Nesrine Malik is spot-on (The creep of corpspeak: why have Starmer and Sunak’s promises become ‘priorities’?, 4 June). Corporatist language is designed to bleed political rhetoric of all meaning, serving a corporate culture impregnable to changes of government. In the case of the Tories, “corpspeak” is morphing into “corpse speak”, as the decaying carcass of the party is devoured by National Conservative vultures, opening the door to outright populist control after the expected election defeat.
An incoming Labour government will inherit a broken economy and ravaged public services. Failure to have distinguished itself from the Tories risks early rejection in favour of a charismatic demagogue. Labour needs to replace vacuous corpspeak with clear guiding principles and a coherent programme, backed by recognisable and meaningful slogans with which the public can identify, in order to command long-term support. Leaving clarification of key policies to the election will be too late.
Dr Anthony Isaacs
London
• Nesrine Malik is right to say that the government and opposition have clearly converged in so many areas, as revealed through their shared use of corporate speak. But how are we supposed to respond to language bereft of meaning in its sloganeering and soundbites? With whom exactly are politicians communicating when using language so far removed from what the rest of us use every day? Since these are meant to be the slickest of slick communicators, and the audience must surely be voters, in what possible way do we sit in their conception of us?
Few of us ever take part in focus groups, attend political meetings or belong to political parties, but that is no excuse. In future, when a trapped tenant in atrocious housing conditions speaks of their plight they need to talk of their personal “housing challenges” rather than their despair, in the hope that somebody might hear.
Dr Peter Mangan
Beckenham, Kent
• Nesrine Malik pinpoints the fact that Keir Starmer’s language, policies and intentions differ little from those of the Tory party. I want Keir Starmer to unashamedly misquote Margaret Thatcher and say that there is an alternative to the Conservative formula of yet more austerity, nepotism, industrial chaos and crisis. Voters are desperate for change. Not just a change of personnel but a fairer distribution of wealth, a rebuilding of key public services and an end to the dishonest and incompetent governance that the Tories inflicted on us for far too long. That should be the manifesto Starmer offers the country. If he has no real alternative to offer then the electorate will ask what is the point of voting Labour.
Peter Riddle
Wirksworth, Derbyshire
• I have to disagree that political corpspeak is a new phenomenon. I have a newspaper cutting from 1990 reporting on a parliamentary debate where MPs from both parties indulged in obscure language: “We wish to go down the high status value route”; “we are going to roll out connection partnerships”; “we must engage all stakeholders”; “we must promote excellence, discipline and diversity”, etc.
For connoisseurs of this kind of political language, we can go even further back to President Roosevelt, who told the American people that they “had a rendezvous with destiny”, which sounds splendid, but means absolutely nothing.
Ian Arnott
Peterborough
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
