by Tom Regel

I have stared at the words “one nation” long and hard, from all sorts of angles, in different typefaces and in varying font sizes, waiting for it to slide into place or for something to click. But nothing happens. Even when those two words roll of the tongue of someone who isn’t perpetually nasal (an unfortunate trait that lends the slogan a peculiar unctuous quality) it still fails to arouse much curiosity or excitement.

Because Labour’s new mantra is just the sort of affected, quasi-utopian rhetoric that would compel most ordinary people – if heard upon waking in Nick Clegg’s “alarm clock Britain” – to want to stay firmly put in bed and with the blinds snapped shut, try and forget about the outside world.

Or is that just me? There is nothing particularly egregious about the “one nation” slogan. But, on balance – speaking purely from a lyrical perspective – there is nothing particularly exciting, potent or sharp about it either and that is the problem. Of course, there are plenty of worse examples.

It is nowhere near as lame or patronising as David Cameron’s infamous, “big society”. But, “one nation” – just like nearly all other political campaign slogans, ringing with eschatological sentiment (even Obama’s famous war-cry, “yes we can”, feeling somewhat cringe-inducing upon reflection) – still has a nauseating effect. It seems that their banality stems partly from their familiarity. Because half of them sound as if they were plucked from the same sparkly pool that the advertising and marketing moguls fish in – and the connection, I suspect, isn’t a coincidence. The logic isn’t particularly difficult to work out. It must be said though, that most political slogans, by nature, tend to sound a little lousy and contrived – and so my angst about the “one nation” slogan is perhaps a little futile, and isn’t worth dwelling on for too long or too seriously.

However, this fascination with the slogan and its increasing prominence in day to day rhetoric does reflect a much more widespread and deep-seated problem with our political language in general. Cliché is one of the main problems with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse. It has become a staple feature of the rhetoric that politicians use to communicate their, “big ideas” for a, “better future”. In effect, the slogan has become part of mainstream political dialogue. And as a result, political language has swiftly been reduced to a stagnant pool of stock expressions, cheap one-liners and tawdry phrases. Some of which wouldn’t look all that out of place on a bill-board ad for the latest smartphone, or across the type of religious pamphlets that street-preachers wave in your face on the high street.

The pious incantation: “restore your faith in politics”, or, for example: “politics is broken and it needs fixing”, are variations of two of my personal pet-hates.

Somewhere in this lies the ignorant assumption that people have switched off because the political tongue is too tricky or complex to understand, forgetting that there are a lot of other reasons why people don’t care much for politicians or political parties.

The technical jargon of Westminster should be translated into a more tangible and comprehensible diction, however that doesn’t mean it has to be dumbed down or glossed over to appeal to hearts instead of heads.

It is a tame imitation of a very American tradition. The prevailing wisdom across the Atlantic appears to be that with a few token phrases like, “believe”, “change”, “different”,”together” (admittedly, Cameron failed the acid test on this one), “future” and “America” – and with the right amount of luck – you can ride the electoral wave half the way to polling day on pure spontaneous emotion alone, without too many questions asked.

But there is another reason why the political landscape is currently so polluted by this cacophony of cliché, slogan and euphemism. George Orwell once wrote that (to paraphrase slightly) orthodoxy demands a lifeless, imitative style. With all the three main parties trying ultimately to occupy the centre-ground – an elusive and mysterious place in the electorate that seems to demand strict orthodoxy – the quality of political language (and imagination) has diminished as a result. If it isn’t lifeless, then it is certainly in a state of comatose.

There can’t be much life left in some of the recycled and overused phrases politicians regurgitate to appeal to ‘us’ and taunt their opponents (the famous, ‘the mess they left us’ line has so worn so thin it is now practically transparent).

The three main parties obsessive compulsion to win the centre-ground makes those who – to use a cliché of my own – don’t quite sing from the same hymn sheet sound like half-baked, heretics who don’t understand or much care for the notion of pragmatics in politics.

These people are either shut up, or quietly driven into exile on the isolated and obscure fringes of the political sphere. Orwell had a keen eye for describing the sort of mechanical ‘party-line’ characters that instead dominate mainstream politics:

“…one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether  fanciful…The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.”

The depressing thing is, that you can be sure that months of research and data, garnered from endless focus-groups and days of in-depth strategising has been invested into what makes up the bulk of our contemporary political discourse.

And, in this lengthy effort to transcend the ideological differences between left and right and maintain all the tonal qualities of mass-appeal, political language and rhetoric has suffered, and has probably driven just as many people away from politics as it intended on drawing in.

Tom Regel is an English and history student at Goldsmiths College, University of London

Tags: Big Society, one nation, rhetoric, Tom Regel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2025 at 11:02 am and is filed under Grassroots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.