WHEN TERMS ARE POLITICS
The media: Paul Johnson explains why the Government should pay more attention to words
I HOLD no particular brief for Bryan Gould, who seems to me a very overrated fellow at present, but he is unquestionably right in arguing that the way in which a policy is presented is an integral part of the policy itself and should be considered ab initio. In a democracy it is folly to settle on a policy and only get round to its presenta- tion afterwards. This is to invite your enemies to do the presentation themselves, and give it an indelibly hostile tinge.
An outstanding example is the govern- ment's proposed reform of local govern- ment finance. Any fundamental change in the way money is gouged out of the public by government is bound to evoke strong emotions. In this case Ministers are replac- ing one tax by another. The tax to dis- appear bears the meaningless and etymolo- gically obscure but ancient and familiar name of rates. Rates is what might be termed a SEPE (Sub-Editor's Preferred Expression), that is it is short and instantly recognisable. At the early planning stages of the reform it should have been obvious that rates would be replaced by another SEPE. But which — a hostile or a neutrall friendly one? In recent years the homosex- ual lobby has given a brilliant demonstra- tion of how a self-chosen SEPE ('gay') can be used to help transform the image of a hitherto unpopular and reviled group, largely replacing such earlier terms as homo, queer, bugger etc. There are many of us who will never forgive the homosex- ual militants for this larceny and besmir- ching of a beautiful and innocent word. But that is another point. As an exercise in PR, the gay offensive was a copy-book success.
Well then, what did the government wiseacres come up with to replace rates? They produced 'community charge', as perfect an example of Whitehall jargon as it would be possible to find. No sub-editor on earth is going to accept that one, which does not even have the merit of accuracy, since the tax is to be imposed not on communities but on individuals. Civil ser- vants love these cumbersome and rotund terms. In 1940 they produced Local De- fence Volunteers and it took Churchill to replace it with Home Guard, another good example of a SEPE. But no Churchill was around this time. Mrs Thatcher is not totally indifferent to the political overtone of words. Thus she will not contemplate selling the Post Office to the public be- cause she associates it with the magic term Royal Mail. She quite rightly dislikes the use of foreign expressions when perfectly good English ones are available and re- cently rebuked Peregrine Worsthorne for employing the horrid term bourgeois when he meant middle class. She has even shown herself sensitive to the titles of Acts of Parliament. For her own anti-union mea- sures she rejected Industrial Relations Act, associated with the Heath disaster, and called them simply Industry Bills. But she has no ear for words as such, and the people who are supposed to advise her on such matters — Bernard Ingham and Lord Whitelaw — did nothing, as usual. So Community Charge it was.
Now that was to invite the enemy to produce their own SEPE and they prompt- ly did — poll-tax. This abusive term has been knocking about the Labour Party ever since I can remember, to be employed against any imposition which is not specifi- cally designed to soak the rich by steeply progressive rates. I often use it myself against the BBC's licence fee. Its invoca- tion to describe the government's com- munity charge was entirely predictable and should have been foreseen. Indeed the new tax is the perfect opportunity for Labour to invoke the entire historical syndrome, so that Neil Kinnock, who had probably never heard of the Plantagenets before, is now ranting on about Richard II, the Peasants' Revolt and Wat Tyler. This might not have mattered if the government had produced a short, snappy term of their own. As it is, after some initial resistance in some quarters, such as the posh papers and the BBC, virtually everyone is now calling it the poll-tax. A critical battle has thus been lost even before we know what is actually in the bill.
Can no room be found in Downing Street, or in the Government as a whole, for some clever person whose job it is to think about .words and their political re- sonance? Considering the large sums the government and the Conservative Party between them spend on public relations, it amazes me that no better term has yet been found than 'privatisation' for what has become the most important single aspect of their programme. The point is of some substance. Up till now, the process we call privatisation has enjoyed the immense advantage of being the opposite, in the public mind, of nationalisation, a classic hate-term describing a highly unpopular thing. So the fact that privatisation is a clumsly and ugly word has not mattered.
But the position may change. At the rate it is going, British Telecom seems set fair to make itself the most loathed institution in the country within a year or so, a by-word for inefficiency, overmanning, high charges, complacency and indiffer- ence. It already has the ring of 'Ground Nuts' about it. The danger for the govern- ment, and indeed for all of us who value freedom and hate the all-enveloping state, is that British Telecom will bring the entire concept of privatisation into disrepute and so turn back one of the most welcome tides in recent history.
In my view the problem can be tackled as follows. Privatisation should be reserved for the process, in itself unsatisfactory, of turning a public monopoly into a private one. That is exactly what is wrong with British Telecom, and if BT ends by discre- diting what is already a dreadful word, no great matter. What we need to find, with some urgency, is a decent word, preferably short, which describes the process of turn- ing a public monopoly into an area of private and healthy competition — the true opposite to nationalisation. Any offers?
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