A future fair for all

Slogans fun

February 22, 2010  8 comments

The Labour Party has announced its election-campaign slogan: A Future Fair For All. We can assume this does not amount to a promise to every citizen of a Ferris Wheel and Waltzer to be delivered to their garden in the years following a Labour victory. Still, not everyone is happy with the slogan. Alex Massie, for example, complains of:

the now traditional absence of punctuation that further obscures the meaning

I assume he means that he would prefer to see the slogan punctuated with a forceful comma, like so: A Future, Fair For All. Though, as a matter of general principle, I very much agree that it is desirable to punctuate everything more heavily than is common, I’m not sure Massie’s suggestion (if it is indeed as I have guessed it to be) would enhance a meaning previously obscured; it would, though, certainly have an unfortunate side-effect. To promise A Future, Fair For All would be to imply that at least, with the Labour Party, there will actually be a future, whereas if you vote Tory, time itself will stop.

Massie also considers that the slogan has chosen arbitrarily to reverse the normal order of words:

Seriously, what’s wrong with A Fair Future For All?

Well, there’s nothing wrong with it; it’s just that it doesn’t mean quite the same thing. Massie’s version promises that everyone will share in a fair future (howsoever defined). The actual slogan, however, emphasizes that the future will be fair (howsoever defined) for everyone — ie, not just fair for some, as would be, or so the slogan charges implicitly, the programme of a Conservative government.

Not a trivial aspect of slogan-engineering — or slogangineering — meanwhile, is the matter of scansion, and it is the work of a few seconds’ speaking-aloud to determine that A Future Fair For All is a quintessentially English, fluidly skipping run of iambs (“To be or not to be”); while Massie’s suggested A Fair Future For All arrests the eye and tongue with the toe-stubbing combination of the iamb-trochee halt and the fact that here, the labiodental fricative must be repeated in the very next syllable (fair future), without the breathing space accorded by -ture in the original (fu -ture fair). The authentic slogan is thus easier to say, more rhythmically agreeable, and thus (or so I suppose) more memorable. Perhaps the at-first-surprising inversion in future fair has, moreover, the faintest tang of a literary sensibility, but I for one am not about to complain.

It is in the nature of political slogans, of course, that they leave enormous pragmatic and philosophical questions unanswered (how exactly will this future be fair?; how will this species of fairness be accomplished?; who, exactly, is all?), and tend rather to unspeak political complexity by appealing to the warm feelings engendered by studiedly vague appeals to what no one is against (future, fairness, all). Still, as slogans go, A Future Fair For All does not strike me as especially pernicious, unintelligible, or stupid.