Predistribution

• Text settings

  Text size

  • Small
  • Medium
  • Large

  Line Spacing

  • Compact
  • Normal
  • Spacious
• Comments
• Share

  Share

  Dot Wordsworth

  Predistribution

  Copy link

  • Linkedin
  • Messenger
  • Email

Already a subscriber? Log in

This article is for subscribers only

Subscribe today to get 3 months' delivery of the magazine, as well as online and app access, for only £3.

• Weekly delivery of the magazine
• Unlimited access to our website and app
• Enjoy Spectator newsletters and podcasts
• Explore our online archive, going back to 1828

Most popular

Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

But to use a word that no one knows the meaning of is quite in the spirit of the radical 17th century. Owen Felltham (1602-68), for example, a man who kept on writing the same book, which he called Resolves, invented, for the edition of 1628, the word disdeify, which is plain enough. In the eighth edition, of 1661, he wrote: ‘Wealth in a miser’s hand is useless’, a sentence that might attract Mr Miliband, and, on the same page: ‘Wisdome and Science are worth nothing, unlesse they be distributive.’ In the sense that he appears to have intended, the word distributive was then unknown, though the thought was a commonplace, often expressed in the Latin tag bonum diffusivum sui, which derives from the Pseudo-Dionysius in the fifth century.

Anyway, Felltham would have loved Mr Miliband’s notion of predistribution, for he had given thought to the far more troubling question of predestination. His neat tripartite formulation was: ‘I hold man saved to be the subject of predestination. I believe no man saved but by God’s mercy; no man damned, but by his own default.’ For God read the state, and for predestination read predistribution.

As it happened, predistribution was used only four times in Mr Miliband’s speech, but the phrase ‘is about’ was used five times. Supporting Britain ‘is about’ something, Labour’s agenda ‘is about’ another thing and predistribution ‘is about’ saying something else. To explain words by what they are about is more a hint than a definition, rather like a narrative verdict in an inquest — you still don’t know if it was murder or suicide.

Often, politicians prefer to say what things are not about, which is even vaguer. ‘Predistribution is not about stealing chips from children on doorsteps.’ ‘Predistribution is not about curbing rural bus services.’ No, no, certainly not.