All together now

Ed Miliband is never the most exciting speaker in the world. There are worse leaders’ speeches in recent conference history. John Major had very little authority as prime minister, so we can only imagine how underwhelming his speech as prime minister-in-waiting would have been, as he was never opposition leader. And the NHS is still surgically unclenching the buttocks of many people who sat through Iain Duncan Smith’s ‘The quiet man is turning up the volume’.

But it’s hardly great news for Miliband that he’s not the worst ever. It’s not the kind of description to build an election platform on: “Vote for Ed: I bet you can think of someone even worse.”

Of all the things to criticise him for, he seemed to get the most grief for omitting the word ‘deficit’. As if the speech would have been much more exciting if he had. It is hard to see how anything could be made more exciting by the addition of the word ‘deficit’. Try it with film titles - the result is always duller, with the possible exception of ‘Deficit in Venice’.

But he did use the word ‘together’. A lot. It’s quite an all-rounder as a word, ‘together’. It can be used in any part of a sentence. You can start a sentence with it, you can end a sentence with it. You can, according to the transcript of the script that I found online, have a sentence comprising the word ‘together’ and nothing else. Now there’s rhetorical confidence.

Miliband must have felt he had created such a world of meaning around this word, he could simply say it and walk away, knowing that the audience were piecing together the whole edifice of political thought that the word embodies. A bit like when Paul McCartney makes a peace sign, and the world understands, and loves, peace a little more than if he’d kept his hand in his pocket. No one can look at Paul McCartney’s index and middle fingers and remain a fan of war. Similarly, no one can hear Ed Miliband say ‘together’ without embracing collectivism.

Because presumably that’s what ‘together’ means. It means that the government should be run in a way that values the collective bounds of society, and therefore presumably values individual freedom slightly less. It’s a weak and vague statement, but it confers a slight leftwards lean.

You could say the same thing about “Yes we can”. Left-wing principles spring from the idea of people being together, while the right wing are more inspired by the sanctity of the individual. The left wing think that the government can, and should, do more. The implication of ‘Yes we can’, was ‘And we damn well will’. It outlined the beginning of a political principle without getting bogged down in what it is we can do, or even exactly who ‘we’ are. Or, if you preferred, it meant no more than a few more verses of ‘U-S-A! U-S-A!’

Obama meant the state when he said ‘We’, and Miliband meant the same thing by ‘together’. Tories think we should all be together as well, but they think that the state is not the best means of establishing togetherness - they prefer the family, capitalism, and the Rotary Club. It is understood that Miliband is referring to the government because that’s his job - or at least he wants it to be.

The biggest problem was with the grammar of how the word was used. In one section, Miliband illustrated various things that the ‘principle of together’ stands for. Stretching the metaphor to breaking point, he listed various things that ‘together says’. Together, it seems, has now acquired the power of speech. With so many things that ‘together says’, it starts to sound like a verbose opinionated friend, or possibly a rulebook.

It wasn’t at all clear how this brand new sense of the word together, freshly minted for the speech, was meant to work logically. It is the worst kind of jargon. When very obscure technical terms are used, the users are often criticised for their jargon. Jargon-users - mortgage providers, IT helpdesks, hi-fi salesmen - are guilty of failing to connect with ordinary people, or possibly even trying to hide the truth from them. This second offence is the more serious.

When the jargon word is a new invention, the speaker’s intention is clear. If a businessman starts talking about ‘innoventation’, we’re all meant to look mildly confused and ask for a definition. It’s dreadful jargon, but it’s not pretending to be anything else. Much worse is when jargonisers take a word that you thought you knew, and start using it in a brand new way. This is an underhand ploy to gain your agreement by making you feel you've understood - but you haven’t understood, possibly because there was no meaning there to start with.

Turning ‘together’ into something that ‘says’ things belongs to this nastier, more invidious form of jargon. By using simple words that people know, it disallows the response of: “I don’t know what you’re talking about”. At least ‘neo-endogenous growth theory’ was just begging for someone to say, ‘What the hell’s that?’ When ‘together’ starts ‘saying’ things, there’s the whiff of the kaftan, and people earnestly saying, ‘Oh my God, I know exactly what you mean.’

Together does sound better than it reads. Listening to Miliband’s speech, it just felt like he’d said it a lot. Reading the speech, the word ‘together’ starts to swim before your eyes, and do that thing where it looks like you’ve spelt it wrong. Maybe that was why he performed without notes - afraid that when he read the word ‘together’ for the 51st time, he’d start to doubt whether the word actually existed, or perhaps he’d made it up.

Speaking without notes is not difficult. Speaking well without notes is difficult. And Miliband’s performance needed to attract rather wider admiration than it did to justify the method. The most vocal fans of the speech seemed to be people he has the power to sack, and members of his immediate family (not including his brother). Neutrals were not convinced.

Parading his scriptlessness seemed a particularly inept wheeze. It reminded me of the Fry and Laurie sketch where Stephen Fry plays the harmonica very badly for a few seconds, then says to the camera, ‘And the interesting thing is, I’ve never had a lesson in my life.’ Doing a speech without notes is only impressive when the audience is surprised at the news. No one watching Miliband’s speech, and being told afterwards that he was winging it, would have said, ‘No way! That’s a miracle.’

It’s a shame that the presentational clunkiness was such a distraction from the content. The content wasn’t mind-blowing, but it picked the right simple targets - highlighting a coalition policy, and promising to do the opposite. The harmful, divisive, and nasty policies of this government do mean that the Labour manifesto must half-write itself. There are so many coalition policies that simply need to be repealed - and each promise of a change is another tick in another electoral column. Much as John Major in 1990 probably didn’t spend a huge amount of time wondering whether he should keep the Poll Tax, Labour should notice that a large part of their policy agenda is a series of open goals.

Miliband’s speech has been criticised as a ‘core vote strategy’. But in that case, who is Labour’s core vote? People who go to the doctor, people who will in the future get old, and people who have bills to pay. If that is Labour’s target demographic, then that’s a pretty savvy election strategy. The newspapers may have you believe that these policies appeal to a left-wing rump of the country. But then newspapers are exclusively owned by people who own houses worth more than two million pounds.

The brilliant thing about Miliband is that he’s actually talking to the vast majority of the country. The unfortunate thing is that he’s not doing it particularly well.