The Dark Art of Spinning,

It's difficult to not have contempt for Lord Peter Mandelson who introduced the dark art of political spin into British political life and created the Tony Blair product. There is no point buying the memoirs of this self-important fool now he's got his boring memoirs published.

In the dying days of New Labour after the debt fuelled consumer boom his regime engineered, Peter Mandelson returned in 2008 to power without even being elected and found again the Third Way. It was as much drivel then just as it is now. In his Hugo Young lecture he opined,

...the inherent rationalism of markets makes any role for the state in industrial policy unwise.

It is important that Britain continues to make a vigorous case for an open industrial activism that engages with globalisation and competition rather than trying to shut them out.

How it is possible to engage with abstract nouns and what 'open industrial activism' can mean in practice is curious. For if markets are rational and the state cannot have a role, then where the 'activism' comes from is mysterious.

Markets are extraordinary tools, but they are not possessed of unique or infallible wisdom. Innovative businesses, especially in technology and manufacturing, can require substantial investment.

So this could mean that the government does have a role to play when Mandelson wants NuLab to take credit for debt fuelled consumer booms but not when the markets go wrong as they have during the recent slump.

That's basically what Mandelson means in plain English. The rest is simply a warbling Orwellian corporate version of the Newspeak in 1984. When people rebranded New Labour as NuLab they knew their Orwell with English Socialism reduced to Ingsoc.

What Madelson's brand of banal waffle also proves that politicians resort to jargon because they aren't that important other than as obfuscating intermediaries between the global money markets and a bewildered public.

Government itself has simply become part of an 'enabling state' in which large scale corporate capitalism dominates every aspect of people's lives and designer revolutionaries fake enthusiasm for impersonal transactions.

Democracy is exercised merely through what brands a consumer buys and this propaganda is merely in the marketplace for cliches lapped up by those who want buzzwords to do the thinking for them.