The Metaphors of New Labour

Abstract

New Labour came to power through showing a fresh awareness as to the importance of communicating its message; it employed researchers, image consultants and a range of specialist advisers to ensure that its policies were appealing to the electorate (Giddens 2000). Evidence of the importance it placed on representation may be found in the fact that it has led to its critics introducing a term originally used by Ronald Reagan to refer to specialists in manipulation of the media: ‘spin doctor’. The very coinage of this term shows how important metaphor is in political discourse. The term draws on ideas of manipulation from three different sources: the idea of a spider drawing out a thread that will catch a victim; the idea of a spin bowler who tricks his ‘victim’ by guile rather than by power; and the idea of doctoring or tampering. Clearly the use of the metaphor ‘spin doctor’ is strongly motivated by the pragmatic goal of negatively evaluating New Labour’s use of the media as manipulation rather than as communication. As the stakes surrounding effective communication have raised, it seems that the importance of metaphor in political discourse is likely to increase rather than decrease.