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TELEVISION NEWS AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT 143

Later in the year, as the major unions, particularly the National Union of
Miners and the Transport and General Workers’ Union, rejected the
Government’s economic strategy, the plot was modified, but again not
fundamentally revised. The Government was still allocated the part of hero and
the unions the part of villain. There was, however, a marked shift from a heroic
to a tragic orientation.
In the coverage of the Transport and General Workers’ Union Conference the
centrepiece was again made to be the consequences of their discussions on pay
for the Government’s economic strategy. The BBC News bulletin of 5 July 1977
represented that union’s leadership’s attempts ‘to keep Britain’s largest union
firmly in line with TUC objectives’, and in so doing emphasized that the
leadership believed ‘that if there were a wages free-for-all, it could damage the
long-term prospects for the British economy’.
While this part of the account employed actuality forms to ground the
narration, these were not employed in representing the ‘considerable ground
swell of opposition to these policies’. This opposition was formed up entirely by
means of the newsreader’s direct address to camera:

And as Mr Jones and his executive left the conference hall tonight, they
took with them copies of a motion that will also be put to the delegates
tomorrow which calls for an immediate return to unfettered collective
bargaining and the total ending of phase two on 1 August of this year—a
call which, if it is heeded, would finally shatter what remains of the Social
Contract.

The articulation of the ‘considerable ground swell of opposition’ in this union
considerably raised the stakes. The narration transformed that opposition into an
act of destruction which threatened not only the remains of the Social Contract,
but also the long-term prospects of the British economy. This signification of this
union’s actions was massively re-enacted on the following day after its vote
‘against an orderly return to free collective bargaining’. We have, then, the
lowering of wages represented as ‘orderly’—a term bringing into play such
semantic equivalents as ‘obedient’, ‘not unruly’, ‘well behaved’. The
representation of the union’s vote against this opened with the statement that
delegates had ‘defeated the moderate motion against the advice of their General
Secretary, Jack Jones’, thus associating wages restraint with moderation. There
then followed an actuality extract from a speech against ‘the moderate line’:

Brothers and sisters, we’ve been conned [cheers]. The pensioners and lower
paid workers are worse off. The social services have been cut to ribbons,
and we’re in the grip of the talons of the international money-lenders. Of
course we do not want a Tory Government. But if this Government does
not reverse these disastrous policies and introduce the measures advocated
by the Labour Party Conferences, that is, a socialist alternative, we’ll get