I will not be cowed by Theresa May

In September 2014 the then PM David (PR guy) Cameron told us Britain would not be cowed by threats from sick killers. He meant ISIS.

On December 22nd 2016 — just a few hours ago, in fact — now PM Theresa May (come to her senses) tells us that Britain will not be cowed by terrorists.

Good word, isn’t it? Cowed. Especially when juxtaposed with that ‘will not be’. Not entirely accidental Churchillian overtones.

As any NLP practitioner will tell you, however, even when you add a negative — as in “don’t run in the corridors” — it is the verb we hear most strongly. Better to tell kids to walk in the corridors.

So you wonder the psychology of focusing on ‘cowed’. And not just once: it obviously features strongly in the Tory leader’s manual. When you put the focus on a weak word — rather than saying something positive like “we will stand strong” for instance — the real message is one of fear.

Our leaders are delivering a message of fear: they want us to be afraid because in fear we are more likely to, well, be cowed by our corporate government.

And it’s a lot better to concentrate on not being cowed in the face of potential threats instead of wondering who we might be trying to cow with our own brand of regular terror.

Our bombs, of course, are surgically precise and nobody in their right mind would consider feeling cowed as they fell — if they had done nothing wrong. Our bombs are smart bombs: they can smell guilt as they plunge to the ground at a frantic pace. Dropping bombs from expensive planes is never terrorism. Terrorism is only carried out by people who can’t afford the £800,000 for each smart bomb/missile dropped.

But it’s good to have the Tories make clear the things we/they won’t be cowed by. Especially when our government is cowed by so many things:

Saudi Arabia

Israel

The USA

Rupert Murdoch

The Daily Mail

Transnational corporations

I could go on.

I won’t.