Words: Project

Project

'WE'VE got to be the party,' Tony Blair has told the editor of the New Statesman, 'that is going out addressing the problems that people face in the workplace and in society today. And that,' he added, 'is a project that is beginning with this leadership.' Mr Blair is a great man for projects. He has one for European integration, another for educational renewal and a general one 'to rebuild Britain as a strong and cohesive society' ('the Blair project', as we have learnt to call it.)

You can understand his fondness for the word, so much crisper than mere policies offered by rival party spokesmen. There are heartening echoes from the construction industry. You imagine the project engineer, hard-hatted, scale drawings in hand, patrolling the site as the great edifice begins to soar.

But to any self-respecting left-of-centre person a project means much more than that. It is a whole scheme of life. Those not committed to one are without purpose. ('But has he a project? No? Don't marry him.')

However, Mr Blair would be wise not to use the word too often for it has more prosaic associations from schooldays. The 'project method' is meant to involve pupils in schemes of work which they carry out themselves. And the results can be dispiriting. Remember the test tube whose contents, over the Bunsen burner, were expected to change magically into beautiful blue or gold crystals, but produced only a sticky brown mess?

In truth project is too broad a word for serious political purposes. It embraces too many madcap ideas, too many earnest culs- de-sac. Nor is this new. The OED has a nice quotation from John Taylor, the poet. 'Some get their livings,' he wrote in 1630, 'by their brains, as politicians, monopolists, project-mongers, suit-joggers and star-gazers.' A project, once something precise, had already become something vague. That might also suit Mr Blair, who has said he dislikes 'things written in concrete', but he can't have it both ways.