Deflection (or how to avoid facing up to your nannying fussbucketry)

People who are challenged by journalists, politicians or the public have take to responding by accusing the challenger of a sin against proper language - you're sexists or racist or transphobic or just plain patronising. Such a response shifts the discussion away from the substance of the debate focusing instead on what words are being used in the debate. Here, from nannying fussbucket in chief, Dame Sally Davies:

Dame Sally was questioned about the nannying claims by Mr Robinson.

He asked her: "You always have this question, so I know you are familiar with it - this balance you have to get between nannying on the one hand, or being accused of it at least, and on the other hand banality, stating things that are obvious."

Dame Sally shot back: "I thought you were going to be sexist."

Robinson asked, "What bit of that is sexist?" and Dame Sally replied: "I wonder whether you would say to a male chief medical officer..."

The story becomes Nick Robinson's language rather than whether or not it is "nannying" to issue guidance to parents on limiting screen time (what this has to do with the chief medical officer god alone knows). Dame Sally's question is unanswerable because we only have one chief medical officer and she is (if I'm still allowed to say this) a woman.

Over recent times public health people have become really sensitive about being called 'nannies' - Duncan Selbie, the boss of Public Health England famously denied (despite backing sugar taxes, smoking bans, minimum unit pricing and a host of other interventions into people's choices) being a nanny:

It’s important not to say we are into nannyism. That winds me up because I never had a nanny in my life. It’s too important to leave it to the state. This is about individuals.

It seems to me that saying it's 'nannying' to boss the public around, lecture them about their 'bad' habits and treat them as pariahs is both accurate and guaranteed to wind up public health people. Mostly because they know it's what lots of people think.  Dame Sally, Mr Selbie and all the others really are nannying fussbuckets.

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Manners maketh man - so let's teach them

"Manners maketh man" was one of William Horman's proverbs lovingly set out in his Vulgaria all the way back in the 16th century. It is still the motto of Winchester College and New College, Oxford and we should perhaps pay it a little more attention.

I recall one (middle class) parent, when pulled up on her childrens' poor behaviour at the table, exclaiming, "oh, table manners, they're so middle class". As if this did her children any favours. There's a reason why we think manners are important, why we frown on eating with mouths open, speaking while eating and the correct use of the cutlery provided. And there's a reason why we insist on children saying please and thank you, not interrupting and showing respect to older people.

That reason is that politeness and good manners make for better people - easier to live or work with, more pleasant to deal with and more likely to get on. Good manners, politeness and charm go a long way just on their own and, as that old teacher William Horman knew, they allow for brains, skills and creativity to shine through. Without manners all we see is coarseness, unpleasantness and rudeness. It's not that manners are everything but that they are an essential component of the successful person.

Manners and politeness aren't innate, they have to be taught. Left to their own devices children won't say please and thank you, won't show respect to others and won't become pleasant, charming adults. We seem, in our frantic age, to have forgotten all this and to have arrived at a point where aggression, bullying, vulgarity, cursing and rudeness are celebrated while politeness, charm, respect for others and good manners are become weaknesses.

I was at a posh dinner and, in a conversation with the gentleman besides me, the subject of a TV interview with former spin doctor, Alistair Campbell came up. My neighbour was blown away by Campbell's behaviour - he was being interviewed along with a woman (and remember Campbell is a very big man). "While she was talking," gushed my neighbour, "he folded his arms and leaned in dominating her, it was brilliant". It struck me at the time that, far from being brilliant, Campbell was just being an ill-mannered, rude bully. The argument wasn't won by the brilliance of Alistair's argument but by his intimidation of the other, far smaller, person.

Everywhere you look, people are celebrating this sort of behaviour - the sort of people who use violent metaphor in political debate have always been with us but it has never been normalised in the way it is today. And when the leaders in school begin to act, to once again teach children politeness, good manners and respect, the response from those celebrants on modern coarseness is shocking:

Top of the things that make me despair this week (there are many options) is the decision by Ninestiles secondary school in Birmingham to enforce silence on “all student movement, including to and from assembly, at lesson changeover and towards communal areas at break and lunch”. It is difficult to think of a more harmful and mean-spirited policy than taking away children’s means of communication for a significant part of the day.

To watch the opprobrium poured onto Katherine Birbalsingh for her advocacy of teaching working class young people manners, good behaviour and politeness is to see that "manners are so middle class" made flesh. Today, Ms Birbalsingh's Michaela School is routinely described as 'Britain's strictest school' because it insists on a set of standards in children's behaviour, enforces those standards and expects parents to back the school in this work. Hardly a day passes without some comment about behaviour in schools, how it stresses teachers, disrupts learning and contributes to mental ill-health. Yet when a school does something about this, the same folk pile in using words like "prison", "institutionalising" and "controlling".

I appreciate I've little room to talk but it really is time we called out ill-mannered behaviour and gratuitous rudeness. For sure, you can invoke free speech (and have my backing) but it's perfectly possible to support free speech and, at the same time, believe that good manners and politeness are preferable to vulgar insult or crude metaphor. Right now our political discourse is become corrupted by its language - the two extremes, having adopted an absolute position, do not seek to debate but rather to adopt that Alistair Campbell behaviour of aggressive domination, rudeness, ill-manners and wind up all spiced, if you're on Twitter, with gross language.

It is, for example, right that we call out the use of children by parents as vehicles for their political prejudice. This is a ghastly exploitative practice and grown ups should know better but calling the grown up using his child this way a 'cretin' isn't right or justified however angry we might be about the action. And using the "he said, she said" argument to defend this sort of language doesn't wash either - "we are better than that" is a far better argument.

I wish every success to people like Tom Bennett and Katherine Birbalsingh as well as Alex Hughes and Andrea Stephens, the joint heads at Ninestiles School in Birmingham. Civilisation is built on an assumption of good behaviour, politeness and respect, without these values it's hard to do all the other collaborative, co-operative and creative things that make for a great, successful society. Manners really do maketh man and for this to happen we need to teach those manners because they don't happen without that teaching.

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Learning the language of populism - a lesson for the elite

I've been curious about the way in which language is used to, as the trendies put it, 'other' people - make them out to be pariahs. Most commonly this language is used to validate the prejudice of its user. Take this example:



The anonymous author of this comment doesn't like vaping and explains why (although heaven knows where they got the science from - Daily Telegraph maybe). Which is all fine, even if I disagree. What's interesting is the final sentence - "...it does seem to be the chavs who use them most."

Imagine - and this is Bradford so entirely possible - if most of the vapers this person saw were from our fine city's Asian population. You can be absolutely sure that, not only would the commenter be unlikely to use the term 'paki' but the newspaper would have taken down the comment sharpish had they done so. Yet comment after comment can cheerfully use the term 'chav' without facing any sort of opprobrium.

Now you know me well enough to understand that I don't see this as a problem - people shouldn't be punished for what they say only, should it harm others, for what they do. We've created this idea of 'hate speech', embellished and polished it to the point where things that are merely stupidly unpleasant become 'hateful' - we're encouraged to report all of this stuff to the cops without actually knowing at what point 'hate speech' becomes a 'hate crime'. Worst of all we've begun to use this as justification for considering anyone not sharing the established view of what is 'hateful' as beyond the pale - xenophobes, bigots, ignorant. Or in the words of the commenter - chavs.

As a result of this enforced language moderation, we are shocked when people like Nigel Farage, Donald Trump or Katie Hopkins seem to get through to a load of ordinary people by ignoring what the elite has decided is 'hateful'. We assume that this is hate finding hate and stop there (hoping that there aren't enough of these nasty xenophobes, bigots and ignoramuses to actually get any power - risky given Brexit). We even misunderstand what people hear:

This kind of liberal dismissiveness is common but does not reflect the way that many Trump supporters actually talk about his statements. To use some terms from linguistics that actually may apply to the candidate, we can observe that Trump supporters are highly cognizant that what his words denote (building a wall, for instance) are not as important as what they index (his stance toward the world: that he is against the status quo, that he is willing to offend, that he is not phony, that he is willing to discuss racial animosities that other politicians dance around).

This conforms well to the way in which many in public health believe that, while they are immune to the blandishments of advertising, others (by which they mean those sort of people who use e-cigarettes and go to KFC) are not able to resist. The result being calls for all sorts of advertising bans and marketing restrictions.

If us liberals - and I use this in its proper English sense rather than its corrupted American meaning - are to make our case, we need to understand how folk like Trump, Hopkins and Farage communicate. It's as much about positioning as it is about content. We're familiar with the phrase 'sticking it to the man' but what we've not spotted yet is that we are 'the man'. And this is hard for folk who consider themselves to be bang on trend, caring, socially responsible citizens.

Keven Meagher wrote an article in Labour Uncut that set it out:

You don’t own an Apple Mac. You can’t taste the difference between Guatemalan and Colombian coffee beans. You voted to leave the European Union and you don’t regret it one tiny bit.

You want to buy British and be proud of your country. You like your politicians in suits. You wonder why we can’t just jail or expel Muslim fanatics who hate us.

You drink lager or real ale, not craft beer. If you go out for a meal, it’s to a Harvester pub, not a bijou Vietnamese canteen.

You’ve started shopping in Aldi and Lidl these past few years. You think climate change is overblown. Overseas aid is misspent and the benefits system is a soft touch.

The problem is that plenty of people "of the left" simply failed to get what Meagher was saying. These folk chose to think that he was arguing for an anti-immigrant, anti-union, union flag wrapped policy platform rather than making a plea to change how we talk to people, to learn the lesson of Trump and Farage, to listen to folk rather than lecture them about their failings and inadequacies.

During the referendum campaign I was asked to speak with the Denholme Elders, a group of old people who meet at the village's Mechanics Institute. It was inevitable that the discussion moved to immigration and I made clear that, whatever the outcome of the referendum, we'd still have significant immigration. One woman, not liking what I'd said, told us a story of how her daughter had been insulted and spat at by some young Asian men in Bradford. This tale resulted in nods and murmers of agreement - immigration was a problem.

Now I could have simply moved on and, in the manner of Gordon Brown, ranted about Little Englander bigots once I'd left. Indeed that's how the bulk of the commentariat feel about these situations. How does this help? Isn't it better to say to them - "those young Asian lads aren't immigrants, they were born here and it's their city too - their nasty attack on your daughter is our problem but not something made worse or better by immigration." After a bit of argument back and forth, most people in the room accepted that the bad behaviour and criminality of some Asian lads isn't resolved by stopping future immigration.

Now I'm not suggesting that all these folk have become open borders advocates but they went away having had a conversation - on their terms - about immigration. None of this patronising "how can you think immigration is a bad thing" language that so many use and a recognition that immigration should never be used as a prod to nudge people into changing the fundamentals of their culture. If anyone changes it should be the immigrant not the folk those immigrants have come to live amongst.

We've spent a couple of decades sneering at white working class culture - attacking its diet, its music, its dress and its language. And at the same time we've rammed the celebration of other cultures - food, dance, dress and festival - in the faces of these people whose lifestyle we disparage and dismiss. We need to stop a moment and think what we're doing. And recognise that what we call promoting order, what we call public health, and what we call multiculturalism - all this represents a consistent and unjustified attack on the traditions of England's working class.

The people many of you call xenophobes and bigots, the folk you dismiss as stupid - even morons, are no longer there to be herded. Unless we change our language, recognise the effectiveness of that blunt incorrectness used by Trump, Farage, Hopkins and others, we will see these people continue their support for such populists - they are, after all, the only politicians actually listening to them. The only ones offering anything to the chavs.

We have to learn the language of populism, to be less sensitive, to reject the word police and to start painting - in blunt terms - a picture of a society that celebrates the beery, smokey, loud culture of the chav just as much as it celebrates the cultures of Muslims, Hindus and Jamaicans. And a society that doesn't condemn the simple pleasures of a pint, a fag, a burger and some banter.

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Sorry but the language police are just a load of bullies

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It's a joke isn't it. We smile knowingly because we're in the know. Ho ho, 'grammar fascists' we chuckle, confident in our grasp of the lingo being enough to hold the line against the attacks. We're canny enough to remember not to use the words 'political correctness' when the irritation rises at yet another perfectly normal, regular word that's shoved off the agenda by the language police.

Look folks, I'm good at this stuff. I've got a vocabulary way bigger than the average person. And I know that those different words for different things mean subtly different somethings. But when you see someone saying not to use the word 'stupid' because it's offensive to those with learning disabilities a little whimper of linguistic pain escapes. Why, why oh why oh why do people want to do this stuff? What do they gain by setting themselves up to police the language? And on whose authority do they act?

I get it that we should be considered, respectful and thoughtful in our choice of language. I also understand that communication doesn't happen if everything we say is set around with caveats and qualifications. And - most importantly - I take the view that most of this righteous policing of others' language isn't about that respect and consideration. Rather it's simply bullying. They're not interested in the actual content of people's speech but in catching them out using the wrong words - 'coloured people' instead of 'people of colour', 'migrant' instead of 'refugee', any number of commonly used words that might just have some sort of connection to mental illness.

What happens is that this policing of language, this poking away at words, is used by those who do not want discussion to achieve their end - the closing down of debate. If you look at how this so-called debate happens, you'll see that there is no such thing taking place because critics are either excluded or shouted down for crimes against the latest iteration of linguistic controls. The substance of the discussion is of no consequence, this is replaced by an unremitting focus on attacking the language used by the critic. Followed by complete closing of any debate through the exclusion of that critic from debate because of:

...white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latinx racism, anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/ indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism,”

And when you cry 'free speech' in response you get some like:

...we do not tolerate the actions of student(s) who posted the “All Lives Matter” posters, and the “Free Speech” posters that stated that “in memoriam of the true victim of the Missouri Protests: Free Speech.”

This is not respectful but rather bullying intended simply to prevent any challenge to a prevailing orthodoxy of speech. The people who do this - whether on Twitter, on university campuses or through hectoring folk from the comfortable platform of a newspaper blog - are the worst of the righteous, smug bullies who use their ability to raise a mob as the basis for punishing the critic. And this is all done while moaning about abuse, blocking half the universe on Twitter (very publicly) and talking very loudly about trolls. Where the definition of troll in their world isn't anything beyond someone who won't bow to their bullying approach to language, to their use of that palette of the banned as a means to judge people.

But it's not enough to just ignore the critic. No, that person has to be crushed, humiliated, exposed as the evil bad person they are for daring to challenge your orthodoxy. Someone says 'perhaps we'd have fewer problems if we'd been less open to migrants' and they are blocked, their words twisted to make them 'vile racists'. And that blocking is celebrated - waved around like a bloody trophy in front of the other righteous: "look at me, I've dealt with an evil troll, look at me".

I don't think we should be rude. If I've genuinely upset someone, I'll be the first to say sorry. But most of what I've seen - the long list in that quotation above or the offence at some students making a pretty straight point about free speech - isn't folk being upset but rather bullies using others' fear of language rules to close down debate, to impose their selective, exclusive orthodoxy on others. I've lost count of the times I've been insulted during forty years of active politics - some of it just banter but a fair bit spiteful, aggressive, in-your-face insult intended to intimidate. Yet that's OK - trust me it's OK or the righteous would have done something about it except that it's mostly the same people - whereas someone making a mildly critical point about immigration, free speech or the portrayal of women in computer games gets metaphorically dragged kicking and screaming to the nearest pillory for all and sundry to abuse them for their sins against the language.

It's not a joke. It's not even political correctness. It's patronising. It's divisive. It's intimidation. And it's used by bullies.

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A dangling conversation about Mrs Roosevelt and parking outside Cullingworth Primary School

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For many years I subscribed to that famous Eleanor Roosevelt dictum - you know the one:

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Now leaving aside just what an unpleasant gossipy bitch Mrs Roosevelt was, I've now come to the conclusion that this dictum is a monumental load of tommyrot. And this realisation came from listening to a song I really don't like all that much - Paul Simon's 'The Dangling Conversation'. In the third verse Simon tells us:

Yes we speak of things that matter,
With words that must be said,
"Can analysis be worthwhile?"
"Is the theater really dead?"
And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow,
I cannot feel your hand,
You're a stranger now unto me
Lost in The Dangling Conversation
And the superficial sighs
In the borders of our lives.

The couple in the song lived absolutely according to Mrs Roosevelt's dictum yet Paul Simon suggests that the result of this is that what they considered to be grand thoughts about important matters were, in truth, utterly superficial. What matters is more personal, more direct and much much more difficult to discuss - how we feel about others, how people relate and how this affects our lives.

This morning I turned down the opportunity to go on the radio for a discussion about 'Charlie Hebdo', free speech and all that stuff. I did so because some neighbours of the primary school in Cullingworth have complained about parking by parents delivering their children to the school. An utterly mundane matter of no strategic significance but, I decided, far more important than pontificating about grand things on the radio.

At the primary school I've got a fighting chance of doing something to make the situation a little better, to allow my neighbours (and the school's neighbours) to rub along together a little better. And this matters far more to people than whether or not I think it's OK to publish cartoons that might upset someone. Those people are the small minded folk that Mrs Roosevelt viewed with such snooty disdain - they want to tell me about the man who parks his 4x4 on the pavement or the taxi driver who always ignores the double yellow lines. This is because these things matter.

When the grand people on the radio or television - or those apeing them like the couple with the dangling conversation in Paul Simon's song - talk about grand ideas they forget that those grand ideas, when acted on, result in real effects on real people. Indeed that, were the ideas presented to those mums at the school gate or the couple in the council house round the corner, they'd get short shrift - out-of-touch would perhaps be the most polite response.

Because us grand folk have Mrs Roosevelt's disdain for such small-mindedness (too often thinking that those people simply won't understand so why bother), we resort to conducting political debate through dumbed down slogan and pithy soundbites. This is the world of 'not right or left but right or wrong', 'long term economic plans' and 'for the many, not the few' - endlessly repeated advertising mantras that mean little but make a pleasing sound.

We pretend that people like what we're saying by the liberal use of opinion polling as post hoc justification of the slogan or soundbite. Yet this brand marketing is weak, inconsistent and ineffective compared to that from big brand owners - put simply Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Persil are more trusted than any political brand anywhere in the world. And this is because, unlike those brands, political parties treat their customers - the voters - with Mrs Roosevelt's disdain.

None of this is to suggest that we shouldn't discuss grand ideas but we need to try to include more people in those discussions rather than, as is typical, using words and concepts seemingly designed to close the debate off to any but the cognoscenti. Whether it's a debate about 'culture' or a discussion of macroeconomics, we should try at least to use words people understand rather than pretending that language is somehow a barrier to the analysis of the subject in question. In the end - as so often with these things - someone has made the point much better - here's George Orwell:

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Above all, it seems to me, we need to spend more time talking about (and to, and with) people and their daily lives and not pretending that somehow this is a lower form of talk reserved for people who aren't nearly as clever as we are. For, by the use of that grand language, we fall into Orwell's trap and become fools. Fools no-one else much can understand but fools - snobbish fools - nonetheless.

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Of course Public Health don't want us to understand it...

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This quote sums up everything wrong with Public Health:

But Greg Fell, consultant in public health, who was leading the discussion, said the idea of an Easy Read version had been considered but rejected.

He said there was a concern that it could be too “reductionist”.

Even the explanation of why it's incomprehensible is difficult to understand! And just for flavour:

“It is recommended that we make greater, but still intelligent and parsimonious, use of the wealth of epidemiological data that can be found within existing but as yet untapped sources of data.”

Suck on that ordinary member of the public!

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More stupidity and ignorance from those folk at Joseph Rowntree Foundation

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In an article about the use of words - a po-faced little lecture from the word police - the author, one Gary Rae, says this:

That said, according to the Department for Work & Pensions’ own figures, last year we overpaid 0.7% of the welfare budget due to fraud. Compare that with an estimated £70 billion lost through tax evasion.

Note the two figures - the first one is an accurate and referenced link to information from the government. The second one - well it's a load of rubbish, deliberately misleading rubbish. Here's the truth:

The latest estimates show that tax evaders, including those operating in the hidden economy and those who undertake organised criminal attacks on the tax system, deprive the public purse of around £14 billion

Still a lot of money but not anywhere close to Mr Rae's figure. With one flutter of his typing fingers the author destroys his argument (albeit a very thin argument) and reveals himself - and JRF - to be just as manipulative and exploitative of language as the rest of us. That and misleading.

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Humpty Dumpty and the damage of political correctness

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I read an exchange on twitter in which two correspondents tied themselves into angst-ridden knots over the proper terms to use when discussing the paralympics. We scuttled about different phrases - "able-bodied", "people with disabilities", "the disabled" and "not disabled" - with, it seems some of these being 'offensive' and others not.

There is perhaps a whole thesis to be written about the evolution of non-discriminatory language and perhaps it will explore the fuzzy boundaries between giving respect to others and political correctness. How often do we read of some or other person causing 'offence' while not intending to do so - usually by using the incorrect iteration in the evolution of language to describe a particular minority.

There are two problems with this approach to language. Firstly it gives the power of the bully to those who are appointed (usually through some unspecified and undemocratic role as a 'representative' of the minority concerned) to police the language. By not being up with the latest 'approved' terms of description we expose ourself to causing 'offence' - even if we are using a term that is not disrespectful and has been in common and polite usage in the recent past.

Secondly, it removes context. The speaker is always exposed to the risk of challenge - regardless of intent or of context - simply for failing to use what we might call the "Approved Politically Correct Term" (APCT). The result of this is that language's subtlety is destroyed - the games of wit and pleasure we play with words are closed off because the guardians of the APCTs watch over us prepared to be offended. And to use their duly appointed bully pulpit to punish.

This brings me to one of the most important passages in English literature, a passage where the magic of words is revealed and where we are given permission to be in charge of the language rather than supplicants to some approved order:

    "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice said.
    Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!' "
    "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected.
    "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
    "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
    "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master      that's all."
    Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. "They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they're the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!

The liberty that Lewis Carroll tells us about through the mouth of a nursery rhyme character is the very opposite of political correctness. It says that context is everything and that the author of the words sets the context. Rather than APCTs we have laissez faire language - joyous, challenging, exciting and - on occasion - offending. It is this that the deadening debate of precise minority descriptions destroys and the political correctness damages. The edge is taken away from communication, we concern ourselves more with the potential for offence that with the purpose of the communication - it's not just that people are offended by 'niggardly' and 'nitty-gritty' for no good reason but that when we use words, the word police ensure that they don't mean just what we choose them to mean. They mean what the politically correct have determined is their meaning.

All this kills language as we tippy-toe around certain subjects, eschew huge chunks of the dictionary and adopt a bowdlerised, dumbed-down language so as to avoid that moment of 'offence'. And the saddest thing is that, far from recreating sensibility and politeness, such political correctness makes for upset where there should be no upset and offence where there is no offence.

Perhaps we should take Humpty Dumpty's words and put them on big posters - make people realise that the language belongs to all of us. That we can wreck it as we wish, meddle with its meaning, love it and hate it as we wish. Maybe we should say to the bullies of language that we've had enough - respect is a reflection of character not a form of words. Political correctness is damaging, dangerous and joyless - it is time to get those words back under our control.

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The language of politics

For many years some of my colleagues have looked askance, mumbled into their beards and mutters about it "just not being right". I mean they come over here from god knows where, bring all their funny habits and strange food and clutter up the place with their unenglish bright colours. The least they can do is learn the language - and not expect us to produce everything in their own outlandish script.

But politics is practical - after all despite the habits, the food and an incomprehensible language these people have votes. So we have (accompanied by mutterings and mumblings) produced literature in "community languages" and tried to take a speaker of said language with us while campaigning. Whatever we might say about people learning English, we make this necessary compromise so as to ensure that our vital and vibrant political message reaches the eyes and ears of the whole electorate.

And, it seems that the same goes in Spain. The poster above is from Benahavis which is a small town just inland from Marbella famous for its restaurants and for an extraordinary number of golf courses. And Senor Guerrero has spotted that quite a lot of the town's population (even more in the Summertime) is British - moreover a growing proportion of those Brits are permanent residents and likely to vote. So our politician addresses them in English ignoring any sensitivities about campaigning in a foreign language.

The recent local elections in Spain saw - for perhaps the first time - a concerted effort by the main parties to reach the ex-pat communities and especially the Brits. As one local blogger writes:

In my local town, I believe for the first time ever, one of the major Spanish parties is actively looking to entice non-Spanish residents to vote for them.

So I guess we in Bradford shouldn't grumble about election leaflets in Urdu!

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Humpty Dumpty and the word police

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“…There's glory for you!'

`I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.”

It may seem a little trite to start a discussion about the serious issue of language by quoting from a children’s book – even one as famous as “Alice Through the Looking Glass” – but it seems to me that Humpty Dumpty’s point is important to this discussion.

I’ve always been with Humpty on the matter of words – at least in so far as we manage to get our meaning across. But it does concern me that an order of lexical understanding has grown up from a belief that words inevitably carry a cultural loading. That there must be a list - and ever expanding list - of words that we cannot use, words that might offend some protected group or other.

The proper use of words is compromised. People write badly by using the plural to denote the singular or through the soul-destroying use of passive language. All so as to avoid the possibility that we use a masculine singular to refer to someone who could be of either gender. As if this really matters in the order of things – in the desire to see women’s equality.

But all this is just annoying, limiting and slightly dispiriting rather than something to die in the ditch over. What should really concern us is the manner in which language has become a tool by which the powerful destroy the weak – unguarded comments be they about women, a polemical comparison of someone’s speech to that of a past fascist regime or innocently alluding to black people by reference to their skin colour.

The recent example of Greg Stone, Lib Dem candidate in Newcastle East, is a case in point. Under a pseudonym, Mr Stone posted some choice comments on the Guido Fawkes blog – perhaps ill-advised but not a hanging offence surely? However, to hear Nick Brown the Labour MP for the constituency, you’d have thought Mr Stone had been caught in bed with a goat, murdered his mum and run off to Morocco with a stack of charitable funds.

Or the endless resort of many MPs, campaigners and media hacks to accusations of racism, sexism or some other kind of dread discrimination. One slightly bufferish comment and the word police are down on you like a ton (or do we have to say tonne these days) of bricks. No-one’s actually been offended. No-one’s been prevented from doing anything. But the word police – motivated more often by power and spite than any semblance of genuine concern – are there and are not interested in what the accused has done beyond the instant condemnation for using the “wrong words”.

The existence of this word police presents a gift to the bully. Good men and women are destroyed by powerful men like Nick Brown because it suits them and their search for power. Local standards boards for Councillors do not raise standards but provide instead a platform for the bully. Allegations of discrimination are automatically introduced into employment disputes because the lawyers know they are treated differently and are more likely to secure a settlement. And the media loves a good: “Councillor in racist abuse” story – even when it’s nothing of the sort.

My words mean precisely what I want them to mean, nothing more, nothing less. If you think they are racist, sexist, ageist or homophobic, that's your problem because I'm not any of those things.

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