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.

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?

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.