Let us proactively invest in some twaddle

As we have a brand new, fresh from the political hothouse Prime Minister and a proactive new wave of government decision-makers, we should look to the future and begin this fine Tuesday morning with some aspirational twaddle.

Preparing for the next wave of decision-makers

Across organisations, a generational shift is already under way. Generation Z, those born from the late 1990s onwards, are entering the workforce in growing numbers and bring with them distinct expectations, values and a redefinition of what leadership looks like.

By 2030, Gen Z and millennials will account for nearly 75% of the global workforce. Ambition has not diminished, it has evolved. As noted by Forbes, only a small proportion see leadership as an immediate goal, while a much larger cohort still aspires to senior roles over time, provided these roles align with wellbeing and sustainable workloads.

Research suggests that organisations that proactively invest in this next generation of leaders are already seeing benefits in greater adaptability, more inclusive cultures, and stronger alignment with purpose-driven work, as research links inclusive leadership and development investment to improved organisational adaptability, innovation, and employee engagement. The message is clear - preparing Gen Z for leadership is not a future consideration, it is an immediate strategic priority.

By gum this is horribly uninspiring - he doesn't know what to do next

 

Governing is hard

Reeves warns Burnham ‘governing is hard’ and says he must have a plan

Rachel Reeves has warned Andy Burnham he needs to have a proper plan for government when he enters Downing Street in just over a week’s time.

In what is likely to be her last interview as chancellor, she appeared to concede her hopes of staying in the role were over and told the PM-in-waiting “governing is hard in Britain”.

During an appearance on the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg programme, she said: “It is important that when Andy walks through that door, that he has a worked-through plan, because governing is hard in Britain, and lots of lots of challenges and shocks will come his way.

“What is really important is that him and his team are really clear about what they want to achieve. As those shocks come along, he needs to stay laser-focused on those things that have always motivated him, have always driven him, and are the reason why he wants to lead our great country.”

It's good that "laser-focused" is in there, we wouldn't want to lose that in the new regime. Maybe it  could be part of Burnham's plan, along with a scattering of "turbocharged" and "good for Britain" and even "five point plan".

The language is something to look forward to as Mr Burnham finds out that governing is indeed hard. The carefully casual attire may not be enough for someone who seems to be shallow, politically unimaginative and weak on detail.

But possibly laser-focused.

Cheaper Screens

Good news for cheaper OLEDs: China's huge screen factory is finally rolling at full speed

• BOE has started mass production at its huge new factory in China
• It's cranking out OLED panels for use in monitors, laptops and other devices
• These OLEDs will be more affordable, and provide competition to drive down pricing with the dominant players, LG and Samsung

In a move that's set to usher in more affordable OLED monitors and laptops, BOE has officially flicked the switch to crank the production lines into action for its Generation 8.6 panels.

The Elec reports that mass production of Generation 8.6 OLEDs began this week at BOE over in China, with the manufacturer holding an event in Chengdu to celebrate the milestone.

Apart from the technical interest and a further indication that China is doing things that Europe can't, perhaps there is another hint that the world may still be moving away from the written word.

There are two videos and a picture embedded in the above article and the previous blog post to this one was a parody video which said things in a way that the written word never could.

Major politicians may emit spoken words that make little or no sense, but in doing so they may also have their faces transmitted to millions of screens. The words are heard, the screens are seen. Politically, which matters more?

 

Drowning in communities

Henry Clifford has a very useful Centre Write piece on the common but misleading political use of the word 'community.' Not an unfamiliar source of mendacity, but the whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder that it is a very common one.

Most “communities” are empty categories

We are drowning in communities. Gay community, Muslim community, international community, business community.

Yet, we feel increasingly isolated. Forty-four percent of Britons say they sometimes feel like “strangers in their own country,” and 50% feel “disconnected from society around them.” Indeed, these “communities” seem to be sources of opposition and division rather than connection. After losing the Gorton and Denton by-election, Matt Goodwin took to X to proclaim, “We are losing our country” to a “dangerous Muslim sectarianism.” Battles over the place of the “trans community” within society have likewise become incredibly divisive. While public figures like JK Rowling have faced death threats and boycotts over their views on the topic, trans people themselves have been increasingly suffering too — according to the Home Office, in 2014/15, 607 recorded hate crimes were motivated by trans identity. By 2024/25, that figure had risen to 4,120.

Community ought to be the bedrock of our society, the things which bind us to one another. Why then are individuals isolated and “communities” in conflict?

A large part of the trouble stems from a wrong, and statist, view of what ‘community’ means.

Community, properly conceived, is formed from the concrete connections between individuals — not from shared characteristics. Communities are existing networks, not downstream from categories, but groups of real connections.

Lost for Words

Lost for words! Proof we're losing the art of conversation as Britons using 20 per cent fewer words

They say the art of conversation is dead – and psychologists have found we now speak about 20 per cent fewer words every day than we did two decades ago.

We are losing more than 300 words from our daily conversations every day – equivalent to 120,000 words a year, a study reveals.

The biggest decline is among Gen Z, with major implications for the loneliness epidemic and how we communicate in the future, especially with the rise of AI.

Baffling - perhaps there are reasons why we don't listen to words as much we used to - 

 

The Litmus Duo

Meta and YouTube found liable in landmark social media trial

The trial is the first in a series of first-of-its-kind cases against Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snap that are set to follow in the US.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have said "the floodgates are open" for more legal cases against tech giants after Google and Meta were found liable for a woman's social media addiction in a landmark lawsuit...

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex said "accountability has finally arrived" and declared: "The question is no longer whether social media must change - it's when, and how fast."

In a statement, Harry and Meghan hailed the "landmark" court verdict as a victory "for families, advocates, and young people everywhere - and a powerful message that justice has caught up to Big Tech".


Ah - that's the word we are looking for - justice. If Meghan and Harry tell us an issue is about justice then it isn't likely to be about justice, but about them. It always is - they are a kind of language litmus test and a pretty reliable one. 

This 'justice' is likely to reflect an underlying and powerful political desire to give compliant mainstream media a boost against digital media where sniggering about such people as Meghan and Harry can be part of the fun. 

Some people do seem to be addicted to their mobile phones though. 

Only an hour ago I saw a young woman park her car then wander across the road, head down, fiddling with her phone. She probably wasn't reading a sycophantic account of the latest efforts of Meghan and Harry to grab some attention though.

It's complex and there are language games in play, such as framing the use of digital media as an issue  of 'personal responsibility' or 'manipulation' or 'addiction' or whatever.  

Using the word 'justice' is part of another language game of course, but fortunately Meghan and Harry have signposted that one for us.

But no crackdown on tax gouging

Reeves reveals plan to protect public from unfair Iran war price hikes

A crackdown on companies profiteering from the Iran war at the expense of millions of Brits is among cost-of-living plans announced by Rachel Reeves today.

The Chancellor vowed that the Government would guard against unfair price rises amid fears over surging oil and fuel costs sparked by Donald Trump’s conflict in the Middle East.

She told MPs on Tuesday that she was investigating cuts to tariffs on food in a bid to keep prices low and would be meeting with supermarket and banking bosses this week to “discuss how they can further support their customers”.

The Government will “monitor the cost of household essentials for both price rises and disruption” and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will have the power to "crack down on price gouging", the Chancellor said.


By gum this is poor stuff, as if senior politicians still hope certain words and phrases might trigger something more than indifference. Twaddle words such as protect, unfair, crackdown, support, monitor, gouging and so on. 

Among voters, only blockheads are likely to pay attention and even Labour doesn't seem to have enough of them to stave off electoral disaster. 

Presumably it's the best they can do, but where do they go from such a low and hopelessly unconvincing baseline? Nowhere we'll enjoy probably.

Boutique poverty measures

Ryan Bourne has a topical CAPX piece on invented forms of poverty. Interesting and worth reading as another example of campaigners shifting goalposts and inventing new bits of language to obscure the shift and also obscure pragmatic solutions which don't require campaigners. 

Invented bits of language are also used to obscure the totalitarian narrative in the political background, but we already knew that.


Why are the Greens campaigning against invented forms of poverty?

• Green MP Hannah Spencer is backing a campaign to end 'furniture poverty'
• Households do not receive neat little envelopes marked ‘for beds’
• Slicing poverty into ever more theatrical subcategories won't help struggling families

Amid some brief research about the new MP for Gorton and Denton, Hannah Spencer, I came across her campaign against a boutique poverty measure I hadn’t previously been aware of: ‘furniture poverty’...

This methodology is now standard fare among anti-poverty charities. You take the old workhouse noun ‘poverty’, bolt a spending category in front of it, and declare a new affliction which society (read: taxpayers through government) must deal with. We’ve seen ‘food poverty’, ‘fuel poverty’, and now ‘furniture poverty’. But why stop there? One could imagine ‘car poverty’, ‘clothes poverty’ and ‘cutlery poverty’ if we want to explore a new first letter. Or what about sub-components of furniture? Perhaps ‘futon poverty’, ‘ottoman insecurity’ or ‘coffee-table precarity’.

When Language Fails

 

It’s deliberate

Suppose we come up with 10 words to describe UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. This could be a selection of 10 words from any number, which might include –

Mendacious
Evasive
Wooden
Earnest
And many, many more

Yet if we try to apply 10 words to Starmer and assuming we choose a range of words with somewhat different meanings, then those words are not likely to summarised his political persona in a simple phrase or a single sentence, tempting though the attempt may be.

In other words we cannot sum up Starmer the politician in a way which isn’t diffuse and subject to elaboration. With elaboration it would become longer and eventually end up as a long essay, or after a long grind of unaccountable enthusiasm it could end up as a book.

This summary problem casts a weird fog over political discourse where even the terminology is ambiguous and inexact, where brief summaries never work and other aspects are always available to render political discourse forever unsatisfactory.

It’s deliberate, senior politicians are brokers, but not our brokers.

Lib Dems - not a serious political party

Matthew Bowles has an interesting CAPX take on the Lib Dems. It is familiar in that we know we shouldn't take Lib Dems seriously, but also a worthwhile reminder that the Lib Dem smoke and mirrors approach to reform is standard across the UK political arena.

   

The Liberal Democrats don’t understand growth

• The Lib Dems' hare-brained scheme to abolish the Treasury is style over substance
• Britain has an abundance of pro-growth rhetoric, but an extreme shortage of pro-growth policies
• If their last manifesto is anything to go by, the Liberal Democrats are determined to throttle growth

The Liberal Democrats have announced that they want to abolish the Treasury and replace it with a new ‘Department for Growth’, supported by a separate department for public spending. On the face of it, this sounds radical, even refreshing. Britain’s economy has stagnated for over a decade, productivity has broadly flatlined (especially in the public sector) and living standards have barely recovered since the 2007/08 financial crisis. If the Treasury really is part of the problem, why not scrap it?

But as with so many Lib Dem policy announcements, the ambition dissolves on contact with detail. Strip away the rhetoric and the proposal looks less like a serious growth strategy and more like a rebranding exercise, which leaves the party’s underlying policy instincts firmly intact. Simply having a department for something doesn’t make it so.

The whole piece is well worth reading because so many political proposals are merely rebranding wheezes like this one, a standard way to evade reform rather than (clutch those pearls!) actually carry it out. 


The truth is that Britain does not suffer from a lack of growth rhetoric, but from an excess of anti-growth policies. High marginal tax rates, a labyrinthine planning system and endless red tape have combined to suppress economic dynamism for years. Addressing that would require political choices that governing parties of all stripes have shied away from in recent years.

None of this precludes reforming the Treasury. But reform must follow strategy, not substitute for it. Otherwise, the overarching risk is that Britain ends up yet again with the same policies, and the same stagnation, just administered by a shinier department with a more fashionable name.

Weird Little Worlds

There is something desperately odd about Sir Keir Starmer’s version of political discourse. Everything he says seems to be out of sync with reality, limited to a weird little world of inadequate words and phrases, conveying nothing of substance or interest.

What did Starmer say yesterday, last week, last year? Who cares? Phrases emitted and forgotten, but many other politicians are equally limited. It all makes for a curiously remote and disconnected political arena, a graveyard of deceit, falsehood and implausible expectations .

Has the traditional reliance on political slogans, soundbites and cliché become obsolete? Possibly - perhaps the internet and AI have destroyed it, because many senior UK politicians obviously struggle with their attempts to persuade.

Whatever Starmer and his senior colleagues say within their curiously restricted world of political discourse, voters merely have to browse online for –

Better Ideas

Better Sources

Better opinions

Better questions

Better Explanations

Not all voters bother of course, weird little worlds seem to suit them.

Drivelism

The drivelisation of our culture is an interesting aspect but too complex for a single blog post, especially when we take in drivelist politics, drivelist bureaucracy and the general trend of global drivelism.

Suppose we give it a go though and take a moment to reflect on the possibility that the BBC could more accurately have been named BDC, the British Drivelcasting Corporation. Similarly in 1955, ITV could have been IDV, Independent Drivelvision.

So many words and phrases have drivelised, thus contributing to the political rise of Drivelism and Drivelist ideas and policies. We now have drivelised words and terms such as democracy, voting, racist, human rights, welfare, economy, xenophobia, far-right, left-wing, socialism, socialist, liberal, green, environmentalist, carbon, fairness, equality, carbon, climate, sustainable, fascist, extreme, expert, science, clean, recycle, responsible, gender, catastrophic, holistic, community, pledge, promise, bombshell, jaw-dropping, risk, survey, study, unprecedented, fight, critical, literally and many more.

We also have drivelised words such as ‘decimate’, ‘fact’ and ‘proof’ where historically interesting or useful meanings have been drivelised into vague and almost worthless possibilities.

Or we have two common related phrases which are not strictly drivelised because they seem to have evolved within Drivelism for strictly Drivelist purposes. These are the phrases ‘the science says’ and ‘science says’.

It’s literally unprecedented.

Multi-hazard event

Met Office warns of 'multi-hazard' weather event this week as Storm Goretti named

Weather forecasters have issued a warning about a 'multi-hazard' event hitting the UK this week. And a new storm has also been named.

The Met Office says the current cold snap will continue before a deep area of low pressure threatens to bring further snow, strong winds and heavy rain to southern parts of the UK from Thursday night. Meteo France has named the low Storm Goretti, as the worst of the wind impacts are expected to be felt across northern France.


Infantilising everything, even the weather, isn't likely to end well. Pseudo-technical language which isn't technical and barely counts as language because it's a language-game fronting an agenda, that doesn't help either.

Humpty Dumpty goes to court

French court convicts TotalEnergies over misleading climate claims

The Paris court found that TotalEnergies had made environmental claims that “misled” consumers into believing that it could achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 while increasing oil and gas production.

The court, however, dismissed complaints over TotalEnergies linked to its fossil gas and biofuels.

Activists had argued that they had deceptively promoted gas and biofuels as clean energy.


“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.”

Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

Unanswered questions

Pressure on Starmer to address ‘unanswered questions’ over China spy case controversy

Sir Keir Starmer is under fresh pressure to address “unanswered questions” over the China spy case controversy as the government was accused of being complicit in a “cover up” over the saga.

On the day MPs return to Westminster from conference recess, Kemi Badenoch has written to the prime minister calling for “clarity and honesty” and asking him to make a statement in Parliament over the collapse of a case against two men accused of spying for Beijing.

The intervention came as former security minister Tom Tugendhat described the collapse of the case as “absolutely abhorrent” and claimed the government is “willing to cover up the actions of a hostile state”.


Yes, but not answering questions is a key part of the political armoury as Tugendhat knows, without it they would have to answer questions - obviously. 

In this case it could involve some extremely edgy questions about official attitudes towards the Chinese government which could become very interesting indeed, so their inflexible rule is - 

Don't answer the question - talk about something you want to talk about.

Everyone does it, but the way politicians do it all the time is abhorrent*.

* I decided to copy Tom Tugendhat and sneak in the word 'abhorrent'. It's one of those words which seems to have emerged from relative obscurity about fifteen years ago. This episode is worse than abhorrent though, Tugendhat knows that too.

A swathe of bold policies

Take that, Nigel! Kemi Badenoch has just proved why Reform don't stand a chance

Kemi Badenoch and her Conservative colleagues have announced a swathe of bold policies that might at last start to win over wavering voters. Over the past year, Kemi's critics have complained that she's been too slow to set out big ideas - and let Nigel Farage make all the running. But she's making up for it, at the Tory party conference in Manchester.

We've seen pledges to take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights, stop the welfare bill rising even further and cut household energy bills, giving some much-needed relief to people still struggling with the cost of living. And the conference has barely begun. In the days to come, we can expect big announcements on cutting crime, making sure our courts really do punish criminals and more.

A plug for the Tories of course. Any ambitious political leader may announce a swathe of new policies, just as anyone may play language games.  

Yet there is an obvious wider problem with political promises which aren't worth anything, the voting field becomes significantly skewed by too many useful idiots. We saw that when Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, but it is far from being a modern problem.

For example, it could be said with some justification that the current Labour government was put there by useful idiots. In which case, anyone paying attention must have at least some doubts about the value of elections and the point of voting.

Does voting for the least damaging option work? It is not obvious that it does, all established political parties chase the useful idiot vote with worthless slogans, clichés and promises. If it continues to work as it has in the past, what else are they going to do?

What is missing is that subtle recognition of a leader who intends to deliver, knows how to do it and is backed by enough supporters to make it work. If this isn't there, then the voting booth can't deliver it.

The digital language police

Rhys Laverty has an entertaining Critic piece on how WhatsApp changed the word “turkey” to “Türkiye” when he meant the bird and not the country. 


Resist the language police!

Why are my words being censored by WhatsApp?

Given my severe phobia of birds, and farm birds in particular, I am the last person who should be writing about turkeys. But hey ho, cometh the hour and all that.

This week, whilst typing on WhatsApp Web on my laptop, rattling off what I though was a mildly amusing joke about Jamie Oliver’s war on turkey twizzlers some years ago, I found myself censored — yes, dear reader, censored I tell you. Before my very eyes, the word “turkey” was rendered “Türkiye”. I hadn’t even written it with a capital letter; I was mid-sentence. Cue some furious backspacing and de-umlautification.

A familiar trend but the piece is well worth reading as a reminder of what is a political and social trend, not merely a static feature of digital 'assistance'.

If you notice any of this, if you mispronounce a name, or if you fail to observe the quietly revised spelling of anointed words, even in the sanctum sanctorum of your own mind, you are exposed to both the world and yourself as Entirely The Wrong Sort. You are not Respectable. You have missed the latest episode of The News Agents. Gary Lineker is very disappointed in you. The interference of WhatsApp is particularly egregious because it intrudes upon my private communications. It is a Foucaldian policing of private desire, a life submitted to the progressive digital panopticon. It is multiculturalism working as intended.

Spot the Eggcorn

Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 7 is put through the ringer as a teardown shows its difficulties

I'd have called 'ringer' a malapropism in this context, but apparently it might be better described as an eggcorn. Makes sense, presumably only people of a certain age would be familiar with a wringer.

From Wikipedia -

Eggcorn

An eggcorn is the alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements,[1] creating a new phrase that is plausible when used in the same context.[2] Thus, an eggcorn is an unexpectedly fitting or creative malapropism. Eggcorns often arise as people attempt to make sense of a stock phrase that uses a term unfamiliar to them.