Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

Accompanying the hysteria surrounding swine flu, I have noticed a particularly insidious piece of jargon, which, if it is does not yet constitute an epidemic amongst health professionals, is certainly rapidly becoming endemic. Rather than refer to the risk of death which the disease might pose, experts keep discussing the possibility of it precipitating a ‘mortality event’. A more obfuscating piece of doublespeak it is difficult to imagine. Could any phrase more neatly epitomise a living example of the type of English which George Orwell excoriated in his essays and satirised in his fiction? Doctors are already notorious for dancing around the truth. For many years it was established procedure to refer to all manner of ‘growths’ rather than tell a patient he or she had cancer. Sometimes, I imagine, it is beneficial to speak in language which only the initiated can interpret. But in a public debate about the possible effects of a disease, in which any sense of proportion has long ...

Some journalists have asked whether Orwell might have written a blog, had the technology been available to him, after the addition of a  weblog category  to the prize that bears his name. When a longlist comprising twelve websites was announced, Radio 4 invited  Hopi Sen to consider the question on its ‘Today’ programme. I suspect that while Orwell would have been enthused by the potential of political blogging, he would have been appalled by the content and style of many political blogs. For any writer who makes politics his subject, reading Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ is a chastening experience. Its contents are yet more disquieting when one has been included on a shortlist of six bloggers , contesting an award dedicated to the great man’s memory. The truth is that it is almost impossible to adhere to the precepts set out in the essay.  The essayist acknowledged that even he occasionally infringed his own rules. It is possible t...

Perhaps as a reaction to Brown’s appropriation of the idea of Britishness, and perhaps because leftist politics have, since the disintegration of the USSR, turned increasingly away from internationalism to embrace localism, those who presumptuously term themselves ‘progressives’ have become increasingly inclined to raise the English nationalist banner. In a review of a new book entitling itself ‘Imagined Nation – England After Britain’, Arthur Aughey offers a critique of the conceptual knots which these ‘progressive patriots’ tie themselves in, and challenges the false assumptions about Britishness which inform the narrative these people are advancing. In order to rationalise attempts to break up the United Kingdom, and in order to cleave their new found nationalism to an identity which they adjudge convivial, it has become de rigueur to write naval gazing tomes in which the English national identity is offered a set of civic, multi-ethnic, liberal clothes. Aughey notes the incohere...

It is perhaps best not to analyse Naomi Klein's political pronouncements too closely. That may better be left to callow youth, whose adolescent reflexes are best satisfied by the "anti-globalisation poster girl". Fair play though, she can coin a phrase - BONOISATION ! She also gives us bloggers a touch. The gist of her argument is that people are spending too much time formulating argument and too little time firebombing their local McDonalds. Still ..... "Bonoisation".