Saturday, April 25, 2009

Multi-area agreements - New Labour Nonsense No.4



I defy anyone to make sense of this youtube clip from 10 Downing Street, advertizing the launch of yet another meaningless New Labour initiative

Hazel Blears conceded that Multi-area agreements were gibberish. She started her presentation with the following fatal words:

"Hi, we're here today to sign things called Multi-area agreements. What that means in ordinary language is local authorities from big city regions coming together and saying they want to tackle employment, skills....etc...etc...."

This is how it is; we mere mortals speak ordinary language. Blears and Brown speak something else. I call it New Labour multi-area agreement language; a tongue that is totally alien to this fair isle but has somehow invaded and taken over the government.

7 comments:

  1. London estate agentApril 25, 2009 at 9:38 AM

    That was awful. Why do you inflict this kind of thing upon your readers?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I can't make heads or tails of it either.

    I have a theory: in professions or industries where the subject matter is intrinsically quite difficult to grasp - say physics, other hard sciences, law, medicine etc..the practitioners try, in their communications between themselves and with outsiders, to simplify things as much as possible and only use jargon when necessary.

    In circumstances where the subject matter at hand is not that difficult to grasp such as(and this isn't meant as an insult) planning, government and education studies, there is a tendency amongst those involved to introduce needless jargon and to jazz up what is being said to make it sound more intellectual or rigorous than it really is.

    ReplyDelete
  3. That was bad, very bad.

    ReplyDelete
  4. There seems not to be pots of money for (failed?) ex-businessmen in their fifites and sixties to drop by on struggling small businesses for unhelpful chats which can't address the crises people are facing.

    This I believe because of small businesses which have told me about the initiatives resentfully, for whom the consultants could achieve nothing but take up work time.

    The beneficiaries are the quangoesque "consultants". As with Blears and a lot of parliamentarians, government initaitives are about getting for yourself some of the large sums of money collected by (compulsory) taxation. Bloated government, in gibberish, for the benefit of spongers.

    B. in C.

    ReplyDelete
  5. They're doing a marvellous job tackling the problem of employment...

    Look at the figure for the unemployed fly upwards.

    ReplyDelete
  6. No one really understands what they are talking about or supposed to be 'advertising' - not an ise/ize word.

    ReplyDelete
  7. A chipper member of the Politburo. How novel.

    ReplyDelete