'It's Time to Reclaim our Political Vocabulary'
Toxic right-wing idioms have made us meaner and more hateful. In a new political era, it is time for a new vocabulary, argues Hadley Coull.
Over several decades, the British right has cultivated a vocabulary designed to legitimise and propagate neoliberal ideology. A range of rhetorical strategies and devices help to shape discussions, influence opinion, and elide fault lines in right-wing thinking.
The words and phrases in this lexicon are devious, and each is devious in its own unique way. These terms are constructed not to communicate clear concepts, but to make us feel certain things: resentment, greed, sanctimony, and other values which feed the dark underbelly of the British right.
Many of these terms are dysphemisms. While a euphemism replaces an offensive or unpleasant word with a more palatable one, a dysphemism does the opposite, substituting a relatively neutral word with a derogatory or vulgar expression in order to stigmatise or malign the underlying concept. Thus, regulation becomes red tape, public money becomes taxpayers’ money, and so on.
The ubiquity of this language speaks to the dominance of right-wing ideology, the diminished gap between the mainstream left and right, and the limited emphasis on critical thinking across much of our political and media landscape.
Two phrases in particular exemplify this style:
‘Taxpayers' money’
Margaret Thatcher famously claimed in 1983 that “there is no such thing as public money. There is only taxpayers’ money.”
Since then, the phrase has been used to suggest that taxed income belongs to the taxpayer. However, once tax is paid, it becomes public money; it belongs not to the individual, but to the collective. It becomes our shared resource, not your personal property.
It’s hard to think of any other context in which we use the possessive form (taxpayers’) to denote something that is from someone, rather than something that belongs to them. Yet this distortion of language is tolerated within our media because it invokes images and emotions which reinforce right-wing thinking: images of bank notes and wallets, notions of individualism and ownership, and most fundamentally, a reluctance to part with that money.
Public money, conversely, conjures a very different emotional world that is more likely to inspire solidarity and pride. We are more inclined to want public money to be abundant and generously spent.
Taxpayers’ money suggests that money that ought to sit in taxpayer’s bank accounts is taken away for wasteful or inappropriate ends. Public money, on the other hand, accommodates the idea that the money which we pay in tax is put to good use for the benefit of all – and that’s likely to elicit a more generous emotional response and a more progressive political stance.
‘Hardworking families’
Every day, politicians across the political spectrum claim to represent hardworking families. The term draws from a longstanding Protestant ethic that aligns work with virtue, yet in doing so, it reinforces division and hierarchy.
The expression is underpinned by the idea that we are legitimised through our work rather than through our status as citizens. We must earn respectability through our labour.
Like many of these terms, the phrase functions both literally and figuratively, reflecting both lived reality and aspiration. It addresses both the core audience of cohabiting parents, as well as secondary targets of family-adjacent cohorts who aspire to the idea of hardworking families. Divorcees, childless couples, and even singles hoping to find a partner and start a family might all see a part of themselves in the image of the hardworking family, even if they’re not quite there yet.
Crucially, the concept creates an Other: the ‘skiver’, dark shadow of the hardworking family. Just as how taxpayers’ money encourages mean-spiritedness and parsimony, so too does hardworking families nurture an ‘us and them’ mentality that is designed to breed resentment and division.
The term reinforces a certain ideological stance. Karl Marx argued that a worker’s labour is a key asset and strength which becomes powerful when it organises collectively. The ‘hardworking family’, however, conjures a more isolated, subservient, and docile image of the labourer, invoking notions of sacrifice, deference and suffering rather than empowerment or solidarity.
What about Citizens?
Imagine for a moment that rather than focusing on hardworking families, our politicians instead aspired to represent Britain’s citizens: a term which suggests equality, a vibrant civic sphere, democratic engagement, and solidarity; unifying, constructive values that Britain desperately needs right now.
Other terms in this lexicon include the politics of envy, red tape, wokery, the tax burden, champagne socialist, difficult decisions, metropolitan liberal elite, talking down Britain, the silent majority, legitimate concerns, and of course, the motherlode, take back control.
The terminology falls apart the moment we start to examine it, but we’re barely doing that. Instead, this toxic and divisive language is played back across the political and media spectrum.
In the realm of identity politics, there’s growing awareness of how language can perpetuate prejudice and inform how social groups relate to and understand each other. Yet we seem to pay significantly less attention to the language of class politics, despite its role as a vector of antagonism and division.
One might hope that our media would be replete with experts in language, critical theory, and semiotics, with a wealth of bright young minds eager to explore and analyse the role of language in shaping the dynamics of power in Britain. Yet much of our media seems silent on this issue, complicit in the rollout of terminology that pushes us all to the right.
These are not matters of pedantry or mere semantics. Language shapes our understanding of the world, the parameters and value systems of our politics, and the tone and register of our shared conversations. Right-wing idioms have made our media shrill and adversarial. They have nudged us all to the right while reinforcing unjust hierarchies and power structures. Most profoundly, they have impoverished our political imagination: our sense of what is possible, what is relevant, and what is fair.
Talking over the Common People?
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, we see the rise of a very different vocabulary.
The left’s ongoing efforts to dismantle unhealthy power structures has led to the mainstreaming of critical theory in recent years. Terms such as patriarchy, heteronormativity, decolonisation, critical race theory, and intersectionality increasingly shape conversations in certain politicised spaces, and are slowly entering the popular consciousness. Yet this lexicon, which predominantly relates to identity rather than class and cultural politics, may feel alienating to mainstream audiences. Put simply, it’s not the kind of language that ‘regular folks’ are likely to embrace.
As such, there seems to exist a divide between right-wing language that is accessible, emotive, and relatively everyday, and emergent progressive vocabulary that can feel intimidating, technical, and jargonistic. Reclaiming the space between these two poles will enhance the quality of our discourse and create space for a wider range of viewpoints.
The Way Forward
As we enter a new political era under an ostensibly more progressive party, it’s time to reappropriate our language from the right and foster a more diverse and forward-thinking vocabulary that reflects contemporary Britain. We must stand up against the erosion and manipulation of our language, while tired right-wing clichés should be laughed out of the room.
Let’s celebrate public money and public works. Let’s talk about ourselves as citizens rather than taxpayers, strivers, or hard workers. Let’s consider (and be careful with) the words we use, and let’s embrace clear, neutral language over elaborate, leading idioms. Let’s reclaim our political vocabulary.
Hadley Coull is an independent writer and researcher. hadleycoull@gmail.com
I am glad you mentioned the phrase "hard-working families,", as this has always irked me! Presumably the children in these families are not necessarily expected to work hard. And what about people who can't work hard, through no fault of their own, such as disability, or sickness? I am sorry to hear Keir Starmer trotting out the phrase so often.
Language is indeed a very important element of communicating ideas and the feelings that go with them but they don’t exist in isolation. The phrases of the right you mention are part of a narrative that is based on a truth that people experience but which is twisted to stoke division. The great irony is that it suits the twins - wealth and power - and resonates with the dispossessed building resentment not against the austerity imposed by the twins but hapless scapegoats. The left, meanwhile, inhabit a semi-utopian world that as you point is characterised by intellectualism and jargon with few - if any - bridges from our current reality. This is of course the difference between the certainty of the lie and the complexity of the truth. If we don’t want the devil to have all the best tunes we’d better learn how to make the complex palatable and rock it!