No more abstract nouns, we need to start talking about the real world

At rapid pace since Labour’s catastrophic defeat a fortnight ago, my inbox has been pinging with explanations about why we lost and what we should do next. I wonder if one of our problems isn’t that it’s too easy to do just what I’m doing now, to publish one’s solitary thoughts about the future of the party. Where words in ever greater numbers flow so quickly all around us, it is possible to imagine the Labour Party’s problem can be fixed simply by tweaking our language. We forget it’s what we do not just what we say which matters.

Too often, that language has been dominated by abstract nouns, by words describing something you can’t see, feel or touch and which is often impossible to pin down. The politics of Labour’s last decade has been saturated by them. Here a few: ‘Choice’, ‘equality’, ‘delivery’, and most of all at the moment ‘aspiration’. In the great Blair – Brown battles, these kinds of words marked membership of one of the fighting factions, ‘choice’ meaning you were a Blairite for example. The growth of their use occurred as war needed to be waged and followers mobilised with language that, to the outside world, looked innocuous. Speeches and pamphlets were written in a kind of internal code that made sense to politicians, but whose critical intent could be disavowed. The point was precisely that the public didn’t understand what was really being said.

These kinds of games stopped under Ed Miliband. But Labour’s leaders couldn’t give up the code-writing habit. In place of Blairite mantras we had phrases like ‘the squeezed middle’, ‘predistribution’ and ‘one nation’, all utterly inoffensive terms, which no one could disagree with, but which were supposed to signal a clear and distinctive political direction. Of course to anyone outside the political bubble they just seemed vague and platitudinous.

And I shouldn’t exculpate my wing of the party from the criticism. Those of us with broad sympathies for what used to be called blue Labour, who think the central bureaucracy has too much power and believe the revival of the party lies with community organising (i.e. getting out there and doing stuff) not just getting out the vote have our own pet phrases, which mean little to most people. What exactly does a politics based on ‘reciprocity’ or which is ‘relational’ mean? I have a good idea, but if I need to explain it I should be using different words to start with. If my point is we should spend more time getting to know each other better, why don’t I just say that?

The problem with abstract nouns is precisely that they are abstract – they refer to nothing in particular. They allow arguments to be made at a grand level of generality, without the need to make commitments about particular actions. Each of the abstract nouns I’ve mentioned can be interpreted in almost an infinite variety of ways. ‘Equality’ for example, can be used to support everything from the nationalisation of the top 100 firms to child tax credits. And who isn’t ‘aspirational’? The use of these terms is a sign that politics has lost any real understanding of what political action is. To put it very bluntly, politicians talk in such abstract terms when they have no real idea what to do.

Our best leaders – and there are some of them out there – spurn the abstract for the concrete, and talk about doing real things with real people. The only way Labour can regain the trust of people in Britain is if we, as a movement, from grassroots activists to the leadership, do the same. So, join me in trying to cut abstract nouns out of our political language, and start talking about the real world. The leadership contest would be a place to start.

* And yes, ‘power’ is an abstract noun, and ‘redistributing power’ a vague idea. We need better ways to talk about it.