The Right Dishonourable

It is common among British armchair constitutionalists to advocate for Parliament to be moved away from Westminster and plonked elsewhere – usually the North or the Midlands. A less explored candidate is cyberspace. But that was before the pandemic.

A virtual home for parliamentary business is mooted in a new paper by the Study of Parliament Group (SPG) which looks at the impact of the pandemic on the functioning of legislatures in Britain and elsewhere. While the paper does not advocate a wholesale abandoning of the Palace of Westminster, it suggests that more online legislating would be good.

Many writers will have been told to read George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language at some point. This is not so much for the political content, but for the advice on writing clear English.

Some of it is obvious, but most writers I’ve read or worked with would benefit from it. “Never use a long word where a short one will do,” is an instruction many a schoolboy would sympathise with, while “if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out” would make editors obsolete if followed.

It is funny to think that 10 months ago as we faced the most serious pandemic for decades, the West fell out about what its name should be. Exemplifying our misplaced energies, headlines were briefly dominated by whether terms like ‘Chinese virus’ or ‘Wuhan virus’ were racist.

Almost a year later ‘Covid-19’ or more simply ‘the coronavirus’ are the accepted terms, while the more cumbersome ‘SARS-CoV-2’ for the virus has fallen away. But controversy over how we deal with China looks less likely to disappear, as Nigel Farage has latched onto the country as his next big project.