Everyone not in a war loves a war. Perhaps not war itself but the words of war. We let them slip into our language like…like a… platoon in the jungle. Media, politicians, twitterati and creatures of satire are all guilty. We want to capture our readers with high drama through simile and metaphor. What’s more dramatic than a war? So we warp and we twist, the stale words of a political debate becomes a fight, by-elections become battles and government campaigns become a war.
The war against COVID-19 has been the most recent strategic misuse of metaphors and one of the first sketches for this blog. Boris Johnson wanted to be just like his idol Churchill, rousing the nation to defeat the Germans, I mean Corona. The Ministry of Defence and legions of arms industry secondees were eagerly waiting for the command to begin testing artillery against the microscopic pathogen. But in real life it was love for a universal health service and a sense of communal fragility that got people to do their best to overcome the pandemic. Proper funding for the NHS and politicians following the rules would have helped more than a pantomime performance as Winston.
One day, not-Churchill and con-bombshell, Boris Johnson will complete his self destruction. As party-gate and cost of living crises draw this closer his successors plot their next move. One possible successor, Liz Truss, has turned to tanks to try and make herself stand out from the crowd. A profile pic of the twat in a tank published last year was the perfect opening play. It’s unoriginal but echoing Thatcher pleases the party. Dinners to court influential MPs and gain their support was the next move in her game. It’s not a full blown assault to oust Boris or see off Rishi Sunak, instead it’s called ‘on maneuvers’. Tank analogies follow tank rides. After months of Russian military build-up exploded into a full-blown invasion of Ukraine, most (but not all) of the British political bubble abandoned describing minor political shenanigans as the movement of heavy armour just to drum up interest in a B-rate politician’s leadership chances.
Not everyone got the memo. The Telegraph’s war metaphors have been fighting a desperate rearguard action against linguistic decency. A recent headline in the Telegraph asked everyone to ‘Ignore the sniping’..of unfair criticism of Boris inexplicably in a column about actual sniping in Ukraine. But then the author managed to argue that Ukrainian refugees are legitimate because they are women and children whereas refugees from everywhere else are exclusively young men who have abandoned their women and children. Presumably the Telegraph thinks refugees from the Middle East and Africa are fleeing pillow-fights or have been summoned here by the dark sorceress Meghan Markle to further her transgender agenda. The same columnist has previously called for the return of National Service on the grounds that it’s character building. After a stint in the armed forces and some adventures overseas, Britain’s millennials will have a robust rounded character to go with their prosthetic leg and PTSD.
The war in Ukraine has thrown all kinds of assumptions, political calculations and policy options out of the table. The violence of a conflict that feels closer to home and involving a bigger baddie than most, has thankfully caused a retreat for the most unnecessary war metaphors in British politics. It just doesn’t feel appropriate to see a debate between two parties described as a battle or a round of criticism as an artillery barrage when images of clusterbombs and bodies fill our screens. But then did it ever? The world is hardly a stranger to the ravages of war and political violence. The bitter brutality of conflict in everywhere from Yemen to Sudan, Iraq to Northern Ireland should have caused Westminster’s word smiths to pause for thought long ago. Surely the UK has more than defeating the Nazis available to instill national pride? Support for the NHS was enough to encourage the public to behave responsibly during the pandemic. Maybe weaseling, conniving, scheming and shenanigans are better names for the political games of our politicians than invoking machines of war?
Well this satirist is not going to stand for poorly chosen conflict analogies anymore. Load your thesaurus and rally your synonyms. I'm declaring...
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