MR SIMON HOGGART, MR MATTHEW PARRIS, MR DAVID CRYSTAL AND MS MARIE CLAIR

9 JULY 2009

  Q40  Mr Prentice: What about when politicians use simple words but give those simple words new meaning? In the Prime Minister's relaunch document, Building Britain's Future he talked about "entitlement" and I thought that an entitlement would confer a right to something which would be enforceable, but that is really not what entitlement means in the context of that document. What is the Plain English Campaign doing to alert people to the fact that politicians may be using words and giving them a different meaning?

  Ms Clair: This is exactly the point that we have to defend often about plain English. It is not dumbing down, it is not simple, it is not about using a short word. Sometimes really to understand and get clarity and honesty behind a meaning, you may need to use more words, but what is essential is that the audience at which you are aiming that message will understand and that the language is appropriate for them. If "entitlement" is a word that is understood in one context amongst one group, that is fine, but we are really concerned when this is used on a much wider basis that it can be interpreted in so many different ways. It is not about complicated words.

  Q41  Mr Prentice: Matthew at the beginning said the public are not fooled, and perhaps it is the stock in trade of politicians to fool the public. If politicians are using words routinely like "entitlement" and "guarantee" then they have their agenda. They want people to think that people have new rights which they can exercise, but that is not the case.

  Mr Parris: I do not think we need to worry about it too much because I think people see through it very quickly. I think someone who uses "entitlement" in a context in which he does not mean "entitlement" is simply being foolish because the question: "How am I to get my entitlement?" will come quite fast and there will not be an answer. I do not think we need to worry about that.

  Mr Hoggart: The equivalent is the ad "You deserve it"—which I think is for hairspray. How the hell do they know? I am lazy and slovenly, what do I deserve?

  Chairman: Yes, "Because you deserve it."

  Q42  Mr Walker: I cannot recite word for word Churchill's speeches, nor Obama's, nor Tony Blair's.

  Professor Crystal: "Yes, we can."

  Q43  Mr Walker: But I remember that they had passion, that they could move a room. I remember the clause 4 debate at the Labour Party Conference. John Prescott, a man widely dismissed as being inarticulate, gave the most incredible passionate speech that moved the room. So it is not necessarily what you say; it is how you say it. There was a ripple of laughter when somebody said the one-minute speech, and you, Marie Clair, said that would be a good thing. I could think of no better way of showing disrespect to people on many occasions than by talking about the sacrifices being made in Afghanistan and Iraq by families and young men by giving it a one-minute speech. I am not quite sure where you gentlemen are coming from. I agree with you that many politicians have little to say but there are a few politicians who have a great deal to say and they say it very well. Do you not accept that?

  Ms Clair: I certainly accept that, because, as we said earlier on about the arresting situation, there is a difference between language that is creative, that is emotive, that is passionate—and I am passionate about plain English, but the fact is that plain English needs to be used when it is simply about getting information across in a way that is easily understood. If you are rousing people to feel something, you are not necessarily going to do it in 140 letters, but if people understand what is at the end of that passionate speech, then you have achieved your aim.

  Professor Crystal: I think you are absolutely right, Charles. It is only the bad news that gets the publicity. It is only the bad occasions. It is only the people saying, "I didn't understand that." Far more frequently than that are the occasions when people do understand. This morning, as you may not be aware, I had five minutes on Today with Matthew and while we were waiting for our turn (because Today always treats language as being a little end of term kind of affair) we were listening to Ed Miliband talking. It does not matter about what; the point was, I understood every word. There was five minutes of stuff there and it was absolutely clear, no problem at all about it. I suspect that if one listened and listened and listened, and genuinely listened in an objective way, you would find that probably, I do not know what the percentage would be, the majority of stuff would be clear enough, no problem. That never gets the publicity at all.

  Mr Parris: It was Churchill himself who said, "I'm sorry to have made such a long speech but I didn't have time to write a shorter one."

  Q44  Mr Walker: And he said, "If you can't say it in 20 minutes, go away and write a book about it." There is an art here to making a speech clearly, and many people go on too long, but do you think the art of speech-making has been downgraded by the fact that the media is simply not interested in reporting much of what is said in the House of Commons? Mr Hoggart, you said that you are here to take the piss, and quite frankly that is what most political journalists do now: they are not really interested in serious politics. Politics has become a branch of the entertainments industry—and we are as much responsible for that as you are.

  Mr Hoggart: No, I think we are probably more responsible. There is a Sherlock Holmes' short story—I think it is the Cardboard Box - in which Dr Watson is saying how bored he is in August in London, nothing is happening, and he says, "Parliament was not sitting, so there was little to read in the newspapers." It is inconceivable that a news editor would think that, because all the more space for David Beckham's injured foot or whatever and Jordan's marriage break-up. When I came to work here for the first time in 1973, there was a Times room—and Matthew will know this—which had 16 people in who produced a record of virtually every speech that was made in the Commons the previous day. Obviously it was not like Hansard, it was not verbatim, but: "Sir Patrick Cormack said that he disagreed with the proposal on the grounds that... " and every speech would be mentioned. That is long ago gone. More recently, the papers felt, like you, that we should have more coverage of what was being said in Parliament, and so most of the broad sheets (as we then were) put in an extra parliamentary correspondent who would do the same and produce half a page, perhaps, of what had been said. They soon discovered from the page traffic reports which they do constantly, all the time, that nobody was reading it at all, and they were taken out. I am afraid that one of the reasons why we sketch writers are preserved for the time being at least—and I do not know for how much longer—is that people do read it, and they read it more often than they read the far more important articles about some subtle shift in defence policy.

  Q45  Mr Walker: As opposed to wide-screen TVs. Professor Crystal, you were talking about the internet, and you were talking about chat rooms and threads. Why is it that most people in chat rooms and threads that I come across—and maybe I am just unlucky—are just so miserable and violent and vicious? Why are they so malcontented? Why do they wish such terrible things on their fellow mankind? I do not think ordinary, nice, happy people go on to the internet.

  Professor Crystal: Yes, they do. You really have to cast your net very, very wide and you do get a lot of what you say but you also get the opposite. I have never done the analysis of positive versus negative attitudes on the internet, but if one did I think one would find a representative selection of all sorts of attitudes. There are some forums which are extremely positive and you would be delighted to be part of them. But the thing about the internet is that, unless the site is moderated, it does allow you to say what you want. An awful lot of people, for whatever reason, do have axes to grind about all sorts of things and, suddenly, they find a medium where you can say whatever you like and in whatever language you like pretty well—although there are a few filters for this and that—and so they make use of it. It is probably a novelty of the medium. I suspect this will slow down as time goes by and people get used to it and realise that sounding off is not going to do much more than, say, cursing when you bang your head against a cupboard door or something like that.

  Mr Parris: Information technology can, I think, be bent to your Committee's and to the Plain English Campaign's purpose. A couple of years ago, with a BBC analyst over at Millbank called Paul Twin we made a couple of 15-minute programmes for Radio 4 about very much the subject that your Committee is covering. If the Committee would like, I will see that they are sent over. All Mr Twin needed to do was to assemble the archive of parliamentary speeches and questions and then do a word search. For instance, for "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic" I think we found about 430 instances. Of "level playing field," "fatally holed below the waterline," "dead in the water," it is a very good tool for tracking the incidence, the rise and the fall, of particularly unfortunate expressions.

  Q46  David Heyes: I would like to try to get a feel from you as to what we ought to be doing about this, what the politicians ought to be doing about it, what recommendations this Committee might make that parliamentarians might act on. I have a pretty clear idea from you of the things you would do: it is a continuation of ridicule—or focused criticism, as you may prefer to call it; a continuation of an effective Plain English Campaign; a continuation of academic work. All that will go on and maybe be stepped up, but what should we be doing? It seems to me this is just one aspect of the loss of faith in politics and politicians that is the most important task of Parliament at the moment to do something about that, to try to rebuild that lost trust, and sorting out the language we use and our accessibility is an important feature. What should we be doing? It is difficult to see how we might legislate. It would not be popular to introduce fines for inappropriate language. We could maybe set up a quango. What else ought we to be doing as politicians?

  Mr Hoggart: It is a matter of care, really. On Mr Hopkins's point, it is much harder to write crisply. It takes longer to write a short speech, as Churchill said. Tabloid journalism is far more difficult than what we do because you have to get often a very complicated thing and express it in very few words which will be understood by every single reader. Just take a little bit more time. It is much more important with ministers, who very, very often have speeches prepared for them by civil servants. Ministers are fantastically busy. All Members of Parliament, I know, are fantastically busy. When given a speech, the idea of taking out half an hour from your incredibly busy day and saying, "No, I hate that phrase. That means nothing. What are we really trying to say here?" must be very, very difficult for a minister to do, but if he or she did have time to say, "This is what we are trying to convey to our colleagues in Parliament and to the Public," that would be a wonderful thing.

  Professor Crystal: I would say that one thing you can do is focus on the point I was making some time ago about the need for good models. Every now and then I guess most of you will encounter somebody saying something or writing something, and everybody saying, "That was good." We have talked about Churchill, we have talked about Barack Obama, and there will be local examples, where you say, "That was good." What happens to that piece of good English? It is just part of Hansard now and maybe it might get into the press. As you say, it might get the occasional mention, but then it is forgotten forever. Why should there not be a little archive of good practice built up in some way which is party neutral, when people say these are good examples of not necessarily plain English but effective English in the context in which the language is going to be used.

  Q47  Mr Walker: It is not what you say, it is how you say it.

  Professor Crystal: It is the way that you say it.

  Q48  Mr Walker: Passion. John Prescott, clause 4. "John Smith believes because that is what John Smith believes" was total rubbish but the man was totally believable and he had passion and emotion. That is the difference. That is what moves room, not the bloody content. It is how you say it.

  Professor Crystal: It is both.

  Q49  Chairman: We should ask Simon about that, because you have had fun with John Prescott over the years.

  Mr Hoggart: John Prescott did not use much jargon at all. He used good demotic English; it is just that he got his words jumbled up. He was talking about the firefighters' strike and the FBU became "the FBI", and he talked about the leader "Mr Andy Christ," for example. But he spoke in a very jargon-free way, John Prescott. I notice now that he is a blogger principally, rather than a Member of Parliament. I do not think that was a problem at all, really.

  Q50  David Heyes: I would be interested to hear what Matthew and Marie have to say in response to my question. What should we be doing as politicians about this?

  Mr Parris: As I said earlier on, not to feel ashamed to be sticklers and to harp on about questions of phraseology and vocabulary. I think it should become a fashionable thing to do.

  Q51  Mr Prentice: Should we be comfortable about using words like "subsidy"? I cannot remember the last time I heard a Member of Parliament talk about subsidising".

  Mr Parris: No, it is investing now.

  Q52  Mr Prentice: It is investing. Maybe we ought just to be more honest with people If we are talking about the East Coast Mainline, we could say to people, "We cannot run a railway without subsidising it," instead of wrapping it up in all this talk about investment.

  Mr Hoggart: That came from the bookies, did it not? A £10 investment can win you £100.

  Professor Crystal: Have you ever gone in for word clouds yet? Have any of you done word clouds? You take a huge chunk of language and you put it through a computer and the computer spews out a cloud of the words, with the most frequent occurring words most prominent and in a nice big colour, and the next most frequently occurring words not so big, and you get this cloud. If you did that—I am not quite sure how often—day by day or perhaps week by week, then suddenly "subsidy" would be high and then maybe "investment" would be high, and you would see the coming and going of vocabulary. Maybe if you had that on a screen at the back of the House all the time, it would alert the people to the way things are going.

  Chairman: Perhaps you could help us. Perhaps we could produce a glossary, so that whenever one of these words was used people could turn up and see what it meant.

  Q53  David Heyes: Is that part of what Plain English—

  Ms Clair: Funnily enough, that is one of the methods we use. The recommendations that Chrissie Maher told me to bring to this meeting are no different from what we have been doing over the past 30 years with all sizes of organisation, and that is to get the understanding from people at the top, not necessarily to get them re-writing everything they do in plain English or speaking in plain English when it is not appropriate, but the reality is if those people understand the purpose of clearer communications then those people, the foot soldiers, the ones who are on the frontline who have that job of communicating the message with the public in a way that they understand, they will have the wherewithal, the resources and the proper understanding of what the senior officers mean. You start off with getting everyone at the top understanding what is happening, buying into it—you can tick that one in the box as well—and then you set up a programme, as we do, with training, you review the documents, you look at the material you have, you identify by whatever means where the danger words or dangers areas, the hotspots, are, and you deal with those. You come to some agreement because, yes, not everyone is going to say this is the only way to do something, but that is why it is important to test the solution that you come to with the right audience. A lot of the time, the work that we do, particularly to acquire a crystal mark on a document for any organisation is to test it with the audience that is intended and that sample will give you their honest feedback and you will know whether you have got it right or not. That way there is no excuse for them not understanding.

  Q54  Mr Prentice: There is a lot of talk about parliamentary jargon just being impenetrable. Do you get a lot of people talking to you about just how difficult they find it to understand what is happening in Parliament?

  Ms Clair: Yes.

  Q55  Mr Prentice: Would you like to see us get rid of all this "Honourable Member" stuff and "Right Honourable Member" stuff and talk to each other by name? Would that help?

  Ms Clair: From the public responses that we get, they do not want to do away with tradition. There is an understanding that communication is as much a part of our culture and heritage and what makes us the people we are. Some of those traditions are part of what we do, but it is when it comes to public information that is needed to be acted upon, it is fine if you are going to talk in that way and you are happy to do so within your various meetings and hearings and such like, whether it is in the courts or anywhere else, but at some point that will need to be translated for other people to deal with.

  Q56  Mr Prentice: Could I ask our two sketch writers if they would advise the Speaker to modernise and update our parliamentary language and traditions, just to remove that barrier of understanding that there is?

  Mr Parris: No, I would not. I think the slightly ceremonious parliamentary language, particularly the rule that one speaks always in the third person rather than the second person does not impede meaning or understanding at all. It does give a slightly ceremonious patina to the whole thing, but it does not impede understanding. I also think, from the point of view of keeping tempers in the House, that once people start saying "you" it can quite quickly turn into something like a fist-fight. That just is a slightly calming influence.

  Mr Hoggart: We saw that with Cameron shouting at Brown recently, "You're hopeless." Even Michael Martin paid attention to that. I think Matthew is absolutely right. It has to be "my Right Honourable and gallant friend."

  Q57  Kelvin Hopkins: For the first time ever I think I disagree with my colleague Gordon here and agree very strongly with what Matthew and you have just been saying about this third person usage. I may say that I think the debate this morning has been too much about speaking. I think often the speeches we do understand, especially speeches from non-government ministers. The Government is maybe trying to obfuscate and make less clear, in a sense, because they are trying to hide things, whereas everyone else is speaking quite clearly. I must say I enjoy listening to speeches. It is government publications, government statements, and written speeches by ministers where the problem arises. When they are trying to describe something about PFI, for example, PFI is a way of ripping off the public purse, to pour vast sums of money into corporate pockets. That is what PFI is about and yet that does not come across. It is portrayed as something benign. I might say that and nobody would disagree with me. They might say, "I think I would phrase it rather differently", but that is the truth. Speeches, I think, should not be the target. It is publications. It is written statements. It is government statements by ministers.

  Mr Parris: Perhaps in its conclusions and recommendations the Committee should suggest that PFI should be replaced with RPP (ripping off the public purse).

  Kelvin Hopkins: Absolutely.

  Q58  Chairman: A member of the public has sent us in a very nice submission on PFI. I think it is a she and she translates the language in great detail—not quite in the robust way that Kelvin has given us but something pretty close. Perhaps I could just give you this thought at the end. As you think about this and have this discussion, you can see a terrible danger looming, can you not, which is that if after all this mockery and the rest of it politicians finally do get the message and therefore they work out that a sort of plain speaking is much better than the other stuff, what you get then is a sort of faux authenticity develop which in turn will have to be mocked by you and so we shall go around in circles.

  Mr Parris: Yes. We are already.

  Q59  Chairman: A bleak conclusion.

  Ms Clair: But that is for the internal. Our concern really is about public information and what people understand.

  Chairman: Yes, of course. Thank you stakeholders. I think we have had a meaningful interaction. Thank you very much indeed for all your time this morning.