Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives have gone from encouraging people not to vote for their opponents, to telling them “don’t surrender” to Labour. The Conservatives have said that a Labour vote would mean surrendering the economy, their pension and their children’s education, among others.
One image shows a family holding their hands in the air – apparently at gunpoint – with the accompanying text “Don’t surrender your family’s future to Labour”. Sunak tweeted this with the line “I will never stop fighting for this country”. So, what does it mean to talk of “fighting” and “surrender” in a democratic election?
War metaphors have a long history in politics. We can find references to “fighting” elections back in the 1830s in the Hansard archives. Just think about how we talk about election “victories”, running an “election campaign” or “conceding defeat”. These are all quite conventional and well-trodden, expressions we might use without even thinking of them as metaphorical.
