Hooray! No more red lines in the sand, blue sky thinking, hearts and minds, your call, y’know… Tony Blair has gone, and taken with him the worn out clichés and the Bee Gee-style lyrics, sorry, plain down-to earth sort of a guy appeals to ‘the people’. Let’s hope his dead language will evaporate with him into the noisome urban chic of Cool Britannia.

Chaucer’s House of Fame was written more than six hundred years ago but it remains a close description of parliamentary life under late Blair.

The House of Fame is a grand mansion floating between heaven and earth where every word spoken, anywhere, is recorded and re-issued. ‘I saw a lie and a sober truth that at the same time drew near to pass out the window, both were checked and neither could go out, each so crowded the other, till each cried shrilly, “Let me go first! “Nay but let me, or let us be like one sworn brother, so that no-one can get only one of us, but both at once.” Thus I saw falsehood and truth compounded and fly abroad as one piece of news.’

I have said before that it would do politicians good to read poetry. Not only because they might blush at the descriptions of themselves, (‘these pardoners, couriers, messengers, with boxes crammed as full of lies as ever vessel was with dregs’), but because reading poetry improves language skills. The poem, or the poetic text aims for exactness just as a mathematical equation does; all excess, all unnecessary verbiage is pruned out. The paradox of poetry though, is that unlike the equation, no excess does not always mean stripped out; in the right hands the most extravagant language can be the most purposeful ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne/Burnt on the water. The poop was beaten gold,/Purple the sails, and so perfumed that/The winds were love-sick with them;’

The taut discipline of poetry, allowing both richness and exactness, has hardly been heard in politics since Churchill, who might have been the last great politician to believe that art and culture were integral to life. For nearly all politicians, the arts are a bolt-on optional extra, uncomfortably elitist, and probably a waste of time. I would like to be Minister for Culture, but I don’t suppose it’s going to happen. What would I want? Not more money but real energy; no more apologising, no more questionnaires or public value exercises, no hand-wringing or justifying. Show people that art is for them and it becomes so. Above all put a rigorous rich language back at the centre of political discourse. This can only happen when we realise that language is not just about conveying information, but is in itself a way of thinking. If your language is impoverished, your thinking will shrink to fit it.

 Where’s my proof? Try learning a foreign language and realise how little of complexity you can manage. For most of us, thanks to decades of poor education and dumbed-down TV, English no longer stretches our minds. In everyday life this is boring; in politics it is a disaster.

For weeks now, on the radio, I have heard no-one challenge the over-repeated phrase ‘undistorted Capitalism.’ The French are keen to see some social element in the Treaty of Rome, and in return the gurus of Free Markets – another contradiction in terms, offer us the linguistic and moral absurdity of late Capitalism as ‘undistorted.’

For my money, Capitalism begins with the Enclosure of common land in the eighteenth century and has been distorting human endeavour since then. Politicians are welcome to espouse Capitalism as a global system – Margaret Thatcher’s marvellous golden girl TINA (There Is No Alternative), but let’s call a spade a spade; Capitalism subsidises itself out of cheap unregulated labour in poor parts of the world, which then affects the competitiveness of both manufacturing and farming in richer parts of the world. Exploitation of diminishing resources and climate destabilisation will cost taxpayers trillions of dollars. I call that subsidy and I call it distortion. Mind your language please, gentlemen.

Will Gordon Brown be different? I suppose he might read Tam O’Shanter on Burns Night, and he has promised to disinfect the language of politics from its current state of sweet rot. The spray tactics of the Blair years – political animals laying false trails and throwing the rest of us off the scent, may, perhaps, be over.

I think I will send our new Prime Minister a present: The Oxford Book of English Verse.

7 July 2007