A modern moral economy? Edward Thompson and Valentin Vološinov Meet in North

Manchester Colin Barker Manchester Metropolitan University Paper presented to the conference on Making Social Movements: The British Marxist Historians and

the study of social movements, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, June 26-28, 2002

When we seek to understand a word, what matters is not the direct meaning the word gives to objects and emotions - this is the false front of the word; what matters is rather the actual and always self-interested use to which this meaning is put and the way it is expressed by the speaker, a use determined by the speaker's position (profession, social class, etc.) and by the concrete situation. Who speaks and under what conditions he speaks: this is what determines the word's actual meaning. All direct meanings and direct expressions are false, and this is especially true of emotional meanings and expressions. (Bakhtin, 1981, 401) "I don't know what you mean by 'glory'," Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" "But 'glory' doesn't' mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all." (Carroll: 196)

Introduction

One charge brought against E P Thompson is that his most famous work, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), fails to account for the way discourse mediates between 'experience' and 'consciousness'. Looking at the evidence of linguistic usage in the early 19th century, his post-structuralist critics find, not a growth of 'class consciousness', but a continuation of 18th-century radicalism (Stedman Jones 1983) or a 'populism' (Joyce 1991). Marxists have responded to these criticisms in several ways. One school (e.g. Palmer 1990) treats the focus on language as evidence of a rampant idealism. Another (e.g. McNally 1993, 133-5) objects that Stedman Jones reads the historical evidence selectively and one-sidedly, ignoring the growth of a socialistic literature among workers in the first half of the 19th century. A third school (e.g. Steinberg 1995, 1997) argues that merely examining the terminology of movements, and measuring it against a self-constructed 'standard of class consciousness' is itself a seriously mistaken enterprise.1 Rather than look for evidence of the presence or absence of a

1 Charles Tilly (1981:17) had already argued a similar point: 'We dare to speak of "class conflict" because so

many of the struggles portrayed in this book pitted sets of people who occupied similar positions with respect to the means of production - social classes, that is, or fragments of them - against others who occupied different positions. That usage opens us to the objection that the people involved did not cast their action in terms of class, were not truly aware of their class interests, or defined their enemies inaccurately. To these hypothetical objections we can only reply that such demanding standards for class conflict nearly banish class conflict from history; however

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'class conscious language', Steinberg suggests, we should explore the actual 'fighting words' used by workers in conflicts with employers and the state; and we should expect to find, not that they developed a separate class-conscious discourse of their own, but rather that they took signs and concepts already made hegemonic by their powerful opponents and contested their 'tenure' (Vološinov 1986). Class-consciousness is revealed, not in the development of a distinct workers' language, but in workers' attempts to seize and use bourgeois language for their own purposes in struggle.2 Steinberg suggests that such a 'dialogical' view of language, itself drawing on the Bakhtin School of the 1920s, is - while not explicitly recognized by Thompson - entirely compatible with the main thrust of his argumentation.

The case is convincing. Indeed, I suggest here that Thompson's (1971, 1991) idea of a moral economy - an aspect of his work on popular consciousness - is both open to fruitful use in settings other than the one for which it was initially designed, and is itself best comprehended within a dialogical framework.

The small crowds studied here formed briefly in the mid-1990s in two public halls in North Manchester. Unlike the 18th century crowds examined by Thompson, they did not engage in food-rioting, but did nonetheless struggle over issues which their members interpreted in 'class' terms. Examining a contemporary crowd permits access to some kinds of evidence not normally available to the historian. I try to show how, using a dialogical analysis, it is possible to explore an emergent class-consciousness rooted in an actual process of class struggle, and how it can partly be grasped through the use of Thompson's moral economy.

Booth Hall Hospital

In the early 1990s, Manchester Health Authority set out proposals for closing Booth Hall Hospital, a long-established children's facility in North Manchester. The Authority's plans provoked local opposition and campaigning, which I studied by means of semi-participant observation between 1993 and 1995. During the autumn of 1994, the Health Authority organized publicly advertised meetings, in order to 'consult' with local people about its proposals. I made video- and sound recordings of two such 'consultation meetings', at Moston and at Middleton. The form of these meetings was similar: the Health Authority booked the premises and advertised the meeting in the local media, they hired a local radio journalist to chair the events, and they offered a place on the platform to a local body organizing opposition to their plans, the Save Booth Hall Campaign. Opposition was also voiced from the platform by a spokesperson for the local Community Health Council.

Those speaking on behalf of the Health Authority were very aware that they would meet with antagonism, while no one who spoke from the audiences at either meeting said one word in support of the proposals. Local campaigners had made efforts to bring along supporters to the events. In practice, therefore, the meetings were constructed, before they even began, as arenas

engaging the vision of workers speaking articulately in class terms and acting decisively on the basis of an accurate assessment of their interests and enemies, the event itself has been rare indeed. We settle for a less demanding, and wider-ranging, conception of class conflict.' (My thanks to John Krinsky for reminding me of this passage.)

2 This approach also enables us to explore ways in which this contest for hegemony over the use of a shared language may also set limits to the formation of what, from outside, we might judge an 'adequate' movement. Steinberg points up particularly the ways that the Spitalfields silk-weaver's construction of their own struggle reinforced the subordination of women to men within their community and their movement.

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of combat. Within them, the Health Authority, represented by senior officials and consultant paediatricians, faced a 'protesting crowd'.

Here I want to explore some facets of the interaction between that 'protesting crowd' and the Health Authority, treating the meetings as 'events' or 'social situations' through which aspects of wider social structures and social antagonisms can be decoded. In this, I hope, I am following something of the logic of two famous papers: Max Gluckman's Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand (1958) and Edward Thompson's 'The moral economy of the eighteenth century crowd' (1971). Gluckman describes a ceremonial accompanying the official opening of a bridge, revealing within it a set of structured social divisions underpinning South African Apartheid, while Thompson explores cases of 'food riots' to uncover a whole set of popular assumptions and the social relations in which they were embedded. Both writers consider specific events as episodes in larger national dramas.

In North Manchester, both sides - Health Authority spokespeople and protestors - came into the encounters with some parts of their stances prepared. However, the actual interactions were not pre-scripted. Neither side knew, in advance, who would be attending, quite what arguments the other side would offer, or indeed what speakers on their own side would say. Through the course of the meetings, speakers from both the platform and the body of the meeting engaged in both discovery and improvisation.

The Health Authority's speakers faced a problem. They must try to convince audiences of protestors that they were wrong to object to the Authority's plans, indeed that the hospital closure was in their own and their children's best interests. Current legal-administrative rules required the Authority to engage in 'public consultation', although without binding them to take any final account of what such consultation might reveal about public opinion. If they failed to convince their audiences, they could always fall back on their administrative power of recommendation and decision. Thus the meetings had a certain quality of 'democratic theatre', in which 'authority' submits to a process of essentially 'sham consultation' before carrying through its 'expert' decision. Both sides were very aware of this.

The Health Authority case, and its reception

At the heart of the argument presented by the Health Authority's speakers was a 'medical' case.3 First, the Manchester region currently had two children's hospitals, Booth Hall and Pendlebury, and specialist technical and medical resources were divided between two sites. There was a professional-technical case for unifying these resources on one site.4 Second, apart from some highly specialized 'tertiary' provision for relatively rare disorders, advances in medicine had much reduced the need for children's hospitals. For example, the advent of nebulizers meant asthma sufferers need no longer spend long periods in hospital. The Health Authority proposed to replace Booth Hall with a new children's ward at the North Manchester General Hospital, and

3 The proposal was embodied in a public document under the title Caring for our Children (Manchester Health

Authority, 1994) 4 At no point did the Health Authority speakers clarify why Pendleton rather than Booth Hall should be the

preferred location. Indeed, it seems that their real preference was the building of an entirely new specialist children's hospital, replacing both Booth Hall and Pendleton, at the South Manchester Royal Infirmary site, close to both the linked St Mary's maternity hospital and the University of Manchester's Department of Medicine. At the time, this 'first choice' option was ruled out on grounds of cost.

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to expand the range of community-based medical services available to children and their parents in their own homes.

At both meetings, the audience's starting point was a desire to keep Booth Hall Hospital open. Given that stance, they were bound to listen for weaknesses and contradictions within the platform speakers' various utterances. For if they could directly refute any part of the Authority's case, their own argument would be strengthened. However, faced with the 'medical' arguments, the audience was at a decided disadvantage. Only the Health Authority and the consultants had direct access to the kind of standpoint from which an overall medical-organizational assessment could be made. The hospital consultants maintained a united front in public, generating from their own ranks no 'dissident expert' voice that might have aided the protestors. Local GPs had expressed support for the Save Booth Hall Campaign, but none of them attended the consultation meetings to air their reported views. Although more junior medical and other personnel at Booth Hall were believed to have doubts about the proposed closure, their voice was also not present in the meeting. In any case, the audience was prepared to grant the Authority's medical personnel a certain (if delimited) degree of legitimacy - something they proved far less willing to grant to the Authority's administrative officials. (The Booth Hall campaign secretary complimented a neurology consultant at the Middleton meeting - 'I'm sure he's very good at his job' - before proceeding to demand that he keep his nose out of politics. No one was that complimentary about any Authority official.)

Some of the medical-organizational arguments were thus accorded a relatively respectful hearing. Seemingly framed around a case that patients would directly benefit, they carried something of a halo of authority. On the 'medical' front, at least, the protestors lacked the resources to issue a significant challenge to the Authority's plans.

Yet the Authority quite failed to convince their audiences, and indeed remained on the defensive throughout both meetings. There were two broad reasons. The first is that part of the medical case touched on matters that the audiences did know about, and strongly contested. The second is that the audiences expressed considerable mistrust of the proposers' motives, thus discounting much of the purported medical case as contaminated by another, concealed, and more pernicious agenda. The first oppositional theme was sounded most strongly at the earlier meeting, at Moston. The second, voiced at Moston, provided the dominant oppositional rhetoric at the later Middleton meeting.

'Community medicine'

Part of the Health Authority's case, enunciated at the Moston meeting, was that they wanted to develop a community-based service. Both the Authority's chief executive, and two doctors, were listened to without interruption when they outlined their case for switching more resources away from hospital-based care and into community medicine. Modern medical techniques meant, they argued, that children needed to stay in hospital less than in the past; it was better for children, where possible, to be cared for at home, if adequate support could be provided in the shape of assistance to GPs, community nursing services and the like.

The chief executive explained: Children, by and large, are well. It's a minority of children that are unwell. And a minority of that minority that do have to go to hospital. The technology of health care is changing and we can treat more children in a community setting. Keep them in their home if at all possible in a safe environment.

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And a consultant neurologist offered two examples: When I took up neurology we used to admit children with epilepsy for two weeks to try and stabilize the seizures. Then we realized the children were much better off going to school, keeping active, keeping interested and altering their medication out of hospital. So we've reduced our mean stay in neurology from about twelve days down to three and a half and so it is for most services in the children's hospital. You just don't need the number of beds that you used to.'

'Increasingly we're trying to take the care of children with asthma back into their homes and if some of you here have children with asthma you know of the development of nebulized treatment that can be given at home often supported by nurses coming out from hospital to add advice er and erm it's supported by the attention of the general practitioner too.

The case appeared to have some general plausibility. But during the question session a woman in the audience (a local Labour councillor) rose to say, in a speech interrupted by general applause:

And now the lady on the end - the consultant, whatever she is, about this er. I get the feeling that we're going to get a "Care in the Community" for children now, which we've got for the old people. Which we all know has not been working for the last twelve months. This is what it comes to me... (Cries of Hear hear, and clapping) ... So if you can't do it for the pensioners of the country you're certainly not going to do it for the children of the country.

Once that theme had been enunciated, others picked it up: Woman: I'd like to say to Dr Ferguson that what you're describing is absolutely wonderful and if you could guarantee that then fine. But we've seen Care in the Community, we've seen the mentally ill and how they're cared in the community. We've seen the geriatric patients and how they're cared for in the community, and we don't trust what you're saying because it doesn't work. Ferguson: But it's beginning to happen all the time while you watch. There are more and more children... Woman: How many have to die ? Ferguson: Nobody's died. Woman: before. People are dying. People are being killed by the mentally ill because they haven't got a hospital bed. Now you're saying that's your dream for the future.

With each development of the theme, the antagonism grew more confident. The final speaker from the floor at Moston added a significant social generalization:

Can I just say that I I er although part of me agrees with er Care in the Community I'm also very very worried about it and I'm very worried about the pressure that that puts on working class people. Because to me Care in the Community is a middle class theory and to nurse at home lots of women in working class areas, and in middle class er societies, have to nurse elderly relatives, sick husbands and they have other children and now what we're talking about is bringing other sick children with nurses popping in and out and everybody else in to your home and I just find Chair: Okay. Woman: absolutely appalling and Chair: Care in the Community Woman: and I'd like to know when are you consult with people like me on this stupid idea of Care in the Community with our children. Chair: Okay, that's your question. Let me stop you Ferguson: The answer is Chair: That's the end for the evening. Ian. Ian, if you could take that. The question is Care in the Community is a smashing middle class idea, it's a working class world, how do you make it work?

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Ferguson: The answer is it'll be a choice. Do you want to have your kid at home and a nurse come round? Or do you want to have your kid in hospital? Have the choice. (shouts from floor) Chair: Well it. Okay I did say I did say Ferguson: I just said it's a choice.... (inaudible) Chair: That was the end of questions for the evening, it'll degenerate into a blazing row I know.

After the Moston meeting, some of the protestors went to the pub. Here they evaluated the evening's proceedings, like sports fans looking back on a match. The speeches on 'community care' were recalled with especial relish.

Fighting for Words

In his Keywords, Raymond Williams provides the following entry: Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society, etc.) it seems never to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term. (Williams 1983: 74)

Muncie and Wetherell (1995) develop this theme, suggesting that the term 'community' - along with others like 'family' and 'neighbourhood' - forms part of a signification system, or chain of concepts and associations, which includes other key terms like 'natural', 'harmonious', 'organic', 'healthy', 'warm', 'evolving', 'personal', etc. Governments attempted to deploy the term 'community' - with its 'warmly persuasive' connotations - to justify what turned out to be cuts in public welfare spending. Muncie and Wetherell suggested that the term's connotations can inhibit or confuse opposition:

The argument against community care is rendered more difficult by the reassuring humanistic imagery of neighbourliness, close ties, social support and a lifestyle more akin to a mythical image of village life than the urban housing estate. (ibid 56)5

However, the speeches from the floor at the Moston meeting suggest that by 1994 the term 'community' could be and was being used unfavourably, or at least as a term of suspicion. At least in adjectival form, 'community' was becoming associated with privatizing and closing public services, in both the mental health and geriatric fields. What the first woman speaker did was to evoke that sense of suspicion, in a way that provoked rapid applause from other protestors, thus opening the way to a cascading series of criticisms of the Health Authority's proposals. The second speaker amplified the opening theme by connecting 'community care' with killings by mental patients. The third speaker went on to critique the whole idea as a 'middle-class' imposition on working-class families. In the process she directly challenged sentimental accounts of both 'community and 'family' by referring to the toil and trouble of managing a household with a sick child.

5 John Muncie and Margaret Wetherell, 'Family policy and political discourse' in John Muncie, Margaret

Wetherell, Rudi Dallos and Allan Cochrane, eds, Understanding the Family, London: Sage, 1995: 56. See also Wetherell and Potter (1988), who predict that critics of 'community care' policies will need to deconstruct or negate the 'community' emphasis to effectively argue against them.

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The interchange is interesting, not least as an illustration of a general point about practical language-use in political struggle. Here the writings of the Russian 'dialogical' school of the later 1920s, notably V.N. Vološinov, M.M. Bakhtin and P.N. Medvedev, provide a key.6

When people meet to discuss any matter, what they say is shaped by the processes of their mutual interaction. In Bakhtin's expression, 'Two discourses equally and directly oriented toward a referential object within the limits of a single context cannot exist side by side without interacting dialogically.' Regardless of whether they support or contradict each other, 'they must come into inner contact.' 'Two embodied meanings cannot lie side by side like two objects - they must come into inner contact; that is, they must enter into a semantic bond.' (M M Bakhtin, 1984).

Words and signs are anything but socially innocent. They exist only in the mouths of ourselves and those with whom we interact, and their usages are shaped by our intentions as speakers. If language is the product of a shared social activity, it is also and equally a contested product. Thus Vološinov (1986: 23) argues:

Class does not coincide with the sign community, i.e. with the community which is the totality of users of the same set of signs for ideological communication. Thus various different classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of the class struggle.

Words carry with them all manner of associations, connotations, points of reference and contextuality which provide their meaning and their power. Political argument consists in good part in fighting over who shall have 'tenure' of significant terms, that is, whose wider referential system and whose 'evaluative accent' shall predominate.

How we use language is shaped by who we are, that is, by the position we occupy within an ongoing system of social relations.

... there are no "neutral" words and forms - words and language that can belong to "no one"; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word. (Bakhtin 1986: 293)

People speak from their social position to others in social positions, and in so doing they address the utterances of those with whom they converse and debate. Language is inherently dialogical, in at least two senses. First, and obviously, it exists as part of an ongoing sequence of dialogue, in which we respond to the speech of others. But second, what we say is a response to the speeches of others, and includes elements of their speeches. This is of central importance in the process of political contestation, which is about power, ideology, mobilization. Any particular person's utterance takes into itself other people's utterances and attempts to redefine them and re-determine their meanings. Language itself is a site of struggle, and a key element of that struggle is a conflict over the useability of specific terms, especially terms with extensive symbolic loading.

6 I have also benefited from reading books and articles by Martin Barker (1989), Chik Collins (1995, 1996,

1999), Michael Gardiner (1992), Joan Kelly Hall (1995), Ken Hirschkop (1999), David McNally (1995) and Marc Steinberg (1999, 2002).

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Vološinov suggests that speakers give the words they use specific 'evaluative accents'. These give their utterances much of their situational meaning and force. In part evaluative accents express speakers' social location, i.e. the places they occupy in systems of social relations, themselves stratified by power and status and marked by social oppositions. Evaluative accents are also provided by the other meanings and associations that speakers and listeners evoke when a given term is used. Words thus acquire practical power, becoming good and bad, safe and dangerous, ugly and beautiful, sacred and profane. But the meanings people give them have to be fought for, and fought over.

Some terms are more easily contested than others.7 To the degree that speakers can make words 'monological', closing off rival meanings and referential loadings, they make them into their own property, or establish authoritative and undisputed 'tenure' over them. The Health Authority succeeded, in that sense, in 'monologizing' the discourse about 'specialist care', leaving their audience with little space for independent critical evaluation. But it was quite another matter with 'community care'. Where the Authority sought to evoke the 'warmly persuasive' accent of the term 'community', especially when yoked to the equally warmly persuasive 'care', they stepped onto territory that was already mined. 'Community care' had, thanks to previous Government policies, already developed quite other experiential associations, attracting popular scorn and abuse. The protestors seized on these other meanings of 'community', drawing on opposed associations and meanings and invoking differentially perceived realities of working-class life. Here, the very term 'home' was also identified as a place of labour and stress, and the notion of 'community care' was shown to be massively contaminated. The protestors claimed 'tenure' of the word 'community'.

They largely succeeded. Summing up at the end of the Moston meeting, the Health Authority chairman acknowledged the point:

I think fourthly we're agreed erm on er the importance of developing, I'm not sure we are agreed on this, but I think the support for the delivery of community services if we could get past the skepticism that it's let down the public in other areas like old age and mental illness, there's a lot of skepticism about it (comments from floor) but but supported it could be done right.

By the time of the next meeting, at Middleton a few days later, the Health Authority dropped all mention of its 'community medicine' proposals. It was the protestors' opening speaker who offered this theme, now in an offensive vein. Holding up the Authority's document he declared:

This booklet is riddled with one central concept, and that is Community Care... that rhetoric, that theme, is actually masking the real central core, the objective is to close Booth Hall

The Health Authority spokespeople, once burned by 'community care', declined to play with that fire again. They did not respond to the challenge.

A wider agenda of dissent

Dialogical theory is distinctive within the fields of linguistic, ideological, and cultural studies in its attention not only to the producers of discourse but also to their audiences. Bakhtin (1986) is

7 Chik Collins (1996, 1999) addresses this matter in an interesting way in relation to arguments about the

closure of the Upper Clyde shipyards in 1971.

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very explicit about this matter. Exploring the social character of the 'utterance', Bakhtin insists on the active and responsive stance of the listener, that is, the individual or group to whom an utterance is addressed. Any single utterance is but one event in a chain of dialogical exchanges; it is itself constructed both as an active response to what has been said before, and in anticipation of generating a future response. As listeners, attending to another person's utterance, we are already preparing our own answer.

Just as every utterance has an evaluative, expressive aspect, so too does every listener's responsive attention. An utterance can only be understood in its specific social context (which includes the listener as a central element), as the expression of an intention and as organized according to a 'plan'. The listener needs to make sense of the utterance-in-its-context, to grasp the speaker's purpose and understand their plan. Part of that ongoing active evaluation by the listener, which will in turn affect her or his response, consists in determining what status to accord both to what is said but also, and simultaneously, to the person speaking. Speakers and listeners alike, orienting themselves towards others through speech, 'place' themselves and others, determine their relative powers, form a picture of those others are and what they want in the given setting (Hall 1995)

In the consultation meetings, this kind of evaluative process proved very damaging to the Authority's cause. For the audiences at these meetings called into question not simply the adequacy of the arguments presented by the officials and consultants, but their motives and their trustworthiness.

As I noted above, the audiences seemed prepared to grant some legitimacy to medical personnel, so long as they were discussing strictly 'medical' matters. But this legitimation was quite strictly de-limited. Consultants were quite rapidly challenged if they strayed from the area of their acknowledged expertise into other matters - and notably into issues concerning money. This happened at both meetings. At Moston, a woman paediatrician was listened to in silence as she presented the Authority's case for unifying specialist services, until she began to talk about the issue in terms of financial advantages. At this point the audience became restive. She worsened matters worse for herself by offering an analogy:

'Suppose you had half your family in one house and half your family in another house and you've got to run the rates and the rent and poll-tax and God know what else they sting you for...'

Here she was compelled to halt by interruptions from the audience. A speaker from the floor told her, a little later:

Can I just say to Doctor Phillips, I understand you trying to draw analogies, but the analogy you're doing is basically very much the Mrs. Thatcher patronizing housekeeper's basket... (applause)... I think we do understand that analogy. It's extremely patronizing to think that we that is the level you have to come to try and explain budgets to the community.

Here, that 'multi-accented' word community, which the Authority had attempted to 'tenant', performed a new duty. It was re-populated with new meanings, now referring to a group of people hostile to doctors taking a patronizing view of them. In the process, the doctor was linked to Mrs. Thatcher; her 'medical' persona was discounted as she was re-identified as moving in the same linguistic universe as an immensely disliked politician, whose 'economics' were deeply mistrusted.8

8 Stephen Hill has summarized the evidence on 'how restricted a purchase Thatcherism [had] on the lower

classes and that it was contested by significant numbers even among the service class'. Most people, he notes, 'still

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At the Middleton meeting, again, a male consultant faced a similar response. After speaking without interruption for several minutes, he strayed into the issue of the financial benefits of merging specialist services:

...for every pound you pull out of your pocket to buy that sort of thing it's a pound less to hire a nurse or a scientist in the laboratory or a... (shouts from floor): Rubbish Consultant neurologist: Now why is that rubbish? If you. If you at home are given a fixed budget you have a choice on what to spend it on. The reality... (shouts from floor, the chairman intervenes to restore order, but the doctor has temporarily lost his speaker's authority) A pensioner from the floor: It's all about money all the time. Chair: The whole world's about money, love. (shouts from the floor) Chair: Dr. Newton may we progress please, if we could progress....

Later, when the same consultant referred in positive terms to the 'purchaser / provider' split in the Health Service, he was heckled. He ploughed on through interruptions:

Now in the new system everything that happens a bill is raised for it, but the money from the purchasers instead of coming to Pendlebury will go to Hope and the status quo is maintained. So there's no actual change it's just erm a financial arrangement. (sarcastic laughter) Man from floor: Sack the managers.

The Booth Hall Campaign secretary told him, to applause: I want doctors who are doctors, I don't want doctors who are frigging accountants. I want. I don't want purchasers and providers, I want doctors and nurses in our hospitals running it and I don't appreciate hearing consultants, paediatricians or whatever adopting this terminology which is totally bogus. If the man could concentrate on the job for which I hope, I'm sure he's very good at it, but if he would concentrate on that.

When the doctors raised questions about money, the audience was ready to oppose them, and in so doing to call their social roles into question. Wandering into the contested sphere of 'political economy' in the broadest sense, they faced an audience that knew immediately what kinds of language it neither trusted nor allowed to pass unchallenged.

Both sides struggled, in part, to define the nature of the interaction between themselves. The Authority and the doctors sought to shape the dialogue at the meetings so that, in a sense, it would extend the doctor-patient relationship into the reorganization of the health service itself. They would appear as disinterested professionals, deploying their technical expertise to benefit the population and their children, offering an 'education' in the changing realities of medical practice to their client-consumers. What we propose, they suggested, is in your own best interest, adding that we understand and sympathize with your 'feelings'.

The protestors, in various ways, challenged that stance and that account of their mutual interaction. What you're actually doing, they charged, is pursuing an alien 'monetarist' philosophy, seeking to cut the health services we enjoy - and when you deny it we simply don't believe you. Members of the audiences regularly asserted that, whatever the Authority's

subscribe to the welfare compromise and a "dependency" culture' (Hill 1990, 21). We might contest his language, but not the content of his argument.

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spokespeople claimed, they possessed a covert agenda they dare not assert in public. The Authority's Chief Executive opened the Middleton meeting with the words:

Let me make two very clear unequivocal points by way of introduction. The first is that this not about saving money on Children's Services....' (sarcastic laughter and comments from floor) Man's voice from the floor: Big joke. (comments from floor) Chief Executive: I I'm sure you'll disagree with me later....

And when he repeated the point at the end of his opening address, a woman near the front inquired,

Do you mind if we laugh again?

and a man in the audience called out: Rubbish. Tell the truth.

At the Moston meeting, a pensioner asked, rhetorically: What is your real reason for wanting to close Booth Hall ? What is it ? Money to balance the books. (applause)

The chairman noted that the question had been asked 'almost with venom'. A tenants' association chairman remarked

By the sound of it Mr. Boyd or Professor Boyd seems to be looking for pounds, shillings and pence. You seem to be wanting to just save money and not provide any services. Or if you're going to, the young lady there made an absolute point, what have the staff got as guarantees that you're not going to get rid of them?

A community consultant trying to explain the advantages of community medicine was interrupted:

Come off it, you're saving money. You're making money

- thus compelling her to reply 'I'm not saving money, I want it better for the children in Manchester.' In the process of replying to the interruption, she lost the flow of her speech.

At the Middleton meeting the same charges flowed as freely. Bigger hospitals, the SBHC spokesman told the audience, 'mean more money for the bureaucrats who manage them.' One floor speaker described the officials on the platform:

They don't deserve to be on there because they're just money grabbers, put there and paid by the Tory government.

And one woman told them: You're not willing to put your money where your mouth is and that's why we don't believe a single word that you say. And if the money's gone down from forty million six years ago that it would have cost to provide a hospital down to fifteen or twenty million I bet you any money that you could improve Booth Hall site and provide all those services on that site well for that price. Or has somebody like Eddie Shah already offered you the money for that site? (applause)9

9 Again, context is relevant. Eddie Shah had recently attempted to purchase a large piece of public park-land

to develop a private golf course, a project defeated in part by another local campaign.

12

The theme of 'money' kept coming up in different ways. Doctors' references to the market were taken as indications of their monetary agendas. The platform were accused of only being at the meeting because they were paid, while the audience was there because they cared. The Authority was charged with subordinating its proper concern with health provision to Government financial constraints, instead of making public demands for more resources. They wanted, speakers alleged, to close Booth Hall in order to sell off the land to private developers. While you put money first, the Authority was warned, we have a different scale of values. We pay happily for Booth Hall, but should we be paying for you?

Man at Middleton: We were clearly told that the Health Trust could not afford two children's hospitals. This town has never decided that it cannot afford to save children's lives. We don't want some sycophants coming in telling us that we have. If it takes more money then we have to go back to government and say that we want more money. I'll leave you with a question. How much does it cost to employ a nurse and how much does it cost to employ you lot sat on that table coming here to tell us something we don't want to hear? (applause)10

Running through a whole series of contributions, interruptions and heckles at the meetings was an effort to 'de-credential' the Authority's speakers, by challenging their personal or social character. While, as Billig (1995) suggests, speakers regularly make 'credentialing' moves, to establish their own credibility, they do not always succeed. The Authority's spokespeople were accused of bad faith, of being the 'minions' of the Tory minister of Health, of changing their story from meeting to meeting, and of attempting to run the hospital down secretly before the consultation period was even over. The officials were called 'unelected men in their grey suits and plush offices', who never stayed long in their jobs and thus had no loyalty to the people they were supposed to serve. You are, one woman told them at Middleton, 'liars and hypocrites'. Every remark and gesture by the Health Authority representatives was liable to be taken suspiciously, sometimes with general amusement. At one moment in the Middleton meeting, Professor Boyd, the Health Authority chairman, replied earnestly to a question, 'My view is that one should be honest on these occasions even if the audience don't...' and was interrupted by general laughter and a man's voice remarking sardonically, 'He'll be sacked tomorrow for that.' A little later he was accused of not caring that much, since he could always use private medicine for his own children - an accusation he went passionately out of his way to deny.

The sense of mistrust was allied to a further theme, strongly enunciated by numbers of speakers. Officials had no right to decide the future of the hospital. The protestors knew they had 'public opinion' on their side. The councillors from all three major parties had decided it was politic to oppose Booth Hall's closure; and not just Manchester but all the Councils to the north of the City had passed virtually unanimous resolutions to that effect. Speaker after speaker

10 There was another side to the 'money' theme. The audience made positive claims about its right to determine

the future of the children's hospital. We pay your wages, they told the platform. But also, we have raised large sums of money through fund-raising activities to buy a scanner for Booth Hall. Over the years, North Manchester people had devoted time and energy to supporting all manner of charitable activities connected with the hospital. Local clubs, churches, unions and the like would always give a good hearing to fund-raising efforts for 'our children's hospital.' 'Charity' here was something quite different from images of 'Lady Bountiful'. It was embedded in, not imposed on, the institutions of local working-class life as an aspect of solidarity. Their own fund-raising provided a basis for asserting some claims to moral ownership of the hospital.

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reminded the platform of how unpopular their plans were, and of how unrepresentative they were of local opinion.11

Thus the question arose, what weighting did the Health Authority give to local opinion, and to the views of local elected bodies? There was no escape from this. Asked directly what credence he gave to local views, Professor Boyd attempted to divert the question to a competitive theme:

HA Chairman: A lot of credence but I'm not going to advise or my authority will not er in trying to devise the best services for your children and grand-children be just taken over by views that want to defend one hospital. I mean the very remark we had earlier: "Why not move Pendlebury to Booth Hall?" - erm you know, if that was the right solution we'd have a meeting like this round Pendlebury.

But at both meetings he was compelled to acknowledge that he and his colleagues were in the difficult position of saying that they knew better than the people what was in their best interests.

Chair: Again I like to get answers and boil them down. If I can boil that answer down you seem to be saying the hundred percent of public opinion which is against it, apart from the two people you spoke to, are against it because they are ill informed. Is that what you're saying? Boyd: Yes. (comments from floor) Chair: Okay, well. SBHC Secretary (from the platform): There. There. There's. There's a democrat. There's a democrat. A moral economy?

The North Manchester meetings involved a contests between standpoints. What the protestors were expressing might, perhaps, be explored through the concept of a 'moral economy'. Edward Thompson originated this notion to help account for the specific 'rationality' of 18th century food rioters.12 Within their actions and speech, he outlined a set of moral assumptions central to the 'rebellious traditional culture' of the period. These moral assumptions underpinned resistance to social reorganizations, introduced from above, which took the shape of 'innovations of capitalist process' and were 'experienced by the plebs in the form of exploitation, or the expropriation of customary use-rights, or the violent disruption of valued patterns of work and leisure' (Thompson 1991: 9).

Elaborating his argument in 1991, Thompson made two points: first, he was pointing up a contrast between two different sets of assumptions, two differing discourses; second, the evidence in the historical record for the difference is abundant. The 'moral economy' represented a set of assumptions, discourses and moral judgments which stood opposed to another such set; indeed, it was partly defined by its place in this opposition. The 18th century antagonist of 'moral economy' was the powerful emerging official doctrine of 'political oeconomy'. Moral economy takes on its meaning in 'dialectic tension' with market economy (Randall and Charlesworth

11 A local newspaper organized a write-in poll, which produced a vote of 1,004 to 3 in favour of preserving the

hospital (Moston Express). 12 Thompson first used the expression 'moral economy' in The Making of the English Working Class (1963),

developing it in 'The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century' and further exploring and refining it in Customs in Common (1991).

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2000:2). Like other kinds of ideological ensembles or 'fighting words' (Steinberg 1999), a moral economy, in this conception, is a negotiated, relational, dialogical notion, constructed and reconstructed as part of an ongoing interaction between power and powerlessness. Far from being fixed, its precise terms, boundaries and extent are open to reshaping, challenge and modification.

Within the larger field of ideological ensembles, a 'moral economy' is marked by several characteristics. First, working people identify the cause of some problem, threat or breach in their lives as what Thompson called 'the innovation of capitalist process', where that innovation is being pursued by wealthy or powerful figures whose agendas are at odds with the people's needs. The origins of a moral economy are to be found within a capitalist economy.13 Second, a moral economy engages a response that not simply negates, but affirms a positive counter-ethic, a vision of the common good entailing non-monetary values. Third, that vision has aspects of 'tradition' or 'custom' in its articulation, in that it affirms something already practiced, known and valued; it is 'conservative' in that it seeks to protect a humanly valuable pattern of social activity, rights and obligations. That valued pattern need not have existed from time immemorial, but could be the product of some moral, economic or social gain which the people won in the rememberable past.14 Fourth, the enunciation of a moral economy is a kind of battle-cry, or at least a justification for action; and its defence licenses forms of action and speech (for example, physical confrontations with authority, 'imprecations against the rich') which, in other circumstances, might be adjudged inappropriate.

Numbers of authors have followed Thompson in suggesting that part of a moral economy's practical power comes from the partial validity that the powerful have granted it in the past. Thus Hay (2000) sees the 18th century moral economy as dependent on state law; while Randall and Charlesworth comment:

The moral economy was as much about the negotiation of power as about actual rights.... When one party stopped playing by the old rules, indeed ceased to believe in the efficacy of the old rules, the moral economy of the crowd was fatally threatened. Riot and economic action drew upon, as Thompson said, values and attitudes which were common to governors and governed alike.... [S]tatutes, proclamations and conciliar directives contributed as much to the content of the moral economy as did the community-based experiences and traditions of the crowd. This is not to say that the motives and aims of official policy were identical with those of the people who engaged in riot and other dearth-related protests. Nor does it mean that state paternalism was the equivalent of the moral economy of the crowd. But it is clear that the notions on which the concept of the moral economy is based were worked out in a complex, tension filled, and sometimes conflictual relationship between central authority, local magistrates and the inhabitants of local communities. (Randall and Charlesworth, 2000: 20-21, 34)

A moral economy is a specific manifestation of the class struggle within capitalist development, capable of taking different forms in different settings: in the 18th century market place where Thompson decoded it, but equally in respect of enclosure of land, workplace regulations, or 'welfare' provisions by local and central government. Since Thompson first

13 Adrian Randall (1991:255, cit Steinberg 1995: 80) remarks, on the moral economy of trade relations among

woollen workers, 'The origins of the moral economy therefore have to be found within a capitalist economy, not outside or in opposition to one'. This seems slightly mistaken: a moral economy emerges within and against a capitalist economy. Otherwise there is no sense in Thompson's suggestion that moral economy can be seen 'constantly regenerating itself as anti-capitalist critique, as a resistance movement' (1991:341).

14 Concrete expectations and 'rights', established in one period, can come to seem stable aspects of a moral universe, and later be threatened by the dynamics of further capitalist restructuring.

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proposed it, the concept has been deployed by sociologists, historians and anthropologists, to help understand aspects of manifold forms of the discourse and practice of popular resistance in very different settings.

The concept of a moral economy rests upon a double process of generalization, both by 'observers' and by 'participants'. First, sociologists or historians may point to a 'moral economy' at work if the ideas expressed and assented to by the people they are studying conform broadly to the model above. In this sense, a 'moral economy' is a part of the analytic theoretical arsenal alongside other 'ideology' concepts like 'social purview', 'interpretive framework', 'vocabulary of motives', 'evaluative schema' etc. Second, such an 'observer's theorization' itself assumes that the actual participants in a situation are themselves generalizing various incidents in their own experience into a particular, shared mode of interpretation and response. The theorists' term, 'moral economy', is an effort to sum up the 'sense' that actors make of what's going on in a concrete situation - where those actors are identifying 'capitalist process' as their target and problem, and are invoking a distinct set of moral-economic principles in opposition.

One caution should be sounded. We should not regard a moral economy (or almost any other ideological form) as if it were a carefully articulated theoretical system. Rather, it has the character of a loosely coupled and dynamic ensemble (Steinberg 1999:20) of ideas, evocative symbols and the like developed in various degrees of opposition to ruling ideas (which are themselves commonly similar 'assemblages' of signs and notions). A moral economy is developed and shared through conversations among its adherents (in Vološinov’s term, it wins 'choral support') within a local environment of speech or 'community of response'.15 The tenets of a moral economy may be only partially self-conscious, becoming so only when the 'tissue of customs and usages' it articulates is threatened by 'monetary rationalization' (Thompson 1991: 340).16

Thompson noted the role of 'rumours' in generating 18th century popular rebellion, along with the rulers' dismissive attitude to these fragmentary and sometimes unreliable snatches of information. However, Thompson remarked, the people had direct information sources rooted in their everyday lives, and these could not be so easily discounted. In the arguments over Booth Hall, too, 'rumours' played a significant part in the way members of the audience constructed their account of what was happening to children's services. The speakers quoted concrete facts. This ward was closed, that section was being moved. One speaker who had participated in a brief 'stunt occupation' of an empty ward at Booth Hall told the meeting that the window frames in the hospital were rotten, but that new carpet was being laid for offices - for him, a highly symbolic material contrast. Another remarked on the sheer wastefulness of closing a newly refurbished accident and emergency suite at Booth Hall. The audience remembered that this child died when there was no intensive care bed available. They knew those parents with a sick child had difficulty getting to the hospital, this parent had to wait too long to see a doctor, that child should not have been sent home without an x-ray, or a disruptive teenager was placed on

15 The term 'community of response' was developed in cultural studies by Martin Barker (2000), who identifies

it as an 'essential circulatory medium' for shared evaluations and stances. 16 In becoming self-conscious, a moral economy may provide materials for some degree of systematization.

However, it can be invoked for different socio-political purposes. A moral economy may provide underpinnings to a socialist critique of capitalism, for example, but may equally be harnessed to demands for a capitalist economy modified by a stronger 'public service' element (Davies and Flett 2002). Suitably re-worked, it may also appear within fascist assemblages.

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the same ward as young babies. Authority might charge that the people sometimes mis-read the facts, but they knew what counted as important evidence.

The knowledge the audiences brought to bear on the Health Service might be as piecemeal as many oppositional ideologies, and might often be anecdotal, but it was also concrete. From their social location it was difficult to form an overall picture, and they were prepared to listen to those with information they lacked and who offered a general perspective. But they listened with suspicion, for that other perspective was 'from above', and therefore had two potential weaknesses. First, being 'from above', it might be merely 'up in the air', a balloon with too little connection with the ground of real experience. Second, a view 'from above' is always liable to contamination from its contact with others 'above', who are known to put their own class interests first.

Given Thompson's (1991:340) own cautions about so over-extending his concept that we end up 'turning up moral economies everywhere', is it appropriate to apply the notion of a moral economy to the views of the North Manchester protestors? Cautiously, I think it is. The sense the protestors enunciated was indeed that the Health Authority's proposals represented 'innovation of capitalist process'. What was going on, they insisted, was exploitation, the expropriation of existing use-rights. For them, the very use of the language of 'cost' and 'economy' in relation to the Health Service was quite as contentious as the abolition of regulation in the corn trade in the 18th century. The audiences at the meetings were deeply sceptical that the Authority could, in the 'monetarist' climate of the time, be proposing anything good; rather, they interpreted the proposals as an attack on established and valued rights. If the Health Service was not 'customary' in the sense of being rooted in some ancient way of life, it was part of what people were used to, and expected. As for children's healthcare, that was sacred ground. It was, additionally, envisioned as their own property, as something won for and by the people in a legendary past and maintained by them through a web of voluntary activities.

The audiences expressed a view about what is legitimate and illegitimate in the running of a valued public service, and linked this to views of social norms and obligations, and of the proper functions of the several parties in medicine. Doctors and nurses should concern themselves with patients' welfare, and not mix in management politics or start talking managerial jargon. To the extent that 'management' within the Health Service was permitted any legitimacy, its role was to facilitate the provision of good services for the community, and not to line its members' own pockets or impose alien 'market' values on a community that needs and expects medical care to be provided regardless of the capacity to pay, and has won that as a right. Whatever privileges the rich and powerful might have won in other spheres of social life, health care should be exempt from these. Definite and passionately held views of the common weal were being expressed in the meetings, along with a claim that these were indeed the shared notions of the whole people. By contrast, the Authority was represented as embodying a distinct, and opposed, set of values.

Those who spoke against the Health Authority could draw on months and years of everyday talk across North Manchester, both formal talk in meetings of various kinds and informal conversation among neighbours. They could assume a 'community of response' and 'choral support' for the ideas they expressed about Booth Hall, about the Health Service, about the Tory government, about threats to their children's welfare, about their right to define their community's views. While each speaker and heckler from the floor of the meetings spoke with his or own individual 'accent', speakers were mostly willing to support and encourage each other, and to share and develop common themes in their criticism of the Authority's plans.

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In practice, the Authority had to bow to those views, was even itself a partial prisoner of them. So too were even their political masters: Mrs. Thatcher herself felt impelled to declare, 'The NHS is safe in our hands'. The Authority might believe that their vision of a remodeled children's service in Manchester was the only possible rational way forward, but they were aware that what stood in its way was a certain potential power that must be respected and negotiated with - even if they categorized what the audiences told them, not as reason but as 'feeling', as 'the meddlesome interference... of popular prejudice'.17

Crowd Organization

To identify a moral economy is to begin to account for some aspects of the meetings. Thompson never claimed that it explained everything. The presence of a moral economy could not, for example, explain why a food-riot occurred in this 18th century situation or setting but not in that. Other explanatory elements are required to handle issues of that kind.18 While Thompson decoded an 18th century moral economy within the actions of 'riotous' crowds, we need not assume that those who suffered dearth without rioting were contented in their passivity. A moral economy may provide justifications for active resistance and protest, but does not determine the shape that this might take. How a moral economy is inflected and given practical and verbal expression, whether it is expressed in collective action or remains at the level of verbal grumbling, whether it is articulated as an overt battle-cry or is attached to nothing more than what Bagguley (1996) terms 'informed fatalism' - all these are matters shaped by participants' situational judgments and other factors shaping particular concrete settings. It does not follow that those who agree with each other about the core elements of a moral economy will share a common view about what should be done. Behind an apparent homogeneity of ideas may lurk major strategic and tactical disagreements.

Within and between different theories of ideology and discourse, there are variations in the stress placed on stability as against instability in the meanings of words, on patterning as against uncertainty in the articulation of ideas, on group consensus as against conflict and ambiguity. One way in which the dialogical school distinguished itself from structuralism (notably in the hands of its most famous exponent, Saussure) was in its emphasis on the situated creativity of each individual utterance, the ways in which speakers, while drawing on a shared pool of linguistic elements and rules, constantly made the language anew by turning it to their social purposes.19 Each utterance, however trivial, takes on significance as an 'event' in which human creative intentions are apparent. It is not simply in the general system of a language - in the langue, as Saussure has it - that meaning resides; those who make everyday utterances (Saussure's parole) themselves create new meanings in using words and in deploying evaluative accents and stylistic devices to express themselves. Language is in a constant process of being made and remade through local usages, and as people struggle over the 'tenure' and the evaluative accents and associations of significant terms.

17 Thus did Adam Smith summarize the main force preventing the full and desirable introduction of the self-

adjusting market in the corn trade. (Cited Thompson, 1991: 202-3) 18 This matter is explored by Waddington et al (1989). 19 There was some kinship in this respect between the thinking of the Russian dialogists and the American

pragmatists, notably Peirce and Mead. See Rochberg-Halton (1982); Petrilli (1993). Both would have strongly opposed the position taken by Patrick Joyce (1994:13): 'meaning makes subjects and not subjects meaning,' insisting on the meaning-making creativity of speakers.

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In a dialogical view, the creativity of utterances does not only reside in the ongoing making and remaking of the meanings of words, but also, and simultaneously, in the social relations being established among those who speak and listen to each other. This approach offers us a way of extending further Thompson's argument about crowds.

Although he did not directly address the argument, Thompson's 1971 article can be read as a contribution to a long debate about the 'rationality' of crowds. Up to the 1960s, most academic literature on crowds and 'collective behaviour' still relied, in significant senses, on an account developed by conservative thinkers in late 19th century. Crucially influential was Gustav Le Bon's The Psychology of the Crowd, first published in 1895 and translated into a host of languages. Le Bon's essential argument was that, in crowds, individuals lose their capacity for autonomous self-control and descend to a less rational form of behaviour. Sigmund Freud (1921), among many others, hailed Le Bon's work as a fundamental contribution to understanding crowd behaviour.

Le Bon's ideas were imported into twentieth century sociology, notably by the American founders of the 'social interactionist' school. Robert Park (1904), followed by his student Herbert Blumer (1939/1969) and by others, developed an account of 'collective behaviour' which owed much to Le Bon. These thinkers made a sharp conceptual distinction between two forms of elementary human behaviour: 'everyday' and 'collective' behaviour. Everyday behaviour is regulated by established norms, collective behaviour is not.

Blumer's discussion of collective behaviour assumed 'classic' status for some thirty years. People in crowds, he suggested, finding themselves in situations of uncertainty and anxiety, engage in 'circular reactions'. They 'mill' around each other, sharing emotional impulses, and become open to excitement and manipulation. Blumer drew a categorical distinction between interpersonal processes within 'crowds' and within 'publics'. Crowd members engage in feeling-based circular reactions, becoming more similar in the process; while members of a public engage in interpretative interactions which make them if anything dissimilar. Crowds exchange feelings, publics exchange ideas. In a crowd, individuals lose self-consciousness; in a public, they increase it. Blumer relied on images drawn from either the animal world (crowds act like 'alarmed cattle') or from popular psychiatry (deploying such terms as 'neurotic' and 'hypnosis') to illustrate his account of crowd reactions. He also drew on a picture of the crowd, developed within theories of 'mass society', as an entity made up of anomic individuals, isolated from each other, experiencing anxiety and 'unrest' of an unfocused kind. Among such individuals, there few formal or informal ties and networks exist.

The Le Bon-Blumer position has been extensively criticized, most exhaustively by McPhail (1991). One intellectual by-product of the social movements of the 1960s was a shift in the way social scientists approached the explanation of collective action and crowds (Jenkins 1983, Morris and Herring 1987) - indeed, so marked was the intellectual shift that one commentator has suggested it came as close to 'an authentic revolution' as any change in social thinking (Rule 1989). One significant weakness of the old 'collective behaviour' school was that it based itself on second-hand accounts and impressions of crowd action, rather than close detailed study (McPhail 1991). Now, social historians and sociologists began to gather careful empirical material on crowds, their composition and activities. Where crowds had been seen as inherently 'irrational' or 'non-rational', the new accounts stressed their rationality. Where, in the old picture, crowds appeared as accidental aggregates of rootless individuals, now they were shown to be highly representative of local communities. Far from their activities and purposes being random

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and infinitely manipulable, crowds were now represented as acting in perfectly comprehensible ways in pursuit of clearly identifiable and established interests.20

The shift in emphasis was necessary and highly salutary. However, in some of this work, the new model of 'rationality' adopted was taken over rather uncritically from orthodox economics. Some valuable 'social constructionist' questions remained under-explored. How do crowd participants come to define a specific situation and the kinds of behaviour appropriate therein? How do they discover and communicate among themselves what their specific common interests are, and what they should say and do? Such questions suggest a need to consider the process of communication within crowds, and between them and their opponents, looking at what people say (and otherwise signal) to each other, and how they respond to the various 'signs' (Vološinov 1986) they receive. In many crowd settings, such matters are quite difficult to study empirically. Often - in relation to 'riotous crowds', for example - the best an analyst can do is the kind of post factum reconstruction that Reicher provides in his valuable studies of the St. Paul's riot in Bristol or of the 'Battle of Westminster' (Reicher 1984, 1996). In this sense, one advantage of studying a crowd at a protest meeting is that it is possible to follow people's arguments and counter-arguments fairly directly.

Certainly, none of Blumer's conceptions helps make sense of the North Manchester meetings. Nothing suggests that individuals making up these crowds lost any element of 'purposive self-control'. Certainly they expressed 'feeling', but always in the context of proposing, evaluating, accepting and rejecting specific ideas.21 Furthermore, what they said can only be understood if we see them as established members of all manner of existing networks and associations within the North Manchester area; many, indeed, made a point of declaring their specific social, community and political affiliations.

We can view the content of crowd interactions in problem-solving terms. Participants face two parallel questions demanding solution: first, What's going on here? and second, What should and can we say and do? In the case of the protest meetings, as in some other situations like public demonstrations and riots, we can see two sets of communications going on, as protestors interact both among themselves and with their opponents. Thus the question - What's going on here? - turns into an interrelated set of multiple queries. Who are we? Who are they? What are they saying and doing, and why? The question, What should and can we say and do? includes various sub-questions, including, Whar are our powers? Are we agreed? Crowd members seek answers to such questions through their interactions with each other and with those they confront. In that sense, they engage in processes of 'discovery', involving creative response and mutual clarification.

None of this occurs, of course, in a social and historical vacuum. Previous relationships, interactions and discoveries, from outside the specific setting of this particular crowd, provide participants with resources for labeling, framing and making sense of this specific interaction. Participants draw on already familiar categories of understanding and identification - both of themselves and of others - to see what's going on. In this sense, larger ideological purviews are rediscovered and found relevant, and even elaborated and amplified. Far from an uncritical

20 As well as Thompson's 1971 article, notable contributions included Rudé (1959), Davis (1973), Reddy

(1977), Reicher (1984 and 1996), and Johnson (1987) 21 The 'idea-feeling' distinction, along with that between 'Reason' and 'Emotion', has long bedeviled western

social theory. Only if we insist that all human action is marked by both qualities, just as all utterances possess evaluative accents, can we begin to break free out of this kind of false dichotomy. For a brief statement of my views, see Barker 2001.

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'emotional' process, it entails ongoing listening and watching, evaluating and responding, of a practical-theoretical kind.

In the consultation meetings, successful speeches from the floor evoked certain themes - about 'community care', about 'money', about 'democracy' and so on - that other participants could recognize because the currency of those themes in North Manchester made them rapidly familiar. If there was a 'moral economy' at work, this is how it was drawn on and recognized. Speakers summoned up a existing stock of ideological resources they could assume others shared, revealing how they fitted this occasion. The more effective speakers were those who, in a sense, 'spoke for the community' through this process of evocation. Their success was marked by responsive markers: they won audience applause, later speakers referred back with approbation to what they said, or picked up a theme they had opened and developed it further. (The development of the 'community care' theme, above, is a good example.) It is in the use of the themes involved in the 'moral economy' that we can see the process of dialogical development at work. Nothing here suggests an 'irrational crowd', but its 'rationality' is a process of mutual discovery carried on among its members.

That the audiences were critical of their opponents is obvious. But they were also critically aware of their own 'side', and in the very process of arguing with the Health Authority they were also evaluating and organizing their own forces. These were crowds which, far from being 'structureless', were giving themselves a definite form for the occasion. People came to the meetings armed with a general purpose, namely, opposing the closure of Booth Hall. But what the meeting would be like, who would speak and what they would say, they did not know. During the meeting they listened, judged, evaluated, discovered - and organized. They rewarded approved speakers with applause, laughter, supportive remarks, waves, smiles and pats on the back. By such means, they awarded 'leadership' status to some speakers.

However, they also withdrew or limited that status. At the Moston meeting, the Save Booth Hall Campaign Secretary told the Authority that campaigners were not 'wedded to the bricks and mortar actually on the particular site', and that they welcomed the idea of an expanded community service for children. One of the Authority's spokespeople embraced this remark - for it seemed to suggest they could discount attachment to the physical fabric of Booth Hall Hospital. But the very first speaker from the floor made a point of disagreeing with the Campaign Secretary on the matter of 'bricks and mortar', while, as we have seen, other speakers went on to question the 'community care' notion. Some speakers from the floor did not attract applause, even though some of them spoke passionately: they failed to enthuse the audience, to make telling points, to enunciate shared themes in convincing ways. Their contributions were awarded no prizes of recognition. By interactively 'accrediting' and 'discrediting' their own members, the crowds at both meetings gave themselves shape and direction.

The Limits of Discourse

Steinberg (1994: 515) remarks of ideological conflict that, while it can map a terrain of legitimate action and validate contention, it can't organize networks, it can't garner resources, and it can't take action: 'People do that.' Those who attended the North Manchester meetings could, and did, enunciate a powerful 'moral economy'; they forced the Health Authority to retreat from one of its main justificatory claims; they demonstrated how unpopular was the proposal to close their local children's hospital. If anyone could claim 'victory' at the consultation meetings, it was the protestors.

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But there were limits to that victory. While the protestors spoke with power and passion, a reality 'beyond discourse' conditioned their speech. For they also knew some things they did not mention. True, they could claim to speak for hundreds of thousands of local people, but the actual numbers who turned out for a November evening meeting were small. If dissatisfaction and angry frustration at the Authority's proposals were widespread, few people were mobilized into more than signing petitions and displaying posters. No local demonstration in support of the children's hospital exceeded a few hundred participants. Also, there was a voice missing from their own ranks at the meetings - that of organized hospital workers whose jobs were threatened by the closure. Nor, therefore, were there threats of industrial action from other workplaces in solidarity with the hospital workers.22

The audience spoke from a position where the potential practical sanctions they could bring to bear on the Health Authority were weak. Compared with those who campaigned to defeat the Tory Government's 'Poll Tax' only a few years before (Burns 1992), the hospital protestors lacked an obvious practical weapon. They could speak woundingly, but lacked the capacity, just now, to inflict more deadly blows. In interviews, one campaigner described his modest hopes for success: 'If we achieve nothing else, at least we will have made them limp.' Another reported her own feelings of frustration during the meeting:

I went to one of those consultation meetings, at Moston Brook, and there people were attacking people on the top table, considerably, very much so... They were talking very Left. I had the feeling, What could we say? And the thing was, there wasn't anything at that point, because of the way the campaign had gone.. Unless we'd organized people walking out, or storming the platform or doing something that. I remember discussing it afterwards and feeling dissatisfied with that meeting and the contribution that we'd made. Maybe we should have - but that would have just been a stunt saying, "We're disgusted" - somehow done something along... In a sense we'd lost the argument by then with the people that mattered, that could turn it round.... And we did try to build that meeting. I remember doing a lot of going round a lot of people trying to get people to come to that meeting.... Mostly they didn't come.

It was one thing to speak angrily at the meeting, but to do that and no more was a confession of weakness. A 'moral economy' was being expressed, but only verbally. In this sense, what was actually said in the meeting was only part of a wider context of social power relations. For the moment, the protestors were also constrained by a wider context of what Bagguley (1996) terms 'informed fatalism'. On the one hand, the floor speakers at the meetings expressed dissatisfactions rooted in a rationality consistent with working-class beliefs and circumstances. But it was a 'bounded rationality', contained by an awareness of the present limits of practical possibility. The fact that, from a potentially much wider 'repertoire of contention' (Tilly 1978, 1993), resistance was limited to the verbal utterance can't be dissociated from crowd members' awareness of their own class's recent history of defeat and political quiescence, or from the wider tactics and strategies of the campaign organizations themselves which contested the closure of Booth Hall (Barker 1996).

That said, if the consultation meetings expressed a limit on the forms of protest, they also revealed the possibility of wider generalization and different forms of action. The protestors' ideas were inherently capable of being given a different practical construction, and without any

22 For the most effective of the demonstrations, two hospital porters made their own banner. Carried at the front

of the march through Manchester city centre, it declared, 'Jesus Said "SUFFER Little Children" SO DO THE TORIES'. Voices like that were not heard again in the campaigns.

22

major internal restructuring. As Bagguley (1996: 22) remarks about the opposition to the Poll Tax:

One never knows when some subtle shift of circumstance, some new alignment of the institutional matrix will crack open the opportunities for collective action that multiplies its effectivity beyond the wildest dreams of the participants.

Quite a small shift in the 'conjuncture' - for example, via a differently focused public campaign in the period preceding the 'consultation' meetings - might have altered the balance of practical power as between the protestors and the Health Authority, and thus have been registered in how people spoke. There was something of the 'carnivalesque' in the ways that people addressed the Authority in the licensed setting of the 'consultation' meetings. If carnivals have been understood as 'safety valves' where people can safely 'let off steam', they are also, on occasion, moments when actual reversals of and challenges to power are sometimes achieved.23

Words - and power

... the meaning of what is said ... is infused with forms of power; different individuals or groups have a differential capacity to make a meaning stick. (J B Thompson 1984: 132, cit Gardiner 1992, 222)

I doubt that anyone's mind was changed by what was said at either of these public consultation meetings. Two contrasting logics had clashed publicly. On one side, the Health Authority had, as one of their executive officers told the Moston meeting, complied with the law and 'consulted'. On the other, local audiences had expressed hostility and disbelief towards their plans. The audiences had openly enunciated the view that the Authority were knaves or fools or both. The officials and doctors, more circumspectly, had articulated a view that the people were ill-informed, characterized more by emotional reactions than a rational appreciation of circumstances.

In a sense, the Authority never needed to win the argument, even if they might have preferred doing so. For, as one floor speaker alleged, the meetings involved 'pseudo-consultation'. The Authority was bound to listen to but not to follow local opinion.24 It could, as if it had learned from Le Bon and Blumer, discount crowd opinion as the product of 'feeling' rather than of reason. It retained the power of decision.

And it would demonstrate this. In January 1995, after the 'consultation period' ended, the Authority held a final meeting in

Manchester Town Hall. It was, the chair explained to a sizable crowd who attended, a 'private meeting being held in public.' At that meeting, in an extraordinary piece of unpopular theatre, the members of the Health Authority voted through every point in the original proposals. Their hands went up and down some twenty times, in front of an audience that heckled and insulted

23 See the remarks on this question in Scott 1990, 178-181. 24 Molotch (1990, cit Staggenborg 1993) draws on studies of ecological protests, including those over oil-spills,

to suggest that elites have the capacity, after periods of 'vulnerability', to recoup their positions. They can organize public meetings as 'pseudo-events' - 'strictly planned and ceremonious encounters' - where the illusion of popular participation is maintained, while simultaneously organizing 'creeping events' (real events 'arranged to occur at an inconspicuously gradual and piecemeal pace') which actually determine the outcome.

23

them as 'puppets'. At the end, the Authority members departed rather quickly, leaving a room full of rather stunned and angrily subdued people. The power of argument, it seemed, gave way ultimately to a slightly shamefaced argument of power.

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