Category: Words and Things

Three ways in which this government is devaluing the currency of political language

20th November 2021

Over at his substack the fine political journalist Adam Bienkov has a good and detailed post on how Downing Street lies:

Of course, some will say, all politicians lie.

But what is distinctive about these lies is how easy they are now to document and expose.

For example, Downing Street had falsely insisted Johnson had complied with the rules on a recent hospital visit.

So yes, all politicians lie – but rarely are the lies in such plain sight.

We can all watch this dishonesty in real time, and there is no other word for what we can all see but lying.

Yet this is just one of (at least) three ways in which the current prime minister and his government are devaluing the language of politics.

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Take promises.

 A recent post on this blog set out three express promises in the 2021 general manifesto that the government has disregarded:

‘We will proudly maintain our commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on development, and do more to help countries receiving aid become self-sufficient.’

‘On entering Government in 2010, the Conservatives acted decisively to protect the UK’s pensioners. The ‘triple lock’ we introduced has meant that those who have worked hard and put in for decades can be confident that the state will be there to support them when they need it. We will keep the triple lock…’

‘We promise not to raise the rates of […] National Insurance […].’

We can now add to these reneged commitments, a fourth:

‘We will build Northern Powerhouse Rail between Leeds and Manchester and then focus on Liverpool, Tees Valley, Hull, Sheffield and Newcastle.’

Of course, all elected governments depart from their manifestos.

But there is something so blatant about how the current government repudiates on its explicit commitments.

These are detailed explicit promises – and the government does not care about disregarding them.

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And take threats.

How many more times are we going to hear Lord Frost threaten to trigger Article 16?

Even jaded Brexit commentators cannot easily keep up.

And now, with the prospect of Christmas supply lines being affected by any European Union response to the United Kingdom triggering the provision, the United Kingdom this weekend seem to be downplaying the prospect.

But threats, like promises, need to be credible to be effective.

And the United Kingdom government generally, and David Frost in particular, seem to be doing everything they can to discredit and undermine their own position.

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Words matter.

For although the United Kingdom state has (rightly) a monopoly on the use of coercive power, most politics – and policy and law – in practice rests on words and the meanings that people understand those words to have.

And so if there are fundamental dislocations between words and meanings then this subverts the polity itself.

Our current government states things which can be effortlessly disproved, reneges on detailed manifesto promises, and does not carry out threats.

Political discourse thereby becomes just noise.

Yes – the government can perhaps claim some tactical advantages from this conduct, but this is at the cost of strategic strength.

And as Bienkov avers in his post, one recent cost is that nobody believes Downing Street when it denies a story.

For this Boris Johnson and those around him have only themselves to blame.

They are squandering something of absolute political value.

And they do not seem to care.

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“Let me be absolutely clear” – the two rules of clarity

19th November 2021

Here is a government minister:

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“For clarity…

“I would like to make our position… 100% clear….

“I want to be clear…”

And so on.

This minister is not even the worst politician in this respect – the former prime minister Theresa May often seemed incapable of saying anything without prefacing with how she was making something clear.

But David Frost’s latest verbiage means it is perhaps time for me to state on this blog a couple of rules about clarity that I have often tweeted.

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The First Rule of Clarity

If you have to describe a thing as “clear” then it usually is not.

The Second Rule of Clarity

The stronger the intensifier for “clear” (for example, “very clear”, “absolutely clear”, “crystal clear”) the less clear that thing will tend to be.

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The rules also apply to “clearly” – and this is always a tell in a litigation letter or legal argument that the author has no confidence in what they are saying.

Compare and contrast:

“This passage clearly shows that…”

“This passage shows that…”

The very fact you are having to gloss what the passage means indicates that the passage is not clear.

If the passage were clear, the gloss would be redundant.

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Going back to the example above, Frost says three times – in a tweet and his quoted speech – about things being clear.

If the position were clear he would, of course, not need to tweet or make a speech in the house of lords saying things were clear.

As it happens, there is no clarity about what the government’s position on Article 16 is – and it seems to change every weekend with the Sunday papers.

And the reason why the position is unclear is that the thinking (or lack of thinking) is unclear.

Fog everywhere, as Charles Dickens would put it.

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These are rules – and not laws.

They are not laws in the scientific sense – like Godwin’s law – which are perhaps affirmed rather than broken.

Nor in the jurisprudential sense, the usual fare of this blog.

Of course, there will be exceptions to these general rules.

But: clear is a good strong word describing a good strong concept.

And if you do take clarity seriously, you will never have to say so aloud.

Is that clear?

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Why ‘legally ringfenced’ is a phrase used by political knaves to take you for a fool

7th September 2021

Another late-night revelation about our current government-by-essay-crisis:

The phrase ‘legally ringfenced’ is a legal and political nonsense.

It is a legal nonsense because nothing in the United Kingdom can, in any meaningful way, be ‘legally ringfenced’ .

This is because of the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, which means a parliament can make or unmake any act of parliament.

Nothing – to use a similar dishonest phrase – can be ‘enshrined in law’.

Even if there were a provision put in a statute – with super-duper protections intended to prevent its repeal or amendment – the provision and all those super-duper protections could be repealed or amended with a simple parliamentary majority.

And it is a political nonsense for it is a trick that that has been played before and which has been exposed as trick before.

The international aid budget was, supposedly, legally ringfenced.

The fixed-term parliaments act was, supposedly, enshrined in law.

The current triple-lock on pensions likewise, and so on.

And so on.

But still politicians use this trickery – and still too many nod-along by these impressive sounding phrases.

The claims ‘legally ringfenced’ and ‘enshrined in law’ do have a rhetorical purpose, of course.

They invoke the majesty of law to charge up what would otherwise be a banal political utterance.

An utterance intended to reassure waverers or even win over somebody who would otherwise be opposed.

And in that way, it is perhaps slightly significant that politicians still feel law has sufficient respect so that political statements can be framed as grand legal announcements.

But it is trickery all the same.

Any politician who uses the phrases ‘legally ringfenced’ and ‘enshrined in law’ is a knave – and a knave taking you to be a fool.

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“I am sorry but I make no apology” – words and meanings and politics

12 August 2021

The eminent jurist Elizabeth Doolittle once averred:

‘Words Words Words
I’m so sick of words
I get words all day through’.

Of course, the problem of too many words and not enough meaning is an old problem.

Once can point at a current example and deplore it, and soon someone in reply will point out it is nothing new.

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Perhaps it is not new, and perhaps the only difference now is that, because of the internet, there are just far more words to be seen.

An ever-growing tower of babble.

But.

The use (misuse, abuse) of words by the authoritarian populist nationalists in today’s politics – in both the United Kingdom and the United States – does seem to have something novel to it.

Maybe it is the shamelessness of the knowing disconnect between words and their meanings – as if our ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ predicament meant that politicians do not even need to try to have words that correspond with reality.

If so, and if this is indeed a novel situation, then there is no inherent reason to believe that politics will be happily cyclical, and that we will return to the good days of there being a match between what politicians say and what they do.

That said, it may not actually be that happy and good, if those politicians – like Orban in Hungary (see here) – next say illiberal things and very much do mean them, because they no longer care about liberal pieties.

For the illiberal politicians of our age, it seems the first step is to rob words of meanings, and then to be unafraid of saying what they really do mean.

This in turn makes the political challenge difficult for those (of us) who are liberal and progressive.

Not only do we have to combat the assault upon truth, but we then have to combat the follow-on candid and unapologetic assault upon human dignity and autonomy.

It is a grim prospect – and it is one for which illiberals ‘make absolutely no apologies’.

Brace, brace.

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