Shaun Wright, the police and crime commissioner for South Yorkshire, spoke to Sky television last week about how little he knew of sexual exploitation of young people in the area. ‘This report demonstrates that lots of information was not escalated up to political level or indeed senior management level,’ he said. ‘For that I am hugely shocked and hugely sorry.’ He did not apologise for having used the word escalated, no doubt because he thinks it is a fine and proper thing for a man in his position to use the word escalate.
Mr Wright uses escalate in a different sense from the escalation reported in the papers last week of violence in the Middle East. I was complaining mildly here in the spring (Mind your language, 15 March) about de-escalating, which is what David Cameron called for in Ukraine.
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