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The liberals have no use for you, Daddy, but children do
There were several big books, when I was a student, which everyone knew about and talked about but hardly anyone seemed to have read, such as Marx's Das Kapital, or Freud's Civilisation and its Discontents. It was exciting; people seemed to think that by some magical student osmosis you could know what was in them without the bother of opening them.
One seminal, much discussed and very unread such book was Julien Benda's La Trahison des Clercs. I assumed (entirely wrongly) that the meaning was pretty much all there in the title -the betrayal of the intellectuals or, as one might say today, the cowardice of the chattering classes. I never did get round to reading it but I was reminded forcibly of it last week by the pronouncements of Suzi Leather of fertility quango fame.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, of which she is chairwoman, called last week for a change in the legislation controlling in vitro fertilisation. She and her quango recommend removing the legal obligation on doctors in fertility clinics "to take account of the need of a child for a father" when assessing a single woman who wants to have a baby.
"It is absolutely clear," said Leather, "if you think about the changes in society and the different ways that families can be constituted, that it is anachronistic for the law to include the statement about the need for a father".
"IVF for single women (fathers not necessary)" was the way one broadsheet summed it up.
Before rushing to the barricades in outrage, one ought to show some fellow feeling for unmarried people who want babies. Lesbian couples (who are, legally speaking, single) may want to have their own children, just as gay male couples may do, and there is a good case for arguing that we are, and ought to be, equally free to have babies, regardless of who we are and whom we share our beds with.
In any case, nobody and nothing can stop us, in these days of turkey basters and the internet, except infertility. And even people who are infertile can easily arrange help with conception or adoption if they are prepared to pay for it privately, or get it abroad, and nobody can stop that. Nor is there any good argument, among people who truly believe in personal freedom, for any law to stop them.
The question gets difficult only when (as distinct from our general freedom to do what we want) the "right" to state-funded fertility treatment comes up, as it does with Leather and her powerful but unelected quango. Once the state gets involved, and public money and politics and "equity" get drawn in, the state has to take a line and to oblige us all to toe that line until by some process of acculturation we have unconsciously adopted the line ourselves. That is how compassion was nationalised by the welfare state, for instance.
In this IVF case, since the fertility quango has taken the line that it is anachronistic to worry about fathers (presumably because a few IVF seekers don't, and because irresponsible single motherhood is rocketing) it will almost certainly become the official state view that fathers are no longer necessary. That would be very dangerous.
If the law is indeed changed as Leather recommends -and it is a fair bet that the great and the good will support her -the state will be sending out a very wrong, very destructive and indeed immoral message to all kinds of people, directly and indirectly.
Such official changes alter people's attitudes. Most obviously it will send a demoralising message to boys and men. In criticising fathers, the might of the state is effectively criticising men.
Young males today are already suffering from a growing fear that they are useless, or worse than useless, beginning with their failures (compared with girls) at school and going on to an increasing sense of marginalisation and devaluation.
Masculinity is constantly presented as a problem, which is a self-fulfilling attitude.
The state long since took over the masculine role of father-provider, so that a young mother is usually better off financially alone and unmarried than with a live-in young husband or boyfriend. Now, it seems, males are officially extra to requirement as fathers in every other sense as well -as role models, male confidants or simply non-female adults. This official attitude is hardly likely to make young fathers embrace their responsibilities.
Meanwhile, to girls and young women, this continuing marginalisation of men as both tiresome and unnecessary is a further and clearer signal that they might just as well go right ahead and contribute to the disastrous boom in single motherhood.
It's okay. It's official.
It is hard to know where to begin with such nonsense. Common sense alone says that children need fathers. Fortunately, since common sense is all too often ignored, almost all the research also demonstrates that children need fathers. How often does this need to be said? Even left-leaning think tanks in this country at long last agree.
Children without fathers are much more likely to do worse in life in measurable ways -they are much more likely to be poor, poorly educated, illiterate, mentally ill, unemployed, poorly employed, delinquent, convicted of crimes and slung for long stretches into the slammer. Boys in inner-city slums, without fathers to provide role models, are particularly at risk.
All this is no longer controversial. It is considered a matter of fact, from Downing Street to every social services department, that children need fathers of some sort. Dads matter. I wish I had had one.
How can one account for an important public body, composed (apparently) of the brightest and the best of our cultural elite, the great and the good as they are often actually called, taking a view so flamboyantly at odds with what most people think and know and want and so much at odds with common sense?
This does feel like a betrayal on the part of the intellectuals, both of intellectual rigour and of their responsibilities. Unfortunately it is far from unusual.
Take almost any serious public matter, such as asylum seekers' numbers, or exam standards, or racism, or the allocation of council housing, or public service make-work jobs, or equal opportunities targets or the culture of the criminal justice system (as discussed in this paper by Charles Murray) and you will see the same disjunction between what the sheltered elite says and decides and what most people know and want. Perhaps it is a failure of nerve or sense, or of a lack of perspective.
It is the function of intellectuals to stand up for minorities, such as infertile lesbians for example, but one feels more and more in this country that the claims of minorities or criminals or outsiders are too often given precedence, one way or another, unfairly and unreasonably, over the entitlements of most ordinary people.
Whatever the explanation for this most mysterious loss of perspective or moral conviction, it amounts to a betrayal by the elite.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 25, 2004 | Comments (0)
If you love Auntie, now is the time to save the old crock
Poor old Auntie. For such an august and well-meaning old girl, she is having rather a hard and humiliating time these days. The BBC is beset on all sides by criticism and underlying it all is the question of what the corporation is really for.
The Hutton report, to be published on January 28, will almost certainly contain serious criticisms of the way the BBC and its governors handled the Andrew Gilligan "sexing up" affair. Meanwhile, the Robert Kilroy-Silk "Arabs" affair has left unresolved questions about freedom of speech and BBC neutrality.
There was, too, the fuss last week about the BBC's decision to put an ambitious drama about Alan Clark on BBC4 when 50% of the population don't have digital television. There were also what the BBC called "misleading reports" about the "poor" performance of its digital channels.
Earlier this month Melvyn Bragg accused the BBC of "brochure broadcasting", hiding away its arts programmes on the little-watched digital BBC4 as a "fig leaf", in a gesture towards public service broadcasting.
A letter to The Guardian last week from an independent arts producer, referring to Bragg's criticisms, pointed out that his comments came at the end of a week when BBC1 and BBC2, together, devoted 30 minutes to the arts, but 43 hours and 35 minutes to darts.
Ofcom, the body set up to regulate the communications industry, is already conducting a review of public service broadcasting, led by Ed Richards, a former Downing Street policy adviser. Richards said last week that research passed to Ofcom showed viewers attached least value to regional programmes (excepting news) put out by public service broadcasting -hardly encouraging for the BBC public service empire in the "regions".
The Tories have an advisory committee on the BBC's role and funding, led by David Elstein. It is due to report next month and is likely to recommend scrapping the BBC's licence fee and replacing it with a subscription.
The Institute for Public Policy Research, the Blairite think tank, called last week for radical reform of the BBC, including abolishing the licence fee in favour of a hypothecated tax. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is conducting a review of the BBC's online services and will also review digital broadcast services.
Most importantly for the BBC, last month Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary, launched her department's review of the BBC's charter, which is due to expire at the end of 2006. She has put out a leaflet entitled Your BBC, Your Say. Actually, people don't need to be encouraged to have their say about the BBC. It is a national sport.
Last autumn almost everybody who is anybody in television did just that, at the Royal Television Society jamboree in Cambridge. Most of them (59%) agreed with the motion at a debate that "the BBC is out of control".
Central to this debate was a discussion of the governance of the BBC; as Peter Bazalgette, the chairman of Endemol, an independent production company, said, the Hutton inquiry has revealed the impossible position of BBC governors, as both cheerleaders and regulators. At the same convention Patricia Hodgson, a former director of strategy at the BBC, said the corporation's campaign to renew its charter was "in deep trouble", because it has fallen foul of both Labour and the Conservatives.
Elsewhere the usual grumbles about waste and misguided management in the BBC continue to rumble. Last week a tabloid revived an old story that the BBC is spending £2m-£3m on sending 5,000 employees on residential management courses offering "action learning".
And one of the most successful comedy writers in television, Andy Hamilton, author of Drop the Dead Donkey, said he would no longer write for BBC1 because the channel has become obsessed by short-term ratings and is governed by focus groups.
(He said that "audience insight managers" who are marketing experts sit in on development meetings with writers.) Poor old Auntie. Now is the time for those who love her, faults and all, to stand up for her. I worked for the BBC for several years, beginning as a television trainee, and though I was often shocked by what I saw of waste and political correctness and an almost entirely unconscious political bias towards statism and the left, I was also deeply impressed by what is best. Britain led the world with the best in broadcasting, and still does, and that excellence was, and still is, fostered in the BBC.
It is worth answering Jowell's question about what you value most about the BBC.
For myself, I value not having advertisements on television. Everyone seems to agree that they inflame children's materialist lusts and drive us all to envy, crime and obesity. The advert-free universe of the BBC is worth preserving .
For another, I value the serious attempt at political objectivity, observed in the breach sometimes, we know, but a nice idea. The BBC website is outstandingly good and was an excellent, risk-taking use of public money. The creativity in comedy and in drama has been inspiring, as have educational television and some documentaries. I still love Radio 3 and 4 and the World Service, though not uncritically.
And, for another thing, huge numbers of the best people in commercial radio and television today were originally trained, extraordinarily well, in the BBC, in every aspect of the craft; the BBC was for years an unrecognised free university (or poly) of communications.
The real problem with the BBC is a central confusion about its role. It is entirely protected by public money yet it has for years been obsessed with competing in the marketplace. I've always suspected this had more to do with market machismo than with the usual argument about justifying the licence fee. For 25 years the BBC has been in a muddle, lurching between competition and privilege, constantly falling between both stools, infuriating everyone in the process and thereby threatening its own survival.
The BBC does not need to pursue -cannot pursue -huge audiences, to compete with commercial producers. For one thing, on state money that is unfair. For another it is unnecessary. The licence fee (or other public funding) does not need to depend on BBC audience sizes. Let someone else make money out of bread and circuses; the BBC can satisfy less universal tastes, especially in the coming era of narrow casting through multichannels.
Let the BBC make fewer programmes and cut back its bloated staff and management; it does not need to fill so many hours at our expense, when others do it just as well. What on earth is the point of BBC TV daytime drivel for instance? Or Radio 1? Or sport?
The role of a publicly protected provider is to pursue excellence and innovation and genuine objectivity, regardless of the competition, in a way that market-driven producers cannot usually afford. Drop a lot of programmes, people and initiatives and sort out the governors. Radical surgery would make Auntie look and feel as good as she used to. We need her.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 18, 2004 | Comments (0)
They made the workplace so nice that we're all angry
We have become so used to laughing at psychobabble, or at least I hope we have, that the phrase anger management training can usually be relied on to raise a titter. The news on Thursday that a school in north London is offering anger management classes for six-year-olds must have provoked a full-throttle guffaw in anyone who spotted it.
It is very cheering to find something funny at breakfast time, so I was rather enjoying the story of how children even as young as three are taking part in an anger resolution and conflict management scheme at St Ann's Church of England primary school in Tottenham.
It seems patrols of children -some of them only six -wearing badges and red caps marked "Mentor", are learning how to stop bullying. They have weekly role play sessions, including anger management and conflict resolution training. They are taught ways of helping other children walk away from arguments and fights, and control their anger with breathing techniques.
When anyone gets hot-headed in the playground, their little mentors can help them stop, think and listen and deal with their anger. There is even a "friendship stop" in the playground, a bench where mentors give childish advice to angry and unhappy little girls and boys.
This sounded perfectly absurd at first. Role play is yet another of those maddening phrases that immediately makes one think of Ricky Gervais and The Office. But slowly I began to believe that this scheme is perhaps not such a silly idea.
Pupils from this poor inner-city area are now doing very well. Their behaviour has improved greatly since the scheme was introduced, and has been praised by Ofsted, and their academic performance is well above the national average. This year 93% of the 11-year-olds reached the government's expected level for science, 89% for English and 78% for maths. Yet, as the head teacher explained, the school is in a deprived and violent area and many children lack good role models at home.
Perhaps it is time to readjust some prejudices. I had always assumed that while there is a great deal of anger management training about these days, it is largely to make work for people in personnel, or rather human resources, with not enough to do. Perhaps that is wrong.
On Thursday last week, at the British Psychological Society's occupational psychology conference, Jill Booth presented a small research study arguing that UK workplaces are hotbeds of anger. She said she was shocked at the levels of anger she discovered among the workers she interviewed, including tears of rage and frustration. She feels anger is generally much more common in the workplace than it used to be.
In the United States, according to some of the plethora of websites devoted to anger, rage is almost epidemic. It is impossible to know, in the furious onslaught of information, what to believe, but a Gallup poll in 2002 found that two out of 10 employees feel angry enough to actually want to hurt someone at work.
I confess I have known the feeling. Perhaps Americans are more enraged than us for some reason, but in any case, where they lead we tend sooner or later to follow.
Meanwhile, I find it very difficult to understand why people are so newly furious, if indeed they are. Has something changed? Booth's study found that the main reason for anger at work was "immoral behaviour" such as cheating, lying, stealing or skiving, or unfairness such as exploitation or unjust criticism.
Other causes of anger were incompetence, rudeness, disrespect and bad communication. But these things have always been with us, and were far worse in the past. Employers were much more powerful and cruel. As described by Dickens in A Christmas Carol Bob Cratchit's conditions of employment were infinitely worse than those of today's worker, who is protected by human rights legislation.
Working conditions these days are hugely more pleasant and relaxed even than when I first got a job in the late 20th century, not so very long ago. It was absolutely normal then for a woman to be patronised, insulted and even goosed by men, without redress, and managers were allowed to say things to anyone that would be unspeakable today.
Incompetence and "immorality" were just as common too, I am sure, and exploitation and the feeling of powerlessness were very much worse. Since working conditions have improved so radically, you might logically expect less anger, not more.
What's changed, I suspect, is that people feel newly free to express anger. They feel more able to acknowledge their fury to themselves, as they are not only more able, but everywhere encouraged to admit any and all of their feelings to themselves. Then we have all been encouraged, in the recent feminisation of culture, to express our feelings to others. Sometimes we are compelled to do so.
What's more, we're encouraged to be believe our health depends on it too. Every magazine, every television channel, every film preaches the therapeutic necessity of expressing one's feelings, even those, like anger, that used to be considered deadly sins. Wrath, lust, sloth -tell it like it is.
The result of discussing and rehearsing and reliving something, however, may well be to overemphasise it, and even to exaggerate it and strengthen it. Some therapists are beginning to acknowledge this. And there is some evidence that watching violent videos and games, as almost all children now do, encourages aggression.
Another change has been the decline of patience, traditionally seen as the virtue corresponding to the cardinal sin of anger. Older generations were much more patient. A Gallup poll in America in 1996 found that 18 to 34-year-olds were more than four times more likely to report feeling angry at work than workers of 50 or more.
One could argue that the older workers suffered just as badly from anger, but merely repressed it. Alternatively, one could suggest that as the older people grew up less used to instant gratification, with fewer unrealistic expectations than young people today of autonomy, empowerment and an inalienable human right to creative satisfaction, they genuinely felt less frustrated and angry.
There has been one change in working life which might, perhaps, account for genuinely higher levels of frustration and anger, and that is the enormous increase in regulation and paperwork in all sectors as a result of human rights and health and safety laws.
Booth agreed that one of the causes of anger she had found among employees, though not at the top of their lists, was the powerlessness they feel when frustrated in doing the real work they imagined they would be doing because of the burden of paperwork, particularly among the health and education workers in her study.
There is a neat little irony in the thought that legislation intended to empower and protect people may serve, in the end, to disempower them and threaten their self-esteem, not to mention their efficiency and their arteries.
Actually, it makes me feel angry.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 11, 2004 | Comments (0)
Everywhere we turn, nanny is there and ready to hit us
When Gwyneth Paltrow said recently that one of the things she most dislikes about this country is the traffic wardens, few people took her seriously. Not everyone looks to an American actress resident here for comment on the checks and balances of the civic weal. However, in her Olympian way she had touched a nerve.
Traffic wardens infuriate most of us out of all proportion to what they do. After all, illegal parking is something up with which we should not put, and they are only obeying orders. But somehow their officious bullying has come to stand for something significant in the public imagination; traffic wardens are the storm troopers of the forces of state interference.
Of all the functionaries who control, restrain, regulate, fine and tax us, traffic wardens have the most public face. And increasingly they have to confront the long pent-up rage of the over-regulated.
Last week The Sun ran a spoof story about the despair of Joe Public, the proverbial decent, hard-working family man, who on one all too plausible day gets stung for £880 in fines for doing little wrong. First of all, poor Joe realises that although he has filled in his self-assessment income tax form, he has forgotten to post it in time for the deadline. This means that he has incurred a new automatic £100 fine. He also realises that he has forgotten to renew his road tax disc and that means another new automatic fine of £80.
Joe dashes for the post office to put things right, but in his haste he forgets to put on his seat belt and strays a couple of miles per hour over the speed limit.
He is caught by three speed cameras in succession, although in bright sunlight he sees none of them. The fine is £180. When his mobile phone rings, he parks so as to answer it but leaves his engine running. A policeman, miraculously free of the desk duties that prevent him catching real villains, appears at his window and Joe is fined £30 for driving while using a mobile phone and £30 for not wearing a seat belt.
Proceeding to the post office and struggling to find a parking space, he squeezes into the end of a bay and pays for a ticket. Unfortunately the end of his car is hanging slightly over the painted line. His fine for incorrect parking is £40. He crushes the offensive ticket in his fist and throws it to the ground, whereupon a litter warden fines him £50.
Now late for work, Joe forgets to pay London's congestion charge and drifts into a bus lane a few yards early when planning to turn left, something which is often unavoidable and one of the many reasons why bus lanes are worse than useless. He is caught on camera both times and the fines are £80 and £100. Back at home and walking the family dog, he loses sight of the beastly mutt, who disappears and defecates in sight of a neighbour, who reports it. The fine is £50.
At home his wife points out that their pre-paid cheap off-peak holiday with the children will expose them to a new fine of £100 if the school doesn't give permission of absence. Then, drowning his sorrows in the pub and complaining histrionically to a policeman, he is fined £40 for being drunk and disorderly. His total bill is £880.
Poor Joe is beginning to think that Someone is after him. He is right. They are after both us and our money. People up and down the country have stories like Joe's. Many of these taxes are new and the excess of zeal with which they are being demanded is an offence against good citizens and good sense. It is not as though these intrusions necessarily serve any useful purpose.
Of course, speeding, especially in residential streets, is a bad thing. But the extraordinary rash of humps and bumps and pavement extensions and painted hieroglyphics on streets and roads is quite obviously daft as well as bewildering and probably a safety hazard in itself.
I could not at first help smiling when I learnt that traffic humps are not only damaging ambulances and fire engines but are also slowing them down so much as to prevent them doing their work, but it is not funny. The London Ambulance Service estimates that about 500 lives a year are lost to speed humps.
Equally I often wonder about the assumptions made by zealous traffic supremos. A bold theorist from Buckinghamshire, Ralph Ingham-Johnson, claims that graphs relating the introduction of speed cameras and the rate of road deaths indicate that speed cameras cost 1,000 lives a year. My point is that the effectiveness of speed control methods is at least debatable.
If nothing else, one might hope that the money raised, whether sneakily or pointlessly, serves some social good. However, the sad truth, as people are at last beginning to believe, is that it is often wasted, like most of our taxes. The National Audit Office has reported to parliament the risk that the extra money going into public services will be wasted.
The government itself admits that council taxes are at the "edge of tolerance".
They have risen by 70% on average since 1997. Yet even in such a penny pinching climate, Solihull borough council seems to think that it takes six men in three vans to plant three tiny saplings on a public green. A pensioner was so horrified by the waste that he recently took photographs of one workman digging while the others watched.
Yet at the same time councils are facing Whitehall-imposed fines of £100 a day for every pensioner in a National Health Service hospital who is a "bed blocker", owing to the decline in council care-home places for said pensioner, owing in turn to council and Whitehall over-regulation. This is the spectacle of an over-busy bee frantically chasing its own sting.
According to Richard Bacon MP, a member of the Commons public accounts committee, there is a black hole at the heart of British government. The public sector is losing billions. The Department for Work and Pensions, for instance, loses between £3billion and £7billion every year through fraud and error. Each year taxpayers spend £100m training teachers who never set foot in a classroom.
The government itself thinks the NHS loses 16%-20% of its budget through waste, mismanagement, incompetence and fraud, while critics would suggest a much bigger estimate.
There are 40 new Apache helicopters worth more than £1.2billion stored idly in a Salisbury Plain warehouse at a cost of £6m, because the Ministry of Defence didn't train enough pilots in time. We have 103,000 civil servants to support 189,000 military personnel. Civil servants don't know whether housing benefit fraud is going up or down. And so on. It defies belief.
We feel the weight of rules and punishments everywhere. Yet the benefits, such as they are, we feel less and less. Predictably enough, the response from the left and from government is that we need more control, not less.
Tessa Jowell, secretary of state for culture and so forth, wrote an article last week called "Learn to love the nanny state", and singing from the same hymn sheet Jackie Ashley published a piece in The Guardian entitled "Britain needs the nanny state now more than ever". They are more than ever wrong.
All stick and no carrot makes Joe Public an angry boy. And angry boys and girls tend to turn upon nanny and tell her they don't love her any more.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 04, 2004 | Comments (3)
