This is not a lecture about declining standards in English grammar, I promise. But just a word, on words. Some are unfashionable and probably deserve to be.
About 20 years ago, I remember standing in Paris next to Sky TV’s Adam Boulton as he told a French politician that the new president was a “prig”.
Now “prig” is a fine old word to describe someone who is overzealous about rules. But it is easily misunderstood. Especially when shared with someone who does not speak English as their first language and who is answering questions via a satellite link. “Prick!” exclaimed the startled French MP. “You are calling our president a prick!”
For that reason, among others, another word that would be incredibly useful in helping us navigate the shoals of the culture wars has also fallen into disuse. That word is “cant”. Like “prig”, it risks being misheard as something else entirely.
It is also a victim of that great engine of declining vocabulary – autocorrect. Try typing “cant” into your smartphone and, all too often, your Californian computer chip will insert an apostrophe because it thinks you’re actually trying to write “can’t”.
But let me encourage you to reclaim cant. Few words better describe the afflictions of our age. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “insincere or hypocritical language, especially regarding moral matters”. By that definition, there is an awful lot of cant about these days, especially from those who insist that we should all “be kind!”.
Cant. Few words better describe the forces tearing Britain apart. It's time to reclaim it - Colin Brazier
For, to be woke is to be a great practitioner of cant. Woke folk insist they are being inclusive, while cancelling and condemning anyone who declines to sign up to their dogma about pro-nouns, or trans rights or ‘positive’ discrimination or any number of other inanities which characterise this most stupid and hypocritical of eras.
They are cheerleaders for “diversity”: except when someone has a different opinion of something they feel possesses only one interpretation.
But, lest we become too smug ourselves, let us consider whether we too are guilty of cant. As Jesus said in Mark’s Gospel: “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see more clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
Because the populist right, though often inoculated against double standards by common sense, is not immune to cant. What do I mean?
Well, take some of the hot-button issues of our time. Then ask if all of us are willing to do – really do – what is required to offset the iniquities we sometimes condemn.
First, let us consider illegal migration. Yes, the Labour government has talked the talk (“we will smash the gangs!”) without walking the walk.
But, by our own individual actions and inaction, do we contribute to the problem? If, as the early feminists used to say – “the personal is political” – are our own choices making things better or worse?
Last month, for instance, we learned how illegal migrants are using a loophole to join the gig economy. An investigation by the Tories revealed that young men, sometimes literally just off small boats, were working from their taxpayer-funded hotels to deliver food by logging onto an app pretending to be someone else. It turns out that something many of us had long suspected was actually true.
That thousands of undocumented males on e-bikes, often wearing face-coverings and weaving across the pavements of our big cities, are doing so illegally.
But here’s the thing. When the Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp told GB News it was for Deliveroo and Uber Eats to “put their house in order” – he might equally have asked their customers to do the same.
Because it is our demand for fast food, delivered to our door, that is helping to create an economic pull-factor that is luring some migrants from the continent.In short, they are cashing in on our slothful unwillingness to cook a meal. Anyone inveighing against small boats cannot, with their next breath, order a takeaway from Deliveroo. To do so is to be guilty of cant, pure and simple. Such people need to get off their soapbox and into the kitchen.
It's not just our fondness for fast food that is our undoing. Walk around your local town centre, past boarded-up pubs, and smell the weed. I think the police have questions to answer about the spread of low-level lawlessness, and law enforcement’s acceptance of illegal drug consumption is one of them.
For some people, that becomes an argument for legalising drugs, which is a debate for another time. But, again, it is difficult to be morally coherent – whingeing about Islamist terror, with a spliff balanced on the bottom lip.
I think, to be fair, many of us are already voting with our feet. There’s a reason all those Turkish barber shops on our high streets are empty (how can they make a profit, such a mystery…).
Many ordinary folk refuse to be complicit and get their hair cut elsewhere or simply at home. But, fast food, recreational drugs, dodgy haircuts; in the grand sweep of hypocrisy, these are all second-order vices - what Catholics call venial, not mortal sins. Because, when it comes to cant there are two big things about which we should not be two-faced.
The first is legal immigration. If you are not prepared to have children yourself, you have absolutely no right to denounce migrants who are willing to come to the UK to fill labour shortages created by our own fertility shortfall and record-low birth-rates.
Obviously, I draw a distinction between those who will not start a family lest it impairs their lifestyle, and would-be parents who cannot have children for medical reasons (although that is often a product of a cultural malaise which leaves people unwilling to have children until it is too late).
The second is Islam. There are many intellectually honest reasons to feel uncomfortable with the spread of Islam in the West that are anchored in humanism and atheism.
As a Christian, I don’t like to see my faith routinely ridiculed, but I accept it as the price to be paid for free speech and living in a society that has moved beyond medieval blasphemy laws.
But, as a student of human history, I am with GK Chesterton. It was he who famously said that “when people stop believing in God, they don’t start believing in nothing, they believe in anything”.
A fuzzy belief in “being spiritual” will not be enough to win a civilisational war with a proselytising and buoyant creed like Islam.
As Osama Bin Laden once claimed: give people a choice between a strong horse and a weak horse and they will choose the strong horse”.
Christianity is not a particularly strong horse right now, especially in its Anglican incarnation. But it has the potential heft and institutional integrity to provide a bulwark against the encroachments of muscular Islam.
Again, and I apologise if this sounds simplistic for effect: people have no right to criticise Muslims who convert their local church into a mosque, if they were never willing to sit on its pews.
In short, the choices one makes as an individual are rarely consequence-free and regularly reveal a heavy dose of cant. As John Donne said, no man is an island unto themselves. We may think ourselves patriotic, but what if our behaviour suggests otherwise?