The most exciting thing about this general election is that it has been as much about the impoverishment of political language as the impoverishment of the country. The Conservatives in particular have been ruthless in deploying only a miraculously stunted vocabulary of emotionally laden but deliberately vague terms.
There is “strong and stable leadership”, of course, but there is also “no deal is better than a bad deal”, which Theresa May repeated four times on the Paxman TV non-debate, to audience applause. The line is obviously false, since no deal is the worst possible economic outcome. (“No air is better than bad air,” says mad astronaut.) But the nonsensical, ringing defiance of “no deal is better than a bad deal” seems to resonate with Little Englanders, stoking a sense of prideful sour grapes. (“No grapes is better than those grapes!” said the fox who couldn’t reach them, shortly before being torn apart by hounds.)
By the time he appeared on The One Show to talk about his hedge, Jeremy Corbyn appeared to have wisely abandoned the line “Theresa May is strong against the weak; weak against the strong”, because ramming home the association between your opponent and the word “strong” is probably counterproductive. Unfortunately his new brand of politics still has not broken the mould of leaders disingenuously refusing to answer “hypothetical questions” that they don’t like the sound of. Asked by Jeremy Paxman whether he would order a drone strike on someone suspected of terrorism, Corbyn replied: “You can’t answer a hypothetical question without the evidence.” Of course you can. People do it all the time. General elections are about nothing but hypothetical questions. The entire Labour manifesto is an answer to the hypothetical question: what would you do if you were in government? It has been written in the absence of concrete evidence that Corbyn will be prime minister.
Perhaps the most surprising thing for a time-traveller from 2010 would be to see that we are back to a two-horse race. The Liberal Democrats are fudging their position on Brexit but promising to “put children first”, which is not everyone’s idea of the right policy in a coffee shop. Ukip, meanwhile, is in the final stages of accomplishing its beautiful public metamorphosis into a simple fringe party for racists, rather than, as it was previously, a fringe party for racists that pretended to be concerned about the European Union’s influence on our affairs. Leader Paul Nuttall made this clear by floating the possibility of Muslim internment and announcing: “We’ve got to get to grips with this Islamist cancer within our midst,” thus situating himself comfortingly in the tradition of Joseph Goebbels, who liked to speak of Jews and homosexuals as “cancers” too.
The canniest rhetorical move of the election by far was Labour’s rapid adoption of the splendid enthymeme, or term of Unspeak, “dementia tax”, for the Tories’ plan to make people pay for end-of-life care with their houses, but only if they had some kinds of diseases and not others. “Dementia tax”, in fact, has been around in the context of British politics for a number of years. It was used in parliament by Glenys Thornton in 2011, who told the Lords: “The current system of charging for care, such as help with eating, hits people with dementia hardest … and amounts to what the Alzheimer’s Society calls a ‘dementia tax’.” The phrase was taken up in the Commons by Andy Burnham the following summer, and bounced around regularly thereafter.
Only when the new Conservative manifesto revealed how they bravely planned to make things even worse for sufferers did the “dementia tax” suddenly go viral thanks to Twitter. Very soon, indeed, it became clear that, for all the pseudo-scientific strategy of the Conservative party’s rigorous message discipline on “strong and stable” and “coalition of chaos”, it was “dementia tax” that was the great rhetorical earthquake of the campaign – as evidenced by the Tories’ seemingly desperate resort to buying Google ads against the phrase to try to explain themselves.
Of course the dementia tax is not actually a tax, but the phrase does encapsulate a truth about the unfairness of being heavily penalised in a disease lottery. One may wonder, though, about the general long-term strategy here. With “dementia tax” as well as “bedroom tax”, the forces of the left have borrowed their opponents’ rhetorical weapons, since it was traditionally a Conservative or Republican strategy to call things taxes that were not taxes so as to make the public afraid of them. But if progressives thus actively acquiesce in the general assumption that taxes are a bad thing, how will they convincingly defend the ones they want to impose if they ever get the chance?
