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Thursday 9 February 2012

A Future Fair for All

Saturday, 20th February 2010

Yup, that's what the whizz kids and the marketing gurus at Labour HQ have come up with for Labour's election campaign slogan*. A Future Fair for All. Try that one on for size. Note too the now traditional absence of punctuation that further obscures the meaning. As one wag put it, the Tory response might be A Fête Worse than Death.

More than anything else, however, it reminded me of Wolcott Gibbs's classic profile of Henry Luce. Published** by the New Yorker in 1939 it remains a hoot today and a devastating parody of Luce's bombast and the special, magnificently empty prose style he favoured at Time.

Timespeak, however, seems to inspire our political parties. A Future Fair for All is, as Gibbs (almost) put it, Yet to suggest itself as a rational method of communication, of infuriating citizens into voting, was strange, inverted Labourstyle. Verily, Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.

And, as Gibbs concluded, triumphantly, Where it will all end, knows God!

This latter, of course, might be a depressingly apt summary of a campaign that has every chance of setting a whole series of new and dismal lows.

*Seriously, what's wrong with A Fair Future for All? Sure, few people are promising An Unfair Future for You but at least A Fair Future for All is, you know, English. Then again, Sunder Katwala's suggestion that Labour's slogan (if they must have one) should be Fairness Doesn't Happen By Chance is a better, if still grisly, "frame" for Labour's message.

But they're all at it. Here's Wee Dougie Alexander explaining that the difference between Labour and the Conservatives is Change is a process: future is a destination. That's what the man said. Normally you need to spend a lot of money on management consultants and brand mangers and whatnot to produce such guff. Of course, perhaps that's what they did do. The best that may be said of it is that while dumb it's not as idiotic as 2005's Forward Not Back.

**And available in this terrific selection of classic New Yorker profiles. Recommended.

Filed under: 2010 Election (77 more articles) , Labour (2014 more articles) , Newspapers (360 more articles) , O Tempora, O Mores (182 more articles)

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Christine

February 20th, 2010 8:45am Report this comment

I enjoyed reading this article this morning. I hate this lack of punctuation. Eats shoots and leaves comes to mind! A Fair Future for All would have been fine. A Future Fair makes me wonder where it will be held. It could be somewhere to take the children.

Lallands Peat Worrier

February 20th, 2010 10:20am Report this comment

This may perhaps me my own invented etymology - but doesn't one also encounter a phrase like 'free for all', in the sense of a disorderly fracas and brawl which is styled a 'fair for all', or a 'fare for all'? Perhaps it is a Scottish thing. If it isn't just a weird toadstool thought, grown up independently in my head - that affords us another reading of the slogan. Namely, the anticipatory promise of a riotous brouhaha.

bernerlap

February 20th, 2010 10:35am Report this comment

Actually I can see where Brown is going. I've always thought NuLab epitomised the Disneyfication of politics, now they're all off to the EPCOT centre in Orlando to leave us to carry the can.
I only hope they take the moronic 30% of the electorate who still say they will vote Labour with them.

Chris W

February 20th, 2010 11:09am Report this comment

So now we know why they built the Dome! It was for the site for the Future Fair. Or maybe they are referring to the other unaffordable, unwanted mess of hoopla, the Labour Olympics

Wahiba

February 20th, 2010 11:57am Report this comment

Many years ago I remember reading some research on what people wanted out of life. One interesting fact I always remember is that fairness in life score much higher that all the incentives, carrots and sticks.
That Labour are onto something is obvious.

Why are the Conservatives flirting with Co-Operatives? While a Co-Operatives fits in with the self help ethos of Conservatism, the social self help bit, i.e. socialism, grates with many.

Labour could easily blow this approach, but do not quickly denigrate it. Fair play is supposedly a British trait, and most of the complaints in life are about a lack of fairness.

Labour for once might have picked a winner.

Beer Moth

February 20th, 2010 12:56pm Report this comment

Wahiba

"social self help bit, ie socialism"

Eh?

Kittler

February 20th, 2010 1:39pm Report this comment

Wahiba
Agree, the trait is in the marrow, congenital.
Ever noticed, that the words "that's not fair" are ever on the lips of children?

Craig Strachan

February 20th, 2010 4:19pm Report this comment

Maybe the "future fair" he has in mind is the Kircaldy Links Market?

Paul

February 20th, 2010 10:40pm Report this comment

There is only one Future Fair For All and it wont be found under the Labour Party..or the Conservatives, or the Democrats or Republicans or any current political system.

Jacque Fresco's lifetime work on the Venus Project is the only system that would guarantee fairness. The Zeitgeist Addendum movie explains the problems and the solution but people need to wake up and realise what is going on.

"A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality" - John Lennon.

Beefeater

February 21st, 2010 2:52am Report this comment

Chinese whispers:

- Futile tears for the fairly awful
- A few cheer for the fairy fall
- A future fair for all

Rhoda Klapp

February 21st, 2010 9:51am Report this comment

Your mention of New Yorker and 1939 made me think of the New York World's Fair. That's what Labour's future fair would be like, except interpreted in a distinctly leftist fashion. If you want to know what the future holds, you may see it to this day on the South Bank, for evidently Gordon aims to give us the Festival of Britain, 2010's style. Hurray.