Draining off Trade Unions' Role: Gordon Brown's Speech to the TUC Conference 2007

Abstract

According to Bourdieu and Wacquant (2001) Trade Unions are one of the obstacles to the success of the neo-liberal project carried out by powerful social actors, international institutions and Governments.  Analysis of how Trade Unions are construed (Fairclough et al. 2002) by Governments is thus a necessary step in understanding language in new capitalism.  Because of the change of power in Great Britain from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown both Trade Unions and political commentators expected a change in the relationship between New Labour and the workers’ organisations.  However, analysis of Gordon Brown’s speech to the 2007 TUC annual conference shows that those expectations have not been fully met.  The conceptual framework for this analysis is Fairclough’s most recent one for Critical Discourse Analysis (2003, 2006), coupled with the Discourse Historical Approach (Wodak and Meyer 2001).  Text analysis is carried out using a pragma-dialectic approach to argumentation theory (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1992) alongside the tools of systemic-functional grammar (Halliday 2004).  The interconnectedness of the linguistic data with other moments of the social practice is also discussed as the study claims a post-disciplinary (Jessop and Sum 2001) perspective.