Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Critical Discourse Studies on 30/10/2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17405904.2015.1103764
Accepted author manuscript, 166 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - 'The man who hated Britain’
T2 - the discursive construction of ‘national unity’ in the Daily Mail
AU - Stoegner, Karin
AU - Wodak, Ruth Emily
N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Critical Discourse Studies on 30/10/2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17405904.2015.1103764
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - In 2013, the British right-wing tabloid Daily Mail triggered a fierce controversy, focused on antisemitism and patriotism/nationalism. It was sparked by the publication of an article on the British economist Ralph Miliband with the provocative headline ‘The man who hated Britain’. The lead refers to Ed Miliband, then leader of the British Labour Party: ‘Ed Miliband’s pledge to bring back socialism is homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country’. In this paper, we analyse how Ralph Miliband is discursively constructed as a dangerous ‘Other’ and subsequently politically instrumentalised in a campaign against his son, Ed Miliband. We focus on how a particular concept of national unity is constructed with reference to the stereotype of the ‘disloyal, intellectual, international Jew’. This figure emerges as the ‘Iudeus ex machina’ in the scenario of impending doom in order, we assume, to distract attention from structural issues facing British society and economy. In our analysis we tackle the complex interdependencies of – mostly coded – antisemitic and nationalist rhetoric with the help of an interdisciplinary framework that integrates approaches to antisemitism, nationalism, media studies, and critical discourse studies, and related methodologies.
AB - In 2013, the British right-wing tabloid Daily Mail triggered a fierce controversy, focused on antisemitism and patriotism/nationalism. It was sparked by the publication of an article on the British economist Ralph Miliband with the provocative headline ‘The man who hated Britain’. The lead refers to Ed Miliband, then leader of the British Labour Party: ‘Ed Miliband’s pledge to bring back socialism is homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country’. In this paper, we analyse how Ralph Miliband is discursively constructed as a dangerous ‘Other’ and subsequently politically instrumentalised in a campaign against his son, Ed Miliband. We focus on how a particular concept of national unity is constructed with reference to the stereotype of the ‘disloyal, intellectual, international Jew’. This figure emerges as the ‘Iudeus ex machina’ in the scenario of impending doom in order, we assume, to distract attention from structural issues facing British society and economy. In our analysis we tackle the complex interdependencies of – mostly coded – antisemitic and nationalist rhetoric with the help of an interdisciplinary framework that integrates approaches to antisemitism, nationalism, media studies, and critical discourse studies, and related methodologies.
KW - Antisemitism
KW - nationalism
KW - national identity
KW - Labour Party
KW - UK
KW - Daily Mail
KW - critical discourse-analysis
KW - discourse-historical approach
KW - calculated ambivalence
KW - coded antisemitism
U2 - 10.1080/17405904.2015.1103764
DO - 10.1080/17405904.2015.1103764
M3 - Journal article
VL - 13
SP - 193
EP - 209
JO - Critical Discourse Studies
JF - Critical Discourse Studies
SN - 1740-5904
IS - 2
ER -