Not naming any names, but a government minister recently wrote a piece on the outlook for Belarus and similar I Can't Believe They're Not Democracies, which contained the following passage:

A European Democracy Foundation financed by the EU but at arms length from the Commission and the Council of Ministers can take up the struggle for democracy and engage in a myriad of ways with the young citizens of Belarus and Europe's near abroad. The money is there. The need is there. The Council of Ministers and the Commission now need at their meeting today to act to make democracy promotion a core political activity of tomorrow's EU.

This is the political equivalent of buzzword bingo. "Buy a printing press and take it to Belarus" is a specific action. "Give some money to a foreign political party" is a specific action. "Take up the struggle for democracy" is an abstraction. "Engage in a myriad of ways" is a vague term referring to a myriad of abstractions. "Make democracy promotion a core political activity" is an abstraction. In everyday life, I always make myself unpopular in meetings by insisting that the question "what are we going to do" is answered by a sentence that can be translated into one describes the physical movement of human bodies relative to the Planet Earth, and not accepting answers like "utilise synergy", "engage with the client" or "achieve market dominance" which cannot be so translated, and I wish there was someone doing something similar before opening up the European chequebook to fund another well-meaning but woolly hearts and minds operations.

I suspect I am going to come back to this again and again like a dog with a bone, because it is an absolute cancer in political life; the refusal to make a distinction between what gets done, and what we think about it. It's basically an abuse of certain linguistic constructions in English which superficially resemble those which describe actions, but actually describe non-actions, transitively. There are two main categories of statement I am objecting to here:

1. Actions that it would make sense to consider if you were God Almighty, but not otherwise. "Create a democratic society" is a viable goal for an omnipotent deity. So are "create a connection between people and their government" and "foster a culture of respect". However, since there is nobody currently in the UK government who can make things happen simply by an expression of their will, all these things will have to either be translated into actual instructions for specific people, or forgotten about. If it is possible to do the first, the big vision statement is surplus to requirements. If the second option is more likely, it is a better idea to forget about it before rather than after making the big vision statement, because it confuses people and sets up false hopes.

2. Actions which nobody can tell whether you're doing them or not. I suspect that it is possible to "express solidarity with Iraqi democrats" while drinking a glass of water, even if you aren't a ventriloquist. I am pretty sure that you can "engage with the fundamental values of our core constituency" while you are asleep. Nine times out of ten, "support" is used in political rhetoric in a sense which is exhausted by its utterance; once you've said you support someone, that's usually all the support they're going to get from you.

This stuff is bad in business and not laughed at nearly enough when it shows up in politics. Believing that "replace totalitarianism with democracy" was a plan is the kind of thinking that got us into Iraq and which could quite easily cause us a hell of a lot more trouble if our Prime Minister's recent speech is anything to go by. I am thinking of starting the Campaign for Real Transitive Verbs.