British election slogans are vague and - gasp - verbless

Six syllables. That's all it took to craft one of history's most effective political ads. The 1978 poster showed a long queue of people snaking out from an unemployment office under the slogan: "LABOUR ISN'T WORKING."

The rhetoric struck a chord with voters, who soon dumped Labour's James Callaghan for the Tory's Margaret Thatcher.

Pithy slogans are more central to British than US elections. Strict limits on campaign spending and TV time mean that the free-wheeling US TV ads and televised debates are absent from the 30-day British campaign. But with voters going to the polls Thursday, the slogans of the two leading parties have been so widely ridiculed that new slogans have just been unveiled.

Labour's initial "Britain forward not back," was skewered in the land of Shakespeare as verbless. And the Conservative's "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" was lampooned as too vague. " 'Are you thinking what we're thinking?' I don't know," said comedian Chris Langham. "I'm thinking about biscuits. I hope they're thinking of something more important than that."

But amid the parodies by satirists and groans from grammarians lies a deeper concern. Analysts say the rhetoric, however deficient, betrays the growing insinuation of spin and professional marketing into British politics.

It's a development, they add, that bodes poorly for the civic health in a nation already struggling with the trustworthiness of the government.

"This is an unusually hostile period, in terms of the relationship between politicians and the public," says Gillian Peele, fellow and tutor at Lady Margaret Hall, a college at the University of Oxford.

Polls show that with a strong economy, Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party is on its way to winning a third consecutive term. But this past week Mr. Blair's integrity was questioned after leaked documents showed that the attorney general questioned the legality of invading Iraq.

"We have an atmosphere of complete distrust of politicians," says John Wild, a spokesman for the Plain English Campaign, a British group that advocates clarity in public communication. "If a politician were to tell me it was Friday afternoon, I'd check in my diary first."

Mistrust about this year's slogans began soon after they debuted. Observers noted that Labour's motto resembled a line from an episode of "The Simpsons," in which an alien dressed as Bill Clinton says "We must move forward not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling toward freedom."

And Tory's sound bite, noted some critics, was similar to a catchphrase from a popular Australian children's program, "Bananas in Pyjamas."

The trouble soon multiplied. Labour's byword drew scorn from the Plain English Campaign for lacking a verb. Other observers noted that three of Labour's six election pledges - "Your family better off"; "Your community safer"; and "Your children with the best start" - had no verbs.

"By omitting the verb, they commit themselves to nothing except a vague idea that the words 'your family' and 'better off' somehow deserve to be in the same sentence," says Lynne Truss, author of the bestselling punctuation guide "Eats, Shoots & Leaves." "But is the truth actually: Your family is better off? Your family will be better off? Your family isn't better off? Your family will never be better off?"

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