ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2014, on July 28, half a million British readers of the Daily Telegraph were served the usual ‘view’ of their newspaper on immigration: Coalition deserves credit for progress on tackling unchecked immigration David Cameron’s Government is finally taking steps to stop abuses of immigration system that were ignored by his predecessors
Voters consistently tell opinion pollsters that immigration is among their biggest concerns – so it is incumbent upon our political leaders to address the issue. The last government patently failed to do so, presiding over the greatest inflow of foreign nationals in this country’s history while doing nothing to plan for their arrival.
Until 1997, most voters believed that successive governments, by and large, had operated sensible immigration controls. However, Labour’s decision to open the jobs market – not least to workers from the old Warsaw Pact bloc – saw the system weakened to the point of collapse. Putting it back together, and reviving public confidence in the UK’s ability to control its own borders, has been a tall order.
In his article on the page opposite, David Cameron argues that the Coalition has begun this process, by clamping down on abuses and making sure we take in the right people who will benefit the country. He also announces new measures to tackle the “pull” that an easily accessible benefits system exerts: instead of unemployed EU workers being able to claim Jobseekers’ Allowance or child benefit for six months, that will be reduced to a maximum of three. Recruitment agencies will also be required to advertise jobs in the UK and not just exclusively abroad.
By itself, this will not be enough to fix the problem – the Government is hampered by EU rules and, as Mr Cameron says, the failures of a welfare and education system that has produced too few qualified workers. Ministers still look unlikely to reach their target of reducing net immigration to “tens of thousands” before the next election. But they 27certainly deserve much credit for their sustained efforts to get to grips with a problem their predecessors simply ignored.
A systematic discourse analysis of this editorial will attend to many of the typical features of this media genre, such as its characteristic overall organisation, its (political) topics or the argumentative or rhetorical strategies employed to persuasively present this ‘view’ to the readers. As with many newspaper genres, this editorial also has a headline, in this case summarising the newspaper’s opinion as defended in the editorial, printed on top and in bold characters. In the online newspaper version, the article is accompanied by a picture of UKIP leader Nigel Farage (not reproduced here) under the headline. More generally, as is the case for all coherent text and talk, the editorial has the usual local syntactic and semantic structures that define its grammaticality and meaningfulness as a discourse. Among many aspects of discourse semantics, the expression “stop abuses” in the headline presupposes that there were such abuses of the immigration system under the previous (Labour) government. Among many more properties of editorials, such a discourse analysis would pay attention to the way such a ‘view’ is formulated as an opinion or appraisal, by such lexical expressions as “deserves credit” in the very headline. The other chapters in this Handbook detail these kinds of systematic and explicit discourse analysis (see also Bhatia, Flowerdew and Jones 2008; Blommaert 2004; Tannen, Hamilton and Schiffrin 2015; Titscher et al. 2000; van Dijk 2011; Wooffitt 2005).