How our masters misuse words to deceive us: The EU is not a “club”.

When I worked selling management consultancy projects, we were very careful about the words we used with our clients. We would class key words into three main groups: power-selling words, neutral words and sales suffocators. For example, when flogging a million-pound project, we tended to avoid the neutral word “project” and would instead call what we were selling an “improvement plan” or even better a “transformation programme”.

Or, another example, when writing the blurb for one of my books, a publisher wrote that the book “examines” how the Government wasted trillions. But “examines” is a dead word. It’s lifeless. It makes the book sound like an academic study. It’s a sales suffocator. Much better to use something like “reveals” or “exposes” or even “lays bare” – those are power-selling words.

Similarly, our masters (politicians and journalists) abuse language to subtly (and often unsubtly) manipulate our opinions. A prime example is when they refer to the EU as a “club”. The word “club” is a bit like a power-selling word. It suggests warmth, belonging, meeting people with similar interests, friendship and equality.

Moreover, by referring to the EU as a “club”, our masters can make statements like “all members of a club should follow the same rules” and “you can’t have separate rules for one member“.These statements sound eminently reasonable – or would do if the EU was really a “club”. But the EU is most definitely NOT a “club” for several reasons:

1. It’s an attempt to build a socialist superstate – a club (usually) doesn’t increasingly encroach upon the freedoms of its members, continually imposing new rules and grabbing ever more power for itself.

2. The EU doesn’t act in members’ interests – a club usually benefits all its members. The EU isn’t interested in what’s good for the UK taxpayer or what benefits Britain, it works to the advantage of the professional civil servants and politicians as it gives them the chance of perpetual gravy, of a life of luxury and power without the need to pander to local voters. It is nirvana for the governing classes and their public servant colleagues and they will all fight tooth and nail to grow it and protect it through any means they can.

3. The looters outnumber those who pay – in a club, most members pay the same for membership. In the EU, there are about 10 countries which pay in more than they take out and around 18 countries which take out much more than they put in. So, as every country has equal voting status, the majority – the freeloaders, passengers – will always vote for more taxes and more spending as that means more money for them.

4. It’s undemocratic – in a club, you can usually elect the governing committee each year. But not in the EU. The people who rule the EU are the unelected commissioners (komissars?) who are appointed and then seem to cling onto their jobs for many years massively enriching themselves and accumulating ever more power for themselves and their cronies.

5. You can decide to leave a club – would the EU ever let Britain leave? It’s certain that if there were a referendum in the UK, the EU would pour many millions into a propaganda campaign to help the Europhiles. Moreover, the EU will make a series of threats like cutting off trade to Britain, refusing to cooperate with Britain on things like crime and defence and causing massive job losses in Britain. When you try to leave a club, the board or committee don’t usually spend members’ money attacking you and threatening you and trying to destroy your friendships and your life.
The EU is not a “club”. Please don’t get taken in by our weasel-worded, deceitful, self-serving masters, and let’s not use their doublespeak language.