This chapter looks at how language is used in local government. It explores whose interests are being served by particular discourses. It asks how discourses could be changed to make them serve the ethical framework developed in Chapter Four and the objective of reclaiming local democracy.

Chapter Five focused on how representative democracy can be strengthened by local councillors working to promote active citizenship and discussion around the ethical framework and routes of influence through the tiers of government. I argued for more political discussion and debate at all levels of government. But this debate occurs within a cultural framework. Social and cultural norms shape the way we see the world and how we then represent it in our own discussions and actions. It is important to raise awareness of who benefits and who loses and how the discourses constrain alternative courses of action. Understanding how discourses can impact on policymaking can strengthen the way councillors can promote participation. Councillors could also do more to contest the dominant discourses and so open up alternative possibilities.

The chapter starts by asking why language is important and how it can be used as a political resource. Three dominant discourses that constrain debate are then explored. In this way, the need for an alternative discourse is highlighted. The chapter finally looks at appropriate strategies through which such an alternative can be developed, building on the development of active citizenship and participation advocated in Chapter Five.

Is language important?

The word ‘wicked’, for example, moved from its meaning of ‘evil’, to its use by children in the 1980s (‘It's wicked!’) to mean ‘It's excellent!’, to the concept of ‘wicked issues’, originating in the 1960s, but promoted by Rittle and Webber (1973) and Stewart (2003, p 12) to categorise complex problems that were ill-defined and resistant to resolution.

Raymond Williams noted the changing meaning of words, particularly ‘culture’, when he returned from the Second World War to Cambridge University in 1945 and it encouraged him to write his famous book Keywords (Williams, 1983).