Rhetorically speaking

Oct 9 2009 by Our Correspondent, Liverpool Daily Post

RHETORIC. A few weeks ago, I said restraint didn’t come naturally to Scousers. This week, something that does. Well, at least those of Irish descent. The gift of the gab.

It’s something we also expect this time of year when the political parties gather to hold hot-house seminars in the subject. Rhetoric is part of the toolkit. The art of persuasion. To convince people of this, that or the other. Or to change paths or stand firm. Yet, that is not to be confused with oratory. Something else a lot of Scousers find easy.

Oratory is style. Rhetoric is content. Too often the two are confused. The listener expects too much. The speaker delivers too little. It’s the difference between a good and a mediocre stand-up comedian. Or party leader. I will leave you to make any leap you wish between the two.

It was the difference between Wilson and Callaghan, Thatcher and Major and perhaps between Blair and Brown, which throws up an interesting point: following the orators come the rhetorics. Is that a consequence of too much verbiage eventually wearing people down, or does it simply indicate that good orators are few and far between?

Yet, neither oratory nor rhetoric alone is enough. Behind it all needs to be a reasonably simple proposition. Like, let’s ditch the aristocracy, capitalists or (insert your oppressor of choice) and seize power for ourselves. The current political debate around the solution to global recession, “our cuts are better than their cuts,” does not have the same ring of fervency as, say, Hitler’s idea of beating the 1930s depression by creating a master race to restore world order through wiping out all sub-species and ruling the world from Berlin.

No doubt there are those in the political corridors of the world’s capitals who may harbour similar, simplistic, solutions. There are probably some closer to home in the North- West. Yet a timely historical reminder comes with the publication of Cambridge academic Michael Scott’s book, Democrats and Kings, which outlines the collapse of the world’s greatest democracy, Greece, into tyrannical dictatorship in less then 80 years.

It only took Hitler six years to go from promising never to undermine democracy to installing himself as dictator and, with the aid of centralised databases, only a further 12 years to be responsible for the deaths of 60m people. So much for simple rhetoric.

Although such lessons from history should be considered with caution, they nevertheless remind us, as we now officially enter the countdown for both national and local elections, that whenever anyone stands up on a stage and promises us a brighter tomorrow, there are three questions to be asked. How is it going to be done? Who is going to do it? And at what cost?

Never mind the rhetoric.