Power to the people?

This is the third post in a short series analysing how the PM changed his rhetoric after he got into government. It compares how a number of themes are presented in his campaign speeches vs his early speeches as PM, based on close, statistical, lingusitic analysis.

Taken from: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=415741 (06/05/2012; 16:27)

'We can be a Government that always remembers we serve the people, we're the servants of the people we are never their masters and this if we are elected we will never, ever forget.'

- David Cameron, 5th May 2012

People are the masters. Politicians serve. Serving to lead. The electorate empowered. The ballot is boss. That’s very much the message David Cameron was evoking in the quotation above, and throughout his campaign in 2010. Indeed, in office he was still saying ‘[i]t's about holding our hands up saying we haven't got all the answers - let's work them out, together.’ Not quite the same, but the similar thought.

So is this what has come to define Cameron’s government? What do the early days, his words in his first year tell us? The previous quotation notwithstanding, there’s a shift.

Firstly, and perhaps fairly, Cameron moves away from any suggestion of the public having direct power. In his campaign he had used ‘if you’ a load of times - and only a small handful were ‘if you vote Conservative’ or ‘if you get a Conservative government’. Most of all, he talked about the people’s power to ‘change’ things ‘if you want’. All of this, along with with ‘you can’ and ‘you want’, nearly disappear after the election, as Cameron puts less emphasis on both possibility and people power.

Then, while ‘politicians’ appear alongside ‘serve’, ‘serving’ or ‘servants’ quite a few times pre-election, he never uses them together as PM. The same is true of ‘people’ and ‘masters’ - lots before, never after. What’s more, his calls to ‘hold us to account’ occur only as campaign rhetoric, and are dropped afterwards.

In fact, this ‘holding to account’ ties in with one of the big vanishing acts of Cameron’s speeches: his much-vaunted contracts. Cameron made 5 speeches specifically about these ‘contracts’, and at the first launch said ‘I urge people to read it, to hold us to it, to make sure we deliver it.’ It was a clear democratic tactic and offer to involve people more in politics - something which Cameron continually emphasized in this, and in his use of ‘invitations’.

So: how does that go for us? Well, surprisingly for such a massive chunk of the election campaign, it totally disappears. Totally. Utterly. In one speech Cameron refers to employers’ contracts with their workers - and this is the only use of the word in the twelve months after the election! The same is true for ‘invitation’: never used. And for ‘manifesto’.

Statistics are always a little tricky to be objective and substantiative with - but no mentions at all?? As a fan of Cameron’s ‘invitations’ and ‘contracts’ pre-election, I’m a little disappointed (if not that surprised) that it may all have been electoral bluster.

Comments always welcomed.