Whither the message?

© 2006 Ian Cundell

WARNING: poachers will be shot and, if practical, questioned later.

Sign at Wankei National Park, Zimbabwe, c1985

Browsing around Ottakars last week, I was struck by two books of similar theme, both dealing with the manner in which marketing-speak has polluted public life. Unfortunately, not being in the shop right now I can't remember either title but one of them was by Francis Wheen (I think).

Most senior politicians are skilled at using rhetorical devices - often little more than sophistry, but frequently question begging and equivocation - to either give misleading (but not actually false) answers, or to simply dodge the question. These days they are only very rarely caught in outright lie.

For some reason this line of thought reminded me of the sign quoted above. It has the merit of being entirely economical, addressed to a clear audience and gives a clear statement of probable outcomes. Yet it is open-ended enough to suggest that the poacher might just live to tell the tale.

But the chain of thought didn't stop there and eventually it occurred to me that politicians being politicians is not the real problem. Another event last week crystallised this.

When I was a kid a trawler called Gaul vanished in the Barents Sea. Her loss - the worst peace time loss in UK fishing - quite captured the public imagination and spawned various conspiracy theories. Earlier this month Mr Justice Steel reported that the most probable cause of the loss was that waste hatches were left open at a time that they should have been closed. He didn't quite come out and say it - partly for sound epistemological reasons and partly, I think, to avoid undue hurt to the bereaved - but they were left open because some of the crew were not adequately briefed on the safety aspects of those hatches.

And here is the problem. In part because Justice Steel did not say it, the bereaved remain convinced that another explanation exists - she was a spy ship sunk by the Soviet Union, collided with a submarine and so forth - when the bleak truth is that Gaul was lost because some of her crew made honest mistakes of the sort that any of us could. What they needed was a sign that said: "Leaving these hatches open may sink the ship".

That Justice Steel did not come right out and say this, it seems to me, condemns the bereaved to never finding peace. He is a judge and it his job to judge, without fear or favour. As with the notional 1980s Zimbabwe poacher, being shot at is the problem. But also as with the poacher, from the point of view of truth, clarity is more important than compassion.