The language of politics has shifted, and in local government, valued activities are in danger of being brushed aside by the latest fad and phrase, says Dan Corry

Words matter in politics and policy. Get people to think that something they always thought was satisfactory is, in fact, bad, by renaming or redefining it, and you are halfway there.

Many on the left of the Labour Party embraced this strategy in the past by claiming that any attempt to bring market-style approaches to aspects of public service reform was ‘privatisation’.

How frustrating that was to those who just wanted to bring more incentives into the system or a bit of contestability in to ginger-up service-providers, but were still far away from wanting a privatised system.

Well, good though the left might have been at this, the current Tory-Liberal Democratic coalition seems to be past masters. While there are cutbacks just about everywhere, rebranding seems to be a major growth area.

Anyone who thinks that we may be going a tad fast in the reduction of the imbalance between expenditure and income – a perfectly respectable and debatable economic position – is now known as a ‘deficit denier’, a haunting phrase with fairly chilling echoes.

The phrase ‘back-office’ has also come to the fore. To be honest, few of us were ever sure exactly what it meant, but it has now come to represent a vast horde of paper-pushing bureaucrats drawing a salary for no particular reason, and who can be sent off to redundancy with no impact whatsoever on improving or running services.

At a stroke, it seems, vast swathes of public sector workers are deemed to be superfluous – and, in fact, nobody really knows why we ever had them in the first place.

But if this trend is worrying – not least to anyone who understands how public services really work – even more worrying is the new badging of the idea of rigorous accountability and scrutiny. Once thought a useful activity which improved our democracy, told us what worked, what did not work and how one area or service compared with another, scrutiny is now reduced to just something to do with bureaucracy and red tape.

No longer an essential way to ensure that governance is good, and that things are carried out the way we want them to be, scrutiny of public services is now promoted as the work of a bunch of meddling, innovation-destroying, busy-bodies.

It is these people who allegedly destroy voluntary action, and hold back the plethora of social enterprises itching to grow up and run all our services. It is this ‘big bureaucracy’ that is the enemy of the Big Society – and it must go!

Much of these criticisms are aimed at the reams of inspectorates, frameworks, partnerships and the like which did get a bit out of hand. Some cutting back may make sense, and the armchair auditors let loose through the transparency agenda could turn out to work better than some fear. But the real concern is that when an ideological tsunami sweeps through, lots of good things are destroyed along with any bad.

There is a fear that important ways of holding organisations to account are being engulfed. Even local councils start to be seen as obstructive rather than helpful, with sections of the press insinuating almost every day that they only exist to pay outrageous sums to senior managers.

PM David Cameron has recently spoken of opening up public services to the private sector, and has just hired Paul Kirby – a partner at KPMG who was seconded to the Tories before the election to audit some of their plans for government – to Number 10 to help him do that.

The 2010 KPMG paper Payment for success, which Mr Kirby co-authored, was enthusiastic for this approach to accountability: ‘Payment by results should be implemented across the public sector without exception. Where it exists already, it should be made more forceful and sophisticated. Where it does not exist, it should be introduced with very limited transitional periods.’

This worldview sees choice, the market and competition as the real key to accountability, and so inevitably sees less need or desire for democratic oversight per se. So, concepts such as scrutiny, the value of councillors, the various sometimes-cumbersome mechanisms which help make society work are, at the very least, relegated in importance.

The language and mood of politics and policy has shifted. In local government, valued activities are in danger of being brushed aside by the latest fad and phrase. But where people are working for the public good, staff should surely try to maintain the right words and the right meanings for them.

Dan Corry works at FTI Consulting and is a former Treasury and Downing Street adviser under ex-PM Gordon Brown