In November 2014, British MP Emily Thornberry tweeted a photograph of a house with several flags of St George a white van parked outside. This tweet unleashed a maelstrom of public debate that held Ms Thornberry had transgressed ‘the first rule of politics’. This episode appears to be a classic example of what Fairclough & Chouliaraki call the ‘dialectic of reflexivity / ideology’: a self-evident understanding of gender, class & nation displaced ideology as a resource for power domination. This paper will trace down the ways in which changing performances of gender, class & nation on both social and traditional media in response to Emily Thornberry’s tweet reflect changing articulations of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary British society. In so doing, it will adopt a critical approach to symbolic resources which combines elements of critical discourse analysis as developed by Fairclough & Chouliaraki with ethnosymbolism as developed by Anthony Smith.
