At the present conjuncture of political, economic, social, and ecological crises, it is important to pay attention to the ways in which intensifying demands for equality, sustainability and social inclusion are met in education policy. In this article, we present results from a critical discourse analysis of an EU council recommendation on 'microcredentials' -- credits for short courses primarily oriented towards the attainment of skills. Through our analysis, we identify a set of discursive techniques that use progressive language in order to depoliticize issues of social inequality and protect a fundamentally neoliberal and market-oriented agenda from being contested. We conclude that the linguistic expressions used in the operationalization of these techniques have the capacity to 'bling' the argumentation for microcredentials -- making invisible an underlying neoliberal foundation and hypervisible an apolitical and consensus-oriented surface, thereby preventing disagreements over aspects of education that are fundamentally political.