Cameron vs Orwell

After reading the first few paragraphs of David Cameron’s New Year message on Monday, I experienced familiar sensations: a heaviness of the eyelids, a nodding of the head, a wandering of the mind towards Facebook. It was clear that this speech, like so many other examples of political writing, didn’t really mean anything. Vague, general and devoid of specific details, it embodied nothing more than a PR exercise designed to make Cameron, and the government, look good.

As I scrolled wearily down to the end of the piece, I wondered how much of my time is taken up reading stuff in the press that is meaningless. Determined that the three or four minutes I spent reading Cameron’s message weren’t going to be consigned to the internet waste bin, I decided to glean as much as I could from the piece with a little help from the rigorous and bullshit-intolerant analysis of Mr. George Orwell. As there wasn’t much meaning to be found in the content of the speech, I’d look for some in how the speech tries to avoid meaning.

‘Politics and the English Language’ was written in 1946. ‘In our time,’ Orwell wrote, ‘political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.’ In 2012, not much is different. Almost every statement, speech or article written by a coalition minister tries to defend policies that are causing a huge amount of damage to the lives of ordinary people. This is done by (mis)using language in very deliberate ways which Orwell identifies and categorizes in his essay. In Cameron’s message, they pop up pretty frequently.

The first paragraph is worth quoting in its entirety:

'This will be the year Britain sees the world and the world sees Britain. It must be the year we go for it – the year the coalition government I lead does everything it takes to get our country up to strength.'   

The mind glides over these lines like a skate over ice – there is nothing to grip onto, nothing to stop the reader from passing serenely by. They almost repel attention. What is Cameron talking about? The first sentence is most likely a grand allusion to the Olympics, but the second is impossible to understand exactly. This is because of the slippery nature of phrases like ‘go for it’, ‘do everything it takes’ and ‘get[…]up to strength’. Orwell calls these ‘Operators’ or ‘Verbal False Limbs’: ‘The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word,[…]a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb.’ Instead of using single-word verbs like ‘cut’, ‘privatise’ and ‘change’, Cameron uses vague phrases that have no precise meaning to refer to policy-making that is having a negative impact on a majority of people.  

Elsewhere, similar phrases point to a lack of meaning for Cameron himself, who can’t seem to find appropriate words to describe the people he governs: ‘The British people have got what it takes – and the government has got the ideas and policies we need.’ The British people have got what it takes? What is this, Europe’s Got Talent? Are we all part of some continental talent contest to see who can get by on least without complaining? Oh, you’re much better at austerity than Greece is, Britain. But prove it by undergoing six more years. If there’s no more rioting, you win.

Cameron can, however, find the right abstract nouns to describe what the Queen represents, as he tries to buoy spirits by anticipating her diamond jubilee: ‘in the 60^th year of her reign, we honour our queen as the finest and most famous example of British dedication, British duty, British steadiness, British tradition.’ These words, used as they are here, fall into the category of what Orwell simply terms ‘meaningless words’: ‘Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.’ To be dedicated, we must have something to be dedicated to. There are different types of duty: moral, patriotic, professional. But Cameron doesn’t specify because meaningless words allow him to appear to be talking about Great British Qualities. In fact, when he implores us to ‘use these things as a mirror of ourselves too, a mirror of the nation’, he’s talking about obedience to the State, unnecessary self-sacrifice and suffering austerity in silence.

Another category of Orwell’s is that of the ‘Dying Metaphor’: ‘worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’ Here’s Cameron’s description of the Eurozone crisis: ‘We’ve got clear and strong plans to bring down our deficit, which gives us some protection from the worst of the debt storms now battering the Eurozone.’ We’ve heard so much in recent months about ‘turbulence’ in the Eurozone that the storm metaphor has ceased to, as Orwell puts it, ‘assist thought by evoking a visual image.’ When I first read this sentence, no mental picture was created for me. Instead, just the vague notion that there’s a bad situation in Europe that’s to do with debt. Cameron is thus able to refer to the crisis without having to define exactly what the crisis is. There is no need to mention investment banks, bailout loans or economy-shrinking austerity measures.

Towards the end of his essay, Orwell argues that ‘political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.’ Cameron’s New Year message is itself one big euphemism: an attempt at talking about what the Tories are doing without offending anyone.