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.
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