Bad news at breakfast

When you travel across the world, you seem to spend a lot of time lounging around in-between places - airport lounges, hotels, railway stations. When you are there, you watch people, read, and look at a lot of television. It doesn’t matter that you don’t always speak the language - most of the programmes are remarkably understandable, following formats that vary little from country to country. One of these is breakfast television. This almost always includes a middle-aged man and a somewhat younger woman. The man has the reassuring but bland look of the chair of the members’ committee in the local golf club. The woman is always attractive and wears different clothes each day (no-one notices whether the man wears a different suit from day to day). Much of the programme consists of a friendly chit-chat between these two, interspersed with reading the news from the Teleprompter. When they report some disaster, war, or human interest story with associated suffering, they both assume serious or even troubled expressions. They often read alternate sentences. When the man reads, the woman will either look at him or make a range of appropriate expressions for the camera. Generally, however, the mood is jolly. Any troubling news is rapidly followed by celebrity gossip, entertainment chit-chat, or some amusing story. What you don’t get much of is news.

When you do get the news, there is almost never any explanation. Why are people in Bangkok wearing red shirts and rioting? Why do the people in Gaza seem so angry? How come so many Southern European countries are in financial difficulties. Do not look at breakfast television for any understanding. What news exists is dominated by pictures. A disaster which kills two people in the USA (with film) is far more ‘newsworthy’ than one which kills a thousand (without film) in Bangladesh. Terminology is slack. Alabama is apparently in ‘Southern America’, while Japan is one of the ‘Western’ nations. The vast diverse continent of Africa is spoken of as an undifferentiated entity. Breakfast television exists in a kind of collective Korsakoff’s Syndrome, with no memory, no awareness of context, and complete lack of insight. The ambition of its presenters is not to overcome these deficiencies by becoming real journalists, but to star in one of the many televised talent shows (Dancing with the Stars, Dancing on Ice etc).

Every so often, real journalists do break into breakfast television, in cases where the talents of the presenters prove insufficient. Then we hear the political correspondents, the economic experts, and so on. These do know what they are talking about, seek out stories, and write interesting books in their spare time. However, they do lack the good looks of the breakfast television presenters - expertise, it seems, does not always coincide with a pretty face.

The Dark Heart of Suburbia

There are places we are supposed to find menacing: neglected churchyards down a lonely country lane in a cold night with the wind howling round a ruined church tower; or derelict urban streets covered in gang slogans inhabited by diverse menacing locals. But these are all clichés. My view is that true horror is found in the mundane, particularly in the English suburban streets of detached, semi-detached and terraced houses. Horror in Fred West’s terrace house, with bodies stuffed in the cellar, the garden and in the wall cavities. Or horror in Dennis Nilson’s house in London, where the dismembered remains of his many victims were found by DynoRod, called in to unblock the drains.

I confess that I was born and raised in a standard English suburban location (‘community’ seems an inappropriate word). When I was a child, Shirley was a string of shops along the main road from Birmingham to Stratford, plus several streets of semi-detached and detached houses. It had once been an attractive village, and there was still an old blacksmith’s forge and some timber-framed buildings. I was able to walk to the countryside from my home, and the streets were full of children playing. But the old buildings were demolished, and Shirley stretched ever further over what had been the beautiful green fields, woods and hedgerows of Warwickshire. The stream where I used fish for sticklebacks became a ditch in the middle of a housing estate. I used to walk through a wood and come out the other side in a cornfield. Now the wood remains, but is surrounded by houses. Shirley stretches for miles along the main road, lined with the dreary shed cities of supermarkets, DIY stories, household furnishers, and electrical goods stores. The roads are full of cars (parked or moving), and children sit indoors watching television and computer games.

Shirley has not had its mass murderer, but it did have the only political party in England to collapse because its leader set fire to his wife. The Shirley Ratepayers’ Association in July 1997 had three councillors on Solihull Borough Council: Trevor Eames, his wife Ursula, and Brenda Otton. Ursula had been having an affair with a council official, David Parfitt, and photographic evidence of this had been collected for Trevor by Brenda. According to the press, David and his wife met Trevor and Ursula to discuss things over dinner. This does not seem to have resulted in reconciliation, because Trevor subsequently attacked David with a hammer. Ursula eventually decided to leave Trevor, and he responded by throwing a glass of petrol over her and setting it alight. He was sentenced for seven years in prison afer causing what the papers uniformly describe as ‘horrific injuries’ to his wife. This seems to have been the end of the Shirley Ratepayers’ Association as a political force, but not of Trevor.

He emerged from prison after four and a half years, and resumed his interest in local politics. He soon after stood (unsuccessfully) for the council, and is now a very active secretary of the Solihull and Meriden Residents Association (SAMRA). In the picture below he is standing next to Nikki Sinclaire who at that time was a representative of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the European Parliament. Ms Sinclaire has now been expelled from UKIP, after refusing to join meetings of the group to which it is affiliated in the European Parliament. Apparently, she discovered that UKIP and its affiliates are ultra right-wing and intolerant of her lesbian sexuality. The latest development is that SAMRA candidates (including Trevor) are contesting every seat in the Solihull Borough elections, while Nikki is standing for the UK Parliament as a SAMRA candidate. The horror continues.

South Pacific politics

My encounter with New Zealand politics came in Paihia. This is a pleasant town in the far North of New Zealand. It has a subtropical climate (Tangiers is on the comparable latitude in the Northern Hemisphere). There is a small grid of wide streets surrounded by densely-wooded hills  facing an enclosed bay. Ferries cross frequently over the bay to the fine historic town of Russell. On the third side of the bay are the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, where the treaty between the Maori and the British was signed. The date is now commemorated as New Zealand National Day, which in London becomes an occasion for exiled Kiwis to take part in a Circle Line pub crawl.

My family stayed three nights in Paihia in early March this year, in a penthouse apartment in a splendid motel called (rather strangely) the Swiss Chalet Lodge. One day at lunchtime, I walked the few yards down to the waterfront, and then along the sea front to the shops. I stopped at a small booth selling kebabs and ordered one. I chatted to a genial Kiwi and his mate. I learnt he had family connections with my part if England and had visited it. I asked his name and discovered he was Phil Goss, the Leader of the Opposition in the New Zealand Parliament, former foreign minister, former trade minister etc etc. Phil was touring by bus to campaign against an increase in the local version of VAT. ‘Campaigning’ seemed to be a matter of stopping and chatting to people.

This all seemed appropriate for a profoundly egalitarian country like New Zealand. Phil told me that when he was a minister he visited London and was met at Heathrow by an official chauffeur-driven car. As usual, he sat in the front. The driver was horrified and told him that ministers always sat in the back. That says a lot about life in England: some politicians think they are too superior to their drivers to sit alongside them, and the drivers regard their inferior status as right and proper. If you come across a British politician in our general election, look where he sits in the car.

I remember another observation Phil made. He was surprised that people in different parts of England all spoke with different accents. New Zealand has an accent of its own but few if any local variations. I don’t believe this situation will last. The country has a bigger area than the UK but has only four million inhabitants. About a quarter live in Auckland, but the rest are scattered over small cities, towns and villages separated by hills and mountains (and linked by narrow winding roads). There are strong local loyalties: several people in the South Island told me how much more beautiful it is than the North Island; while people I met in Coromandel were keen to prevent people from  Auckland building holiday homes in the Town. Local loyalties mean people try and distinguish themselves from outsiders, and speech is one way to do it. Over the next century, Kiwi ingenuity will create a range of new accents, possibly with even more unexpected vowels than the ones they use at present.

Working in the machine

 
The best parody of industrial work is by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. He shows men working to a pace set by machines, and how the most ordinary human activities (scratching your armpits, swatting a fly which lands on your face) disrupt production. The factory has a time card for going to the toilet, and a big cinema screen inside the toilet so that the manager can threaten workers having a quiet smoke. The workers in the film are, as far as the management is concerned, a regrettable necessity - they are only valuable in as much as they themselves become machines. Humanity is an obstacle to efficiency.

This is a familiar picture of factory life, raised to a peak of supposed efficiency in firms which applied the principles of ‘scientific management’ developed by Frederick Taylor in the early part of the last century. Scientific management involved the careful measurement and evaluation of each human activity in the production process, which could then be defined precisely, so that workers could be set production targets and rewarded according to  degree of attainment (called ‘piecework’ in the UK). Scientific management essentially views an organisation as a machine with human components. It is hardly surprising that it became the standard way of organising repetitive industrial processes (most typically automobile manufacture) and was enthusiastically supported by Lenin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The shortcomings of scientific management have been recognised for many years. Workers rarely look with enthusiasm on any organisation which treats them as interchangeable and disposable components. Unless very closely supervised, they will take their revenge on the organisation by strikes or sabotage, or cut corners to meet targets at the expense of the quality of output. Even if workers do thoroughly internalise their job description, problems occur. The job description becomes the limit of their responsibility: workers no longer cover for each other or collaborate in solving problems, while they pursue the rules of the organisation to its detriment. When workers in the 1960s, wished to bring an organisation to its knees without going on strike, they ‘worked to rule’.

The alternative to seeing an organisation as a machine, is to see it as a society of varied individuals with diverse skills, who interact with each other to complete tasks and solve problems. They can be motivated to perform well and creatively not just by money but also by their loyalty to their colleagues, their sympathy with the aims of the organisation, their commitment to their customers, and their personal standards and self-respect. This view of the organisation was a key element in success of the Toyota Management System, described by James Womack and colleagues in their book The Machine that Changed the World.

You know that you work in an organisation as society when its workers celebrate each others’ birthdays, marriages, promotions and departures. There will also be a strong organisational culture, with a collective wisdom about what actions work and don’t work. At their best, organisations as societies can provide a strong sense of identity and meaning for peoples’ lives. There can, however, be problems. Organisations with strong social bonds can becme inward-looking and exclusive: the organisation comes to exist only for its workforce rather than to meet the needs of its customers, students, clients or patients.

Expressions of concern about this displacement of goals have been used to justify the ‘modernisation’ of public services over the last 20 years. It has been proposed that governments need to re-assert  strategic direction and the maintenance of quality by setting up a series of public and private agencies to take over many of the activities formerly provided by employees of national and local government departments. Output and quality targets are set for each agency by central government (or one of its nominated QANGOs), while quality of services is monitored by a further set of agencies. It is proposed thereby (in the words of Osborne and Gaebler in their book Re-Inventing Government) to separate ‘rowing’ from ‘steering’: leaders of individual agencies can use their skills to motivate their staff within a set of strategic objectives set by government.

This model has been extended throughout public services, even to organisations like universities which, in the UK at least, were never previously managed by national or local government. The effect has been catastrophic. Setting enforceable targets for agencies drives their managers to cascade these targets throughout the organisation, even to the extent of setting targets for individual members of staff. As the organisation as a whole becomes ‘mechanised’, co-operation between staff diminishes, which leads managers to promotes elaborate job descriptions and procedures manuals. These become quasi-legal documents within the organisation, and thus eliminate opportunities for creativity. Staff become demoralised, and the loss of quality familiar in traditional industrial work spreads to the professions and to public services.

Of course, the mechanisation of public services can be seen as part of a wider pattern in which the whole of society becomes regulated and monitored. We may not have television screens in our workplace toilets yet, but we have CCTV cameras almost everywhere else.