They are also evident in Blair’s text, and they can be seen as aspects of the semiotic realization of depoliticization. In the construal of economic change in the ‘modern world’, there is an absence of responsible social agents. Agents of material processes are abstract or inanimate. In the first paragraph, ‘change’ is the agent in the first (passive) sentence, and ‘new technologies’ and ‘new markets’ are I the second – agents, notice, of intransitive verbs (‘emerge’, ‘open up’) which construe change as happenings or processes without agents. The third sentence is existential-‘new opportunities’ are merely claimed to exist, not located within processes of change. Notice also that in the third paragraph, the inanimate ‘this new would’ is the agent of ‘challenges’, construing change itself as articulating what responses to it are necessary. By contrast, when it comes to national responses to these implacable and impersonal processes of world change, social agents are fully present – business, the government, the KTI and especially ‘we’.