A London lecturer reads about the agency whose buzzword output exceeded its income and finds that British universities, government departments and political parties have been running the same business model for years
Friday, 16 October 2026. A faculty strategy away-day in a hotel conference room in Holborn, a lanyard around my neck, a plate of untouched pastries, a slide that reads Leveraging Our Synergies For A Future-Facing Tomorrow, 11.05am.
Bingo
I am writing this under the table during a session titled Reimagining Excellence, which is the fourth session today to reimagine excellence and the third to promise a future-facing tomorrow, as opposed, presumably, to a backward-facing tomorrow, which would be an achievement in itself. I have just read the London Prat’s report on a PR company that became the first agency to generate more buzzwords than revenue, and I am trying very hard not to laugh out loud, because the Deputy Vice-Chancellor is looking in my direction and I am already on a list.
The Prat imagines an agency whose principal product is jargon. I have news for the Prat. That agency has been running British higher education for fifteen years. In this room alone, in the past hour, I have heard the words stakeholder, ecosystem, deliverable, pivot, bandwidth, granular, holistic and north star. I have heard someone say we need to land this, as though the university were a plane, and someone else say we need to unpack it, as though it were a suitcase. Nobody has said the words students or teaching. I am keeping count on a napkin.
A Theory Of Jargon
As a political theorist, I have a professional interest in the language of power. George Orwell, whose essay on politics and the English language I set for my first-years every autumn, warned that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. He would recognise a strategy away-day immediately. He would also, I suspect, eat all the pastries, on the grounds that they were the only honest thing in the room.
My theory is that jargon expands to fill the space left by the absence of decisions. When an organisation knows what it is doing, it uses plain words. When it does not, it uses buzzwords, because buzzwords cannot be wrong. Nobody can prove that you have failed to leverage your synergies. Nobody can demonstrate that your north star is in the wrong place. The PR company in the Prat simply took this principle to its natural conclusion. If words are cheaper than results, produce words. It is the most rational business plan I have ever encountered.
Westminster Speaks Fluent Agency
Government has been speaking this language for years. Every department now publishes strategies, frameworks, roadmaps and action plans, often several at once, each promising to deliver transformational change at pace. I once counted the number of times the phrase at pace appeared in a single government document. It was fourteen. The document was about speeding up planning decisions. Nothing in the document was faster than the previous document.
Political parties are no better. The modern party conference speech is largely assembled from the same fifty words, shuffled like a deck of cards. A friend who writes speeches for a shadow minister, and who will remain nameless because she would like to remain employed, told me over a gin last month that she keeps a document called Approved Words. If a word is not on the list, it does not go in the speech. Hope is on the list. Fairness is on the list. Taxes is not on the list. Neither is sorry.
The Slide
The slide on the screen has now changed. It reads Empowering Our People Through Agile Transformation. A colleague in the history department, sitting beside me, has written on her own napkin: Agile Transformation equals redundancies. She is not wrong. In my experience, every time a British institution announces that it is becoming more agile, someone in the building loses their job, and it is never the person who wrote the slide.
I have decided to respond in kind. When it is my turn to speak, I will propose that the faculty leverages its core competencies to pivot toward a learner-centric paradigm of sustainable, scalable pedagogy. This sentence means we should teach our students. I expect it to be enthusiastically received. Nobody will ask what it means. I will then go home, feed Hobbes the cat, and record the whole experience at Dr Caitlin B. Moran’s diary at the London Prat, which is the only platform at my disposal that has no key performance indicators.
An Appeal For Plain Words
My appeal, as a political theorist and as a human being who has sat through seven strategy away-days this year, is simple. Let us say what we mean. If we are cutting budgets, say so. If we are hiring more managers, say so. If we have no idea what we are doing, say that, too, because it is often the most honest statement available. Plain words are democratic. Everyone can understand them, which means everyone can argue with them. Jargon is undemocratic, because it shuts people out of the conversation. That is not a theory. That is a description of most meetings in Britain.
Closing Notes
The session is ending. The facilitator, a cheerful man in trainers who charges, I am told, a sum that would fund two lecturers, has asked us to share one word that captures how we feel. Around the room, colleagues are saying energised, inspired, aligned. When it is my turn, I say hungry. There is a pause. Then the historian beside me says, also hungry. Then a third colleague says hungry, and a fourth. It spreads around the room like a small revolution. The facilitator, a professional to the end, writes HUNGRY on his flip chart in large letters and underlines it twice. Then we all eat the pastries. It is, by some distance, the most productive outcome of the day.