Industrial relations and conservative governments in the eighties. Argumentation and liguistic strategies for the taming of trade unions

Industrial relations and Conservative governments in the eighties, explores the instances of argumentation and the linguistic strategies used by British conservative governments in the 1980s in their discourse on trade unions. Such discourse is taken as an important example of neoliberal ideology at work in one of the countries where, through Margaret Thatcher's rule, such ideology has had the strongest impact on the lives of working people. The research is inscribed in the tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and was conducted on a large corpus of official documents and public statements, analysed through Argumentation Theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics. This second edition of the book has been revised in order to include documents that have been made public in 2011, which shed light especially on the genesis of the expression “enemy within”.