QUENTIN LETTS: 'All rise, if able'... yet another confected attack on our language by the grievance seekers who gave us 'chest feeders' and 'birth people'

Daily Mail​

10-05-2025

Since mouldiest days it has been the command heard in our courts of law: 'All rise!' The judge or judges would enter. Lawyers, witnesses and occupants of the public gallery would cease chattering and clamber to their feet, bringing focus to the legal tasks ahead.
For centuries those crisp two words, rasped by a court usher, were deemed sufficient for the commencement of judicial proceedings and a show of respect for the so-called majesty of the law.
Until now. Instruction has gone out from faceless central officialdom that 'all rise!' is no longer adequate. Allegedly it could offend those who are unable to stand. And so the cry is to be altered in the courts of England and Wales. 'All rise!' will become 'all rise, if able'. Insufferable wetness? Or a harmless tweak in an obscure area of state activity?
We are only talking about two extra words. A mere six letters. If their addition is going to make disabled or elderly people feel more welcome in courts, is that not a good thing? Or is 'inclusivity' once again frying our Middle England brains, mocking us for being so tolerant of an official class that imposes change merely to score career points and demonstrate, grindingly, who is in charge?
When the change was reported last week, political trout rose to the fly. Jack Rankin, a Conservative MP, called the move 'unnecessary virtue-signalling' and suggested that the time and effort involved in the change could have been used better in reducing the post-Covid backlog of trials. Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform UK, averred that another tradition was being 'trashed to the god of wokery'.
His Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service, which is run by a bearded career civil servant called Nick Goodwin, claimed that the change would 'ensure that everyone can access and take part in court proceedings, helping to create a more inclusive and accessible justice system for all'. Blimey. Two words can do that?
The politics of language is not always rooted in reality. Bureaucratic souls sometimes get it into their heads that new terminology will bring cultural changes. Look at the NHS, which in a job advertisement last year referred to pregnant women as 'birthing people '. This was allegedly done to be kind to transgender people.
Well, being kind is a commendable aim. Few will argue otherwise. Yet the public thought 'birthing people' was a ridiculous phrase.
Ensuing protests – scornful laughter and angry denunciations of the 'gender police' – outweighed any happy vibes that may have been generated among trans people. As with the term 'chest-feeder', women felt the NHS was behaving politically and trying to erase their gender.
Given the torrent of opprobrium, it might have been better to leave things as they were.
Likewise Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, announced a £6.3 million renaming of the city's Overground railway. The new names included the Windrush line (after West Indian Windrush immigrants), the Weaver line (celebrating London's 'diverse migrant communities' who worked in textiles), the Mildmay line (Mildmay hospital was important at the height of the HIV/Aids crisis) and the Lioness line (after England's female footballers). What a busy box-ticker Mr Khan was. The only surprise was that there was no 'Sadiq line'. Give him time, folks.
The Mayor was actually being just as outrageous as his old enemy Donald Trump, who has renamed the Gulf of Mexico, which he now calls 'the Gulf of America '. Yet Mr Khan chose his names artfully. Anyone expressing irritation at his tinkering was going to look a curmudgeon.
Who, after all, could gainsay showing some generosity to Aids victims or hard-working West Indians or immigrant weavers, or even the England women's football XI, who seem a perfectly decent lot?
As with 'all rise, if able', anyone grumbling would look the most frightful kvetch, to use a fine Yiddish expression. Mayor Khan was setting his opponents a trap: if they attacked him, they would look like crosspatches. Voters generally do not like misanthropes.
The nakedness of that calculation, however, sticks in the throat. It is as sly as the deployment by some Right-wingers of exaggerated patriotism. I am a royalist and a patriot and a supporter of Remembrance Sunday, but I am seldom persuaded when the Right tries to stir trouble about Lefties not showing sufficient respect to the Union flag or Royal Family or Poppy Day. It just feels like grievance inflation – an attempt to wrap themselves in nationalism.
Equally, 'all rise, if able', along with Sadiq Khan's look-at-me renaming of the London Overground, tastes overdone, like burnt toast. They are crying wolf.
The Law Society Gazette, hardly a reactionary publication, said it was 'not sure if the words 'all rise' had ever actually prevented access to court proceedings'.
We may be talking, in other words, about confected offence. Was any trans person seriously upset by the terms 'breast-feeding' or 'pregnant women'? Even if some said they were, did their distress withstand serious scrutiny?
Is it not fair, before imposing uncongenial new words on society, to ensure that complainants are sane, sensible and honest?
Was any female cricketer ever so distressed by BBC Radio Test Match Special commentators using the term 'batsman' that they gave up playing the game? Yet 'batsman' has been dropped in favour of the ugly term 'batter', which sounds like something from a fish and chip shop.
You can sense the programme's producer radiating political pleasure every time the new, gender-blind word is employed. No doubt it has done his BBC career some good but it makes plenty of the rest of us quietly seethe and turn off his damn programme.
In a move by inclusivity staff, the 2,000 House of Commons employees have been told not to use terms such as 'ladies and gentlemen', 'manpower' and 'guys'. These, too, are apparently offensive. Said who? Were they being serious or were they being paid to claim so by some pressure group?
English is not the only language affected. The Latin used at Oxford University's degree ceremonies will now be stripped of masculine nouns such as 'magistri' and 'domini' in order to 'represent better those graduates who identify as non-binary'.
How many people actually understood the Latin and paid attention to it and then felt a stabbing pain of societal rejection? Or is this a case of one or two activists thinking 'we can make a name for ourselves by kicking up a fuss', and knowing that feeble governance bodies will cave in pronto?
Is it a case of the grievance industry justifying its existence? And a case of them, and the institutional decision-makers they pressure, wishing to assert their right to impose change? 'Look at us,' they are saying. 'We are the boss class. We have the power to pronounce, the clout to make Middle England quietly fume. And you lot can't complain because if you do, you'll look mean and you'll probably be cancelled on social media. Ha ha ha!' What a petty game.
Yet it is not without its dangers. With the introduction of 'all rise, if able', some of us might say we are now so revolted by the politicisation of our courts that it has had a grievous physical effect.
A Brexit-hating, Rwanda plan-blocking, Lady Hale-worshipping, two-tier-Keir justice system seems, alas, to have destroyed our mental control of leg and thigh muscles. When the judges come swanning into court, you can forget any sign of respect.
If that's how you want to play it, we're going to stay put on our stubborn backsides. And look, the illness has even now made our arms convulse and we now cannot stop flicking two fingers at the beak.