Speechification

This show’s a bit like when you’re a kid and your friend’s parents are Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah’s Witnesses or something and you’re dying to get a look at the inside of their house to see if they have an altar or interesting dietary habits and then they turn out to be just like your own Mum and Dad (only no Christmas presents—which is just inhuman). It’s about The Socialist Workers Party and it got me grumbling and groaning round the house (”Bloody Trots”) a few weeks ago.

I never attained the heights of political awareness that my SWP mates did. But that didn’t stop them bugging me for years (and selling me their infernal, braindead newspaper in my own front room). So I wasn’t very positively disposed towards this 15-minute doc (part one of two) about the party. But the members and loyalists interviewed are less nutty and self-righteous than I remember and they provide some interesting insight into the ways of Britain’s largest kooky political tribe (but none at all into their actual politics, which is a pity—maybe that was in part two). MP3.

The shows originally went out as part of Sunday evening’s excellent Westminster Hour and they have a good archive so you can listen to both shows again here.

The Sunday Supplement is one of the highlights of the Westminster Hour. This week’s was “The Jam Generation” (MP3), presented by Anne McElvoy of the Evening Standard.

Photo credit: ‘Jam of Sun’ by yvesmoreaux

None of the “music of conspicuous consumption of Duran Duran and Wham” for the Jam Generation. The people who lived their teenage years to an acoustic back-drop of Paul Weller’s ‘The Jam’ have reached the tops of their political parties.

Strange and fascinating to hear (around 08:20) that David Cameron listened to The Jam (and The Clash) while growing up. Hard to imagine him tapping his brand new shoes to The Eton Rifles when he was a member of the actual Eton Rifles. The cadet corps of Eton college, described by Weller as “a bunch of tossers” for heckling a socialist right-to-work march, inspired the song by the same name.

A largely interesting documentary, and is only fleetingly irritating when the politics is occasionally allowed to break the surface. I’ll be looking out for the second part next Sunday.

This is the third time I’ve talked about the Sunday Supplement but if you’re a real fan the Sunday Supplement Archive lets you listen to them all the way back to 2005.

The current Matthew d’Ancona Sunday Supplement reminds me of another one, the best bit of thoughtful commentary on modern political bullshit I’ve recently heard, and I’m glad to see it’s still online. Not My Words, Mr Speaker by Matthew Parris was broadcast a couple of months ago.

Matthew Parris takes a canter through the arid badlands of political language and asks why politicians drape their speeches in the tired glad-rags of stale phrases.

Matthew Parris was an MP before he was a political commentator, and understands this world as well as anyone. He seems to delight in highlighting the clichés which litter political life in Britain. At one point Parris suggests a “ticking time-bomb” as an example of a well-worn phrase to Norman Tebbit. Tebbit, you’ll remember, was injured in the 1984 bomb attack of the Tory party conference in Brighton. Much as I love Matthew Parris, it’s also rather fun to hear him blush at that point.

Part one (MP3, Real) covers

1. Grabbing attention by dramatising with sensational language (holed beneath the waterline)
2. Padding (year on year on year)
3. Make a question sound like an answer (we need a debate…)

Some brilliant examples, including “Rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic”, “Hearts and minds” and “I’ll take no lectures”. In part two (Real) we hear more modern examples of post New Labour bullshit bingo, including “rolling out”, “we must be seen to walk the talk” and the latest favourite, “across the piece”.

Matthew d’Ancona (he’s the editor of the Spectator, but you might know him for doing a great Al Pacino impression at Interesting 2007) asks “whether the World Wide Web has the potential to reshape society” in Power and the Web. Here’s the first part (MP3, Real).

You can also hear it as the ‘Sunday Supplement’ of the Westminster Hour, broadcast on Sunday evening.