Re-presenting Protesters' Identities: A Critical Ideological Analysis of UK Political Discourse

After a series of protests demanding political action against climate change and institutional racism, the UK Government introduced the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021 in Parliament, which included measures to tighten conditions for protesting and expand police officers' powers to tackle non-violent protests. The Bill finally became an Act of Parliament in 2022. Drawing on Discursive and Rhetorical Psychology (DRP) and Social Representations Theory (SRT), this thesis examines how Government ministers and Members of Parliament (MPs) represent protests and protesters’ identities when advocating for or opposing the measures in the PCSC Bill 2021 during its parliamentary scrutiny. This study reveals how, despite the consensual portrayal of the right to protest as a cornerstone of British democracy, MPs advocating for the Bill represent protesters as selfish, deviant minorities whose purpose is to disrupt the rights and daily routines of hard-working citizens. Contrarily, MPs opposing the Bill represent protesters as social justice campaigners who act in defence of other democratic rights and the future of humanity, whilst being systematically repressed by members of the Government through police interventions. The study also reveals how different representations appear to underlie MPs’ discourse, depending on the kind of protest being discussed: while the discourse surrounding climate activists is supported by a neoliberal capitalist representation of how society functions, the discourse on anti-racist protesters is demarcated by a racialised representation of the British national community. By drawing on both representations, MPs end up reproducing hegemonic meanings that compromise the conditions for life and marginalise the voices of those who have been oppressed by unequal social structures by positioning them as illegitimate political actors. The primary contributions of this thesis are threefold. Firstly, it provides novel findings on the discursive representations of social protests and protesters’ identities in contemporary elite political discourse in the UK, and their material implications for the future of the right to protest. Secondly, it strengthens the relationship between DRP and SRT by emphasising how integrating them enables the analysis of discursive practices aligned with interlocutors’ rhetorical goals, as well as the reproduction or resistance of taken-for-granted knowledge in everyday communication. Thirdly, it proposes that social representations, despite their original configuration in discourse, have material effects by constraining which arguments are deemed reasonable in specific contexts.