Harold Macmillan's "Winds of Change" Speech: A Case Study in the Rhetoric of Policy Change

Abstract

A political leader who decides to change policy confronts a heterogeneous audience comprised of old supporters who may feel betrayed and potential new supporters who may be suspicious of the leader's motives. Analysis of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's "Winds of Change" speech in 1960 on British relations with Africa reveals techniques used when a leader confronts this rhetorically challenging situation.

From Pioneer Historiography to Patriotic History: Constructing Usable Pasts in Zimbabwe (1890–2018)

“…However, Southern Rhodesia’s political ambitions were compromised by demographics, black nationalism, and Britain’s decolonization impulse — the “winds of change” announced by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1960. London would no longer support the political dominion of white minorities as it had exchanged the Empire for the Commonwealth, an arrangement more in line with the emerging world order, and was unwilling to sacrifice its strategy for the sake of white dominium in Southern Rhodesia (Myers 2000; L’Ange 2005). Settlers were also losing on the demographic front: whereas between 1945 and 1960 the white population had increased from 80,500 to 219,000, the black population was growing much faster.…”

Situating Speech: A Rhetorical Approach to Political Strategy

“…An example is Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's 'Winds of Change' speech to the South African parliament in 1960, in which he announced Britain's support for majority rule across Africa and an end to his government's acceptance of white domination. Macmillan responded to an objective situation of spreading demands for national independence across the continent by presenting these, metaphorically, as an inexorable, nature-like 'fact' to which whites urgently had to adapt by abandoning their vain aspiration for continued supremacy (Macmillan, 1960).That charged re-conception of the situation was blended with an insistence that adaptation was the only way to ensure the continued influence of 'Western civilisation' in the face of growing communist influence (see Myers, 2000). Thus Macmillan boldly conveyed a controversial idea (radical policy change) by means of topics of definition (what something is) and circumstance (what is possible or impossible), supplemented with an established narrative of Western cultural supremacy.…”

Moral Argument and the Justification of Policy: New Labour's Case for Welfare Reform

“…An argument may also be selected because it is logically and/or culturally consistent with the party's ideological commitments, and hence is more likely to be convincing than one that contradicts them. Politicians enhance the effectiveness of their justificatory strategies with a range of rhetorical devices (see inter alia Myers 2000;Charteris-Black 2005;Finlayson 2007), and an examination of these techniques will enable us to take into account the 'emotional as well as the intellectual attractiveness of arguments' (Freeden 1996, 37). Using this understanding of the 'context of justification' as a starting point, the article offers a three-fold analytical framework, which is applied to investigate the use of moral argument in contemporary politics.…”