‘Stop the…’ slogans

Philip Seargeant

During the 2013 Australian general election, the then prime minister Kevin Rudd declared that ‘Three-word slogans won’t solve complex problems. They never have. And they never will.’

Which is doubtless very true. But then slogans aren’t there to solve problems; they’re there to attract and persuade voters. To sway people’s beliefs. Or at least, this is their principal aim in politics.

In advertising, a slogan is used to communicate a company’s mission and values. The objective is a statement of identity; part of the paraphernalia of branding. This can be the case for political slogans as well, of course – MAGA being a prime example of the way that a phrase (or in that case, the acronym for the phrase) has become the name for an entire movement. But in politics, persuasion remains primary.

One of the key features that distinguishes slogans from other forms of political catchphrase is that they’re purposefully designed. They’re created as a tool to promote the interests of a particular party, faction or campaign – and this design process aims to craft something that’s attention-grabbing, memorable and able to convey (or be imbued with) a particular ideological meaning. The possession of these three qualities matches the affordances of spontaneous political catchphrases – the difference being that a measure of intentional planning exists in the one which is absent from the other.

Given that their creation is guided by intentional design, one would suppose that all aspects of their linguistic form and function are pre-meditated, and that each of the words that comprises the whole has been purposefully chosen to do a specific job. Based on this simple hypothesis, I want to look at one particular political slogan and analyse how it’s constructed. The slogan in question is the current UK Conservative government’s pledge to ‘Stop the boats’.

As the quote from Kevin Rudd alludes to, there’s been a trend in politics over the last few decades, particularly on the populist right, for three-word slogans. These come in a variety of forms. There are emphatic statements such as ‘Black Lives Matter’ or ‘Brexit means Brexit’; and there are the tricolons (the repetition of three parallel words or phrases) of Tony Blair’s ‘Education, education, education’ or Margaret Thatcher’s even more succinct ‘No, no, no’.

Then there are the calls to action. ‘Defund the police’, ‘Lock her up’, etc. These have a particular formula as speech acts. They begin with an imperative verb, followed by a noun phrase, and often act as a combination of what John Searle has labelled the commissive and directive illocutionary points. The commissive point is a speech act in which the speaker commits themselves to doing something (‘I will finish this article by tomorrow’); the directive is when they attempt to make their audience do something (‘Shut that door!’). For instance, ‘lock her up’ could (most likely) be a directive to the judicial system to have Hillary Clinton imprisoned, or (less likely) it could be a rallying call for the MAGA movement to push for Clinton’s prosecution.

In most cases the context suggests whether the speech act is to be interpreted as a commissive or directive speech act – ‘Defund the police’ is addressed to the governing authorities; ‘Take back control’ is a rallying cry for the populace (it began life, in fact, as a four-word slogan, ‘Let’s take back control’, which makes this communal commitment explicit). But the way that the slogans could, and in some cases appear intended to, be addressed both inwardly and outwardly mirrors the populist emphasis on a discourse of legitimate power being invested in the will of the people. We, the people, are not requesting action from a higher authority as, ultimately, we are that authority.

‘Stop the boats’ makes use of a very popular template. Along the same lines we’ve also had ‘Stop the Steal’ in US politics; there’s the oft-used refrain of ‘Stop the war’ (which has been adopted as the name of the anti-militarist campaign group in the UK); and there’s the Civil Rights’ movement’s ‘Stop the violence’ campaign.

The first obvious point to make about such slogans is that the truncated form – the use of just three words – is itself a motivated choice. It’s not simply a matter of convention but is, rather, a stylistic preference driven by a belief about the workings of persuasive language. Concision assists in making a statement both arresting and memorable. But it also obliges each word to carry a substantial burden of meaning.

So what do the individual words in ‘Stop the boats’ contribute to the whole?

‘Stop’ provides the call to action. It states a desire for change – which is so often a key component in political persuasion. And it does so in a participatory way – again, an important element in political persuasion.

The third word, ‘boats’, acts as a metonym for ‘illegal aliens’ and unwanted immigration more generally. The word (and indeed the entire slogan) can be seen as a political dog whistle whose more honest translation would be something along the lines of: ‘stop immigrants from underdeveloped countries from coming to settle in the UK’. While seemingly neutral and descriptive, ‘boats’ is thus readily open to a racist interpretation, and is emblematic of an expansive narrative about national sovereignty, cultural and racial identity and economic politics.

Which leaves us with one final word: the definite article. In and of itself, this is a rather unexceptional word. It contains little meaning on its own. But within the context of the rest of the slogan it is in many ways the pivotal word – and the one which politicises the entire discourse.

So what is it that the ‘the’ does?

Firstly, it assumes shared knowledge. And in doing so assumes – and contributes to the creation and maintenance of – a community with shared values. It’s a form of deixis – of indicating a very specific category of boats and doing so in a way which refers back to an earlier discourse in which the defining details of this category has been established. For the deixis to work, the audience for the slogan is expected to know this broader narrative.

As such, the slogan contributes to the framing of a particular political issue and, crucially, promotes this particular framing as simply the way things are. A phenomenon (immigrants crossing the English Channel on boats) is positioned as a crisis, which means that it needs to be addressed by the authorities within society. This in turn calls for decisive action which, so the corollary of the Conservative’s use of the slogan has it, can only be provided by the Conservatives themselves.

As an illustration of how this tactic of contextual inference works we can contrast the UK Conservative Party’s use of the slogan with an earlier incarnation. The phrase actually originates in Australian politics: Tony Abbott, former leader of the Liberal Party, used it in his successful general election campaign a decade ago. So does this mean that ‘the boats’ that people are being encouraged to stop are the same ones in both the UK and Australian cases? Well, yes and no.

They’re different in that the one group consists of vessels crossing the English Channel while the other refers to boats travelling from South and Southeast Asia to Australia. But they’re the same in that both groups are carrying immigrants attempting to reach a country in which they can seek asylum. And all of this is meant to be (and for large parts of the population is) understood immediately through the combination of this use of the definite article in a three-word slogan, alongside the high-profile communication of a particular – and particularly divisive – narrative about immigration.

Philip Seargeant is a writer, researcher & educational filmmaker specialising in the study of language & communication. He is currently Senior Lecturer of Applied Linguistics at the Open University. His latest book to be published is The Art of Political Storytelling (Bloomsbury).

Inset image: Barbed Wire in Monaco, Wikimedia Commons