On "Broken Britain" and pedantry

 
The Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella, has this to say on the word "broken":

One breaks things like guitar strings, bicycle chains, and glasses. That which is broken no longer functions as it was intended to. A broken X is not a suboptimally functioning X but a nonfunctioning X.

That seems fair. Vallicella points to Obama's (mis)use of the word to describe the U.S.' healthcare system.

But the most prominent use of the word here in the UK in recent times has been in the phrase "Broken Britain". It was used by David Cameron in the Conservative's General Election campaign earlier this year. What does it mean? Those without the patience for such questions may say that we shouldn't "quibble", that "we know what it means". But unless there's a clear definition we really actually don't.

An image from prepriministerial days:
Cameron, visiting an estate in Manchester

The point of such a phrase is to conjure up associations and images, to play on the emotions. In fact, the phrase is powerful and successful in the way that photographs can be — without any context, we are left baffled and end up bringing our own values (or, if you like, narratives) to bear on the image.

A phrase like this can become a rallying point, for people who believe they share the same values and that the phrase somehow articulates those values. But the point is that phrases like this don't articulate anything.

Cameron's call for a "Big Society" as a fix for "Broken Britain" may be more helpful but suffers from a similar weakness of definition. It sounds aspirational but it's a euphemism, the very vagueness of which seems to protect the government's aims from accountability and leave us busy, hotly debating its meaning.

Like Obama's "hope" and "change" of 2008, or more recently "squeezed middle" from UK Labour Leader Ed Milband, such phrases aren't supposed to articulate anything. They're designed to be pithy and catchy. The best one can say about them is that they generate debate, but unfortunately I tend to think the worst: that they're distractions which lead to pedantic posts like this one. Meanwhile, somewhere out there, there are issues that are both deserving of more precise language and in need of being debated and discussed.
 

Modern Policing in the UK

 
My friend just sent me a couple of links to items he said made him feel "angry and upset". So be warned.

One link is to an article from The Guardian about protestor Jody McIntyre being tipped out of his wheelchair and dragged across the street, here.

The other to a (slightly glitchy) YouTube video of a BBC interview with McIntyre, in which he is asked at least twice whether he was "rolling towards" the police in question:



The BBC interviewer (Ben Brown) asks some other frankly absurd questions. For example, would McIntyre label himself as a "revolutionary"? But since when did a person's beliefs become reasonable grounds for inflicting violence when that person poses no threat?

Perhaps one could argue that beliefs, statements, even statements of fact constitute some sort of threat. But the point here is that McIntyre posed no physical threat to the police, even if one were to argue that in his beliefs he posed some sort of threat to society.

Surely in the policing of protest, the police are ideally looking to prevent or stop violence and destruction. That is, they should deal with physical threats or actions and not with why the protesters are actually there. Whether that is what the police have actually been doing in practice is another question, perhaps one the BBC should have asked instead of looking into McIntyre's beliefs.

McIntyre is fortunately very articulate and patient on several points: though it might be reasonable for an interviewer to ask if he has complained to the police, it seems less so to ask the same question three times when the interviewee has already given a perfectly reasonable response. Which McIntyre did — it seems eminently sensible that he first consider his legal options.

And he's right to point out that these are not isolated incidents in recent policing by the Met. Remember Ian Tomlinson, or Delroy Smellie, or very recently Alfie Meadows (here, here, and here).

The footage will stir certain emotions and doubtless cause many to feel anger. And the debate around the cuts and fees means that some will already have taken sides. But whether or not McIntyre and other students are right is besides the point. Just as whether or not McIntyre was, according to The Observer, a "cyber-radical" is surely irrelevant to his treatment at a protest. The arguments for or against the coalition's decision to cut funding for higher education and raise tuition fees seem to me to be very separate from the issues of policing or the media's coverage of protest.