George Orwell, in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, berated political writers for employing words and phrases that misrepresent what they mean. “The writer either has meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else,” he suggested. “Or,” he added “he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not”. Three years later, in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell explored a more sinister misuse of language, the development of ‘newspeak’ to deliberately distort reality.
In the present-day UK, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party regularly misuses language, but more often to deliberately distort or divert from reality than to inadvertently use the wrong words.
‘Gender’
In opposition, Labour spokespeople found it difficult to define what they meant by ‘woman’. They wanted to continue their support of the gender industry, and to respect a previous Labour government’s Gender Recognition Act, which allowed men to be issued with new birth certificates that lied that they were born female. This meant endorsing the newspeak redefinition of ‘gender’ - a term that no longer described identifiable sex-role stereotypes, but now alluded to a mysterious, and indefinable, inner essence. Confronted with the irreconcilable conflict between men demanding access to women-only spaces and women seeking to protect those spaces, Labour stuck to the line that a woman is anyone who says they are one. Where possible they avoided having to say this quiet part out loud. Instead, they suggested it would be ‘unkind’ to give an answer to the question ‘what is a woman?’ because, they claimed, the question was ‘transphobic’.
It’s hard to believe that Starmer actually thought his bizarre statement that ”99.9% of women don’t have a penis” would convince women that there was no threat to women-only spaces. But that’s the sort of nonsense modern politicians come up with when they persist in denying reality.
The Halloween Budget - ‘serving working people’
Labour’s 2024 election manifesto announced that “Labour will not increase taxes on working people.” True to form, what they meant by ‘working people’ was not made clear. Their intention may have been to indicate they wouldn’t increase taxes on work, but they chose a less precise and more problematic phrase instead. Implying that people who work are more important than those who don’t (children, pensioners, students, the unemployed, the sick etc) was unnecessarily divisive. Perhaps they thought that a vague definition would give them more flexibility, but instead it has generated not just division but distrust about their true intentions. As this week’s budget announcement drew nearer, there were endless questions about who was included in the definition, and who was excluded.
Before the election, Labour spokespeople were unable to answer the question ’what is a woman?’ Now, they were unable to answer the question ‘how do you define working people?’. In a pre-budget speech earlier this week, Keir Starmer doubled down on the phrase. He mentioned ‘working people’ 25 times. He offered a definition of sorts, too, coupled with a textbook example of what Orwell termed a ‘dying metaphor’. “The working people of this country know who they are,” he insisted. “They are the golden thread that runs through our agenda.” Here, Starmer employed the same evasion as he had done over the definition of ‘woman’ - he relied on self-identification. There’s an important difference, though - the government is not allowing individual taxpayers to choose which of the taxes they pay should change, and which stay the same. Identity politics clearly has its limits.
The actual budget speech was given today by Rachel Reeves, who, as Keir Starmer proudly mansplained in his pre-budget speech, is the first woman Chancellor of the Exchequer. Her budget speech made it clear how narrowly ‘taxes on working people’ had been defined. As promised, rates of income tax and VAT did not rise, nor did employees’ National Insurance contributions. But this ruled out being able to set higher income tax rates for high earners. Instead, Reeves chose to increase National Insurance contributions by employers, which will hit both pay and jobs, with particularly damaging consequences for nurseries and social care. One of the cruelest measures was a 50% rise, from £2 to £3, in the cap on bus fares . This is particularly cruel because many low income workers depend on bus journeys to get to their place of work.
Embracing ‘fiscal reality’
A key passage in Starmer’s pre-budget speech was a mixture of metaphors to celebrate his perception of ‘fiscal reality’: “Politics is a choice. And it’s time to choose a clear path. It’s time to embrace the harsh light of fiscal reality.”
Embracing what Starmer calls ‘fiscal reality’ is, as he suggests, a political choice. But it’s one, as I explained in an earlier substack post, that opts to be “constrained by fiscal rules that are justified only by the false doctrines of defunct economists.”
One of Labour’s fiscal rules is a commitment to reduce public debt as a % of national income.. After consulting with the IMF, Reeves changed how that debt figure is calculated, and she has rebranded her debt rule an investment rule. The new definition is more realistic than the one it replaced, and it allows the government to borrow more to finance long-term capital investment.
The juxtaposition of ‘choice’ and ‘rule’ and ‘fiscal reality” is a good example of what Orwell called ‘meaningless words’, where words are stripped of their original meaning for political ends. “Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way,” Orwell wrote. “That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.” Starmer suggests that anyone who doesn’t accept the need for fiscal rules is denying reality. He makes clear that he is not only accepting those rules, he is choosing to do so, because he embraces reality. But Reeves has seen that following the debt rule will starve Labour’s growth mission of the investment it requires. So she chooses to scrap the rule she chose to follow, and to adopt a new rule based on her new choice of a different definition of debt.
We are supposed to trust that this makes some sort of sense (and to accept without question the dubious assumption that growth must be the prime goal of economic policy). But the actual reality is that there is no need for this fiscal rule, as public debt, unlike private debt, does not have to be repaid. There is no particular significance to its size, however the Chancellor of the Exchequer chooses to define it.
The ‘fiscal reality’ that Starmer wants to embrace includes a £22 billion ‘black hole’ in the public finances, which the Labour Government pretends it did not expect to have to fill. “Black hole’ is a particularly inappropriate misuse of what Orwell called a ‘dying metaphor’ - we are supposed not to notice that inability to escape is part of the definition of an actual black hole. The government should be able to choose how the financial shortfall is addressed - by increasing taxes, by reducing spending, by increasing borrowing, or by creating new money. But it has chosen to be constrained by another self imposed fiscal rule, that current spending must be matched by current taxes.This, like the investment rule, is a constraint that dictates what can and can’t be done to manage the economy. It’s another constraint which is self-inflicted, and for which there is no economic justification.
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The UK Labour Party’s use of distorted language to address ‘gender’ and ‘fiscal reality’ is not unique. Dishonest use of language is common, about other topics, by other political parties, and in other countries. George Orwell, back in 1946, explained why:
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”