What’s in a Party Name?
27th July 2026
Centuries before semioticians decided it was exceedingly clever of them, Shakespeare’s fourteen year old protégé, Juliet, argued rather more elegantly than any academic, that the connection between a word and the physical object it represents, is arbitrary. If we all decide tomorrow that the often exquisitely scented, gracefully shaped flower that comes in an endless variety of colours is called a nose, and not a rose, it really doesn’t matter. In spite of endlessly trite and tedious efforts by academics to tell Ferdinand de Saussure what he actually meant when he claimed, The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, onomatopoeia remains the only example of a word which real people think has some kind of integral connection to the physical world they inhabit. Bees really do buzz and wind chimes really do tinkle.
The insidious spread of sociolinguistics across educational institutions, and the cultural chaos it has fuelled, is a topic I’ve frequently written about, and so I thought I’d take a leaf out of these linguistic anarchists’ textbook and ask myself a particularly current question. What words might we now use, to accurately identify our major political parties?
Because it’s quite obvious today that Blair and Campbellson’s attempt to rename the Labour Party Nu Labour has been an abject failure. All it took was Corbyn’s spectacularly brief rise and fall to demonstrate their rebranding had not even been skin deep, even as the sight of all that ugly anti-Semitism on display made decent folks’ skin crawl.
But you would have to be a linguistic eunuch not to think that calling the party Burnham has just usurped, the Labour Party, is a lexical felony worthy of a life sentence. To plunder Blair’s painfully slim legacy volume, I’d suggest we all start referring to Burnham’s bourgeois, Glastonbury tent as the Not the People’s Party, because the idea that they represent working people and not their own peculiarly idiosyncratic hang ups and interests, is risible.