"Ethical" is the new "New"

Remember the heady days of 1996? An urbane and beautifully groomed Tony Blair - a sort of pre millenial white Obama - was doing the rounds, reasuring us like crazy that Labour could be trusted. It was a golden pre-Prescott Punch era; a time when the word "Cherie" was most closely associated with Stevie Wonder; a time when most of us naively thought that only Tories could be sleazy. And it was a time when "New" meant "Better," "Brighter," "Fairer,"... and so much more. Look at us now. Sickened by the let-down, living in a post-democratic world, where we alternate between wishing that the media would shut up altogether and wishing that they'd say or do something genuinely worthwhile. No, what we really need to cheer us all up is a new, totally vacuous word or phrase that means nothing, but that everyone can get behind. President Obama had the wonderfully nonsensical "Change we can believe in," which the Tories have disappointingly cribbed into "Vote for Change" (surely "Change we can vote for" would have been more in-keeping and therefore funnier?) But my favourite empty tautology of the moment has to be the concept of "Ethical." Ethical can mean anything - and usually means nothing. I love the idea of middle aged nerdo-hippies criticising George W Bush's preposterous idea of "a war on terror" as being an empty piece of rhetoric...then nipping down the shops to buy some "ethical" coffee. By what measure is one product more "ethical" than another? And how can units of ethicalness be compared? For example, how many tonnes of carbon emissions equate to the un-ethicalness quotient of asking a South American child to dig one tonne of coal for us to burn in our power stations? Of course it's all utter tosh. The most cursory examination reveals that. But in the post democratic society that we have allowed to develop, questions like these really should be asked. While we've still got the chance.