The Right Dishonourable

There’s rarely been a bad time in American history to write about dysfunctional government. The country harbours a distrust towards authority that has little purchase in Britain, despite its grounding in ill-feeling towards London governments.

The rancour of Donald Trump’s presidency has done nothing to stop this, although it has entrenched a split between pro-government liberals (in Yankee terms) and their conservative opponents. The divide is well attested by Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk, released back in 2018, but not with any subtlety.

Many arguments in politics quickly descend into language games. As the American hack likes to say, there’s a lot to ‘unpack’ in how we talk about things. And with English grads running things we’re doing more unboxing than an Amazon returns department.

Perhaps this is never truer than with arcane and ever-changing politically correct speech. Terms that were acceptable yesterday are today derogatory or hateful. ‘Person of colour’ is fine; ‘coloured person’ deeply offensive. The euphemism treadmill keeps turning, and it’s not the only machine in the gym.

It is traditional in August for journalists to muse on their own exam results days, usually dispensing sarcastic advice. How useful the trade’s experience is to the public is dubious given it is staffed by those who went to private school, university and frequently Oxbridge, but what is life without the right to snark?

The decision not to sit exams in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic has made hacks’ recollections of their own experience even less relevant than usual. More than that, the attempts to create synthetic grades through teacher estimates and central moderation has raised doubts about the whole examination process, as evinced by the current scandal in Scotland.