Keir Starmer has been completely clear and consistent. The prime minister is so determined that we should all know, that he gave a whole speech last week making everything even clearer than it was already.
Starmer had already set out his priorities. There were three foundations, five missions, six “first steps” and seven pillars. To that mix, he has added six milestones, which government spokespeople insist aren’t any deviation or relaunch from any of the previously announced goals, but which do seem to have replaced the first steps, probably.
It’s not entirely clear why Starmer felt the need to give a heavily trailed and hyped speech that was inevitably billed as a relaunch if his team were also going to brief that it wasn’t a relaunch.
But if the aim of the speech was to galvanise the civil service, which he accused of being too comfortable sitting in the “tepid bath of managed decline” to notice what is important and what’s not, it seems likely to fail. When journalists noticed none of the milestones mentioned immigration, for example, and asked whether that meant it wasn’t a priority, they were told that “border security” is still one of the government’s three foundations – even if it doesn’t connect to any of the milestones and barely any of the missions.
Perhaps No 10 is as confused about all of this as the rest of us. Or perhaps there’s a very clear and coherent plan that’s just being horribly communicated. The problem is that there’s really no way for any of us to know. Even where the government seem to have changed their targets, they issue carefully worded statements saying they haven’t.
Reading a Labour press statement feels like reading a genie’s riddle while hungover. Everything needs parsing in three different ways to check what it might actually mean. The government has “no plans” for additional tax rises. The government stuck to its pledge not to increase national insurance for working people, because it increased it for their employers instead. The list goes on.
At its best, this stuff is too clever by half: nothing makes a government look more dishonest than forcing ministers and spokespeople to constantly parse their words carefully to avoid telling a direct lie. This doesn’t result in the public rewarding those concerned for not actually telling whoppers live on air, it results in them correctly disregarding everything that gets said as being devoid of meaning or value.
That’s this stuff at its best. More often, No 10 and the government just issue statements that are unreadable sludge. The following is an extract from the official read-out from cabinet last week. Try reading it out loud:
“The prime minister then turned to the Plan for Change, which will be published on Thursday, and reflects the determination of this Government to deliver on the priorities of working people. He said the Plan for Change would focus Government delivery on a clear set of priorities and reflect this Government’s intention to do things differently, working with partners in business and communities to deliver on the public’s priorities.”
If you tried to say this aloud, you will realise it’s pretty much impossible. The human mouth cannot form sentences this dense and incomprehensible.
No sane human being has ever spoken anything like this: it’s meaningless word salad, and badly written to boot. It’s rambling, repetitive and contains no value. This is a deliberate statement to the media: what does its author want the journalist to write? What is a voting member of the public supposed to take home from it?
There is nothing special about that particular paragraph either – it’s just the one I happened to have handy when I wrote this piece. The government endlessly issues statements that barely resemble the English language, using a vernacular that is alien to absolutely everyone. No one speaks like this, no one writes like this, and no one wants to read this.
This isn’t a problem unique to Keir Starmer or even to Labour – government statements have been horrendously written for decades. But it’s taken less than six months for Starmer and all of his ministers to speak even more fluent officialese than their predecessors.
The distant, dishonest and clinical language of government only expands the gulf between it and the people. It’s not relatable. Because people get so tired of hearing this babble, anyone who doesn’t speak it comes across as refreshing, and even honest.
People including those who vote for them are well aware that Nigel Farage and Donald Trump tell lies. But at least they talk like human beings, and at least they sound as if they’re saying what they think, instead of parroting bullet points from a briefing memo and wasting five minutes of airtime finding creative ways not to answer a question.
Imagine how much easier Labour might have found the week after its budget if it had just decided to admit that hiking national insurance would probably look to a lot of people like a break of its pre-election promise.
They could have insisted they meant taxes paid directly by workers when they made the pledge, but accepted that wasn’t very clear and they understood some voters might think the promise was broken, but they couldn’t find a better way to clear the financial mess left behind. Does that not sound more honest?
Similarly, Starmer could say that once they were in government and had access to all the data that they were denied when in opposition, they decided to adjust their targets so they were realistic and desirable. They’d learned more about the problems, and had decided that the right solutions were a bit different to what they had thought. The public are perfectly capable of being spoken to in this way. Most of us would find it refreshing.
Starmer’s language problem is not him alone. It seems to be shared by mainstream incumbent parties across the world, which seem incapable of grasping the very simple fix: politicians who are known for speaking simply, plainly and off the cuff get known for “gaffes” but are rarely brought down by them.
It is impossible to “gotcha” a minister who admits a mistake. People like hearing someone say they were wrong, or they changed their mind.
Starmer’s team should try this: pretend voters are people you know, in the room with you right now, and talk to them like that. If you wouldn’t say it yourself, don’t write it down.
It might work miracles.
Or as they would put it, the different approach to the execution of interlocutory functions might be expected to deliver positive synergies in the delivery of the government’s strategic plan for its communications functions.
