From Compass magazine
Twelve years ago I went to Rwanda post genocide to report on the terrible state of the refugee camps in neighbouring Congo – what was then Zaire.
The camps were hewn from the forest by members of the Hutu tribe using the same machetes with which weeks earlier they’d massacred their Tutsi countrymen. Smoke from the fires used for cooking outside thousands of makeshift shelters formed a choking cloud over these twig cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants each; the ultimate status symbol was a blue tarpaulin cover provided by the United Nations.
Bodies lay at the roadside between camps, and children with swollen bellies waited to die in the makeshift hospital tents provided by Médécins sans Frontières.
Workers from 50 charities, falling over each other to provide aid for the starving and the dispossessed, were powerless to do anything: the fact was that refugees formed themselves into groups based on the communities they lived in when they fled Rwanda. If you were a refugee who had been parted from your community, your needs were ignored. These fetid camps, in which the hard, unrepentant soldiers filled their bellies at the expense of women, children and the weak, worked under the maxim of sauve qu’il peut.
The $1 million a week that poured into the UNHCR (the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) alone still wasn’t sufficient to pay for a simple blue piece of plastic for every shelter. Which begged the question: why not simply give these people money rather than employing a workforce of young Westerners sating themselves with new life experiences? It seemed to be lost on the aid workers that they were the face of a baggy-trousered, T-shirt colonialism, looked upon with contempt by the poorest people on the planet they were trying to save.
The people of Africa knew that, unless they got to marry one of them, these charity workers were essentially useless. When the Live8 concert was going to Make Poverty History in 2005, it seemed to occur to no one that since millions of dollars were raised by the original Live Aid in 1985, Africans have actually got poorer. Aid, in other words, isn’t working.
The reason can be found in countries such as Nigeria. With oil production of 2.6 million barrels a day, it should be one of the world’s wealthier countries, but corruption has brought it to its knees. Thanks to the likes of Bono and his Live8 mates, Western governments wrote off Nigeria’s £16 billion – let’s repeat that, £16 BILLION – debt, but most of its 140 million inhabitants live on less than 52p a day. Even official figures tell us that since independence in 1960 $380 billion has been stolen by its politicians.
These people are simply sticking two fingers up at the concerns of posh white people wearing charity wristbands who anyway blame nasty capitalism rather than political greed for the maladies of the poor.
Yet charity itself is a £65 billion-a-year industry and chief executives of these organisations can enjoy six-figure salaries. A nouveau riche of thrusting young executives are falling over each other trying to persuade journalists to give them publicity and working up advertising campaigns with fatuous slogans such as “Love Your Heart” from Heart Research UK.
There are some 185,000 charities listed on the Charity Commission’s register and between them they employ 563,000 people according to The Guardian newspaper.
We used to know where we stood when we put our spare pennies in the Spastics Society box outside the Grocer’s. Now there are a bewildering range of causes clamouring for our cash. But do they deserve it? The Lottery, for example, has given money to, inter alia, The National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, which has helped terrorists fight deportation, Dancers of the Northern Ireland Filipino Association, the UK Network of Sex Work Projects – which calls for the state regulation of brothels – and £403,000 to Allavida to start community groups in Bulgaria.
Allavida, in case you haven’t heard of it: “…is concerned with mobilising financial resources, building local grant-making and grant management capacity, enhancing skills in community organisations for local development, encouraging local philanthropy and facilitating learning in and between organisations.”
It really has come to something when a charity decides that what the poor of Bulgaria, Romania, the Western Balkans, East Africa and Central Asia really need is the gobbledegook of Western political correctness. A tin with a slot on a pub counter might not be the perfect answer to solving the world’s problems, but surely it’s got to be better than that.
Wednesday, 28 November 2007
What are guys?
From The Oldie
Turn up at Chez Bruce, voted by Observer readers as the best restaurant the country, second-best by Harden’s restaurant guide, and the maitre d’ will more than likely greet you with, “Hi guys, how are you doing this evening?” In just about any restaurant you care to mention, the waiter breezes up to your table and says with rising southern hemisphere enunciation, “Can I get you guys some water?” (being a waiter, he probably can) and later barges in to your conversation to ask, “Is everything all right for you tonight, guys?”
The word “guys” – always in the plural – is the latest example of the Americanisation of our language permeating modern civic life: Arrive at the check-in, “Hi guys, how are you this morning?”; stroll into a fashionable kitchen shop, “Can I help you guys with anything?”; listen to the nation’s children being told to “Dig in guys,” on the sports field.
In fact, teachers use the word habitually and non-discriminately. Their charges are never referred to as pupils or, God forbid, children. Teacher will now exclaim: “Will you guys be quiet, please!” as if that somehow puts them on a level with the “kids”.
So what are guys? They are certainly not the gang of burly men the word used to connote. Can a group of women be “guys”? Is there an age limit? Does the Maitre d’ at Chez Bruce eye his customers up and down and, upon the sight of walking stick and a decent coat, amend his welcome?
He does not. Increasingly this horrid catch-all appellation is replacing the trusted honorifics of Mr and Mrs, sir and madam.
Guys are what used to be gentlemen, women, children. Now they have involuntarily become part of a club that spans the Anglophone world. Those who use the word guys do so in the belief that it makes them at ease in Sydney, Cape Town or LA. It is meant to imply a classless mateyness that says they are part of a modern, tolerant, thrusting, unisex global village.
It is not, though, an expression of being working class. Tony Blair used the word not in the way that he used the glottal stop to ingratiate himself with his working class constituents, but as the informally formal parlance of the new professional class – the wonks, say, who inhabit his department of spin as well as the Washington offices of his grown-up friend George W, who of course is just a regular guy.
But it is, of course, ultimately selfish. And bogus. Whereas manners are meant to make the beneficiary of those manners feel at ease, the use of the word guys is for their benefit, not yours. By saying “Hi guys” they are telling you that they are cool internationalists. Even worse, guys is a word that forms part of the vernacular of a generation convinced that it is more enlightened than it really is.
Turn up at Chez Bruce, voted by Observer readers as the best restaurant the country, second-best by Harden’s restaurant guide, and the maitre d’ will more than likely greet you with, “Hi guys, how are you doing this evening?” In just about any restaurant you care to mention, the waiter breezes up to your table and says with rising southern hemisphere enunciation, “Can I get you guys some water?” (being a waiter, he probably can) and later barges in to your conversation to ask, “Is everything all right for you tonight, guys?”
The word “guys” – always in the plural – is the latest example of the Americanisation of our language permeating modern civic life: Arrive at the check-in, “Hi guys, how are you this morning?”; stroll into a fashionable kitchen shop, “Can I help you guys with anything?”; listen to the nation’s children being told to “Dig in guys,” on the sports field.
In fact, teachers use the word habitually and non-discriminately. Their charges are never referred to as pupils or, God forbid, children. Teacher will now exclaim: “Will you guys be quiet, please!” as if that somehow puts them on a level with the “kids”.
So what are guys? They are certainly not the gang of burly men the word used to connote. Can a group of women be “guys”? Is there an age limit? Does the Maitre d’ at Chez Bruce eye his customers up and down and, upon the sight of walking stick and a decent coat, amend his welcome?
He does not. Increasingly this horrid catch-all appellation is replacing the trusted honorifics of Mr and Mrs, sir and madam.
Guys are what used to be gentlemen, women, children. Now they have involuntarily become part of a club that spans the Anglophone world. Those who use the word guys do so in the belief that it makes them at ease in Sydney, Cape Town or LA. It is meant to imply a classless mateyness that says they are part of a modern, tolerant, thrusting, unisex global village.
It is not, though, an expression of being working class. Tony Blair used the word not in the way that he used the glottal stop to ingratiate himself with his working class constituents, but as the informally formal parlance of the new professional class – the wonks, say, who inhabit his department of spin as well as the Washington offices of his grown-up friend George W, who of course is just a regular guy.
But it is, of course, ultimately selfish. And bogus. Whereas manners are meant to make the beneficiary of those manners feel at ease, the use of the word guys is for their benefit, not yours. By saying “Hi guys” they are telling you that they are cool internationalists. Even worse, guys is a word that forms part of the vernacular of a generation convinced that it is more enlightened than it really is.
Sunday, 11 November 2007
Someone to watch over you
From Compass magazine
Earlier this year it was revealed that Haringey Council in East London had taken it upon itself to spend its residents’ money to spy upon them.
This impoverished borough lashed out £21,000 on an aeroplane with a camera to buzz its tax-payers’ houses at an altitude of 1,500 feet. Was the reason to improve traffic flow? A look-out to find litter hotspots perhaps? No. Haringey had decided that it should appoint itself a guardian of the planet; the aeroplane ported heat-seeking cameras to find out which homes wasted the most energy.
“This single study will play a key role in helping us address three of the biggest issues currently facing Haringey – climate change, fuel poverty and housing waiting lists,” claimed Labour councillor Isidoros Diakides. This can only lead surely to an army of bullying council workers bashing your door down and asking you to explain the draught coming from the bedroom window.
The UK is the most looked over nation on earth. We are spied upon by more than four million cameras and photographed on average 300 times a day. We don’t know the exact figure, because anyone is free to spy upon anyone else. The police, business, transport networks, private detectives and of course nannying councils can – and do – set up thousands of them to keep us on a righteous civic path.
Amazingly, we seem to find this acceptable.
But why? We would be horrified if as we walked to work we were surrounded by masked figures panning around us with the latest digicams, if they sat next to us on the bus zooming in on the book we were reading, or trotted along behind us as we walked through the corridors of our offices. This is in effect what is happening. Yet we seem not to be bothered by this gross intrusion into our private lives.
In the London borough of Camden there are Flashcams which, triggered by “suspicious” behaviour automatically go off with a vivid flash and a voice shouts “Stop! If you are engaged in an illegal activity, your photograph will be taken and used to prosecute you. Please leave the area.”
There is an argument in favour of cameras, of course. Who can argue when the grainy image of some thug on caught on CCTV is called up in a court of law as he sticks his boot into a hapless passerby and condemns him to a few years behind bars (or, at least reinforced glass with only a colour TV and a few drug-dealing friends for company)? Who of us has not thought, when the disappearance of a child such as Madeleine McCann is reported, if only there were a few more cameras around?
The truth is, though, that cameras do little to prevent crime. Research from the Scottish Centre for Criminology, for example found that the year following the introduction of CCTV in Glasgow recorded crime rates rose by 9 per cent and detection fell by 4 per cent. In the 10 or so years since the explosion of spy cameras, our streets are hardly safer or more civilised. On the contrary, our town centres have become no-go areas for anyone not of a mind for a fight or being subject to boorish drunken abuse.
But the authorities cling on to the idea that they should be scrutinising us ever more carefully. It is what people in power do.
Police minister Ton McNulty revealed in May that the Home Office was considering using “unmanned aerial vehicles” (UAVs) to watch over towns and cities. Yes, more spyplanes. Housing estates are now built with CCTV as standard; instead of patrons of the local pub, the shop, the park and even the local nick – remember police stations? – keeping an eye out for our wellbeing, monitoring low-level crime is now entrusted to a functionary who sits in front of a rack of television screens.
But what have these cameras achieved so far? Inevitably their most notable effect is in raising money for the government by policing those willing to be policed.
Drivers caught speeding through motorway roadworks were fined £5 million last year. On the M2 in Kent, cameras snapped 16,078 drivers flouting temporary limits – usually set at a self-righteous 40 miles an hour – generating £1 million in fines; 15,813 were caught on the M40 and 13,697 on the M1.
You could argue, of course, that if you are on the right side of the law, then you have nothing to fear. But when it becomes a crime to live in an old Victorian house with draughty windows, we should surely be very frightened indeed.
Earlier this year it was revealed that Haringey Council in East London had taken it upon itself to spend its residents’ money to spy upon them.
This impoverished borough lashed out £21,000 on an aeroplane with a camera to buzz its tax-payers’ houses at an altitude of 1,500 feet. Was the reason to improve traffic flow? A look-out to find litter hotspots perhaps? No. Haringey had decided that it should appoint itself a guardian of the planet; the aeroplane ported heat-seeking cameras to find out which homes wasted the most energy.
“This single study will play a key role in helping us address three of the biggest issues currently facing Haringey – climate change, fuel poverty and housing waiting lists,” claimed Labour councillor Isidoros Diakides. This can only lead surely to an army of bullying council workers bashing your door down and asking you to explain the draught coming from the bedroom window.
The UK is the most looked over nation on earth. We are spied upon by more than four million cameras and photographed on average 300 times a day. We don’t know the exact figure, because anyone is free to spy upon anyone else. The police, business, transport networks, private detectives and of course nannying councils can – and do – set up thousands of them to keep us on a righteous civic path.
Amazingly, we seem to find this acceptable.
But why? We would be horrified if as we walked to work we were surrounded by masked figures panning around us with the latest digicams, if they sat next to us on the bus zooming in on the book we were reading, or trotted along behind us as we walked through the corridors of our offices. This is in effect what is happening. Yet we seem not to be bothered by this gross intrusion into our private lives.
In the London borough of Camden there are Flashcams which, triggered by “suspicious” behaviour automatically go off with a vivid flash and a voice shouts “Stop! If you are engaged in an illegal activity, your photograph will be taken and used to prosecute you. Please leave the area.”
There is an argument in favour of cameras, of course. Who can argue when the grainy image of some thug on caught on CCTV is called up in a court of law as he sticks his boot into a hapless passerby and condemns him to a few years behind bars (or, at least reinforced glass with only a colour TV and a few drug-dealing friends for company)? Who of us has not thought, when the disappearance of a child such as Madeleine McCann is reported, if only there were a few more cameras around?
The truth is, though, that cameras do little to prevent crime. Research from the Scottish Centre for Criminology, for example found that the year following the introduction of CCTV in Glasgow recorded crime rates rose by 9 per cent and detection fell by 4 per cent. In the 10 or so years since the explosion of spy cameras, our streets are hardly safer or more civilised. On the contrary, our town centres have become no-go areas for anyone not of a mind for a fight or being subject to boorish drunken abuse.
But the authorities cling on to the idea that they should be scrutinising us ever more carefully. It is what people in power do.
Police minister Ton McNulty revealed in May that the Home Office was considering using “unmanned aerial vehicles” (UAVs) to watch over towns and cities. Yes, more spyplanes. Housing estates are now built with CCTV as standard; instead of patrons of the local pub, the shop, the park and even the local nick – remember police stations? – keeping an eye out for our wellbeing, monitoring low-level crime is now entrusted to a functionary who sits in front of a rack of television screens.
But what have these cameras achieved so far? Inevitably their most notable effect is in raising money for the government by policing those willing to be policed.
Drivers caught speeding through motorway roadworks were fined £5 million last year. On the M2 in Kent, cameras snapped 16,078 drivers flouting temporary limits – usually set at a self-righteous 40 miles an hour – generating £1 million in fines; 15,813 were caught on the M40 and 13,697 on the M1.
You could argue, of course, that if you are on the right side of the law, then you have nothing to fear. But when it becomes a crime to live in an old Victorian house with draughty windows, we should surely be very frightened indeed.
Sunday, 14 October 2007
Art for art’s sake
From The Oldie
Earlier this year, the people of the capital of Wales were apparently somewhat baffled to see blocks of yellow paint daubed over the Cardiff Bay Barrage. Given the current mania for public art, though, they probably should have realised it was something important, and indeed it was: The Three Ellipses For Three Locks by the Swiss-born artist Felice Varini formed three concentric circles – but you could only see them if you stood at one specific spot. Smart, eh?
Mansfield’s citizens have been treated to a rather more obvious piece called High Heels – a six-metre high pair of stainless steel stilettos, and in Stroud artist Philip Thompson is currently putting the final touches to his three-metre tall metal sculpture, titled Heart Of Stroud that will sit outside Stroud College.
While the Victorians treated their citizens to public parks, libraries and museums so today’s mania for “regeneration” is resulting in thousands of public artworks springing up like giant stainless steel and fibreglass weeds in our towns and cities.
“Local authorities park hundreds of anodyne public sculptures like tanks in a war of cultural aggression against the relatively uneducated,” wrote the artist Grayson Perry in The Times. “They hope that these civic baubles will replace social capital that has been lost to decades of upheaval in patterns of work, family and leisure time.”
You can see his point. The pomposity behind these simplistic, insensitive creations that litter the nation is quite breathtaking.
As they walk along a newly created pedestrian route from a viaduct in Hymers Court, next to the Tyne Bridge for example, the people of Gateshead can be inspired by the words “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO,” that bark at them from five archways that form part of a railway viaduct.
“No, No, No, No, No” is “deliberately ambiguous”, according to Miles Thurlow , who created the work with fellow artist Cath Campbell (sort of complex idea that needs the creative input of not one but two artists, obviously). “By giving an answer, it forces you to find a question. The meaning comes from the person who’s looking at it, and not directly from the piece itself.”
The piece, according to Councillor John McElroy, “cabinet member for culture” – there’s posh – “challenges the way we think about ordinary locations”.
From Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North in Gateshead to the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth – cost a mere £35 million – public art is local government on steroids. You think I’m a dreary functionary? Well, look at my tower, mate. Liverpool is spending a staggering £96 million on its Capital of Culture programme (including £450,000 for a sculpture by Londoner Richard Wilson, an installation that rotates an oval panel cut from the side of a derelict office block through 360 degrees).
But it’s not just our urban areas in need of “regeneration”. On Tiree in the Inner Hebrides residents have been treated to an installation An Turas near the ferry port that acts as a shelter. Alas it was conceived by Tiree Arts Enterprise, a group of local and visiting artists, so much of it doesn’t have a roof. Nor is there a heater. Or any seats – which seems to make it at £98,000 rather poor value, even if it is, according to Tiree Arts Enterprise, “a work of individuality, epic in scale, aesthetically beautiful and of contemporary and Scottish cultural significance”.
Meanwhile, back in the North East of England, the 141,000 residents of south east Northumberland have been lucky enough to have their own public art “initiative” Inspire and their own public art and design officer, Wendy Stott. Wendy has rolled up her sleeves up to help conceive the country’s first offshore sculpture in the sea off the village of Newbiggin. The commission – part of a £10 million sea-defence breakwater scheme – is entitled Couple and comprises two bronze figures measuring five metres tall, which will stand 300 metres out into the bay.
“My hope is that the sculpture will embody some of the emotion we all feel when contemplating the sea, the sky and the horizon,” says the artist Sean Henry.
He shouldn’t bank on it. Last year Hackney Co-operative Developments decided to uncover a 4ft stencil of a girl wearing a frilly dress and gas mask by the ‘subersive’ graffiti artist Banksy. Alas, cleaners spotted the graffiti 24 hours before the official opening of Gillet Square and removed every trace of this great work. Their emotional response to this great work speaks volumes for what public art really means to ordinary people.
Earlier this year, the people of the capital of Wales were apparently somewhat baffled to see blocks of yellow paint daubed over the Cardiff Bay Barrage. Given the current mania for public art, though, they probably should have realised it was something important, and indeed it was: The Three Ellipses For Three Locks by the Swiss-born artist Felice Varini formed three concentric circles – but you could only see them if you stood at one specific spot. Smart, eh?
Mansfield’s citizens have been treated to a rather more obvious piece called High Heels – a six-metre high pair of stainless steel stilettos, and in Stroud artist Philip Thompson is currently putting the final touches to his three-metre tall metal sculpture, titled Heart Of Stroud that will sit outside Stroud College.
While the Victorians treated their citizens to public parks, libraries and museums so today’s mania for “regeneration” is resulting in thousands of public artworks springing up like giant stainless steel and fibreglass weeds in our towns and cities.
“Local authorities park hundreds of anodyne public sculptures like tanks in a war of cultural aggression against the relatively uneducated,” wrote the artist Grayson Perry in The Times. “They hope that these civic baubles will replace social capital that has been lost to decades of upheaval in patterns of work, family and leisure time.”
You can see his point. The pomposity behind these simplistic, insensitive creations that litter the nation is quite breathtaking.
As they walk along a newly created pedestrian route from a viaduct in Hymers Court, next to the Tyne Bridge for example, the people of Gateshead can be inspired by the words “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO,” that bark at them from five archways that form part of a railway viaduct.
“No, No, No, No, No” is “deliberately ambiguous”, according to Miles Thurlow , who created the work with fellow artist Cath Campbell (sort of complex idea that needs the creative input of not one but two artists, obviously). “By giving an answer, it forces you to find a question. The meaning comes from the person who’s looking at it, and not directly from the piece itself.”
The piece, according to Councillor John McElroy, “cabinet member for culture” – there’s posh – “challenges the way we think about ordinary locations”.
From Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North in Gateshead to the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth – cost a mere £35 million – public art is local government on steroids. You think I’m a dreary functionary? Well, look at my tower, mate. Liverpool is spending a staggering £96 million on its Capital of Culture programme (including £450,000 for a sculpture by Londoner Richard Wilson, an installation that rotates an oval panel cut from the side of a derelict office block through 360 degrees).
But it’s not just our urban areas in need of “regeneration”. On Tiree in the Inner Hebrides residents have been treated to an installation An Turas near the ferry port that acts as a shelter. Alas it was conceived by Tiree Arts Enterprise, a group of local and visiting artists, so much of it doesn’t have a roof. Nor is there a heater. Or any seats – which seems to make it at £98,000 rather poor value, even if it is, according to Tiree Arts Enterprise, “a work of individuality, epic in scale, aesthetically beautiful and of contemporary and Scottish cultural significance”.
Meanwhile, back in the North East of England, the 141,000 residents of south east Northumberland have been lucky enough to have their own public art “initiative” Inspire and their own public art and design officer, Wendy Stott. Wendy has rolled up her sleeves up to help conceive the country’s first offshore sculpture in the sea off the village of Newbiggin. The commission – part of a £10 million sea-defence breakwater scheme – is entitled Couple and comprises two bronze figures measuring five metres tall, which will stand 300 metres out into the bay.
“My hope is that the sculpture will embody some of the emotion we all feel when contemplating the sea, the sky and the horizon,” says the artist Sean Henry.
He shouldn’t bank on it. Last year Hackney Co-operative Developments decided to uncover a 4ft stencil of a girl wearing a frilly dress and gas mask by the ‘subersive’ graffiti artist Banksy. Alas, cleaners spotted the graffiti 24 hours before the official opening of Gillet Square and removed every trace of this great work. Their emotional response to this great work speaks volumes for what public art really means to ordinary people.
Welcome to the new bossiness
From Compass magazine
In September this year, the murder of a motorcyclist led to some 10,000 motorists to be stranded for eight hours on the M40 when police closed the motorway. Eight hours of crying children with no food or water; flights missed; family reunions in tatters; vital assignations that oil the wheels of society cancelled.
Murder isn’t to be taken lightly, of course. And what’s a bit of a delay when compared to the poor schmuck who was taken out on his motorcycle? Nonetheless, why eight hours?
Because of a new bossiness that has blown into every nook and cranny of modern British life.
By refusing even to consider using some of their workforce to get the traffic moving while they investigated the murder, the police were saying, simply, that their time was more important than everyone else’s. And so the self-importance of officialdom hung over the scene like a damp, miserable fog.
We’ve all been subjected to this low-level inconvenience. London streets are routinely closed on a whim due to an “incident”. We are never told what these incidents are – one suspects a hoody with a catapult – but we are meant to genuflect before the greater good of our police forces, who, while very good at scrambling helicopters, closing off public highways and rushing to the scene of a case of alleged racist abuse, are absolutely diabolical at apprehending, arresting and charging criminals.
And if we have precious little sympathy for the police nowadays, what about the whole new raft of professional busybodies whose purpose is to treat us like five-year-olds?
Local authorities have decided that we’re incapable of making any adult decisions without their moral guidance. They spend millions of pounds sending out smoking cessation officers and five-a-day-co-ordinators to boss us into eating what they deem to be a healthy diet. They litter our streets with railings and signs telling us to slow down, stop, not to stop, to drive carefully through the village. (Damn! And we were just on the point of seeing if we could hit 100 miles an hour by the time we reached the primary school.) And now they are to boss us about in our homes (it was only a matter of time). So microchips are to be in placed our bins should we dare to drop in the remains of our lunch and we are issued with edicts by the Royal Society for the Protection of Accidents pointing out the hazards of going about our daily in business at home – if you are thinking of running a bath without an official to help you, it’s best to know that you should “test the water temperature before getting in”.
This sort of bossiness has become so all-pervasive, we barely now notice it. On the Red Jet “Hi Speed” ferry from Southampton to the Isle of Wight, the stewardess, whose main purpose is serving up an overpriced mud with the description of coffee, precedes her little speech over the Tannoy with the dreaded words “for your comfort and safety” – always translatable for “our convenience” – by telling us to stay in our seats like good children.
Alcoholic drink brands meanwhile entreat us to “drink responsibly”. Or what? Can we expect the nation’s brewers and distillers to send in the goons and snatch the glass out of our hands should we have the temerity to go one over the bossy government guidelines telling us not to drink more than three units a day.
Look out for the health warnings that already adorn cigarette packets to appear on bottles near you soon. And as for smoking, it is now law for any public building to stick up a sign telling us not to at its front doors. How meaningless is this? Even in the Fifties, when it was de rigueur to have a fag on even while you cleaned your teeth, no one, but no one, sparked up in the churches which are now required to deface their ancient porticos with these ghastly civic regulation-sized signs.
But what more do we expect under a government that has introduced 3,000 new laws since it came to power in 1997? A new one from Environment Secretary Hilary Benn will force us to use ugly, expensive lightbulbs that watt-for-watt are about as illuminating as a rainy day in Bognor. The self-righteousness of our age, it seems, can only be realised by living in the half light gloom of Seventies Leningrad. And we know the terrifying results of what happened when the bossiness of politicians was applied there.
In September this year, the murder of a motorcyclist led to some 10,000 motorists to be stranded for eight hours on the M40 when police closed the motorway. Eight hours of crying children with no food or water; flights missed; family reunions in tatters; vital assignations that oil the wheels of society cancelled.
Murder isn’t to be taken lightly, of course. And what’s a bit of a delay when compared to the poor schmuck who was taken out on his motorcycle? Nonetheless, why eight hours?
Because of a new bossiness that has blown into every nook and cranny of modern British life.
By refusing even to consider using some of their workforce to get the traffic moving while they investigated the murder, the police were saying, simply, that their time was more important than everyone else’s. And so the self-importance of officialdom hung over the scene like a damp, miserable fog.
We’ve all been subjected to this low-level inconvenience. London streets are routinely closed on a whim due to an “incident”. We are never told what these incidents are – one suspects a hoody with a catapult – but we are meant to genuflect before the greater good of our police forces, who, while very good at scrambling helicopters, closing off public highways and rushing to the scene of a case of alleged racist abuse, are absolutely diabolical at apprehending, arresting and charging criminals.
And if we have precious little sympathy for the police nowadays, what about the whole new raft of professional busybodies whose purpose is to treat us like five-year-olds?
Local authorities have decided that we’re incapable of making any adult decisions without their moral guidance. They spend millions of pounds sending out smoking cessation officers and five-a-day-co-ordinators to boss us into eating what they deem to be a healthy diet. They litter our streets with railings and signs telling us to slow down, stop, not to stop, to drive carefully through the village. (Damn! And we were just on the point of seeing if we could hit 100 miles an hour by the time we reached the primary school.) And now they are to boss us about in our homes (it was only a matter of time). So microchips are to be in placed our bins should we dare to drop in the remains of our lunch and we are issued with edicts by the Royal Society for the Protection of Accidents pointing out the hazards of going about our daily in business at home – if you are thinking of running a bath without an official to help you, it’s best to know that you should “test the water temperature before getting in”.
This sort of bossiness has become so all-pervasive, we barely now notice it. On the Red Jet “Hi Speed” ferry from Southampton to the Isle of Wight, the stewardess, whose main purpose is serving up an overpriced mud with the description of coffee, precedes her little speech over the Tannoy with the dreaded words “for your comfort and safety” – always translatable for “our convenience” – by telling us to stay in our seats like good children.
Alcoholic drink brands meanwhile entreat us to “drink responsibly”. Or what? Can we expect the nation’s brewers and distillers to send in the goons and snatch the glass out of our hands should we have the temerity to go one over the bossy government guidelines telling us not to drink more than three units a day.
Look out for the health warnings that already adorn cigarette packets to appear on bottles near you soon. And as for smoking, it is now law for any public building to stick up a sign telling us not to at its front doors. How meaningless is this? Even in the Fifties, when it was de rigueur to have a fag on even while you cleaned your teeth, no one, but no one, sparked up in the churches which are now required to deface their ancient porticos with these ghastly civic regulation-sized signs.
But what more do we expect under a government that has introduced 3,000 new laws since it came to power in 1997? A new one from Environment Secretary Hilary Benn will force us to use ugly, expensive lightbulbs that watt-for-watt are about as illuminating as a rainy day in Bognor. The self-righteousness of our age, it seems, can only be realised by living in the half light gloom of Seventies Leningrad. And we know the terrifying results of what happened when the bossiness of politicians was applied there.
Wednesday, 11 April 2007
How dare you be a man
From Esquire magazine
For the past 150,000 years, being a man has been a respectable occupation. We hunted stuff, fought valiant battles, and spent our leisure time over a few drinks discussing what a groove it is to rule the world. Oh, and we got married, possibly did a bit of whoring, often fell in love – sometimes ruinously – and sired children.
Now, we’re told, our time is up.
You probably haven’t read the small print, so here it is: up until this year clinics offering IVF or sperm donation services have had to take the welfare of a subsequent child into account, including its “need for a father”. Now the Fertilisation and Embryology Act has been revised to stipulate instead simply the amorphous need for a “family”. No need for dads, ergo no need for men.
Hurrah! trumped politically correct pressure groups. Let’s get away from that anachronism that was the man looking after his family. Here was another – possibly the last – pillar of male domination knocked to the ground.
Yet why should this view have credence? In fact, medicine is moving fast enough for there not to be a biological need for mothers, so why is it men who have to be written out of the evolutionary equation?
Because we live in an age where emasculation has become desirable, fashionable even, among the politically correct. The abolishing of school sports, rubbishing men’s competitive spirit, the insistence that women should be able to stand alongside their male counterparts in the Fire Service and even the SAS is all part of the wisdom of the unwritten constitution of the nanny state.
It promulgates, too, the cult of “All men are useless”. The sitting about, can’t cook, love beer comedy of Men Behaving Badly, which we thought was a friendly pastiche on the behaviour of the male of the species, has actually been taken seriously by these people.
So now we see Neil Morrissey incapable of putting up a shelf to the exasperation of his fellow Men Behaving Badly star Leslie Ash in the Homebase television commercials. Carling lager ads feature a man’s girlfriend pouring the last drops from a can of lager on the floor so he will lick it up cleaning the house as he goes along. Or how about the BT advert in which a stepfather figure is constantly shown up as a dimwit by his wife and family, who are happily au fait with the technology?
Commercial-makers reflect the views of society: their living depends on it. So when even the advertising newspaper Campaign earlier this year accused the industry it reports on as portraying us as “castrated dweebs” who appeal to neither men nor women, it would seem that we should have something to worry about.
The former leader of the Australian Labor Party, one Mark Latham, 46, certainly thinks so. “One of the saddest things I have seen in my lifetime has been the decline in Australian male culture,” he writes in his delightfully titled book A Conga Line of Suckholes (the description he applied to the floor of the Conservative Government because of their loyalty to George Bush). “Australian mates and good blokes have been replaced by nervous wrecks, metrosexual knobs and toss bags.” Don’t hold back, Mark.
Yet he has a point. The politically correct masters – all right, all right, and mistresses – of the nanny state who cheered the news that families don’t need fathers are certainly doing all they can to create a brave new society in their terms. So it is that the Labour Party is enforcing women-only shortlists for MPs in a move to make the parliamentary party comprise 50 per cent women and “reflect” the society in which they live, (conveniently forgetting, of course, that we vote for MPs, making any target inherently impossible). Similarly, perfectly able male applicants to police forces up and down the country are rejected because quotas have to be filled.
But because of the number of women who still choose stay at home to look after children, surely if we take this to quota-filling to its logical conclusion there would either permanently have to be a body of men unemployed to ensure a 50-50 balance continues in the workplace, or a workforce that has permanently more men than women. The Royal Highland Fusiliers, in other words, would need to comprise 50 per cent female soldiers and provide baby changing facilities on the front line.
They would have to employ equality officers, too, because the nanny state seems to have this weird idea that without the intercession of legions of bureaucrats, we’d all be tits-out-for-the-lads sexists, poring over Zoo and Nuts and smashing each other over the head at football matches.
So it was that earlier this year, bubbling up from deep in the reservoir of government quangos, somewhere no doubt, in the Department of Stating the Bleeding obvious, we were presented with the Dad Pack.
It came from “Fathers Direct”. They are not to be confused with Fathers 4 Justice, the embittered men who clamber up public buildings and win the support of Bob Geldof; these are lip-quivering civil servants whose living appears to depend on producing so many yards of fatuous, self-evident nonsense. So the Dad Pack told us, for example, to “Bite your lip, not your partner, when she is ratty” and in the section on the birth to take a “water spray to keep her cool – a water pistol is less effective but can lighten the atmosphere”.
Hah! We men, eh, if we’re not too busy attacking our wives, we’re always at the ready with a water pistol gag.
This crude stereotyping is par for the course. The Dad Pack is written in a weird Ronseal advert bloke vernacular, as if none of us has been to a university or had a civilised relationship with a woman before. When your “partner” is pregnant, it advises: “Shop, clean, decorate. When knackered, try not to say, ‘who is having this baby, you or me?’” As you would.
Anyway, who’s to say females are such victims, left to suffer the vagaries of troglodyte male behaviour were it not for the intercession of Fathers Direct? Career women in middle and top management jobs, for example, earn nearly as much as their male counterparts. A survey in 2003 by the Chartered Management Institute and analyst Remuneration Economics found the average female department head earned 1 per cent less than her male equivalent – £53,257 a year compared to £53,732. Indeed, many women were the bigger wage earners in their family. Meanwhile, British Government figures show that there are now more female millionaires aged between 18 and 44 than there are men. In an episode of the BBC series The Money Programme entitled “Filthy Rich and Female”, the businesswoman Nicola Horlick estimated that within 20 years 60 per cent of the United Kingdom’s wealth would be controlled by women.
If this is true, then we should all celebrate. What will happen to women’s rights groups if it really is a fact that women are doing better in the workplace than men? Could it mean the final death knell for the feminism that declared all men are rapists? Will a new glass ceiling for men come into being and women’s groups be replaced by men’s organisations? And if that means that coffee mornings will be replaced by park football afternoons, and ladies who lunch by men who lager, then bring it on, boys, bring it on.
For the past 150,000 years, being a man has been a respectable occupation. We hunted stuff, fought valiant battles, and spent our leisure time over a few drinks discussing what a groove it is to rule the world. Oh, and we got married, possibly did a bit of whoring, often fell in love – sometimes ruinously – and sired children.
Now, we’re told, our time is up.
You probably haven’t read the small print, so here it is: up until this year clinics offering IVF or sperm donation services have had to take the welfare of a subsequent child into account, including its “need for a father”. Now the Fertilisation and Embryology Act has been revised to stipulate instead simply the amorphous need for a “family”. No need for dads, ergo no need for men.
Hurrah! trumped politically correct pressure groups. Let’s get away from that anachronism that was the man looking after his family. Here was another – possibly the last – pillar of male domination knocked to the ground.
Yet why should this view have credence? In fact, medicine is moving fast enough for there not to be a biological need for mothers, so why is it men who have to be written out of the evolutionary equation?
Because we live in an age where emasculation has become desirable, fashionable even, among the politically correct. The abolishing of school sports, rubbishing men’s competitive spirit, the insistence that women should be able to stand alongside their male counterparts in the Fire Service and even the SAS is all part of the wisdom of the unwritten constitution of the nanny state.
It promulgates, too, the cult of “All men are useless”. The sitting about, can’t cook, love beer comedy of Men Behaving Badly, which we thought was a friendly pastiche on the behaviour of the male of the species, has actually been taken seriously by these people.
So now we see Neil Morrissey incapable of putting up a shelf to the exasperation of his fellow Men Behaving Badly star Leslie Ash in the Homebase television commercials. Carling lager ads feature a man’s girlfriend pouring the last drops from a can of lager on the floor so he will lick it up cleaning the house as he goes along. Or how about the BT advert in which a stepfather figure is constantly shown up as a dimwit by his wife and family, who are happily au fait with the technology?
Commercial-makers reflect the views of society: their living depends on it. So when even the advertising newspaper Campaign earlier this year accused the industry it reports on as portraying us as “castrated dweebs” who appeal to neither men nor women, it would seem that we should have something to worry about.
The former leader of the Australian Labor Party, one Mark Latham, 46, certainly thinks so. “One of the saddest things I have seen in my lifetime has been the decline in Australian male culture,” he writes in his delightfully titled book A Conga Line of Suckholes (the description he applied to the floor of the Conservative Government because of their loyalty to George Bush). “Australian mates and good blokes have been replaced by nervous wrecks, metrosexual knobs and toss bags.” Don’t hold back, Mark.
Yet he has a point. The politically correct masters – all right, all right, and mistresses – of the nanny state who cheered the news that families don’t need fathers are certainly doing all they can to create a brave new society in their terms. So it is that the Labour Party is enforcing women-only shortlists for MPs in a move to make the parliamentary party comprise 50 per cent women and “reflect” the society in which they live, (conveniently forgetting, of course, that we vote for MPs, making any target inherently impossible). Similarly, perfectly able male applicants to police forces up and down the country are rejected because quotas have to be filled.
But because of the number of women who still choose stay at home to look after children, surely if we take this to quota-filling to its logical conclusion there would either permanently have to be a body of men unemployed to ensure a 50-50 balance continues in the workplace, or a workforce that has permanently more men than women. The Royal Highland Fusiliers, in other words, would need to comprise 50 per cent female soldiers and provide baby changing facilities on the front line.
They would have to employ equality officers, too, because the nanny state seems to have this weird idea that without the intercession of legions of bureaucrats, we’d all be tits-out-for-the-lads sexists, poring over Zoo and Nuts and smashing each other over the head at football matches.
So it was that earlier this year, bubbling up from deep in the reservoir of government quangos, somewhere no doubt, in the Department of Stating the Bleeding obvious, we were presented with the Dad Pack.
It came from “Fathers Direct”. They are not to be confused with Fathers 4 Justice, the embittered men who clamber up public buildings and win the support of Bob Geldof; these are lip-quivering civil servants whose living appears to depend on producing so many yards of fatuous, self-evident nonsense. So the Dad Pack told us, for example, to “Bite your lip, not your partner, when she is ratty” and in the section on the birth to take a “water spray to keep her cool – a water pistol is less effective but can lighten the atmosphere”.
Hah! We men, eh, if we’re not too busy attacking our wives, we’re always at the ready with a water pistol gag.
This crude stereotyping is par for the course. The Dad Pack is written in a weird Ronseal advert bloke vernacular, as if none of us has been to a university or had a civilised relationship with a woman before. When your “partner” is pregnant, it advises: “Shop, clean, decorate. When knackered, try not to say, ‘who is having this baby, you or me?’” As you would.
Anyway, who’s to say females are such victims, left to suffer the vagaries of troglodyte male behaviour were it not for the intercession of Fathers Direct? Career women in middle and top management jobs, for example, earn nearly as much as their male counterparts. A survey in 2003 by the Chartered Management Institute and analyst Remuneration Economics found the average female department head earned 1 per cent less than her male equivalent – £53,257 a year compared to £53,732. Indeed, many women were the bigger wage earners in their family. Meanwhile, British Government figures show that there are now more female millionaires aged between 18 and 44 than there are men. In an episode of the BBC series The Money Programme entitled “Filthy Rich and Female”, the businesswoman Nicola Horlick estimated that within 20 years 60 per cent of the United Kingdom’s wealth would be controlled by women.
If this is true, then we should all celebrate. What will happen to women’s rights groups if it really is a fact that women are doing better in the workplace than men? Could it mean the final death knell for the feminism that declared all men are rapists? Will a new glass ceiling for men come into being and women’s groups be replaced by men’s organisations? And if that means that coffee mornings will be replaced by park football afternoons, and ladies who lunch by men who lager, then bring it on, boys, bring it on.
Sunday, 8 April 2007
The beginning of the end of free society
From The Yorkshire Post
Who would be a fireman at the beginning of the 21st century? In Glasgow last year a watch manager was demoted and eight of his colleagues officially warned for refusing to hand out safety leaflets at a gay pride march through the city. Needless to say they all had to undergo intensive “diversity training”. In Plymouth firefighters, as we must now call them, weren’t allowed to slide down a pole at their new fire station because of “health and safety” concerns – God forbid that health and safety discover they have on occasion to deal with a blazing inferno. And during the World Cup last summer, firemen in Hampshire were ordered not to fly the flags of St George that were fluttering across the nation because they might offend other nationalities.
This is what we all recognise as political correctness, a frightening political phenomenon that is sweeping across the country; frightening because although we’ve all heard of the term, we all use it, what we can’t do is vote for it.
We didn’t vote for new laws making children of up to 12 sit in car seats. We didn’t vote for the cameras that photograph us 300 times a day. We didn’t vote for a government to ban smoking. No one voted for that matter, for smoking cessation officers.
And certainly no one voted for that essential cog in the running of our country – the five-a-day-co-ordinator.
Yet here we are with thousands of these people ready to tell us off us for not eating our greens. For the first time since Oliver Cromwell, politicians seem to think they have the right to tell us how we should behave.
The anti-social-behavioural order – the ASBO – is surely emblematic of the society in which we live today. It is at the heart of what we all recognise as the nanny state. Firstly, that the government feels it can boss us around like this, and secondly that we as a society are so immature that we have to be treated like children.
We have battalions of a new breed of functionaries – let’s call them the meddling classes – setting themselves up on huge salaries to convince us that they are essential to our wellbeing. The likes of school travel-plan advisers, people team-managers and partnership coordinators stalk our town halls ready to set up rafts of guidelines and joint action committees to boss us about. The sort of people who come up with the Dad Pack, launched this year at a cost of £50,000 to impart such wisdom to potential fathers “not to have affairs” while their wives, sorry, “partners” are pregnant.
And we should be very afraid of them. In four states in the USA, there is a three-drink rule in pubs and bars. Enforced voluntarily now, but for how long? In Texas nanny can send police into bars and arrest drinkers who have had one too many on the basis that they might commit an offence. A spokeswoman for the commission that decided this was the proper way to police society, one Carolyn Beck, declared: “People jump off balconies trying to reach a swimming pool and miss.” Happens all the time, Carolyn.
We see in this country these stories every day in which some busybody is protecting us from ourselves. An old man lobbed off the bus in Cardiff, because he was carrying a can of paint. It was, of course, a “hazardous article”. You can hear the bureaucrat saying in the drear voice of the official, “We take the safety of our customers very seriously”. A mother and father with three children turned away from a swimming pool in Bridgwater, Somerset, because only one child per parent was allowed.
And there are hundreds of thousands of these busybodies competing to be ever more self-righteous. Between 1998 and 2005, there was a 680,000 increase in the number of public sector jobs – 524,000 of which were in the fields of health, education and social work.
In the nanny state, the bureaucrat is on the ascendant just as it was in Socialist Russia and Nazi Germany. Communism was never about the proletariat, but an army of functionaries who in the interests of the state were there to stop you thinking for yourself. Even worse was the network of household spies who could win favours by sneaking on their fellow citizens, for, say, oh propagating anti-revolutionary ideas. Want a better house? Shop your neighbour. Now in England and Wales next year there is to be a smoking hotline to report smokers to the “authorities”. The authorities, indeed!
Most of us would prefer a hotline to report a burglary, or an assault – we used to have one by dialling 999, but it doesn’t work any more.
Then again, can we really expect it to when the police’s paymasters at the Home Office go on courses where they’re being asked to look into beardism and note their reactions to facial hair?
Who would be a fireman at the beginning of the 21st century? In Glasgow last year a watch manager was demoted and eight of his colleagues officially warned for refusing to hand out safety leaflets at a gay pride march through the city. Needless to say they all had to undergo intensive “diversity training”. In Plymouth firefighters, as we must now call them, weren’t allowed to slide down a pole at their new fire station because of “health and safety” concerns – God forbid that health and safety discover they have on occasion to deal with a blazing inferno. And during the World Cup last summer, firemen in Hampshire were ordered not to fly the flags of St George that were fluttering across the nation because they might offend other nationalities.
This is what we all recognise as political correctness, a frightening political phenomenon that is sweeping across the country; frightening because although we’ve all heard of the term, we all use it, what we can’t do is vote for it.
We didn’t vote for new laws making children of up to 12 sit in car seats. We didn’t vote for the cameras that photograph us 300 times a day. We didn’t vote for a government to ban smoking. No one voted for that matter, for smoking cessation officers.
And certainly no one voted for that essential cog in the running of our country – the five-a-day-co-ordinator.
Yet here we are with thousands of these people ready to tell us off us for not eating our greens. For the first time since Oliver Cromwell, politicians seem to think they have the right to tell us how we should behave.
The anti-social-behavioural order – the ASBO – is surely emblematic of the society in which we live today. It is at the heart of what we all recognise as the nanny state. Firstly, that the government feels it can boss us around like this, and secondly that we as a society are so immature that we have to be treated like children.
We have battalions of a new breed of functionaries – let’s call them the meddling classes – setting themselves up on huge salaries to convince us that they are essential to our wellbeing. The likes of school travel-plan advisers, people team-managers and partnership coordinators stalk our town halls ready to set up rafts of guidelines and joint action committees to boss us about. The sort of people who come up with the Dad Pack, launched this year at a cost of £50,000 to impart such wisdom to potential fathers “not to have affairs” while their wives, sorry, “partners” are pregnant.
And we should be very afraid of them. In four states in the USA, there is a three-drink rule in pubs and bars. Enforced voluntarily now, but for how long? In Texas nanny can send police into bars and arrest drinkers who have had one too many on the basis that they might commit an offence. A spokeswoman for the commission that decided this was the proper way to police society, one Carolyn Beck, declared: “People jump off balconies trying to reach a swimming pool and miss.” Happens all the time, Carolyn.
We see in this country these stories every day in which some busybody is protecting us from ourselves. An old man lobbed off the bus in Cardiff, because he was carrying a can of paint. It was, of course, a “hazardous article”. You can hear the bureaucrat saying in the drear voice of the official, “We take the safety of our customers very seriously”. A mother and father with three children turned away from a swimming pool in Bridgwater, Somerset, because only one child per parent was allowed.
And there are hundreds of thousands of these busybodies competing to be ever more self-righteous. Between 1998 and 2005, there was a 680,000 increase in the number of public sector jobs – 524,000 of which were in the fields of health, education and social work.
In the nanny state, the bureaucrat is on the ascendant just as it was in Socialist Russia and Nazi Germany. Communism was never about the proletariat, but an army of functionaries who in the interests of the state were there to stop you thinking for yourself. Even worse was the network of household spies who could win favours by sneaking on their fellow citizens, for, say, oh propagating anti-revolutionary ideas. Want a better house? Shop your neighbour. Now in England and Wales next year there is to be a smoking hotline to report smokers to the “authorities”. The authorities, indeed!
Most of us would prefer a hotline to report a burglary, or an assault – we used to have one by dialling 999, but it doesn’t work any more.
Then again, can we really expect it to when the police’s paymasters at the Home Office go on courses where they’re being asked to look into beardism and note their reactions to facial hair?
Sunday, 25 February 2007
How goggbledook is taking over the world
From Compass magazine
Towards the end of last year the right of centre think-tank Reform Reforming Welfare surprisingly declared that the UK’s benefits and welfare system was “not fit for purpose”.
Well, not surprising in that it costs us billions of pounds a year (£79 billion at the last count) and soaks up more money than education, twice as much as law and order, or that it is open to systematic abuse. But that they should describe it as not fit for purpose.
What does that mean, exactly? Does it mean, for example, that the Welfare State doesn’t work? That its whole mighty edifice is so rotten that one metaphorical prod will have it crumbling to the ground? Or does it mean that this is an essentially sparklingly efficient organisation that just hums long very nicely, but not in a way to suit the nation’s needy – rather like a well-drilled army that goes to war in Afghanistan only armed with muskets (probably not far from the truth)?
Well, it means either of these things, or neither of them. You might as well say, “The Welfare State is pork pie, car, hat, bicycle, irradiation” for all the light the words “not fit for purpose” throw upon it.
This ridiculous phrase was drummed up by John Reid to describe the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, and didn’t mean anything then, either; he was just too scared to say that the whole department simply wasn’t doing its job properly. These weasel words are emblematic of the way we are governed. Gobbledegook has taken over our government, our public institutions, our charities, even, to a certain extent, our businesses. They are awash with a new breed of bureaucrat, swaggering around the public sector especially, on huge salaries, building empires that depend upon doing anything other than saying what you mean.
In the week that Reform decided that the Welfare State was not fit for purpose, for example, Lincolnshire County Council was just crying out for a Head of Democratic Services, for which it was offering a modest £51,261 - £56,376. “We are looking for a key player to provide leadership and direction to a team of professionals, developing strategies and policies in support of the Council’s vision, aims and objectives.”
Warrington was searching for a Director of Skills Policy (circa £75,000 plus benefits) to, “Distil and evaluate policy thinking, influencing key stakeholders to ensure regional and national targets are met, and major projects and initiatives are progressed.”
And so on. Every Wednesday The Guardian newspaper’s Society section is bulging with advertisements for these jobsworths on steroids. Between 1998 and 2005, 680,000 public sector jobs were created that seemed to have achieved little more than turning nouns such as progress into pompous little verbs so that initiatives are “progressed”. So when finally these functionaries do get feet under their publicly financed desks, their prime motivation is to keep talking rubbish to each other in endless reports and endless conferences that will hopefully make them appear important enough to employ even more people in their puffed up little empires.
In Manchester in 2004, a joint children’s unit was established in response to an Every Child Matters (yes, really) Green Paper to among other things: “Provide a focal point for the interpretation of Government requirements and new initiatives in the context of local aspirations and strategies and help make and plan appropriate responses.” Er, OK, if you say so.
What is so scandalous is that if every child really did matter, Manchester’s joint children’s unit would be pouring its efforts into education and teaching them to read and write properly rather than “identify mainstream evidenced-based good practice”.
But that isn’t the point. These jobs are about maintaining power. Lack of plain English makes it almost impossible to question these people’s pampered positions. Obfuscation is a means to an end.
Power and leadership are not the same thing, and it is the latter that these people lack. Churchill would never have bleated that something is not fit for purpose. Real leaders have the ability to use concise, erudite language to explain complex issues. Indeed our democracy depends on it.
If our leaders described the Welfare State as, “A monstrous white elephant populated by egocentric jobsworths”, then something might be done about it. Saying it’s “not fit for purpose” can only result in the employment of yet more bureaucrats working with stakeholders committed to improving outcomes.
Towards the end of last year the right of centre think-tank Reform Reforming Welfare surprisingly declared that the UK’s benefits and welfare system was “not fit for purpose”.
Well, not surprising in that it costs us billions of pounds a year (£79 billion at the last count) and soaks up more money than education, twice as much as law and order, or that it is open to systematic abuse. But that they should describe it as not fit for purpose.
What does that mean, exactly? Does it mean, for example, that the Welfare State doesn’t work? That its whole mighty edifice is so rotten that one metaphorical prod will have it crumbling to the ground? Or does it mean that this is an essentially sparklingly efficient organisation that just hums long very nicely, but not in a way to suit the nation’s needy – rather like a well-drilled army that goes to war in Afghanistan only armed with muskets (probably not far from the truth)?
Well, it means either of these things, or neither of them. You might as well say, “The Welfare State is pork pie, car, hat, bicycle, irradiation” for all the light the words “not fit for purpose” throw upon it.
This ridiculous phrase was drummed up by John Reid to describe the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, and didn’t mean anything then, either; he was just too scared to say that the whole department simply wasn’t doing its job properly. These weasel words are emblematic of the way we are governed. Gobbledegook has taken over our government, our public institutions, our charities, even, to a certain extent, our businesses. They are awash with a new breed of bureaucrat, swaggering around the public sector especially, on huge salaries, building empires that depend upon doing anything other than saying what you mean.
In the week that Reform decided that the Welfare State was not fit for purpose, for example, Lincolnshire County Council was just crying out for a Head of Democratic Services, for which it was offering a modest £51,261 - £56,376. “We are looking for a key player to provide leadership and direction to a team of professionals, developing strategies and policies in support of the Council’s vision, aims and objectives.”
Warrington was searching for a Director of Skills Policy (circa £75,000 plus benefits) to, “Distil and evaluate policy thinking, influencing key stakeholders to ensure regional and national targets are met, and major projects and initiatives are progressed.”
And so on. Every Wednesday The Guardian newspaper’s Society section is bulging with advertisements for these jobsworths on steroids. Between 1998 and 2005, 680,000 public sector jobs were created that seemed to have achieved little more than turning nouns such as progress into pompous little verbs so that initiatives are “progressed”. So when finally these functionaries do get feet under their publicly financed desks, their prime motivation is to keep talking rubbish to each other in endless reports and endless conferences that will hopefully make them appear important enough to employ even more people in their puffed up little empires.
In Manchester in 2004, a joint children’s unit was established in response to an Every Child Matters (yes, really) Green Paper to among other things: “Provide a focal point for the interpretation of Government requirements and new initiatives in the context of local aspirations and strategies and help make and plan appropriate responses.” Er, OK, if you say so.
What is so scandalous is that if every child really did matter, Manchester’s joint children’s unit would be pouring its efforts into education and teaching them to read and write properly rather than “identify mainstream evidenced-based good practice”.
But that isn’t the point. These jobs are about maintaining power. Lack of plain English makes it almost impossible to question these people’s pampered positions. Obfuscation is a means to an end.
Power and leadership are not the same thing, and it is the latter that these people lack. Churchill would never have bleated that something is not fit for purpose. Real leaders have the ability to use concise, erudite language to explain complex issues. Indeed our democracy depends on it.
If our leaders described the Welfare State as, “A monstrous white elephant populated by egocentric jobsworths”, then something might be done about it. Saying it’s “not fit for purpose” can only result in the employment of yet more bureaucrats working with stakeholders committed to improving outcomes.
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