The perils of being nice

When I was at school, we were warned against using the word ‘nice’ - a word, we were told, which was milk-and-water, signifying the bland and the inoffensive. Being told to ‘Have a nice day’ was therefore hardly a blessing, which may explain why most English people wish you have a ‘good day’ instead. Nevertheless, niceness is a real and important phenomenon which shapes day-to-day behaviour, particularly in large organisations. The most important part of niceness is an extreme reluctance to say anything which might possibly cause offence to another person, and a corresponding fear of being the subject of complaint by another. Niceness consequently means remaining silent when people do something wrong, refusing to challenge another person’s opinions however wrongheaded they may be, and avoiding any action that might possibly be attributed to you personally.

Niceness is often confused with good manners, but they are different. The core of good manners is consideration and respect for others. This means that you take the opinions of others seriously, disagree where appropriate, but do so in a way that does not humiliate or intimidate. The difference between niceness and manners can be shown in this example. Some time in the 1990s, I was asked to give a presentation at an NHS conference in Birmingham on ageing in society. I was due to speak in the morning session after several other speakers. There were the usual rules in such matters - 15 minutes for each presentation, followed by five minutes for questions. All the speakers kept to these rules until the one before me - a woman who had recently completed a PhD. Her presentation was a description of her research, set out at length, with one tedious detail after another - all spoken in a dull flat voice. Before the talk, she had placed a sheaf of paper copies of her overheads on each seat, and the audience realised after half an hour that she was still less than half way through her intended talk. Despite this, the chairman failed to act until a member of the audience (the local political activist Dave Spilsbury), asked “Mr Chairman - when is this talk going to end? Some of us would like to hear the next speaker”. The chairman, with obvious reluctance, asked the speaker to draw her talk to a close. She droned on with no sign of concluding for another five minutes, until he finally told her to finish. There were of course no questions. It was then my turn. I spoke for ten minutes in as punchy a manner as I could manage. After that, the audience inevitably applauded with great enthusiasm.

As I let the room for lunch, I heard one woman say to another: “That man was so rude”. She meant Dave Spilsbury, not the nice and ineffective chairman, who had failed to exercise the very simple task of keeping a speaker to the allotted time and had therefore shown a lack of respect to the audience and to the next speaker. His behaviour was therefore an example of bad manners combined with niceness.

I had even worse experiences at two other NHS conferences, when the chairmen allowed the speaker before my presentation to drone on for twice their allotted time and then asked me whether I could possibly shorten my talk “because we seem to be running over”. The three ineffective chairmen at these conferences were all senior managers in the NHS, and their niceness may have been a factor in their career success. Niceness was indeed the dominant culture in NHS management and the other public sector organisations in which I have worked, and those who conform to the dominant culture tend to be the most successful.

When I worked in the NHS, one general manager (who later rose to great heights) would look concerned whenever disagreement broke out in a board meeting, and then immediately suggest that the issue should be considered by a subcommittee. This ensured that a nice atmosphere could be preserved at the meeting and that all disagreement (or difficult decisions) could be avoided. One consequence of this tendency is a preference for reacting to events rather than anticipating them. In this way, conflict can be avoided and decisions presented as fait accompli. When I was a member of the same management board, the monthly accounts at the start of the financial year showed a substantial operating deficit. I pointed this out and suggested we start planning how to re-organise services to reduce costs. But this view was dismissed, the deficit accumulated until at the very end of the financial year the general manager announced to staff that the board had reluctantly been ‘forced’ to close a ward.

A second consequence of niceness in organisations is a futile obsession with secrecy. Since criticism is to be avoided at almost all costs, all decisions are inspected for any possible embarrassment they may cause, and a major effort is put into keeping them secret. Keeping things secret is thereby given greater priority than challenging incompetence and dealing with abuse. Staff who abuse patients or clients are therefore quietly re-located instead of being dismissed. The culture of niceness among staff means a lack of respect for those in their care.

See also:The rudeness of strangers

The original sin of babies

Many years ago, I worked as a social worker in Scotland. I lived in a pleasant village in Clackmannanshire under the lea of the Ochils, and I worked in a miserable town in West Lothian. But in both places I heard several parents say the same thing about their babies: that when they cry, they should be left to do so because it helps ‘break their spirit’. I do not know how common this view is in Scotland or whether it is unique to Scotland, but it seemed to me then to incorporate a strange and harsh idea of the nature of children and how best to respond to their needs. It is harsh because it seemed to attribute a baby’s act of communicating distress or discomfort to a desire to manipulate and control its parents. It is, in other words, a belief in original sin.

This belief, as conventionally developed by Christian theologians from St. Augustine onwards, is that human beings inherit sin from Adam, who committed the original sin of disobedience (ie eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge) in the Garden of Eden. All human beings are therefore deemed to be depraved in their nature from birth, and to lack the freedom to do good or respond to the will of God unless they receive His grace. The idea of original sin was especially favoured by the first Protestant clerics like Martin Luther and John Calvin, but would seem to have little to do with the expressed statements of Christ or the Book of Genesis.

Three of the Christian gospels have similar texts in which Christ tells his disciples not to prevent children coming to see him, and saying that “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18: 1-6). He therefore regarded children as innocent beings, not as innately depraved.

The Book of Genesis reports that God punished Adam and Eve and their descendants for their disobedience, but the punishment comprised the pain and suffering of toil, childbirth, illness and death (Gen. 3: 16-19), with no mention of the inheritance of sin. According to the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden to prevent a challenge to God who said: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”. (Gen. 3:22-23).

Sin therefore arises because Adam and Eve’s acquisition of knowledge provided them with the capacity to choose rather than act on instinct. This choice created the possibility of helping or harming others, and it is a choice we have all inherited because of our intellectual capacity as human beings. That we can choose evil is emphasised in the following chapter in the Book of Genesis, which tells the story of Cain murdering his brother Abel.

The doctrine of original sin involves a distinctly pessimistic view of human nature - of children as well as adults. It leads some parents to see their children as innate sinners who must be disciplined from birth, rather than innocent and curious souls driven to respond to the attention and love of their parents.

See also: No sympathy for the devils

The dangerous mythology of computers

Last year, my aged laptop ceased to work and I so I went to the local PC World to buy a new one. I discovered that it had the new operating system called ‘Windows 8', in which the main screen resembles that on a mobile phone. I managed to find out how to make this work by trial-and-error, and eventually modified it so that it resembled the earlier version of Windows with which I was familiar. I do not use the programme Microsoft Word and prefer Corel Wordperfect, which I re-installed on the new computer. However, I do use PowerPoint , and so I decided to buy the Microsoft Office suite, which also includes Word and the Excel spreadsheet programme. Instead of getting an installation disk, PC World took my money and gave a product key on a card, so that I could download the Office suite from the Microsoft website. All went well until this week when I finally needed to use Microsoft Word. As soon as I loaded the programme, an error message informed me that it had ceased working and it closed down. The same thing happened, I discovered, with Excel.

So I phoned Microsoft technical support for help, and was told that they could solve the problem if I took out a support contract. In other words, Microsoft had sold me a product that did not work and wanted more money to make it work. My next step was therefore to contact PC World, who as the retailer have a legal obligation to sell goods that are ‘merchantable’ (a legal term meaning that goods should be reasonably fit for the ordinary purposes for which such products are manufactured and sold). Their technician told me that such principles could not apply to computers because of their complexity, and the possibility that different software applications can conflict with each other. However, they could sort it out for me if I paid them a £50 repair fee. Not being a complete mug, I went home and checked the Internet. It became clear that my problem was a common one, and occurred because Word and Excel are incompatible with a programme called ‘Finereader’. I have never used Finereader, and do not remember installing it, so it was probably supplied with the computer. Anyway, I deleted Finereader, solved the problem, and saved £50 plus whatever a Microsoft support contract costs.

All this illustrates an important part of the mythology of computers and their software: that they are complicated and that they are expected to be fallible, and that their failure is somehow not the responsibility of those who made them. Complexity and fallibility were once expected of cars. Up to the 1980s, brand new cars would often break down and old ones frequently so. Car-owners would expect to spend a lot of their time attempting to repair them or waiting for a roadside recovery service. All this ended when Japanese manufacturers began to make cars that were highly-reliable. A similar transition has yet to occur with computer systems and so there is still a common belief that computer systems are inherently unreliable. This suits the corporations that make and market them. They can continue to produce poorly-designed products like Windows 8 and expect supplementary payouts from customers when their products prove unworkable. The sum of repair fees and software support contracts from millions of customers must amount to a tidy sum.

Even better profits are generated by the failure of large contracts for public computer systems. This month, the National Audit Office has reported that the General Practitioner Extraction System (GPES) has utterly failed to operate. This is not failure in the sense that the system is unreliable or slow, rather it is failure in the sense that it has never managed to generate a single piece of data for general practitioners. The GPES failed to operate when it cost £19 million, which resulted in a further large input of public cash so that it now fails to operate having cost £40 million. But that is chickenfeed compared with some other public procurement systems like the NHS patient records system abandoned after costing at least £10 billion. In any rational economy, the companies responsible for wasting public money on this scale would be out of business and the civil servants responsible for procurement and management would be in prison or exile. I suspect, however, that they have retired with a good pension, a lucrative ‘consultancy’ post, and the award of a medal from the honours list.

The horrors of planning 3: local plans

It took some time after I became a parish councillor to realise that planning departments of district councils do not actually do much planning as most of us would understand this term.

In everyday use, the word ‘planning’ means the activities of setting out an objective to be achieved at some defined point in the future, identifying the steps needed to achieve it, and specifying the resources required for each step. Effective planning does a lot more: it investigates the possible threats to the implementation of the plan and the preferred response to them, it estimates the scheduling of the various steps so that resource costs can be minimised, and it considers how the people involved in implementing the plan should be informed and trained. A lot can change after a plan is made, and so delays in implementation may result in action being based on obsolete data. So good management involves rapid planning followed by a timely implementation. There should also be review stages, so that the planning team can check progress and adapt the plan if this is required.

How much does the work of planning departments correspond to this definition? Planning departments have two main activities: they produce a ‘local plan’ for their area, which specifies where and what type of development should take place; and they recommend what should be done about applications to build, modify or demolish buildings. The two activities are related - permission to build is not usually recommended in areas not so specified in the local plan, while the local plan also defines some places as being ‘conservation areas’, in which there are tight restrictions on what can be built and what changes can be made to existing buildings.

The local plan-to-be in my part of England is called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan (SWDP)’ and covers the area of three local councils: Malvern Hills and Wychavon District and the City of Worcester. I call it a ‘plan-to-be’ because it is still being formally examined by a planning inspector appointed by the Government, after which, if he finds the plan ‘sound’, it will have the full legal force of a local plan. But until then, there is actually no local plan in force for the entire area, which means that, according to Government policy, almost anything can be built almost anywhere.

This situation has come about because of the inordinate time taken to complete the SWDP.  Work seems to have begun in 2010, followed by publication of a draft in 2011, followed by lots of consultation, followed by a new draft, followed by the planning inspector indicating that insufficient sites for new housing had been included, followed by another revision, followed in 2015 by the current round of ‘examination’ by the planning inspector. This length of time does not seem to be unusual for local plans. However, all this shows that the process of planning has become more important than the actual plan itself.

Why these delays? The problem lies in the way in which planning law now operates. Gaining planning permission to build houses on farmland results in a massive increase in the value of the land. The designation of areas for development in a local plan and the consequent granting of planning permission therefore has the effect of donating large sums of cash to selected individuals. This creates a sense of injustice among those refused planning permission, anger in communities which see their neighbourhoods despoiled, and a temptation for corruption among councillors and planners. As a result, planning has become a prolonged quasi-judicial process, with extensive periods of consultation, appeals, and examinations.

What of the contents of the SWDP? Well it certainly looks like a plan - there are high-sounding statements of objectives, maps, lists of ‘policies’ (ie quasi-laws which define what development can be permitted), and various estimates of population growth. But it fails the definition of ‘planning’ as set out above for several reasons. In particular, it is concerned only with ‘spatial planning’ - the allocation of land for specific purposes. This means that although the SWDP analyses the growing number of older people in South Worcestershire, it has nothing to say about the implications of this trend on local health and social services, the potential impact on the need for public transport, or how local communities can best cope with a larger elderly and infirm population. This is a product of ‘departmentalism’, or the way in which governments partition inter-dependent activities between different departments and agencies. Each of these then avoids trouble by keeping within its own area of responsibility. So healthcare is planned by the various local agencies of the NHS, social care and transport by the County Council, and spatial planning by the district councils. Each then generates their own separate sets of plans and strategies for their particular topic.

There are other problems with this spatial planning approach. By focussing on the allocation of land for specific purposes, local plans include nothing about the appearance of the whole place. So the policies in the SWDP relating to leisure and recreation are concerned with the use of community centres, village halls and playing fields because these all take place on defined bits of land. But the most popular recreational activity were I live (and probably in most of England) is walking in the countryside. This can hardly take place where extensive housing estates are built over fields and where woodlands become thin strips dividing various estates of suburban dwellings.

A further problem is that planning in England has become almost entirely reactive. Planners react to population change (including high rates of immigration), to speculative applications from developers, and, more generally, to the desire of most English people to own a house with a garden in a low-density suburb while also preserving the countryside. This can be seen in the way in which the planning authorities approve individual applications to build. Here is an example from my own village. Our primary school is large by village standards, with 140 pupils. It occupies a site near the parish church (the school was founded by the Church of England) which has gradually been built over as the school has expanded. There is now no room for further expansion on the current site. Expansion will be necessary in the near future because 75 new houses are being built in the village, while some smaller schools in neighbouring parishes will probably be closed and their children transferred to our village school. Fortunately, there is a decent-sized field next to the school that would be suitable for expansion. Good planning would therefore involve purchasing the land for the school or, at the very least, preventing it being used for anything that would impede expansion. However, the land is in private hands, and there is much more money to be made selling land for housing than selling land for school expansion. So the owner duly applied for planning permission for 14 new houses, which the District Council (against the advice of the parish council) has approved.

I do not believe these problems with local planning in England have come about because of any personal shortcomings among our district councillors or our local planners, who I have always found to be capable and willing to help members of the public. But, as I learnt when I was a social worker, the most capable and earnest people can have all their best efforts rendered ineffective when they have to cope within an unworkable system.

See also: The horrors of planning 1
                The horrors of planning 2

The two villages

Where I live in Worcestershire, there are two villages, very close to each other. The upper village has a high population density, packed with hundreds of small family homes. The inhabitants are noisy but lead surprisingly orderly lives. Each morning, most commute to work, leaving some to care for the young. Parents have strong family bonds and rarely divorce. But there is a definite hierarchy between families, and in hard times those with the lowest status starve. Thirty feet below this village of jackdaws is the village of humans, living at ground-level rather than among the tree tops. The humans also commute to work in the morning, but they lead much quieter lives than the inhabitants of the jackdaw village. When the jackdaws return home, there is no quiet evening on the nest in front of the television. Instead, there is boisterous party-going, circling round in formation flying, and calling to each other from nest to nest. The only human activities that match the jackdaw village for noise are football matches - an occasion for shouting abuse and swearing.

Jackdaws were once called ‘daws’ in England: the ‘Jack’ was added as a personal name, in the same way that Redbreasts were all named ‘Robin’ and Wrens are called ‘Jenny’. Perhaps these three species were given Christian names because of all the birds they seemed the most human: busy, loud and assertive. At this time of year (early June), the jackdaw village in the bank of trees opposite my house is sufficiently loud and assertive to wake me up every morning some time soon after 4am.

Dead whale-watching in Iceland

People now prefer to watch whales instead of eating them. But I ate whalemeat a long time ago, and the only whales I have ever seen were dead ones being hacked to pieces in Iceland. This all happened in 1966, when I spent a summer in Reykjavik as a trainee placed by AIESEC - an international organisation which arranges what would now be called ‘internships’ for economics students.

I flew out of Birmingham Airport (then called ‘Elmdon Airport’) on the day of the World Cup Final. The passengers crowded round a transistor radio in the departure lounge to hear the match. I spent the first week staying with an Icelandic family, where I ate quite a lot of fish. After that, I moved to lodgings with some other AISEC trainees in a house with a young landlady. I was based in a firm called ‘Kassagerdin’, which made boxes (mainly for fish) as well as printing all sorts of materials. I began working in the office, working on a complex accounting machine. But later, I had a far  better time on the workshop floor as a member of a three-man team operating a large machine which cut and printed cardboard boxes. The two other workers were the teenage son of the firm’s owner and a teacher working over the summer school break.

The AISEC committee in Iceland did an excellent job, and the group of trainees went on various trips to see the vast volcanic landscape of Thingvellir, the Arbaer Folk Museum, the waterfall Gullfoss, the Great Geysir, and Hveragerdi (where we saw bananas grown in greenhouses heated by hot thermal springs). I took a few days off on holiday to hitch-hike around the coast to Akureyri and from there to the Lake Myvatn. I was given lifts by many friendly and interesting Icelandic people. These included the driver of an articulated oil tanker. At one point on the journey, he turned off the road, and drove the truck along a track through the twisted rocks of a lava field until we came to a half-built bungalow. He unloaded some long planks he had stored along the side of the trailer, placed them next to the bungalow, and then returned to the main road. He was building this house himself, he explained, for his retirement. Later that day, I checked into a hotel in the village of Blonduos. I slept in the hotel annexe, built on the edge of a beach of black sand facing the Arctic Ocean.

Before all this, however, I paused in my journey at Hvalfjordur, just North of Reykjavik. In 1966, the road would around the head of the fjord - the location of a whaling station. From my memory, this comprised a jetty, a slipway and a large shed. The jetty had originally been built by the US Navy, and several Icelandic spectators pointed to the ‘secret American submarine base’ around the coast. Eventually, a small whaling boat approached the jetty with (I think) two whale carcasses slung on each side. The first carcass was winched to the slipway, and as it rose on the slope a mass of blood swelled out into the sea. Some young men, stripped to waist, climbed on the body of the whale and began hacking it to pieces with large long cleavers. In a short time, there was just bones, meat and entrails. There was also the smell - a smell so strong I remember it now almost 50 years later.

Also 50 years later, the Hvalur Whaling Company still operates in the same location, still catching fin whales and bringing them to a whale-abattoir in a fjord named after whales.

Five things they didn’t tell you about the 2015 British General Election

1. This is the second-most unpopular elected government since the beginning of universal suffrage. The Conservative Party won 331 seats in the House of Commons (51% of the 650 seats in the House) from only 36.8% of the vote. This is the second-lowest winning percentage since universal suffrage began at the General Election of 1929. Only Labour's 'victory' in 2005 with just over 35% of the vote is comparable. The other winner in 2015 from our grossly undemocratic election system was the SNP. This has 56 seats from only 4.7% of the vote. Compare that with UKIP, which won one seat from 12.6% of voters.

2. Scotland will have less influence in the UK than at any time since the Act of Union.
The claim by the SNP that they will give Scotland a voice at Westminster is a familiar combination of deceit and self-delusion. Scots have played an important part in all UK governments since the Act of Union. This rose to a peak in the most recent Labour Government, in which Scotsmen were, at various times, Prime Minister, Chancellor the Exchequer, Defence Secretary, Lord Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, and Secretary of State for Health. However, membership of a senior post in government, with few exceptions, requires membership of the House of Commons. Since the SNP has all but three of the Members of Parliament who represent Scotland, this will effectively eliminate the Scots from both Government and Opposition front benches. 

3. Rupert Murdoch will be rewarded. One of the fascinating features of the election campaign was the co-ordinated campaign by the Conservatives and the SNP to build up the SNP threat to the Labour Party. Each time David Cameron claimed that a minority Labour government would be controlled by the SNP, an SNP leader would state a new demand they would make of such a government. Both the Conservatives and the SNP received the enthusiastic support of, respectively, the English and Scottish editions of The Sun on the instructions of its American owner Rupert Murdoch. Both parties have invested a big efforts in wooing this evil old man, and he will expect a reward for his support. This will probably be approval for a takeover bid for Sky and the breakup of the BBC.

4. The Labour Party has popular policies but failed politically. The various policies announced by the Labour Party during the campaign (such as ending the tax-avoidance status of non-domiciles, controlling rents, restricting the use of zero-hours contracts and preventing further privatisation of the NHS) all proved to have majority support in the public opinion polls. But the Labour leadership failed to promote these policies over the lifetime of the preceding Parliament, and they therefore had limited impact at the election. Most important of all, the Labour Party failed to effectively challenge the claim that it had ‘bankrupted’ the UK economy by massively increasing the National Debt. The increase in this debt was a result of having to borrow money to avoid the bankruptcy of three of the world’s largest banks, as well as various building societies and smaller banks in 2008. None of the political parties had anticipated the recklessness of the management of so many financial institutions, and all would have acted in the same way as Gordon Brown’s Labour Government to protect the savings of British citizens. But the impression was given of panic and incompetence, rather like Black Wednesday in 1992, when the Conservative Government was forced to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Labour failed to defend its actions in 2008, and has failed to do so since. This is a primary political failure, in the sense of being unable to make a case and persuade people to accept it.

5. In two years time, the Conservative Party will fall apart. A referendum will be held on membership of the European Union in 2017 after a supposed renegotiation of the terms of British membership. The Government has never stated what changes it aims to achieve, and any significant changes would in any case require the revision of the various inter-governmental treaties that determine the structure and functioning of the EU. Treaty-revision requires unanimous consent of all the countries in the EU, which is unlikely to be forthcoming since new treaties in some countries require formal constitutional change and/or a referendum . We can therefore assume that any renegotiation will be mainly cosmetic and unlikely to appease the majority of the Conservative Party which opposes membership of the Union. The following 2017 referendum campaign will in consequence involve rival sets of Conservative political leaders on opposite sides bitterly denouncing each other. This will be interesting to observe.