Monday 25 October 2010

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946.

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Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

And so begins this classic essay by George Orwell. Recently I've read some truly awful pieces of prose, especially about politics, which I have always noticed is cursed with being more densely infested by cliche than almost any other area of writing. There is nothing I could say about this that has not already been said better in this essay by George Orwell. It is piercingly intelligent, accurate and really funny. It is all about some necessary features for writing well and clearly, but should be of interest not only to anyone who writes but also to anyone who wants to think clearly in words (and that should be everybody). It also about how language is particularly abused when dealing with politics. It challenges some of our pre-conceptions about what makes good and clear writing and is not too long either. 

It is especially interesting if you have read 1984, Orwell's masterpiece, with its sections on Newspeak, because much of what George Orwell puts into Newspeak in 1984, he discusses in this essay. This is an important feature of Orwell's writing often not understood. He was mainly a journalist and campaigner, using his writing as a weapon, and only secondarily a writer of fiction. Features of his work always correlate with features of reality. And whereas Animal Farm was a parable of recent history, 1984 was a piece of prophecy, in the true sense of the word.  The prophets in the Bible did not just, or even mainly, tell what was going to happen in the future, but what would happen IF certain things continued to occur, often for the purpose of stopping them happening. Jonah prophesied Nineveh would be destroyed if the people did not repent. But he was so effective they did repent, and he then felt pretty stupid when they were then not destroyed.

George Orwell, in 1948, prophesied in 1984 what could happen if the worst trends he saw around him came to dominate society. It is a worst possible outcome but not a fantasy, in the sense that all the things he put in that book, and feared for our world, were things that he saw actually occurring or developing in the world, and had fought, spoken and written against his whole adult life. And many of those relating to the abuse of language he argues against in this essay, using real world examples. It's a fascinating bridge between the world presented in 1984 and the real world Orwell fought with in 1948.

It is also interesting because it argues a middle path between two views often subconsciously accepted in our intellectual society. Firstly, that language is something we have complete control over, an entirely neutral tool we may shape as we wish. And secondly, in the opposite direction, that the language we use defines and forces our thoughts and ideas, like a straitjacket we can't reach out of. The truth is, as almost always, somewhere in between. Like with any tool what we can do is shaped by what we have at our disposal. The language and vocabulary we have does exert pressure on our vision of the world and ourselves, subtly, and often totally outside our awareness. But, we are not slaves of our language.  We can make new words, new phrases, to match new ideas and ways of thinking, or just use different words and thoughts from the stock we already have, to change and express ourselves differently. But this requires conscious effort, to use our imagination and our knowledge to encourage ourselves in different directions. Enough of me though, I give you the words of Orwell himself, and they are well worth the read.


Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that i can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder .

Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa)

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)

4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream -- as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English." When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers.* The jargon peculiar to
                                                                                                                                                                                                            
*An interesting illustration of this is the way in which English flower names were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, Snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.
                                                                                                                                                                                          
Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in
                                                                                                                                                                      
† Example: Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness . . .Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bittersweet of resignation." (Poetry Quarterly)
                                                                                                                                                                                           
the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations -- race, battle, bread -- dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing -- no one capable of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena" -- would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry -- when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech -- it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. 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 The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip -- alien for akin -- making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another -- but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" to write -- feels, presumably, that he has something new to say -- and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence*, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases
                                                                                                                                                                     
*One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.
                                                                                                                                                                                   
and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style." On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Many thanks to Mount Holyoke's College, Massachusetts, Woman's Liberal Arts College, for the text of this essay  http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

Thursday 14 October 2010

Dealing with the Deficit! (3) - Cutting Defence.

Of Military spending, Trident, Cuts, Cabbages and Kings (And why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings - well, not really.)

This article follows on from previous articles outlining the economic arguments around the Coalition's budget plans and introducing the structure of the public finances and the plans for reducing the deficit.  It's followed by looking at popularly proposed schemes for cutting the deficit more efficiently/morally by raising taxes and cutting ring-fenced spending and a final article on fairness and (my) opinion of the government's plans.   I've separated them out to try to keep them shorter.  

The current government's approach to cutting the deficit is to take a broad based attack on the problem, raising some money in taxes, and also taking money from across government departments (apart from ID and Health) as well as capital spending and welfare, at varying rates decided on due to various other considerations. All these choices can and have been questioned, most completely by the Labour party's plans, but also by a range of commentators and public bodies. As Polly Toynbee notes, 'What's your cut?' has become a popular game in the media, with various people suggesting their own swinging cuts of things they just don't care about, or they claim are unimportant, or of raising taxes they claim are painless or intrinsically 'fair' compared to the government's plans. These suggestions can be divided into two classes, those such as the Labour party's, which take a similarly broad approach to the coalition, though differing in detail, and those that take a narrow approach and suggest massively attacking a few narrow areas of policy, believed to be particularly unworthy by the suggester, with the belief that this could mean saving most of the pain elsewhere. (Though of course there's also a range in the middle.) These narrow suggestions seem to be uniformly based on the principle that their proposers believe there to be vast pots of money somewhere either just waiting to be painlessly taken in taxation, or being totally wastefully spent that can just be excised without much harm to our general body politic.

These suggestions seem to be largely motivated by the belief that our financial problems are not complicated, deeply based and systematic issues with our economic and political structure but rather a simple problem with an obvious and largely cosmetic solution. The problem with this idea is that it is total bunk, and with most of these ideas underwritten by faulty logic or data. A common thread with these ideas is that either the tax rises proposed could not easily raise nearly as much money as suggested, or the simple spending cuts would not save nearly as much money as their starry eyed proponents would hope, at least not without causing serious damage. These suggestions can be roughly divided into right-wing ideas and left-wing ideas, though both share similar characteristics, as they do with other similar examples of simplistic, near conspiratorial thinking.


The first category for bizarre left-wing approaches to solving the budget deficit is the stop-spending-money-on-defence school. The most bizarre and radical form of this idea comes from Simon Jenkins who proposes saving £44 billion a year by entirely eliminating the armed forces, and thus saving the entire defence budget. Yes, you heard that correctly.  But sentiments along the same lines, if a lot less precise, are expressed widely as a throwaway line by left-wing commentators.  A lot of the desire to be rid of defence spending seems to be based on an emotional dislike of funding things whose sole purpose is to wage war. This is an understandable concern. Ask any person whether they'd rather spend money on healing the sick, educating the ignorant, or purchasing new and better ways to kill people, it is pretty clear, which anyone would chose. There is also the fair criticism that post-Cold war the level of traditional military threat to the UK is unsure.

However, sadly the world is not so simple. In defence of the armed forces there are a number of serious points. Despite the progress mankind has made, we still live in a dangerous world where violence rages all around us. Although Britain itself is relatively unlikely to be invaded anytime soon there are many calls on our armed forces, whether defending British territory abroad, such as the Falklands, or in fighting threats against other peoples and innocent countries. Nor can we be sure that this state of affairs will continue. Europe enjoys unparalleled peace and prosperity, but around exists a deeply unstable world. Whether Russia, the Middle east, China, Africa or other areas the danger of violence increasing in an increasingly populated world struggling over natural resources, changes in climate and political and economic problems. And the terrifying truth is that it only requires a brief period of military unpreparedness to have terrible consequences. We maintain armed forces all the years we don't need them because the possible risk of a situation when we do need them is just so great. Also, an inability to defend ourselves is itself a temptation to less morally scrupulous groups to attack us, knowing we are not strong enough to resist. Even if one does not go as far as Simon Jenkins tentatively suggests there is a temptation to say, well, why don't we hold minimal armed forces then. But this is not a real option, there is no point having a military that cannot quite win in a conflict, considering the damage that can ensure that is hardly better than having no military at all.

Even ignoring this though,although the moral argument that we should not be spending such vast sums on what are in effect weapons of death is a powerful one, but I would say there is an equally powerful opposite argument. As far as the world is a dangerous place, and it is, and this is something we must be aware of then we have an active duty to both provide for our own defence ourselves and also to maintain capability to help others. Europe today has a habit of spending relatively little on defence and criticising the USA for spending relatively more. But this is disingenuous in as far as Europe still benefits from he implicit or explicit protection of American forces and strength, as it did to a huge extent in the Cold War and also the 2nd World War before that. More generally, even if we ourselves are not threatened we have a moral duty to help others who are. And others are most definitely threatened. Neutrality and isolation, a la, Switzerland or Ireland or Sweden, is nice for us, but it sucks for everyone else, and in the larger analysis is really an abdication in the face of evil. We no more really have a moral option of walking by on the other side of violence and military oppression than we do of poverty or sickness or ignorance, and this fact carries the corollary of we, who can afford it, maintaining the military forces to help others who cannot afford it. Whether the first world war, the 2nd world war, the Korean war, the gulf war, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan, the Falklands, fighting pirates off Somalia or peace keeping engagements around the world our military forces are primarily engaged in defending others, often for our own benefit as well, but significantly in defence of those who cannot defend themselves. Indeed, except for the example of Iraq, that particularly divisive conflict, then the main examples of the failure of peacekeeping efforts are examples of the western world not acting decisively enough to stop great evil, whether in Rwanda or in Srebrenica or elsewhere. Elsewhere in a more continuous example, today the security of Taiwan is probably only guaranteed by the promise of military support from the United States in the event of any conflict. Otherwise it is highly likely Communist China would have destroyed this small country. The sad truth is that in a dangerous world we must be able to defend both ourselves and all other peoples of the world, even as we work for a reduction in arms and the threat of force in international and intranational politics. And this is not to mention the central role our military has in relieving disaster zones around the world. Along with our international aid spending, our defence forces are our main ability to actively project our power around the world for the better.

That would be the moral case for military spending (as odd as that may sound), but assuming one does not go quite as far as the complete abolition idea for our armed forces there are practical issues as well. Unlike some departments, such as Health, Education, Welfare, spending on Defence held pretty much flat in real terms throughout Labour's 13 years, while public spending in total increased by around 60%. Our armed forces are already stretched thinly after years of running the forces on an effectively frozen budget. We are also still engaged in a war in Afghanistan, putting additional pressure on the military budget. On top of this defence effectively already has its own internal deficit. Military procurement is legendarily bad value for money. We sink huge sums into purchasing equipment over several years, and by the time it comes it is largely out of date for the threats we face. We are, in procurement terms, always fighting the last war. Also due to the financial pressures of War in Iraq and Afghanistan eating into the military budget the government attempted to save money by stretching out the contracts for major purchases for the armed forces. Like other instances of, effectively, borrowing money over the long term this just means that we end up paying more money in the end, than we would have originally. Talk of inefficient procurement may make it sound as though there is plenty of room for efficiency savings in the armed forces, and hence strengthening the argument for cuts, but what it does mean is that although there is considerable scope for doing things more efficiently in the future, in the present we face looming bills from prior mistakes that we cannot get out of. We would have trouble maintaining our armed forces at their present standard even were funding to remain the same due to this looming internal deficit. In the face of even relatively modest cuts (compared to other budgets, as is planned now) we are going to lose a significant part of our military capability.

That is the broad argument surrounding the inability to solve the deficit through attacking military spending. One important sub-set of this argument is the widespread argument that scrapping the Trident nuclear deterrent should be the first call in cutting the deficit, advocated in a limited sense by the Lib Dems and more strongly by the Greens, SNP, Plaid, as well as a host of organisations and commentators. This bears even greater immediate appeal than the standard cut-the-military argument. Nuclear weapons, by definition, can never be actually used except to deliberately cause massive civilian casualties. Their only legitimate purpose is deterrence. Especially in a post-Cold War world there seems relatively little purpose holding expensive nuclear weapons. There is a problem with this, though, similar to the argument above. The number of unstable countries either with nuclear weapons or seeking to gain them continues to increase: China, Russia-ish, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and possibly others. As more countries gain nuclear weapons the possibility of an unstable future situation involving nuclear blackmail at the hands of one of these non-democratic countries increases and this is something that is deeply to be avoided as once we get in that situation there is no way we can respond. There is also a feasible argument that nuclear weapons actually reduce conventional conflict, by making it not worth people's time. Between their founding in the late 1940's and their acquiring nuclear weapons in the 1970's Israel and its Arab neighbours and India/Pakistan engaged in three wars each, but since these states acquired nuclear weapons there have been no major wars. On a grander scale the threat of Nuclear war may have contributed to the peaceful (at least in Europe) conduct of the Cold War, that could so easily have turned into a 3rd World War of immense proportions.

If we accept the importance of some respectable nation having nuclear weapons to counter the possible threat from less stable nations, soon or even in the relatively more distant future, then there comes the criticism that it is unnecessary for us to maintain nuclear weapons, as some people correctly suggest there is no conceivable situation where we would use nuclear weapons independently of America. So why not just let them pay for them and scrap our own capability? The argument is, again, moral. To push the responsibility of maintaining a nuclear capability for the "good guys" onto the USA is to abdicate a responsibility to others. It is to say that it is acceptable for American taxpayers, soldiers, politicians etc to bear the essential responsibility of defending the enlightened world in this most extreme manner, with the danger of retaliation that entails, but it is not a danger and cost that it is worth us bearing. This is an abdication of moral responsibility, and a remarkable one at that, seeing as how it explicitly places us as a strategic dependent of the United States. What is particularly odd about this is that it is generally the same people who claim to be most worried about the UK being subservient to America, or following too closely America's foreign policy, who advocate most strongly that we abandon this major independent capability for independent action and policy and effectively cede this entire area of independent strategic policy to the US in its entirety.

That is, again, the theoretical case for maintaining our nuclear deterrent. The practical issue in terms of deficit reduction is that even entirely scrapping Trident and our whole Nuclear deterrent would not save that much money. And this itself it not something that any major political party supports. Pre-election the Lib Dems went the furthest in supporting an alternative cheaper system than Trident, though they never actually said what system. This is one of those topics for which reliable statistics seem most in need. Numbers given for the actual cost of the Trident system and its renewal vary dramatically depending on the person giving them, as well as contextual factors such as whether figures given involve just the cost of purchasing the system, the cost of running it over the next parliament, over the entire lifetime of the system or something else. And of course those who give the statistics do not make this clear when they give them. Possibly depending on which of these features one takes into account or just what your ideological bias is, it is possible to read statements running from £20 billion to as high as £100 billion I read in one commentary piece, for the cost of replacing the Trident system.

 Actual official estimates for replacing the system, as opposed to whatever numbers column writers come up with, tend to be at the lower end of this continuum, with estimates in the range of around £20 billion for replacing the system and around £1.5 billion annual running costs. It is only possible to get the higher range estimates for costs should we take the possible costs over the entire life-time of the system, some 20-30 or more years. Looking at the total cost of a nuclear deterrent is a reasonable thing to do in general but in a conversation about a budget deficit it is not, since that is mainly concerned with annual cost. One could take a similar approach and produce monstrous figures that the cost of housing benefit is £400 billion, but neglect to mention that is over the next 20 years. On an annual basis, assuming the cost of purchase is spread over a 20 year period, Trident makes around a £3 billion a year contribution to the deficit. Getting rid of it is evidently not going to solve our budgetary problems or really even make more than a small dent in the hole. And these savings are for the outright scrapping of the nuclear deterrent. Trident is already assessed as one of the cheapest long term option for an independent nuclear deterrent. Any other system, even if was cheaper, would still have significant costs running in the billions of pounds and so relative savings would be even smaller.

This is not to say that some savings cannot be made in planning for the nuclear deterrent. It is possible to lengthen the lifetime of the Trident system by refitting submarines and missiles, rather than replacing the system now, as well as reducing from the current level of Continuous At Sea Deterrent (CASD). Full replacement could be put off until we don't have a desperate budget crisis and there is more money to go around. It is estimated that postponing Trident's replacement could save some £11 billion over the next 5-10 years. This is definitely worth doing in a time when money is tight, and the nuclear threat over the next few years is tight. But neither cuts to defence nor the nuclear deterrent particularly are either a wise nor useful solution to cutting the budget deficit, except as small part of a much wider program of savings and tax rises.

Wednesday 13 October 2010

Dealing with the Deficit! (2) - Introduction

Of Public Spending, Budgets, Cuts, Cabbages and Kings (And why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings - well, not really.)

In the first part of this mini series, I looked at the economic arguments for and against the government's economic policy. Next I turn to the questions of whether the policy outlined in the Budget is 'Fair' and if we accept a broad number for the fiscal squeeze to bring down the deficit then what particular tax rises and spending cuts should be implemented. Since the Emergency Budget numerous suggestions and analyses have emerged, both for various spending cuts and tax rises and also of the expected impact of the fiscal squeeze, particularly the distributional impact, that is how it will proportionately affect the poor and the rich. These analyses and suggestions have branched from the sensible to sheer fantasy and back again. They are also, obviously, possibly as numerous as the amounts involved. There are literally, millions of potential ways of slicing up the spending cuts, and here I will only attempt to discuss a few of the more popular suggestions.

I will first discuss various plans for making up the amounts of spending cuts and tax rises mentioned in the budget before moving onto the question of the relative impact and 'fairness' of the government's own chosen approach. I am doing it this way round because, as you may have guessed from part 1 of this series, I broadly support the Coalition's approach, and I, hence, will explain the reasons for why I believe there is no sensible, substantive alternative, economically, and then move onto the question of, regardless of this practical point, how 'fair' this approach is. In this article I just introduce the problem.  Following this in subsequent parts I will look at proposed ideas of cuts to defence, raising taxes and then after that ring fencing areas of spending such as ID and Health. Followed by a final part about the question of 'fairness'.

The twin issues of the fairness and morality of a deficit reduction plan and which taxes/spending to alter are obviously linked. People's perceptions about what counts as a fair approach to the former will affect their outlook on the latter. There is a risk with this though. What is considered moral, or 'fair' in the immediate term may not be the most economically effective solution on a longer framework. Obviously there are basic standards of what we should and should not accept, but within that framework it is important to remember that in almost all cases greater economic activity and a swifter and better recovery is the surest and most sustainable way to restore the tax and spending levels we enjoyed before the economic crash, and to ensure greater prosperity in the future for all of society and other the long and even medium term in many cases these cumulative affects will significantly outweigh any advantage gained by a slighter higher degree of initial fairness. This, evidently, does not apply in all cases, each case must be considered on its own merits, but it is important to keep in mind when discussing various ideas.


Just to explain slightly how government spending is made up. Government spending can be roughly divided into capital and current government spending. Capital spending is spending on infrastructure, building schools and railways and on constructing buildings and bridges and other things. It is equivalent to the economic category of investment. It comes to about £60 billion. Current spending is everything else. It is itself can be divided into departmental spending and welfare and non-useful spending. Non useful government spending is the money the government spends on interest payments on government debt. This spending is non-useful for obvious reasons. It is mostly paid to foreign investors and is neither targeted nor spent on anything useful or decided by parliament. It is wasted money, money that we must raise in taxes but cannot spend on anything useful like infrastructure or services or welfare or all the other things the government does. In the UK today this amounted to about £30 billion before the recession, and is forecast to rise to about £70 billion by 2015. Departmental spending is all the money government departments spend running all the services the country requires such as the NHS, the Education system, the Armed Forces, the social services, street sweepers, road repairs the government itself, etc, etc. it is equivalent to the economic category of consumption and account for about £400 billion. It is this spending that politicians and commentators talk about when they discuss 25% cuts to departments or whatever. The final category is welfare or, more accurately, transfer payments. Whereas departmental spending involves the government spending money to then run some kind of service we either directly use or indirectly benefit from, transfer payments are when the government spends money just transferring it to citizens under various guises: the dole, the state pension, tax credits, incapacity benefit, etc, etc for various social reasons. This is different from departmental spending because it is a direct money transfer, rather than the government spending money itself on good and services for various purposes. It comes to about £200 billion. So government spending can be divided into the main categories of non-useful spending (debt interest), departmental spending, capital spending, welfare. With the last three being useful government spending, and welfare, departmental and debt-interest being current spending.

The government's plan is based on an 80:20 ratio of cuts in spending to tax rises with spending cuts spread across departmental spending, capital spending and welfare, with only the Health and International Development budgets entirely protected from cuts with DfID (the department for international development) seeing its funding increase significantly. This contrasts with the previous government's plan which was based on a plan of 2:1 ratio of spending cuts to tax rises with 'frontline' spending on schools and hospitals, etc, protected from all cuts, along with International Development and Welfare.

In both cases they diverged slightly from these intentions. Alistair Darling's budget plan involved 70:30 ratio of spending to taxes, whereas George Osbourne's was 77:23, so less divergent than initial impressions may suggest. The main difference in the Coalition's plan is the sheer scale. It involves an extra £40 billion of consolidation in addition to the £73 billion already planned by Labour. Both plans involve approximately halving capital spending for the next 5 years and deep cuts in departmental spending. To this the Coalition adds £11 billion of cuts to welfare, with more possibly coming. Also, although the Coalition is ring-fencing the entire health budget, whereas Labour only ringfenced areas of certain budgets, because they did this across multiple departments they actually managed to ringfence more than the Coalition. Due to this fact and the cuts in welfare, this meant that average cuts on unprotected departments under the Coalition's plans are only marginally higher than Labour's, 25% compared to 20%, despite the considerably higher over-all amount of spending reduction. Further to the complete ringfences for ID and Health, the Coalition has also committed to partially protecting Education and Defence from cuts, planning only 10-15% cuts in these areas. This in turn means that the cuts on those areas not protected at all rise to about 30% on average. It is also worth remembering that Welfare is treated separately to these figures, and although it is possibly losing as much as £15 billion it is the largest area of government spending by far, anyway, and hence this translates to only a 7.5% cut.

Beyond these categories, the actual numbers are that the Labour party planned a £73 billion consolidation consisting of £21 billion of tax rises and £52 billion of spending cuts and the Coalition plans £113 billion of consolidation consisting of £29 billion of tax rises and £83 billion of spending cuts. Just to give one last figure, all in all, these cuts amount to a 12% total cut in useful government expenditure. These are the figures that must be made up somehow, whether in terms of cuts to services people use, or taking money from people in tax rises.

Nominal government spending will actually rise over the next 5 years from just below £700 billion to around £760 billion, capital spending falls, even in cash terms, and current spending and welfare continues to rise. Taking inflation into account in real terms capital spending halves over this period, with current spending declining by 1%. This figure masks the spending cuts, because it includes debt-interest. Stripping this out, useful government spending falls by about £50 billion, with a little more than £20 billion from capital spending and £30 billion from current spending. The remaining number to make up the headline figures from cuts comes from the fact that some government spending naturally rises outside the direct control of government, such as pensions and others, and hence to maintain these levels, spending cuts must be found elsewhere to compensate for this within the over-all given numbers.



The current government's approach to cutting the deficit is to take a broad based attack on the problem, raising some money in taxes, and also taking money from across government departments (apart from ID and Health) as well as capital spending and welfare, at varying rates decided on due to various other considerations. All these choices can and have been questioned, most completely by the Labour party's plans, but also by a range of commentators and public bodies. As Polly Toynbee notes, 'What's your cut?' has become a popular game in the media, with various people suggesting their own swinging cuts of things they just don't care about, or they claim are unimportant, or of raising taxes they claim are painless or intrinsically 'fair' compared to the government's plans. These suggestions can be divided into two classes, those such as the Labour party's, which take a similarly broad approach to the coalition, though differing in detail, and those that take a narrow approach and suggest massively attacking a few narrow areas of policy, believed to be particularly unworthy by the suggester, with the belief that this could mean saving most of the pain elsewhere. (Though of course there's also a range in the middle.) These narrow suggestions seem to be uniformly based on the principle that their proposers believe there to be vast pots of money somewhere either just waiting to be painlessly taken in taxation, or being totally wastefully spent that can just be excised without much harm to our general body politic.

These suggestions seem to be largely motivated by the belief that our financial problems are not complicated, deeply based and systematic issues with our economic and political structure but rather a simple problem with an obvious and largely cosmetic solution. The problem with this idea is that it is total bunk, and with most of these ideas underwritten by faulty logic or data. A common thread with these ideas is that either the tax rises proposed could not easily raise nearly as much money as suggested, or the simple spending cuts would not save nearly as much money as their starry eyed proponents would hope, at least not without causing serious damage. These suggestions can be roughly divided into right-wing ideas and left-wing ideas, though both share similar characteristics, as they do with other similar examples of simplistic, near conspiratorial thinking.

I will look at the three most common areas of these suggestions, from both left and right wings in subsequent articles.  Starting with Defence, and then moving onto tax rises and ring-fenced spending.