Richard Ingrams’s Week: Why say what you mean when you can use jargon

I was never much good at philosophy, which I studied at Oxford, but it did give me the useful habit, in the age of jargon, of asking what people mean when they say certain things.

Before looking at the facts in the case, say, of the Baby P tragedy, it helps to pay attention to the language used by officialdom in all its different grades.

You could start, I suppose, by noting the way the dead boy is not to be known by his name. By pinning, for whatever reason (legal or otherwise), the label Baby P on him, they immediately diminish his humanity and make him look like just another case history.

Then there is the language of the social services. Writing yesterday in The Independent, a retired doctor who had worked in Haringey described trying to alert the authorities to a clear case of child abuse, only to be advised "not visiting for fear of upsetting the family dynamics".

If anything should ring alarm bells – to use the familiar cliché in such stories – it is the use of words such as this which you will find nowadays in many walks of life and particularly in education, the aim of which ought to be to teach people to express themselves clearly and whenever possible in words of one syllable.

If you want to understand Sharon Shoesmith, the head of social services in Haringey, consider carefully the title of a talk she is due to deliver next year at a conference in Japan: "Breaking Down Silos: Inspiring Ownership and Sharing Responsibilities for Measuring Impacts and Outcomes Across Partnerships".

No sensible person could possibly have any confidence in someone capable of delivering such a lecture.

It worked for Thatcher. Could it work for Osborne?

Since the affair of the Russian oligarch's yacht, George Osborne's reputation has suffered a dramatic slump. Many, like me, will find this satisfying as Osborne always had a rather too cocky air about him which we found mildly offensive.

Faced with a number of setbacks, Osborne is now reported to be having elocution lessons. Different explanations have been offered. One is that Osborne is worried that he speaks too much like a toff and is trying to give his accent more of what is called an estuary flavour. This is something that public schoolboys have been doing for some time and even Tony Blair had a go at it, though not very successfully.

Other reports suggest that Osborne thinks he would do better in the opinion polls if he lowered his voice a bit. This again has been tried, but more often by women. Early on in her career, Margaret Thatcher was advised that she was putting off the voters by speaking too stridently and too squeakily. With the help of no less a person than Lord Olivier, the Iron Lady, pictured above in 1975, transformed her voice into a more soothing contralto. It worked.

It is a pity that more women, particularly those employed by the BBC, have not followed her example, as there are few things more offputting than a rasping female voice like that, for example, of Ms Sandi Toksvig. The point was well made by King Lear, who said of his dead daughter Cordelia, "her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman".

If only the punters would behave ...

The BBC's attitude to John Sergeant, voted by viewers the most popular star of Strictly Come Dancing, illustrates again the general distaste for democracy. Politicians and pundits all pay lip-service to the wonders of democracy. It was, you will remember, one of the main justifications for the invasion of Iraq. We would get rid of the evil dictator Saddam Hussein and introduce all the special advantages of democracy to the country.

But, when it comes to putting it into practice, our leaders don't actually like democracy, the reason being that, given the choice, the voters have an awkward tendency to vote for the wrong sort of people. The Iraqis were supposed to vote for nice, moderate politicians in suits who were keen on our so-called Western values. Instead of which, they showed an unhelpful preference for bearded ayatollahs with links to Iran who regarded the likes of Bush and Blair with understandable distaste. The same sort of thing had happened with the people of Northern Ireland, who turned their backs on the middle-of-the-road candidates and voted in large numbers for Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams.

The BBC viewers of Strictly Come Dancing were told by the judges who the best dancers were. Instead of which, they perversely insisted on voting for Sergeant, the man with two left feet.

A similar process often occurs in the courts where juries, which again uphold the democratic principle, persist in acquitting the accused even after a judge has made it clear that he is guilty. No wonder that the jury system is increasingly under attack from those who think they know better.

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