Newspeak

"Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."

With that quotation from George Orwell, the Centre for Policy Studies introduces its 2008 guide to 'Newspeak' and "the language of bureaucracy [that] has long provided a convenient disguise for government action, or inaction."

Here are a few of the terms from the CPS' 2008 Lexicon:

Anti-social behaviour: Anything of which the government does not approve.

Bandwagon: Something a political opponent is jumping on when he is closely in tune with public opinion.

Blue skies thinking: Uncosted ideas for further government activity.

Community leader: A self-appointed or government-appointed leader of a community group.

Czar: The well-paid head of a quango appointed to demonstrate activity in dealing with a problem (not to be confused with solving a problem).

Dialogue (meaningful): The pretence of genuine two-way communication.

Guidance: Government interference.

Looked after children (referring to children in state care):  Children who are not looked after.

Multi-agency: No one's responsible.

All too true but not - in our humble opinion - quite as good as Inigo Wilson's famous Lefty Lexicon of August 2006.

Download a PDF of the CPS' Lexicon from here by clicking 'View'.

10am: The CPS' Jill Kirby writes about 'Newspeak' for today's Independent.

Comments

[Graeme Archer]

What happened to Inigo?

[jonnyboy]

Surely these have been taken from Clue's Uxbridge dictionary!

[Sally Roberts]

One of my pet hates is when they talk about "investing" when they simply mean spending!!! Also referring to a school or a hospital which is simply performing as it should being referred to as a "beacon"!

[Deputy Editor]

His suspension was lifted after the hysteria died down.

[James Maskell]

Good to hear that Inigo's susension was lifted.

The use of the term "zero-tolerance" is nothing less than spin and in practice never appears. In fact true zero tolerance would greatly upset civil liberty activists.

I hate the term looked after children. Its a softer term for children in care which provokes nightmarish visions of care homes (and the government hates talking about care homes for the elderly because every time it speaks onm the issue it gets sledged by every interested organisation). There is absolutely no difference between the two terms but it just sounds softer and less controversial. The issue doesnt need dumbling down.

[Tony Makara]

How about Labour's favourite "On the verge on full employment" something they repeat at every opportunity. "More people in work" is another of Labour's favourite. Then there is the "New Deal for Young People" which in reality means a young person is paid 50pence an hour on top of benefit to stock shelves for thirty hours a week, still they do get their P45s back and magically disappear from the jobless register for 26 weeks. Even with that slight-of-hand disappearing act youth unemployment is still up by 20% under Labour.

[Sean Fear]

Hmm,

"Community Leader" - gangster

"Looked After Children" - children who can be abused with impunity

"Guidance" stuff the government couldn't get through Parliament, but forces you to do anyway.

[London Tory]

Blair has his own particularly nauseating entry in this lexicon- "because it was the right thing to do".

i.e. Why did you take the country to war on a false premise, resulting in the deaths of over half a million innocent people?

"Because it was the right thing to do".

The next time you see him interviewed, just count how many times he trots this out.

[graeme archer]

that is good news about inigo. There is a HUGE academic body of work to be done on new labour's manipulation of language. The authors of this report do us all a favour by highlighting some of the left's textual manipulation. Orwell was, as so often, eerily prescient in his warning of newspeak. What is 'newlab' if not Ingsoc? What do all these creepy super-ministeries remind you of? Minilove? Even Blair's post hoc justification for the Iraq war reminds me of 'war is peace'.

[Tony Makara]

Graeme Archer, indeed, the inversion of words also means an inversion of values. The Labour government seem to believe that if they say something enough times, ie 'full employment' the people who are too busy with their own lives to analyze these things will just accept it as truth. After all why would a prime minister say we have full employment if it isn't true? However that monumental lie is going to look pretty threadbare when the jobs market collapses next year.

On the subject of George Orwell, I think the book Animal Farm could have been written with New Labour in mind. Particularly Labour's sanctimonious statements about helping the poor and oppressed while in opposition.

Certainly on the subject of 1984, it has almost become a self-fulfilling prophesy with Labour, from traffic cameras, to finger printing primary school children, from the flawed DNA database to the plan to stamp and index our people with a national ID card scheme. All these things, and many more, are manifestations of a Big Brother style society.

The next election is more important than most people imagine. As our freedom's melt away by degrees under the Labour regime we need to make a clarion call in support of liberty, in favour of freedom, and oust this vile dictatorial Labour government.

[Moral minority]

Cameroon Newspeak

European reform: acceptance of, or support for, the EU Super-State

Grammar streams: forced comprehensive education

Open primary: diluting the influence of Party members in candidate selection

Priority List: CCHQ crony list of candidates that associations in target or safe seats must choose from

Positive discrimination: discrimination against men, especially white or middle aged men

Share the proceeds of growth: increase tax revenue in real terms

[Dontmakemelaugh]

Blair has his own particularly nauseating entry in this lexicon- "because it was the right thing to do".

i.e. Why did you take the country to war on a false premise, resulting in the deaths of over half a million innocent people?

"Because it was the right thing to do".

The next time you see him interviewed, just count how many times he trots this out.

Posted by: London Tory | December 28, 2007 at 11:32

Blair only got one thing right and that was his assessment of the Islamist threat and linked ambition of Saddam Hussein.

By far the greater number of deaths have been caused by Islamists against Muslims that they do not agree with - Sunnis verses Shiites

If it the Tories disagree with ""Because it was the right thing to do", why has n't Cameron demanded that the troops return home immediately? Answer: he recognises the danger to the West posed by the muderous, nihilistic ideology of Islamists and therefore, whether he likes it or not, is in support of Blair.

[Tony Makara]

Tony Blair scurried off to America to milk publicity after 9/11 and he was in the pocket of George Bush from that point on. George Bush played Tony Blair's passive compliance with great skill. President Bush is very good at working people, notice how at his press conferences he will be seemingly ready to answer a journalists question and then say "no not you" and then jump over to answer a question from a different journalist, this is very clever and keeps the journalists on a leash and begging for attention, Bush also has a way of mockingly smiling at any question he deems to be unimportant. So he certainly knew that Tony Blair's grubbing and scraping behaviour was there to be exploited, and Bush had Blair eating out of his hand.

The attack on Iraq certainly shifted Muslim extremism from being anti Israel and America to being a global anti Western philosophy. My own view on this is that I'm sad that this situation has developed. I would prefer to see friendly and positive relations with all Muslim groups. Tony Blair's ego brought a regional dispute into our back yard. He is the one to blame. Of course David Cameron and others are now responding today to the global threat of terrorism, but the global threat wasn't a global threat before Iraq.

[London Tory]

@Dontmakemelaugh

Read "Blairs Wars" by John Kampfner, then come back to me if you feel the same way.

[Tony Makara]

This is interesting from today's FT:

The outlook for the UK jobs market is the worst for a decade with unemployment and redundancies expected to rise in the wake of the international credit crisis, according to research by a leading employment organisation.

Unemployment is forecast to rise by 150,000 to 1.8m next year, the highest level since 1997 when Labour came to power, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
UK office property investors hit - Dec-27
November mortgage approvals tumble 40% - Dec-27
UK vacancies rise and pay growth eases - Dec-13

The institute’s study follows a survey of independent forecasts published by the Treasury which predicted that the number of people claiming unemployment benefit would rise by 12 per cent to 910,000 by the end of next year.

John Philpott, CIPD’s chief economist, warned that the jobs slowdown could prompt “bigger cuts in interest rates than currently anticipated to head off the threat of recession” and prolong the effects of the economic downturn into 2009.

It could also undermine the government’s flagship welfare-to-work policies designed to get more long-term unemployed into work and reduce by 1m the number of people claiming incapacity benefits.

Much would depend upon whether the flow of eastern and central European migrants coming to Britain to work would slow as the labour market weakened, Mr Philpott said.

The jobs squeeze would be greatest in the financial services sector, which in recent years has been “a substantial driver of employment growth” but is “now facing a direct hit from the credit crunch”. More public sector job losses would also make 2008 “the worst year for jobs this decade and easily the worst since the Labour government came to power,” Mr Philpott said.

Industrial relations and staff management skills would be in greater demand, according to the study. Human resources managers whose experience did not “stretch back to before the economic stability of the past decade” were facing “their first taste of seriously choppy business water”.

Mr Philpott said that, in spite of considerable organisational restructuring in the past decade, large-scale redundancies had been running at historically low levels. “This is likely to change in 2008 with more HR professionals having to deal with the particularly tricky task of handling compulsory redundancies.”

But unlike previous bouts of large-scale job shedding, redundancies would now “have to take care not to fall foul of age discrimination legislation”.

THIS MUST BE THE FIThe outlook for the UK jobs market is the worst for a decade with unemployment and redundancies expected to rise in the wake of the international credit crisis, according to research by a leading employment organisation.

Unemployment is forecast to rise by 150,000 to 1.8m next year, the highest level since 1997 when Labour came to power, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
UK office property investors hit - Dec-27
November mortgage approvals tumble 40% - Dec-27
UK vacancies rise and pay growth eases - Dec-13

The institute’s study follows a survey of independent forecasts published by the Treasury which predicted that the number of people claiming unemployment benefit would rise by 12 per cent to 910,000 by the end of next year.

John Philpott, CIPD’s chief economist, warned that the jobs slowdown could prompt “bigger cuts in interest rates than currently anticipated to head off the threat of recession” and prolong the effects of the economic downturn into 2009.

It could also undermine the government’s flagship welfare-to-work policies designed to get more long-term unemployed into work and reduce by 1m the number of people claiming incapacity benefits.

Much would depend upon whether the flow of eastern and central European migrants coming to Britain to work would slow as the labour market weakened, Mr Philpott said.

The jobs squeeze would be greatest in the financial services sector, which in recent years has been “a substantial driver of employment growth” but is “now facing a direct hit from the credit crunch”. More public sector job losses would also make 2008 “the worst year for jobs this decade and easily the worst since the Labour government came to power,” Mr Philpott said.

Industrial relations and staff management skills would be in greater demand, according to the study. Human resources managers whose experience did not “stretch back to before the economic stability of the past decade” were facing “their first taste of seriously choppy business water”.

Mr Philpott said that, in spite of considerable organisational restructuring in the past decade, large-scale redundancies had been running at historically low levels. “This is likely to change in 2008 with more HR professionals having to deal with the particularly tricky task of handling compulsory redundancies.”

But unlike previous bouts of large-scale job shedding, redundancies would now “have to take care not to fall foul of age discrimination legislation”

SO WE ARE ON THE VERGE OF 'FULL EMPLOYMENT' ARE WE PRIME MINISTER?

STOP LYING TO THE BRITISH PUBLIC MR BROWN AND TAKE THE CLAIMS IF FULL EMPLOYMENT OFF YOUR PARTY WEBSITE...IT IS A LIE!

http://www.labour.org.uk/britain_in_the_global_economy

[Tony Makara]

Apologies for the double-post, don't know how that happened?

[Tanuki]

To the lexicon-of-lies I'd add Tackling climate change: convenient excuse for introducing increased regulation and taxation.

[David Sergeant]

Labour introduced, around 1993, Animal Farm speak. They swept the country with it. To be fair Old Labour was fond of using a parallel English language so New Labour realising Old Labour got away with it exploited it. History will tell our children that this was a humiliating time for a country such as Britain. We need to sit down in a quiet room and ask ourselves how this disater happened.

The BBC, with the best will in the world were, and are, constantly in trouble: faced with shamefull lies by Labour spokesmen interviewers, who are mostly ingnorant of their subject, were more than happy to take the easy way out and claim they were balancing their stories - even if they knew one was a lie. On the other hand Conservative spokesmen, trying to stick to the rules were easy prey to an interviewers trying to pretend they are tough guys.

During all this the Conservative party went to sleep, giving the impression they were incapable of putting up a fight and this encouraged media who might not be Labour friendly to go along with Labour spin. Even to-day one can read Telegraph journalists more or less just repeating Labour press releases without analising them.

I am reminded of Jeremy Clarkson reviewing all the people in Rover's demise. Who is to blame he asked? They all are he said.

[jonnyboy]

David Sergeant:

Hear bloody hear!

Even worse the Telegraph continues to publish letters from NuLab/OldLab/something Lab ministers who write a tissue of lies eg Jim Murphy "the treaty is not the Constution nor does it have the same effect" and so on.

Yes we went to sleep or the majority of our elected represesntatives did in that lab (any description) was not challenged ever and the beeb accepted (still often does) assertions by ministers as fact.

The whole emphasis of cross examination is wrong. What ministers say is accepted as the "prospective" status quo and those who challenge the assertions have to prove the case against rather than those who assert having to both prove and demonstrate their case for.

[Graeme Archer]

I don't think we've all gone to sleep; but I do think the BBC has, certainly early in the morning on its 'flagship' Today. I am always getting worked up listening to a reporter breathlessly reading out some left of centre lobby group press release as though s/he's discovered some 'news'. This morning's was a classic. The Trades Union Congress have produced a press release claiming that public sector workers are full of simmering discontent at the cushy number - apparently - that private sector employees enjoy. The reporter didn't query this: he presented it as fact. He then read more: apparently the TUC has issued this warning now as the economy faces problems. In the past, it was OK for the public sector to lose staff, because there were jobs to be had in the private sector. But now with belts a-tightening &c &c.

This was so factually incorrect -- we know that most jobs in the private sector have been taken by the eastern europeans who've come recently (thank goodness) and we know that public sector workers have had higher pay rises than their private sector peers and we know that public sector pensions and retirement ages far outweigh anything those of us in the private sector could dream about *and* we know of the massive expansion of the state as an employer under Brown. So, did BBC flagship Today programme query any of the points made by the TUC? No, of course not. The TUC's tissue of fiction was presented as fact by the reporter and left completely unchallenged. I wonder why that would be?

[Sally Roberts]

". I am always getting worked up listening to a reporter breathlessly reading out some left of centre lobby group press release as though s/he's discovered some 'news'"

I know, Graeme - amazing isn't it!! Next we'll be told that the Pope is a Catholic and that bears do what comes naturally in the woods!!!

[David Sergeant]

"Even worse the Telegraph continues to publish letters from NuLab/OldLab/something Lab ministers who write a tissue of lies eg Jim Murphy "the treaty is not the Constution nor does it have the same effect" and so on."

The point Jonneyboy is that Labour, Lib/Dems/UKIP, to name but three will write in when an issue comes up. Tories rarely do, they are still sleepy.

I honestly wonder if the Telegraph prints Labour letter in an attempt to get Tory spokesmen reacting and saying something. And, by the way, I wonder if some BBC interviewers get at Tory spokemen in an attempt to provoke them in to come out fighting and point out Labour lies. I really think things are that bad.

[Matt Wright]

"Concensus" - used to brow beat someone who asks a difficult questions that spoils the Govts "consultation".
"Consultation" - a plan that has already been decided but will be easier to force through if the Govt pretends to speak to people.

[James Maskell]

I agree about the "because it was the right thing to do" line. Its not objective so how can it be straight out the right thing to do? He just uses that line because it puts a moral negative on the argument of the opposition, as if disagreeing with Blair over whether to invade Iraq makes you an apologist for terrorism. BY implication if you disagree with the Iraq invasion (even if you genuinely believe its in your mind the right thing) you dont believe in the right thing and you dont know what you are talking about.

The last line of defence is that...everyone else may think you have lost your mind, but you continue to say "it was the right thing to do". A politicians defence mechanism.