A brand new ‘robust’ framework was being woven and nailed together, so the Prime Minister announced at the end of last week. It’s barely a year since he presented the UK with a similar kind of structure, which he called the Windsor Framework. I imagined it to resemble in some way a Windsor chair. In 1766, the newspaper Jackson’s Oxford Journal (which still had more than a century of success ahead of it) declared that ‘the Bodleian Library has most confessedly been very much improved by the Introduction of Windsor-Chairs, so admirably calculated for Ornament and Repose’. The Windsor framework didn’t prove quite so reposeful.
There is no agreement on what a framework should look like. Someone in the Guardian was complaining recently that the English Football League lacked ‘a clear and transparent framework’ for sanctions. That sounds like the glass cucumber frame into which the White Rabbit fell in Alice in Wonderland. Everything seems to need a framework to keep it in order. There are sentencing frameworks, a flood-recovery framework, a Rugby League framework on head-on-head contact, and a judicial framework that makes it impossible, so a judge complained last month, ‘to be both “trans” and a salaried, fairly prominent judge’.
When explaining the science of perspective, I can see how it helped to sketch lines superimposed on the visible world. For a while physicists imagined a framework, later a frame of reference, bolted on to the universe, against which to describe movement in space and time. Such a framework, used metaphorically, was then applied to any area of activity to impose inescapable rules. The same use was made of the metaphor guidelines. These were first used literally in the business of surveying. Now guidelines have sometimes drifted from being voluntary indicators to become strict penal laws.
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