POLITICS generates its own word meanings and phrasing, so as a service to understanding, here are some of my notes towards a dictionary of contemporary political language. Let’s start unpicking the jargon, both old and new, at “A” and work on.

 

Astroturf

A campaign that seems like something from the grassroots. But look closer and it is totally artificial.

Groups that have a lot of money, some grand titles but few actual members — like, say, the Taxpayers’ Alliance — are always worth inspecting to see if they are astroturf, fake campaigns designed to covertly push their funders’ interests by pretending to be “popular” spontaneous “from-below” campaigns.

 

Big tent politics

Building a broad coalition — by filling it with right-wing piss. In the past, the Labour Party was often called a “broad church” to show it was a coalition of left and right.

New Labour people started using “big tent” to describe their coalition-building. Why a tent not a church? Because the tent is a reactionary, pissy version of the church.

The phrase is based on a quote attributed to US president Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) who refused to sack one unpleasant official because “it’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.”

“Big tent politics” means keeping the horrible people inside your tent to piss on everybody outside. The tent-pisser LBJ didn’t want to sack was FBI boss J Edgar Hoover.

LBJ was wrestling with powerful grassroots protesters, like the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement: LBJ offered the former too little and rejected the latter.

Instead he kept FBI boss Hoover in his tent, while Hoover ran a secret dirty tricks campaign against the protesters.

History shows the protesters were on the right side and Hoover was a wrong ’un. So “big tent politics” means having a broad coalition by keeping a reactionary crook like Hoover in your tent while keeping grassroots with a good cause out.

Call the manager

Brexit and Donald Trump have made many formerly middle-of-the-road people realise something is very wrong with the political system.

Moderate-minded and moderately well-off folk who thought politics was about choices between different respectable brands — David Cameron or Tony Blair, say — suddenly find the system delivering for “disreputable” forces.

Many have become sort of militant moderates, suddenly discovering biases which the left always knew existed: the media is dominated by the right wing.

BBC “impartiality” is not really neutral. Big spending billionaires distort politics.

However, the new militant moderates sometimes have a tendency to focus on — real or imagined — “rules,” and demand they be “enforced” from above, rather than persuading people from below: Brexit must be “cancelled” because of “cheating.” Trump only “won” because of tricks by Vladimir Putin, and so his victory can be cancelled by legal means.

The danger is this can become a high-handed “call the manager, this needs to be fixed” politics, a self-satisfied approach that won’t persuade people not already signed up.

Centrist

Around 2015, people from the New Labour pole — including the Tony Blair Institute – were talking about “centrist” politicians.

However, in 2017, when the rising Corbynite left took them at their word and also described lots of the New Labour people as “centrist,” so-called “moderates” got upset and started saying: “Centrist is a slur.”

What was going on? Has the word changed meaning? Not really. It is just the meaning became embarrassing.

Traditionally “moderates” in the Labour and Conservative Party tended to self-identify as “centre left” or “centre right.”

Party identification and the split between left and right was as important as “moderation.”

But with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, and the Brexit vote, some leading politicians and pundits promoted the unity of the supposed “centre” over party loyalty.

When the left challenged the “moderates” for Labour’s leadership, acknowledging “centrism” — that some Labour MPs were closer to the Tories than their own rank and file — was an embarrassment.

You don’t hear so many complaints that “centrist is a slur” since New Labour MPs led by Chuka Umunna literally joined with Tories in a new “centrist” party Change UK. Umunna argued that “centrism” was the defining factor of the new party.

He said: “The SDP was essentially another Labour Party, whereas we want to build an alternative that unites those who have progressive values across the centre left, the liberal middle and the centre right, and who are currently sitting in parties with others whom they have increasingly less in common with.”

The “centre” sounds reasonable, but the middle of an unfair system is unfair: it is worth remembering the “centre” where “sensible” “moderates” of the Tories and Labour agreed included PFI, contracting out the NHS, putting Atos in charge of disability benefits and G4S-run private prisons, “lock up asylum-seekers,” academy schools, student loans, the Iraq war and military intervention in Libya.

Grown-ups in the room

This is the “technocratic” argument gone Freudian. Fans of “technocracy” argue politics is best run by dispassionate experts, making rational choices about the best policies. They might consult the masses, but their guidance and decision-making is ultimately best.

Technocracy assumes that we don’t need fundamental change or challenge to a market-based economy and that there are “right” solutions for all of society rather than any inherent conflicts.

Post-crash society has not been fertile for technocracy, as stagnant wages and slashed services reduce confidence in the system.

“Grown-ups in the room” is a phrase that envisions the technocrat as daddy and mummy, and anyone outside of consensus politics as unruly, naive children.

The idea that centrist politicians are the actual grown-ups and conviction politicians are children hasn’t survived the reality of the amateurish, childish and bumbling attempts by the supposed “grown-ups” to deal with the left-wing “children.”

The Liz Kendall and Owen Smith leadership campaigns and the Change UK breakaway have looked more like the Haribo Starmix ads, where suited and booted people in the boardroom turn out to be childishly amateur.

Oddly enough, the centrist party that has revived somewhat, the Lib Dems, has done so by being the teenagers in the room, with its infantile “Bollocks to Brexit” slogan.