Here is a conference advertisement that appeared recently:
‘Choice Partnership presents Managing Care Services Improvement: a two day conference exploring citizenship, new realities, and sharing risk through promoting integrated delivery of health, housing and social services.’
Fascinated by the language, I decided I would put some of the phrases on cards, shuffle them, ask my wife to pick up cards at random, and then put the resulting sequence of phrases back into the original framework. We did the exercise three times. This is what we came up with:
A. ‘New Realities Partnership presents Managing Choice: a two day conference exploring care services improvement, health, housing and social care services, and promoting sharing risk through integrated delivery of citizenship.’
B. ‘Care Services Improvement Partnership presents Managing New Realities: a two day conference exploring choice, sharing risk and promoting citizenship through integrated delivery of health, housing and social care services.’
C. ‘Sharing Risk Partnership presents Managing Health, Housing and Social Care Services: a two day conference exploring new realities, care services improvement, and promoting choice through integrated delivery of citizenship.’
Now I have to confess I have played a little trick on you. The original advertisement was actually not the one in the first paragraph but version B… or possibly C, or maybe A. Can you guess which one? Of course not. Because the genuine version is just as vacuous as the scrambled ones. They are all equally devoid of meaning, a kind of political pornography, designed to induce a satisfied glow of righteous recognition in the same way that a photo of two breasts or a bottom is calculated to produce a different kind of glow.
Why do we not scream with outrage at the constant assault we now suffer from this kind of language in the public services? Or even better, why do we not laugh at it till the tears stream down our cheeks? It reminds me of spending a morning not too long ago in the presence of a score of senior colleagues while we all struggled with the question set for us by a highly paid facilitator: how were we going to rise to the challenge of consumer choice, a patient-led service, an accelerated pace of change coupled with necessary efficiency savings? We all sat there like well-behaved children at an old-fashioned preparatory school, listening to this rubbish as if it meant anything. By the end of the morning we were actually speaking the stuff, as if we believed it, as if it had become part of us. Grown men and women, each with decades of serious professional experience, were jumping up energetically to add empty resolutions to the bullet points on two flip charts, under the fatuous headings of ‘quick wins’ and ‘smart objectives’. For goodness’ sake, what is happening to us? Can anything be done to prevent us losing our souls entirely to this fraudulent drivel?
Before I decline into permanent acquiescence with it, let me spell out some truths that may help us resist this pervasive deceit in the public services:
1. There is a close relationship between corruption of language, corruption of thought, and corruption of action. There may be some ways in which parts of the public services are improving at any given time, and it is even possible that some organisational changes may be for the better. However, celebrating these patchy successes in increasingly messianic slogans leads to the disablement of any serious analysis, then to the denial of any error or failure, and then to systematic cover-up and abuse.
2. It used not to be like this. There was a time in the recent past when people in the West read such bombast with horror, because we thought it belonged to totalitarian states where people were unable to protest at the blatant hypocrisy that surrounded them.
3. The practice of medicine is not a state activity, and doctors who are over-identified with the state, or with the language of the state, have sold out. Medicine is generally conservative and respectful of those in power, and it probably needs to be. But there are also times when medicine has to be subversive. Doctors who cannot act, think and speak subversively can be dangerous.
4. Thank goodness, we still live in a society where we can at least make fun of people in positions of power who tell lies to themselves or others, who take themselves too seriously, or who talk nonsense. We should take every opportunity to do so. As most of the population of Europe discovered during the twentieth century, it is a right that is quickly and easily removed, and only recovered at an appalling cost.