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New Labour, New Voicescapes, 1997–2007

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Book cover Voice and New Writing, 1997–2007

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Abstract

In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher’s voice had seemed to carry an iron authority that had firmly kept political opponents in their place. Headlines in the popular Sun newspaper screamed of bashing the miners, routing the ‘Argies’ and smashing the Unions, and Thatcher’s tactic seemed to be to squash, silence and suppress. When she banned the direct voices of Sinn Fein politicians in the late 1980s however, the rich actor’s voice that spoke the words of Gerry Adams seemed to stoke more fascination for the muted voice of the political leader. As a North-South divide split the country, Yosser Hughes’ Liverpudlian mantra ‘Gizza job’ echoed through the age like a plaintive symptom of the unemployed man’s alienation.1 Alternative voices in magazines Spare Rib and Marxism Today, or of the women of Greenham Common, seemed to be a part of this marginalised, but nevertheless substantial culture of dissent. Thatcher’s own infamously crafted voice, lowered in tone to downplay the semiotics of a feminine presence, spoke both of the social mobility of the educated conservative as well as of the ways she exercised her authority according to the male norms of the period. Her use of the Lincolnshire dialect word ‘frit’ in 1983 seemed to be designed not to remind the voters of her relatively humble background, but to scare the Opposition benches with the Boedecian credentials of the Iron Lady.2

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Notes

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Queen Mary University of London, UK

    Maggie Inchley

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© 2015 Margaret Inchley

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Inchley, M. (2015). New Labour, New Voicescapes, 1997–2007. In: Voice and New Writing, 1997–2007. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137432339_2

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