New Politics Or Just New Language? - Review - book review

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2000 by George Wedd

New Labour, New Language. Norman Fairclough. Routledge. [pound]35.00. 164 pages. ISBN 0-415-21826-8. Dumbing Down: Culture, Politics and the Mass Media. Ivo Mosley, editor. Imprint Academic. [pound]12.95 p.b. 326 pages. ISBN 0-907845-65-7. The Rape of the Constitution? Keith Sutherland, editor. Imprint Academic. [pound]12.95 p.b. 368 pages. ISBN 0-907845-70-3.

'The limits of my language', said Wittgenstein, 'means the limits of my world'. He also said: 'whatever can be said, can be said clearly'. These are sombre thoughts for anyone interested in current political thought. Britain's general election of 1997 is beginning to look more and more like a major watershed, in which more than an old gang of exhausted Tories was swept away. Into the dustbin with them went a whole lexicon of language. But does the new discourse actually mean a whole lot of new ideas? Usually, language is used to express thoughts or feelings which are present and seeking expression. Do we now have a reverse situation, in which the language comes first and the ideas take shape behind it?

New Labour. New Language is a technical linguistic treatise (by a Professor of Language in Social Life), which examines in great detail and, I suspect, with the help of a computer, the vocabulary and syntax of New Labour utterances. He makes many subtle points, for example that in a Blair speech on rights and responsibilities the first word is used nearly twice as often as the second. The stylistic tricks which would go nearly unnoticed by someone listening, none too attentively, to a single Blair speech are identified by someone who has analysed nearly everything the Prime Minister has said and written, and can be seen as the hammer-marks of his style.

Listing is one - little lists are common. Putting things in pairs of opposites is another. A third is ambiguity and shifts in the meanings of key-words - I sympathised with the sub-heading 'Who are "we"?' Professor Fairclough does not, I think, comment on Mr Blair's economy with verbs; I recall an article by Blair in The Daily Telegraph which contained six consecutive sentences without a single verb among them. The effect was meant to be staccato, like a trip-hammer. This reviewer found it irritating.

A great feature of a Blair speech is the attention paid to rhythm and to the sheer sound. 'Difficult' words and complicated constructions are avoided, but I have the impression that no Prime Minister since Churchill has paid so much attention to the inner music of each passage. This came naturally to Churchill, who neither had the time nor needed it to work and re-work his 'Finest Hour' and similar speeches. I suspect Blair speeches are more worked on, probably with the aid of a mirror and a tape recorder. This is a powerful tool, since English is above all a singing language even in its spoken prose. Sometimes Mr Blair comes dangerously close to vers libre.

Professor Fairclough's book is penetrating, but rather technical, and I doubt if it will have a wide direct influence. It will, however, contribute to the deposit of scepticism which is slowly building up, to the effect that the present Government is dominated by presentation and that the effort goes first and foremost into the words used. Meanings, such as the 'Third Way' and 'community', will follow. A small lesson can be learnt from the fate of 'stakeholding'. This was a prominent concept in Labour's election talk, but has been dropped in a thunderous silence, perhaps because it called for, and suggested, early substantive filling-out which Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor (and no friend to wordy obfuscation), declined to provide.

The British People are shrewd, cynical and slow, and will need all these characteristics to form a true appraisal of the rhetoric about the Big Tent and the single Party which unites all people of goodwill in looking to the future and opposing the 'forces of conservatism'. When I feel sanguine, I think this is Panglossian. When I do not, I hear distant echoes of the man who became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933.

The other two books which cover this general area of public intellectual life are both published by Imprint Academic. This firm was new to me. It is based in Exeter, and its experience is largely in publishing heavyweight academic journals in the social sciences. It has recently prepared two volumes of essays, as follows: Dumbing Down: Culture, Politics and the Mass Media, edited by Ivo Mosley and The Rape of the Constitution? edited by Keith Sutherland.

Both titles are over-dramatic, suggesting journalistic polemic. There is some of this, but for the most part they are well-selected and serious essays by known and established writers. The first is the broader book. It includes not only contemporary essays, but a classic by Michael Oakeshott on the development of the individual before and during the Renaissance which reminds one of what a great thinker Oakeshott was.

It is impossible to review fairly a book of twenty-nine essays ranging across trends in the media, the consumer society, education and religion. Apart from the Oakeshott piece, there is a good interview with Tam Dalyell recording the decline of the House of Commons and 'government by conversation', symbolised by the emptiness of the Smoking Room in the evenings. There is also a thoughtful essay by the late Michael Polanyi on the way nihilism and despotism can grow out of liberty -- though, after the French Revolution, one hardly needs to be told that. An essay of the 'dumbing-down' of religious language, and therefore of religious thought, by Nicholas Mosley, makes some good points about the banality of modem liturgical language. He omits to point out that when the Church of England sets about up-dating Cranmer it ignores the fact that Cranmer's liturgy does not use the vernacular of the early sixteenth-century, but a language more elevated and mysterious. One does not talk to, or about, God, as one talks to one's gardener.