Alarm-clock Britain?

I had a little outing on Newsnight last night (the text is here). It was part of their little series on how to fix modern democracy. I don't think that I have any recipe for fixing it. In fact, I'm probably not quite as sure as many are that it is badly broken -- or at least I'm not sure whether a trip back 100 years, still less 2500 years, would offer us a version of democracy that we preferred (what about the women, for example?). The more optimistic line would be that reasonably healthy political systems ought to be dissatisfied with how they are doing.

Nonetheless, I am fairly certain that we need to think harder about political language and its increasing disengagement with MEANING anything. So we had a bit of light hearted attack on the empty slogans of current politics, "hard working families" being only the most famous. And this included a few glimpses of Nick Clegg's doomed attempt to launch "alarm clock Britain" as his own contribution to the slogan anthology (what DID it mean?... you can see Charlie Brooker's answer to that here).

But there was a bigger point that was also developed in the discussion with Phil Collins, once Tony Blair's speech writer, and -- I can assure -- you a good companion. (You should be able to access the full discussion here, about 30 minutes in.) I mean if politicians talk in soundbites, if they don't write their own speeches and if they don't even write their own tweets . . . how can they possibly complain that the electorate is disengaged? I mean there is nothing to engage with, apart from a brand.

My argument was NOT that the ancients got it right (people are always wanting me to say that, and it is almost never true). But I was trying to say that they did retain a real focus on words meaning something and being part of an ARGUMENT, rather than a set of disconnected slogans.

Overall I was pleased with how it had turned out and everyone at BBC did a great job. Fun with a point, I thought. The only person who came off badly was poor old Roy Jenkins. There was a clip of him talking about immigration, but after the editing he emerged as appearing to say the exact opposite of what he really was saying. The clip showed him saying "Immigration in reasonable numbers is a cross we have to bear...". What he actually said was "Let there be no suggestion that immigration in reasonable numbers is a cross we have to bear..". That is to say (to oversimplify his argument a bit) he was talking about the centrality and importance of immigration to modern life, rather than than seeing immigration as something that was to be "tolerated".

It was a bit of an odd editing mistake to make in a piece about soundbites and the meaningfulness of political language! (You can find the full text in various places, including Peter Kellner's book "Democracy", which is pre-viewable on Google books.)

So what is my fix? Well I dont really have one. But I do think it would be a good idea if we all read Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" who was talking about just this in the 1940s (a nice sign that this is not a new problem). And I think possibly we ought just to laugh -- a rampant chorus of giggles -- when ever one of these soundbites comes out.