Chris Game
Initialisms (abbreviations pronounced as individual letters) are obviously necessary and useful, but acronyms, properly defined (abbreviations pronounced as words), are surely more fun. That’s always been my rule of thumb, anyway. Actually, fun’s perhaps not the best word, especially as examples I’ve occasionally used include HIV/AIDS: HIV – initialism for Human Immunodeficiency Virus; AIDS – acronym for Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.
I suppose “seem cleverer” is what I really mean, because, in politics anyway, most of the big acronyms, while undoubtedly worthy, are so familiar as to be almost boring: NASA, NATO, OPEC, WASP – though I quite like POTUS, as I imagine President Trump himself does. And at least they’re easier to remember or work out – easier than certainly some initialisms like, say, LGBT, LGBTQI, or is it LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, all other)?
In modern-day UK politics there are only two acronyms I can think of offhand, unless you count voting for RON – the rather pleasing democratic mechanism, largely confined to Students Union elections, allowing voters to choose not to elect any candidate in an election, but instead to vote for ‘RON’ and then, if ‘he’ wins, for a Re-Opening of Nominations and the process to start again, until one candidate achieves at least half of the votes and is elected.
As nearly happened this year, incidentally, for the Presidency of Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union. Not quite, though, and, while the eventual winner reckoned she had “no actual words to describe” her feelings, she most certainly found a few for her acceptance speech, which I equally most certainly won’t repeat here.
My Acronym No.2 is UKIP – the Eurosceptic, right-wing populist UK Independence Party, founded in the early 1990s and so labelled in 1993. All of which is leading to precisely … ? The Government’s promised/threatened abolition of all Acronym No.1s, of course: QUANGOS – Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations. OK, I know it’s not perfect, but it’s surely the best-known example.
You’ll doubtless have seen the various, and by no means co-ordinated, media announcements over the past week or so: that “Ministers could introduce legislation to abolish a swathe of quangos [nice concept in itself: a swathe of quangos!] in one go, as part of the Government’s plans to restructure the state and cut thousands more civil service jobs …. [and are] considering a Bill that will speed up the reorganisation of more than 300 arm’s-length organisations that between them spend about £353bn of public money.”
It’s apparently not quite as arbitrary as some of the early reports made it sound. As reported in The Guardian (April 6th): Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, has written to every Whitehall department, asking them to provide “compelling justification” for the existence of each ‘quango’ or risk [it] being closed, merged, or having its powers brought back into the department.
Just like NHS England, possibly the world’s biggest quango, whose 15,000 staff were judged collectively to have failed the self-justification test, as it was the first to be scrapped, and that, “under the control of ministers, [will apparently] avoid duplication, bring greater accountability and save [unspecified amounts of] money”.
There’s an enormous amount to be studied and written about these developments, but not here. The sole purpose of this blog is precisely that set out in the title: to remind readers of what, to the best of my knowledge, is the etymology of ‘Quangos’ – not least because it involves an erstwhile academic colleague of mine.
When I first started ‘studying’ UK Government in the 1960s, at the Universities of Manchester (undergrad) and Essex (post-grad), Quangos simply didn’t exist – or, rather, they weren’t labelled, categorised and studied as such. That evolution took place during the 1970s, by which time I’d moved on, eventually to Birmingham and INLOGOV.
Leaving behind, inter alia, a former colleague who, by his own, invariably self-effacing, admission, was the actual author of our Quango acronym: Anthony/Tony Barker – though he, accurately, if pedantically – called it a near-acronym. If you need confirmation, though, just try Wiki-Quango-History: “The term ‘quasi non-governmental organization’ was created in 1967 by the Carnegie Foundation’s Alan Pifer …The term was shortened to the acronym QUANGO by … Anthony Barker, a Briton, during one of the conferences on the subject”.
It’s something to be rather proud of, you might think. If it had been me, I feel I’d regret it if, say, a whole week passed, at least during term time, without my somehow managing to ease it into some lecture/seminar/casual conversation or other. “I’ve just paid my TV license – £174.40! Outrageous – it’s just another Quango, you know”. “Did you see that bit in the papers about how they’ve found a way of possibly eliminating HS2’s ‘sonic boom’? It’s actually a Quango, you know?” “Yes, as it happens, I did invent the name.”
Yet Tony Barker, almost from the outset, was dismissive of something that he felt was overused, thereby misused, and “as useless as it is inelegant”. He goes into more detail in his 1979 book, Quangos in Britain, comprising mainly the papers delivered at a conference he convened on ‘The World of Quasi-Government’, describing the “near-acronym which I derived from a rather roundabout (and originally American) technical term ‘quasi-governmental organisation”.
But here’s the thing. Even in these early accounts, while not actually disowning the term and his authorship, he was his own severest critic – seeming almost to blame himself for creating a term that others have stretched to the point of near-meaninglessness – “they may be talking about any kind of body which has a definite relationship to the government or to local government”. I can’t help wondering what he’s thinking now, as the Government’s abolition programme gets underway.
Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan. He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.
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