“I benefited from social mobility” | Rebecca N. 2017

Indledning
Lately, more and more often the class division of Britain has been questioned. Some people feel dis-regarded and tuned out, and some of the ones that against the odds manage to climb the proverbial stairway to the heaven that is the middleclass are shocked to see the vast difference in norms.

Such an event is what Rebecca Nicholson describes in her text “I benefited from social mobility” from the 29th of November 2017.

Therein she describes how rather than descend into poverty, she escaped the working class with the help of a trust fund. As such she has an idea of what social mobility feels like, and she explains how “Moving around makes you a permanent outsider, even if you’ve learned the rules.”

This works as a critique towards Theresa May’s government, as she promised to make social mobility easier, but didn’t keep the promise.

Nicholson rails against this unjustness and she is not alone when it comes to criticizing the government and larger institutions. The text “Are Oxford and Cambridge universities fostering “social apartheid”?” from October 20th 2017 debates who should take the blame for the underrepresentation of the black minority on universities.

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Uddrag
In his speech, David Cameron uses multiple instruments to engage the reader. A notable example is his anaphora which goes as follows: “You can call it liberalism, you can call it empowerment.

You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society.” First off, Cameron uses this to create a lot of positive links as to what his idea, his construct, his Big Society should be associated with.

By creating an anaphora he puts extra emphasis on this part of the speech, but there’s a particu-larly strong dissonance in continuity when he contrasts this beginning of every sentence by saying what he calls it.

This, once again, puts stress on what he believes the Big Society is, and the fact that he is so ambitious and confiding towards the idea adds ethos, which further strengthens all of Camer-on’s arguments. Another thing he does to gain ethos is to relate to his audience.

The speech was held in Liverpool, a city well known for hosting primarily working class residents, so he starts the speech of as follows: “It’s great to be here in Liverpool.I’ve been in Downing Street for a couple of months now and it seems to me that the business of gov-ernment falls into two categories.”

He continues to talk about duties and necessities, and with this he attempts to neutralize the negative bias that a scathed working class society may have towards an af-fluent government official, and this allows him to get his points through more easily for the remainder of his speech.