Compulsory sterilisation
There’s a verbal tic going around government circles at the minute and it’s spreading fast. See if you can spot it:
Here’s transport secretary Ruth Kelly, this afternoon, on the subject of road pricing:
We have been trapped in this sterile debate about road pricing.
Here’s Pat McFadden, minister of state for employment relations, on February 19, endorsing city academies and school trusts:
We need to move on from a sterile debate about governance to a realisation that these reforms are essential to giving some of the most disadvantaged children in the country more opportunities than they have enjoyed up until now.
Here’s New Labour MP Martin Salter preparing to surrender on the issue of 42 days detention, on February 26:
We have got stuck in a sterile debate on the number of days. We need to move the debate to ask: is it parliament or the judiciary that should call the home secretary to account?
Work and pensions secretary James Purnell in a speech launching a new ‘Commissioning Strategy’ on February 28:
[O]ver the last ten years, Britain has been lost in a sterile debate between public and private. It’s time to move on.
Sterile debate. Now, it’s not an uncommon phrase so I’m prepared to believe it wasn’t handed down from on high by a spin doctor as a ‘line to take’. It might be a coincidence.
Maybe somebody said it at a meeting they were all at and they thought independently, ‘ooh, that’s good, I’m having that’. And God knows this government can take the most inspiring language and reduce it to soul-crushing tedium and ubiquitous cliche.
Sterile debate is, however, being used in exactly the same way in each of these four instances. All four uses are performing the identical rhetorical task. When they use the term ’sterile debate’ what these four mean is ‘I don’t want to talk about this any more’ or ‘I’m losing this argument so let’s ditch it’ or ‘I’d like to draw a line under this and move on’.
Who after all, wants to get stuck is a dry and arid conversation about hard decisions involved in reducing road congestion, or who should be running our schools, or how long we should intern terrorist suspects, or how far the private sector should be allowed to provide public services? Sterile equals non-productive.
It’s been decided that these discussions are firing blanks. They’re dull, it’s boring, and ministers have got better, more modern and thrusting ideas than you anyway. Move on.
Posted on March 4th, 2008 at 7:35pm under New Labour
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• 20 Comments |
They remind me – very much, it’s not just a conceit – of the sort of mediocre line manager who calls meetings to ask for everybody’s “input”. As the meeting progresses, though, and as everybody else’s suggestions get turned down, it becomes clear that they’d already decided the outcome of the meeting before it started. Everybody comes away from the meeting loathing them even more than they did before on account of the insult to their intelligence. But the manager’s boss is pleased.
Remember that obscure slice of legalese Blair used a couple of years ago? He “resiled” from some bit of fuckery-foo I can’t remember now and for about a week later all the rest of New Labour’s middle-managers were using the same word in interviews, like the drones they are.
I’m sorry, Sean, but definitely expect to see fuckery-foo over-used from now on. It’s too good not to steal.
‘This debate is so much fuckery-foo. It’s time to move on’.
Excellent.
I have emailed the OED to demand its inclusion.
Fuckery-foo
The quality of irrelevance, frivolity or meaninglessness
2008, Chicken Yoghurt
Try the Urban Dictionary – that way it will live on Teh Intarnets forever.
Perhaps they’re just introducing the concept of sterilisation into the public mind before passing the Pre-Birth Intervention Act 2008?
Of course, this is from the same people who brought you ‘I don’t recognise…’ (i.e. ‘La la la…I’m not listening…’)
I hate ‘I don’t recognise…’. Geoff Hoon was one of the early exponents, the bastard.
“Sterile debate” statements generally indicate intellectual bankruptcy on the part of those saying the debate is sterile.
“resile” was dug up from its mouldy grave by David Lange, as far as I know. But these things occur from time to time — journalists and politicos write their stuff (or have it written for them) in a hurry, and so follow the current fashion. What’s more, they don’t realise how odd their fashions sound to other people. A few years ago they suddenly started talking about “scoping reports”; I’d never heard “scope” as a verb, and no-one ever acknowledged (or at least I never saw such an acknowledgement) that it might be uncommon. And in my youth “rebarbative” suddenly became every journalist’s standby.
hmm, the first phrase leeched by the carrion was Ken Clarke’s “robust”.
This was instantly picked up and used for some 8 years thereafter, describing everything from the bacteria in Harriet Harman’s yoghurt to the thrill of no more fingerthrough in Mandelsohn’s Brazilian Bogpaper
Ahem.
Worn-out,adj. Any argument which lacks the courtesy to remove itself from your attention, even in the face of your repeated and persistent failure to refute it.
Someone or other, June 2005.
I wish I could claim priority for fuckery-foo as well, but you can’t have everything.
Anyone remember a few years back when “sea-changes” were all the rage? I was convinced there was some kind of contest between journos and politicians to see who could use the phrase most often.
Yeah, but things have moved on since then….
Notice also how ministers tend to preface a particularly purulent pile of policy bollocks with the highly defensive ‘It is right that…’. As Phil Edwards pointed out to me a while ago, this adds a bit of the Book of Common Prayer to the managerial slurry.
‘What you have to appreciate…” is another good one. Why do I have to appreciate it? Tell me. It’s code for, I’m not interested in your argument but you’re damn well going to listen to mine.
I could do this all day.
Paradigm was a rare word, but now are a digm a dozen.
Alan Douglas
I have found cases where automatic spell-checkers have changed “scoping study” into “scooping study” and no-one has noticed, and the idea of “scooping studies” has now entered the vocabulary of some countries where English is not the first language.
This stuff about “sterline debates” is a reflection of a deep-seated anxiety among politicians, especially NuLab ones. They don’t want to have to choose, they don’t want to recognise that there are some fundamental choices that have to be made. They want to be all things to all persons, so these fundamental (ideological) choices have to be made to disappear. Blair once said something about how the UK shouldn’t have to chose between the USA and Europe – but unfortunately for him sometimes the UK will have to choose between them.
Another horror from politicians on all sides: “I have been very clear that…” (and similar formulations talking about ‘being clear’). Meaning either “I’ve said nothing like this before, or indeed used to say the opposite, but will try and bluff my claim to having held a consistent position” or “I don’t care that I may be talking bollocks and/or ignoring another (more important/tricky) argument, all that matters is that I’ve re-iterated one or two God-awful points that the spin doctors have given me. And I shall go on doing so ad nauseam.”