Notebook

For obvious reasons, people are always looking for a nicer word for right-wing. For a while, they tried ‘free-market’ — after all, it sounds spirited and buccaneering — but the 2008 financial crisis left that one holed below the waterline. There was a brief fashion for trying to make the word ‘laissez-faire’ sound attractive, but it succumbed to the same lethal question Raymond Williams once asked of the permissive society. ‘Oh yes? And, tell me, who exactly is meant to be doing the permitting?’ After that, the right tried vainly to appropriate the word ‘radical’ and make it work for their side. All wingnut think-tanks and rich men’s lobby groups, when coming up with ingenious wheezes to make the poor suffer even more, were suddenly styled ‘radical’. Andrew Lansley always called his proposals to axe hospitals ‘radical’. But now we’re groaning under this Mickey Mouse usage ‘libertarian’. It’s meaningless. Michael Gove wants centrally to dictate the curriculum in schools, to ban BBC television plays he doesn’t like, and has let out not one squeak of protest against the Home Secretary’s plans to read all our private emails.