As explained here, what you need to do is imagine the speech being delivered by one of the characters from "The Thick Of It". If you can't tell the difference, it is a spin-rich content-free zone. Or, as we have now learnt to call it, "normal politics".
There is a message here for politicians, which Obo points out
And then politicians moan about the lack of "democratic engagement". Hint: how about you [bunch] give us something to engage with? Honestly, if you take out Ed's half-[hearted] "attack" on the Big Society, is there anything in his speech that would sound odd if it were delivered by Cameron or Clegg?We're in a bind; Cameron won't say anything remotely interesting because he's in government, Clegg is incapable of having a sensible idea of his own (even if he wasn't in government, as he sometimes seems to think), and the Millillillibababble is, well, just incapable.
So three cheers for the Libertarian Party, who stand at the vanguard of a new... errr, oh.
I once had a fun computer program which was designed to produce meaningless phrases using all the current buzz-words in order that they could be included in a report. I used it a couple of times to see what would happen, and no-body seemed to notice; whether it was because they didn't read my reports or because their ignorance prevented them from questioning the phrases remains unresolved.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that most politicians are now using a modern, more sophisticated, version of my fun program, where they just put in a few keywords such as "NHS" or "cuts" to get a high sounding but totally meaningless speech.
I fear you may be right!
ReplyDeleteI hope you were given recognition for your best practice in pro-actively self-motivated resource-neutral time management optimisation?