between it and the safety net exists in that both are based on the up-down image schema applied to material circumstances in the poverty is down conceptual metaphor. Interestingly, poverty here is a figurative container to be climbed out of, in contrast to the restraint models, where the welfare state is a trap to escape from. The ladder, classifiable as part of the ascent theme discussed below, allows upward movement rather than merely arresting downward motion as a protective measure and thus affords the active involvement of beneficiaries. This is consistent with the active–inactive interpretation of the image schema and the ensuing positive evaluation of thus-construed welfare state within the dependency argument. The description of the ladder model as an ‘enabler’, along with the reference to self-responsibility in the following sentence, amplifies the self-reliance element. In this way, the former Labour minister is represented as aligned with the professed spirit of Conservative (if technically Coalition) reforms indicated in the headline. Finally, if the passages analysed in this section accept the existence of the safety net model of the welfare state, there is a text (Brown, Guardian 2013) in the corpus where the welfare state is contrasted with rather than construed as a safety net. The text, in the Guardian subcorpus, is a letter responding to the column by Esther McVey analysed in Chapter 2. It takes issue with what McVey



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represents as the original intention for the welfare state: while McVey declares this to be a safety net, the letter writer believes the welfare state was intended as the slayer of the five ‘evil dragons’ from the Beveridge Report. Instead, another component – the National Assistance – was the safety net. Its protective function is contrasted with a much more active role ascribed to the welfare state, that of eradicating social problems. This is an unconventional instance of the topos of original intention, here used to legitimize a broader remit for the welfare state on the basis of its founding document. This contrasts with the typical context of the topos, which is the support of the safety net model. Contested instances of the safety net model prevail in the conservative subcorpora but are noted across the corpus, both before and after the 2010 election, again with no major qualitative change. Like in the uncontested cases, the model is typically evaluated positively; in the conservative subcorpora, a positive evaluation of the welfare state is contingent on its residual quality, and the safety net tends to represent such residual welfare state in these subcorpora. This is also why the validity of the model is so frequently denied, as the welfare state is often represented as having gone beyond its original remit, with alternative models  – frequently ones negatively evaluating the welfare state – posited to illustrate its functioning. Interestingly, no reason is given in the excerpts analysed for the transformation of the welfare state from a safety net into an alternative model, and the transformation appears drastic and unjustified. The contested safety net typically works to legitimize reform, a function which occurs also in the left-leaning corpora, testifying to the pervasiveness of the Coalition discourse of welfare reform.

3.3  Lifesavers: Other rescue devices Other rescue devices as figurative models of the welfare state occur in the Guardian and Mail subcorpora, while a single Telegraph text uses sheltered spaces as models. The Guardian and Mail models are all to do with water and use conventionalized Vehicles, as in the excerpts below: (3.23) A  welfare state that now, because of middle-class Waynettas like Bird who studied psychology at university finds itself increasingly under attack from many who understandably see it as little more than a magnet for scroungers and opportunists and not as it was originally conceived: a lifeline for those in genuine need. Vine, Mail 2015

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(3.24) Though the G15 is right to point out that most social tenants are ordinary working folks, there will always be some tenants for whom the welfare state is a necessary lifeline. Disabled tenants face enough challenges without feeling like their own housing providers are isolating them as an anomaly or, worse, suggesting they are undeserving of the support they receive. Fearn, Guardian 2013 (3.25) So too with punk: this generation – that of my parents – owed everything to the welfare state, yet they destroyed as much of it as they could. Decades later, I’d find its remnants a lifeline in a society otherwise dominated by privilege and capital. Hatherley, Guardian 2014

The figurative use of ‘lifeline’ to denote a way out of a difficult situation is conventional and indeed is attested in the corpus in the context of specific payments to individuals (Ramesh, Guardian 2012)  or countries (Traynor, Guardian 2010) rather than the welfare state. The lifeline model of the welfare state resembles that of the safety net in that it too maps downward movement onto poverty and the life-saving device onto benefits and is a mapping within the same assistance is support conceptual metaphor. The falling source scenario is, however, replaced with that of drowning to conceptualize poverty. The downward movement (and so the up-down image schema) is less salient than in the safety net model, as the threat to life does not result from the movement itself but the aquatic environment. At the same time, the very existence of the threat is foregrounded  – unlike a safety net, a lifeline is not typically used as a precaution; rather, it is only deployed in an emergency. The life-saving function of the device is thus much more obvious, and the activation of the topos of help, which gives the welfare state a positive evaluation, is much more forceful. This emergency deployment perhaps facilitates the presence of a recipient of the lifeline, whether generalized, as in the first two excerpts, or specific in the last passage, although it is difficult to notice a definite pattern with so few occurrences of the lifeline model. The participants are crucial to the Mail passage, excerpted from a section criticizing a benefit claimant who went on a long, ‘benefit-funded’ holiday. The lifeline here is an instance of a contested model, designated as preferable within the topoi of help (as indicated by the ‘genuine need’ of the beneficiaries) and original intention. The alternative model, ‘magnet for scroungers and opportunists’, is a novel metaphor related to the fraud theme, although it



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highlights openness to abuse rather than metonymically convert fraud into an attribute of the welfare state. It is also restricted to perception (with the welfare seen as, rather than being, a magnet), although this perception is validated as understandable (‘by many’). The magnet model is based on a strongly negative assessment of beneficiaries and indeed appears to convey little more than such assessment; it is thus perhaps better classified as an evaluative metaphor rather than explanatory model. Classification notwithstanding, it is clear from the passage that the lifeline function no longer holds. This is not the case in the Guardian passages, where the first excerpt in particular explicitly refers to and attempts to counteract the stigmatization of benefit claimants as undeserving. Further, the correspondence between benefits and the lifeline is easily identifiable in the first of the Guardian passages, but not necessarily so in the last extract: the welfare state here counteracts the impact of ‘privilege and capital’, which may be done by supplying financial support, but also, potentially, in the more abstract sense of providing evidence for values other than those. Nonetheless, the aptness of the lifeline model is not questioned in either of the Guardian excerpts, although it is stated in the second passage – and implied in the broader context of the first one – to be under threat. The key function of this figurative expression is to emphatically underscore the positive value of thus-construed welfare state, given the threats to its existence. The other rescue device model in the Guardian subcorpus is that of the life raft. A  novel metaphor, it occurs only once in the subcorpus, in a feature summarizing a book-length study on the impact of austerity: (3.26) What is so rarely understood  – and what has been under direct attack during austerity – is that the welfare state is not about dependency: it is about opportunity. Done well, it is a life raft when times are tough and a springboard to better things. The social safety net envisaged at the end of the second world war, and supported and upheld by successive governments over many decades, was designed for that purpose. O’Hara, Guardian 2014

The excerpted paragraph is metaphorically rich, with three figurative models of the welfare state and several indirect metaphors. The models  – the life raft, the springboard and the safety net  – are concordant in that they share a positive evaluation of the welfare state and some elements of the conceptual structure: the up-down image schema, where the down point corresponds to

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property, and the protective function in the case of the life raft and the safety net. In contrast to the life raft and the springboard, however, the safety net appears naturalized as a synonym to the welfare state, echoing (3.3) above. It is not used as part of the same list as the life raft and the springboard, which are straightforward Identifiers of the pronoun ‘it’ referring back to the welfare state, and it has a specific purpose, which can be interpreted as distinct from that of breaking a fall (and is perhaps indicated by the two other models). If so, ‘safety net’ would be more heavily conventionalized than the other Vehicles. It should be noted, however, that this could simply be an editing oversight, the text being a shortened extract from a book. Like the lifeline, the life raft is a life-saving device to be used in an emergency, or ‘when times are tough’. Its figurative use appears novel, with no instances in dictionaries or the BNC, and is based on the same scenario of drowning. The sense of a threat to life remains clear and results in the activation of the topos of help, with its attendant positive evaluation of the welfare state. The other model, that of the springboard, is conventional and fits into the ascent theme (see the references to ‘ladder’ in this and the next section). Material circumstances are here construed with recourse to the axiologically marked up-down image schema, as the up point is not just the opposite of poverty but also a higher social status (‘a springboard to better things’). The welfare state is thus not only a means of attaining financial comfort but also a tool of upward social mobility, which is self-evidently desirable. The argumentative function of the three metaphors does appear to vary somewhat: the safety net, as noted above, appears a straightforward synonym of the welfare state. The life raft gives urgency to its positive evaluation, and the springboard is the metaphor that best corresponds to the purpose of the welfare state explicitly articulated in the passage as ‘opportunity’, as opposed to the protective function highlighted by the life raft metaphor. Interestingly, the life raft and the springboard models are not entirely factual in the passage, introduced as they are with the caveat ‘[d]‌one well’ (this, notably, is not the case for the safety net, which is excluded from this reservation). This might be because providing opportunities is  – perhaps  – more self-evidently valuable than the protective function of the welfare state, either as more consistent with neoliberal capitalism, or because it might be less prone to abuse. The verb form does not indicate counterfactuality, however, presenting thus-construed welfare state as attainable if not wholly factual. In the conservative part of the corpus, the rescue theme with a model other than the safety net occurs in a single text in the Telegraph. Published weeks



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ahead of the 2010 election, the column expresses support for the Conservatives as the party that would curb the abuse of the welfare state: (3.27) It was never meant to be like this. Lord Beveridge and the others who devised the welfare state planned it as a refuge for the elderly, the disabled and the chronically sick: those who could no longer cope with the heat and labour of the day. For the able-bodied, it should only be a casualty-clearing station, providing a brief respite for the man on hard times before he got back on his bike and looked for work. Anderson, Telegraph 2010

The passage has two novel figurative models of the welfare state – the refuge and the casualty-clearing station, assigned to two different classes of beneficiaries. In both models, the welfare state is essentially a place, or more specifically, a sheltered location. It is clear from the broader context that the welfare state in the text is residual and benefits-based; thus, recourse to benefits is mapped onto being in a certain location, consistent with the generic states are locations mapping (on mappings between image schemas, see Kövecses 2017). The refuge metaphor evokes what might be termed a protection scenario but does not evoke one specific context, with violence, the elements or loss of habitat providing some possibilities. The ‘heat and labour’, originally from a poem by Oscar Wilde, indicates the drudgery of menial work done outdoors (or, more generally, the daily grind): the reference to environmental conditions perhaps motivates the choice of the refuge as a model, which highlights the protective function of the welfare state within the topos of help. The casualty-clearing station (CCS) on the other hand indicates a very specific set of circumstances – that of a frontline, with the station performing triage before providing care for those less gravely wounded. Another mapping is thus identifiable as ‘A Poor Person is a Casualty of War’, with war as the source domain. The severity of circumstances entailed in the model works to strongly activate the topos of help and, like in the Guardian examples above, positively evaluate this model of the welfare state. However, it appears that what the clearing station model foregrounds in the context is the provisionality of the location – as an interim measure – rather than the specifics of the life-saving circumstance. The construal of the welfare state as a location dovetails with the literal and figurative journey in search for work referenced in the passage, which echoes Thatcher’s employment minister Norman Tebbitt’s description of his unemployed father who famously ‘got on his bike’ to find work. This is often quoted as advice to

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the unemployed to make more effort in search of employment within what might be described as ‘Job Search Is a Journey’ mapping, possibly again within life is a journey. It also makes the positive evaluation of the welfare state contingent on it being a transient stage in this process, unless special circumstances apply. The mapping of the welfare state as a place thus bears some resemblance to the habit theme noted above (for instance in 3.20), where the welfare state is censured for weakening the self-reliance of beneficiaries and preventing the rise of the enterprising self. Though the emergency-only deployment of help is entailed in all models in this theme, it is only the conservative Telegraph that emphasizes it so strongly as a precondition for a positive evaluation of the welfare state, though an exception is made for beneficiaries other than ‘the able-bodied’. In general, the rescue device models in the corpus do not entail a judgement on beneficiaries, and – perhaps because they tend to be expressed with novel Vehicles – they evoke the topos of help in a way more expressive than the safety net.

3.4  Moving up: Devices aiding ascent Present in the Mail and Guardian subcorpora, the models in this theme are based on the up-down image schema, which corresponds to material status as well as social standing. The welfare state is a device that enables upward movement, as an improvement in material status corresponds to physical motion up. The end point of the path – such as the ‘better things’ in (3.26) – may but need not be specified. The Vehicles tend to be conventionalized, as is the case in the two models – the ladder in the Mail and the springboard in the Guardian – analysed above in other sections, where they co-occur with other models. The remaining model, that of ‘a hand up’, is also noted in the Mail and the Guardian as a recurrent metaphor of the welfare state. The Telegraph instance – ‘Or, as Tony Blair once promised but didn’t deliver: a hand up, not a hand-out’ (Duncan Smith, Telegraph 2011) – does not explicitly refer to the welfare state, although the context is welfare reform. The Guardian example, from the pre-election part of the corpus, comes from a passage excerpted from a text outlining a Scottish council’s policy on poverty indirectly caused by cancer: (3.28) The intelligent welfare state prevents poverty as well as relieving it; and through its public services and partnerships enables people to ‘learn, earn, and care’. The welfare state must be shaped by the changing nature of people’s lives, rather than people’s lives being shaped to fit in with services available.



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John Smith described this kind of welfare state as ‘a hand up rather than a hand out’. This definition of rights and responsibilities (reciprocity) has been a feature in much of the more recent policy work on modernisation and transformation of public services. Clark, Guardian 2009

The ‘hand up, not a hand out’ is not a novel phrase and is attributed in the passage to John Smith, whose tenure as Labour leader immediately preceded Tony Blair’s. The phrase is a play on the established figurative usage of ‘hand’ to denote ‘help’, analysable as an instance of metaphthonymy  – combining metaphor and metonymy (means of action for action). It juxtaposes two expressions in which, combined with a preposition, it denotes a means of elevation (a hand up, as though a hand was reached out to a person who has fallen) or is part of a compound denoting giveaway (a handout; the spelling in the passage is perhaps motivated by stylistic reasons – to stress the anaphoric ‘hand’) as two models of the welfare state. The former – the hand up – is based on the up-down image schema, where the up represents both activity and social mobility in the way similar to that analysed above in the ladder and springboard models (3.26). Because it involves helping someone stand, it is not unrelated to the topos of help; nonetheless, it is the dependency argument that makes it preferable to handouts:  the standing position indicates independence, selfreliance and agency, as in the phrase ‘stand on one’s own two feet’, which also recurs in the corpus (although not in close proximity to ‘welfare state’). In this, the hand up contrasts with the dispreferred handout model: the passivity of the beneficiaries, who merely receive the benefits handed out to them, undermines a positive evaluation of the welfare state within the topos of help, because this help would prevent the development of self-reliance. The handout welfare state is obviously identifiable as benefits-centred and likely residual. In this passage, the hand up variant appears to be inclusive of services, as evident from the reference to ‘its’ public services. This is unusual, as other instances of ascent models in the corpus – and indeed the other occurrence of the hand up model – refer to a benefits-based welfare state, as is the case in a Mail column on a Channel 4 programme criticizing benefit recipients (another excerpt of which is analysed above in 3.12): (3.29) My parents worked incredibly hard for their entire lives but sometimes things go wrong for people and they need a hand up. It’s for periods such as this that benefits were created, and having witnessed the desperation in my parents’ eyes, I will defend the welfare state with all my might. Pemberton, Mail 2014

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The passage uses the phrase ‘a hand up’ to denote the benefits-based welfare state, supporting individuals in what can be inferred as times of poverty. Notably, the example the writer gives is that of his hard-working parents, with the hard work positioning them as deserving of support: ‘things go[ing] wrong’ implies a cause of hardship beyond their control. The ‘hand up’ model, like in the Guardian passage above, indicates the topos of help and the dependency argument, leading to a positive evaluation of the welfare state. This is further amplified by the explicit promise of the writer to defend it. But although the ‘hand up’ model is not juxtaposed with another figurative alternative, the passage serves as an introduction to a paragraph where the abuse of the benefits system by undeserving beneficiaries is strongly criticized. The ‘hand up’ thus describes a model of the welfare state that is desirable but does not necessarily obtain in modern Britain. Whether contested or not, the ‘ascent’ models of the welfare state are generally represented as preferable to alternatives, even when the alternative is already a desirable model in itself, such as the safety net. Their positive evaluation stretches beyond the conservative part of the corpus, where they are consistent with the importance of self-reliance in conservative discourses.

3.5  Looking after us: Carers If the protective or supportive function of the welfare state tends to be mapped from physical objects in the passages above, there are also models  – mostly in the Mail subcorpus  – that use personification to highlight these functions. Here, the welfare state is a person who has a specific family or professional role that includes providing care and support, within the generic institutions are persons mapping. In two Mail texts excerpted below, the role is that of a husband. The first excerpt is from a column on absent fathers, the second criticizes the perceived negative impact of the welfare state on teenage pregnancies: (3.30) To single out these boys [‘runaway dads’] for censure – while calling lone mothers ‘heroic’, as Mr Cameron did – is not only unfair and perverse, but will fail to get to grips with the problem. . . . That means the welfare state has to stop playing the role of surrogate husband through the benefits it gives single mothers. Phillips, Mail 2011



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(3.31) If you had a baby without getting married, the State, in its utterly misguided compassion, would give you things: an income to pay your bills, a flat of your own. The Welfare State effectively offered to be your husband and provider. Never mind the child who would not have a father. This is a big contrast with the incentives for women in the top social class. . . . They have no temptation whatsoever to marry the Welfare State. Bartholomew, Mail 2014

In both texts, the existence of mapping from the family source domain is brought to attention, rather than presented in the transparent A is B format: in the Phillips column, the husband is not the Identifier of the welfare state, but the welfare state ‘plays the role’ of one; the welfare state is also premodified as a surrogate rather than real husband. In the second excerpt, the adverb ‘effectively’ functions as a metaphor signal, flagging the incongruity between the source and target domains. Both texts thus stop short of a full and direct identification of the welfare state and the husband but at the same time imply that such identification is possible. The parallel between them is based on the function of providing support, with the benefits (as well as residual services such as council housing in the second passage) provided by the welfare state corresponding to the contribution made by the ‘provider’ husband in a patriarchal family, who can be expected to ‘give you things’. Receiving something one did not earn is normally self-evidently wrong in conservative subcorpora, indicating the topoi of fairness or dependency, and indeed single working-class mothers are censured for their dependence on state aid. Notably, however, the negative evaluation is conferred only on the reliance of such mothers on the welfare state. In both texts, a similar degree of dependence on a husband is not censured; indeed, it appears to be commended, as evidenced in the following extensive extract from the same Phillips column: (3.32) [B]‌efore the sexual revolution, relations between the sexes were based on a kind of unspoken bargain [care for faithfulness]. . . . With the combination of the sexual revolution, the Pill and the welfare state, however, women’s interests changed. Suddenly they were being told sex outside marriage was fine, unmarried motherhood was fine  – and crucially, that the welfare state would provide them with the means to live without male support. Phillips, Mail 2011

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The welfare state is thus rendered problematic but not because it engenders dependency per se. Rather, it is because it enables working-class women to depart from the script of the traditional patriarchal family. This family itself is represented as a contractual model that would perhaps be demeaning outside the Daily Mail. The choice of the surrogate/would-be husband as a figurative model of the welfare state reinforces the implication in both texts that thusconstrued welfare state effectively renders men redundant by taking over their traditional gender role. It is this takeover rather than the imbalance in the roles that is the target for criticism: neither text castigates women for accepting ‘things’ from their husbands; rather, it is young working-class women having children out of wedlock that is the cause of poverty and family breakdown. In this way, the dependency argument works to delegitimize the welfare state as well as reinforce support for ‘traditional’ gender roles, a reasoning consistent with the examination of dependency in Fraser and Gordon (1994). An argument broadly similar to that made in Phillips, albeit with a less gendered thrust, is made in another Mail text, where the welfare state assumes the role of the father: (3.33) We have to recognise the truth that for some, child benefit has provided a perverse incentive towards family breakdown, with the welfare state becoming a substitute father, and certain lone parents having children with multiple partners to boost their income. In this way, the benefits system has worsened poverty by deepening the culture of dependency and weakening the stability of our society. Green, Mail 2012

The passage has a more direct identification between the welfare state and the source concept, although the latter is still premodified as ‘substitute’; another difference is that both men and women are censured, as ‘certain lone parents’ likely refers to a case of polygamous families mentioned in (3.21) above. Nonetheless, the existence of benefit dependency is presupposed rather than proposed and so negatively evaluated as blocking self-reliance, with the threat to the traditional family just as stark. If the would-be/surrogate husband is a novel figurative model, broadly defined family matters provide the source domain for a stock metaphor of the welfare state – that of the nanny. While ‘the nanny state’ typically denotes government rather than a particular element of the political system, one of its occurrences in the corpus  – in the headline of a news report in the Mail, ‘Strong families



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make successful children … not the nanny state’ (Doughty, Mail 2012) – is very clearly a textual synonym of the welfare state. The other, in a Guardian column, is placed in scare quotes as a detractors’ summary of leftist views (‘the “nanny state” [is] not socialism’, Douzinas, Guardian 2009) with no further comment, although it too appears contextually related to the welfare state rather than the state in general. The nanny as a model of the welfare state is possibly the only one where the services-based welfare state can be the target concept, as public (and indeed social) services are represented as caring responsibilities. The model does not appear to be used  – at least in BNC e­ xamples  – in contexts other than those expressing or implying criticism of the welfare state as overprotective. This is because it carries a strong negative evaluation within the dependency argument due to the infantilization it entails of the users of public services: if the welfare state corresponds to the nanny, and the services are childcare, the users are inevitably children. As such, their agency is severely limited, and the welfare state exerts a controlling influence on them, rendering self-reliant actions impossible. This indeed appears to be the significance of the reference to the nanny state in the Guardian text, where it is mentioned in passing; the Mail text, however, is a report of the results of a study analysing the impact of family structure and state support on children and makes a reference to the idea that the welfare state might adversely affect the traditional family, as evident in the quote from a social scientist who co-authored the study: (3.34) We wanted to see whether the role of parents was equally important in both societies because the argument has been made that more developed welfare states, such as Great Britain, can make the role of parents less important, by providing additional supports that can help compensate for situations where households have more limited resources. Doughty, Mail 2012

The specific context of caring for children makes the nanny model slightly less figurative but not more acceptable: like in (3.31) and (3.32) above, the welfare state colonizes what is seen as a traditional, or perhaps in this discourse natural, task of the family and is therefore negatively evaluated  – notably, neither the support of a literal husband nor the services of a literal nanny are in themselves subject to criticism. In all Mail texts excerpted here, the choice of the carer figurative model correlates with, and is likely motivated by, the subject of the family, consistent

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with the notion of topic-triggered metaphors (Semino 2008:230). As models of the welfare state, they express a strong negative evaluation of the welfare state, particularly so with the husband and father roles, where the support of the welfare state is represented as the state encroaching on the family, and so undesirable.

3.6  For a rainy day: Resource While most figurative models of the welfare state  – whether personifications or objectifications  – highlight its protective or supportive function, there are those – one in the Guardian, the other in the Mail – that construe it as a resource or a repository for funds, in the broadly defined money source domain. The Guardian has two 2011 texts by the same author in which the figurative model for the welfare state is the piggy bank, exemplifying the latter group. Excerpted below, one text where it occurs outlines benefit cuts and eligibility changes. The passage comes from a section describing the impact of limiting a contributory out-of-work benefit to a year for those who are assessed as ill but not permanently disabled: (3.35) End of the piggy-bank welfare state One of the most significant but little-heralded changes is that the welfare state should no longer be regarded as a piggy bank. In the past the public were told that by paying into national insurance, they would be guaranteed benefits should they fall on hard times. Ramesh, Guardian 1 September 2011

The piggy bank premodifies the welfare state as an epithet in a straightforward description of the model (‘the piggy-bank welfare state’) and is then reiterated in the embedded clause, the verb ‘regarded’ acting as a flag for cross-domain mapping in an instance of Steen et al.’s (2010) direct metaphor. The use of this Vehicle can be considered novel:  a similar usage of the piggy bank to denote amassed savings or reserve funds is attested in the BNC but not with regard to the welfare state. As an explanatory model of the welfare state, the piggy bank provides an accessible explanation of the functioning of contributory benefits:  the National Insurance contributions paid in by taxpayers fund the benefits taxpayers can then receive, in the same way as coins are put in and then taken out of a piggy bank. It overlaps with what has been called ‘a national



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“club” view of the welfare state’ (Sefton 2009:239), where people deposit funds that are used to support them in need. The model implies a benefits welfare state, but its contributory quality precludes the usual criticism of the welfare state (more specifically, criticism of the receipt of benefits) as discouraging selfreliance or as providing unearned support, within the topoi of dependency and fairness, respectively. Instead, the piggy-bank model enables the criticism of the announced reforms precisely within the topos of fairness, as essentially depriving individuals of a reward they have earned. This is the case in another text by the same author referencing the piggy-bank welfare state (Ramesh, Guardian 18 February 2011), where a specific individual has his benefit withdrawn after a year despite 44 years of contributing to the National Insurance, clearly denouncing the reform as unfair. A similar if more conventional model, that of the pot, is used in the Guardian and Mail subcorpora, although it tends to have a less direct connection to the welfare state. The reference of ‘the pot’ in the Mail text is ambiguous, while the one Guardian text that does appear to use the pot to figure the welfare state makes a broader argument against universal benefits, using the example of another columnist, Janet Street-Porter, a wealthy 66-year-old entitled to pensioner benefits: (3.36) More people are now in work than ever before in Britain. This is, of course, good news for taxpayers:  more people are paying into the pot, fewer drawing from it. Hannan, Mail 2013 (3.37) But that argument [that Street-Porter had paid her taxes and national insurance and these benefits were nothing less than her due] doesn’t hold when you know she probably could pay for travel and energy without government or local authority help, while there are others who can’t survive without help. These days, it is perhaps not simply a question of what you have contributed to the pot – it’s whether your need is as great as that of others. Porter, Guardian 2013

In the Mail passage, the pot can be interpreted as simply representing the budget, but the act of ‘drawing from’ the pot, especially one performed by a number of people rather than the government, does appear to indicate the welfare state as the source of benefits. The pot is in both cases a receptacle for a collectively owned resource, with the model based on the commonsensical (if not necessarily

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economically correct) assumption that only as much as is put in can be drawn from it. Similarly, the pot can be interpreted as either the budget or the welfare state in the Guardian text, with the similar implication of a closed financial system, although the idea that individual benefits must be proportionate to contributions is rejected on ethical grounds. The resource models – the piggy bank and the pot – have a strong positive evaluation, although they profile a benefits-based welfare state. Interestingly, in his analysis of social attitudes, Sefton (2009) observes that this perception of the welfare state ‘appears to be in the ascendancy’. This ascendancy is not reflected in the discourse analysed here, at least as is evident from figurative conceptualizations of the welfare state.

3.7  Reprehensible: Fraud and abuse Several figurative models of the welfare state, attested only in the conservative corpora, construe fraudulent or dishonest recourse to the (benefits-based) welfare state as a feature, rather than abuse, of the welfare state. These models use highly creative novel Vehicles and diverse source concepts. One Mail example discussed in (3.21) above is that of the welfare state as a profitable racket, which metonymically converted abuse of benefits into an attribute of the system. Another model in the Mail subcorpus metonymically represents the welfare state as its mock founding document, in a digression that comments on a TV programme: (3.38) The other interesting moment was a Channel 4 programme in which three modern welfare claimants were subjected to the rules of the original welfare state set up by Labour. That welfare state was a proper, decent thing – people who worked hard insuring themselves against age and illness, and genuine efforts to find work for all, even the seriously disabled. It was completely unlike the Sponger’s Charter that modern Labour has set up, under which the genuinely poor tend to suffer, and cheats prosper. Hitchens, Mail 2013

The 1940s welfare state is evaluated positively as a ‘proper, decent thing’, amplified by a positive assessment of its tasks and beneficiaries. The contemporary welfare state, in contrast, is referred to mockingly as ‘Sponger’s Charter’. A  charter



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is a founding document of an institution, and here it can be interpreted metonymically as the document standing for the modern welfare state, a reading supported by the reference to present-day Labour as its founder. While not illegal, sponging, as unjustified recourse to benefits is frequently called in the Mail, is considered dishonest or reprehensible at the very least. ‘Sponger’s Charter’ as a synonym to the welfare state thus foregrounds such use of benefits to the extent that undeserving beneficiaries are implied to be sole or main users of the welfare state by design, as the welfare state is interpretable as founded specifically for such cases. The name is also an ironic echo of John Major’s Citizen’s Charter of the 1990s, a drive to improve public services, and likely works to amplify this impression of intentionality in the design of a public institution. Thus-construed welfare state is given a strong negative evaluation: the Sponger’s Charter moniker itself sets off the topos of burden – showing the welfare state as not worth the expense for moral reasons  – and the topos of fairness/just deserts aggravates the negative assessment, as evidenced by the explicit claim in the last excerpted sentence that those who need help do not receive it, while those undeserving do well. In the Telegraph, a 2009 (and so pre-election) column by Simon Heffer also has a model of the welfare state that entails dishonest rather than downright fraudulent behaviour. The column criticizes the priorities of the then Labour government, and the following excerpt comes from a list of its missteps: (3.39) Instead, the Government has done other things. (…) It has built the client state and turned the welfare state from being an agent of compassion into an alternative career structure for the proletariat. Heffer, Telegraph 2009

The passage sets the ‘alternative career structure’ model of the welfare state in a transitional opposition to its earlier actions motivated by compassion. The highly negative evaluation of the modern welfare state is achieved by this juxtaposition and by the career structure model:  a career structure is upward progression through the ranks of a company, and the connotation as evident from dictionary and BNC examples is that of a stable and well-paying job, perhaps a profession. The model thus sets up an ironic correspondence between the habitual recourse to benefits, often represented as incompatible with work (see Fairclough 2010, Paprota 2013) and so effort, with earnings from a steady job. The beneficiaries of thus-construed welfare state are referred to as ‘the proletariat’, interpretable as a term of class contempt if taken at face value, or as a sarcastic borrowing

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from discourses of the Left, the latter particularly concordant with the irony evident in the mapping. The inference is that beneficiaries of the welfare state are interpretable as professional recipients of benefits, which, while not illegal, results in a negative evaluation of the welfare state within the topos of fairness. All three models are positioned in a transitional opposition to the past welfare state, whether or not the latter is expressed in figurative terms. Two of them specifically indicate the culpability of Labour for the transformation and the ensuing systematic exploitation of the welfare state, although the beneficiaries are also represented as at least dishonest.

3.8  Downright evil: Harm If fraud and indeed several other themes entail a negative evaluation of the welfare state, this evaluation is particularly strong with two models that represent its impact as harmful if not evil. One is in a 2008 Telegraph column by Simon Heffer on the causes of youth crime and construes the welfare state as a curse: (3.40) That is because of the curse of the welfare state. It has always struck me as odd that the Left cannot see how the welfare state is a curse. It is either naive, or wicked, of them not to make the link between it and the gruesomeness of our sink council estates, the amorality of many of the people who live on them, the perpetuation of an underclass in a society as rich as ours, the failure of so many of our schools, and the utter lack of value being obtained for taxpayers’ money. Heffer, Telegraph 2008

The contextual sense of ‘a curse’ – ‘a continuing negative influence’ – is traceable to the more basic sense of words endowed with malevolent causation. It is this malevolent causation that leads to the interpretation of the ‘link’ between the welfare state and the problems listed as that of cause and effect, invoking the topos of burden as well as vice. Interestingly, while other negatively evaluated models highlight the perceived negative impact of benefits, the passage appears to refer to a services-based welfare state, with education one of the problems listed. The other model entailing such a stark negative evaluation of the welfare state comes from an Observer editorial. The paragraph outlines the presumed rationale behind a reduction in welfare spending by the Coalition government,



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perspectivizing conservative discourse, and the model  – perhaps for that reason – verges on parody: (3.41) The dominant Tory narrative is that the benefits side of the welfare state has become an incubator of broken Britain and fecklessness, much of it Labour’s responsibility. It’s a political tale that holds credence for many voters. Guardian 2012

The incubator is, notably, a model of the benefits system, explicitly stated to be a part rather than the entirety of the welfare state, which is thus not tantamount to but inclusive of benefits. In the basic meaning, the function of an incubator is ostensibly to protect a (valuable) organism until it is viable. That function is here subverted, however, as what is being incubated is undesirable qualities: considered morally reprehensible, fecklessness is ascribed to benefit claimants in the discourse of welfare reform (see Baumberg et al. 2012; Tyler 2013), while ‘broken Britain’ is a 2010 election campaign soundbite, often deployed in complaints about undeserving benefit claimants or the perceived breakdown of the family (elsewhere in the corpus: Barrow and Duke, Mail 2010). The incubator model is thus used to create a causal link between the benefits system – part of the welfare state – and social problems. The function of protection is replaced with that of causing harm, evaluated negatively within the topos of vice. The Observer passage (to reiterate, a representation of conservative discourses) clearly indicts Labour for the faults of the welfare state; in the Telegraph text, the responsibility of the Left is indicated contextually, but is no less clear. Both models in fact offer little information on the functioning of the welfare state, although its impact is expressively illustrated; as such, they shade into evaluative metaphors rather than explanatory models of the welfare state.

3.9  Models of the welfare state: Summary of findings This section has focused on the figurative models of the welfare state, understood as ones that are constitutive or explanatory of the concept and explicitly indicate the source concept. The metaphors have been analysed in the themes of rescue devices, including the safety net; indulgence; habit; restraint; devices aiding ascent; carers; resource; fraud and abuse; and harm. Table 6 collates the direct metaphors, or explanatory models, of the welfare state analysed in the course of this section, with their entailments as noted in the

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Table 6  Model metaphors of the welfare state Model (welfare state is)

Mappings or entailments, if called up

Safety net

Benefits: net Claimant: person falling Austerity: destruction of net

Lifeline, life raft Refuge, CCS Ladder, springboard, hand up Straitjacket Shackles Ceiling Way of life Comfy sofa, feather-filled mattress Sponger’s charter Racket Alternative career structure

Image schema, Usual topoi conceptual metaphor/ metonymy or scenario

up-down poverty is down assistance is support falling Benefits: lifeline, life raft poverty is down Claimant: person drowning assistance is support drowning Benefits: safe spaces war Claimant: person seeking refuge Benefits: ladder, up-down springboard, hand up poverty is down Claimant: person climbing social mobility is or jumping up upward movement climbing Claimant: restrained person agency is motion Straitjacket: availability of benefits Claimant: restrained person agency is motion Shackles: benefit system Claimant: person climbing, or flying Benefits: ceiling Claimant: person used to or choosing something Benefits: choice Claimant: person at leisure Benefits: place of rest Claimant: sponger Benefits system: charter Receipt of benefits: unabashed fraud Claimant: fraudster Benefits system: racket Claimant: employee Benefits system: company Benefits: salary Long-term receipt of benefits: promotion

agency is motion social mobility is upward movement life is a journey

Help

Help

Help Help, selfreliance / dependency Selfreliance / dependency Selfreliance / dependency Selfreliance / dependency Vice, burden

up-down agency is motion

Vice, selfreliance / dependency founding document Vice, is institution burden effect is cause organised crime work

Vice, burden Vice



Figurative Models of the Welfare State

Piggy bank

Claimant: saver Contributions: savings in Benefits: savings out

money

Almosthusband

Claimant: wife Benefits: spouse’s income

money family

Nanny

Claimant: child Services: care

family

Curse

Claimants and service users: the cursed Unclear

witchcraft

Incubator of social problems

healthcare

139 Fairness selfreliance / dependency Selfreliance / dependency Selfreliance / dependency Vice, harm Vice, burden

texts analysed, and the scenarios, source domains or image schema that could be established based on the texts. In some instances, the models are not elaborated or extended in the texts, though this would in principle be possible: one example is the curse, with no reference in the text to whether there is a witch uttering it and who the witch might be. It is also important to note that not all entailments are called up in all instances: for instance, in the Mirror, the safety net is destroyed by austerity; this is emphatically not the case in the conservative subcorpora. Further, as Sullivan (2013:74–5) notes, where the source concept is indicated explicitly and is not obvious, mapping may be problematic, and this indeed has been the case in some instances here. Across the corpus, some broad patterns can be discerned in the use of explanatory figurative models of the welfare state. The evaluation they confer on the welfare state, contextually or by the model itself, tends to be negative in the conservative subcorpora and not unequivocal in the left-leaning ones, with even the small Mirror subcorpus showing instances of negative and positive assessment. This pattern is stronger with models figuratively representing what is designated as the factual rather than a past or hypothetical welfare state, where the conservative subcorpora show exclusively negative assessment (apart from some perspectivized models). Counterfactual models of the welfare state are, however, often evaluated positively in the conservative subcorpora, where this assessment is contingent on its residual quality, while no such condition exists in the left-leaning subcorpora. The evaluation ties in with the function of most models, which are usually deployed to provide a rationale for, or to delegitimize, reforms of the benefits

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system. These are usually rationalized within the topoi of self-reliance, burden or fairness and opposed within the topos of help. Counterfactual models of the welfare state are, again, typically represented as policy goals and as such also help justify reform. There is little diachronic change in qualitative terms: there are few instances of explanatory figurative models in the pre-election part of the corpus but those that do exist are broadly similar to those in the larger post-election part. The one pattern that can be noted is the themes that confer the strongest positive evaluation on the welfare state are only attested in the post-election part of the corpus, typically in response to reforms announced or carried out by the Coalition government represented as the threat from which the welfare state must be defended; notably, all models in pre-election part have an assessment of the factual welfare state that ranges from slightly to very negative. The general evaluation pattern shows some relation to the distribution of themes across the corpus, which, however, presents a less clear picture, if only due to many models being one-off mappings rather than recurrent metaphors. The themes most strongly critical of the welfare state – those of fraud and harm – are practically restricted to the conservative subcorpora, while ones in which a positive evaluation of the welfare state is most evident – those of rescue devices (other than the safety net) or ascent – are scarce outside of the Guardian, the subcorpus with the broadest range of themes (and models themselves). This is consistent with the political fault lines evident in the general assessment of the welfare state rather than specific ideological elements  – the ascent theme, for instance, is concordant with the topos of self-reliance, which features strongly in the small-state classical liberal outlook, but the theme has very few occurrences in the conservative subcorpora, even to model a hypothetical welfare state. Though expressive value of metaphors is difficult to gauge beyond personal impression, it would appear that it is novel Vehicles that are more effective at achieving rhetorical goals. This is particularly evident with instances of ‘reframing’ or attempts to shift the perspective on the welfare state, such as the repeated undermining of the safety net model of the welfare state in favour of novel ones, which, perhaps significantly, tends to occur in the conservative subcorpora. Extending a conventional metaphor can also have a strong expressive effect, such as the visualization of the impact of austerity on the safety net welfare state. It should be noted, however, that a metaphor interpretable as highly expressive or indeed explanatory need not be widely used, such as the piggy bank in the Guardian.



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It is also significant that virtually all the figurative models of the welfare state outlined here profile a benefits-based welfare state. Two – one (the curse) highly negative, the other (the hand up) not so – are specifically stated to include at least some public services in specific texts; in neither case, however, is the presence of services highlighted within the model. Another negative model, that of the nanny, does conventionally allow the inclusion of services, but only occurs sporadically in the corpus. This confirms the default status of the benefits-based welfare state and is potentially problematic if a more positive attitude to the welfare state is to be engendered, as what appears from the models in the corpus to be hegemonic discourse skews to the right of the political spectrum.

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4

What the welfare state is: Other metaphors of the welfare state

This chapter analyses the conventional metaphors of the welfare state in the corpus. These largely resemble the metaphors of institutions or organizations and do not necessarily carry a specific delineation of the welfare state. Nonetheless, their use reveals specific assumptions about the welfare state in the discourse analysed.

Chapter  3 outlined the figurative models of the welfare state, where the welfare state was more or less expressly articulated as other things. This chapter continues the examination of figurative conceptualizations of the welfare state. Across the corpus, the welfare state is also spoken of in terms of other things in a less direct manner. Those ‘other things’ are not articulated explicitly but inferable from its attributes or actions. These metaphors of the welfare state, many of them highly conventionalized, are not substantially distinct from known metaphors of institutions or parts of the political system. Further, the impact of such metaphors, in particular those that are heavily conventional, on the perception of the concept they structure is subject of much debate, as outlined in Chapter 1. Nonetheless, some argumentative functions of these metaphors are identifiable and therefore worth analysing. A list of collocation candidates of the search term ‘welfare state’ within a broad eight-token window on either side in SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) provided the starting point for the search of metaphor candidate expressions. The list of collocation candidates was then examined for qualities of the welfare state and actions or processes with the welfare state as a participant. To supplement the resulting list of qualities and actions or processes with less frequent or statistically significant metaphor candidate expression, each subcorpus was also queried for adjectives and verbs within a four-token window on either side of ‘welfare state’ and for the prepositions ‘of ’, ‘for’, ‘on’ and ‘at’ within a four-token window to the left of the same search term. The resulting concordance lines were then examined manually to ensure that the qualities and actions or processes

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were relevant to the term ‘welfare state’ and then analysed for metaphoricity using Metaphor Identification Procedure – Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU) criteria; the meanings assumed to be literal are the same as those in of Chapter 3. The metaphors analysed here do not explicitly indicate the source concept, which can be inferred from the Vehicles and the co-text. Further, a (low) quantitative threshold was applied for this section:  for a source domain or scenario to be included in the analysis, at least three metaphorical expressions had to occur in the corpus. There are clearly too many Vehicles to analyse each instance, so the Vehicles are listed ahead of the analysis, and those representative of a trend are examined. The role of metaphors of the welfare state in argumentative structures is then considered for each subcorpus.

4.1  Objects: The welfare state as a thing The ‘other things’ in terms of which the welfare state is spoken of are interpretable as just that  – things, or objects. The construal of the non-material in terms of the material, or what Szwedek refers to as objectification (2007), has been posited to be ‘one of the basic processes in human conceptualisation’ (Fabiszak 2007:21). Objectification, understood as ‘the metaphorization of all abstract concepts (including relations) in terms of physical objects’ (Szwedek 2007:312), thus precedes other metaphorical mappings, and so Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) ontological metaphors, described by Szwedek as mapping ‘various modes of existence’ (2007:309), are the most elemental type of metaphors. In the corpus, there are instances of the welfare state subjected to such basic objectification with few other apparent mappings, such as ‘a wider view of the welfare state’ (Benjamin, Guardian 2012) or ‘for the broader welfare state’ (Chessum, Guardian 2013), where the welfare state is an object in the range of vision or in space. They do not of themselves yield much analysable material in terms of argumentative functions, and so are not examined here. However, instances of objectifications where mappings are at least somewhat more specific also exist, as do those where the welfare state is construed as identifiable objects, and these are outlined in this section.

4.1.1.  Too big? Objects with dimensions A number of metaphorical expressions across the corpus construe the welfare state as an entity  – object or substance  – with a size, an attribute that has



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interpretable significance and corresponds to the cost of the welfare state and/ or the uptake of benefits or public services. The meaning focus can be rephrased as follows: The welfare state is an entity with dimensions, where the expenditure on or availability of the welfare state comprises these dimensions. The related Vehicles occur in all newspapers apart from the Mirror and are as follows: Telegraph: expand, extend, massive, lavish, overblown, bountiful, stretched Mail: expand, expansion, extend, spread, shrinking, reduce, big, immense, extensive, lavish, overblown, size, ballooned Guardian: expand, expansion, extend, reduce, contract, big, extensive, large, small, ponderous Mirror: – The verbs (and the related nouns) among these Vehicles indicate a change in the size of the welfare state. This change is not always represented as factual and is typically evaluated consistently with the political fault lines. ‘Extend’ in particular, which has a single occurrence in each of the three subcorpora, always refers to a policy goal and so to a prospective welfare state. This is the case in the following examples: the Mail passage comes from a column praising work capability tests on recipients of disability benefit, the Guardian one from a text on the Dilnot report into the funding of social care for the elderly: (4.1) When the Coalition announced that disability claimants should undergo tests for their eligibility, the move was denounced as a cruel and pointless exercise by those campaigners who always seek to extend, not reduce, the welfare state. Now it is disclosed that more than a third of those welfare recipients decided to drop their claims rather than face the tests. McKay, Mail 2013 (4.2) Dilnot’s plan is social democratic, with a progressive tax to extend a universal welfare state this government is bent on dismantling. Toynbee, Guardian 2012

In the Mail passage, the reference to benefit recipients dropping their claims is taken as implicit evidence that the claims were unjustified and the campaigners who opposed the tests were wrong. Accordingly, their efforts to prevent a decrease in the availability of benefits, which is what the size of the welfare state here represents, were also misplaced. The Guardian extract appears to evince a similar understanding of what extending the welfare state means. It juxtaposes the plan proposed in the Dilnot report on social care (where the extension is

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positively evaluated as ‘social democratic’ and involving a ‘progressive tax’) with the thrust of the Coalition reforms, delegitimized as the dismantling (in a machine metaphor) of the welfare state. Evaluative harmony indicates that extending the welfare state by means a progressive tax is also assessed as desirable in this passage. The Mail excerpt invokes the topos of burden with regard to the welfare state, justifying the unwillingness to expand it. In contrast, the Guardian passage appears to operate within the topos of the good welfare state, since dismantling the welfare state is a negative outcome in itself. The progressive quality of the tax mentioned in the passage is another positive factor in its evaluation, as progressive taxation is consistent with the solidarity argument, placing the largest tax burden on the wealthiest to help those worse off. The verb ‘to expand’, along with its derived forms ‘expanding’ and ‘expansion’, is also evaluated consistently with the broad political affinity of each newspaper – negatively in the conservative subcorpora but not in the Guardian. Significantly, however, it does not refer to the Coalition welfare state in any one instance. In the Telegraph, all but one of its occurrences relevant to the welfare state are located in 2008 and 2009 columns by the same author, with a clear focus on foreign policy, as in the excerpt below: (4.3) No relationship ever runs smoothly. America has reason to worry that Gordon Brown is less interested in standing with America than financing an expanding welfare state, and Britain has reason to worry that Barack Obama thinks history began the day he appeared on the international scene. Steltzer, Telegraph 2009

The growth of the welfare state is presumed as factual (consistent with expenditure data, see e.g. Timmins 2017), with the focus of the clause on the attitudes of the two countries. The implication in this and other texts by this author is that expenditure on the welfare state prevents the UK from performing an appropriate role in international relations. The ‘expanding’ welfare state run by Labour is thus represented as burdensome. The only other instance of ‘expansion’ is in a post-election 2010 column critical of ‘big government’ and ‘the social-democratic experiment’, complaining that ‘[e]‌ven Thatcherism (…) never dared to touch the fundamental structures of the welfare state, or even to halt its expansion’ (Daley, Telegraph 2010). The column announces the imminent end of the ‘experiment’ in the UK, following a sea change in attitudes evident in election results: the expansion of the welfare state is both evaluated negatively and confined to the past.



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In the sole instance in the Mail, the expansion is similarly factual and problematic, but it is European welfare states that are represented as expanding to ill effect, bringing about social problems (‘A decline in the work ethic, induced by the expansion of the welfare state, is key to understanding European unemployment’, Doughty, Mail 2009). In the conservative subcorpora, though the welfare state is not (beyond the Daley column referred to above) described as expanding after 2010, other verbs are used throughout the timeframe to indicate, and denounce, the growth of the welfare state. The growth is then typically viewed in a longer perspective, that is from the establishment of the welfare state, rather than recent. It can be mapped in a more expressive way by means of a specific object that expands, such as a balloon (‘Welfare state has ballooned to over 12 times its original size’, Grover, Mail 2012) or a rubber band (‘Regardless of which party is in charge, the welfare state has been stretched so far that it has snapped’, Heath, Telegraph 2014): the entailments in such cases clearly convey the finiteness of the expansion. Just noting an increase (‘the spread of the welfare state’, Utley, Mail 2009) has less expressive value. Verbs or nouns related to a reduction in the size of the welfare state are used in a similar context: ‘shrinking’ or ‘reducing’ the welfare state, mentioned in the Mail subcorpus, are policy goals rather than ongoing processes, as in a column that describes lifting ceilings on tuition fees as something that ‘could be a critical stage in the shrinking of the welfare state’ (Rees-Mogg, Mail 2010), where the reduction is aspirational but not factual. The increasing size of the welfare state is a cause for concern in conservative subcorpora, particularly so in the Mail, as such an increase is normally represented as unsustainable and/or socially disruptive. The former is the case in the news report noted above covering the ‘ballooning’ of the welfare state, as evident in its opening paragraph: (4.4) THE cost of the Welfare State has risen 12-fold in real terms since its introduction, figures reveal today  – as George Osborne prepares to unveil a benefits freeze. Grover, Mail 2012

The act of ballooning contextually means a drastic increase, which – despite the literal lightness of a balloon – is likely to set off the topos of burden, amplified by the construal of cost as size. The cost is further broken down into components, and the spending on benefits is singled out, while the state pension, which accounts for the largest increase in spending but is the only benefit which is evaluated

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positively, is glossed over. This further intensifies the negative evaluation of the increase within the topos of burden in this particular subcorpus, providing a rationale for reform announced in the opening paragraph. The socially disruptive function ascribed to the welfare state in the conservative subcorpora is actively exacerbated by its expansion, as evident in the passage below excerpted from a column stressing the need to work regardless of material circumstances: (4.5) According to Jean-Baptiste Michau, who wrote the report, the work ethic has been steadily crumbling away throughout Europe over the past few decades, with fewer people in each succeeding generation finding it wrong to accept money for doing nothing. Blaming the spread of the welfare state, he finds that the stigma that once went with claiming benefits instead of working is rapidly disappearing – and with it, the will to work among twentysomethings of my two elder sons’ age. Utley, Mail 2009

Here, the implication is that if the support given by the welfare state, providing ‘money for nothing’, were limited to a sufficiently small group of people, the stigma of claiming benefits would persist; this in turn would be desirable because it would help uphold work ethic in Europe. The ‘spread’ of the welfare state is thus strongly criticized within the dependency argument, as it is purported to weaken people’s motivation to stop ‘doing nothing’. In the Guardian, the expanding welfare state is not that of the present UK but of other countries (‘Brazil is expanding its welfare state just as Europe is cutting back on welfare’, Bunting, Guardian 2010)  or of the mid-twentiethcentury Britain (‘a period of full employment, an expanding welfare state and strong trade unions’, Malik, Guardian 2013). In both cases, the expansion is a positive development, as evident from evaluative harmony:  the paragraph on Brazil also mentions the country’s role as a provider of food aid, resulting in a positive evaluation of the action within the topos of help, while the other example coordinates the expansion with two strongly positive concepts. When ‘expand’ does refer to the contemporary British welfare state in the Guardian during the Coalition years, it is either perspectivized, or the welfare state is expressly described as not expanding, and sometimes contracting or reducing. Perspectivization is evidenced in an excerpt from an analysis of the views of the Conservatives and Labour on welfare claimants in the aftermath of the Philpott case, while denial is noted in the excerpt from the closing question of a column on social mobility:



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(4.6) Labour insists its position is being distorted. . . . The source said it was wholly misleading to claim that Labour simply wants to subsidise an ever-expanding welfare state. Watt, Guardian 2013 (4.7) And can we engender a similar period of upward social mobility, when the welfare state isn’t expanding, by investing in the education and family support available to our children early on to improve their skills base later in life to access jobs in sectors which are now growing, such as the creative and tech sectors? Field, Guardian 2015

In (4.6), the description of the welfare state as ‘ever-expanding’, along with Labour’s wish to finance it, is the contents of the claim explicitly designated as misleading. In (4.7), the past expansion of the welfare state and upward social mobility are clearly related, and the positive evaluation of the latter implies a similar assessment of the former. Notably, the possibility of recreating the latter without the former is posed in a rhetorical question closing the text. This would appear to highlight the difficulty of the task, and so intensify the positive evaluation of an expanding welfare state, shared in other Guardian instances of the description. Further, it also appears that conceptualizations of the welfare state as not expanding in the Guardian use size to map not its cost, which has continued to increase, but the availability of support and/or services, facilitating a positive evaluation of the welfare state and its expansion. The adjectives indicating the size of the welfare state show a similar evaluation of said size in the conservative subcorpora. In the Telegraph, the welfare state is big, as in the following excerpt from an outline of welfare states worldwide: (4.8) Welfare states are everywhere in the advanced world. There is not a single advanced country that does not have one. One in seven Americans receives food stamps, which is a reflection both of how big welfare states have become and how dysfunctional they frequently are. It is an absurdity and a failure that one of the richest countries in the world should have so many millions depending on government handouts. Bartholomew, Telegraph 2015

Though the specific example ostensibly concerns the US welfare state, it is deemed representative of its counterparts elsewhere. The uptake of state support in the United States indicates the size of its welfare state, which can be interpreted not as simply large but as excessive, an implication underscored

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by the quantification ‘so many millions’ in the following sentence. The size is represented as problematic and expressly called ‘a failure’. It is not clear, however, whether the failure is that of the welfare state or the broader political system. In the Mail subcorpus, the welfare state is not just big but explicitly too big. The Mail calls the welfare state ‘too big and extensive’ (Glover, Mail 2013)  in an ‘if ’ sentence that is not counterfactual. Elsewhere, a stronger adjective (‘immense’) is used to indicate the size of the factual welfare state in an editorial about immigrant benefit claimants with large families: (4.9) Our desires are limited by our incomes. And our incomes are greatly reduced by the amazingly high taxes that we have to pay to sustain this country’s immense welfare state. In fact, welfare and pension payments of one kind or another swallow up every penny paid in income tax in this country. Mail 2010

The column is critical of council housing in an expensive part of London being provided for a specific immigrant family with seven children. The intensifying adjectives and adverbs in the second excerpted sentence – ‘greatly’, ‘amazingly high’, ‘immense’ – work to position the expense as excessive, forcefully setting off the topos of burden with regard to the welfare state, where again the size corresponds to the cost. The expense is further undermined as unjustified within the topos of fairness: living in ‘a nicer area’ is represented as a desire of many. But with ‘[o]‌ur desires limited by our incomes’, the size of the welfare state directly impacts on the ability of many to actualize it. In this way, the welfare state becomes commonsensically unaffordable. Some of the adjectives in the Vehicles above emphasize excess as well as size. Two of them overlap between the two conservative subcorpora:  ‘lavish’ and ‘overblown’ occur in both. The former in particular highlights excess, and a ‘lavish welfare state’ co-occurs with a representation of its beneficiaries as undeserving. A  stark example is a Mail column on the 2011 London riots by Peter Hitchens: (4.10) What an utter admission of failure, that after 50 years of the most lavish welfare state in the solar system, you cannot govern your country without soaking the citizenry in cold water and bombarding them with missiles from a safe distance. Except, of course, that it is because of the welfare system that this is so. Hitchens, Mail 2011



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The heavily hyperbolic description of the support offered by the welfare state, where the solar system is a needlessly broad point of reference, highlights the purported generosity of provision. This provision, however, is stated to have contributed to unrest, rather than having prevented it. As such, the topos of vice is invoked, whereby the welfare state is deemed to encourage criminal behaviour among beneficiaries, clearly represented as undeserving. In the Telegraph, a column criticizing the availability of state support and public services to migrants sarcastically refers to the British (unusually, servicescentred) welfare state as ‘miraculously bountiful’ (Daley, Telegraph 2013). The implication is that the lack of a contributory principle for most services or benefits means that (recently arrived) migrants do not fully deserve them. The welfare state is thus represented as an extravagance rather than an investment or a necessity, and the topos of burden in particular ensures its negative evaluation in both subcorpora. In the Guardian, the size of the welfare state can also be construed as excessive, as in a column advocating for the introduction of charges for some services, which otherwise would be ‘entombed in a ponderous welfare state’ (Jenkins, Guardian 2010). Unusually, the adjective highlights weight rather than spatial dimensions, a choice consistent with the criticism of the inertia of the welfare state in the column. This is an exception, however, as a ‘large’ welfare state in the Guardian is not in fact deemed excessive, as exemplified in columns by economist Ha-Joon Chang. One of these, outlining different welfare states, observes that ‘Sweden has built one of the most egalitarian societies in the world because of its large, and largely effective, welfare state’ (Chang, Guardian 2011). The positive evaluation of the welfare state is evident in its commendable impact on the social order, equality being self-evidently morally right. It is also implicit in the adjective ‘effective’, coordinated rather than contrasted with ‘large’. In another of his columns, the US welfare state, typically criticized in the Guardian subcorpus and described in the column as inefficient, is designated as ‘very small’ (Chang, Guardian 2014). Similarly, a brief news report on a study into how drug addiction is best combatted is headlined ‘Bigger welfare state “the way to help addicts” ’ (Ramesh, Guardian 2010), indicating an increase in the size of the welfare state would be justified within the topos of help. The topos of burden is thus not activated with regard to the size of the welfare state in the Guardian. The conservative subcorpora consistently show the size of the welfare state as growing and/or excessive, and the negatively evaluated increase almost always corresponds to cost. The Guardian presents a more complex picture, but overall stops short of construing the current UK welfare state as increasing in

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size. This corresponds to cost in some texts and the availability of benefits and services in others, which facilitates the positive evaluation of a larger welfare state in the subcorpus. In most cases, the growing welfare is the benefits variant, although this is slightly less the case in the Guardian subcorpus. The evaluation of the increase is consistent with that of the benefits welfare state, as outlined in Chapter 2.

4.1.2.  Buildings and machines: Specific objects A group of Vehicles across the corpus indicate the construal of the welfare state as a specific, recognizable object. The metaphorical expressions indicate two main source domains, building and machine.

4.1.2.1.  Building metaphors The building source domain, one of the most salient in this corpus, is a staple of political discourse. building metaphors have been much analysed, among others by Charteris-Black (2004), Lu and Ahrens (2008) or Goatly (2007)1. Charteris-Black (2004) examines among others British election manifestos of the two main parties and finds this source domain accounts for the plurality of metaphorical expressions in his sample of discourse. The figurative expressions in his analysis are motivated by two conceptual metaphors society/country is a building and worthwhile activity is building. They tend to convey communal action, aspiration and shared goals, with a temporal context broader than the immediate present. As such, they tend to carry a positive evaluation, although this is not the case with all his examples. The study of Taiwanese political speeches by Lu and Ahrens (2008) substantially expands on the findings of Charteris-Black. Their study locates functions of building metaphors distinct from those in Charteris-Black (2004). The cultural context as well as the functions of the discourse they analyse differs somewhat from those in Charteris-Black (2004), affecting the form and function of metaphors, a difference partly accounted for by sociocultural factors such as the view of country-building effort. If Charteris-Black’s analysis stressed the importance of collective effort and aspiration, Lu and Ahrens (2008) find that one group of their metaphorical expressions – past-oriented or retrospective building metaphors – profile country-building and accomplishments of leaders. They also find another, hortative group of metaphors profiling reconstruction, which does connote collective effort. Both groups, they find, carry a positive evaluation.



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Goatly (2007) points out that building metaphors in political discourse highlight stability and durability, a feature of countries and (at least some) social or political organizations. Such metaphors are interpretable as instances of a more general conceptual metaphor complex systems are buildings (going back to an even more general metaphor, abstract complex systems are complex physical objects, see Goatly 2007). This is also the case in this corpus. Figurative expressions indicating the conceptual metaphor complex systems are buildings occur in texts from all four newspapers. They can be broadly categorized into three groups. Their meaning foci highlight the establishment, structure and disintegration of the welfare state.

Fundamentals and founders: Establishment metaphors In these metaphors, the establishment of the welfare state is conceptualized as the construction of a building. The meaning focus tends to be on the construction process, but the presence of the (reversible) metonymy planning as building broadens the category somewhat.2 The most obvious form of the building metaphors of the welfare state is various forms of the verb ‘build’ co-occurring with the term ‘welfare state’. Other Vehicles metonymically construe building as laying foundations. All are attested across the corpus, although they follow different patterns in each. Telegraph: build, foundation Mail: build, foundation, cornerstone Guardian: rebuild, build, foundation Mirror: build; foundations To some extent, the figurative use of the verb ‘build’ follows the pattern described by Charteris-Black (2004). One example from the Mail  – the sole context in which ‘build’ occurs with ‘welfare state’ – conveys implicit criticism of the welfare state in a pre-election column on Big Society: (4.11) Cameron’s vision amounts to nothing less than a total revolution in the way Britain is governed. He acknowledged as much when he said that while the six decades since the end of the Second World War had been about building the Welfare State, the decades to come will be about building the Big Society. Oborne, Mail 2010

In this passage, building is a long-term process whose duration is counted in decades, highlighting the long-term perspective. This resembles the usage in

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Charteris-Black’s corpus, perhaps because the Conservative leader’s speech, given about a month ahead of the election and paraphrased in the passage, is not far removed from a manifesto. The time perspective precludes any one political party as Actor, indicating the nation and/or the country as the builder. Collective action is thus highlighted, in line with Charteris-Black’s findings. The welfare state is nonetheless rejected as a product of the process:  the ‘total revolution’ implies that it should be supplanted rather than complemented by Cameron’s Big Society initiative. The building metaphor would thus work to underscore effort and duration rather than a result positive in itself, unlike in CharterisBlack’s (2004) analysis. The other two instances of ‘build’ as a Vehicle in the conservative subcorpora depart from this, however. This is due to the presence of the planning as building metonymy, used to highlight the authorship of the welfare state. An example is excerpted from a Telegraph column critical of state intervention: (4.12) William Beveridge contemplated with dismay the welfare state he was said to have built. (…) Since 1948, when the NHS began, it has been hard to persuade the British that the welfare state is not due to Labour; harder still to persuade them that Beveridge wanted something else. Watson, Telegraph 2008

In the excerpt, the verb ‘built’ indicates a completed process, which is thereby compressed into something that can be accomplished by a single individual. This individual is William Beveridge, author of the Beveridge Report, which provided much of the inspiration for the welfare state (see Chapter 1). Beveridge is here metonymically construed as its (sole) builder. The second excerpted sentence expresses criticism of the welfare state as departing from Beveridge’s wishes, and it is the reference to Beveridge that renders the criticism legitimate. This stresses the centrality of Beveridge’s personal intentions to the welfare state, and as such is an instance of the topos of original intention (where consistency with the intentions of the founders is self-evidently desirable). The topos of original intention  – noted across the corpus, but more pronounced in the conservative newspapers – often co-occurs with Vehicles such as ‘architect’ or ‘blueprint’ (which I analyse in Paprota 2018). While the topos does not depend on figurative expressions, the planning as building metonymy (in conjunction with metaphorical expressions related to either of those domains) facilitates the glossing over of factors such as social change and the faults of original design, instead prioritizing authorship.



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The Guardian presents a more varied picture. It has more occurrences of ‘build’ as Vehicle, and they at least partly follow the patterns described in literature. Past-oriented metaphorical expressions with ‘build’ as an active verb all co-occur with terms identifying the Actor responsible for building the welfare state, foregrounding its authorship. The builders to whom credit for the act is assigned are not specific individuals, but groups or collective entities: countries (Argentina, ‘the [country] that had built a solid welfare state by the mid-1940s’, Bonasso, Guardian 2011); countries of the UK, in the context of Scottish independence (‘[we] built the welfare state together, Darling, Guardian 2012); politicians (‘Soini is a long way from the sober consensus politicians who built Finland’s welfare state’, Orange, Guardian 2011) or a government (China, ‘the administration is leaving behind what could yet prove a significant political legacy:  building the skeleton of a welfare state and attempting to put a shelf below those at the bottom of society’, Branigan, Guardian 2012). Building the welfare state is thus interpretable as an achievement of the Actor(s) in question. The welfare state appears to be self-evidently good in the examples listed. This is consistent with the topos of the good welfare state as a legitimizer and with the conclusions of Lu and Ahrens (2008) on past-oriented metaphors. Collective agency is stated or implied in the three nominalizations (‘building (of) the welfare state/s’) in the subcorpus. The Actors ascribed agency are: ‘an alliance between progressive intellectuals and the victims of oppression’ (Edgar, Guardian 2008); ‘the left’ (Douzinas, Guardian 2009)  and ‘pesky progressives’ (Orr, Guardian 2011). In all, building the welfare state is listed among events or movements recognizable as significant accomplishments of the broadly understood Left. The topos of good welfare state works to reinforce this element of the political system as part of the Left’s political identity. Beyond these, a group of what Lu and Ahrens (2008) call ‘future-oriented’ building metaphors is attested in the subcorpus. Four out of five instances contain the verb ‘rebuild’, and it can be inferred from at least three that a future Labour government would be rebuilding the welfare state, as in the live-blogged quote by a Labour shadow minister: (4.13) The big picture for those in the squeezed middle is how you rebuild the welfare state for working people … We should be the party that says: ‘No matter who you are and where you’re from, if you work hard, you should do well.’ Sparrow and Owen, Guardian 2011

The indirect question (‘how you rebuild …’) is arguably answered with the next sentence in the excerpt (ellipsis original), and so the second-person pronoun in

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the first sentence – which has a clearly different reference from the ‘you’ in the final excerpted sentence – could easily be replaced either by the impersonal ‘one’ or the ‘we’ from the next sentence, which refers to Labour. Further, in all texts with instances of ‘rebuild’, what the welfare state would be rebuilt from is not specified. This differs from the findings of Lu and Ahrens (2008), whose ‘rebuild’ metaphors co-occur with the identification of a specific destroyer. Here, this lack of specificity is perhaps consistent with the convergence in Coalition and Labour discourses of welfare reform, in which the welfare state is generally regarded as dysfunctional. There is no convergence between the contexts as to what the rebuilding would involve, with one text – a letter from student demonstrators – simply calling for ‘a rebuilt welfare state and NHS’ and specifying only that it should be ‘funded by taxing the rich and big business’ (Chessum et al., Guardian 2012). ‘Rebuild’ metaphors in the subcorpus therefore have little in common beyond a general diagnosis of problems with the welfare state and the assumption that it is worth reconstructing, indicating the topos of the good welfare state. The one future-oriented use of ‘build’ (rather than ‘rebuild’) is in a column by David Freud, a Labour peer working as a Coalition expert. The column defends the Coalition welfare reforms, including the introduction of Work Capability Assessment, and its closing paragraph contains the passage below: (4.14) Changes of this scope are understandably worrying for some people. We are working to build a welfare state that gives the support to vulnerable people when they need it, but doesn’t abandon them to a life on benefits. Freud, Guardian 2012

The future-oriented building metaphor describes a policy goal, and in combination with the indefinite article preceding the term ‘welfare state’, implies that an entity whose function matches the description in the relative clause (‘that gives the support to vulnerable people’) does not exist at present because the extant welfare state fails to meet the condition. The metaphor therefore articulates the reform  – which is interpretable as a cut, since it decreases the eligibility for sickness benefits by subjecting its recipients to strict tests – as a constructive act of building a better welfare state on the part of the government, invoking the topos of help in defence of the change. In the Mirror subcorpus, all the ‘build’ metaphors have a past reference, and in six out of seven cases they express the establishment of the welfare state as an achievement of those responsible for creating it. Typically, the significance of this achievement is underscored by signalling specific advantages from the



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welfare state. A representative example is the column headlined ‘United we built NHS and welfare state – beacons to all the world’ (Reid, Mirror 2014), which then specifies state-run, free at the point of use healthcare as one such benefit of the UK-wide welfare state. This indicates the topos of help and a broader argument of advantage rather than that of the self-evidently good welfare state. The verb ‘build’ co-occurring with the welfare state has only collective actors as builders (or co-builders) in this subcorpus: today’s pensioners (‘These pensioners are the people who lived through the austerity years of post-war Britain and helped to build a new welfare state’, Mirror 15 April 2008); the generation fighting in the Second World War (‘my parents’ generation who returned from the Second World War and built the welfare state’, Beattie and Buckland, Mirror 2013); the Labour party3 (‘we also built the welfare state for those who fall on difficult times’, Mirror 25 March 2015) or Britons from different countries of the UK (Reid, Mirror 2014). This is in stark contrast to the Telegraph subcorpus, where the few ‘build’ examples stress individual authorship, or even the Guardian, where building the welfare state is attributed to elites, although both are predictable along political and class readership lines, respectively. The one instance in the Mirror where the ‘build’ metaphor does not co-occur with authorship is the conclusion of a brief text supporting a campaign for disability rights. It states that if the point of the welfare state is not to help those in greatest need, ‘then it has lost sight of why it was built’ (Parsons, Mirror 2011). This is a case of mixed metaphors – losing sight of something is a wellconventionalized instance of personification, incompatible with the qualities of a building in the literal sense. The figurative use of ‘built’ to express the intended purpose of the welfare state fits into a broader trend in the corpus, and while the personification conveys criticism, albeit conditional, of the welfare state, the building metaphor expresses the purpose as something evaluated positively. The functions of the construction metaphorical expressions are thus diverse, ranging from stressing the importance of the builder/planner and giving credit to builders to creating political identity and legitimizing reform, but – consistent with the findings of Charteris-Black – they almost always entail a positive evaluation of the welfare state, perhaps accounting for their higher prominence in the left-leaning subcorpora.

Pillars and cornerstones: Structure metaphors Another subcategory of building metaphors has the key parts of the structure of a building as the meaning focus:  important elements of the welfare state

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correspond to (often load-bearing) parts of the physical structure of a building. The important elements of the welfare state are typically its constituent parts or its significant principles or values. Charteris-Black (2004:72) notes the positive connotations of such metaphorical expressions. Ahrens (2010) has a more detailed discussion of such metaphors with abstract ideas as the target concept. There are relatively few of these metaphors of the welfare state across the corpus, with the Vehicles listed below: Telegraph: foundation Mail: cornerstone Guardian: foundation, pillar Mirror: foundation, pillar, cornerstone Foundations and cornerstones are, in the basic sense, essential and loadbearing parts of a building from which construction begins, and as such they typically correspond to what is fundamental in the figurative sense. Pillars are also load-bearing but not necessarily early-stage. There are few instances of ‘foundation’ or ‘cornerstone’ as Vehicle in metaphors of the welfare state in the conservative subcorpora and none of ‘pillar’. The figurative use of ‘cornerstone’ is not attested in Telegraph, and two instances occur in the Mail, both highlighting important components of the welfare state. One, a feature on the centenary of the basic state pension, designates the pensions system ‘the cornerstone of the welfare state’ in a call for reform to bring ‘more fairness’ (Hazell, Mail 2008) to the system. In a clear and obvious way, the pensions system is thus represented as a basic and important element of the welfare state. Interestingly, this positioning of the pensions system as fundamental to the welfare state hinges on a positive evaluation of the latter. This indicates the topos of the good welfare state, unusual in the Mail subcorpus. The other, excerpted from a metaphor-heavy critique of the welfare state, has the Beveridge Report as the cornerstone: (4.15) When his report was published at the end of 1942, it became the cornerstone of a welfare state that supported its citizens from cradle to grave, banishing the poverty and starvation of the Depression, and laying the foundations for the great post-war boom. Sandbrook, Mail 2012

The passage is interesting in that it indicates a discontinuity between the 1940s welfare state and what is referred to further in the text as ‘the current system’. This discontinuity is signalled by the choice of the defining relative



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clause (‘that supported …’) to describe the welfare state of which the Report is a cornerstone and the indefinite article before the term ‘welfare state’. The unambiguously positive evaluation of the Report-based welfare state within the topos of help can thus be disarticulated from the assessment of the modern-day welfare state, which the text then goes on to criticize. It thus preserves evaluative harmony without the positive connotation of a structure metaphor getting in the way. There are no structural uses of ‘foundation’ relevant to the welfare state in the Mail, and the one instance in the Telegraph also notes the Beveridge Report. However, the Report is not designated as the foundation. It is instead stated to have ‘laid the foundations of the post-war welfare state’ (Johnston, Telegraph 2009). As the Actor of the process, it is thus construed as a precondition rather than a component of the welfare state. In the Guardian subcorpus, most foundation metaphors highlight both (early-stage) components and values of the welfare state, or more broadly comment on its structural integrity. The latter group, in a handful of texts in the subcorpus which use the ‘foundation’ metaphor without indicating what constitutes said foundation, makes a comment on the structural condition of the welfare state. This condition is found satisfactory in one text, a review of a Ken Loach documentary on the creation of the welfare state, although the time frame referred to is the late 1940s. The text describes the 1940s welfare state as having ‘strong foundations’ (Roberts, Guardian 2013) by the time of the 1951 election that Labour lost, before listing structural problems affecting it at present. In two remaining texts, where the context is contemporary, the welfare state is not sound: (4.16) First they came for BBC 6 Music, and everyone who had looked at a guitar, never mind played one, spoke up. Then they came for affordable higher education, the education maintenance allowance, 500,000 public sector jobs and the foundations of the welfare state – and the music world remained silent. Hancox, Guardian 2010 (4.17) So – quite apart from the abject failure of his economic and fiscal strategy and the whiff of fudge over the fi ­ gures – Osborne’s autumn statement was deeply unfair, nakedly cynical, and tugged at the fragile foundations of the modern welfare state. Compassionate conservatism has been exposed as a passing fancy almost as brief as David Cameron’s infatuation with environmentalism. Stewart, Guardian 2012

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The first passage contrasts the reaction to the announced closure of a digital-only music radio station (which saved it) with the lack of reaction of entertainers to the imminent welfare reforms by the Coalition government. The extent of the reforms is expressed in a manner which appear almost hyperbolic, at least as contrasted with the closure of BBC 6 Music. It is underscored by the reference to fundamental services, a vast number of jobs and the building metaphor, as the implied impact is the annihilation of the very foundations of the welfare state. The compositional frame borrowed from Martin Niemöller’s poem, often used to rally opposition to injustice, adds to the expressive value. In the second passage, the cuts outlined in the Autumn Statement (and in the text itself) are construed as exerting a similarly destructive physical impact on the foundations of the welfare state. The foundations are described as ‘fragile’, an attribute consistent with the literal sense of the Vehicle. The fragility of the foundations is interpretable from the broader co-text as the decreasing public support for benefit claimants, often perceived as undeserving. The metaphors thus visualize the impact of government policy on the welfare state, represented as under threat in both passages. The texts that establish a correspondence between the early components of the welfare state and structure expressions typically go back to the Beveridge Report, as is the case in the opening paragraph of a text on the introduction of Universal Credit: (4.18) This Saturday marks the 70th anniversary of the Beveridge report, credited with laying the foundations of the modern welfare state, including a social insurance system to provide support in sickness and old age, and during periods of unemployment. Guy, Guardian 2012

The passage identifies social insurance provisions recommended by the report to cover the eventualities of ill health and unemployment as a foundation of the welfare state. The potential problems in the provision of benefits for the sick and unemployed in the transition to Universal Credit, which are noted in the co-text, are represented as a direct threat to this key element of the welfare state, the fundamental importance of which is underscored by the building metaphor. A key principle of the welfare state is highlighted by means of the figurative use of ‘foundations’ in two Guardian texts. The example below is excerpted from an Observer editorial on the need to form an alternative vision of the pensions system in light of the Coalition reforms: (4.19) In the libertarian Osbornian world, traditional Tory paternalism is dead; the individual stands alone. . . . Osbornism was distilled in the liberalising of the



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pensions industry, challenging one of the key foundations of the welfare state – the collective sharing of risk. So how did Miliband respond to this most potent of challenges? Guardian 2014

The sharing of risks, referred to as a fundamental principle of the welfare state, can be understood as solidarity. It is consistent with the discourses of the left supporting a stronger interventionist role of the state. Far from restoring the foundation, the Coalition reforms are represented as a dire threat to it, embodying as they do an entirely different philosophical outlook. The building metaphor here works to achieve the delegitimization of the Coalition reforms within the topoi of the good welfare state and of solidarity. The Mirror subcorpus has both an instance of ‘foundation’ and ‘cornerstone’. The ‘foundation’ is identifiable as a set of principles, or perhaps tasks, forming the essence of the welfare state: (4.20) Over the years the welfare state has been used, abused and had the micky taken out of it. But it still has that glorious foundation  – to protect the weak, to support the vulnerable, to offer a helping hand to those who need it the most. Parsons, Mirror 2011

The foundation of the welfare state is here identified as a set of actions morally commendable within the topos of help. This evaluation is in stark contrast to what appears to be mistreatment of the welfare state, intertextually attributable both to government as well as claimants and the general public. The building metaphor facilitates the dismissal of such criticism by ascribing positive values to an essential part of the welfare state. The sole occurrence of a ‘cornerstone’ in the Mirror subcorpus, in a column on child benefit discussed in Chapter 2, is slightly more problematic: (4.21) Child benefit was introduced by the Family Allowances Act of 1945 – one of the cornerstones of the welfare state. But it was not payable for the first-born until 1977. And by then I was all grown up and skipping down the street with Johnny Rotten. Parsons, Mirror 2010

The context is the Coalition’s move to restrict the to-date universal child benefit. Significantly, it is not this benefit that is designated as a cornerstone of the welfare state but rather the Act of Parliament that established it. Therefore, it appears that

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the symbolic rather than the practical importance of the fact is foregrounded here. The column gives arguments supporting universal benefits but ultimately expresses support for the Coalition reform, designating the child benefit ‘a cherry on the cake of the welfare state’ towards the end of the text. Although the Topics do diverge slightly – the Act and the benefit itself – the building metaphor is nonetheless superseded with one where the Vehicle indicates triviality rather than fundamental importance, facilitating the support for reform. As Vehicle, ‘pillar’ occurs only in the left-leaning subcorpora. In the Guardian, all the ‘pillar’ metaphorical expressions refer to important components of the welfare state, and the load-bearing aspect of ‘pillar’ serves to underscore their importance within the system. When the context is the British welfare state, the ‘pillar’ metaphor highlights the significance of a component whose existence is threatened by Coalition reforms: one is legal aid (see 2.74), and the other is child benefit, expressed somewhat more formally in the list below: (4.22) Together with a national health service and maintenance of employment, a universal children’s allowance was one of the three pillars of the welfare state set out by William Beveridge (below) in his seminal 1942 report. The symbolism of George Osborne’s announcement cannot be overstated. Since 1946, when the first family allowance order books became valid, mothers have received a weekly payment from the state for at least their second child – irrespective of family income. Brindle, Guardian 2010

The introduction of means testing for child benefit, the announcement of which is the context for the passage, is given a special importance in the passage as a symbolic break with the key elements – the figurative pillars – of the original welfare state expounded in the Beveridge Report. The text thus co-opts the topos of original design to oppose a Coalition reform. Notably, the second of the three pillars listed, full employment, appears to have been long abandoned as a goal by UK governments, or at the very least is almost completely absent from public debate, especially given the neoliberal emphasis on preserving low inflation, which tends to rely on a structural unemployment. The use of a structure metaphor and the topos of original intention in the defence of child benefit but not full employment shows that either can be utilized selectively depending on the immediate political purpose. In the Mirror subcorpus, the sole occurrence of the ‘pillar’ metaphor is a quotation from a pre-election speech by Gordon Brown:



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(4.23) For once you go behind the gloss and the PR and the style you find that, policy by policy… the Tories are planning an assault on all the pillars of the welfare state – our commitment to education, to employment opportunity, to tackling poverty and unfairness, and to decent life chances for your children. Roberts, Mirror 2010

What is designated as pillars of the welfare state is not its identifiable elements:  instead, the pillars are interpretable as either principles of Labour in running the welfare state or public attitudes which enable its existence. The personal pronouns – ‘our commitment’ and ‘your children’ – appear to support the first interpretation. The metaphor highlights unambiguously positive concepts and so works to garner support for Labour by associating it with a positively evaluated welfare state associated with a host of self-evidently desirable concepts. In this and all other cases outlined above, the evaluation of the concept figuratively represented with a structure metaphor is positive, and the metaphor works to underscore its importance, though there is no full consistency on what constitutes the specific structural elements of the welfare state across the corpus.

The end in sight? Disintegration metaphors In the quality subcorpora, a small group of metaphorical expressions from the building source domain envision the failure of the welfare state, whether due to purposeful action or as a side effect of other factors. They could arguably be analysed as a subset of structure metaphors, as they also draw on the conceptual metaphor persisting is remaining upright, and the Vehicles convey the breakdown of the structure of the building. However, they do not highlight specific elements of this structure, with the meaning focus on the failure of the welfare state as the disintegration of a building. These metaphorical expressions are almost exclusively future-oriented or hypothetical. The Vehicles are: Telegraph: collapse, rubble, crumble Mail: – Guardian: demolition, crumble Mirror: – In the Telegraph, a serious failure of the welfare state is conveyed by the figurative use of ‘collapse’. It occurs in two texts, excerpted below: (4.24) Dr Tom Palmer (no relation), an American academic, gave an eloquent talk at the think tank Civitas last week in which he explained why he believes

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the welfare state is doomed to collapse, and much sooner than most of us expect. The numbers he produced are certainly alarming. Palmer, Telegraph 2012 (4.25) Officials say that without major changes in lifestyles, the welfare state could collapse under the burden of self-inflicted diseases, which are fuelled by obesity, alcohol and smoking. Donnelly, Telegraph 2014

Despite the generic and thematic divergence – the first excerpt comes from a column giving a personal take on the future of the pensions system, the other, unusually, a news report covering a release on public health – both texts make extensive use of statistics. In both, the welfare state cannot cope with the tasks of respectively paying out pensions and treating the sick. Both tasks are evaluated positively, though perhaps only the latter self-evidently so, with the statistics providing evidence in (4.24). Interestingly, both texts point to public attitudes or actions designated as irresponsible:  support for a non-contributory system of benefits in the first and unhealthy lifestyles in the second. These constitute excessive weight, explicitly referenced in the second passage as ‘burden’, under which the welfare state figuratively collapses. While the collapse is not brought about by deliberate action, the responsibility for it remains clear. A collapse of the welfare state is undesirable in both texts, and the metaphor, with its hyperbolic implication of the end of the welfare state, thus gives weight to a warning against what is perceived as irresponsible behaviour. Another Telegraph text, a column advocating for a comprehensive reform of social care, visualizes the welfare state as having already disintegrated: (4.26) Add homelessness, ill-educated school-leavers and a flat-lining economy, and you have almost all the ingredients needed for a reprise of the Devil’s Decade that preceded the publication of the Beveridge Report. In the rubble of the welfare state, the NHS has, despite funding constraints, retained its status as ersatz religion and treasured institution. Riddell, Telegraph 2012

The passage is preceded and followed by an extensive list of the ways in which the welfare state does not fulfil its tasks, although some of these tasks, such as sustaining a healthy economy, are typically seen as beyond the remit of the welfare state. The ‘rubble’ metaphorical expression construes the failing services comprising the welfare state as debris, with its lack of structural



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integrity representing the uselessness of the institution. The implication of the metaphorical expression that the welfare state practically does not exist, combined with the comparison of the present to the pre-welfare state decade of 1930s, works to provide a rationale for reform. A similar image of disintegration is deployed in a Guardian text, but the context is that of immigration and social cohesion: (4.27) When the first wave of postwar immigrants arrived in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, it was a period of full employment, an expanding welfare state and strong trade unions. Today, Britain’s manufacturing base has all but disappeared, working class communities have disintegrated and the welfare state has begun to crumble. Malik, Guardian 2013

The decline of the welfare state corresponds to the condition of the economy and social cohesion, all of them affected negatively by ‘broader economic and political changes’. The passage makes the point that immigration coincided with rather than caused these changes, all described by processes that require no external agencies. In another Guardian text, a book review, the disintegration of the welfare state is expressed more forcefully and has a clear cause: (4.28) [Mendoza writes]: Austerity is not a short-term disruption to balance the books. It is the demolition of the welfare state – transferring the UK from social democracy to corporate power. Airs, Guardian 2015

In its figurative sense, ‘demolition’ connotes destruction, irreversibility and perhaps the use of force. In the passage, the demolition of the welfare state is specified as a de facto regime change, with the result that the force connoted by the metaphorical expression is reflected in a forceful political claim. It is also a textual synonym of the term ‘austerity’, as the Identified to which the pronominal subject of the second excerpted sentence (‘It is the demolition …’) refers. The positive evaluation of the welfare state is inferable from its association with social democracy (which in turn is self-evidently good in the Guardian subcorpus); the ‘demolition’ metaphor is thus one of the factors that represent austerity as undesirable. The last passage is the clearest example of a disintegration metaphor as a delegitimizing strategy concerning a specific policy. But with virtually all metaphors from the building domain, the persistence of the welfare state is ultimately desirable, although its form may be subject to criticism.

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4.1.2.2.  Machine metaphors A machine is another recognizable object among the indirect metaphors of the welfare state. As a source domain, machine is common in organizational discourse, but its potential to convey the functioning of a whole with many parts (Goatly 2007:362) lends itself to representing the functioning of systems, organizations or large groups (see Goatly 2007:100) and accounts for its presence in political discourse as well. Goatly notes, after Kövecses (2002), the general positive evaluation of the source domain in machine metaphors, where the mechanical highlights efficiency or ‘appropriate functioning’ (2007:102).

What works and what does not: Operation metaphors In the corpus, machine metaphors are not a substantial group, and the metaphorical expressions from this source domain are for the most part ones that pertain to the functioning – or more typically the malfunctioning – of the welfare state. For the former group, the welfare state achieving its intended results corresponds to a machine operating correctly, with an entailed fixing scenario, whereby satisfactory operation is restored by an intervention. The Vehicles are as follows: Telegraph: overhaul, broken, rewire Mail: overhaul, working, works, broken Guardian: works, working, operate, run down, overhaul Mirror: broken ‘Work’ or ‘operate’ with the welfare state as Actor occurs in the Mail and Guardian subcorpora. It is used in both to refer to its general principle (‘the way the welfare state works’, Jones, Guardian 2011) or problems with its operation. The principle broadly concerns who gets support from the welfare state and on what grounds and can either mean the principle of universality, referenced both in the Mail and in the Guardian, or issues specific to each newspaper. In the Mail, the sole instance mentions national sovereignty in whether ‘decisions about how our welfare state works’ (Groves, Mail 2014) are to be taken in the UK or the EU. In the Guardian, examples are speculations about how the welfare state might be reformed to accommodate social change, or ‘how the welfare state can operate across the life course’ (Jones, Guardian 2011). The more frequent negated use of ‘work’ to indicate problems with the welfare state subsumes different issues under the welfare state ‘not working’. In the Mail, the problem concerns the provision of benefits, as in the passage below:



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(4.29) ‘Mrs Atkinson was in a “militant” mood’, she recorded in her diary. ‘She said it was time the welfare state got working smoother & not throwing money about’. Mrs Atkinson was particularly cross about a widow living nearby who was ‘never economising’ and was getting her rent and rates paid. Kynaston, Mail 2013

The insufficiently smooth operation of the welfare state might suggest delays or benefits being mistakenly withheld, but it appears from the passage that the problem is supporting an individual who, ‘never economising’, does not in fact merit support. Another text quotes the Chancellor of the Exchequer as saying ‘Taxpayers don’t think the welfare state works properly any more’ (Chapman, Mail 2013), and the problem is specified in the next sentence as the welfare state making ‘people better off on the dole than if they went out to work’. In this way, a generous provision of benefits to those who do not necessarily merit them is represented as problematic. The implication is that it deprives individuals of the motivation to engage in paid employment. As such, it is undesirable in accordance with the topoi of fairness and dependency. As is typical with the latter, other structural factors, such as low pay, are in this way overlooked. The utterance of the Chancellor also appears in the Guardian subcorpus (Watt, Guardian 2013), but in other Guardian texts the welfare state ‘not working’ tends to mean insufficient rather than excessive provision. One example is a welfare state criticized for not providing the right services for the ‘squeezed middle’ (see 2.59). Another is a quotation by a Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson justifying the introduction of Universal Credit to ‘help us get back to a working welfare state where people don’t have to rely on food parcels’ (Rayner, Guardian 2011), where the failure of the welfare state means that food banks step in to fill the gap in provision. A welfare state that does not work thus involves a violation of the topos of fairness in the Mail and of the topos of help in the Guardian, with the exception of the Osborne quotation in the latter. In all subcorpora except the Guardian, the failing welfare state is described as ‘broken’, and the pattern resembles that of the welfare state ‘not working’. The sole occurrence of the term as an attribute of the welfare state in the Mail is in a text by columnist Peter Oborne (as are two out of three in the Telegraph). The fault with the welfare state is identified only in his Mail column as the system being ‘perversely structured so that there are no proper incentives for the unemployed to find a job’ (Oborne, Mail 2010), a phrasing that resembles that in the Osborne quotation above and signals the same topoi. The inference is that a satisfactory

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operation of the welfare state does not appear to be possible unless the structure is altered, providing a rationale for reform. If a ‘broken’ welfare state in the conservative subcorpora is one that overprovides, the sole Mirror text referencing a ‘broken’ welfare state gives a drastic example of insufficient provision: (4.30) On Sunday, I asked him to take part in our Daily Mirror Real Britain event at the conference with Gill Thompson, whose brother David died destitute last year after being sanctioned and having his benefits stopped. (…) In 1926, Harry lost his 10-year old sister because there was no welfare state. In 2014, Gill lost her brother because it is broken. Wynne-Jones, Mirror 2014

The parallel between the two deaths shows that support can be as lacking as though the welfare state did not exist. The topos of help in perhaps the most basic form, which is that saving a person from preventable death is a moral imperative, is violated by the condition of the welfare state. The inference that the Coalition reforms are responsible for people dying is supported by the conclusion of the text, which states that ‘[t]‌here are so many vulnerable people who will not survive another five years of being governed like this’, strongly delegitimizing the reforms. Provision is not directly an issue in the Guardian text referencing the problematic operation of the services-based welfare state, which describes it as ‘run down’ in a text about changing social attitudes: (4.31) The welfare state has been run down and increasingly is experienced as either a bureaucratic nightmare (the job centre), or as a viciously competitive struggle for scarce resources (state schools). Seymour, Guardian 2013

The passage (also analysed in Chapter 2 for delineation strategies, see Section 2.44) uses a Vehicle (‘run down’) that connotes excessive use, perhaps referring to the demand for services outstripping their supply. While the results are not as stark as those in the Mirror passage, the outcome is nonetheless a welfare state that is no longer perceived as helpful or beneficial, accounting for a change in attitudes. The diagnosis of the welfare state as ‘not working’ or ‘broken’ does not correlate with the use of ‘overhaul’ or ‘rewire’ about the welfare state. Instead, the verbs are used in a handful of texts noting changes to the benefit system.



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Attested in the Telegraph and the Guardian, they indicate a positive evaluation of the reforms proposed. Such positive evaluation is evident in a Telegraph column’s reference to ‘Blair’s grandiose promises to overhaul the welfare state’ (d’Ancona, Telegraph 2008). The details of the overhaul are not specified, but the evaluative prosody (see Partington 2017) of ‘promise’, which tends to co-occur with positively evaluated lexical items, indicates the overhaul is desirable. This positive evaluation can be contextually strengthened, as is the case with two other instances of ‘overhaul’ and ‘rewire’, which – interestingly – occur in the Telegraph and Guardian’s coverage of a single event: the release of ‘Condition of Britain’ report in 2014 by the Institute for Public Policy Research (a left-wing think-tank), to be adopted as Labour’s policy platform for the subsequent year’s election. A Telegraph column (Riddell, Telegraph 2014) calls the report’s recommendations, which include a greater contributory aspect to the welfare state, ‘a radical overhaul of the welfare state’. It also describes the Labour leader’s decision to follow the report as a ‘moment of epiphany’. The opinion of the proposed reforms is favourable, as indicated by the use of ‘epiphany’ and by the generally positive assessment of contributory systems in the Telegraph and more generally conservative discourses. Another Telegraph column on the report has a similarly positive comment on what is represented as Labour adopting the Conservative platform on welfare reform, where ‘[a]‌penny appears to be dropping over the head of Ed Miliband’, who concludes ‘that the Conservatives are actually talking some sense about the need to rewire the welfare state’ (Nelson, Telegraph 2014). The figurative use of ‘rewire’ thus preserves evaluative harmony. In the Guardian subcorpus, an Observer news report refers to the same policy proposals as ‘a radical overhaul of the welfare state’ (Helm, Guardian 2014) in the opening sentence, perhaps indicating recourse to the same press release. The text then notes the positive reception of the proposals, and so of the ‘overhaul’, by the Labour leadership, with the verb more neutral in this context. This text provides the least information on the present condition of the welfare state, but in all instances of ‘rewire’ or ‘overhaul’ in both subcorpora the need for reforms is assumed rather than justified in much detail. In contrast, the instances of ‘broken’ or ‘not working’ serve as rationale for reform but not necessarily within an entailed fixing scenario.

Real threats or hyperboles? Disassembly metaphors Across the corpus, Vehicles consistent with the machine source domain convey the sense of the welfare state being rendered non-operational. The

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Vehicles – mostly various forms of the verb ‘dismantle’ – are used to indicate the failure of the welfare state, typically as a result of deliberate action: Telegraph: dismantle Mail: dismantle Guardian: dismantle, scrap Mirror: dismantle The Telegraph has two instances of this figurative use of ‘dismantle’; notably, both are instances of perspectivized discourse of the Left, attributing to Thatcher the intention to destroy the welfare state. One text, a review of leftwing historian Tony Judd’s final book, quotes Judd’s statement that Thatcher ‘could not altogether dismantle the welfare state’ as an instance of what the reviewer calls ‘political prejudice rather than historical judgment’ (Malcolm, Telegraph 2010). The other, a review of a documentary on the beginning of the welfare state by left-wing filmmaker Ken Loach, puts the verb ‘dismantle’ in scare quotes (‘The truth is that Mrs Thatcher did not try to “dismantle” the welfare state’, Moore, Telegraph 2013)  in a sentence that explicitly dismisses the claim made in the film. Both texts provide support for their rejection of the claim. The former cites the increased spending on some services, while the latter states Thatcher ‘tinkered with’ some services rather than abolishing them. Both thus make a comment not just on Thatcher’s intention but also on language use by the Left:  the metaphor is implied to be an instance of unjustified hyperbole. In the Mail subcorpus, none of the three figurative uses of ‘dismantle’ concerning the welfare state is implied to be hyperbolic. Instead, one text, a column by a celebrity, makes the opposite point on Thatcher’s intention, stating that ‘had she had her way, she would have dismantled the welfare state and that would have been wrong’ (Dell’Olio, Mail 2009). The statement resembles those dismissed in the Telegraph in that it evaluates the action as reprehensible within the topos of the good welfare state. Two later columns, in contrast, use the verb to refer to a recommended course of action. A 2011 Melanie Phillips column on Big Society echoes David Cameron’s positioning of Big Society and the welfare state as incompatible (see 4.11 above): (4.32) This magnificent civil society, however, was swept away by the arrival of the welfare state. Voluntary giving and personal responsibility were replaced by the culture of rights and entitlement that followed from the belief that the state was more beneficent than the voluntary world.



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This is Mr Cameron’s first and greatest problem. For the Big Society cannot spring up unless the welfare state is actually dismantled. Phillips, Mail 2011

The Big Society is evaluated positively in the co-text as fostering civic virtues. In contrast, the welfare state is negatively assessed as destructive to civil society, in a long-running criticism of the welfare state. Thus, it is desirable that the welfare state be supplanted by Big Society, a preference which is amplified by the contrast between the mechanistic machine metaphor for the welfare state and a plant metaphor for Big Society (‘spring up’), the latter connoting energy and renewal. The adverb ‘actually’, which functions as a metaphor flag as well as an intensifier, is perhaps used because this course of action is rarely proposed. Even the other Mail text, where the verb ‘dismantle’ is used to support this policy, makes an appeal which is very indirect: (4.33) Creating a Welfare State that directs benefits even to the well-off may be silly, but it is so easy to do. Dismantling it, on the other hand, is very tricky and even verges on the impossible when politicians are so determined not to upset this or that section of the electorate. Alexander, Mail 2013

The indefinite article and the defining relative clause post-modifying the term ‘welfare state’ indicate a variant of the concept distinguished by the indiscriminate provision of benefits, negatively evaluated as ‘silly’ and so exempt from the topos of help. It is the dismantling of this variant, rather than the institution itself, that is indicated as desirable. Even so, however, the passage stops short of a direct recommendation. The figurative use of ‘dismantle’ about the welfare state is much more frequent across the left-leaning subcorpora. The Guardian subcorpus has as many as twenty instances. They fall into two broad groups, the first of which concerns Thatcher and intention to ‘dismantle the welfare state’ and comes mostly from a 2012 extended feature on the unclassified Downing Street documents revealing government discussions, as well as readers’ responses to that text, often quoting the headline (‘Thatcher’s role in plan to dismantle welfare state revealed’, Travis, Guardian 2012). The original feature specifies the mooted policy ideas that correspond to taking apart the welfare state. These are chiefly the introduction of fees for education and health services, as well as reduction of other public

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services. These changes are self-evidently negative in discourses of the Left, and the figurative use of the verb ‘dismantle’ appears to underscore the negative evaluation of the plans (which affect components of the welfare state considered self-evidently desirable), while the extent of the changes allows for a nonhyperbolic use of the term. The other group has a contemporary reference, with the Actor of the process identified generally as government, sometimes a named representative, such as Minister for Work and Pensions or Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Actor seeking to dismantle the welfare state need not be the Coalition government, however, as the charge is also levelled at the Brown government, accused of ‘dismantling Beveridge’s welfare state’ (McDonnell, Guardian 2009), as well as at Labour ‘dismantling its own great work’ (Loach et al., Guardian 2013) while in opposition by embracing the Coalition benefit cuts. The specific intention to cause the destruction of the welfare state can be ascribed to the government, as in the passage below, excerpted from a text by a student union activist explaining student protests: (4.34) The appointment of the UCL provost Malcolm Grant as Andrew Lansley’s NHS commissioning board chair is the starkest evidence yet that the privatisation of higher education and the abolition of the NHS are part of a categoric attempt to dismantle the welfare state, designed not only with the same free market ideology in mind, but planned and implemented by the same people. Chessum, Guardian 2011

The writer points out a problematic personal appointment as evidence that there is an intention to destroy the welfare state. This intention is conveyed with the ‘dismantle’ metaphor and amplified further in the text by another machine metaphor, ‘scrapping the welfare state’, more critically expressing a similar idea. The nominalization ‘appointment’ means that no specific Actor to whom the intention would be ascribed is mentioned in the passage, but it is clear (from the co-text as well as general political knowledge) that the government is the Actor in question. The destructive intention is inferred from ‘the privatisation of higher education and the abolition of the NHS’. These are not so much proposed as presumed to be factual, as indicated by the definite articles and their position as the Identified in the clause. The credibility of the threat to the welfare state expressed with the figurative use of ‘dismantle’ and ‘scrapping’ rests on the acceptance of the claims on education and the National Health Service (NHS), which in turn hinges on the view that privatization is self-evidently wrong.



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This is likely to hold in discourses of the Left but can be considered hyperbolic outside of these discourses. The nine instances of figurative use of ‘dismantle’ about the welfare state in the small Mirror subcorpus resemble the contemporary pattern in the Guardian, although the Actor in the process is always identifiable as the Conservatives (sometimes standing for the Coalition government) or their representative. The conscious intention to destroy the welfare state can be emphasized, as in the passage below: (4.35) The Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, has tried to characterise legal aid cuts as slashing the salaries of legal fat cats. In fact, in the Coalition project to dismantle the welfare state, cuts to legal aid are the final piece in the jigsaw. Wynne-Jones, Mirror 2014

The reforms to legal aid are represented as the last step of a long-term plan to render the welfare state non-operational, with the intention inferable from the term ‘project’ and the figurative use of ‘jigsaw’ as a metaphor for a process with several stages. Like in the Guardian subcorpus, the figurative use of ‘dismantle’ has the function of delegitimizing the reform, although in this text legal aid is a recourse to those resisting cuts in court, and so is not necessarily a component of the welfare state itself. Further, if ‘project’ entails intellectual activity, the subcorpus has examples of emotional motivation behind reforms:  George Osborne is denounced as ‘a Tory Minister hell-bent on dismantling the welfare state’ (Mirror 5 October 2010), and Conservative ‘hatred’ of the welfare state (Mirror 18 August 2010, excerpted above in 2.78) is indicated as the ulterior and irrational motive behind reforms. ‘Dismantle’, as well as most other Vehicles from this source domain, is heavily conventionalized, and the meanings they convey here appear to be difficult to express literally. machine metaphors of the welfare state in this corpus are rarely extended, and entailed scenarios or even connotations of the source domain are hardly ever exploited. It would thus appear that for this group of expressions, metaphoricity is not of substantial relevance for the argumentative functions.

4.2  Beings: The welfare state as a person Another type of ontological metaphor is personification, where abstract entities are construed as performing actions normally associated with humans or

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endowed with human qualities (see Semino 2008:101–3, or a highly critical overview in Twardzisz 2013:111–23). Such metaphors, Semino notes, are common in political discourse, drawing as they do on ‘our experience and knowledge of human beings as source domain’ (2008:101). Semino cites the reason for their prevalence as their potential to simplify complex actions and processes, assigning them to identifiable individual actors (2008:102). Twardzisz (2013) takes issue with this claim:  he discounts their accessibility (arguing that the mappings purported to simplify complex phenomena are complex themselves) and denies their prevalence, at least with regard to nation states. At a basic level, such personifications are a shorthand for causation and agency. Like basic objectifications, they are not discussed in this chapter: the few examples across the corpus are such (as in ‘welfare state encourages people to stop helping each other’) that any construal of the welfare state as a person entailed by the metaphorical expression (here, the verb ‘encourage’, which can select human subjects) is secondary to its semantic features (here, its expression of causation). There are, nonetheless, several examples across the corpus of what Semino calls more ‘prototypical cases of personifications’ (2008:102), where entities, in her case nation states, ‘are clearly presented as individual, anthropomorphic entities’ (ibidem). These are exemplified by several adjectives or nouns whose basic sense is a characteristic or condition attributed mainly to humans, with dictionary entries as the qualifying criterion. The other group of personifications across the corpus comprises what Semino calls ‘processes … presented in terms of relatively simple human scenarios’ (ibidem). Both are briefly outlined below.

4.2.1.  The life cycle: Human life stages The two ‘human scenarios’ noted by Semino are those of birth and death, which she claims simplify political decision-making processes, calling birth in particular ‘more familiar and accessible’ (2008:103) than the vagaries of the political process; she notes that while it concerns all living beings, it ‘is prototypically associated with people’. Life events or a person’s age construed as the stages of the welfare state are noted in some form across the corpus. The Vehicles are: Telegraph: reborn, reach pensionable age Mail: birth, infant Guardian: birth, death, offspring, born, die, illness Mirror: born



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In the few examples in the conservative subcorpora and in the Mirror, ‘birth’ and ‘born’ are heavily conventionalized. The Telegraph instance refers to Labour leader Ed Miliband’s putative position as ‘the architect of a reborn welfare state’ (Riddell, Telegraph 2013). This is an instance of mixed metaphors from the building and person source domains, though admittedly a ‘rebirth’ as renewal is already figurative and as such is distant from the prototypical meaning of ‘birth’. The Mail example lists ‘presid[ing] over the creation of the NHS, the birth of the Welfare State and Britain’s recovery from the suffering of wartime’ (Sandbrook, Mail 2009)  as Clement Attlee’s achievements. The NHS is here separate from the welfare state but remains a sister notion, and it is difficult to see a material difference between the ‘creation’ of one of these – nonmetaphorical under MIVPU – and the metaphorical ‘birth’ of the other, as the two could easily be switched to no ill effect. Similarly, the Mirror’s description of the origin of the welfare state – ‘on December 1, 1942, his celebrated Beveridge Report was published and the modern welfare state was born’ (Hunt, Mirror 2012)  – is perhaps motivated by the anaphoric passive rather than the birth scenario. Thus, ‘birth’ appears a straightforward synonym to ‘establishment’, perhaps preferable for stylistic reasons. In the Guardian subcorpus, ‘birth’ and ‘death’ of the welfare state are part of extended metaphors or at least have a significance related to the source domain. One arguable example is ‘How Britain’s new welfare state was born in the USA’ (Asthana et  al., Observer 2010), the headline of a post-election outline of the American inspirations behind the Coalition’s welfare reforms. The phrasing draws on a possible connection between a person’s origin and their culturemotivated outlook to analogize the American influence on reforms. Most probably, however, it is the reference to the Bruce Springsteen song and the failure it connotes that is more salient. A clearer instance of extended metaphor is noted in the opening paragraph of a 1983 Observer article reprinted in the ‘From the Archives’ series in 2012: (4.36) The welfare state is dying. This is not simply a matter of untimely death at the hands of Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues (…) Guardian 2012

The passage refers to the imminent end of the welfare state as a figurative death, and the metaphor is extended by construing the (rejected) cause of death as the policies of the Thatcher government. The cause is co-textually indicated as a change of attitudes, and the metaphor could easily be – but is not – extended

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further to specify natural causes. Another text notes the welfare state being ‘in the worst danger it has ever known’ sixty years after its birth (Beckett, Guardian 2010), also due to the decreasing public support; the personification is extended in the following paragraph, with the welfare state represented as a victim. The most striking example of ‘human scenarios’ being extended is a mock obituary of the welfare state (see 3.3 above), headlined ‘The Welfare State, 1942– 2013 Obituary: after decades of public illness, Beveridge’s most famous offspring has died’. The text personifies the welfare state to the degree that Welfare and State become first and last names and explores the birth and death scenarios as well as family relations (indicated in the reference to offspring), as evident in the headline and the opening paragraph: (4.37) For much of its short but celebrated life, the Welfare State was cherished by Britons. Instant public affection greeted its birth and even as it passed away peacefully yesterday morning, government ministers swore they would do all they could to keep it alive. Chakrabortty, Guardian 2013

The description instantiates what Semino describes as accessibility and familiarity of human scenarios, as the passage calls up the emotions associated with an expected birth of a person and the reflections on an individual’s life on their passing. The death scenario in particular is used later in the text to hyperbolically convey the impact of the introduction of means testing for child benefit as ‘[t]‌he proximate cause of death’, ‘causing a fatal injury to Welfare’. It appears that the reason for such far-flung personification is to satirize the reaction to the introduction of means testing for the child benefit as excessive. Such extreme instances of personification are rare, however, at least for the ‘human scenarios’ in the corpus. Other life stages referenced across the corpus are the welfare state ‘reach[ing] pensionable age’ in the Telegraph, which coincides with the professed end of ‘universal state pensions and free healthcare for all’ (Reece, Telegraph 2010). Another is the Mail’s reference to ‘infant welfare state’ (Utley, Mail 2010)  to denote its early stages in a text on social care and family structure. In both cases, the source domain of the metaphorical expressions is directly related to the topic of the section or the entire text, in instances of topic triggering (Semino 2008).

4.2.2.  Generous or too generous? Human traits and conditions The other group of personifications comprises metaphorical expressions representing the functioning of the welfare state with recourse to adjectives



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or nouns denoting the condition or characteristics of a person. The Vehicles include: Telegraph: sick, generous, generosity, over-generous, non-judgmntal, beneficence, largesse, fairness Mail: bloated, sclerotic, dysfunctional, perverted, generous, cowardly4 Guardian: robust, compassionate, generosity, generous, fair, intelligent, not overbearing Mirror: generous The adjectives that denote a departure from the norm, whether that of physical or mental health, or of acceptable behaviour, occur exclusively in the conservative subcorpora. They all convey strong criticism of the welfare state, and – with the exception of ‘bloated’ – are thematically related to the broader section of the text they occur in. ‘Sick’ in the Telegraph refers to a welfare state that fails to provide satisfactory health insurance in France (Chazan, Telegraph 2014). A ‘sclerotic welfare state’ in the Mail fails to provide care for the elderly (Dudley Edwards, Mail 2009), although the other occurrence is less thematically relevant. A ‘perverted welfare state’ in a Mail letter is stated to encourage teenage motherhood by providing council housing for young unemployed mothers (Mail 1 February 2009), and a ‘dysfunctional welfare state’ is denounced as having a destructive influence on family structure (Bartholomew, Mail 2014). ‘Bloated’ connotes an excess that is pathological but appears to be fully conventionalized and is only borderline metaphorical – it bears no relation to the themes of text sections and occurs solely in mixed metaphors, such as ‘prune the bloated welfare state’ (Oborne, Mail 2008). The criticism of the welfare state it conveys is, however, as strong as with the other adjectives in this subgroup. It is only in the Guardian subcorpus that the condition of the welfare state is described as within the desirable norm by the adjective ‘robust’ (Rayner, Guardian 2013). In this case, however, it is not a factual description of existing welfare state but a hypothetical alternative to the result of Coalition policies. The remaining adjectives and nouns describe human traits that motivate certain behaviours (or, metonymically, these behaviours themselves) and, in a figurative sense, motivate what is construed as actions of the welfare state. In the conservative subcorpora, the most frequently referenced quality is generosity (which includes its more marked synonyms). Its basic sense, giving more than expected, carries a positive evaluation. Nonetheless, in the two subcorpora, its key function as an attribute of the welfare state is to facilitate criticism of its

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beneficiaries, who are represented as undeserving by virtue of exploiting this generosity. One clear example is a Telegraph column that censures campaigners against cuts who occupied a luxury London department store in an act of protest. They are described as people who ‘are entitled to the full largesse of the welfare state, and many of them drink deeply of it’, but ‘just don’t like the prevailing, majority view of our capitalist society’ (Heffer, Telegraph 2011): in other words, as people who cause trouble though they have no legitimate grievances. As such, their recourse to state support is represented as undeserved. In the Mail, a similar evaluation can be inferred from a report on the uptake of benefits by Polish immigrants to the UK (Hickley, Mail 2009). Its opening sequence states that Poles who lose their jobs in the UK are ‘choosing not to return home but to stay and take advantage of the generous benefit system’. Further in the text, a Polish community organizer expresses his appreciation of ‘the generous welfare state’. The verb ‘choosing’ stresses the agency of Polish migrants, underscoring the deliberateness of the act. There is a clear implication the choice to stay in UK on benefits is wrong. The topos of burden is thus set off, as the immigrant beneficiaries are implied to be exploiting the British welfare state. Its generosity is therefore contextually undermined as misplaced. As an attribute of the welfare state in conservative subcorpora, generosity – explicitly undermined with the prefix ‘over-’ or the adjective ‘excessive’ – is also represented as having an adverse social impact, from weakening self-reliance to enabling criminal activity: a Telegraph column by a City economist blames its ‘excessive generosity’ for ‘a loss of competitive vigour’ (Bootle, Telegraph 2014). A stronger claim is made in another column, which states that ‘today’s “paupers” [who use food banks] are the product of an over-generous and nonjudgmental welfare state’ (Daniels, Telegraph 2013), with obvious sarcasm in the use of ‘non-judgmental’. In both columns, the welfare state is assumed to cause poverty within the dependency argument, as the assumption that individuals are not motivated to improve their lot is again rehearsed. The topos of vice, with the generosity of the welfare state enabling criminal behaviour, is in evidence among others in a Telegraph column on Mick Philpott and his criminal act (Oborne, Telegraph 2013), analysed in Chapter  2 (2.34), where the welfare state has an impact that is downright immoral. In the Guardian, generosity is interpretable as positive and, interestingly, is typically an attribute of the welfare state in countries other than the UK, whether of European countries in general (Goodhart, Guardian 2009) or of Scandinavian countries (‘Norway, Sweden and other countries with a generous welfare state



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have the strongest work ethic’, Carvel, Guardian 2009; ‘It’s worth falling ill in Denmark just to experience one of the best healthcare systems in the world, made possible via a generous, high-tax welfare state’, Guardian 20 April 2009). The British welfare state is described as ‘comparatively generous’ (Ehrenreich, Guardian 2011)  at best, while the supposed generosity of the British welfare state is referred to as ‘a mistaken notion’ (Chang, Guardian 2014). This largely parallels the construal of the welfare state as not extensive in the Guardian and similarly avoids setting off the topos of burden. In the Mirror instance, however, the generosity of the welfare state is also a quality exploited by those who do not deserve support, as the column on child benefit analysed in (2.29) refers to some of its recipients as ‘not-very-hardpressed middleclass mothers of today, who see child benefit as a rather laughable bonus dished out by the generous welfare state’. They are undeserving of support not because of their moral qualities but because they do not need it and would be ‘likely to spend it on a Hermes handbag’ (Parsons, Mirror 2010). The generosity is thus, like in the conservative subcorpora, misplaced. Fairness is another trait that recurs across the corpus except the Mirror. It is normally held to be self-evidently and commonsensically right (see the discussion on the fairness argument in Chapter 3). As such, it often serves as a justification for reforms of the benefits system, as in the Telegraph text that has a Department for Work and Pensions official respond to a criticism of the Coalition reforms expressed by the Church of England: (4.38) Our reforms are restoring fairness to the welfare state. There is nothing fair about trapping people in poverty. We’re making sure work pays while ensuring support is there for the most vulnerable. Bingham, Telegraph 2013

The compressed dependency argument provides the link between the first and the second excerpted sentence: by limiting the motivation of individuals who receive benefits to improve their position, the welfare state discourages their self-reliance and encourages a dependence on the state, and so poverty. Thus, ‘making sure work pays’ means limiting state support and thereby rewarding effort rather than idleness associated with being on benefits. The remaining traits as attributes of the welfare state occur in the Guardian, and all are desirable rather than factual, as a prospective welfare state is described as ‘intelligent’ (Clark, Guardian 2009), ‘compassionate’ (Hunt, Guardian 2011) or ‘not overbearing’ (Kandiyali, Guardian 2010). These are contextually interpretable as actual or posited policy goals to be adopted by the Labour party.

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As such, they form part of Labour’s political identity, seeking to co-opt the positive evaluation of a welfare state with these attributes to boost theirs. If life stages typically yield heavily conventional personifications of the welfare state that appear little more than stylistic variants, the use of human-like traits to explain some outcomes or functions of the welfare state appears to be of more ideological substance; this is perhaps because it facilitates an evaluation of the welfare state on moral grounds, particularly so with negative qualities. In contrast, the simplification of abstract issues attributed to personifications (see Semino 2008, Twardzisz 2013) is for the most part not noted in this corpus.

4.3  Conventional metaphors of the welfare state: Summary of findings This chapter has focused on the conventional metaphors of the welfare state in three general categories based on the following source domains: that of object, which includes object with spatial dimension, building, and machine; and person. Due to a quantitative threshold, individual metaphors from plant and animal source domains were not included in the analysis. Table 7 shows a simplified version of the metaphors and key mappings; different mappings and entailments are called up depending on the text. Table 7  Highly conventional metaphors of the welfare state Welfare state is

Mappings

An object with Cost: size size uptake or coverage: size A building Founders: architects Foundation: construction Components: important parts Values: important parts End: demolition A machine (Not) functioning: (not) Working Reform: fixing End: dismantling A person Milestone events: life stages Problem: health condition Rationale: trait

Underlying metaphor or scenario

Topoi

General objectification abstract complex systems are buildings

Burden; help

abstract complex systems are machines institutions are persons

Burden; help

Original intention; good welfare state

Good welfare state



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The specific functions of these metaphors, as shown in the course of analysis, depend on the immediate argumentative purpose at hand, which in turn is not unrelated to political affiliation. When the welfare state is construed as an object with a size, the size tends to be deemed excessive and growing in the conservative subcorpora, with the topos of burden in operation; in the Guardian, the size can be accepted as large but tends not to be considered excessive. building metaphors, often foregrounding the foundation of the welfare state, tend to work to legitimize components of the welfare state or policy goals (as consistent or not with the original design of the welfare state) or apportion credit to individuals or groups involved in its creation. They tend to have a personal focus in the conservative subcorpora, as establishment metaphors indicating a specific author prevail over construction ones focusing on the process of building; while both types are noted in the left-leaning subcorpora, collective authorship of the welfare state is also present. The figurative potential of machine metaphors is not substantially developed in the corpus, but what counts as a ‘broken’ welfare state varies depending on political affiliation. The construal of the welfare state as a person with traits tends to indicate a moral evaluation of certain outcomes of its operation, while the construal of milestone events as life stages is not creatively exploited, with the exception of its figurative death, the cause of which is elaborated in two cases. Unlike the model metaphors of the welfare state, which generally foreground the benefits-based welfare state, the highly conventional metaphors of the welfare state in this chapter are in general agnostic as to the delineation strategy. Still, the evaluation they confer on the welfare state will often hinge on this strategy, and in most, a benefits-based welfare state is in practice the context. Another contrasting factor is that, in principle at least, with the highly conventional metaphors the existence of the welfare state is a good thing, although its operations may be problematic. Calling for it to be abolished is mostly outside the Overton window (the range of views acceptable to the political mainstream) for this corpus. Model metaphors, in contrast, frequently convey a negative assessment of the welfare state.

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Conclusions: Constructing the welfare state – a safety net versus public services

The importance of boundaries Over seventy years after the Appointed Day and close to eighty years after Beveridge Report, the ‘beast’ of the welfare state  – as Timmins (2017:712) concluded – is ‘still alive’ and remains, if not explicitly so, an important part of the political debate in the UK. The exact nature of the beast, however, remains contested. Delineations of the welfare state, as shown in Chapter  2, reveal a dynamic understanding of what is (and what is not) counted as the welfare state. The benefits welfare state is very clearly the prevalent variant in the conservative newspapers, but it is hardly absent from the left-leaning subcorpora. In the pervasive discourse of welfare reform  – as produced by both Labour and Coalition governments, as well as the shadow Labour government during the Coalition years – the system of social security benefits is in fact the welfare state. Other public services – perhaps with the exception of personal social services, especially social care – are as often as not disarticulated from the welfare state. It therefore appears that Timmins is largely correct when he notes the following: Rather than talk about ‘the welfare state’, Labour split the concept apart. It talked on the one hand about ‘welfare’ and on the other about ‘public services’, by which it chiefly meant health and education. After 2010 Conservative politicians in particular took this further. They used ‘welfare’ with an even greater lack of precision than in Labour’s time. Timmins (2017:696)

Where this claim needs to be adjusted is that the split likely goes beyond (New) Labour’s time in office. The discourse analysed in this study does not catch its beginning, and it appears to be naturalized by 2008. Indeed, Jones and Lowe

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(2002:3) point out that ‘the term was surreptitiously narrowed down to the social security system’ as far back as in the 1980s and attribute this to influence from the United States. Nor is the split limited to the two main political parties, or at least not any longer: this study has shown instances where it is reproduced by progressive journalists or activists. The Mirror is the only subcorpus where the benefits welfare state is defended with some consistency, although this too is not without exceptions. The analysis of delineation brings into focus a consensus on the benefits welfare state between the two main political parties in the corpus timeframe: though the broader vision may vary, they share the view that it is deeply problematic, and at least partly agree why. The way the boundaries of the welfare state are delineated has contributed to this consensus and should no longer escape critical attention. In general, abstract and/or contested concepts of significance for the social reality deserve to have their boundaries examined: it follows from the dialectic relation between language and the social that such an examination may well be an essential step in social change.

The morality of less redistribution, more retribution The discourse of welfare reform entails a strongly negative evaluation of the benefits welfare state and is highly morally charged, more so in the case of the Coalition than Labour. The compressed arguments of fairness – particularly in its punitive version of just deserts – and of dependency typically entail a highly polarized view of society, divided into those deserving and undeserving of help. The latter group always comprises the beneficiaries of the social security system, stigmatized and castigated for their many moral shortcomings. The constructions of the welfare state in terms consistent with a morality based on punishment and reward spill beyond the conservative newspapers. The castigatory power of such constructions ranges from the welfare state being articulated as a form of rights and responsibilities to a costly white elephant standing in the way of axiological retribution. This discourse coincides with the hardening social attitudes to those who receive benefits (see Sefton 2009), the increasingly punitive ‘welfare’ policies of the Coalition government in the timeframe analysed, and the increasingly pernicious impact of these policies. Mills (2018) analyses what she terms ‘austerity suicides’, showing the literally deadly impact of the welfare reforms on individuals. The government’s own figures (see Quinn 2020) show that around 5,000 individuals whose social security payments were stopped had died before

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their case was reassessed. It is difficult not to see these developments as related to the discourse of welfare reform, as the vilification of the benefits welfare state and its recipients dovetails with the harsh policies aimed at curtailing the provision of support. While the evaluation of the services welfare state (the broadest variant – economic governance – is only marginally present in the discourse analysed) tends to be positive, it is (significantly) largely restricted to the left-leaning corpora. One example is the ‘welfare state defence’ – where the welfare state is assumed to be self-evidently good, and designating an element of social reality (e.g. legal aid) as its component constitutes an argument in support of that element. The persistence of this legitimation strategy and its limitation to the left-leaning subcorpora contrast with the prevalence of classical liberal discourses of the state and the enterprising self in the conservative newspapers, which often represent services as Big Government with all its attendant faults. This disconnection is a far cry from the time when, as Lowe (2005) notes, the NHS was virtually synonymous with the welfare state, and both enjoyed popular support. It also underscores the importance of bringing concept boundaries to attention and lays bare the need to deploy argumentation strategies less dependent on the pre-existing positive evaluation of the welfare state.

The potential of figurative models The metaphors of the welfare state, in particular its figurative models, analysed in this study are largely in concert with the discourse of welfare reform. This is especially evident in the desirability of the safety net as a model of the residual welfare state in government discourse and conservative newspapers. The models that stress the negative impact of the welfare state on its beneficiaries have a stronger presence in the conservative subcorpora but do seep into the leftleaning ones. This again reflects the imbalance in the sway the two sides of the political spectrum have over discourse in the sample analysed. This is all the more important since model metaphors have the potential to constitute highly persuasive conceptualizations, and as such can be powerful tools in political discourse. The well-recognized capacity of metaphors to highlight and obscure certain aspects of reality matters more when the metaphor has constitutive or explanatory value. Similarly, the entailments, presuppositions and inferences of metaphors are rich packages of connections with other concepts or scenarios. This facilitates the acceptance of certain outcomes or

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actions as commonsensical or natural. It follows that a metaphor can therefore act as a topos or compressed argument, providing a connection between the grounds and the claim. This, again, is all the more important when the metaphor constitutes a model for a concept that is contested or tricky to grasp: the construal of austerity as fiscal responsibility is one such case. A related point is that the delineations of the welfare state and the metaphors of the welfare state are relevant to the argumentation structures not just directly, via persuasive conceptualizations, but also indirectly in that both delineation strategies and many metaphors of the welfare state set a certain profile of its users. The benefits welfare state in particular, and the metaphors that foreground it, can facilitate a strongly negative assessment of the beneficiaries of the welfare state, which is highly problematic from a critical standpoint. Equally problematic is the absence from the discourse under analysis  – or indeed in general – of a metaphor of an inclusive, services-centred welfare state that would carry a positive evaluation (let  alone be widely used). This itself shows just how well entrenched the residual, benefits-centred model of the welfare state is in the British political discourse. There is, it appears, a gap in the British political imagination. The Swedish solution – folkhemmet, or the people’s home – shows that the gap is not in principle unbridgeable but depends on the political culture of the given discourse community.

The power to resist It should be noted, too, that there are many examples showing that metaphors of the welfare state, especially direct ones, can be and indeed are contested in the discourse analysed. Models can be openly rejected, and alternative ones proposed, such as the comfy sofa instead of the safety net. They can be extended or mixed, such as the destroyed or the cruel safety net. Metaphors can also be stretched in instances of mixed metaphors. This is not to argue against the importance of figurative models but rather for greater attention to political messaging and its reception. Perhaps more importantly, however, there are virtually no instances of the delineation strategies being overtly contested: the boundaries of the concept of welfare state are occasionally inconsistent within a text but are virtually never explicitly redrawn within in a single text under analysis. This is not in principle unimaginable, just like contesting a well-entrenched metaphor. That such a possibility is not utilized by Labour in claiming (or renouncing) the mantle of

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the ‘party of the welfare state’ perhaps attests to the extent of the pervasiveness of the benefits variant. Further, though the discourse under analysis has been produced by the media, much of it is in fact authored by politicians, especially those in power. They enjoy privileged access to the  – traditional at least  – channels through which discourse is reproduced, whether by writing in newspapers with a view to reaching higher audiences or being quoted by the media, often curators rather than producers of texts. One implication of this is the substantial power that political elites, especially governments, have over mainstream media discourse, and so over how elements of the political system – be it institutions or elements of social organization – come to be conceptualized and spoken of.

A bleak prospect for the future? The way the welfare state is constructed in the British press is, I believe, unlikely to substantially alter in the immediate future for this reason. The Conservatives went on to gain sole power in 2015, which they then retook in subsequent elections. The asymmetry in the market (and revenue) share, with the rightleaning conservative newspapers in the UK by far outselling the left-leaning ones, means the Telegraph and the Mail continue to articulate hegemonic discourses, including those of the welfare state. If anything, the enthusiastic support of conservative newspapers and their owners for Brexit and the increasing rejection of austerity by the general public will likely contribute to a further polarization of views on the welfare state. Recent – as of 2019 – developments, finally, are unlikely to lead in a substantial re-evaluation of the welfare state in the UK. The attitudes evident from the discourse analysed here point to a preference for a more contractual and residual form of social security, and the long-running policy of austerity has left public services starved of investments. Labour’s move to the Left after 2015 has altered the new consensus somewhat, but this has yet to have an impact on public policy. Further, as the UK left the European Union on 31 January 2020, the pressures of Brexit are not likely to bring relief to the welfare state. The possibility of opening up healthcare provision to US for-profit operators was brought up in the 2019 election campaign but did not become the defining issue of the election. Further, the expense incurred by leaving the EU is unlikely to induce the government to cease economizing on social security at least, if not on all public services. Given these developments, retaining optimism in the future welfare of ‘the beast’ takes some effort.

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Notes Introduction: What we talk about when we talk about the British welfare state 1 Spending on fraudulently claimed benefits accounted for as little as 0.7 per cent of total welfare spending in 2012–13 and was overestimated by the public as 24 per cent of this spending (see Cowburn 2016).

1  The contexts, the corpus and the assumptions in this study 1 Flora and Heidenheimer (1981) attribute the first recorded use of the term to Temple. 2 This typology has been the subject of some criticism, most notably for its oversight of the gender factor and the compression of the diversity of welfare states into too few types (see Cousins 2005, Arts and Gelissen 2010). It should also be noted that the types are idealized models, while existing welfare state are often complex hybrids of the types (see Arts and Gelissen 2010). 3 Given the clearly redistributive quality of the welfare state, it is not clear why quotes are applied around the term in White (2010). 4 See the discussion in Fraser and Gordon (1994) of dependency as a gender- and race-inflected notion predicated on the emergence of independence as an attribute of the waged (white and male) worker, setting him apart from his inferiors (the slave/the native/the single mother). 5 Germany is usually considered the first country to organize a recognizable welfare state, see Castles et al. (2010). 6 See Flora and Heidenheimer (1981a), Marr (2008) or Garland (2016), where the claim is accepted; Kuhnle and Sander (2010) note dissenting views. 7 A concise but comprehensive overview of the impact the Thatcher government had on the welfare state is offered in Hayward (2012). 8 The earlier edition is more emphatic, describing the levels of inequality as ‘unparalleled in postwar Western Europe’ (Lowe 1999:339). 9 However, Timmins (2018) already calls the 2012 NHS Act ‘dysfunctional’. 10 Reisigl (2011) has an extensive list of the different terms used in various sources to describe what was then broadly referred to as CDA.

190

Notes

11 An extensive overview of early relevant developments can be found in van Dijk (1985); other approaches to the study of discourse, particularly those not grounded in linguistics, are laid out in Mills (2004). 12 Conceptual metaphors and other elements of conceptual structure are indicated in small capitals. Elements of linguistic metaphors are designated as Topic (for the target expression) and Vehicle (for the source expression); mappings – whether one-off or more stable – that arguably do not qualify as conceptual metaphors are capitalized. 13 An earlier, more concise version of this argument was published in Paprota (2018), where I first propose the modification of the DHA repository. 14 I also make this point in Paprota (2018) and (2020).

2  Boundaries of the welfare state 1 This is also the case in many analyses within DHA, such as Triandafyllidou, Wodak and Krzyżanowski (2009), although the divergence is not elaborated on. 2 The title in italics identifies the subcorpus rather than the individual newspaper (here, the Telegraph subcorpus includes texts from The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph). 3 Both dependency and self-reliance are parts of the argument, but self-reliance is normally elided from it. 4 PIP replaced the Disability Living Allowance. 5 Indeed, the construal of benefits as an unfair advantage has been mentioned as a feature distinguishing Coalition from New Labour in this respect (see Daguerre and Etherington 2014). 6 See Chapter 1; as of 2019, the Universal Credit is still behind schedule and subject to extensive criticism, see Timmins (2017). 7 For the sources and copyright statements of these brief quotations from corpus articles, see the list of ‘Shorter quotations not numbered in the main text’. 8 See e.g. Baumberg et al. (2012), Skeggs (2004) or Paprota (2015) for analyses of the stigma associated with benefit receipt. 9 This transcript is misattributed to Labour leader Ed Miliband in an unspecified TV broadcast in Garland (2016:3).

3  What the welfare state is: Figurative models of the welfare state 1 The BNC was accessed via SketchEngine, Kilgarriff et al. (2014).

Notes 191 2 The address only appears to be direct; the actual audience comprises Telegraph, not Guardian, readers. 3 Notably, an almost identical claim – ‘[w]‌elfare should be a safety net, not a way of life’ – is noted in Simon Heffer’s column and recurs almost verbatim in his 2012 column after his move to the Mail. This particular combination of figurative models is, however, common across the conservative subcorpora and indeed conservative discourse – the 2012 column in fact paraphrases a speech also by Iain Duncan Smith. 4 While the benefits system as the welfare state is not analysed as a metonymy here, the recourse to it is in principle classifiable as such.

4  What the welfare state is: Other metaphors of the welfare state 1 I also discuss these in Paprota (2018). 2 I analyse the figurative conceptualizations of the designers of the welfare state in Paprota (2018), where I first propose the topos of original design. 3 Interestingly, these words are uttered by Rachel Reeves MP (see Section 2.3.2 in Chapter 2), following the unfavourable reaction to her comments on Labour and the welfare state. 4 The Mail’s description of the welfare state as ‘cowardly’ (‘the welfare state – inefficient, overblown, disempowering and cowardly – is to blame [for the death of Richard Damilola]’, Brown, Mail 2012) is difficult to interpret with little data to go on and is perhaps best accounted for as yet another in a string of mixed metaphors and literal attributes that conveys a strong criticism of the welfare state.

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Williams, R. (1988). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana Press. Wintour, P. (2013, 1 April). The day Britain changes: Welfare reforms and coalition cuts take effect. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2013/mar/31/liberal-conservative-coalition-conservatives. https://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/10/london-olympic-opening-ceremony-team-wasput-under-political-pre/. Accessed on 1 December 2019. Wodak, R. (2001a). The discourse-historical approach. In: Wodak, R., and Meyer, M. (eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, 63–94. London: Sage. Wodak, R. (2001b). What CDA is about – A summary of its history, important concepts and its developments. In: Wodak, R., and Meyer, M. (eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, 1–13. London: Sage. Wodak, R. (2015). Critical discourse analysis, discourse-historical approach. In: Tracy, K., Ilie, C., and Sandel, T. (eds), The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, 275–88. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Žagar, I. (2010). Topoi in critical discourse analysis. Łódź Papers in Pragmatics, 6(1), 3–27. doi: 10.2478/v10016-010-0002-1.

204

Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text Extended excerpts numbered in the main text.

Excerpts in the Telegraph subcorpus (copyright Telegraph Media Group Ltd.) 2.1 (Andrew Porter, ‘Millions forced to work in benefits shake-up’, The Daily Telegraph, 27 February 2008). 2.2 (Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson, ‘Welfare? It’s a mess that no one can manage’, The Daily Telegraph, 2 February 2008). 2.7 (Simon Heffer, ‘Things wouldn’t be so bad now if we had listened to Frank Field’, The Daily Telegraph, 23 July 2008). 2.8 (Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson, ‘Welfare? It’s a mess that no one can manage’, The Daily Telegraph, 2 February 2008). 2.9 (Edmund Conway, ‘How do they get out of this mess?’, The Sunday Telegraph, 6 June 2010). 2.10 (George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith, ‘We’re fixing the benefits system, and living a better deal to those in work’, The Daily Telegraph, 1 April 2013). 2.12 (Iain Duncan Smith, ‘It’s time to take the benefit system back to Beveridge’s original vision’, The Daily Telegraph, 1 December 2012). 2.16 (Peter Dominczak, ‘IDS: We’ve reversed the boom in’s benefits’, The Daily Telegraph, 4 February 2015). 2.17 (Janet Daily, ‘A moment of truth on the welfare state’, The Daily Telegraph, 13 January 2013). 2.18, 2.19, 2.20 (Bruce Anderson, ‘Miliband has no answer to IDS the dragon-slyer’, The Sunday Telegraph, 10 November 2013). 2.21 (Jeremy Warner, ‘On welfare, IDS is the heir to Gordon Brown. Mr Duncan Smith’s reforms mark the final nail in the coffin for the contributory principle’, The Daily Telegraph, 5 April 2013). 2.34 (Peter Dominczak, Robert Winnett, ‘Osborne: why should state fund people like Philpott? The debate beings on benefits’, The Daily Telegraph, 5 April 2013).

206

Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text

2.35 (Peter Oborne, ‘Osborne can’t claim credit for IDS’s virtuous reforms. The energy and radicalism in welfare policy have nothing to do with the Treasury and everything to do with Iain Duncan Smith’s moral vision’, The Sunday Telegraph, 7 April 2013). 2.42 (James Bartholomew, ‘Let’s stop pretending we’re top of the world. There is a conspiracy among politicians and broadcasters not to mention the really important issues facing Britain’, The Daily Telegraph, 10 April 2015). 2.46 (Janet Daley, ‘Blair’s project was always destined to fail’, The Sunday Telegraph, 4 April 2010). 2.47 (Peter Oborne, ‘Osborne can’t claim credit for IDS’s virtuous reforms. The energy and radicalism in welfare policy have nothing to do with the Treasury and everything to do with Iain Duncan Smith’s moral vision’, The Sunday Telegraph, 7 April 2013). 3.12 (Max Pemberton, ‘I see ‘Benefits Street’ every day’, The Daily Telegraph, 20 January 2012). 3.15 (Brendan O’Neill, ‘The Left appears to think welfare reform is sacrilegious – but to the dismay of hand-wringing commentators, those trapped on benefits take a different view’, The Daily Telegraph, 3 April 2013). 3.20 (Iain Duncan Smith, ‘Our welfare reform are just the beginning’, The Daily Telegraph, 6 April 2014). 3.27 (Bruce Anderson, ‘Only Cameron has the guts to tackle the welfare aristocrats’, The Sunday Telegraph, 11 April 2010). 3.39 (Simon Heffer, ‘The trouble with Labour is that they never grasp the consequences’, The Daily Telegraph, 12 August 2009). 3.40 (Simon Heffer, ‘The real culprit behind this wave of youth crime is the welfare state’, The Daily Telegraph, 28 May 2008). 4.3 (Irwin Steltzer, ‘Don’t dismiss our special relationship’, The Daily Telegraph, 10 September 2009). 4.8 (James Bartholomew, ‘Let’s stop pretending we’re top of the world. There is a conspiracy among politicians and broadcasters not to mention the really important issues facing Britain’, The Daily Telegraph, 10 April 2015). 4.12 (George Watson, ‘Beveridge, a reluctant hero Labour leaders fought hard against the recommendations that led to the welfare state, says George Watson’, The Daily Telegraph, 28 June 2008). 4.24 (Alasdair Palmer, ‘We can’t rely on magic to sort out the welfare state’, The Sunday Telegraph, 23 September 2012).



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207

4.25 (Laura Donnelly, ‘Lazy lifestyle can be as deadly as smoking. Move the clocks forward to keep children fit, says study’, The Daily Telegraph, 24 October 2014). 4.26 (Mary Riddell, ‘Will Cameron slot in the missing piece of Beveridge’s jigsaw? At last, the Coalition is poised to end the dithering over properly funded social care’, The Daily Telegraph, 28 November 2012). 4.38 (John Bingham, ‘Poor suffer while rich escape in welfare reforms, says Church’, The Daily Telegraph, 23 June, 2013).

Excerpts in the Mail subcorpus (copyright Associated Newspapers Ltd.) 2.3 (James Purnell, ‘There is nothing Left-wing about expecting everyone else to pay for people who simply don’t want to work’, Mail on Sunday, 20 July 2008). 2.4 (no byline, ‘Carrots, sticks and the welfare trap’, The Daily Mail, 22 July 2008). 2.13 and 2.14 (James Chapman, ‘War on Sicknote Britain’, The Daily Mail, 17 February 2011). 2.15 (James Chapman, ‘You’re all talking rubbish, Osborne tells Labour critics’, The Daily Mail, 3 April 2013). 2.36 (Simon Heffer, ‘If the Tories win the debate they can win the election’, The Daily Mail, 6 April 2013). 2.41 (no byline, ‘We have had 50 years of the carrot. Now it’s time for some stick’, The Daily Mail, 14 August 2011). 2.43 (Melanie Phillips, ‘From Baby P to this hospital of horrors, the welfare state is protecting callous and incompetent staff ’, The Daily Mail, 7 January 2013). 2.48 (Peter Oborne, ‘Where’s Maggie when we need her?’, The Daily Mail, 2 May 2009). 2.49 (Peter McKay, ‘The Peter McKay column’, The Daily Mail, 1 April 2013). 3.1 and 3.2 (Sam Greenhill, Nick Fagge and Jason Groves, ‘The child star of the Labour conference and the truth behind his ‘life of poverty’, The Daily Mail, 28 September 2011). 3.9 (Simon Heffer, ‘If the Tories win the debate they can win the election’, The Daily Mail, 6 April 2013).

208

Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text

3.13 and 3.29 (Max Pemberton, ‘I’m a socialist but, as an NHS doctor, I know Benefits Street is telling the truth about lazy welfare cheats’, The Daily Mail, 22 January 2012). 3.16 (Nadhim Zahawi, ‘If she can’t afford a third child, why should you foot the bill?’, Mail on Sunday, 15 December 2013). 3.21 (Baroness Flather, ‘Polygamy, welfare benefits and insidious silence’, The Daily Mail, 16 September 2011). 3.22 (Simon Walters, ‘Blunkett set to join Tory war on dole cheats’, Mail on Sunday, 15 August 2010). 3.23 (Sarah Vine, ‘The Sarah Vine column’, The Daily Mail, 25 February 2015). 3.30 and 3.32 (Melanie Phillips, ‘It’s not just absent fathers, Mr Cameron. Family breakdown is driven’, The Daily Mail, 20 June 2011). 3.31 (James Bartholomew, ‘How the welfare state wrecked marriage’, The Daily Mail, 18 November 2014). 3.33 (David Green, ‘Anti-Tory! Anti-family! Anti-success!’, The Daily Mail, 20 March 2012). 3.34 (Steve Doughty, ‘Strong families make successful children … Not the nanny state’, The Daily Mail, 19 May 2012). 3.36 (Daniel Hannan, ‘No, comrades. Welfare reform isn’t about hurting poor people. It’s about trying to make them richer’, The Daily Mail, 2 April 2013). 3.38 (Peter Hitchens, ‘The Labour elite’s secret problem … They can’t stand the working class’, Mail on Sunday, 18 August 2013). 4.1 (Peter McKay, ‘The Peter McKay column’, The Daily Mail, 1 April 2013). 4.4 (Jason Groves, ‘Welfare state has ballooned to over 12 times its original size’, The Daily Mail, 1 December 2012). 4.5 (Tom Utley, ‘I’m the laziest man on earth. But when my boss offered to slash my hours it taught me a lot about the work ethic’, The Daily Mail, 9 October 2009). 4.9 (no byline, ‘Mail on Sunday comments’, Mail on Sunday, 11 July 2010). 4.10 (Peter Hitchens, ‘Police water cannon and plastic bullets? After 50 years of the most lavish welfare state on Earth? What an abject failure’, Mail on Sunday, 14 August 2011). 4.11 (Peter Oborne, ‘This is what Cameron believes in’, The Daily Mail, 1 April 2010). 4.15 (Dominic Sandbrook, ‘Why Britain’s fallen out of love with the welfare state’, The Daily Mail, 3 March 2012).



Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text

209

4.29 (David Kynaston, ‘Indecent and crude! When even Cliff was branded a moral danger’, The Daily Mail, 12 June 2013). 4.32 (Melanie Phillips, ‘A noble idea. But if it fails, it’ll just be a big embarrassment’, The Daily Mail, 15 February 2011). 4.33 (Andrew Alexander, ‘We all pick up the bill for benefits folly’, The Daily Mail, 16 January 2013).

Excerpts in the Guardian subcorpus (copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited) 2.5 (no byline, ‘Drug users set to lose benefits if they refuse treatment’, The Guardian, 21 July 2008). 2.6 (Neal Lawson, Mark Serwotka, Paul Kenny, Sally Hunt, Colin Hampton, Eileen Devaney, Iman Achara, Peter Kelly and 24 others, ‘Your letters: Welfare reforms have whiff of the workhouse’, The Guardian, 30 November 2008). 2.11 (Esther McVey, ‘At last a fair welfare state: The government’s benefit shake-up will make work pay while continuing to protect the vulnerable’, The Guardian, 3 April 2013). 2.22 (Liam Byrne, ‘Beveridge for this century: Labour won’t win on welfare reform by default. We need another tough-minded social revolution’, The Guardian, 3 January 2012). 2.23 (Patrick Wintour, ‘Labour urges radical rethink on welfare’, The Guardian, 3 January 2013). 2.24 and 2.25 (Will Hutton, ‘We deserve a fair society, but it won’t be created by a vendetta against the poor’, The Observer, 10 October 2010). 2.26 (Dan Silver, ‘Our welfare state is being transformed under false pretences’, The Guardian, 22 January 2013). 2.30 (Madeleine Bunting, ‘Labour’s handling of legal aid makes a mockery of its rhetoric on fairness: It’s the poorest who suffer as new crimes, terrorism cases, and clampdowns on lawyers’ fees eat into our legal budget’, The Guardian, 10 March 2008). 2.31 (Jonathan Freedland, ‘The legal aid cuts need full-blooded opposition, not mere tinkering: Sacked unfairly? Evicted? Child with special needs? Access to justice will soon be denied to all but those with money’, The Guardian, 17 November 2010).

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Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text

2.32 (Michael Chessum, ‘It’s not just education: we’re defending the welfare state: Our protest tomorrow could mark the beginning of a month of resistance that finally breaks this government’s agenda’, The Guardian, 8 November 2011). 2.33 (Seumas Milne, ‘A people power fraud that promises mass privatisation: The reality of Tory Big Society rhetoric will be corporate control of schools and the breakup of the welfare state’, The Guardian, 15 April 2010). 2.37 (no byline, ‘From welfare to banks, fairness is the key’, The Observer, 7 April 2013). 2.38 (Toby Helm and Daniel Boffey, ‘Labour plans radical shift over welfare state payouts: Pay in to get more back, says Byrne: Bid to shift debate to high earners’, The Observer, 7 April 2013). 2.44 (Richard Seymour, ‘BBC austerity survey: why the public is wrong this time’, The Guardian, 9 October 2013). 2.45 (Francis Beckett, ‘The grasping generation: The baby boomers are denying everyone else the freedoms that they once took for granted’, The Guardian, 6 July 2010). 2.50 (Tim Bale, ‘Labour and welfare: unfinished business from the Beveridge era’, The Guardian, 18 April 2013). 2.51 (Amelia Gentleman, ‘Labour vows to reduce reliance on food banks if it comes to power. Shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves blames benefits delays and welfare sanctions for an increase in food bank use’, The Guardian, 17 March 2015). 2.52 (Simon Bowers, ‘Special report: Icelandic crisis’, The Guardian, 28 September 2009). 2.55 (Ha-Joon Chang, ‘The right direction: While some say Red Ed is lurching left, the labels left and right have little meaning in today’s world’, The Guardian, 4 October 2010). 3.3 and 4.37 (Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘The Welfare State, 1942–2013 Obituary: after decades of public illness, Beveridge’s most famous offspring has died’, The Guardian, 8 January 2013). 3.4 (Suzanne Moore, ‘In the tawdry benefits debate, not one politician is making the case for our moral obligation to each other – so allow me’, The Guardian, 6 Feb 2014). 3.5 (Kate Green, ‘Food banks are a symptom of failure’, The Guardian, 25 August 2012).



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3.6 (Patrick Butler, ‘DWP and food bank referrals: “a way to keep your job but salve your conscience” ’, The Guardian, 17 March 2014). 3.7 (Stuart Jeffries, ‘With God’s army: The Salvation Army might seem like a throwback to the Victorian age, playing carols in military uniform. But it is now the largest provider of social care after the government’, The Guardian, 17 December 2008). 3.8 (Patrick Butler, ‘A question of responsibility: The director of food bank charity the Trussell Trust is adamant it will not become an arm of the welfare system’, The Guardian, 19 September 2012). 3.10 (Tim Horton, ‘Solidarity, not sympathy: The change to universal benefits will leave those on low income reliant on the charity of high earners’, The Guardian, 6 October 2010). 3.11 (Andrew Sparrow, ‘David Cameron on cutting welfare benefits: Politics live blog’, The Guardian, 25 June 2012). 3.17 (Jenni Russell, ‘We must dare to rethink the welfare that benefits no one: The left has long been blind to the dependency culture that deters adults from flexible work and damages their children’, The Guardian, 21 November 2008). 3.18 (Madeleine Bunting, ‘Red Tory intrigues and infuriates’, The Guardian, 30 March 2010). 3.19 (Esther McVey, ‘At last a fair welfare state: The government’s benefit shake-up will make work pay while continuing to protect the vulnerable’, The Guardian, 3 April 2013). 3.24 (Hannah Fearn, ‘Must do better: reflections on a disappointing year for housing’, The Guardian, 20 December 2013). 3.25 (Owen Hatherley, ‘Owen Hatherley on England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage, the book that compelled him to move to London’, The Guardian, 6 August 2014). 3.26 (Mary O’Hara, ‘Britain’s welfare state is not about dependency: it’s about opportunity’, The Guardian, 28 May 2014). 3.28 (William W. Clark, ‘Creating positive outcomes through social work services: Tackling cancer poverty’, The Guardian, 4 June 2009). 3.35 (Randeep Ramesh, ‘The welfare reform bill is the biggest benefits shake-up in 60 years’, The Guardian, 1 September 2011). 3.37 (Henry Porter, ‘Say no to a bus pass if you have any conscience’, The Guardian, 13 January 2013). 3.41 (no byline, ‘Welfare state: Miliband can strike a blow for social equity’, The Observer, 9 December 2012).

212

Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text

4.2 (Polly Toynbee, ‘Only the state can provide the care we need in old age: It’s an inconvenient truth for George Osborne but the numbers don’t lie: privately we can’t afford to look after ourselves’, The Guardian, 10 July 2012). 4.6 (Nicholas Watt, ‘Welfare: Nasty, cynical and divisive – Labour’s verdict on Osborne’, The Guardian, 6 April 2013). 4.7 (Frank Field, ‘Supporting low-income parents early on will improve children’s life chances’, The Guardian, 17 February 2015). 4.13 (Andrew Sparrow and Paul Owen, ‘Labour party conference live – Tuesday 27 September 2011’, The Guardian, 27 September 2011). 4.14 (David Freud, ‘The coalition’s reforms will make the benefits system work better’, The Guardian, 21 June 2012). 4.16 (Dan Hancox, ‘While Britain rails against the government, the music world remains silent’, The Guardian, 8 December 2010). 4.17 (Heather Stewart, ‘Osborne has murdered compassionate conservatism’, The Observer, 9 December 2012). 4.18 (Gillian Guy, ‘Second thoughts: Osborne must pass the acid test on universal credit, says Gillian Guy’, The Guardian, 28 November 2012). 4.19 (no byline, ‘Osbornism holds sway. It needs a bold response’, The Observer, 23 March 2014). 4.22 (David Brindle, ‘Welfare reform: Pillar of the welfare state in 1942: How it developed’, The Guardian, 5 October 2010). 4.27 (Kenan Malik, ‘Immigration is not the problem’, The Guardian, 12 December 2013). 4.28 (Letters, ‘Syriza voters reject the rule of the markets’, The Guardian, 26 January 2015). 4.31 (Richard Seymour, ‘BBC austerity survey: why the public is wrong this time’, The Guardian, 9 October 2013). 4.34 (Michael Chessum, ‘Students are following the Occupy LSX movement to the City’, The Guardian, 17 October 2011). 4.36 (no byline, ‘The Observer files this week in 1983’, The Observer, 19 February 2012).

Excerpts in the Mirror subcorpus (copyright MGN Ltd.) 2.27 (Paul Routledge, ‘Cam’s words of no benefit for young. Tell that to the young people of today … and they won’t believe you’, The Daily Mirror, 4 October 2013).



Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text

213

2.28 (Paul Routledge, ‘Cameron’s slashing welfare safety net’, The Daily Mirror, 20 February 2015). 2.29 (Tony Parsons, ‘Sorry Mum, it’s time to scrap child benefit’, The Daily Mirror, 9 October 2010). 2.39 (Carole Malone, ‘Dad of 40 is a gift to benefit bashers’, The Sunday Mirror, 5 April 2015). 2.40 (Ross Wynne-Jones, ‘Out on the street: Victims of the broken safety net’, The Daily Mirror, 16 July 2014). 2.53 (Paul Routledge, ‘Slasher Smith and the Tory benefits lie’, The Daily Mirror, 4 January 2013). 2.54 (no byline, ‘Tories offer undiluted Thatcherism’, The Daily Mirror, 18 August 2010). 3.1 (Jason Beattie, ‘Rory points the way to future’, The Daily Mirror, 27 September 2011). 3.14 (Tony Parsons, ‘Welfare state lets fat birds feather their nest’, The Daily Mirror, 25 December 2010). 4.20 (Tony Parsons, ‘It’s right … so fight’, The Daily Mirror, 23 April 2011). 4.21 (Tony Parsons, ‘Sorry Mum, it’s time to scrap child benefit’, The Daily Mirror, 9 October 2010). 4.23 (Bob Roberts, ‘Tories are declaring class war. Axe for 38,000 school jobs’, The Daily Mirror, 26 April 2010). 4.30 (Ros Wynne-Jones, ‘Ed told to remember the spirit of ‘45 that built NHS’, The Daily Mirror, 24 September 2014). 4.35 (Ros Wynne-Jones, ‘Cam’s cuts mean one law for rich, another for poor’, The Daily Mirror, 8 January 2014). And all other quotations from the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror: 

Shorter quotations not numbered in the main text (in the order in which they appear in each section) Texts in the Telegraph subcorpus (copyright Telegraph Media Group Ltd.) Section 2.1.2.2 Andrew Porter, ‘Families benefits will be capped at £26,000’, The Daily Telegraph, 5 October 2010.

214

Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text

Tim Ross, ‘Church must not preach about welfare, say MPs’, The Daily Telegraph, 16 February 2014. Section 2.3.1 Peter Oborne, ‘In every area of our public life, the Left is losing the argument. The facts of life are Conservative – as Labour’s smartest minds now realise’, The Daily Telegraph, 5 January 2012. Section 3.2.1 Iain Duncan Smith, ‘It’s time to take the benefit system back to Beveridge’s original vision’, The Daily Telegraph, 1 December 2012. Peter Dominczak, Claire Carter, ‘Tories to unveil work-for-dole policy’, The Daily Telegraph, 27 September 2013. Section 3.2.2 Max Pemberton, ‘IDS has made a smart choice to help addicts’, The Daily Telegraph, 6 October 2014. Section 4.1.1 Janet Daley, ‘Big government is dead – what do we do now?’, The Daily Telegraph, 7 November 2010. Allister Heath, ‘Voters have had enough of bloated governments failing to pull their weight’, The Daily Telegraph, 21 May 2014. Janet Daley, ‘Niceness is our real problem, not nastiness’, The Sunday Telegraph, 1 December 2013. Section 4.1.1.1 Philip Johnston, ‘From pension to pittance in 100 years’, The Daily Telegraph, 3 January 2009. Section 4.1.1.2 Matthew d’Ancona, ‘Mr Miliband is no iBlair nano and he has to show it’, The Sunday Telegraph, 10 August 2008. Mary Riddell, ‘Labour’s modern Magna Carta has to seal the deal with voters’, The Daily Telegraph, 18 June 2014. Fraser Nelson, ‘Miliband’s welfare plan shows he’s not ready for high office’, The Daily Telegraph, 20 June 2014. Noel Malcolm, ‘Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt: review’, The Sunday Telegraph, 28 March 2010. Charles Moore, ‘A fantasy history of ’45 that misses the point’, The Daily Telegraph, 25 March 2013.



Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text

215

Section 4.2.1 Mary Riddell, ‘Can the Iron Eds discover a touch of Clement Attlee's steel?’, The Daily Telegraph, 5 June 2013. Damian Reece, ‘Welfare state could be the real loser from Britain’s debt crisis’, The Daily Telegraph, 23 April 2010. Section 4.2.2 David Chazan, ‘French professionals refuse to pay into ‘sick’ national health service’, The Daily Telegraph, 10 October 2014. Simon Heffer, ‘Miliband wrecks his reputation by siding with the criminal class’, The Daily Telegraph, 30 March 2011. Roger Bootle, ‘The best thing the state can do for growth is to go away’, The Daily Telegraph, 20 October 2014. Anthony Daniels, ‘Food banks are simply feeding the problem’, The Daily Telegraph, 1 June 2013. Peter Oborne, ‘Osborne can’t claim credit for IDS’s virtuous reforms. The energy and radicalism in welfare policy have nothing to do with the Treasury and everything to do with Iain Duncan Smith’s moral vision’, The Sunday Telegraph, 7 April 2013.

Texts in the Mail subcorpus (copyright Associated Newspapers Ltd.) Section 2.3.1 Peter Hitchens, ‘The Peter Hitchens column’, The Mail on Sunday, 2 October 2011. Section 3.5 Steve Doughty, ‘Strong families make successful children … Not the nanny state’, The Daily Mail, 19 May 2012. Section 3.8 Becky Barrow, Simon Duke, ‘57 per cent pay rises at Goldmans’, The Daily Mail, 22 January 2010. Steve Doughty, ‘Benefits “wrecked British work ethic” ’, The Daily Mail, 8 October 2009. Section 4.1.1 Jason Groves, ‘Welfare state has ballooned to over 12 times its original size’, The Daily Mail, 1 December 2012.

216

Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text

Tom Utley, ‘I’m the laziest man on earth. But when my boss offered to slash my hours it taught me a lot about the work ethic’, The Daily Mail, 9 October 2009. William Rees-Mogg, ‘If it’s Harvard we want, we’ll have to pay up’, The Mail on Sunday, 17 October 2010. Stephen Glover, ‘I never thought I’d say this, but I agree with the Cleggster. Benefits for rich pensioners are bonkers’, The Daily Mail, 10 January 2013. Section 4.1.1.1 Tony Hazell, ‘UK pensioners are the poor relations’, The Daily Mail, 30 July 2008. Section 4.1.1.2 Peter Oborne, ‘On politics and power’, The Daily Mail, 29 May 2010. Nancy Dell’Olio, ‘Gordon is fantastico. But Peter Mandelson… That’s amore!’, The Mail on Sunday, 27 September 2009. Section 4.2.1 Dominic Sandbrook, ‘One giant of a man’, The Daily Mail, 19 June 2009. Tom Utley, ‘No one wants a wrinkly. But sorry, darling sons, if I make it to my dotage you’ll be waiting on me hand and foot’, The Daily Mail, 5 February 2010. Section 4.2.2 Ruth Dudley Edwards, ‘How can we call ourselves civilised when we reward the feckless – yet punish the old for a lifetime of prudence?’, The Daily Mail, 20 August 2009. No byline, ‘Letters: Perverted welfare state kills ambition’, The Daily Mail, 1 February 2009. James Bartholomew, ‘How the welfare state wrecked marriage’, The Daily Mail, 18 November 2014. Peter Oborne, ‘The welfare system is testimony to our caring society, but politicians have turned into a monster that is slowly destroying Britain’, The Daily Mail, 30 December 2008. Matthew Hickley, ‘Jobs dry up but Poles stay to reap the benefits’, The Daily Mail, 8 January 2009. Craig Brown, ‘Craig Brown’s book of the week: Harriet and the Hoodies’, The Mail on Sunday, 15 July 2012.



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217

Texts in the Guardian subcorpus (copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited) Section 2.1.4 Jon Robins, ‘Access to justice is a fine concept. What does it mean in view of cuts to legal aid?’, The Guardian, 6 October 2011. Section 2.3.2 Ken Loach, Kate Hudson and Gilbert Achcar, ‘The Labour party has failed us. We need a new party of the left’, The Guardian, 25 March 2013. Section 2.3.3 Jonathan Jones, ‘The arts will survive cuts. Some people will struggle to’, The Guardian, 20 October 2010. Hazel Davies, ‘Letter: Electoral lessons for the Lib Dems and Labour’, The Guardian, 7 May 2011. Section 3.2.2.4 Mary Brown, ‘Coalition should zero in on the real issue of unfair work contracts’, The Guardian, 4 April 2013. Section 3.3 Randeep Ramesh, ‘Benefits axe falls on disabled judged capable of work: This week 70,000 seriously ill people will lose their £99-a-week allowance’, The Guardian, 30 April 2012. Ian Traynor, ‘€110bn aid deal agreed to stop Greek meltdown’, The Guardian, 3 May 2010. Section 3.5 Randeep Ramesh, ‘Universal credit: The most significant shakeup for 60 years’, The Guardian, 18 February 2011 Costas Douzinas, ‘Does the left still care about liberty?’, The Guardian, 21 May 2009. Section 4.1 Alison Benjamin, ‘Interview with David Brady: A wider view of the welfare state: Targeting benefits at the very poorest people won’t effectively reduce poverty, says the US sociologist’, The Guardian, 21 March 2012. Michael Chessum, ‘Students must act, or watch university privatisation become irreversible’, The Guardian, 11 February 2013.

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Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text

Section 4.1.1 Madeleine Bunting, ‘Brazil's cash transfer scheme is improving the lives of the poorest’, The Guardian, 19 November 2010. Kenan Malik, ‘Immigration is not the problem’, The Guardian, 12 December 2013. Simon Jenkins, ‘In the name of purity, public funds are wasted on the rich: From IVF to universities and museums, Britain's aversion to charging for services punishes women, students and the poor’, The Guardian, 25 August 2010. Ha-Joon Chang, ‘Anti-capitalist? Too simple. Occupy can be the catalyst for a radical rethink’, The Guardian, 16 November 2011. Ha-Joon Chang, ‘Welfare myths, not costs, are out of control: Specious ideas about generous British benefits have hijacked a debate that should be about economic growth’, The Guardian, 28 March 2014. Randeep Ramesh, ‘Drugs: Bigger welfare state “the way to help addicts” ’, The Guardian, 3 November 2010. Section 4.1.1.1 Miguel Bonasso, ‘Argentina is no paradise: Ten years after I saw this country plunged into crisis, government claims of recovery don't add up’, The Guardian, 20 December 2011. Alistair Darling, ‘Why Scotland should stay a partner in the United Kingdom’, The Guardian, 27 June 2012. Richard Orange, ‘Moses... Millwall... Rommel... glimpses inside the mind of the far-right Finn’, The Guardian, 13 November 2011. Tania Branigan, ‘China's leadership transition: Healthcare, pensions and, yes, free lunches ... was this a golden decade for rural poor?’, The Guardian, 6 November 2012. David Edgar, ‘Review: With friends like these…’, The Guardian, 19 April 2008. Costas Douzinas, ‘Does the left still care about liberty?’, The Guardian, 21 May 2009. Deborah Orr, ‘It's a fantasy that growth will go on for ever’, The Guardian, 6 January 2011. Michael Chessum, Daniel Cooper, Leander Jones, and 12 others, ‘Letter: Students return to the streets to demand radical alternatives’, The Guardian, 21 November 2012. Yvonne Roberts, ‘The spirit of ’45: Where did it go?’, The Observer, 3 March 2013.



Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text

219

Section 4.1.1.2 Jay Rayner, ‘Sharp rise in demand for handouts of free food’, The Observer, 2 October 2011. Toby Helm, ‘Labour policy report calls for radical reform of the welfare state’, The Observer, 15 June 2014. Alan Travis, ‘Thatcher’s role in plan to dismantle welfare state revealed’, The Guardian, 28 December 2012. John McDonnell, ‘Labour has forgotten the poor’, The Guardian, 15 September 2009. Ken Loach, Kate Hudson and Gilbert Achcar, ‘The Labour party has failed us. We need a new party of the left’, The Guardian, 25 March 2013. Section 4.2.1 Anushka Asthana, Toby Helm, Paul Harris, ‘How Britain’s welfare state was born in the USA’, The Observer, 7 November 2010. Francis Beckett, ‘The grasping generation: The baby boomers are denying everyone else the freedoms that they once took for granted’, The Guardian, 6 July 2010. Section 4.2.2 Jay Rayner, ‘Food bank Britain: life below the line’. The Observer, 18 August 2013. David Goodhart, ‘Do we need more people in Europe?’, The Observer, 17 May 2009. John Carvel, ‘Welfare: Generous benefits do not make people workshy’, The Guardian, 28 January 2009. No byline, ‘World factfiles, day two: Burundi to Eritrea: Denmark’, The Guardian, 20 April 2009. Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘Do humans have a role in the robot wars of the future?’, The Guardian, 11 July 2011. Ha-Joon Chang, ‘Welfare myths, not costs, are out of control: Specious ideas about generous British benefits have hijacked a debate that should be about economic growth’, The Guardian, 28 March 2014. William W. Clark, ‘Creating positive outcomes through social work services: Tackling cancer poverty’, The Guardian, 4 June 2009. Tristram Hunt, ‘The politics of protest matter’, The Guardian, 28 March 2011. Jan Kandiyali, ‘Letter: Big issues for Cameron’s big society’, The Guardian, 21 July 2010.

220

Excerpts Quoted in the Main Text

Texts in the Mirror subcorpus (copyright MGN Ltd.) Section 2.1.4 Tom McTague, ‘For Sale: Britain. Cam to flog off our public services’, The Daily Mirror, 12 July 2011. Section 2.2.1 Paul Routledge, ‘We’ll all benefit by telling our stories’, The Daily Mirror, 11 October 2013. No byline, ‘Osborne “exploiting deaths of six kids” ’, The Daily Mirror, 5 April 2013. Section 2.3.2 Kevin Maguire, ‘Tories’ dirty work’, The Daily Mirror, 4 January 2012. Section 3.2.1 No byline, ‘Tories on the attack’, The Daily Mirror, 5 October 2010. Jason Beattie, Danny Buckland, ‘War on the poor’, The Daily Mirror, 1 April 2013. Jack Monroe, ‘We need a budget to end the scandal of UK hunger’, The Daily Mirror, 25 February 2014. Section 4.1.1.1 Lord Reid, ‘Stronger together: the brains of Britain. United we built NHS and welfare state – beacons to all the world’, The Daily Mirror, 17 September 2014. No byline, ‘Voice of the Daily Mirror: The poor and aged need help’, The Daily Mirror, 15 April 2008. Jason Beattie, Danny Buckland, ‘War on the poor’, The Daily Mirror, 1 April 2013. No byline, ‘Five-point plan to put an end to Foodbank Britain’, The Daily Mail, 25 March 2015. Tony Parsons, ‘It’s right – so fight’, The Daily Mirror, 23 April 2011. Section 4.1.1.2 No byline, ‘Tories on the attack’, The Daily Mirror, 5 October 2010. No byline, ‘Tories offer undiluted Thatcherism’, The Daily Mirror, 18 August 2010. Section 4.2.1 Tristram Hunt, ‘70 years ago we had soup kitchens… today food banks. We need to go back to Beveridge’, The Daily Mirror, 1 December 2012. Section 4.2.2 Tony Parsons, ‘Sorry Mum, it’s time to scrap child benefit’, The Daily Mirror, 9 October 2010.

Index agency 49, 57, 59, 85, 88, 113–7, 127, 131, 138, 155, 174, 178; and structure 85; Agency is Motion 117, 138 assistance is support conceptual metaphor 122, 138 Attlee, Clement 13, 17, 71, 87, 105, 175, 214 bedroom tax 21, 39, 53, 55, 61, 66 benefit(s) cap 21, 53, 55–6, 61–2 benefit(s) culture 59, 116 benefit(s) system 45, 47, 50, 52–3, 56–7, 59, 67, 71–2, 78–9, 88, 97–8, 128, 130, 137–8, 168, 191; and labour 21, 47, 67, 87; as welfare state 44–5, 47–8, 50, 52, 60, 77–8, 87, 114; reform of 19–20, 39–40, 52–4, 57–61, 65–6, 72, 76, 98, 107, 168 Beveridge Report 1, 16–17, 58, 64, 67, 121, 154, 158–60, 162, 164, 175, 183 Beveridge, William 16–17, 20, 54, 57–8, 65–8, 78, 87, 90, 105, 110, 117–18, 125, 154, 162, 172, 176 Big Society 22, 74–5, 153–4, 170–1 Blair, Tony 19–20, 36, 47, 88, 126, 127, 169 Brown, Gordon 3, 19–20, 22, 46, 65, 87–8, 95, 146, 162, 172 burden, topos of 54, 57, 72, 85, 99, 112, 115, 117–19, 135–6, 140, 146–8, 150–1, 178–9, 181 Byrne, Liam 66–7 Callaghan, James 18 Cameron, David 49, 58–9, 70, 74–5, 95, 110, 128, 153–4, 159, 170–1 Chakrabortty, Aditya 105, 176 Chang, Ha-Joon 96, 151, 179 Charteris-Black, Jonathan 101, 152–4, 157–8 child benefit 21, 53, 62, 71, 105, 108, 110, 114, 130, 161–2, 176, 179

childcare 67, 92, 131 claimant(s) 4, 21, 52, 54–7, 93, 138; impact of reforms on 4, 19, 21, 46–7, 52, 55–6, 59, 69, 79, 145; negative representations of 4, 34, 58, 61, 65, 68, 79–81, 93, 108, 119, 122–3, 137–8, 160; vs workers 56–61, 63, 118 class 8, 11, 68, 86, 89, 113, 129, 135, 157 see also middle (-) class, working (-) class, underclass clientship, topos of 88–9 complex systems are buildings conceptual metaphor 153 Daley, Janet 62–3, 86, 146–7, 151 dependency 3, 48, 51, 54, 57, 64, 66, 68, 89, 123, 130, 138, 189–90; argument 51, 59, 67, 69, 75, 88–9, 91, 114, 116– 17, 120, 127–8, 130–1, 148, 178, 179; rhetoric 20; culture 12, 88, 130; topos of 51–2, 68, 72, 87, 92, 118, 129, 133, 167 (see also topos of self-reliance) deserving, the 68–9, 80, 92, 128, 184 direct metaphor 33–4, 116, 126, 132 disability benefit (DLA) 56, 66, 89, 145, 190 disabled 20, 55, 71, 81, 92, 122, 125, 132, 134 Duncan Smith, Iain 54–5, 57–9, 62, 65, 67, 108–9, 114, 118, 126, 191 education 8–10, 12, 14, 16–19, 22, 45, 53, 72–5, 82, 84–5, 87, 93, 95, 97, 115, 136, 149, 159, 163, 171–2, 183 embodied experience 25–6, 103 enterprising self/selves, 46, 52, 63, 117, 126, 185 EU 57, 166, 187 Europe 11, 15, 148 extended metaphor (examples of) 109, 175, 186; (references to) 118, 139, 173

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Fabiszak, Małgorzata 26, 144 Fairclough, Norman 3, 20, 28, 52, 56, 63, 135 fairness, topos of 55, 60, 66, 72, 98, 112, 129, 133, 135–6, 140, 150, 167

legal aid 45, 72, 73, 76, 162, 173, 185 life is a journey conceptual metaphor 118, 138 Lloyd George, David 15 Loach, Ken 93, 159, 170, 172

gender 130, 189 Gentleman, Amelia 91–2 Giddens, Anthony 13, 20, 86 good welfare state, topos of 74–6, 81, 98, 110, 146, 155–6, 158, 161, 170 see also welfare state defence

McVey, Esther 54, 56, 117, 120–1 middle (-) class 96, 105, 114, 121 migrant(s) 4, 151, 178 Miliband, Ed 96, 104, 161, 169, 175, 190 Musolff, Andreas 5, 26–7

Hall, Stuart 29 Halliday, M. A. K. 24, 28, 114 healthcare 10, 16, 75, 82, 152, 179, 187 Heffer, Simon 38, 51, 78, 109, 135–6, 178, 191 help, topos of 51, 69–70, 80, 91, 94–5, 98, 104–8, 110, 112, 114, 116–17, 122, 124–8, 140, 148, 151, 156–7, 159, 161, 167–8, 171 Hitchens, Peter 90, 134, 150 housing 21–2, 39, 55, 81–2, 122, 129, 150, 177 housing benefit 14, 21, 39, 81 Hutton, Will 68–9 IDS see Duncan Smith, Iain image schema 26–7, 33, 125, 139; up-down image schema 102, 112, 116, 120, 122–4, 126–7, 138 immigrant(s) 150, 165, 178 immigration 44, 59, 165 incapacity benefit 19, 47, 49, 51–2 Jobseekers’ Allowance 19 Johnson, Mark 25–6 just deserts, topos of 56, 60, 65, 70, 72, 98, 135 Keynesian (policies) 17–18, 21, 87 Koller, Veronika 5, 24, 28, 32, 35 Kövecses, Zoltan 26–7, 33, 125, 166 Krzyżanowski, Michał 24, 29, 31, 44–5, 71, 190 Lakoff, George 25–6, 101, 111, 144

National Insurance 9, 14, 17, 68, 132–3 NHS 1, 12, 14, 17–19, 22, 45, 53, 63, 72, 82–4, 87, 93, 95, 97, 154, 156, 164, 172, 175, 185, 189 Oborne, Peter 37–8, 78, 87–8, 90, 153, 167, 177–8 original intention/design, topos of 67, 69, 90, 109–10, 115, 117–18, 121–2, 154, 162, 191 Osborne, George 54–5, 60–1, 70, 77–80, 147, 159, 162, 167, 173 pension(s) 82, 147, 150, 158, 160–1, 164, 170 pensioner(s) 21, 55, 157 persisting is remaining upright conceptual metaphor 163 Phillips, Melanie 83, 128–30, 170–1 Philpott, Mick 78–80, 85, 87–8, 109, 118, 148, 178 PIP 53, 190 polarization 56, 60–1, 65–8, 96, 187 poverty is down conceptual metaphor 103, 105–6, 112, 120, 138 presupposition 45, 47, 60, 90 public services 10, 13, 18, 23, 74, 83, 126– 7, 145, 151, 183, 187; as welfare state 44–5, 72–6, 82, 95, 98, 127, 141, 183; essential 95, privatization of 18, 74–6, 82, provision of 10, 13, 44–5; reform of 1, 43–4, 54, 72, 74–6, 98, 103, 131, 135; universal 50, 90 Purnell, James 46–52 Reeves, Rachel 91–4, 191 restraint, topos of 62

Index scenario 27, 32, 34, 139, 144, 174, 186; birth 174–6, death 174–6, drowning 122, 124; falling 103, 107–8, 112, 117, 122; fixing 166, 169; protection 125; collated scenarios 138, 180–1 scrounger(s) 12, 69, 121–2 Second World War 16, 23, 123, 153, 157 self-reliance, topos of 51–2, 98, 140 Semino, Elena 25–7, 33, 37, 103, 132, 174, 176, 176, 180 single mother(s) 68, 128, 189 single parent(s) 20, 49, 88 social care 76, 83, 98, 145, 164, 176, 183 social insurance 2, 9, 16, 65–6, 160 solidarity, topos of 51, 98, 161 sponger(s) 134–5, 138 state, the 7–11, 14, 16, 22, 49, 56, 63, 74, 81–6, 95, 99, 115, 129, 131–2, 161–2, 170, 179, 185 Thatcher, Margaret 40, 88, 125, 170–1, 175, 189 Thatcherism 146 topic-triggered metaphor 132, 176 topos: definition 30–1, 44

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underclass 13, 20, 22, 59, 136 undeserving, the 68, 93, 112–13, 135 unemployed, the 12, 19, 47, 49–50, 64, 71, 92, 126, 160, 167 unemployment 3, 12, 18–19, 59, 64, 88, 93, 147, 160, 162 unemployment benefit 64, 88, 93 United States 13, 110, 149, 151, 175, 184, 187 Universal Credit 53–4, 57–8, 118, 160, 167, 190 Van Dijk, Teun A. 25, 29, 31, 44, 190 vice, topos of 65, 72, 78, 80–1, 84, 88, 98, 119, 136–7, 151, 178 welfare reform, discourse of 28, 72, 79, 93, 95, 98–9, 137, 183–5; Labour 3, 52, 92–3, 183; Coalition 22, 54, 61, 92, 121, 183 welfare state defence 185 welfare system 59, 71, 77, 150; as welfare state 48–9, 54, 77, 79, 97 Wodak, Ruth 24–5, 28–32, 44, 190 working (-) class 116, 129, 130, 165

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