BY JOE NUTT
Centuries before semioticians decided it was exceedingly clever of them, Shakespeare’s fourteen year old protégé, Juliet, argued rather more elegantly than any academic, that the connection between a word and the physical object it represents, is arbitrary. If we all decide tomorrow that the often exquisitely scented, gracefully shaped flower that comes in an endless variety of colours is called a nose, and not a rose, it really doesn’t matter. In spite of endlessly trite and tedious efforts by academics to tell Ferdinand de Saussure what he actually meant when he claimed, The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, onomatopoeia remains the only example of a word which real people think has some kind of integral connection to the physical world they inhabit. Bees really do buzz and wind chimes really do tinkle.
The insidious spread of sociolinguistics across educational institutions, and the cultural chaos it has fuelled, is a topic I’ve frequently written about, and so I thought I’d take a leaf out of these linguistic anarchists’ textbook and ask myself a particularly current question. What words might we now use, to accurately identify our major political parties?
Because it’s quite obvious today that Blair and Campbellson’s attempt to rename the Labour Party Nu Labour has been an abject failure. All it took was Corbyn’s spectacularly brief rise and fall to demonstrate their rebranding had not even been skin deep, even as the sight of all that ugly anti-Semitism on display made decent folks’ skin crawl.
But you would have to be a linguistic eunuch not to think that calling the party Burnham has just usurped, the Labour Party, is a lexical felony worthy of a life sentence. To plunder Blair’s painfully slim legacy volume, I’d suggest we all start referring to Burnham’s bourgeois, Glastonbury tent as the Not the People’s Party, because the idea that they represent working people and not their own peculiarly idiosyncratic hang ups and interests, is risible.
Not to be outdone, the Conservative (and Unionist) Party that Blair’s mini-me Dave inherited, was about as interested in conserving any of the things its core supporters valued, as it was in healing the scars Blair left in every corner of his disunited kingdom. Devolution was already up there as the most flagrant political own goal in British history before Boris quickly demonstrated any back of the net Blair could hit, he could split asunder, by adopting the CCP as his personal, leadership style, role model.
Whilst about 23 million Brits recovered from Covid-19, the Conservative Party never will. The reactive and revealing phrase Uni-party guarantees that, just as two-tier Keir effectively torpedoed its precise target.
But if Boris’s betrayal wasn’t bad enough, Rishi Sunak, a grotesquely inverted mirror image of Corbyn, turned a blind eye and alley to street level anti-Semitism, thereby signalling once and for all (as if any conservative citizen didn’t already know) that his party had no interest in defending either decency, or country. So perhaps we should relabel the Conservative Party The Judas Party.
In all fairness, I can’t complete this little party game without of course giving both the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party the same treatment.
The former is easy, since its leader Ed Davey, has unusually been in post for six years not six months, and has therefore had ample time to do some fantastic groundwork for me. Any party leader who graduated from clown school with a first, as Davey so obviously did, is clearly leader of The Circus Party.
Which leaves a man whose previous antics as an actor and hypnotherapist belong not so much in a circus, as in an asylum. Yet Zack Polanski’s popularity amongst the mildly affluent young, looks more like a barrier, than a pathway to electoral success. So maybe we should all start calling them what they so clearly are, The Adolescents’ Party.
If you stuck with me thus far you are almost certainly shrewd enough to be wondering why I missed out Reform, the one party that actually seems all set to succeed electorally? Well I haven’t. I happen to think that they have actually done a remarkably clever job in naming the party Reform, since that terse imperative alone reverberates powerfully in the heads of voters sick of listening to all the others promise the Earth, before delivering net zero.
The problem Reform have, is embedded in their name, so as one of millions of chronically nauseous voters, I don’t want to let them off the hook. If they don’t deliver what it says on the tin, there won’t be a special place in Hell waiting for them; there will be Pandemonium.
Joe Nutt is the author of several books about the poetry of Donne, Milton and Shakespeare and an essayist for a wide range of magazines.