The oratory of Ed Miliband

This article is a contribution to an emerging scholarship on the role of rhetoric, persona and celebrity, and the effects of performance on the political process. We analyse party leader Ed Miliband at the UK Labour Party Conference in Manchester in 2012. Our analysis identifies how, through performance of ‘himself’ and the beginnings of the deployment of an alternative party narrative centred on ‘One Nation’, Ed Miliband began to revise his ‘received persona’. By using a range of rhetorical and other techniques, Miliband began to adapt the Labour narrative to the ‘personalized political’. The article sets out the theoretical framework for the analysis and returns to the implications for the theory of leadership performance in its conclusion.

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If Opposition is an Art, is Ed Miliband an Artist? A Framework for Evaluating Leaders of the Opposition

Parliamentary Affairs ◽

10.1093/pa/gsu017 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 68 (1) ◽

pp. 58-76 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

T. Bale

Keyword(s):

Ed Miliband

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The Labour Party under Ed Miliband. Trying But Failing to Renew Social DemocracyEunice Goes

Parliamentary Affairs ◽

10.1093/pa/gsw025 ◽

2016 ◽

pp. gsw025

Author(s):

Øivind Bratberg

Keyword(s):

Labour Party ◽

Ed Miliband

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Selecting the labour leader

Quaderni dell'Osservatorio elettorale QOE - IJES ◽

10.36253/qoe-8533 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 79 (1) ◽

pp. 39-69

Author(s):

Giulia Vicentini

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

Electoral College ◽

The Political ◽

Leadership Selection ◽

Tony Blair ◽

College System ◽

Ed Miliband ◽

British Labour ◽

Election Systems ◽

Jeremy Corbyn

The article aims at assessing the functioning and characteristics of the most recent systems employed by the British Labour Party for selecting its leader. To this end I compared five leadership races: the huge success of Tony Blair in 1994 in the newly reformed electoral college system; the undisputed election of Gordon Brown in 2007; the narrow and disputed victory of Ed Miliband in 2010, still held under the electoral college system; the large but controversial successes of Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 and 2016 closed primaries. The article first traces the evolution of the Labour leadership election systems in recent decades. Secondly, the five leadership races are analyzed and compared, taking into account two main variables: inclusiveness and divisiveness. These have been addressed looking at indicators such as selectorate and candidacy inclusiveness, campaign negativity, race competitiveness and elite attitude, which transversally affects all the other dimensions. The findings suggest that intra-party democracy may be dangerous for party unity and electability but the political context remains much more important than the intrinsic characteristics of the system of leadership selection used.

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The role of adversarial discourse in political opposition

Language and Dialogue ◽

10.1075/ld.3.2.06bul ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 254-272 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Peter Bull

Keyword(s):

Detailed Analysis ◽

Prime Minister ◽

Political Accountability ◽

House Of Commons ◽

Political Opposition ◽

David Cameron ◽

Political Dialogue ◽

Ed Miliband ◽

The Uk

The focus of this study is on the role played by adversarial questioning in political opposition. As an illustrative example, a detailed analysis is presented of two sessions of Prime Minister’s Questions in the UK House of Commons (6 and13 July, 2011), in which the Leader of the Opposition (Ed Miliband) challenged the Prime Minister (David Cameron) regarding his handling of the British phone-hacking scandal. The study is conceptualized in terms of theories of politeness (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) and impoliteness (Culpeper 1996), also in terms of the concept of follow-ups (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975). It is argued that this analysis has implications for all three linguistic conceptualizations, furthermore that PMQs, despite its many detractors and deficiencies, can play an important role in sustaining political dialogue and political accountability through adversarial questioning.

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Constructing social meaning in political discourse: Phonetic variation and verb processes in Ed Miliband's speeches

Language in Society ◽

10.1017/s0047404515000755 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 45 (1) ◽

pp. 87-111 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Sam Kirkham ◽

Emma Moore

Keyword(s):

Political Discourse ◽

Language Use ◽

Labour Party ◽

Social Meaning ◽

Phonetic Variation ◽

Ed Miliband ◽

Political Talk ◽

Political Speeches ◽

The Uk ◽

Different Levels

AbstractThis article investigates how variation across different levels of linguistic structure indexes ideological alignments in political talk. We analyse two political speeches by Ed Miliband, the former leader of the UK Labour Party, with a focus on the use of /t/-glottalling and the types of verb processes that co-occur with the pronouns we and you. We find substantial differences in the production of /t/ between the two speeches in words such as Britain and government, which have been argued to take on particular salience in British political discourse. We contextualise these findings in terms of metalinguistic discourse surrounding Miliband's language use, as well as how he positions himself in relation to different audiences via verb process types. We show that phonetic variation, subject types, and verb processes work synergistically in allowing Miliband to establish a political persona that is sensitive to ideological differences between different audiences. (Social meaning, indexicality, political discourse, verb processes, phonetic variation, /t/-glottalling)*

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