I had emailed my friend Ron Yoder in Texas praising Obama (that must have startled Ron!) for his recent move on immigration, which opens up the way for people who, until now, have been counted as “illegal”, to become citizens. Ron told me that one small Christian group in America (the Marginal Mennonites, if you want to know) has said that when Obama made his announcement “he sounded like Jesus”. Well, I don’t know – I wasn’t there in “them days”. Still, with that broad-brush description, we know what they mean.

And that was going to be the end of it. I just light-heartedly reminded Ron that there were at least two versions of Jesus in the Bible. The MMs were thinking of the “I was hungry and you fed me” Jesus. But there’s also the “Depart from me, you accursed, into everlasting fire reserved for the devil and his angels” Jesus suggested by drones and endless war. Still, I said, the boy’s done good, he’s done the right thing.

And then I remembered something: that phrase has bad associations. In the Blair/Brown days, Labour politicians developed the phrase “the right thing to do”. Every policy was justified because it was “the right thing to do”. Gordon Brown said it so often that I hear it now in my head spoken with a Scottish accent. This was the mantra, whether expressed or simply understood, for all policy. So to try to cut the Disability Living Allowance was the right thing to do (the disabled didn’t agree: they demonstrated successfully outside parliament and in Downing Street, declaring that it was the wrong thing to do). To go to war against Iraq was the right thing to do.  To put asylum-seekers’ children into detention or into care as an incentive to their parents to take the family home to persecution was somehow the right thing to do. And so on. You get the idea.

But so successful was this ploy that when David Cameron succeeded Gordon Brown, he and the Conservatives stole the phrase and kept it in their kitbag. And they use it all the time. From badger culls to the Scottish referendum to NHS “efficiency savings” and privatisation (whatever the consequences), it is nearly always justified because it is the right thing to do. I’m not sure if they said it to justify their policy of letting people drown in the Mediterranean – but if they didn’t, it was “understood”.

Well, we’ve got used to that stuff. But there is a further nightmare scenario looming ahead here: I don’t know how I will cope with the (admittedly unlikely) election of a Labour government in 2015 if, once elected, it claims, every time it breaks one of its election promises (that’ll be about once every two days), “We are retaining the Tories’ austerity measures/sticking to the Tories’ spending plans/not abolishing the Tory bedroom tax – because it is (you know, everybody knows, it’s agreed between us, we can’t go back on it) the right thing to do.”

But we can’t allow these buggers to ruin – despoil – the language we use. We should reclaim the language about “the right thing” and give it the meaning it would have in a decent, just and accountable political system. So I repeat: Obama’s executive action this week on immigration was undoubtedly “the right thing to do”. But if, having done it, he doesn’t apply the principle to other policy areas – doesn’t want to be like the first Jesus any more – then let him get himself to the golf course and stay there.