JOHN Prescott is being told to talk proper. I am sorry about this. When he talks improper he is very entertaining - and entertainment is the only possible purpose of political speeches.

I once heard Mr Prescott say on the wireless: "I have had the whole matter looked at afresh as recently as possible." Marvellous. But now Mr Blair's Communications Department is making him utter such slogans as: "Quality homes and communities for everyone" and: "Modern local government in touch with the people." These phrases remind me of the propaganda put out by the Soviet government of the 1950s.

"Building a safe, just and tolerant society for all the people" is a slogan issued by the Home Office only last week. It gives me the creeps. Whenever you see this indiscriminate use of the word "people", begin to suspect political manipulation. Incidentally, the Home Office has dropped the "the": it is simply "Home Office" now - a device intended to make that particular department of state sound more "people friendly". Blair's Communications Officer is blatantly using Government departments and their once strictly neutral civil servants as agents of New Labour propaganda. This doesn't matter much, because none of us believes a word they say. The real problem is that the departments of state themselves will start to believe their own propaganda. This is dangerous because public policy needs to be devised in language that is clear cut, not in the jargon of the advertisers.

The language of political manipulation is always smoke and mirrors, sophistry and illusion. In the French Revolution, for example, there was something called The Committee of Public Safety whose main function was to go around cutting off people's heads. The real name of the Gestapo was Sicherheitdienst, or "Safety Service". The purpose of political jargon is to make nasty things seem palatable. A nation decides to bomb the civilians of another nation. How is this described? As "pacification". The survivors are driven out into an alien desert: this is "ethnic cleansing" or "rectification of frontiers". One of your aeroplanes accidentally sprays bullets and shells on your own troops: this is "friendly fire".

George Orwell brilliantly reports an English professor of politics defending Russian totalitarianism in the 1930s: "While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain amount of curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement." Orwell says this actually means: "I believe in killing off your political opponents when you can get good results by doing so."

Let's look at a few other examples of the platitudes John Prescott's Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions are being instructed to mouth: "Protecting health, wildlife and the countryside from poor-quality air and water and other pollution, including global climate change." Does the DETR really expect the public to believe that the natural environment can be turned into an earthly paradise by such waffle? And then "a living, working countryside" would be laughable if it weren't so tragic, coming as it does from a Government which has destroyed the farming industry.

But then as Orwell reminds us: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."