Manraj Atwal is a History undergraduate at UCL and President of its Conservative Society.

We all like people who tell the truth. From the Ten Commandments to the Golden Rule, we have it ingrained within us that honesty, decency and good faith are virtues in and of themselves. We praise the candid friend who tells us the unkind truth, the acquaintance who speaks plainly and, that most rare of things, the politician who actually says what they mean. We all love honesty.

And yet the society we’ve constructed is remarkably opaque. No one after all is sacked; they’re ‘let go’. No company downsizes; they merely ‘restructure’. Nobody lies anymore; they just ‘mis-speak’. Reality of course stays the same, and whether it’s convenience fees or collateral damage, a veil of wilful ignorance is woven into the very language we use.

This is doublespeak. Not in the pure Orwellian sense of some grand authority dictating to the masses that ‘war is peace’ and ‘freedom is slavery’, but it is doublespeak, nonetheless. After all, when X is described as Y, what else can we call it? The essence is simple: language is being used not merely to describe reality, but to obscure it, soften it or make one interpretation appear more natural than another.

Language determines how we perceive things. If someone tells you, “I’ve got to talk to you,” or “I want to talk to you,” the linguistic difference is tiny, yet the effect on our minds can be drastic. The first might make us immediately wonder what we have done wrong; the second can leave us reassured, even flattered. The event is the same: a conversation is about to happen. But the words we use to describe it change how we experience it.

Now this may all seem self-evident. Why, of course, you may justly say, we are all aware of the effects of language; we are all aware of its dangers and its uses. But in politics, this fact has gone largely unheeded. To call British politics, as it has been since 1997, a war of words would almost be unfair; after all, a massacre is hardly a war. New Labour, not through conspiracy or coercion, has been able to instil into British politics and institutions, its values, and its prejudices. In short, they have won the battle without even firing a shot.

Take the Human Rights Act. Nobody wants to be the one human rights; human rights are a good thing. We’re all taught we have rights, and so it seems unthinkable that we could want to repeal an act guaranteeing those rights. And yet, the act is not a neutral list of the various rights we have. It can’t be. It is intensely political, from the clauses giving domestic effect to the judgments of a foreign court, to vague propositions such as the “right to respect for private and family life”, which in substance give judges the scope to grant a migrant a claim, however tenuous, to remain in Britain on the basis of abstract principles.

Or look at the Supreme Court. Again, nobody really thinks the courts are bad; once more we are taught that the courts are vital, that they are independent and that broadly they serve to uphold the law. And yet the Supreme Court is not simply some neutral guardian of the law. Its very existence, and the powers it exercises, are products of intensely political choices about who gets to interpret the law and where the ultimate authority of the state lies. Even the name itself does some of the work. A Supreme Court sounds like an obvious and necessary feature of a functioning democracy; but supreme over what, and by whose authority? Once again, the language makes the underlying constitutional question seem almost too obvious to ask.

Here lies the trick. All of these choices are political choices, and yet they’re treated as unquestionable, as beyond reproach or reproof. The seemingly neutral language preloads the discussion in someone’s mind. You’re not debating whether a particular Act is properly constructed; you’re apparently questioning whether people have human rights. You’re not debating whether Britain needs a Supreme Court with these constitutional functions; you’re apparently questioning the courts themselves. There was no conspiracy: new Labour simply understood the value of the language; that new principles could be embedded under the guise of neutrality, allowing Britain to become that most oxymoronic of things, a liberal democracy.

How did the Conservatives respond?

So used to dealing with enemies in the open, Labour, the unions, the Bennites; they failed to recognise when political warfare had ceased to look like warfare at all. The Human Rights Act was not treated as the beginning of a new constitutional settlement, but as a reasonably popular piece of legislation which, for all its faults, could be lived with. Our failure was a failure of insight: the assumption that just because something did not cause immediate problems, it could not still prove corrosive to the fabric of the constitution we are tasked to defend.

And this is where Reform enters the story. Reform has recognised much of the settlement that Conservatives failed to question. It wants to repeal the Human Rights Act, leave the ECHR and scrap Net Zero, attacking precisely some of the institutions and policies that have come to define the settlement. But there is a danger in stopping there. Reform has recognised the settlement; what it has not yet recognised is how the settlement was made. If the problem is merely the Human Rights Act, repeal it. If the problem is Net Zero, scrap it. But what happens when the next apparently innocuous principle arrives, dressed in the same moral language, and the political argument begins all over again?

The Right therefore needs to understand that this is not simply a battle over individual policies. It is a battle over the vocabulary in which those policies are presented. Before Conservatives can hope to reclaim institutions, they must first learn to question the assumptions which made those institutions appear inevitable. We cannot keep accepting every new settlement as harmless simply because its immediate consequences are difficult to see. Nor can we expect the public to reject principles which we ourselves have never properly explained. The words invade the mind before the argument has even begun.

The Left understood that politics is not only about winning votes or passing laws. It is about deciding what words mean, what principles those words invoke and what institutions are then built upon them. Conservatives have spent too long fighting the final battle while ignoring the first one. If we want to change the settlement, we must first learn to challenge the language that sustains it.

Because words become principles. Principles become institutions. Institutions become precedents. And precedents, eventually, become political reality.