DIS-ARTICULATING THE WELFARE STATE: DENOTATION OF WELFARE AND WELFARE STATE IN BRITISH CONSERVATIVE PRESS

Seventy years after its founding document, the Beveridge Report, was published, welfare state remains a contested notion in the United Kingdom, all the more so in times of crisis and austerity. With print media being both the site and the protagonist of the ideological contest over the meaning of welfare state, this paper analyses a corpus of articles from selected British newspapers (2008-2012) in an attempt to establish the denotation of welfare and welfare state, an important aspect of the discursive construction of welfare state in Conservative British press. Using methodological insights of Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Stylistics, the paper shows that denotation to be overwhelmingly restricted to benefits and outlines some ideological motivations and effects of this framing.