‘STICKS and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ rightly finds a perfect home in the playground where grazed knees provoke more tears than bruised egos. Yet in England, in 2025, you would be forgiven for thinking almost no adult elected to the Mother of all Parliaments now believes this. Words are not only miraculously hurtful, they are our elected representatives’ weapon of choice. It has to stop. England needs policing, not English.
Labour’s anti-education minister Bridget Phillipson recently demonstrated the ludicrous levels of foolishness this reversal has led to, when amidst her standard litany of denial at the despatch box, she produced the spectacularly silly phrase ‘school uniform racketeers’. Presumably she believed it would pillory and shame innocuous retailers going about the perfectly civil and necessary business in a healthy democracy of selling grey socks, navy jumpers and white shirts. From someone who accepted a £14,000 ‘gift’ for a birthday party, this isn’t just a bit rich: it’s unpalatable enough to induce retching.
Phillipson was of course taking her lead from her boss and senior colleagues, who habitually deflect all public concerns, however disturbingly painful or criminal the issues that raise them, by name-calling and labelling because they have over decades deliberately and very successfully induced a far too compliant media to replicate their own entirely political antipathies.
‘Right wing’ for these people is not a neutral descriptor in political debate, the pragmatic labelling of a liked-minded group because its members share broadly similar political views. It’s not the kind of compound noun a serious economist, academic or, God forbid, professional journalist might use. It’s a public flogging administered by the morally superior. It’s a highly effective way of rapidly marshalling ill-will against your critics. If you doubt that, think how effectively it has diverted attention away from Sir Keir Starmer in recent weeks.
Starmer and his party deploy this weaponised term because they have no doubt that they can rely on the broadcast media to repeat it with precisely the degree of disdain and contempt they want to elicit. Instead of regarding themselves as the guardians (oh, the irony) or monitors of semantic integrity, far too many in our broadcast media are Labour’s buttons to press. They will repeat the slur as a slur. Their appetite for hurtful words is every bit as voracious as their puppet masters’.
This alignment of the broadcast media with the political left serves only both parties. It does nothing for the public or the nation.
Thankfully there are increasingly dissenting voices and this dangerously rigged game is being exposed by more and more people in a wide range of roles and settings. Perhaps the most uplifting indication of this is how unafraid people have become about using the word liar. Unlike ‘right wing’, the word appears to have maintained its dignity and tends to be used when the deceit or falsehood involved is virtually undeniable.
Which leads to the significant issue I want to raise here: our current prime minister’s use of the English language. Sir Keir Starmer has taken British politics to an entirely new place, a place that all those journalists and indeed politicians who keep identifying and exposing his lies have yet to recognise. Everyone who pays attention understands that he is entirely capable of saying one thing on Monday and the opposite on Tuesday without a flicker of shame or hint of insincerity. He appears to believe words are effective as communication tools only for the brief time it takes to utter them. For him they have no meaning, no force and crucially no commitment beyond the here and now.
What commentators have yet to realise is that this radical departure from democratic norms has placed every citizen and voter in an impossible position. Citizens in any democracy rely entirely on an expectation that their elected representatives are largely true to their word. It is the reason why political parties draft manifestos and politicians write articles or make speeches. Citizens can learn about political intent only from the language used to convey it. Starmer has fundamentally changed the rules of the game.
The genuinely frightening question now is, how do we as citizens respond to someone whose use of language itself, circumvents our expectations entirely? There is absolutely no point in playing by the old rules, as the mainstream media do when they repeat the cycle of identifying lies and exposing them, because it makes no difference. Starmer and indeed many of his CV-twiddling colleagues are self-evidently immune to the pressures which such exposure is designed to exert.
The media have no choice: they have to keep playing to stay in work. As voters we do have a choice, and what has become absolutely necessary is that we must disengage from the game. The fascinating question is what form will that take? The weakest answer is to simply shrug and wait for the next election.
It may indeed be that Brits will show at the next opportunity that they have simply had enough of rule by lawyer, by people whose only stock in trade is words. Making things happen, what the commercial world sensibly calls delivering, is outside the lawyer skills set. When lawyers take to politics, no one should be surprised when money and time is expended not on delivery, but Deliveroo. All those briefings, those meetings, the relentless presentations in all those think tanks, quangos and NGOs have to be fuelled, after all. There’s a kind of Edward Lear form of poetic justice in Boris Johnson’s having been taken down by a party and a slice of cake.
But in the meantime (because that’s precisely what it is) we all still have to deal with the problem our current prime minister’s idiosyncratic use of the English language has created. This legalistic policing of language must stop. There’s no shortage of skilled historians able to tell you exactly where it leads if it isn’t deservedly ridiculed and mocked into the drab filing cabinet where it belongs. The only self-respectful response in 2025 to anyone insisting on telling you which words you can, or cannot use, is to repeat the offending term, loudly, often and preferably in their face. And to the inevitable socio-linguistic quibbler champing at the bit to tell me there is no difference between those of us who object to being told what we can, or cannot say, and the language police: consider this.
There is an entire worldview of historical difference between any adult who assumes the authority to instruct you on which words you may, or may not use, and one who not only respects your right to speak as you please, but protects it; even when your own words offend them, because long, long ago, they learned the difference between grazed knees and bruised egos. One route leads to freedom, the other Tiananmen Square.
