6 NOVEMBER 2004, Page 18

The dead language of politicians

If you can't get a straight answer from your MP, says Rod Liddle, it is because he has been reading too many evasive job ads Here's a job advertisement which appeared in the Guardian this week. Please read it and see if, by the end, you are any the wiser as to a) what the organisation does and b) what duties would be required of the successful applicant.

One Plus One: Working for the wellbeing of couples and their families.

Head of Communications and Outreach Development. Three days per week.

One Plus One is an organisation that bridges the gap between research and practice. We have a strong and distinctive reputation for conveying evidence-based messages on couple and family relationships in innovative ways to a wide range of audiences: policymakers, practitioners, the media and the public.

We are looking for a skilled communicator who is able to think strategically and act locally, with the skills and enthusiasm to contribute to the development, managing and marketing of the organisation's publications and services.

don't know about you, but I find almost every sentence in the above entirely devoid of meaning. Simply: I don't understand it. If were forced to guess. I suppose I would hazard that a charity or quango a little like Relate is looking for someone to edit its inhouse magazines and possibly do some other stuff, too. But I may be wildly wrong. And I am wholly at a loss over the organisation's 'strong and distinctive reputation for conveying evidence-based messages... ', despite falling into two of the categories at whom they insist these evidence-based messages have been successfully directed. Nor was I aware of a gap that needed bridging between research and practice, or, consequently, what one would do to bridge it. The lucky candidate will also have to 'act locally'. What does that mean? Doesn't everybody, by definition, act locally? It's all a bit of a mystery. I wonder if anyone applied. You might be inclined to think, a little facetiously perhaps, that One Plus One is an organisation that needs a head of communications for rather more than three days per week.

On the same page of the Guardian there is an equally indecipherable ad for the post of Community Communications Officer at Haringey Council, but I won't bore you with the detail. You can probably guess most of it, anyway. In any case, if you read Ross Clark's excellent mini-column, lob of the week', in these pages, such spewing of meaningless corporate bilge will not come as a surprise to you. It is absolutely de rigueur. But Ross's stuff is intended to arouse your ire rather more about the (taxpayer's or ratepayer's) money expended on unnecessary and stupid jobs, rather than the language in which the job ads are expressed. Maybe Ross is making the more serious point — the mystery post at One Plus One, for example, pays £36,000-plus for a three-day week and I haven't a clue where they get their funding from, though I would guess that your wallet is involved somewhere along the way.

But, increasingly, the sort of language we see in the sits vac columns is making its way into public and political life. In particular, politicians are incapable of making speeches or writing manifestos without recourse to the twin evils of the deadword and the fatuous, meaningless claim.

Deadwords are words which signify, nothing. 'Commitment' is one such. When a politician tells you that he feels a commitment to something or other, start counting your spoons. His commitment will not require him actually to do anything other than express a degree of sadness if the thing to which he has expressed a commitment withers and dies. And he may not even do that. There are hundreds of deadwords: benchmark, outreach, progress, stakeholder, justice, fairness, community, society —a glistening array of largely abstract

nouns, words that can mean anything the politician wishes them to mean.

And then there's the fatuous, meaningless claim — exemplified in the job advert above, the bit that insists that One Plus One has a strong and distinctive reputation for conveying evidence-based messages, etc. It sounds quite impressive, if you're sort of half-listening, hut it means nothing and may even be a downright lie.

How about this for a neat and brief combination of both deadwords and the fatuous claim as used by a major political party? It is taken from the opening section of the 1997 Labour party manifesto:

We are a broad-based movement for progress and social justice. New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole.

Every single word of the above is either platitudinous, meaningless or a downright lie. It expresses nothing about New Labour. It gives you no information. It tells you nothing about Labour's aims or aspirations. The Conservative party or the Liberal Democrats and even the BNP could have stated exactly the same thing without being authoritatively contradicted, Can you imagine a political party telling you that it was diametrically opposed to progress and social justice? That it was entirely at odds with the views of the British people as a whole, or was the political arm of next to nobody? That its base, whatever that might be, was nothing if not resolutely bloody thin?

There has been a glut of hooks recently about the degradation of the English language and our increasing laziness in the way we write and the way we speak. Lynne Truss, for example, has trousered a sackload of cash — and good luck to her — for her popular exploration of grammar, Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Most of this bourgeois pedantry, though. I admit, leaves me cold, I would far rather read a sentence stripped of punctuation than the correctly punctuated toss which constituted most of New Labour's 1997 manifesto, for example. But if you get a chance, root out Don Watson's recent polemic Gobbledygook How Clichés, Sludge and Management Speak are Strangling our Public Language. Watson is an Australian, a former speechwriter for the infamous -Lizard of Os, Paul Keating, and he has tracked the relentless progression of management bilge from the consultants and management schools wherein it originated to the political centre-stage. Here he is writing about a job ad much like the One Plus One job ad — hut he might also be talking about that sentence from the Labour manifesto:

This kind of writing is now endemic: it is learned, practised, expected and demanded. It is writing of the kind George Orwell said was tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen house.

In fact, Watson's book is a timely and very angry update of George Orwell's essay 'Politics and the English Language'. He tells us where the new language has come from — that terrible institution known in companies up and down the land as 'Human Resources' (HR), via the conduit of fashionable management consultancies such as McKinsey's. Here's Watson again:

By adopting FIR and its various associated creeds, including Knowledge Management and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, educational institutions and other organisations created to provide enlightenment, assistance and care, speak a language that cannot express sentiment. A dead language.

But he does not quite tell us why such language has proved attractive to politicians and charities such as One Plus One. And the answer, I think, lies in his con

tention that such language is these days 'demanded'. That's the whole point. It is not that our politicians prefer to speak in such terms; it is that they feel there is no alternative but for them to do so. HR language was created in order to excise risk from corporate discourse. By carefully avoiding actually saying anything, it avoids the danger that it might alienate or estrange any number of individuals or minority groups. It is risk-free grammar. It certainly touches fashionable bases — benchmarks, fairness, equality, progress and so on — bases which these days we are compelled to touch through regulation imposed, in the main, by single-issue pressure groups. Anyone who has tried to write a job ad in conjunction with some monkey from an HR department will understand immediately the insistence on conforming to a certain set of shibboleths and, as a corollary, to avoid writing anything which might for a moment give an ordinary member of the public the slightest basis for political or personal grievance.

And, in the end, the only way you can avoid such grievances is by not saying anything at all; hy adopting a language which is as inconsequential and transparent (that's another deadword, by the way) as vapour. No wonder it has proved attractive to our politicians; they can talk for hours and nobody will turn a hair. Because it all means nothing.