By asserting manifest absurdities

Maurice Cousins has a useful Critic piece on the corruption of language as a vehicle for political control, especially as it relates to the manifest absurdities of UK energy policy.

The new “enemy within”

Britain needs clear thinking and cheap energy

During the 1970 general election campaign, Enoch Powell delivered a speech in Birmingham in which he warned that Britain was under attack from what he called “the enemy within”. This enemy, he said, was not a physical adversary but a moral and intellectual one. It operated through ideas, slogans and intimidation rather than armies and violence.

Its weapon of choice was purely linguistic. By “asserting manifest absurdities as if they were self-evident truths”, elites dissolved the public’s confidence in its own capacity to reason. The result was paralysis. Ordinary people began to mistrust their senses, defer to official narratives and police their own speech. He warned: “In the end, it renders the majority… incapable of self-defence by depriving them of their wits and convincing them that what they thought was right is wrong, what they thought was real is unreal.” This was the same pathology that George Orwell had described a generation earlier in Politics and the English Language: the corruption of language as the corruption of thought.

The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of how crucial it is to retain free speech as a cultural norm. For example, the term ‘politically correct’ is much more useful than the term ‘woke’, as ‘politically correct’ demands ‘correct language’ in a way that ‘woke’ doesn’t. The covert notion of ‘correct language’ is where censorship shoves its foot in the door.

I was reminded of Powell’s “enemy within” speech this week after reading Professor Sir Dieter Helm’s latest essay on British energy policy. Helm, Oxford economist, former government adviser and hardly a radical, accused ministers of presiding over an energy system that is “not cheap, not home-grown and not secure”. It was his second broadside in a week. In a recent podcast, he went further, predicting that the government would eventually have to renege on renewable contracts if we ever wish to return to economic competitiveness.