Control

In his speech on immigration last week, David Cameron said a couple of funny things. I’m not talking about the politics. Heaven forbid. I mean the language. Why did he call the City of London ‘the financial epicentre of the world’? Epicentre means ‘the point over the centre’, and in seismology it is the place on the Earth’s surface above the subterranean seat of an earthquake. So, unless he believes in an army of immigrant Morlocks slaving away beneath the City, I’d imagine Mr Cameron just meant centre. Epicentre sounds classier.

Then he spoke of worries about ‘the scale of people coming into the country’. I doubt that he thinks them too tall or too short or badly proportioned. It is the scale of the immigration that’s the trouble.

Most popular

Michael Gove

‘I’m a new kind of Christian’: Jordan Peterson on faith, family and the future of the right

This may betray woolly thinking, but the language is presumably that of the speechwriter, and it is hard to iron out these wrinkles in a discussion by committee.