The Tories, with their US Republican ideological soulmates, long-ago came up with the term “Political Correctness” to describe liberal-left attempts to find respectful language to refer to non-white people, LGBT people, disabled people, and so on. Of course, the term itself is a kind of political correctness that allows them to demean these efforts to respect others, dismiss others' rights to self-representation, and which constructs such respect for and rights of others as oppression of their own freedom of speech. Or, put another way, their freedom to continue routinely (and without comic effect or political inversion) using words like darkies, benders, mongoes, spazzers, and so on. There is indeed a whole lexicon of Conservative Political Correctness at work today. I’ve written before (as have others) about how you can’t say “cuts” anymore; nowadays you have to say “efficiencies,” or at least I wrote about it when I saw Tory Not-Even-Slightly-Secret-Agent Nick Robinson using that whitewashing and factually misleading word: http://stevesarson.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/a-long-tweet-to-nick-robinson.html. Similarly, in ConPC-speak, the term “something for nothing culture” now applies to people who actually have nothing, rather than people who inherited large fortunes that their parents acquired by maximising them in tax-havens (or low-tax havens and no-tax havens as they might much more accurately be called). And, of course, the word “not,” in the ConPC dicktionary* means “and break up, privatise, and thereby abolish”: as in the election pledge that “We’ll cut the deficit, not and break up, privatise, and thereby abolish the NHS.” (*Not a typo.)
I’m writing this as David Cameron (David Scameron) is delivering his keynote speech (Ansprache) to the party faithful (fellow Lizard-People) at today's Conservative Party Conference (Nuremberg Rally). There will be lots of ConPC (lies) in the Asprache, and in light (the obfuscatory darkness) of the litany of enormously damaging dishonesty I have decided to publish this brand new blogpost about ConPC rhetoric as it might be applied in a Tory version of a history textbook (reheated version of this:
http://stevesarson.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/a-glossary-of-terms-for-tory-history.html with a new context and introduction and one extra joke: at the end below, if you've read this lazy rehash already and want to skip to the only new bit).
Medieval Society. Early Big Society.
Feudalism. Social responsibility.
Serfdom. Internship.
The Peasants’ Revolt. Class hatred (orig. David Starkey).
Enclosure. Land management efficiencies (necessary and unavoidable, there is no alternative, and it's not at all driven by class-interest or ideology).
The English/British/Civil War/s/Wars of the Three Kingdoms (etc.) / The Interregnum / The Glorious Revolution. The Unfortunate Disruptions.
The Renaissance/Enlightenment/Scientific Revolution. The Birth of Capitalism (orig. Niall Ferguson).
The Birth of Capitalism. The Enlightenment / The Great Going Forward (orig. Niall Ferguson).
Imperialism/colonialism. Global democratisation (orig. Niall Ferguson).
Empire. Free-trade zone (orig. Niall Ferguson).
The Atlantic Slave Trade. African Labour Recruitment System THAT WAS ABOLISHED BY THE BRITISH (orig. Simon Schama).
Slavery. Free Labour.
World War I. The Unfortunate Incident.
World War II. The Even More Unfortunate Incident.
The United States
Margaret Thatcher. Mummy.
Chartism. (See Peasants’ Revolt.)
Suffragettes. Lesbians.
The Working Classes. The Help (orig. Lucy Worsley).
The Welfare State. The Failed Soviet Union (orig. Dominic Sandbrook).
The National Health Service. The Sixty-Year Mistake. The Medical Business Opportunity .
The Tabloid Press. Our Friends in the North.
Bankers. Masters of the Universe.
Boris. Person born and raised in single-parent household.
Not sure if this one has made it to Britain yet but it sure is rampant in America right now.
ReplyDeleteSocial welfare, food stamps, healthcare, subsidized housing = Entitlements
I think in the US, with its more historically patchy build-up of a welfare state, "entitlements" come in chunks as you describe here, making them more vulnerable to such names. It'll come here, though, partly because our right-wing will find a way to translate it, also because they're finding ways to portion out our welfare system in semi-privatised form, and indeed they're in thinktank-type touch with Americans who like to vilify "entitlements".
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