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Mind Your Language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 6th August 2008

Dot Wordsworth on the Miliband brothers and their use of language

Those Miliband boys are clever. I was trying to discover what they stood for, and I thought I’d found something interesting in a speech by Ed Miliband. Then I realised I was mistaken.

‘I want a society where there is intergenerational equity,’ he said in a speech to Compass (not the investor and analyst group of that name but the ‘membership organisation promoting left-wing debate in modern Britain’). Perhaps the investment red herring made me think that ‘intergenerational equity’ meant leaving property to one’s children, without having it confiscated by death duties. No such luck.

To Ed’s interlocutors, ‘intergenerational equity’ is to do with ‘sustainable development’, global warming and all that. In other words, not leaving the planet a wreck for our grandchildren, if any. It is heartening in a way, because it militates against the Keynesian notion that ‘in the long-term we’re all dead’.

As a rallying cry for a revitalised Labour party, though, it lacks a certain bite. There is a seminal source-document on the question called ‘Awakening to the Intergenerational Equity Debate in Canada’. Imagine! ‘Awakening’ is the killer word. It would be like awakening to find a dead caribou in the bed.

The language of David Miliband’s famous article in the Guardian last week was less puzzling. I found the weirdest phrase to be: ‘We green the largest single market in the world.’ It sounded like a cross between ‘He do the police in different voices’ and ‘The biggest aspidistra in the world’.

There was a pleasing mixed metaphor: ‘targeting the spike in gun crime’ (not ‘spiking the guns in crime targets’); a displeasing enjambment of jargon, ‘social norms around women’s and minority rights transformed’; and a flight into poetry, ‘The Tories overclaim for what they are against’ (expenses?).

Now my husband tells me that the article might have been written by someone else. It is quite normal among politicians, apparently. But the language, if only ventriloquistic Milibandese, fits the image sought.

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