Strategic Overarchingness, Specific Underpinnicity

Even after all this time, there are certain retrograde select committees whose members fail to grasp the nature of the New Labour project. In a country where taxpayers' money is thrown at wastrel bankers while bailiffs are empowered to attack the poor, and where the Government's idea of keeping the planet livable consists in building bigger airports and more coal-fired power stations, it should come as no surprise that we have a ministry of education whose functionaries cannot write English; nevertheless, members of the Commons select committee on unemployed graduates have registered a certain dissatisfaction. Ian Whatmore, the delightfully-named Permanent Secretary of the doubtless euphemistically-titled Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, has conceded that the language in his annual report is "impenetrable"; unfortunately, it is not so impenetrable that it cannot be translated in places. A "reputation for innovative policy-making approaches, fresh policy insights, bold points of view", for instance, means that the department was only set up eighteen months ago and has not yet got around to actually doing anything. A "challenging growth strategy for 2010" means the same as it does everywhere else; namely that things are going to get worse. Happily for the Commons select committee with responsibility for reading Ian Whatmore's prose, he has "promised to bring in advisers" to help him write this year's report. If there's one thing that makes for plainer English in a report, it's multiplying the number of bureaucrats involved in the writing of it.