Mind your language | 2 October 2010

Is there a new Labour language from the new Labour leader? It is not always easy to identify a politician’s dialect, because his speeches and articles may be written by others, but presumably Ed Miliband got as far as approving the first sentence of his first article, which appeared in the Sunday Telegraph hours after his election.

Is there a new Labour language from the new Labour leader? It is not always easy to identify a politician’s dialect, because his speeches and articles may be written by others, but presumably Ed Miliband got as far as approving the first sentence of his first article, which appeared in the Sunday Telegraph hours after his election. ‘Yesterday,’ he wrote, ‘the Labour party committed to start the long journey back to power.’

This is not something you or I would say, but it is nearly something Messrs Cameron and Clegg would. As I observed earlier this year (Mind Your Language, 22 May), the coalition, in their own words, decided to ‘commit to holding a full strategic security and defence review’. Most British speakers of English would say ‘commit myself’. The new generation of party leaders drop the reflexive, as if they were friends of Tamara Drewe discussing relationship problems (or ‘issues’ as they’d say). Note that the coalition’s commit to is followed by a participle. Mr Miliband chooses an infinitive, which sounds weirder.

If Ed Miliband is committed to commit (though not as far as to marry the expectant mother of his child), he also feels a need to say need. There are six examples in his first article, and in his interview with Andrew Marr he declared: ‘You don’t need to be left-wing.’ Need is fashionable. Air stewardesses say: ‘I need you to fasten your safety-belt,’ and nurses use the same ploy.