Words: Red Tape

THE PROMISED Deregulation Bill will doubtless bring with it much high talk about the spirit of free enterprise that has made our country great. We have heard these sentiments before. What gives edge to the message this time is that trusty old metaphor in the War of the Slogans: red tape.

The expression free enterprise is an unreliable weapon that might backfire, and words like deregulation find no echoes in the breast. Who could win a campaign with such cumbersome equipment? Red tape, on the other hand, takes us straight into the enemy's territory. The nation can happily unite over it, because we all hate it - as people must have done ever since lawyers and their like started tying unreadable documents in it about 300 years ago, though it was not until the 1830s, if one goes by the OED, that it became a synonym for bumbledom and obstruction.

This does not mean that the Government is against red tape. Not at all. It has itself unreeled a great deal of it to restrain teachers from using their judgement about what they should teach; and there are no immediate plans to undo it. But then ministers call it something else. They call it accountability, which puts a different complexion on the matter, though the tape stays in place.

Humpty Dumpty's technique (when he used a word, he told Alice, it meant what he chose it to mean) is often cited when people discuss totalitarian regimes, where democracy, for example, means one thing in one country, another in another. In true democracies we reverse the procedure. The thing described remains the same: the word used to describe it changes. A man may be called a patriot one day and a chauvinist the next, but he is still the same man.

Fairly harmless by Orwellian standards. But poor George Orwell, that scourge of the weasels, has also had his name misused before now. If a parliamentary candidate dislikes his or her opponents' choice of slogans, he may well accuse them of being Orwellist. I'd call that plain Humptyism.