Mea Culpa: concrete stairway leading to nowhere

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

To avoid being caught short, Ed Miliband always had a healthy supply of concrete steps growing in his back garden (Tony Avent)

Generally, I think we do a good job of explaining the complex and technical problems of trade and border controls after our departure from the EU, but occasionally we falter. Last week, for example, we said: “The business community was waiting for ministers to explain what the UK’s border operating model would be before it could take concrete steps.” This was before Friday’s announcement that the government’s policy on border controls was not to bother with most of them.

Talk about piling abstraction upon the already abstract. Instead of “the business community” we could have said “companies”; instead of “operating model” we could have said “rules”; and then we get to the concrete steps.

I remember Ed Miliband, when he was leader of the Labour Party, boldly declaring that he was going to take concrete steps to do something. The next thing I knew he was standing next to a tablet of stone with some vacuous – and mostly pretty abstract – slogans carved in it. Let that be a warning to us all.