Words matter in politics and pol-icy. 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 'privatisa-tion'. How frustrating that was to those who just wanted to bring more in-centives into the system or a bit of contestability in to ginger-up service-providers, but were still far away from wanting a privatised system.
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