The Rhetorical Analysis Of Tony Blair's Speech

On Thursday July 7 2005, four suicide bombers attacked central London in four different places. It was a co-coordinated attack that struck the Underground simultaneously at three different places in central London. Short time after, the last suicide bomber exploded on a bus. Few days after the attack, British Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke at the yearly Labour party conference, which this year was not only for the supreme decision makers of the party. It’s estimated that over 600 people gathered to hear Tony Blair’s speech.

Mr Blair’s speech successfully uses various techniques and features to emphasize the extent of the problem of terror and the importance of action against it.

The structure of Mr Blair’s speech is circular. Tony Blair starts talking about the

rhetorical questions and short, precise sentences. A rhetorical question is a question asked to make a point, rather than prompt an answer, and in this speech plenty can be found (p. 57, ll. 16-19, 24, 28-29): “If it is the plight of the Palestinians that drives them, why, every time it looks as if Israel and Palestine are making progress, does the same ideology perpetrate an outrage that turns hope back into despair?”, “What was September 11, 2001 the reprisal for?”, “Why if it is the cause of Muslims that concerns them, do they kill so many with such callous indifference?”, etc. These questions are not meant to be answered, and no one at the conference could. They do not serve the purpose of being resolved, they serve to provoke. Mr Blair uses these questions to illustrate how senseless the actions of the terrorists are and to promote the argument that behind this militant, fundamentalist form of Islam stands no logic. Linking these questions together in one whole paragraph as a scheme emphasizes and strengthens the argument by displaying these actions as no single incident, but parts of a dangerous, widespread, meaningless