This book is about blame and in particular how it is performed at public inquiries. Blame has been extensively thought about by moral philosophers, sociologists and psychologists, but has been investigated very little by linguists. The public inquiry as a site of action has also been under-studied, despite its increasing frequency in public life. This work seeks to remedy this—by analysing the talk of actors involved in public inquiries with a view to investigating how blame is constructed in this setting. I will show that, despite not being explicitly performed, blame pervades the discourse of the participants at inquiries. Unlike some, I do not see this as a bad thing, and I hope to argue that blame is a healthy and natural part of public life. Whilst the establishment of a blame culture can have negative effects, these are not outweighed by the importance of accountability in civic life. The public inquiry may be seen as the ultimate arbiter of such accountability and I will demonstrate how this accountability emerges, from the establishment of the inquiry panel, to the questions which are asked of witnesses, to the evidence which those witnesses provide and to the reports which emerge as a result of this evidence.
Having set out the broad aims of this work, in this chapter I will go into some detail about the purpose of the public inquiry and their relationship with blame (Sect. 1.1), the typical processes of inquiries (Sect. 1.2) and the history of public inquiries as a part of civic life in the United Kingdom (Sect. 1.3). In Sect. 1.4, I will go into some more detail about how inquiries unfold over time and the hurdles which are encountered as the inquiry progresses. Section 1.5 explains the general approach of the book, touching upon the main methodological tools and theoretical ideas invoked in the study and Sect. 1.6 outlines the structure of the work. I conclude in Sect. 1.7 with an explanation of why I think this book is needed, and what I seek to achieve in presenting a view of blame at public inquiries.
1.1 The Purpose of Public Inquiries
The term ‘public inquiry’ has a very broad meaning, and the history of the British government shows that there are in fact a number of forms of ‘inquiry’ available, designed, in principle to fulfil specific functions. Sometimes the wish may be simply to establish the relevant facts, leaving their interpretation, the allocation of ‘blame’ and recommendations for future to other agencies such as Ministers, Parliament or the courts. In other circumstances it may be thought desirable that the ‘inquiry’ itself undertake these broader, perhaps more delicate tasks. A prime purpose of some inquiries may also be to allay public (and Parliamentary) disquiet about some public issue or a ‘scandal’. (Briefing note SN/PC/2599)
For the purposes of this book, however, the focus will specifically be on those types of public inquiry which are ‘investigative’ in nature and which have been set up in a context where something has gone seriously wrong in terms of government procedures or actions, or where the matter has raised issues of public concern regarding the behaviours of bodies such as the police, the NHS and the press. Moreover, only inquiries established under the terms of the Inquiries Act (2005) or its predecessor the Tribunals and Inquiries Act (1921) are examined in this work (I will discuss these acts in Sect. 1.3). This will ensure some level of commonality between the rules governing the inquiries and, therefore, offers the possibility of comparison between different inquiries.
Public inquiries are now a central part of modern political structures not only in the UK but also Australia, New Zealand and Canada where older colonial links have created public inquiry models very similar to those found in the UK. But outside such connections the overall concept of the public inquiry is also central to other developed democracies, for example the USA has its own forms of investigation such as Presidential Committees and Congressional Committees.
establishing the facts...the modern model of the public inquiry often has as its central (but not only) question, ‘what happened?’. And further it also functions to ‘identify wrongdoing, blameworthy conduct, or culpability by individuals and organs of the state’. (Beer 2011: 2)
Contrast this, however, with the then Government’s view expressed to a 2004 parliamentary commission that the purpose of a public inquiry was ‘to prevent recurrence...and learn lessons, not to apportion blame’ (House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, Government by Inquiry, Evidence 29, iii, my emphasis).
These two sets of aims seem potentially contradictory or at the very least in conflict with one another, after all given that public inquiries are called where something has gone wrong how does one identify culpability without apportioning blame? Furthermore, how does one learn lessons and avoid recurrence without accepting that what did occur was wrong or should not have happened? In stating that something is wrong, if one shows that someone can be held responsible for such negative actions or outcomes, is this not a form of blame? From the Government’s viewpoint it seems that ‘facts’ should be neutral, i.e. person X did action Y; the perspective of some inquiries is that it is not so simple as to say that X did Y, but that Y is a negative action which X is responsible for and therefore to blame for. Views of what blame is do differ, but a straightforward way of thinking about it is that it sees a speaker assigning responsibility for an action considered to be negative to a hearer or third party. As such, any act which identifies culpability is surely also an act which blames. Describing an act as one which needs to change surely allows a hearer to infer that the act is a negative one. I shall return to these complexities around blame in Chapters 4 and 5. I will also consider the delicate Terms of Reference which inquiries are given which have in mind these conflicting views in the next chapter. But these initial thoughts should plant the seed of an issue which will emerge in this book: blame is something which can be, and is, carried out indirectly.
1.2 The Process of Public Inquiries
Nevertheless, whether chaired by a judge or not, and Chilcot’s comments notwithstanding, most such investigative inquiries take on a quasi-legal status, and although they are said to be less adversarial rather than prosecutorial in nature, their organisation, procedural production and questioning patterns, as well as the overall style/register of the language used places them within a set of recognisable legally-based, if not legally bound, activities. One of the aims of this book is to examine where the language of inquiries is marked as being distinctive from prosecutorial (criminal) forms of courtroom talk and how this relates to the construction of blame and responsibility. I will take up this aspect in Chapter 3.
It is a fundamental claim of this book that language is central to the nature of public inquiries and that they may be seen as discursive activities. That is to say, they are forms of talk in which the organisation, processes, understanding and outcome of public inquiries may be analysed in terms of units of language which are packaged—often as discrete discourse structures: e.g. openings and closings; sequential patterns: e.g. questions and answers; or individual actions: e.g. accounts, justifications, and apologies.any legal activity, such as settling disputes, making contracts, or providing for what happens to your possessions after you die, presupposes the existence of a sophisticated system of communication, which is another way of saying that such legal activities require language. (Tiersma 2009: 11)
We can notice, without the need for invoking any linguistic theory at this stage, several things about this short extract. Its quasi-legal style is clear in several ways, not least of which is Leveson’s own use of the term ‘judicial’ both in judicial perspective and judicial process. But the level of formality used is also noteworthy—both lexically, as in the interesting used of ‘ventilate’ as found in will be ventilated by the evidence and the use of grammatical complexity in lines 2–5 for example, which includes both embedding and conjunction of clauses. In that same extract, note also the use of the auxiliary ‘shall’ which is preferred in more formal genres over the more commonly used ‘will’ (Biber et al. 1999: 148ff.).
Finally, consider the way in which Leveson uses direct quotation to refer to what he said previously (line 1 introduces this). This is a verbatim account, readily available from previous recordings and transcripts. This differs from more informal use where our direct quotations are often more ad-hoc paraphrases, e.g. quotatives such as: I was like, and the expectation of our interlocutors is that what we are reporting is not a completely verbatim account (see Buchstaller and van Alphen 2012). This is clearly something which Leveson is keen to avoid by referring and evidencing what he said, word-for-word.
In this informal assessment of a brief extract from one of the inquiries which I will return to later in this book, we can see some of the things that will be explored in what follows. Many such things we will look at in more technical detail. For now though, let us consider briefly how public inquiries have emerged over time and consider their inexorable rise such that they are now a key feature of the political and social landscape.
1.3 A Potted History of the Public Inquiry
Since 2005 public inquiries have been carried out under the auspices of the Inquiries Act (2005) , which replaced the Tribunals and Inquiries Act (1921). Before the advent of either act, most investigations into wrongdoing or government failings were conducted ‘in house’ by Parliamentary Select Committees of Inquiry—specially convened groups of parliamentarians who were able to call for evidence, examine witnesses and hold ministers to account (see Thomas 1971: 14–44).
This system, of the legislature investigating the wrongs of the executive, was replaced following the Marconi affair in 1912 and its investigation by a Parliamentary Select Committee of Inquiry. The Marconi Company was alleged to have made corrupt payments to the government in order to benefit from a deal to build telegraphy systems across the British Empire. The investigation which followed saw government members of the committee (who were the majority) produce a report which exonerated the ministers implicated. As Beer notes, it ‘was this unsatisfactory outcome that led to the replacement of Parliamentary Committees with public inquiries’ (Beer 2011: 6).
The replacement of this approach was the Tribunals and Inquiries Act (1921). This allowed a motion to be lodged by any parliamentarian to establish an inquiry independent of government to be established, if this was agreed to by a vote in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. This meant that parliamentary time had to be found to debate the motion, and since the executive has control over the majority of business presented before parliament, this could be made difficult. That aside, the power to institute an inquiry laid with all parliamentarians and not just members of the Executive (this is very different to the Inquiries Act 2005) . The Tribunals and Inquiries Act 1921 allowed for an investigation to made either privately or publicly and the constitution of the inquiry’s panel could be decided during the debate on whether to hold an inquiry (and could be changed by seeking an amendment to the main motion). In its history, 24 inquiries were carried out using the 1921 act. Three of those are examined in this book: the Cullen Inquiry, The Shipman Inquiry and the Bloody Sunday Inquiry (see Appendix A for more details on these). More information on the 1921 act can be found in Keeton (1960).
Beer (2011: 23) outlines the reasons which were presented for replacing the 1921 act with the new Inquiries Act 2005. These included a need for a clearer framework for the conduct of inquiries, issues which arose because of devolution to the nations, and some concerns about the cost of tribunals. The main difference between the two acts is that the 2005 act allows only a minister to establish a public inquiry. This means that parliament does not get to introduce a motion to hold a public inquiry and is reliant on the executive establishing an inquiry. We will see in Chapter 2 how MPs may lobby for an inquiry using parliamentary means, but nonetheless, the establishment of an inquiry is in the gift of a minister. That executive power extends to who is asked to chair the inquiry and sit on its panel; there is no necessity for parliamentary involvement or approval in these matters either. Furthermore, the timescale of an inquiry is determined by the minister, rather than the panel and the minister is empowered to terminate an inquiry before it has completed its work. The level of executive power allowed for in the Inquiries Act 2005 has been strongly criticised and this is summarised by Beer (2011: 24ff.). The processes found in the 2005 act are a clear departure from the 1921 act, and some have questioned how independent an inquiry can truly be when so much power is invested in the government. This is not a matter for this book, but it can have a bearing on the work the government has to do to ensure an inquiry has credibility and this is something which I will pick up again in the next chapter.
1.4 A Standard Timeline for Public Inquiries
It almost goes without saying that each public inquiry is different—they are led by different people,1 they inquire into different events which came about in vastly different circumstances and in different areas of public life, etc. However, some generalisations can be made about what happens and when in relation to the establishment and conduct of a public inquiry.
- 0.
The ‘wrong’—the incident or incidents which trigger the need for an inquiry. The length of time between this trigger and the following stages is massively variable (see Sect. 2.3 for some indication of this).
- 1.
Public disquiet—campaign groups may be formed to both support people affected by the wrong, but also to lobby for a proper investigation into its causes and handling (this investigation may include a public inquiry, if the matter is considered serious and/or if previous investigations have been unsatisfactory).
- 2.
Parliamentary moves—individual MPs with affected constituents and/or who are supportive of the campaign groups may raise the need for a public inquiry in questions, debates and emergency debates in parliament. The nature of these moves is discussed in the next chapter.
- 3.
Announcement of an inquiry—the government may concede that a public inquiry is necessary and the minister will then announce its establishment by making a statement in parliament.
- 4.
First hearing of the inquiry—after preparatory work which goes on behind the scenes (including finding a chair and agreeing Terms of Reference, also discussed in the next chapter), the inquiry will hold an initial public hearing in which it outlines what will be investigated. It will call for interested parties to come forward with information that will help in its inquiry and will set out a timeline which the inquiry will aim to follow.
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Collection of written documentation—the inquiry seems to go quiet after this initial hearing, but behind the scenes documents are collected, collated and interrogated. Summonses requiring the disclosure of evidence may be issued.
- 6.
Announcement of core participants—following this huge endeavour of synthesising written evidence, the key witnesses who will be required to give further evidence to the inquiry will be informed of their status as core participants.
- 7.
Hearings to collect oral evidence—hearings take place to collect oral evidence. These are most often public, but can be held in camera. Questions are usually asked on the basis of written submissions. This aspect of the inquiry will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.
- 8.
Correspondence with participants for further information/clarification—if necessary, further clarification can be sought from witnesses in writing. This may particularly happen if a later witness brings evidence which requires a previous witness to clarify a comment. The initial witness may be recalled to give further oral evidence, but it is often sufficient for them to provide a written response.
- 9.
Writing of the report—on the basis of the evidence presented to the panel, the chair (along with other panel members) writes the inquiry report.
- 10.
Writing to those criticised—before the report is published, a warning letter must be sent to those who are criticised in the report which offers them the right to reply. This reply may trigger a redrafting of the report, or may simply be published in the final report, or may be dismissed entirely. Moreover, the inquiry is only obligated to provide warning letters to those who are criticised. Beer (2011: Chapter 9C) discusses this process in more detail.
- 11.
Publication of the report—the report is published and the minister who established the Inquiry lays a copy of the report before parliament. There is usually a ministerial statement of the report and a debate at a later date. These matters are discussed in Chapter 6.
I will seek to show that the construction of blame is something which is done throughout the process of the public inquiry—from its establishment to its reporting. I will show that at various stages this is done implicitly rather than explicitly.
1.5 Approach of This Book
While a noble aim, it is not one I share. Firstly because, like Widdowson (1998) and Geis (1987), I think this view contains an unfortunate presupposition, namely that ‘ordinary’ users of the language require the intervention of a CDA practitioner to spot the particular uses of language by public figures (usually politicians, but establishment figures more generally, to which group inquiry chairs would certainly belong). This clearly has the unwanted side-effect of elevating the analyst’s interpretation over those made by other members of the speech community.produce and convey critical knowledge that enables human beings to emancipate themselves from forms of domination through self-reflection. (Wodak and Meyer 2009: 7)
The other common critique is summarised by Joseph : ‘because CDA has its own strong political commitments, it does not provide any ‘objective’ analysis of texts but a politically interested analysis’ (Joseph 2006: 130). Of course, the rebuttal many CDA practitioners would give here is that there is no such thing as objectivity and, as Breeze alludes to in her review of CDA and its critics, it might be suggested that ‘by not taking a critical stance, they [those espousing ‘acritical’ approaches – JJM] are taking side with the existing hegemonies, guilty of precluding the necessary social critique, and thereby of collusion or of furthering the reproduction of an unjust social order’ (Breeze 2011: 518). Breeze suggests this to be ‘a form of ideological manipulation, a way of disqualifying the competition’ (Breeze 2011: 519).
Elsewhere the quality of analyses produced in CDA has been scrutinised, with some suggesting that too narrow a range of analytical tools is used and that developments in linguistic theory have been neglected in the textual analyses produced (see for instance: Widdowson 1998; Verschueren 2001; Billig 2002). This has led, in Verschueren’s opinion, to a type of discourse analysis which is ‘the product of conviction rather than the result of a careful step-by-step analysis that reflexively questions its own observations and conclusions’ (Verschueren 2001: 65). I endeavour to use a variety of linguistically informed theories in this book, which, it is hoped, will prevent such a criticism being levelled at the analyses contained herein.
[t]he question that is interesting from the linguistic point of view is how did they do it [i.e. use language –JJM], not whether they should have done it or not. In classic terms, we are interested in describing what happened, not in prescribing what should happen. In order to understand what politicians do with language it is important to understand what it is possible to do with language in general. (Wilson 1990: 15)
I propose to do this using a variety of approaches and methods: exploring lexical semantics, presupposition, conversational implicature, the notion of the speech act and activity types. I do this using traditional text linguistic methods, as well as corpus linguistic methods. Rather than discussing and justifying these approaches here, I will explain concepts and methods as they arise in each chapter. Eclecticism is something which, I argue, is to be favoured when exploring the various speech events which make up the public inquiry. I hope to show that this eclecticism can be, and is in this case, principled.
This work, then, aims to describe what public figures do with language, albeit with a narrower focus than that found in Wilson (1990). In particular, I will spend time looking at the resources used by language users to construct blame. I will occasionally indulge in a discussion of the benefits or otherwise of blame and will conclude the book with some observations about how the process of public inquiries may be changed. I hope the reader will forgive such indulgence which is, in part, motivated in Sect. 1.7.
1.6 Structure of This Book
The structure of this book seeks to mirror insofar as possible the timeline of the inquiry discussed in Sect. 1.4.
In Chapter 2, I will look at the processes involved in establishing a public inquiry. I will consider the different parliamentary routes which are open to MPs to lobby for the establishment of an inquiry. I will also examine the lexical semantics of the Terms of Reference which inquiries are tasked with, discussing how these make it possible for blame to emerge at the end of the public inquiry.
In Chapter 3, I will discuss questioning patterns during the oral evidence giving stage of an inquiry. I will show how these are different from those produced during criminal trials and how this helps to establish the inquiry as a different speech event within a broader genre of legally-informed discourse. I seek to investigate how witnesses who may be blameable are treated by counsel to the inquiry as compared to witnesses who are blameless. In so doing, this is likely to give us a better understanding of how blame is viewed by the participants of inquiries, as well as the panel conducting the inquiry.
Chapters 4 and 5 deal most directly with blame. In Chapter 4, I will show how witnesses seek to pre-emptively avoid blame when giving oral evidence. This will provide us with an insight into what blame is, its component parts and conflicting views on the definition of blame. I will also attempt to disentangle justifications, explanations and accounts and demonstrate the linguistic means through which these ‘moves’ are performed.
I will move on to looking at the reports of public inquiries in Chapter 5. Here, I will demonstrate the ways in which public inquiries go about blaming. I will show that, for the most part, this is done implicitly—using implicature, rather than explicitly. I will explore whether blame can be described as a speech act and will try to provide an account for the lack of explicit performativity. This account will stem from the meta-awareness which inquiry chairs bring to bear on blame; it is something which many view as negative and to be avoided. I will conclude that chapter with a discussion of why blame can be a positive thing.
In the final substantive chapter (Chapter 6), I will abandon the sequential organisation of the rest of the book to focus on one particular speech act—apologies—and how they relate to blame. I will argue that apologies can be motivated by: a desire to avoid blame; a view that blame is inevitable and so needs to be mitigated; having already been blamed. I will focus particularly on apologies as government responses to public inquiries and how they can be seen as a means of legitimising the work of an inquiry.
Chapter 7 will conclude with a summary of the findings, a discussion of the value of public inquiries and some suggestions for changes to their processes.
In terms of the inquiries I plan to deal with, this will vary from chapter to chapter, depending on the aims each. The initial substantive chapter, for instance, which covers the Terms of Reference found in inquiries will look at the 25 most recent public inquiries in general terms. The following chapter on questioning will focus on one of those (Inquiry into the Outbreak of Clostridium Difficile in the Northern Hospitals). Chapter 4 focusses on blame avoidance by some witnesses called before the Leveson Inquiry. The final two chapters take examples from various inquiry reports and government responses to four public inquiries. The choice of which inquiry to look at for each topic has, for the most part, been a pragmatic one. It relates to what data was available and in what form. For instance, some of the data were already in machine-readable format requiring only a little ‘cleaning’ and so these were used in chapters which called for corpus-assisted techniques. Others were less ‘tidy’ and so were used when such techniques were not being applied and when an interactional linguistic approach was called for.
1.7 Purpose of This Book
Given the prevalence of public inquiries—and the general interest in them—it is surprising that so little has been written about them, and particularly about the language used during them. This book seeks to remedy this lack of discussion.
One of the main purposes of this book, however, is to begin addressing some of the concerns that families often share about public inquiries: they can often feel re-victimised when an inquiry does not come to conclusions which they see as obvious from the evidence provided. Often this comes about from a clash of expectations: families want to find out who was at fault, i.e. they want to see responsible parties blamed, but inquiry chairs are often reluctant to do this (possibly for fear of prejudicing future criminal/civil action(s) or because it is not explicitly stated in the Terms of Reference).
In this regard, the purpose of this book is two-fold. Firstly, to raise awareness of these constraints on inquiries with a view to making suggestions of changes to the inquiry process. Secondly, I seek to offer an exploration of how blame is done at inquiries, albeit implicitly and in a way which may be unsatisfactory to families. To borrow from Lord Justice Leveson in example 2, I aim in this book to ventilate issues which are of public interest.