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A series of articles by Derek Kinrade originally republished from the National Information Forum's magazine Innovations in Information between 2004 and 2007, but now continuing in the National Information Forum's regular, electronic -
"Member's Information Sheets".
Call centres • Secrecy • Models • Spin • Dogma • Bureaucracy • Pragmatism • The Olympic Games • Petering Out • Retirement • Euphemisms • Football
• NEW Rewarding Failure
The views expressed are not necessarily those of the National Information Forum. There are, of course, many other subjects that are ‘off-limits’ on the website of a charity. But there may, from time to time, be new thoughts that ought to be expressed here towards a healthy debate on social issues.
WE HATE NO.13: REWARDING FAILURE
Derek Kinrade (with Ann Darnbrough)
Golden largesse for feeble performance has become, like lap dancing clubs, 24/7 drinking and casinos, an unsavoury part of the national scene. I refer, of course, to those extraordinary salaries and bonuses awarded to people who have loaned money irresponsibly or, conversely, have invested public money in banks palpably at risk. To people, moreover, who appear to be largely unaccountable for their actions. Obviously no-one has set out to fail. But fail they have: big time. No-one has put it better than Will Hutton (The Guardian, 14 October) who refers to “breathtaking business misjudgment, epic regulatory failure and a 20-year indulgence of now-defunct ‘free market’ principles”. What I hate most in such a context is the indiscriminate payment of excessive ‘rewards’ across the board.
But you may think that it is all very well to be wise after the event: in this case the credit crunch and meltdown of global stock markets. I take that point and rely instead on the remarks of my partner, Ann Darnbrough, in her miscellany A Rebellious Disposition, published, please note, in 2007:
“Though lacking the skills of a trained accountant, I nevertheless have strong views about those sad people who dedicate their energies to acquiring personal fortunes, rather than benefiting the world around them; piling up riches by every this way or that, without thought for those struggling to make an honest living. Some may call it the politics of envy. I prefer to think that it is a basic principle of elementary morality.
“A recent Guardian survey found that over the previous 12 months boardroom ‘earnings’ had risen seven times faster than average earnings. More than 200 directors ‘earned’ more than £1m. Eight chief executives were said to have ‘earned’ more than £1m as a basic salary, quite apart from mind-boggling bonuses, perks and share options. The magic word ‘bonus’ seems to have high ‘earners’ salivating. In 2006, the total of bonuses to be paid out in the UK was estimated at £8.8bn.
“While some attempt has been made to lift the poorest members of our population out of absolute poverty, the disparity between those at the bottom and those at the top inexorably widens as the rich are allowed, indeed encouraged, to become immoderately richer.
Enough is never enough
“Naturally, we all want enough money to keep our lives going and to be able to do those things we enjoy. The trouble is that for so many people, enough is never enough…it all too often seems that once a person becomes rich their main object in life is to become richer. You might say they have caught the deadly affluenza virus that can be almost impossible to shake off.
“The defence for monstrous pay is that it is necessary to attract the right calibre of people. But does this argument stand up? Does outstanding performance necessarily follow financial reward, and is a devotion to high living the best qualification for leadership? Whatever happened to the idea of achievement through dedication as the ultimate prize? Unbridled remuneration simply creates a hierarchy of status, divorcing the leaders from the led. Don’t get me wrong. I know that absolute equality is an impossible dream, not really a dream worth dreaming, and that financial incentives are needed as a spur to achievement. What I am saying is that there needs to be an overriding sense of proportion, a climate of what is reasonable rather than a free-for-all based on supply and demand.
“I believe a healthy nation, one that is prosperous in the best sense of the word, cannot be built on greed. A nation state based on the pursuit of affluence will surely die. True wealth is made up of the contributions of all its citizens to the common good: to each other as neighbours, to strangers around us through kindness and to the wellbeing of the state through fair and equitable taxation.”
Ann was not alone in challenging the culture of greed, but most of us closed our eyes and ears to the dangers of an economy built on excessive debt and weighted in favour of entrepreneurial adventurers. Information about the finances of banks and the ratio of deposits to lending now abounds in the media, but in non-specialist newspapers it was conspicuous by its absence before the bubble burst.
We have drifted into countenancing a society in which the rich get ever richer and the divide between those at the top and those at the bottom has widened to an obscene degree. I may have mentioned (but it is worth repeating) that while people on quite modest incomes pay National Insurance contributions at 11%, high earners pay only 1% on income above £40,040 a year. Similarly, if you cast your eye on your gas or electricity bills, you will find that the price is higher for low consumption. This is surely indefensible.
I rest my case, save that those who have benefited from their mistakes still have an opportunity voluntarily to pay something back. But perhaps that is another impossible dream.
Not, I hasten to say, the beautiful game, nor yet the likes of Accrington Stanley or those who labour enthusiastically on Hackney Marshes. My distaste rises exponentially as we move into the higher echelons of competition.
But at all levels, club football attracts tribal support. The original pretext for one’s particular attachment may be slight, but once implanted it tends to remain entrenched, like religious faith or heroin addiction. And it is irrational and deaf to common sense. At the lower levels of the sport this hardly matters, but at the top it translates to an allegiance and dedication to success literally at any cost.
Thus we have seen, increasingly, an acceptance that success can be bought. It amounts to a collective madness. Given wealthy owners, prepared to commit huge resources, there is virtually no limit to the importation of the talent thought necessary to achieve pre-eminence. And fervent fans have become party to this strategy, apparently unconcerned that, beyond the shirts the players wear, their favourite teams for the most part bear little affinity to the areas they allegedly represent.
Foreign owners, foreign managers, foreign players
Of the big four in the English Premier League, none has an English manager. Only Sir Alex is British. The players are largely drawn from the elite of footballing countries across the world: proven maestros imported to secure supremacy. And the costs are enormous, with massive transfer fees and top managers and players being paid incredible salaries. As we have seen in recent seasons, the result is that the contest has become more and more predictable, with most of the teams in the league destined to be also-rans. This process is reinforced by the inevitable drift of better players from struggling clubs to those challenging for silverware. Soon, unless something is done, I suspect that the big four will become the big two; perhaps even the big one.
Men predominate as the cheer leaders in this outrageous system. I have heard it said that some find the climatic moments in a game as “better than sex”; which is surely a sad commentary on their love lives. Apparently they have substituted the romance of football for romance in their relationships. I think the sad fact is that they bond with other men, and prefer their company to that of their partners. And at such great cost. When I first went to watch Liverpool FC, it cost a shilling (5 pence) to get in and an old penny to store my bike in somebody’s back yard. Nowadays, admission, refreshments, travel (sometimes over hundreds of miles), parking, replica shirts and other accessories add up to a whopping outlay, and for those men with family responsibilities this is inevitably at the expense of their nearest and dearest. Today, even to watch football on television mostly requires a slice of the family income to be diverted to subscription channels. Conversely, people who are hard up cannot afford to participate. It is another example of social exclusion.
Yet another unfortunate consequence of the system, with its over-reliance upon foreign players in our top clubs, is that the home countries are drawing talent from a contracting pool and finding it increasingly difficult to recruit the equivalents of George Best and Billy Wright so that they can field competitive teams. In the pursuit of localised aims we are frustrating national achievement.
Change will not be easy. As Napoleon Bonaparte remarked “There is no place in a fanatic’s head where reason can enter”.
(I swear I wrote this before the acquisition of Manchester City by the sheiks of Abu Dhabi (for the big four now read the big five) and before Andy Burnham’s speech to the Cooperative Party).
WE HATE NO.11 : EUPHEMISMS
(or: what’s wrong with the truth?)
I was triggered to have a go at this subject by the May 2008 issue of Plain English, which reported that our urbane Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, has condemned euphemisms in the public services. Well I wouldn’t go quite that far. Euphemisms are defined in the Oxford Dictionary as the substitution of a mild or vague expression for a harsh or blunt one, and there are many circumstances in which I am on the side of mildness: as when a cherished manuscript is turned down by saying that it does not fit the publisher’s present requirements, rather than pronouncing it to be a load of tosh. Or a gentle let down after a dire audition. Being outspoken may be honest, but it can also be hurtful, rude and offensive.
Much depends on our intention in being less than direct: there are many motives, such as kindness, prudishness, superstition and pretension. Thus shoddy homework may be said to be ‘not wholly without merit’ (rather than fatally flawed), old people are ‘of a certain age’, impaired people are ‘disabled’ (actually, if you think about it, this is a contra-euphemism), foul weather is ‘inclement’ and pets are ‘put to sleep’. Christians do not die, they ‘go to meet their maker’ or are ‘called to higher service’. Such masterpieces of elusion go on ad infinitum. As Charles Dickens (Bleak House, 1852/3) reminded us, even when we speak plainly we are prone to preface our remarks with an apology: ‘Not to put too fine a point on it’. To my mind, weasel words do not matter very much. They are no more than delicate subterfuge in polite society.
Gilding the lily
Euphemisms cross over into ‘We Hate’ territory when we enter the arena of what is commonly called ‘double-speak’: messages honed to camouflage and mitigate an unpalatable reality. Perhaps this is what the writer of the gospel attributed to Matthew had in mind when he recorded Jesus as saying (5:37) “let your communication be Yea, Yea; Nay, Nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil”. So far as the public services are concerned, there is a wonderful example of circumlocution in the June 2008 issue of the DWP’s Touchbase, which describes the latest raft of welfare reform as a challenge “to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to take advantage of the jobs market, irrespective of social, health or other barriers to employment”. Whereas, unless I am mistaken, its primary purpose is to reduce dependence on state benefits. I understand from The Oxford Companion to British History that in the 19th century workhouses were similarly represented as “a productive environment for the able-bodied poor”.
This kind of PR communication is now commonplace. The Nazis perfected propaganda as an art form, so that what began centuries ago as no more than a mechanism for propagating religious faith has become a skill devoted to massaging and neutralising truth; what Alan Harrington (Life in Crystal Palace, 1959) described as “flower arrangements of the facts” and Cyril Connolly (The Unquiet Grave, 1945) as “taking refuge in evasion”. This is where the Forum’s main interest lies, because we hate subterfuge and want public information to be unvarnished.
Cloaking evil
Yet there is a category of euphemism that is even more sinister. Recent conflicts have spawned a category of expressions that seek to disguise what can only be described as corrosive atrocity. Again, Hitler and his henchmen were in the vanguard. They called the holocaust ‘Die Endlösung’ (final solution) to resolve ‘the Jewish question’ in Europe. In more recent times genocide has been diminished as ‘ethnic cleansing’. On the battlefield, attackers speak of ‘friendly fire’ which, being mistakenly directed at their own side, is anything but friendly. The indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of enemy positions has become known as ‘collateral damage’, while the conveyance of prisoners to countries where torture is acceptable has been called ‘extraordinary rendition’. Failing that, ‘water boarding’ may do the trick. (If you have any doubt about whether this and other techniques used at Guantanamo are forms of torture, I recommend the May/June issue of Amnesty magazine). In Afghanistan and Iraq, ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ (SOP), normally a perfectly legitimate term, was deployed as a deadly euphemism for abhorrent and illegal interrogation techniques which, as I write, are said still to be in use.
I recently needed to locate a street parking bay in Westminster for a disabled driver and phoned the City Council (or so I thought). The person who answered seemed uncertain generally about parking bays and passed me on to a colleague who asked me where I needed the space. “In Whitehall,” I replied. “Where is that? Is it Whitehall Road?” the voice asked. “Whitehall,” I said, beginning to sound irritated, “in central London, near where the Prime Minister lives.”
“We’re only a call centre,” rejoined the perplexed operator.
Unsurprisingly, a recent Citizens Advice report finds that telephone call centre service is often poor. You are likely to be kept on hold for ages, presented with a multitude of automated options before receiving an inadequate response.
The report says that four out of ten of us (surely too low) are “dissatisfied with our experience of some call centres”. Such centres, according to the report, are now pervasive, yet CA found that 97 per cent of respondents, when prompted, found at least one aspect of them annoying. The report, Hanging on the Telephone, demonstrates the negative impact of poor call centre service by drawing on a MORI survey of consumers and the experience and evidence of CA bureaux nationwide. In particular, it finds that call centres don’t work well for people who want to resolve complex problems, and those who have learning difficulties or don’t speak English. The time taken to get through, the cost of calls, lack of ownership and a failure to recognise the role of intermediaries like CABx are all highlighted. Utility companies are identified as the worst offenders, followed by government agencies and financial institutions, like banks and insurance firms.
CA’s Chief Executive, David Harker, comments that “the use of call centres is a fact of modern living. They can offer significant benefits if consumers can deal with matters on the phone at a time which suits them. But they are not the answer for everyone. There is a long way to go to achieve a balance between dealing efficiently with high volumes of calls and providing accessible and responsive services. Almost all call centre users have criticisms of their experience and a significant proportion is left dissatisfied. Critical problems about money, debts and benefits, affecting people on very low incomes, simply are not getting through. Call centres should be an effective gateway to services and problem resolution, not a barrier.”
This, we feel, is a gentle verdict. We think that call centres operate for the economic benefit of the provider rather than that of the consumer, and often are designed to protect senior managers from complaints. We suspect that there is an undisclosed pyre of burning dissatisfaction, particularly where call centres are located abroad. The Forum’s concern is with the serious lack of information being provided where this is urgently needed.
It is commonly said that Britain has a “culture of secrecy”. And if the Freedom of Information Act can do anything to encourage that culture to change then that can only be a good thing. We are all for as much openness as possible. But let’s not delude ourselves. Most people have some things that they prefer to remain hidden, and public bodies are no different. No amount of legislation is likely to bring to the full light of public scrutiny the darkest corners and most embarrassing secrets of governments and public authorities. What is disturbing, however, is that an Act that has taken 30 years to reach the Statute Book is quite so full of ‘get-out’ clauses. Described by a leader in The Guardian as “a pale shadow of the 1997 white paper that encapsulated Labour’s enthusiasm in opposition” (31 December 2004), the Act begins simply enough and in the right direction by giving, on request, a general right of access to information held by public authorities. But the devil is in the detail. Part II of the Act (which the Explanatory Notes dispose of in a little over three lines) contains a raft of exemptions, some of them absolute, others dependent on a ‘public interest’ test. Particularly contentious are exemptions which, on the evidence of a ministerial signature, allow for non-disclosure ‘to safeguard the national interest’ (section 24), or if the information sought constitutes a trade secret or would, or would be likely to, prejudice commercial interests – including those of the public authority holding it (section 43).
Under section 60 there is a right of appeal against ‘national interest’ certificates and we know Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, to be a man of the highest integrity and resolve. Nonetheless this is a disappointing Act. ‘Freedom of Information’ is perhaps a misnomer. We think ‘Curtailment of Information’ is nearer the mark.
Not, despite some reservations, the sort that parade on catwalks, but what the French call idées fixées. An example is the ‘social model of disability’ which holds (correct me if I’m wrong) that disability is attributable to the physical, attitudinal and communication barriers created by society, or perhaps more accurately which society fails to dismantle or change. Despite significant progress in addressing the needs of disabled people, society (whatever that means) is certainly not blameless; but is not the greater truth that the shortcomings and insensitivity of non-disabled folk compound disability, rather than being its sole cause? And in a degree related to an almost infinitely variable level of impairment.
The ‘social model’, we think, emerged as a reaction to another paradigm – the ‘medical model’ – which was seen as identifying and relating to disabled people in terms of their impairments. My partner remembers being in hospital as a child (for years on end) when the consultant would sweep in and be told, “this is the spastic”. The danger, however, in repudiating such medical insensitivity is to move on to an unbending hostility to medical interventions, even those that seek to prevent or cure impairments, on the dubious ground that such strategies present disability in an unfavourable light.
Like all models, the ‘social model of disability’ predicates a one-rule-fits-all fundamentalist formula, underestimating the diversity of disability and the severity of its impact. It is not, as lawyers say, ‘case-sensitive’, derogating from, if not entirely rejecting, the view the rest of the world has that impairments are in themselves to a greater or lesser degree disabling.
We are alas increasingly beset with models: a tendency to apply fixed rules to any given situation. I’ve seen it called a disorder, as for example when psychologists at the University of Maryland concluded that conservatism is a set of neuroses routed in “fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity”. Adherents of these values, they said, had a “preference for moral certainty” and disliked nuance, an intolerance of ambiguity that could lead people “to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic clichés and stereotypes”.
In all such beliefs, facts are subordinate to concept; and imagination and exploration outside the rules rigorously outlawed. But not in Innovations.
Don’t we all. Imagine yourself in a descending lift. On the lower ground we find ‘Myth and Legend’, which makes no pretence to reality: holy grails and magic swords in this department; then one floor down to ‘Rhetoric’, which tries to impress through the flamboyance of its language, more often than not with an implication of insincerity; next ‘Confusion and Muddle’, where parrots and finches are kept in quarantine; down further to the level of jargon and gobbledegook, so brilliantly targeted by the Plain English Campaign; finally, deep in the basement, we encounter the dark purveyors of ‘Spin’: at best imparting a favourable bias to a bald and unconvincing narrative, at worst dealing in outright deceit. The task of making up the list I’d rather leave to you.
Official spin, of course, is not new. During World War I, David Lloyd George set up a British War Propaganda Bureau, headed by a Member of Parliament. This was followed in 1916 by the establishment of a ‘Department of Information’. And readers of a certain age may remember a famous wartime speech by Winston Churchill, just after the Dunkirk evacuation, in which he asserted that Britain was armed to the teeth, ready to repel a Nazi invasion. Whereas, of course, our defences, apart from the RAF, were in complete disarray.
Heightening our cynicism
But these messages were directed at the enemy! The problem today is that many of us have come to suspect that almost everything we are told by Government has to be treated with caution. This is more serious. Trust is the first casualty of misinformation, and charm offensives tend only to heighten our cynicism.
Worry not! Last year, Whitehall appointed a ‘spin slayer’: Howell James, a former political secretary of John Major. He is this country’s first-ever ‘Permanent Secretary of Government Communications’ and shares with the Forum a dedication to ‘getting the message across’, albeit a different message. A leaked suggestion reported by BBC News is to use doctors, scientists and other professionals to communicate important Government messages because, it was said, “the public trusted them more than ministers”. Mr James himself has already been accused of using “mealy-mouthed words” and “honeyed phrases”, but we wish him well. Turning round a culture of spin is going to take time. But there is one certain remedy: it’s called honesty.
“The world,” said Albert Einstein, “is so full of possibilities that dogmatism is simply indecent.” Nevertheless, it is an indecency that afflicts huge battalions of people – in religion, politics and many other spheres of thought. This is not to say that all dogma is false; simply that it is by its nature taken on trust as an article of faith, in most cases untested. Dogma, by definition, is not susceptible to independent thought and is often so entrenched that its adherents ignore or repudiate even hard evidence discrediting their beliefs. “The mind of the bigot,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, “is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.”
You may say (rightly) that there is a difference between a naïve belief in beneficent, protective gods and the Nazi dogma of Aryan supremacy. But this is not a defence of the validity of dogma. Nor is it a sound basis for educating our children.
No less disturbing is blind adherence to rigid political agendas. Henry Porter in The Observer recently observed how detrimental political party loyalty is to sensible decision making: “Members of the major parties,” he wrote, “make endless excuses for the failings of their own leaders, while treating their opponents as members of an untouchable caste.”
All ideas should be open to questioning
At the extremes dogma is positively divisive and dangerous. As Professor Richard Dawkins pointed out in a recent broadcast “irrational militant fundamentalism is on the march”. The time has come, he argued, for people of reason to say “enough is enough”.
In a valedictory speech marking the end of his five-year presidency of the Royal Society, Lord May of Oxford, claimed, as reported by Ian Sample in The Guardian (30 November 2005), that fundamentalist thought from religious beliefs to the ideologies of green lobby groups [and I would add some disability groups] is skewing debates over some of the most pressing issues facing humanity. He criticised groups for putting their own traditions, unsupported beliefs and dogmas above scientific evidence. All ideas, he argued, should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of evidence that supports them and not on the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them.
Literally, ‘bureaucracy’ is really no more than the necessary official workings of government. But somehow the word has come to be associated with crass, unimaginative, practices, and is now commonly understood in a pejorative sense.
Sometimes it also brings out qualities in the ‘bureaucrat’ that lead to sloth, petty tyranny and abuses of power. Shakespeare, back in 1601, had Hamlet soliloquizing about “the law’s delay” and “the insolence of office” among those burdens that can engender a death wish! Many frustrated, downtrodden people will resonate to that thought.
Slavish bureaucrats
Sometimes, bureaucracy may also be, to use the words of an old television series, “the last refuge of the timid”, with bureaucrats locked into slavish and blinkered adherence to rules, stifling imagination and creativity.
Bureaucracy sometimes begins well, but changes direction through time. Thus a parking control scheme may be initiated in a genuine attempt to regulate traffic, but degenerate towards a punitive mechanism to provide revenue. Or a public service – that is a service for the common good – may be diminished by passing into hands that have an overriding interest in profit and over-generous executive salaries. Voluntary organisations, alas, are not entirely free from the latter malaise, but in my experience those who work in the ‘third sector’ are generally leaner, fitter and more committed to a strong sense of purpose than their statutory counterparts. The voluntary principle has much to commend it, is cost effective and tends to minimise bureaucracy.
Confusion heaped upon confusion
Just now there are admitted to be bureaucracies in the statutory sector that have so decomposed as to have become “unfit for purpose”. It may be that some bureaucrats are themselves incompetent, or careless, or lacking leadership, or under-resourced, or given impossible tasks, or driven by targets, or so overloaded with well-intentioned new legislation and initiatives as to bewilder not only the service user but also the service provider. It does often seem that as complexity is added to complexity, so confusion is heaped upon confusion. Stir the pot with quangos, directorates, think tanks, task forces, consultants, commissions, strategy units, agencies and malfunctioning computer systems and you have a proverbial recipe for disaster. It all stacks up to systemic failure and a bureaucracy in crisis.
Readers will have their own list of fiascos. They have been whipped up by our tabloid press, but we are all surely legitimately shocked. It appears that each part of a dysfunctional system may be protective of its own narrow remit (and its own existence), fulfilling individual objectives but failing to see the overall picture, so that, in an attempt to achieve cohesion, further overarching bureaucracies are introduced to try to promote “joined-up thinking”.
It is always difficult, even impossible, to pin down blame. Criticism can be deflected by focusing on those parts of the system that are successful, so that failures are portrayed as minor blemishes in a massive drive for progress. This is not a new excuse. Charles Dickens, as a young parliamentary reporter, encountered what he called the “Circumlocution Office… always voted immaculate by an accommodating majority”!
But perhaps we should not be too critical. There is a British tradition of bumbling along and you may well think this is preferable to the kind of ruthlessly efficient bureaucracy that so well organized the holocaust. I couldn’t possibly comment.
Beware if you are told to “live in the real world”. Pragmatism is the antithesis of idealism – the pursuit of romantic, unattainable goals – but no less extreme. It will be said that you can do only that which is practical, but in reality you are being invited to subordinate principle to expediency, to abandon doing what is right because it is inconvenient, expensive, time-consuming or simply embarrassing.
Perhaps the classic example is to say “the poor are always with us”, abandoning policies to address poverty by treating it as an unavoidable misfortune; one of the ‘realities of life’ for which Samuel Johnson coined the phrase “necessary evils”. He was referring only to the appending of notes to Shakespeare’s plays, but it has come to be applied to almost any situation that it is easier to accept as inevitable than to challenge. War is a case in point. Despite the evidence of history, men (and by and large I do mean men) still leap to fight rather than seek alternative resolutions: stoking up even greater hostility, resentment and ill-will instead of first attempting to address the grievances of their enemies.
Continuing to eat factory-farmed chickens is, to my mind, another example. You may think that this comes well down the scale from the horrors of poverty and war, but the chickens would not agree. Simply because we like chicken and the cheaper the better we are pragmatically prepared to close our eyes to the barbaric cruelty that they endure.
Politicians are particularly prone to pragmatism, following the dictates of party whips rather than their own consciences and suppressing their cherished beliefs if they see them as vote-losers. Circumstances alter cases, of course. Our patron, The Rt.Hon.The Lord Morris of Manchester recently pointed out during the passage of a Bill through the House of Lords that to seek to amend it, however beneficially, would effectively result in it running out of time and being lost. The issue, essentially, is one of doing right. Back in the 1960s, as a new MP, he sponsored Sidney Silverman’s Bill to abolish, once and for all, the death penalty for murder. He did so knowing that his constituency was home to both of the parents of Leslie Ann Downey, one of the child victims of the Moors murderers. Many of his constituents openly declared that this signalled the end of his parliamentary career. In fact, when Harold Wilson called a snap election shortly afterwards, Alf Morris’s majority over his Conservative opponent doubled. The moral of this shock result, he reflected later, appeared to be that while they may not share a candidate’s view on some issues, most voters are concerned more about trust and a readiness to stand by firmly held convictions.
This story reminds me of Edmund Burke, who in an earlier age was described by Oliver Goldsmith as “too fond of the right to pursue the expedient”. Or, if you think this particular example is open to question, you may prefer Theodore Roosevelt. “No man,” he wrote in The Strenuous Life, “is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.” Though there is currently talk of “values” in addressing the problems of global conflict, this is one principle that seems to have been overlooked by a later President. You may feel that at the very least there is a case for avoiding unnecessary evils; but I could not possibly comment.
Although support for the 2012 London Games appears already to be declining in inverse proportion to the huge escalation of costs and the prospect of Lottery funds being diverted away from good causes, Londoners are commonly said to be “largely” supportive of the project. Well nobody has asked me. I have been implacably opposed to the whole enterprise from the outset. My latest rant is on behalf of all those who hold similar views.
You may say, “What has this to do with Innovations in Information?” My response is simply that some of the financial information provided in support of the bid appears to have been decidedly optimistic if not innovatory. According to thelondonpaper (6 March 2007), members of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee went so far as to accuse the organizers of the games of indulging in “Alice in Wonderland” budgeting. The cost of the project, as now officially revealed, is already more than treble the original prediction and is probably destined to go on rising; which seems to be the way of all such adventures. As Simon Jenkins put it in The Guardian (2 March 2007): “To build six temporary stadiums for 16 days of sport is the kind of gesture once confined to African dictators”.
A claim in mitigation is that the required developments will help the long-term regeneration of the areas in which they are placed. Well, perhaps, but surely another triumph of hope over experience. The evidence from other major cities that have staged the Games in recent times (not to mention the Dome) hardly supports the notion of an ongoing Elysium. In a letter to The Guardian (10 March 2007), Kevin Swaine pointed out that the Athens Olympics left the country with such a debt that every new home built in Greece now has a 19% tax added to help clear the enormous burden.
A more fundamental objection than money, however, is the nature of the modern Games: far removed from the historic Greek celebrations in honour of Zeus; even from the relatively modest Games held in London in 1948. For the whole bonanza has become largely a rite to nationalism. The Olympic logo may have interlocking rings, but the reality is that rather than being bound in a great spirit of unity the priority of the superpowers is to come top. Personal achievement in sport is primarily a contribution to national pride and supremacy.
The staging of the Games has also become overblown. Each successive host nation cannot be seen to put on a poorer show, so that the attendant presentation becomes more and more elaborate. As far as Britain is concerned this cannot be for the greater glory of our contestants, for if anything is reasonably predictable it is that we will finish among the also-rans of the medal table. The elation that greeted the success of our Olympic bid was, I believe, symptomatic of a fundamental malaise. The supporters of the project have fallen for the conceit, born in Britain’s colonial past and encouraged by Elgar’s sublime music, that ours is a land of hope and glory which God has made mighty. Why ‘God’ should favour one nation above another is unexplained, but the vainglorious hope is that he will make us “mightier yet”. Patriots have succumbed to an inflated sense of our national importance and our place in the world.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the sporting arena. A few, admittedly stunning, successes have inflamed a climate of wholly unrealistic expectation. Pride has well and truly gone before a fall. In football, rugby and, most recently, cricket we have been brought crashing down to earth. Yet a whitewash in the Ashes has not restored humility. Rather we are urged to new ambition by looking forward to a renewed contest in 2009!
I do not wish to pour scorn on the achievements of our Olympians, some of which over the years have been truly heroic. I protest rather at the context in which the medals are won: the triumphalism attending elite success over the mass failure of the losers. In this respect the London Marathon is a far more inclusive model. Pride of place is given to elite competition, but without the pompous anthems and the flag-waving, and followed by a huge contingent of people who simply run for the joy of being part of a great event with the opportunity to raise lots of cash for good causes.
Finally, to return to the financial issues, there is the telling argument that the money devoted to the Games – our money - could be better spent; the Lottery will be raided when there are more deserving priorities. If it must be for sport, then let us strengthen local activities held for grassroots participation rather than national ascendancy. Derek Mapp, chair of Sport England, charged with getting two million more people active before the Olympics, is quoted in Guardian Sport (22 March 2007) as saying, “It is like I have to do it barefoot”. Sport England’s lottery income will be cut by £55.9 million in 2009, which will bring its contribution to the Olympic project to £395 million. And this against a total annual income of £265 million.
Arts funding is also threatened. Joan Bakewell, chair of the National Campaign for the Arts, is reported in London Lite (16 March 2007) as saying that Lottery funding had been a “golden egg” for the arts. “Today,” she added, “it’s starting to look a bit tarnished”.
“All victories breed hate,” wrote Baltasar Gracián in The Art of Worldly Wisdom. For my part, I simply hate the thirst for supremacy. I would like to see the billions about to be lavished on the 1912 Games used to enhance the Social Fund.
Please note “I”, rather than the usual collective “We”. This is strictly personal. If, when close to death, you want to eke out your days in a drug-induced torpor, so be it. I would want your palliative care to be the best that is possible. But please don’t seek to impose your views on me. When my days are numbered, I’m for the quick release button, if necessary and if possible with assistance.
We are generally living longer, sometimes beyond any prospect of a continuing decent quality of our physical life or, indeed, mental capability. Occasionally such deterioration can come earlier through the onset of a fatal disease. Why, in such exigencies, should we wish to hang on? What purpose is served in doing so, apart perhaps to conform to a religious taboo?
Yet it seems to me that it is precisely those of a religious persuasion, theoretically dedicated to goodness and with a belief in the possibility of a blissful hereafter, who are most reluctant to part with earthly torment and want to impose their inhibitions on other people. As an utterly convinced, even devout, atheist, and one who has already experienced being on the very brink of death, I see nothing to fear in oblivion. Indeed, I feel it a rich blessing not to have to contemplate either ‘hellfire’ or the tedium of a disembodied eternity in ‘heaven’.
The disability lobby (and I use that word in the sense that I think it is by no means representative of many disabled people) has its own distinctive dogma, though in some respects similar and overlapping to religious ideology. It has argued against the enactment of Lord Joffe’s Bill for regulated assistance to die, at least until such time as adequate palliative care is available. Well, for myself, I don’t want end-of-life palliative care, however perfect. It is not my idea of dignity in dying. Indeed, having lived an independent life, I doubt if I will want to accept any kind of care. Nor do I think much of the argument that making the option of voluntary euthanasia easier and more acceptable could lead to the inhuman slaughter of disabled people. That’s a smokescreen if ever I saw one.
Don’t misunderstand me. I accept that life is precious; to be preserved, respected and safeguarded. There can never be a limit to reverence for life, but in some circumstances it can be part of that reverence to respect the right of an individual to relinquish a life that has become intolerable and futile and end it humanely.
I (along with many others) want choice over the end of my life. I want to decide when I am ready to die and, in expressing a rational and reasonable request, to have the legal right to get medical help to do so. Death, as Shakespeare reminded us in Henry IV Part 2, is certain to all. The inevitable dénouement is simply a matter of timing, and I don’t want to be frustrated by a vocal minority. I want independence in this final choice and hate laws that constrain my right to make that decision for myself.
Alas, because this is the last issue of Innovations in Information it will also be my final whinge. Which is a pity. I could have gone on, and on, and on, though perhaps not always within the Forum’s charitable objectives.
Speaking for myself, although my work for the past 13 or so years has been purely voluntary, I hate the idea of retirement so much that I intend to continue to avoid it at all costs. I know that many people long for it, and if you’re simply making a living from a ghastly job that isn’t surprising. I met a friend recently who greeted me by saying “I’m just back from Rarotonga”. The smile on his cherubic face seemed to say, “Why on earth are you still working?” I might have said – but didn’t – that I think it’s work that gives meaning to life. Pastime and play simply fill the gaps in between.
The very word ‘retirement’ smacks of disengagement. One of the meanings in Collins English Dictionary is “to recede or disappear”; another – in a military context – is “to fall back”. We ‘retire’ to bed. Work, by contrast, ideally confers a sense of purpose, promotes social interaction and imposes structure. Of course there are some occupations from which one is well advised judiciously to retire. The evidence of late recordings shows that singers have often gone on too long (may Pavarotti be remembered as he was). Footballers have an even more limited effective time span (though Teddy Sheringham seems bent on giving a whole new meaning to the ‘freedom pass’). But for most of us, given reasonable health, there is no obvious reason to leave the field. A fixed age of retirement, after all, is only a 20th century concept.
There are, to my mind, two sides to the same coin: heads, the benefits of work; tails: the perils of idleness. Work can be, in the words of Noël Coward, “much more fun than fun.” Without it, as George Berkeley pointed out in A word to the wise (1749), “there can be no such thing as a happy life”. Alfred Marshall, I think, also hit the nail on the head, in his Principles of Economics (1890):
“The truth seems to be that as human nature is constituted, man rapidly degenerates unless he has some hard work to do, some difficulties to overcome; and that some strenuous exertion is necessary for physical and moral health.”
Unfortunately, the level of such ‘strenuous exertion’ must inevitably change with time, as strength and energy decline. Perhaps we should, in contemplating retirement, substitute another word for ‘work’, since it implies a duty, possibly onerous, from which we may be glad to be relieved. ‘Activity’ could be a happier choice. Yet the transition from the discipline of work to freedom of chosen activity is likely to be a difficult one. As William Cowper wrote in Retirement (1782):
“’Tis easy to resign a toilsome place,
But not to manage leisure with a grace;
Absence of occupation is not rest,
A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed.”
I have enjoyed writing ‘We Hate’ and have been reinforced, from time to time, by letters of support. Though this is my final offering, readers may be interested to know that our director, Ann Darnbrough, has fulminated over a pretty wide range of her own bête noires – perhaps rather more constructively and humanely – in her new book, ‘A Rebellious Disposition’.
(The quotations have been drawn from the superb The Oxford Book of Work (ed. Keith Thomas, 1999), which seems to bring out almost everything that could be said on the subject).
UPDATED November 2008
