Gordon Brown
It seems to have disappeared, but Oliver Kamm had a post up pointing out that the targets of the Plain English Campaign are often speaking plain English. He adds though that a reader says Gordon Brown's famous 1994 declaration that he was a supporter of:post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory
was a self-mocking reference (I think those are the words, as I say the post appears to have vanished). This surprised me, I remember Michael Heseltine's conference jibe that it was "Balls, not Browns", which implies that it wasn't seen as a joke by him, though that is hardly conclusive. An internet search, as for most things before 1999, doesn't help much, though it does turn up (in NS, April 2005):
Even Brown said that, if he hadn't had a heavy cold, he probably would have edited the phrase out of the speech, written by his aide Ed Balls.)
and another site, again which I can't vouch for the accuracy (though he gets the date wrong, which is not reassuring), saying that the quote was followed by:
and a symbiotic relationship between investment in people and infrastructure
which could make it more mocking or less. Nevertheless I have no reason to believe Oliver's reader does not know what he is talking about, so can anyone provide the context of the quote?
Update: Typepad is back, and so is the post. My memory was slightly faulty - the "self mocking" is Oliver's phrase, and refers I think to Gordon Brown's love of soundbites (or New Labour's), which Brown said in the speech the above phrase clearly wasn't. So it was the soundbites not the phrase itself that was being mocked. This has no bearings on whether it is sensible to use the phrase though, however it was a speech to a conference on economics "New Policies for the Global Economy" (26th September 1994).
posted by Matthew @ 12/16/2005 08:31:00 AM
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