George Orwell may be known as a man of the Left, but he would have had a field day with Keir Starmer. As David McGrogan noted here recently, he would have undoubtedly identified sniffy Starmer as a “prig”. And he would have excoriated the man from the pebble-dash semi for his naked contempt for the proles. Not only his attempts to lock as many of them up as possible, but also his joyless crusade against fags and booze – their habitual consolations.
Perhaps most of all, though, he would have skewered our great leader for his political rhetoric. Many look at today’s society of surveillance and censorship and find Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four disturbingly prescient. But Orwell’s great essay, Politics and the English Language, is no less relevant. Some of the fashionable idioms may have changed, but the “gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else” that he identified as one of the worst features of modern political prose remains quite the same. As do politicians’ unfailing attempts to “give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”.
Below is a chunk of special relevance to our platitudinous PM:
By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash – as in "
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Orwell was a remarkable author, and it isn’t that common to find people who understand visually. Roger Penrose is one. It is called ‘having a sense of proportionality’. It is really the realisation of one’s sentience, and while the sentience may be ubiquitous, the realisation is not. It is called “thinking visually” but that is a misnomer, since thinking is a sequential process.
If Starmer is ‘at the helm’ , the ship may founder ?
If Starmer had been a proper barrister, one who argues in court, his failings would have been exposed long ago.
This article is priceless, or it would be funny if it wasn’t true.
An excellent and enjoyable dissection and thank you for listening to this so I didn’t have to.
It’s pretty simple really, the man(if he identifys as that that these days) is a puppet, and as such doesn’t need to think, Bliar and the WEF are pulling the strings, and so no doubt he can put out any old waffle put in front of him
Indeed Starmer is not really thinking. And why does he trot out the tropes of ideologies … ? Because he, like so many, many of his peers is hypnotised by abstractions: This is how it works: there is a Bug in our Thinking https://www.hughwillbourn.com/book
His speeches will have been written by a midwife, 30 something, with pretensions of influence and an over developed sense that they are really clever and intelligent. Clearly our society is failing. The rise of the low intelligence people to positions that would have once only been populated by real intellects, is saddening . Maybe eugenecists are right
Hope, if there is any hope, lies with
the white working classes
Is there such a thing any longer?
It is entertaining to read of Starmer’s witterings, I suppose. And probably useful for the historical record.
But I just have a sinking feeling that the UK has already fallen too far down the black hole of Communism.
I agree with Mark Steyn when he says it will be hard to vote our way out. So it does not matter one bit what Starmer/Corbyn/Johnson/Cameron/Lineker etc says. The course is set, the engines are running on all eight cylinders. The cliff edge beckons. Or is it in the rear view mirror?
The only things we know about Two-Tier are that he hates The People and he lies about his Dad: he owned a Toolmaking Company. Oh, and he is completely and utterly incapable of delivering a sentence.
I don’t want to rip my teeth out, I want to rip his teeth out.
A further point, the witterings of Kneel reveal him to be inordinately THICK. Without Bliar feeding him lines this treasonous Next Tuesday would be revealed as a complete and utter TOOL.
😀
Well I literally cannot think of a time when a previous Prime Minister referred to the leader of the opposition as ”Prime Minister”, not just once but multiple times. He’s nowt but a WEFminster, tooltastic sock-puppet in any case.
Not surprisingly I am in complete agreement Mogs.
I won’t live long enough to hear a politician say “we will do our best to run the essential services the state looks after as efficiently as possible, enforce the law and protect our borders, and other than that we will stay out of your lives”. I don’t want flowery words or fancy visions. I neither want nor need a “leader”.
According to Wikipedia:
I don’t believe we have had any political party like that for more than 100 years. The original Conservatives came the closest, but have now fallen by the wayside. Reform? Maybe, we shall see. Labour? The very antithesis of classical liberalism – everything must be controlled.
Indeed
I fear very few people come close to subscribing to this philosophy
Seconded 👍
Didn’t Starmer come up with the metaphor of not wanting to stamp on your face quite as much (or something)?
Interesting article but I think the writer, Laurie Wastell, is being a bit too pedantic. For example:
If he’s referring to the Government, he should be saying “it” – there’s only one Government.’
I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with referring to the government as “they”, in exactly the same way as there is nothing wrong with saying, for example, “Crystal Palace have signed Wolfsburg centre-back Maxence Lacroix in a deal worth up to £18m”, rather than “has signed”, even though it was just one football club that signed the player last month.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/crrlxyl2k7qo
Is Sir K sure that Britain isn’t in one of those fibonacci spirals? The mathematical miracle that orders sea shells and other parts of nature.
As for populism, Sir K needn’t worry about that. Neither he nor any other of the Centrists will ever be popular.
I think the main point of Orwell’s essay is that such language is deceitful. And that’s part of the contempt that all of Starmer’s ilk have for us all.
How big a step is it from the banality of speech to the banality of evil? Yes, I’ve overloaded on the word ‘banality’ but if you cannot speak in a clear and straightforward manner then the platitudes and clichés can be bent to any end, whether that end is worthy or not. The bromides of Starmer’s speech soften the opposition to his ideas, and in no time at all handing out disproportionate prison sentences for hurty words slides by.
It may be a demonstration of rhetoric but rhetoric is about persuasion, not truth or fact. Or rather lying (to himself and us) by insincere or vague talk.
So we’ve fallen from when there were riots in 2011? How is that falling? From one bad thing to … um .. a bad thing.
Excellent dissection of Kneel’s recent ramblings.
I completely agree that it displays a lack of thought, (or perhaps the absence of the ability to think). As many of us know, ‘thinking is hard, judging is easy’, which is why most people prefer the latter.
Everything he says is (a) propaganda or (b) nonsense. But most of the time it’s both.
Agree, but the real problem
is that he acts as a President..
A few years ago I came up with the phrase “the fickle finger of the invisible hand pokes you in the eye” as a joke for economists. It seems a more consistent metaphor than those cited in this article
Now just compare kneel Stalinmer to Javier Gerardo Milei , ones full of Bullpoo and the other talks and acts common sense, which do you prefer? and how on earth does Stalinmer not know this?
To be fair, Starmer can’t even say with conviction who possesses as cervix and who the penises belong to, and that’s when he’s not forgetting multiple times in one sitting that he is in fact the PM, so as far as speeches go he’s not exactly up there with the quality orators is he? Plus, I find his voice irritating. It’s not as bad as Miliband’s, whose strange voice matches his strange face and is basically Frank Sidebottom without the paper mache comedy head and a different regional accent. You get the picture 😂 Anyways, there’s a saucer of milk with my name on it…🐈⬛🥛
🤣🤣