JOHN: This is Radio 4, and today we have Lucretia Stoker, the shadow Minister for Bureaucracy in the studio. Ms Stoker has declared that she will be standing for leadership of the party. So, Lucretia, if I may, what is your platform?
LUCRETIA: Thank you, John. I fully intend to engage with the challenges facing us.
JOHN: Engage with the challenges? What challenges are they?
LUCRETIA: We have set up a working party and a think tank to identify those challenges, and when they have completed their deliberations, we will engage with those challenges robustly.
JOHN: You haven’t answered my question. What are these “challenges” as you call them?
LUCRETIA: They are the challenges which we intend to identify. Then we will engage with them robustly.
JOHN: That’s not an answer.
LUCRETIA: We have been engaging with members of the public to identify them.
JOHN: That’s still not an answer. (sighs loudly into microphone). Do you accept that your party made mistakes with the economy?
LUCRETIA: If we had identified mistakes, we would have intervened and engaged with them robustly. But look, John, you know as well as I do, that under our last period in office, employment in the button industry increased by a factor of 200%.
JOHN: Could you be more specific?
LUCRETIA: Our robust intervention in a number of areas, enabled members of the public to engage in the challenges of finding employment. Look John, this is an area dear to my heart and the heart of every member of our party. Politics is about enabling members of the public to confront and engage with challenges. And we will enable them to so engage in a robust manner.
JOHN: I have the figures here. It would appear that a button factory in Sedgefield increased its work force from five to fifteen.
LUCRETIA: As I said, 200%. And that is due to the robust intervention of its former MP who identified the challenges and engaged with members of the public locally, then intervened to set up a working party.
JOHN: Tony Blair?
LUCRETIA: (sharp intake of breath) A statesman of outstanding stature who has been unjustly maligned.
JOHN: (chuckles) Is that the new slogan?
LUCRETIA: Indeed not. The party will now use the slogan “We engage with the challenges.”
JOHN: Thank you, Lucretia.
LUCRETIA: Thank you, John.
CONCLUSION:
If I were running Radio 4, I would place the words engage, challenge, enable, robust, identify, confront, intervention, intervene, think tank, working party and members of the public on a banned list along with the word fuck.
Peter Viney's Blog 
[…] new article has been added on Language Viruses: politics. I wasn’t sure whether to place it under ELT articles or Rants, but it goes under ELT as it […]
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Enjoyed the article. Up here in Scotland, I listen to Radio Scotland equivalent programmes. Could you add the words ‘these people’, which are used excessively by presenters and contributors on the politics/current affairs phone in programme, to the banned list?
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‘these people’ joins ‘members of the public’. They both mean “us” to us, but “them” to politicians.
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This is honestly true. Put on Radio Scotland yesterday morning – current affairs with slight religious slant. Fourth word spoken was ‘challenge’. Unbelievable.
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Enjoyed yet another article on politics and language. During my years in teaching profession the worst judgement I received after a motivating speech was: “You talked just like a politician”. (Maybe “you talked like my mother” was even worse.)
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