Common Sense

I was listening to Kemi Badenoch explaining her proposals on the Today programme, and she had used “common sense” three times before I had properly finished being annoyed by the first one.

At that point, something odd happens. You don’t listen more carefully. You listen less. The phrase is supposed to reassure you that sensible thought is taking place, but it now has the opposite effect. It makes me switch off to whatever follows, not because the proposal must be wrong, but because the sales pitch has already started to smell focus-grouped.

That is a pity, because “common sense” used to be a perfectly useful expression. It meant not putting a metal spoon in the toaster, not reversing a trailer downhill into a wall, and not appointing your brother-in-law treasurer after he once lost the Christmas club money in 1987. Ordinary judgement. Practical wisdom. The mental equivalent of checking there’s oil in the engine before setting off for Aberdeen.

Now it means something else entirely.

“Common sense” has become the phrase politicians reach for when they would rather not produce an argument. It arrives just at the point where evidence should be. It wanders in, puts its feet on the table and says, “Well, we all know what’s going on here, don’t we?”

That is the little trick. It flatters the listener. It says you, sensible person that you are, already understand the issue. Only the usual suspects could disagree: experts, judges, civil servants, academics, lawyers, and anyone else who has committed the grave democratic offence of reading the small print.

Nigel Farage and Reform have made an art form of it. Not because they invented the phrase, but because they have turned it into a kind of verbal crowbar. Insert it under a difficult problem, give it a heave, and apparently the whole rotten structure comes away in your hand. No need to worry about the wiring, the load-bearing wall or what falls down afterwards.

And this is where Badenoch managed to irritate me. She is now reportedly framing changes to equality law as “common sense”. That tells you something, not because the law should be immune from reform, but because she has reached for Farage’s vocabulary while trying to pretend she is offering something more grown-up.

Badenoch may well have a serious argument. She may produce the defect, the consequence and the safeguard. She may even be right on some of it. The problem is not that reform is automatically wrong. The problem is that she has chosen to trail it behind a phrase already worn smooth by Farage and Reform.

Once a politician says “common sense” in that register, my scepticism arrives before the policy document has even opened. Not because the proposal must be bad, but because the sales pitch has been borrowed from people who use the phrase to avoid detail, not illuminate it. It is the parroting that grates. Badenoch may think she is sounding plain-spoken. What she risks sounding like is Reform with the buttons done up.

Then, in the same Today programme interview, she moved on to language about “one shared identity” and “one shared culture”. And there it was again: culture-war language wearing a sensible coat. Britain does have shared laws, shared institutions and plenty of shared habits. But one shared identity and one shared culture? Between the pit village and the country estate? That is not history. That is a brochure. Real common sense might notice that Britain has never been one culture with a few decorative variations. It has always contained different cultures of class, region, nation, occupation and ancestry, while also borrowing and absorbing from elsewhere as it went along.

But political “common sense” rarely does. It prefers the neater version, the one where a complicated country is flattened into a slogan and everyone is invited to nod before anyone asks what the words actually mean.

That is the bind Badenoch is in. Reform has set the emotional weather on the right. Farage says “common sense” and it usually means: knock it down, scrap the lot, blame the blob, and worry about the small print later. Badenoch says “common sense” and wants us to hear discipline, clarity and administrative reform. But once a phrase has been used that way often enough, it stops sounding neutral.

The real world, being tiresome, rarely cooperates. Borders need systems. Policing needs evidence. Energy needs physics. Budgets need arithmetic. But “common sense” lets you skip all that. It is a way of saying “surely” instead of “therefore”.

Proper common sense is sceptical. It asks how something works, who pays, what happens next, and what gets worse. Political “common sense” just wants you to nod along.

So Badenoch may think she is reclaiming the phrase. She may even be using it in good faith. But this particular phrase has Nigel Farage’s fingerprints all over it. If she wants to be taken seriously as a reformer rather than a follower, she needs cleaner language. Otherwise the slogan gets to the podium before the argument does.

Common sense used to mean looking both ways before crossing the road.

Now it often means stepping into traffic because someone on the radio has assured you the collision will be someone else’s fault.