Brexit has made politics and the English language a combustible combination

The great British public is not easily fooled. But that doesn’t stop our intrepid politicians from giving it a try. After three years of total immersion in Brexit, they are still deploying the English language to bamboozle, bewitch and bulldoze the electorate. Here are just a few examples of the abuse of rhetoric to which we should by now be sensitive.

Earlier this week, Philip Hammond levelled the gravest possible charge at the Government led by Boris Johnson: “No-deal would be a betrayal of the 2016 referendum result.” The former Chancellor must know that “betrayal” is a dangerous word to hurl at one’s opponents — especially if they are actually supposed to be on the same side of the aisle, if not the argument. Two years ago Hammond himself had been accused of “sabotage” by another former Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, for refusing to prepare for no-deal. Now Hammond is using the language of treason.

Yesterday, however, the Prime Minister also reached for the vocabulary of violence. He accused those in Parliament who are determined to thwart a no-deal Brexit at any price of “collaboration” — a word charged with sinister wartime significance. In his “People’s PMQs” on Facebook, Boris blurted out the following sentence: “There’s a terrible kind of collaboration between people who think they can block Brexit in Parliament and our European friends.” 

The implication here is that these “friends” are the equivalent of the Nazis — and MPs who “collaborate” with them are the British counterparts of Pétain and Quisling, the Nazis’ French and Norwegian puppets. Both were condemned to death after the war. Quisling was executed; Pétain’s sentence was commuted. The best-known British traitor, William Joyce, who made Nazi propaganda broadcasts as “Lord Haw-Haw”, was hanged.

If Hammond and Johnson are both guilty of raising the temperature with linguistic lapses, what about Jeremy Corbyn? Here is a politician whose entire career has been built on hyperbole and subterfuge. Sure enough, in his letter to other Opposition politicians, he is at it again. He would, he says, “seek the confidence of the House for a strictly time-limited temporary government, with the aim of calling a general election, and securing the necessary extension of Article 50 to do so”. 

Corbyn, then, would become a “temporary” Prime Minister. What other kind is there? A permanent Prime Minister is an oxymoron, a contradictio in adjecto — or a dictator. Most dictators promise that their rule is “temporary”, usually for the duration of an emergency: indeed, in ancient Rome that is what the word originally meant. Of course, military autocrats and presidents-for-life are temporary, strictly speaking, even if they die in office.

Any MP tempted by the Labour leader’s offer, on the grounds that they could always remove him from office were he to break his word, should recall the history of such “temporary” regimes. Even if Corbyn did indeed call an election, it would be on his terms. The machinery of government would be in his hands and it is inconceivable that he and his fellow revolutionaries would not use it. For them, parliamentary democracy is only a means, not an end — as it is, too, for the Scottish Nationalists, who eagerly accepted Corbyn’s offer. Both Corbyn and Nicola Sturgeon yearn for people’s republics that would inevitably mutate into one-party states.

George Orwell taught us to beware of the use and abuse of words for ideological purposes. In “Politics and the English Language”, he proposed a set of six rules to avoid the danger of a terminology “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”. The last of his rules, however, was the injunction to break any of these rules if necessary. Language cannot be legislated for. 

Boris Johnson, who is a writer and speaker of considerable distinction, knows the power of language better than most. Indeed, he is already following his hero Churchill’s example by mobilising the English language for Brexit. That is entirely legitimate. But he should set an example by refraining from inciting friends and enemies to translate loaded words into incendiary actions.