Around fifteen years ago, I was living in the US and working, among other things, as a freelance journalist. The Group of Newspapers that I worked for gave every new arrival a large tome that would have made War & Peace look like a pamphlet. It included the style guide, which covered practical matters like where and how to use apostrophes, the company's approach to freebies for journalists (Answer: accept any and you are toast) and its dos and don'ts regarding what could loosely be labelled relationships and discrimination.
Although I thought it unnecessary to spell everything out in such detail, at least it left everyone who worked for the paper in no doubt about its attitude to discrimination of any kind. Put briefly, one was not allowed to discriminate against any group or individual based on gender, sexual orientation, religion or race. I remember talking about it with friends and work colleagues whenever I was back in the UK - about twice or three times a year. Generally speaking the reaction was one of disbelief coupled with comments about bloody pc Yanks and a general sense of relief that we, the British, were far too sensible to need any such guidelines. Oh how easy it is to be smug: And wrong.
I look around the UK now and I doubt that there are many more politically correct countries in the world. Occasionally I read blog sites that make the same claim on behalf of Canada but, never having had to live there, I am happy to claim the PC Cup on our behalf.
Well, happy is probably not the word I am looking for; resigned, disillusioned and bloody furious would be closer to the mark. Because, as with all things in modern Britain, we have embraced political correctness with a degree of enthusiasm that I would never have thought possible twenty years ago.
Like most people I let the sheer irrelevance and pointlessness of most politically correct policies wash over me andwhile I try to get on, probably slightly more grimly, with my life. Recently, though, I have witnessed a prime example of what happens when political correctness becomes the key driver in a decision making process. My company - a global engineering firm- has recently decided, with no small degree of satisfaction, to identify a number of female managers from different parts of the global organisation that it will groom for future occupation of the most senior management positions. In fact, so proud of this initiative were they that they announced it on the company's global intranet. And were, somehow, taken aback by the ferocity of the reaction. A reaction, it has to be said, that was equally disillusioned from whichever side of the gender divide it came.
The stated purpose of this initiative was to redress a perceived imbalance in the number of women on the main board. Which was ironic in itself. You see, my company is Scandinavian, but its reach is genuinely global, with subsidiaries in almost 100 countries many of which have been around for almost 100 years. Despite this fact, the main board is composed almost exclusively of Scandinavians and is, apparently, closed to almost everyone whose name doesn't end in sson, irrespective of gender.
The point of this little anecdote is that "positive discrimination" is an oxymoron. It is impossible to discriminate positively in favour of one group without discriminating negatively against everyone else who isn't a member of that select group. The truth of this is so self-evident that it shouldn't need explanation or justification. Unfortunately, it's a measure of our PC times that, simply for saying so, one can be labelled mysoginistic and anti-female. It engenders the same kind of reaction - a mixture of pity and condescension - that one receives for expressing doubts about Global Warming.
Anyway, since promoting discrete groups seems to be the order of the day, I am currently lobbying for people of the Romany persuasion to be promoted to the main board. If that fails, I might be tempted to turn my lobbying skills to the benefit of left handed, ginger-headed Albanians.
Thursday, 26 February 2009
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
Inhuman rights
Long before Jack Straw did us all a massive disservice by enshrining the European Charter of Fundamental Rights into our Law, the average person had a fairly clear idea of what did or did not constitute right and wrong.
For instance, under English Common Law the idea that crime begat punishment went unchallenged for a thousand years.
Behaviour towards others was, for the most part, covered by the ten basic laws that Moses handed down to the children of Israel. If one wanted a settled, orderly society it made pretty good sense not to steal, or covert your neighbour's ox or his wife. Stealing, likewise, was proscribed for the very good reason that it tended to upset the victim. Of course, the first four Commandments are not particularly relevant in our increasingly secular society. But, the other six provide a fairly straightforward framework for civilised behaviour.
So, we ticked along for a milennium and built a pretty reasonable legal system around these relatively few basic ideas. Because the rules were so few and easy to grasp, there was never any real doubt when lines were being crossed. If you stole, killed, lied about your neighbour or coveted his goods and chattels you were going to be held to account. It was easy to distinguish between the victimiser and the victim in the majority of cases.
That is no longer the case. Jack and his lawyer chums have altered the basic rules with the introduction of their human rights legislation.Six simple commandments have been replaced by 54 Articles, creating a whole new stratum of legal argument. This may be great for the lawyers, but it takes the legal process several steps further away from most people's instinctive sense of what constitutes right and wrong.
In this new Human Rights wonderland, for instance, judges see nothing odd or insensitive in refusing to deport a convicted terrorist back to Iran because the possible threat of torture would breach his Human Rights. As he can't be deported, he has to remain in this country. He has no job and, having spent the last 28 years incarcerated in a British gaol, he's unlikely to have had much opportunity to play the stock markets or build a buy-to-rent empire.
So, the only way he can remain in one of the world's most expensive cities is at the taxpayers' expense.
The judges who reached this great decision would probably tell you that they have to consider the Law as it exists, not the consequences of its implementation. Which is why I hate the Human Rights culture we have fostered. Because, while our ex-terrorist gets to visit the gym, the library, meet his mates and generally lollygag around our capital city, there are old people all over Great Britain who might have to choose this winter between heating their home or eating. Some of them, undoubtedly, will be in their parlous position because they failed to salt something away for their old age. A fair few might have gone through their whole lives scrounging off the state. But the majority will be people who have worked all of their adult lives and, in many cases, through their teenage years as well. They will have paid taxes for forty or possibly fifty years and made National Insurance contributions for a similar length of time. Many would have spent time in the Services.
Now, in their dotage, they have to scrape by on £40 to £100 per week. Of course, these pensioners can always apply for additional benefits but, unlike our Iranian friend, whose every need will be met by solicitous officials keen to ensure that his Human Rights are left unsullied, they will have to fill in copious forms, take various means tests and have their lives generally poked and prodded by nosey officals to qualify for them. This is what happens when you allow the law to become an abstract thing. It might be an amusement to those of a legal bent to debate the nuances of a particular point of Law. But it has as much relevance to Natural Justice as the old religious debate concerning the number of angels that could dance on a head of a pin. It constantly throws up anomalies like our Irtanian terrorist friend and countless others who end up sucking the life out of our benefits system while native British pensioners are left to flounder on the fringes of the system with insufficient money to feed or keep themselves warm.
For them, the only Human Right, apparently, is to live an impoverished but dignified old age until such time as they give up the ghost and quietly fade away.
For instance, under English Common Law the idea that crime begat punishment went unchallenged for a thousand years.
Behaviour towards others was, for the most part, covered by the ten basic laws that Moses handed down to the children of Israel. If one wanted a settled, orderly society it made pretty good sense not to steal, or covert your neighbour's ox or his wife. Stealing, likewise, was proscribed for the very good reason that it tended to upset the victim. Of course, the first four Commandments are not particularly relevant in our increasingly secular society. But, the other six provide a fairly straightforward framework for civilised behaviour.
So, we ticked along for a milennium and built a pretty reasonable legal system around these relatively few basic ideas. Because the rules were so few and easy to grasp, there was never any real doubt when lines were being crossed. If you stole, killed, lied about your neighbour or coveted his goods and chattels you were going to be held to account. It was easy to distinguish between the victimiser and the victim in the majority of cases.
That is no longer the case. Jack and his lawyer chums have altered the basic rules with the introduction of their human rights legislation.Six simple commandments have been replaced by 54 Articles, creating a whole new stratum of legal argument. This may be great for the lawyers, but it takes the legal process several steps further away from most people's instinctive sense of what constitutes right and wrong.
In this new Human Rights wonderland, for instance, judges see nothing odd or insensitive in refusing to deport a convicted terrorist back to Iran because the possible threat of torture would breach his Human Rights. As he can't be deported, he has to remain in this country. He has no job and, having spent the last 28 years incarcerated in a British gaol, he's unlikely to have had much opportunity to play the stock markets or build a buy-to-rent empire.
So, the only way he can remain in one of the world's most expensive cities is at the taxpayers' expense.
The judges who reached this great decision would probably tell you that they have to consider the Law as it exists, not the consequences of its implementation. Which is why I hate the Human Rights culture we have fostered. Because, while our ex-terrorist gets to visit the gym, the library, meet his mates and generally lollygag around our capital city, there are old people all over Great Britain who might have to choose this winter between heating their home or eating. Some of them, undoubtedly, will be in their parlous position because they failed to salt something away for their old age. A fair few might have gone through their whole lives scrounging off the state. But the majority will be people who have worked all of their adult lives and, in many cases, through their teenage years as well. They will have paid taxes for forty or possibly fifty years and made National Insurance contributions for a similar length of time. Many would have spent time in the Services.
Now, in their dotage, they have to scrape by on £40 to £100 per week. Of course, these pensioners can always apply for additional benefits but, unlike our Iranian friend, whose every need will be met by solicitous officials keen to ensure that his Human Rights are left unsullied, they will have to fill in copious forms, take various means tests and have their lives generally poked and prodded by nosey officals to qualify for them. This is what happens when you allow the law to become an abstract thing. It might be an amusement to those of a legal bent to debate the nuances of a particular point of Law. But it has as much relevance to Natural Justice as the old religious debate concerning the number of angels that could dance on a head of a pin. It constantly throws up anomalies like our Irtanian terrorist friend and countless others who end up sucking the life out of our benefits system while native British pensioners are left to flounder on the fringes of the system with insufficient money to feed or keep themselves warm.
For them, the only Human Right, apparently, is to live an impoverished but dignified old age until such time as they give up the ghost and quietly fade away.
Friday, 31 October 2008
Ross on Why?
If you read the blog threads on the Guardian and Independent websites, it rapidly becomes clear that there is a certain kind of person that sees the uproar caused by Russell Brand/Jonathon Ross's telephone prank as yet another example of Great Britain lurching to the right quicker than David Beckham in an England shirt. The Brand/Ross supporters, with a few honourable exceptions, regard themselves as distinctively individual with a penchant for straight talking. No doubt they would also describe themselves as liberal; with a lower case l, of course. Politically, they are more likely to favour the extreme left of the political spectrum.
There is no-one quite as illiberal as the confirmed liberal. Come to think of it, there are very few people in this world quite as conformist in their thinking as those who, on the whole, pride themselves on their non-conformist approach to life. To prove just how non-conformist they are, they plaster the walls of the accounts department where they work with posters like; "You don't have to be mad to work here - but it helps."
They are the people who campaign furiously against modern technology and see no irony in the fact that they use Blackberries and lap-tops to co-ordinate their campaigns. They are the people who would vigorously protest against any kind of discrimination on the basis of colour or creed but who happily vilify millions of people base solely on the newspaper they choose to read over their breakfast cereals.
For proof of this, you need do no more than trawl through the comments posted on the Guardian and Indie websites. The first thing that becomes apparent is their uniform belief that the whole furore has been fomented by the Daily Mail to undermine the BBC. The second is the relative paucity and shallowness of their comments.
They are, for the most part, devoid of original thought and lean heavily on strident repetition for effect. Overall, their command of English, their ability to spell fairly commonplace words and parse a sentence correctly diminish in inverse proportion to their level of support for Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross.
The more strident the tone of their postings, the more dismissive of Mail readers, the poorer their command of English. Given the frequency of their posts, many of them must be low level Civil Servants or be marking time between jobs with stints on the computers in the local library.
A common athread running through all of their postings is that only two people complained about the broadcast itself. It wasn't until the bloody Daily Mail took up the cudgels that the whole thing got blown out of proportion. Without the Mail's intervention, the 30,000 that, sheep-like, eventually complained to the BBC would never have been any the wiser.
This is a completely spurious argument. If I don't personally see a murder or a rape does that make my disgust any less valid? If I don't witness people dying in an Asian Tsunami should I care less than those who were actually on the ground when the event took place? Of course not. The fact that I learn about or experience the event through a news medium doesn't make the emotion it stirs in me any less valid.
Equally, the fact that 30,000 people didn't hear the actual show doesn't invalidate their right to feel angry and outraged that it was ever allowed to be broadcast.
Personally, I didn't hear the programme and, having read the transcripts, wasn't particularly offended by the content. What really got up my nose was the sheer juvenile nastiness of what Ross/Brand did. It was the broadcasting equivalent of a couple of playground bullies picking on a smaller kid for having a snotty nose or glasses. It was cruel. It was arrogant. But, most of all, it was distinctly unfunny.
The liberals constantly trot out the old sore that, to be effective, comedy has to have an edge; has to be "relevant" - whatever that might mean - and break the boundaries of conventional behaviour. That's just so much twaddle.
Comedy's only job is to make the audience laugh. It has no higher calling than that. If it fails then patently it's not comedy at all. On that basis alone, the two broadcasters deserved to be given the boot.
There is no-one quite as illiberal as the confirmed liberal. Come to think of it, there are very few people in this world quite as conformist in their thinking as those who, on the whole, pride themselves on their non-conformist approach to life. To prove just how non-conformist they are, they plaster the walls of the accounts department where they work with posters like; "You don't have to be mad to work here - but it helps."
They are the people who campaign furiously against modern technology and see no irony in the fact that they use Blackberries and lap-tops to co-ordinate their campaigns. They are the people who would vigorously protest against any kind of discrimination on the basis of colour or creed but who happily vilify millions of people base solely on the newspaper they choose to read over their breakfast cereals.
For proof of this, you need do no more than trawl through the comments posted on the Guardian and Indie websites. The first thing that becomes apparent is their uniform belief that the whole furore has been fomented by the Daily Mail to undermine the BBC. The second is the relative paucity and shallowness of their comments.
They are, for the most part, devoid of original thought and lean heavily on strident repetition for effect. Overall, their command of English, their ability to spell fairly commonplace words and parse a sentence correctly diminish in inverse proportion to their level of support for Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross.
The more strident the tone of their postings, the more dismissive of Mail readers, the poorer their command of English. Given the frequency of their posts, many of them must be low level Civil Servants or be marking time between jobs with stints on the computers in the local library.
A common athread running through all of their postings is that only two people complained about the broadcast itself. It wasn't until the bloody Daily Mail took up the cudgels that the whole thing got blown out of proportion. Without the Mail's intervention, the 30,000 that, sheep-like, eventually complained to the BBC would never have been any the wiser.
This is a completely spurious argument. If I don't personally see a murder or a rape does that make my disgust any less valid? If I don't witness people dying in an Asian Tsunami should I care less than those who were actually on the ground when the event took place? Of course not. The fact that I learn about or experience the event through a news medium doesn't make the emotion it stirs in me any less valid.
Equally, the fact that 30,000 people didn't hear the actual show doesn't invalidate their right to feel angry and outraged that it was ever allowed to be broadcast.
Personally, I didn't hear the programme and, having read the transcripts, wasn't particularly offended by the content. What really got up my nose was the sheer juvenile nastiness of what Ross/Brand did. It was the broadcasting equivalent of a couple of playground bullies picking on a smaller kid for having a snotty nose or glasses. It was cruel. It was arrogant. But, most of all, it was distinctly unfunny.
The liberals constantly trot out the old sore that, to be effective, comedy has to have an edge; has to be "relevant" - whatever that might mean - and break the boundaries of conventional behaviour. That's just so much twaddle.
Comedy's only job is to make the audience laugh. It has no higher calling than that. If it fails then patently it's not comedy at all. On that basis alone, the two broadcasters deserved to be given the boot.
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