Existence of Radical Ideas in UK and US Top Political Level – Does the Prime Ministers and Presidents Manipulate Their Speeches?

This article analyses the character of discourse focused on terrorism at the top political level in United Kingdom and United States. It aims to contribute to the focus of the section on drift of radical ideas into political mainstream by answering the question: How radical is terrorism discourse at UK and US top political level and how has it evolve over time? Several articles and books have already been written on the terrorism discourse in UK and US, however none of them focuses on all top leaders of the War on Terror period from both countries. This article analyses speeches delivered by British Prime Ministers and American Presidents between 9/11 and the end of 2019. It will use software for qualitative analyses NVivo to code the speeches and analyse them properly. The analysis is based on methodology that combines Fairclough´s Critical Discourse Analysis and Jakub Eberle´s Affect and Discourse. By combination of these two methodologies it is able to analyse context in which was the speech delivered, connection to other discourses that were present in the speeches, character of the discourse itself – what language and labels does the speech contains and also emotions present in the speech. After finishing the analysis of the discourse the article uses Ruth Wodak´s book Politics of Fear (2015) that analyse discourse of right wing political parties. It provides us with the definition of radical speeches and we use this framework to identify, whether there are radical ideas present in the speeches of British Prime Ministers and American Presidents. This article aims to deepen our knowledge about discourse on terrorism and infiltration of radical ideas into mainstream discourse, which is important for making the public aware of such phenomenon and preventing rise of right-wing parties and manipulation of speeches.