John Harris, the Guardian’s Mr Britpop, has an interesting look at New Labour political language, though it’s not clear why now it’s still very interesting. He notes of David Miliband:
In the financial year 2011-12, in addition to his salary as an MP, he turned £410,171 in fees for "consultancy work and speeches", supplied to such worthy causes as an agribusiness firm called Indus Basin Holding and the United Arab Emirates' ministry of foreign affairs. How he finds time to represent the struggling folk of South Shields as well as overseeing his Movement for Change (which, according to its blurb, works in "specific areas to support campaigns for change in local communities, to identify and nurture talent and to develop new responses to the challenges that people face") is anyone's guess, though his 45% Commons voting record may say something. Or perhaps he's just given up sleep.
Just to further suggest that's he's bionic, the elder Miliband has also become a prolific polemicist, in the Guardian and elsewhere – though then again, maybe "polemicist" is the wrong word…
Miliband's latest article was ostensibly about the old Blairite theme of so-called public service reform, which of itself may represent a pop at his younger brother: Ed Miliband does not talk about that stuff very much, and his brother's wing of the Labour party has always used this subject as a club with which to beat its supposedly unreconstructed adversaries. Anyway, the elder Miliband said things such as: "Successful economies in the modern world are not sheepish about the power and responsibility of the state. But there is a catch. We need to be reformers of the state to reboot our economy and build a fairer society … the fiscal crunch requires a different kind of state. The failure of the government's economic policy makes how much less we spend, and how and where we spend it, a core issue. We cannot meet our goals on jobs, health, education, long-term care and tackling poverty without changing the way government goes about its business."
This is not his only example. Harris quotes pieces by Stephen Byers, James Purnell and Douglas Alexander, where meaning is as difficult to catch as a bar of soap in a tornado.
It brings to mind a famous piece by George Orwell, on Politics and the English Language. His contention was:
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
This was a major theme of his final novel, 1984, which he began writing shortly afterwards (although Newspeak is somewhat the opposite of vapid political jargon).
It’s worth noting there is such a thing as Good English, though it is not as simple as it appears. All aspects of our society are contested. Language is not neutral but the result of centuries of class struggle. The prevailing ideas in any society, most of the time, are the ideas of the ruling class, and that includes ideas of what makes good or bad forms communication. The split infinitive is a small, simple and obvious example. It was drilled into children for decades that you cannot place an adverb before an uninflected verb. Why? Because, it seems, you cannot do so in Latin, and England was supposed to be the modern Rome.
So when the Eton educated Orwell offers us five principles of Good English we must beware (despite being articulate and politically conscious, Orwell’s writing does sometimes slip into traditional class prejudice). He was smart enough to offer a sixth rule: “break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”. Despite notions of Good English being class based, they are real and consensually accepted (or accepted consensually).
If sloppy or opaque language is a sign of political degeneracy, what does New Labourese say about modern politics?
What, aside from firing muted shots in some factional battle no one really cares about, is the point? Right when this most miserable of rhetorical traditions is refusing to die, people at the opposite end of the political spectrum are mastering the business of being altogether more blunt and plain-spoken. For proof, read the already-infamous Tory treatise Britannia Unchained – which may advocate working until you drop dead and deregulated everything, but is at least coherent and straightforward. Meanwhile, David Miliband and his ilk talk – but say what, exactly? Time to leave the gazebo, disrupt the economic narrative and reboot?
Once the Labour Party came to accept the neo-liberal paradigm it had to move to the right while still engaging its base, which was (and remains) social democratic. While it was called Traditional Values in a Modern Setting, it was actually a divorce between words and deeds. Thanks to New Labour, with the exception of the Tory right everyone in Parliament calls themselves ‘progressive’.