Starmer's Greatest Achievement To Date

I

Keir Starmer’s greatest achievement to date is that he invented the phrase “Heineken phrase”.

He did this in an interview following a speech. First, the speech; then, the interview.

In the speech he gave on January 5th 2023 he used a familiar phrase, “Take Back Control”. He said he would turn Take Back Control “from a slogan to a solution” (this is from about 35 minutes in):

It’s not unreasonable for us to recognise the desire of communities to stand on their own feet. It’s what Take Back Control meant. The control people want is control over their lives and their communities. So we will embrace the Take Back Control message, but we’ll turn it from a slogan into a solution, from a catchphrase into change. We’ll spread control out of Westminster: devolve new powers over employment support, transport, energy, climate change, housing, culture, childcare provision, and how councils run their finances, and we’ll give communities a right to request powers that go beyond even that. All this will be in a Take Back Control Bill, a centrepiece of our first King’s Speech. That bill will deliver on the demands for a new Britain, a new approach to politics and democracy, a new approach to growth and our economy. [Applause.]

People are always complaining about political speeches, but apart from the poor word ‘deliver’, this is reasonably fluent and certainly clear, though full of doubleunstuckthinkery. As we saw last month, Starmer is still rather fond of this bad old Brexit phrase. “Take Back Control is a Labour Argument,” he said, at the Labour Party Conference. But back in 2023, some of his supporters were appalled or at least surprised that he had stolen the phrase appointed by Dominic Cummings to be the slogan of Vote Leave. So Starmer went to Sky News to explain himself to Sophy Ridge. He said:

What I said in my speech is something I’ve said actually many, many times. I voted for Remain and I campaigned for Remain and we lost the referendum. But deeper than that, beyond the technical question should we be in the EU or not, I felt that bound up in that referendum was a big question about change. People desperately wanted change. That’s why I think Take Back Control was such a powerful slogan in a way. It was a Heineken phrase, it got inside people. If you can’t make your household budget balance, you don’t think you’ve got control. If you don’t feel that you can send your child to a school that’s excellent in your area because there isn’t a school that’s excellent you don’t have control. If you feel that antisocial behaviour means you can’t go out in your neighbourhood after dark you don’t have control.

Mostly boring, except for the phrase ‘Heineken phrase’. Of course, later we’ll probably find out that his political advisors might have suggested not only the stealing of Take Back Control but also the defence of it as a Heineken phrase. For the moment, however, let us exult in the possibility that Starmer is a man of wit and originated it himself.

II

What does ‘Heineken phrase’ mean? Well, as Starmer intended it, I think it meant, simply, ‘memorable phrase’, where the word ‘memorable’ was replaced by the even more memorable word ‘Heineken’. And ain’t politics now full of memorable phrases.

Get Brexit Done.
Brexit means Brexit.
Strong and Stable.
For the many, not the few.
Flatten the Curve.
Stay home. Save lives.
Hands. Face. Space.
Black Lives Matter.
Take the Knee.
Just Stop Oil.
Net Zero.

In fact our entire world is now a Scrabble board of miscellaneous phrases. Tipping Point. Virtue-Signalling. Echo Chamber. Overton Window. Far Right. Climate Crisis. Proportionate Response. Black Swan Event. Wouldn’t we all like to contribute such a mite to the English language? Shakespeare, or the Earl of Oxford, or his scriptorium, invented words. But it is left to us now, mostly, to invent phrases by the suggestive combination of words, or, the formation of Frankenstein words. Niall Ferguson is quite fond of Frankenstein words: Anglobalisation and Chimerica are his. I wonder if I have ever tried to invent words. I once used ‘interseguate’ and the editor of a book changed it to ‘relate’, a much weaker word (amusingly, after having checked whether such a word existed, and finding that it did not except in my chapter). Here, in the Sceptic I tried out “Bullshit-19” – I thought that might be taken up – and “Nice Totalitarianism”. I seem to remember trying to use ‘thunberg’ as a verb: though I didn’t define it for the public. I suppose the definition would be

            thunberg

            verb

1. make an emotional scene about an impending disaster which is tolerated by the public because of one’s privileged status as a child.

            noun

1. (joc.) the clogging of public discourse achieved by such an emotional scene: by analogy with fatberg.

As usual, excuse the digression.

Why did Starmer say “Heineken” and not merely memorable? Starmer said that the phrase Take Back Control “got inside heads”. A phrase went inside the head and – refreshed the parts that other phrases could not reach.

I hope you notice the allusion.

III

What was the original Heineken phrase? Here, ironies abound. The most famous Heineken phrase was, of course, “Reaches the parts that other beers cannot reach”. It was coined by an advertising copywriter called Terry Lovelock in 1973, and was used by Heineken until the 1990s. I found the information about this in a list of 20 of the best slogans, including appalling bits of doggerel such as: “Beanz means Heinz”, “Just do it”, “Does exactly what it says on the tin”, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité“, “Snap, Crackle, Pop”, etc. Heineken comes in at number 19. Number 20 is Millwall: “No one likes us, we don’t care”.

So Terry Lovelock invented theHeineken phrase, but Keir Starmer invented the phrase “Heineken phrase”. When I first saw “Heineken phrase” I actually got it wrong. I thought he was referring to the Carlsberg phrase, which is, obviously for me, more of a Heineken phrase than the Heineken phrase. Something was in the water, or in the lager, in 1973. For in the same year that Heineken acquired its catchphrase, so Carlsberg acquired its catchphrase, “Probably the best lager in the world“. It was coined by one Tony Bodinetz, also an advertising copywriter. I didn’t know until now that it was Orson Welles who provided the voice for the Carlsberg advertisements, including the Ice Cold in Alex one, where John Mills downs a glass of lager in black-and-white after crossing the North African desert, and says “Worth waiting for”. (Did they have Carlsberg glasses in Alexandria during the Second World War?) As spoken by Welles, who was a talented man, the phrase is deliciously ironic: even down to the way he pronounces “world”.

These phrases, the Heineken phrase and the Carlsberg phrase, conjure up a happy time of “Soft, strong and very, very long” (why didn’t Blair use this?) and also, “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet”, though it was the juxtaposition of mishap, smoke and Bach’s Air on a G String that gave that particular advertisement its glory. Both of them, and the original Heineken and Carlsberg phrases are very far away from the Arbeit macht frei atmospherics of Take Back Control: in fact, Arbeit macht frei is rather genial as compared to Take Back Control, since it is in the indicative, and not the imperative, mood. The Nazis weren’t ordering you to work: they were just suggesting about what happened if one did work. Whereas Dominic Cummings used the imperative mood: “Take!” Just as Klaus Schwab and friends used the imperative mood in “Build Back Better”: “Build!”

Alright, boss – as people used to say, ironically, in Middlesbrough in the 1980s.

IV

A few words about “Take Back Control” and “Build Back Better”.

First, they are imperative.

Second, they are reactionary. This may seem a bit odd to say, but they don’t seem very progressive. Both of them have “back” as the second word. Not ‘forward’. An’t you goin’ for’ard, Keir? Goin’ back’ard, are ye? Perhaps this word, sounding restorative rather than progressive, is designed to appeal to 18th century Tories. But we should be on our guard. This “back” is not Burke’s ‘back’ or Salisbury’s ‘back’. Nay, it is a paradoxical, shapeshifting ‘back’. It is a Back to the Future ‘back’.

Build Back Better is around 20 years old. Wikipedia says it was coined in 2005 in a World Bank document: and then went everywhere. But I asked Google ngram which says it is even older than that, emerging around 2000. It was used by Bill Clinton at the UN in 2005, then by the World Economic Forum in a report of 2011, again in 2016, 2019 and in 2020, after COVID-19, just before Joe Biden announced a Build Back Better Plan as a sort of new New Deal. Finally, it was adopted – rapturous slow applause – by Her Majesty’s Treasury in May 2021 in a report ‘Build Back Better: Our Plan For Growth’. I checked this exciting document, which was presented to Parliament: but it is a repulsive pamphlet full of lesser slogans such as “Levelling Up” and “Net Zero”. For some reason the NHS is not only called “our NHS” as is customary but, astonishingly, by Boris Johnson, in his cheery preface, “our fantastic NHS”, hallowed be its hellish name. Doesn’t this make you ill?

It is human genius and ingenuity that is beating Covid and it is by unlocking that genius and ingenuity across our whole country that we will build back better.

There is Boris, a humorous Aladdin, fumblingly trying to open a lamp with a key, to produce an improbable genie.

Take Back Control, according to Wikipedia again, was apparently coined by Dominic Cummings and first used in February 2016 by Vote Leave. But, again, Google ngram suggests that it is older: a phrase which got going in the 1970s and has risen in our consciousness since, with no obvious acceleration in 2016.

Take Back Control and Build Back Better are very strange counter-revolutionary phrases. The logic of Take Back Control and Build Back Better is that something has gone wrong. Oh, and we can do something about it. And, of course, that we are not doing this for the first time. It is reactionary language used in a disconcertingly stupid, fanciful, hopeful, alarming, potentially totalitarian way.

So, third, these are tricky busybody phrases. Starmer commented in 2023 that he would turn Take Back Control from a slogan into a solution. Solution! Do you need to be reminded, dear readers, that – and, again, I owe this argument to Bertrand de Jouvenel’s book Pure Theory of Politics – politics is about settlements not solutions? This is because politics is gritty: it is sand, not salt, and does not dissolve. In politics, we should never talk of solutions. Anyone who does is making a category error.

But here is Keir Starmer, not a humorous Aladdin, but a plucky Sorcerer’s Apprentice, stirring his political problems in a crucible, adding sulphur and mercury, and hoping that everything will dissolve leaving only gold behind.

Both of these slogans are unironic, but iron fisted, as well as ham fisted, portents of the house that mad geniuses like Dominic Cummings and boring lawyers like Keir Starmer would like to build and take, build and take, build and take…

V

It seems to me that, in stricto sensu, a Heineken phrase, like a Carlsberg phrase, is fundamentally ironic. (Overt overstatement amounting to understatement.) It tells us something that is not true: but thinkable, and a bit mischievous, and amusing when asserted. “This is not true, but isn’t it amusing to suppose that it is true, and don’t want you want to drink a drink that is associated with this delicious, relaxed sensibility?”

And that, emphatically, is not the logic of Starmer’s Heineken phrase. He says, after all, that his Heineken phrase is a “Labour argument”. Well! Labour arguments are leaden, wooden, woolly, worthy, earnest and dull. Not much Heineken there. (At least, I don’t know. I haven’t drunk it for a while.) Perhaps Starmer should have said it was a Rubber Glove Iron Fist phrase: hygienic and useful, good for ‘service’, but also relentless and determined. Tastes of soap, hurts the jaw.

“Probably the best lager in the world” is subtle: i.e., a joke, i.e., not the best lager in the world, objectively, but because of this advertisement, and its wit, subjectively. No blonde tarts here: at Carlsberg we associate ourselves with words. Heineken too: refreshing the parts other beers cannot reach, namely, the parts that like playing with words. But these phrases are memorable without being decisive. Dominic Cummings did not coin the phrase Probably Take Back Control. Klaus Schwab has never been caught saying Build Back Better the bits that other globalist institutions cannot reach. Obama did not say “No. We. Can’t.” with a twinkle in his eye.

If only these phrases had been Heineken phrases. A Heineken phrase, in Starmer’s mind, is a memorable phrase, a great bit of advertising: it makes people think and hence drink, or, in his case, he hopes, do what he wants – accept kontrol. Yes. But a Heineken phrase is also something which is not true, and which only works because it is ironic.

Here’s to more Heineken phrases in politics!

Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.