Care Review Creative writing #2 – The Principles of Famspeak

An updating of ‘The Principles of Newspeak’ in 1984 by George Orwell

In this second piece of creative writing using the Care Review as its starting point  ‘Eric Irwell’ many of George Orwell’s words remain. Quotes are taken from the Care Review final document

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Extracts

….The failure of Famspeak has to be documented. The ambition of the ‘scale and specialist capabilities’ to ‘address the current weaknesses in the system and establish organisations able to transform the care system’ was never translated into practice as it proved to be a utopian idealism, a system with all the messy bits taken out.

…Famspeak was the official language of FrontFam and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Family Help, that superseded English Social Work as a system ‘relentlessly focused on children and families’.

…It was expected that Famspeak would have finally superseded Social Work language 7 years from its introduction.

…All those who were aligned to the Care Review used Famspeak. They used Famspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech at work. Social Work language was moving to the margins.

…The purpose of Famspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Family Help but to make all other modes of thought impossible.

…Any thought diverging from the principles of FrontFam should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a FrontFam subscriber, also called innovators, could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.

…To grasp the full meaning of Famspeak one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by Famspeak. Only a person thoroughly grounded in Famspeak could appreciate the full force of the words newly constructed together, Relationships Protect. Connection was made in the depths of the manuals of Famspeak  as follows, ‘The goal of our reform programme – Relationships Protect – is to leave a legacy of a self-improving system, within which actors have high levels of freedom and responsibility’

…This never happened due to the failure of Famspeak. The ambition of the ‘scale and specialist capabilities’ to ‘address the current weaknesses in the system and establish organisations able to transform the care system’ was never translated into practice as it proved to be a utopian idealism, a system with all the messy bits taken out