Words: Patronising

Alistair Darling, our Secretary of State for Social Security, has a hard word for left-wingers who don't like his benefits policy. His Welfare Reform Bill was going to help people to help themselves, he told the Independent on the eve of its publication last week, but its Old Labour critics were adopting a "patronising attitude" which left claimants over-dependent on the State.

Patronising is the sort of word which, uttered in a left-wing pub, would have the speaker invited to come outside and say it again. It's the last word real Socialists would want used - particularly by those to the right of them - about their own policies, since it is one that they themselves have always used against Tories.

A patron is a protector, and stems from the same word pater that is the Latin for a father; but the correct Socialist view is that the jobless and the disabled don't want protecting. What they want is the chance to assert their natural rights. Anything else smacks of do-goodery, and should instantly be labelled paternalistic.

So it was a shrewd blow of Mr Darling's. Not that anyone likes to be called patronising, whatever their politics. Of course it now carries a nasty association with superiority and contempt, with the person patronised being over-beholden to the patroniser, but this was not the implication of the word patron when we borrowed it off the French, or if it was, no one much minded, since it was taken for granted that practically everyone was beholden to someone or other.

It was only with the notion of the enlightened, free-born Englishman, who up to then had hardly been invented, that the word patronise began to acquire an unpleasant off-flavour. Before that a person who was kind enough to patronise someone was heartily thanked for it. I don't know when the change began, but the editors of the 1989 OED could find no clear example of patronise meaning "behave condescendingly towards" earlier than 1820, and no example of the adjective patronising in its modem sense earlier than 1827 - at first, all it had meant was "acting the part of a patron", nothing wrong with that.

So far as I am aware the French don't even have the word patroniser. And they have remained truer than we have to the history of the word we got from them: le patron is always the boss, and in restaurants he is the owner, whereas an English patron is the one who pays the bill. We have made it an ambiguous word. One may safely patronise a restaurant, but one should never patronise a friend.

Mr Darling also told the Independent that the government wanted "a sea change in the culture of the system", and I rather wish he hadn't. Even quite minor changes are called sea changes these days. Nor, if we remember the origin of the phrase, is it all that appropriate to the future of the welfare state, having been coined by Ariel in The Tempest to describe what must have happened to the corpse of the drowned King of Naples after the fishes had got to it. At least the benefits system isn't dead yet.