La nuova Clause IV del partito laburista inglese: il punto di vista dell’analisi dei generi del discorso

This paper aims to approach the debate on Labour Party’s Clause IV from the perspective of discourse analysis, that is the viewpoint that takes into account the genre variations and macro-textual hybridizations that lie behind the single lexical changes of textual reformulation. The rewriting of the Clause IV that Blair succeeded in approving in 1995 represented the major gap between his so –called New Labour and the socialist tradition, dating back to Sidney Webb’s clause drafted in 1917 and adopted by the party in 1918. After a short introduction in which some references to recent Corbyn’s and Blair’s remarks on Clause IV are given, we will see that the discourse analysis perspective reveals a transformation that is based on genre change, namely from the legal English of Labour Party’s Rule Book to a quite vague and ambiguous promotional discourse. The features of the legal register that identified the old Clause IV will be highlighted, whereas the rhetorical moves of the New Clause IV will be compared to the moves exploited by companies addressing potential customers. In the end, the promotional stance will be analysed in a more detailed way, so as to show how the construction of beneficiaries excludes the category of workers and mirrors a different vision of Labour party’s role within British society.