How Politicians Distort Language

 

George Orwell's Politics and the English Language is one of the best essays ever written on how the distortion and abuse of language in politics helps politicians get away with bad ideas that would be more obviously bad if the language was simplified. Cunning political language is designed to "make lies sound truthful", Orwell said - and that truth has become more and more evident, and has reached a new nadir since the Blair years and beyond.

Take many political policies or ideas, and translate the language into the most truthful and simplistic form, and you'll see all sorts of things about them that seem far less attractive. Consider the absurd initiative politicians call "Levelling Up". The Department of ‘Levelling Up’ is one of the most disingenuous things the government has ever created – so it’s probably fitting that Michael Gove is the Minister for Levelling Up, as his character almost perfectly fits the profile. Here is how the government describes it:

"Levelling Up supports communities across the UK to thrive, making them great places to live and work, and aims to reduce the imbalances, primarily economic, between areas and social groups across the United Kingdom".

And here is a less attractive but more truthful way we could describe it. Levelling Up distorts the more prudent use of capital, where instead of investors risking their own money in areas they think will get the most fruitful returns, politicians spend other people's money where they believe it will be beneficial for securing votes and popularity. Whether people like the Levelling Up policy or not, we should at least ensure that it is described correctly.

The same with small business subsidies. Taxpayers are forced to give money to business owners the politicians choose to favour instead of spending their own money on businesses they prefer. A lot of the most elusive policymaking is sold with shadowy language that evades this core truth - that the government claims an entitlement to the fruits of other people's labour in order to spend it in ways that will make politicians more popular (or less unpopular), and further their own careers by continually increasing the size of the state beyond our approval.

Political language is full of making lies and half-truths sound palatable. Things that are costs are routinely referred to by politicians as 'investments'; initiatives that are sold as benefits are really only benefits for a small subset of the population, where the costs are greater and spread thinly across the nation; rules, regulations and redistributive measures routinely throw up negative unintended consequences and costly spillover effects that are habitually ignored in the discourse; policies purported to be introduced to help the wages of the poor actually end up costing the poor more at the point of consuming goods and services; political ideas sold for our benefit or for some pretext of moral good almost never get backed up by evidence, and never come with a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of both sides of the argument - the list goes on.

Ambiguity and spin are woven into the prose of politicians, because when ideas and policies are stated in plain English, the things we might like less about them become more transparent.