The issue of language is becoming more and more acrimonious and controversial. Politicians are attacked not so much for their views and policies as for the words they use. And this new policing of language is not confined to politically motivated censors. Even the actual police have become involved in the unfolding cultural conflict over language.
There is little doubt that the language used in public and political life has become debased. Political rhetoric often lacks substance these days. It can be bombastic and evasive. It is rarely about encouraging engagement. Indeed, politicians now use words in such a way that they self-consciously avoid communicating a clear outlook. So, yes, it is legitimate to be concerned about the quality of the language used by politicians, on both sides of the Atlantic.
However, the key motivation behind today’s controversies over political language is not a concern with the quality of the language – it is a desire to limit what may be said in public debate. Recent controversies in the UK illustrate this well. Attacks on the ‘toxic’ or ‘vitriolic’ language used by politicians are often accompanied by a censorious demand that certain words should not be used, and certain ideas should not be expressed.
Last month, former prime minister John Major laid into pro-Brexit members of parliament and current prime minister Boris Johnson for using the language of ‘hate’. Major was very precise in his outline of what words should not be used in public debate. He said that words like ‘saboteur’, ‘traitor’, ‘enemy’, ‘surrender’ and betrayal’, had ‘no place’ in the Conservative Party, in ‘our politics’, or in ‘our society’.
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Numerous opponents of Brexit share Major’s view that certain words should be expunged from the political vocabulary. In particular, they take exception to the term ‘surrender’, which politicians in the Leave camp have used to describe the behaviour and policies of the pro-EU lobby. Remainer MPs claim that using the word ‘surrender’ could incite violence on the streets of the UK.
Throughout September, the campaign against the supposed toxic language of Brexiteers was widely covered in the media. Typically, the denunciation of Brexiteers’ language would be followed by a demand for linguistic policing. Even the police got involved. Senior police officers warned about the effect of using highly charged language to discuss Brexit. Charlie Hall, the chief constable of Hertfordshire Police, who heads Brexit operations planning for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, linked the tone of the political debate with an alleged rise in hate crime. ‘In the past few weeks… we did see a couple of spikes that seemed to coincide with some of the debates that have taken place’, he said.
It is a sign of the times that the intervention of the police in the debate about political language was not viewed as unusual by media commentators. Thankfully, Britain is not a police state, so it is still rare for the police to lecture parliamentarians about the language they use and the ideas they express. And yet no one asked the question, ‘When did the police assume responsibility for telling politicians what they should and should not say?’. Nor was the supposed link between the tone of political debate and hate crime seriously interrogated. Indeed, many in the media treated this new, literal policing of political language as a welcome development.
