power » 21stCenturyFix.org.uk

Life in the UK – actually corrupt or “simply” amoral?

corruption, life, power, sexual abuse, unclassifiable, United Kingdom No Responses »

May 102013

This report from the Independent today shows us just how far we have come. Whilst Tory Euro-sceptics continue to plot final disavowal of that evil anti-British entity that we all know and love as the European Union, we get these choice phrases on the corruption Britain is finally now exhibiting all on its lonesome:

Yet recent British scandals can compete with the best Europe can offer. Besides MPs fiddling their expenses and Jimmy Savile’s history of paedophilia, racing has been hit by Frankie Dettori’s six-month drugs ban, we’ve seen London-based banks Barclays and UBS embarrassed by the Libor rate-fixing scandal, and BAE Systems has been investigated over its arms deals.

And yet it gets worse, as goalposts are continuously moved:

[...] “There is no real accountability of these guys coming in—the cops don’t really investigate them,” says Mark Hollingsworth, co-author of Londongrad, a 2009 book about the Russian invasion. “They see the capital as the most secure, fairest, most honest place to park their cash, and the judges here would never extradite them.”

Meanwhile, with respect to the paedophilia scandals, the desire of power to overwhelm through the abuse of sex just gets worse (more here):

A prominent barrister specialising in reproductive rights has called for the age of consent to be lowered to 13.

Barbara Hewson told online magazine Spiked that the move was necessary in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal to end the “persecution of old men”.

Now in a short Twitter exchange this morning it was brought to my attention that the problem isn’t immorality. In fact, the problem may not even be corruption as such. Rather, so much of what we do in both large and small corporate organisations is done with a transcendental amorality. We are circumscribed by process and procedure – and we assume the bigger view is not ours to own. We assume that those who set up process and procedure knew what they were doing when they trained us.

Yet this very amorality, this unquestioning behaviour, this inability to think from scratch and try and perceive – on a rolling basis – a broader set of consequences from our acts, leads to outcomes which are anything but amoral. We ourselves are not immoral – most of us are truly not corrupt – but the accumulation of all our individual tasks does seem to lead more and more to utterly unjust outcomes.

Is it then a systemic question as the Independent reports it might be? Or is it a question of people-culture? After all, you can have any number of protective processes and procedures in place but if the people who are supposed to operate them are of a mind to, any and all may quite easily – and eventually – be circumvented.

The battlecry for the anti-Europeans is that Europe is a dirty patchwork of vile and corrupt marshes we need to retreat from. And yet recent attempts to drag us out of such fields only makes me wonder if the true powers-that-be are looking more to defend their own rights to perpetuate a very British corruption from international law and wider socially-inspired movements than to revert what was apparently once an honest public life to a semblance of modest functionality.

Corrupt or “just” amoral? Does it really matter in the final analysis? The evidence of the impact of widespread corruption – that is to say, inefficient and ineffective socioeconomic systems – is all around us. You don’t need to drill down into that individual or the other to know that the inefficiency and ineffectiveness I mention must be inspired by something seriously wrong.

Solutions? Lord, I really don’t know. I really don’t know where to start. But perhaps we should take a lesson from the best corporate organisations: when you struggle to know the true extent of the bigger picture, start with bitesized pieces. And maybe, just maybe, attempt to comprehend that just as those poor workers were trapped and died in the rubble of a Bangladeshi building, so too many people here in the West – whilst not losing their lives – are wasting their existences in systems which also, in a way, serve to entrap them.

Just because you act in an amoral fashion doesn’t make you immoral. Even as, perhaps, the results of your actions are.

There’s a lesson to be drawn there, then, about how we see, consult and work with others.

Maybe it’s time we thought the best of our fellow workers. And acted in consequence.

The POV Machine

Easter, Facebook, Facebook generation, Google, Google Glass, POV machine, poverty, power, social media, social networks, spying on neighbours, squeezed middle, squeezed middle class, super-rich, Twitter, unclassifiable 3 Responses »

Mar 282013

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been reading and writing a lot about the squeezed middle, the absolute poor and the stratospheric rich. For those of us who are living in the United Kingdom – more precisely in my case, the North West of England – you won’t have failed to notice how the government and the governed simply do not see things eye-to-eye. In fact, lately at least, it’s often more a case of a tooth for a tooth.

http://youtu.be/Exh8t6lUpAI

The thing is, my natural instinct is to see life from tens of different points of view. This doesn’t make me popular – or widely read. Yesterday, I realised the true and abiding power of ranting when itiddly, a Twitter friend of mine, asked me to edit a post of his before he posted it. He’s a tribal fellow; a traditional political activist. He insults and damns and blasts the Tories at every opportunity.

I resisted the temptation to help him out with his post – rather patronisingly (in retrospect) arguing that he needed to have confidence in his writing, as well as some exposure, much more than the help of a struggling editor friend.

You can read his post here. It’s a rant and it isn’t. There’s a barely contained fury, of course, but all the time it’s an evidence-based fury. And whilst I rarely get above five or six tweets for my posts, in a very short time his had hit thirty-five (at the time of writing this post, it now reads a hundred). Exposure wasn’t what was needed on his part here; instead, it was humility on mine.

Yet it is not in my nature to rant one-sidedly, even where ranting of a kind is sometimes something I do. I would not be able, in all honesty, to write something as single-minded as the post we’re talking about. And I wish, in some way, I were able to convey the reasons why. I wish you could all see the ten or twenty different points of view I always see when I see the world.

People have, on occasions, even accused me of dancing around a subject. Perhaps, in truth, they were closer to the mark than even they realised. You dance out of engagement and concentration; a dance is a marvellous combination of emotion, precision and attitude.

That is how I see the process of writing.

Which is why I wish, perhaps by using Twitter and other social-network outputs, we could all appreciate better how each of us is perceiving the world: the pain, the glory, the happiness and joy; the misery, the fear, the certainties and hopes. From high-and-mighty governors to humble barely-surviving governed, the world would surely become a better place if only we could see it properly through each other’s eyes.

So my question must be: is anyone out there at all interested in creating a Point-Of-View Machine?

Or are you all far more interested in setting up monolithic positions of revulsion and non-cooperation?

____________________

Further reading: I wonder, quite sincerely, whether the Google Glass project (more here) – rather than inspire our fear of a final assault on all our privacies – should make us more hopeful in the ways I describe above. If the POV streams resulting from all those users were made available and accessible in a structured way, we would understand much more easily how each of us experienced life. And from that understanding, perhaps a kinder governance would emerge.

A kinder world.

A kinder species, even.

We can only hope, of course.

And, maybe, pray.

The turn of the Anglo-Saxon Inquisition

a con, power, sexual abuse 2 Responses »

Feb 262013

Via Facebook, I’ve just seen a photo of a notable cleric and an infamous DJ. I don’t know if it’s been retouched (the photo I mean). I’m not really interested either – at least for the purposes of this post – in whether the story is true or not.

For the moment, all I would like you to focus on is the game that’s being played.

All of a sudden, from politicians to celebrities, from the clergy to singers, from the high-and-mighty to the lowly of caste, skeletons are being violently forced and levered out of closets and coffins. There seems to exist a particularly Anglo-Saxon delight in pursuing those who have allegedly committed sins of the flesh. Now I’m not suggesting for one moment that they shouldn’t be pursued. As I’ve already said on these pages, we should all bear witness to the lives we have chosen to live. What I am trying to make patent is that there is a certain excess on display – a definite inaccuracy too – with respect to what we’re accusing all these people of having committed.

Above all, when we lick our proverbial journalistic lips and use distancing techniques to protect ourselves from all awful association, or slyly juxtapose old and recent news, the inaccuracies – and perhaps also the bad faith thus contained – become all too apparent.

These matters are being sold as a righteous society cleaning up after sexual perverts. Two reactions on my part:

The sexual abuse committed (or not) by those currently in the limelight is not principally a matter of sorry individuals abusing others sexually – but, rather, a question of the powerful abusing the powerless. It is not sex which matters most here but, instead, the abuse by those at the top of our societal trees over those who find themselves almost inevitably at the bottom.
Inasmuch as we are talking not about sex but – in truth – about power, the lesson we should draw is that any abuse of any power by absolutely anyone – and not just tabloidy abuse of a lascivious nature in a sexually couched transaction – is, frankly, as bad as absolutely any other.

What, as a consequence, is our society ignoring – even deliberately and self-interestedly as might be the case? Well, I would suggest the following: the fact that the Anglo-Saxon Inquisition is now pursuing the “perverts” we perceive with grand vigour – when, at the time, the all-powerful establishment got away with almost everything it cared to, as phone-hacking, the altering of police evidence and the fucking and deceiving of young and impressionable activists in the name of state security all got their shabby green lights – doesn’t half make one wonder whom this sudden inquisitorial bent should suddenly serve to benefit.

For the abuse of power continues apace. The abuse by the powerful over the essentially powerless is as prevalent now as it is now appearing to have been then. And whilst sexual abuse still plagues our societies – and still finds itself the object of rightful condemnation – the kind of abuse I would like our police to pursue with equal enthusiasm is the kind of abuse I see exerted by elected representatives over the people they supposedly serve.

This hullabaloo over sexual abuse is right and appropriate – but only if we inscribe it in a wider campaign to eliminate the cruelty of the rich and connected over the poor and disadvantaged.

Time, then, for us to fight for an Atos for political professionals?

Time to seriously wonder if our politicians are fit for work?

Time to decide if MPs, and other political movers and shakers, are suitable for the jobs they carry out?

Time, in essence, to propose an Inquisition to investigate and interrogate the workings not of Anglo-Saxon sex but – rather – of Anglo-Saxon power?

And grubby little Tube users do it … every day of the year

a con, power, sexual abuse No Responses »

Jan 122013

Two disturbing posts tonight. The first, from Anna Raccoon, examines the Savile scandal – and effectively aims to deconstruct what might in some circles be described as widespread “media hysteria”. It makes for painful reading, certainly for me anyhow. I find my assumptions on the matter becoming confused and uncertain.

Which is why I draw your attention to it without further comment on my own ignorant part.

Meanwhile, another piece which quite coincidentally reached my attention some minutes after the above was this one. A phrase or two to set the scene for what follows:

My first time started about ten minutes into the journey. [...]

It was a long break before my second time. [...]

Not long until my third time though! [...]

But wait for it…it happened again the DAY AFTER! Cor, twice in 24 hours. Aren’t I the lucky one? Aren’t I lucky to be chosen for a stranger’s pleasure? I mean I clearly look hot if this is happening to me. I clearly look like I’d be totally okay with that. This time I was on a tube and a guy was actually trying to finger me from behind. [...]

As I read this second piece, my thoughts were thrown into awful turmoil. The blogger in question, Louise Jones, was describing a process of hidden and casual abuse on a fearful scale. The worst of it was how an intelligent young woman felt obliged to pretend nothing was happening. If intelligent and clever young women feel society requires them to capitulate thus, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Put up against the Anna Racoon piece, I struggle to see a way through. I begin to wonder if the media hysteria Anna’s post rejects is actually – in a strange and perhaps now all too understandable manner – simply a question of a hurting society finding some indirect way to notify its sufferers that reality does, after all, exist. Even as it cannot be spoken about yet, taking pot shots at a deceased Jimmy Savile may be providing us all with the opportunity to express a very referred pain about a much more unpleasant – and society-wide – underbelly out there.

This is why I think the second piece I link to above is the one that more accurately describes the real reasons behind the swirling hullabaloo that the Savile case has generated. Whether Savile did everything he is accused of having done or not, the continuing pain out there is in the daily humiliation that Savile’s elves, helpers and deadly duplicates carry out quite unhappily, unbidden and uncontrolled.

I’ve never, myself, as far as I know, been the victim of sexual abuse. But I have experienced the sadness of feeling persecuted. I even had to spend a month in a hospital because a year of fearing one of society’s underbellies drove me to a puzzling, curious and occasionally frightening psychosis. And I see that very same fear – that ever-present fear of that omniscient underbelly, an underbelly which everyone perceives in some way and yet no one ever cares to pierce (neither by publicly engaging with nor even by discussing) – infusing the story that Ms Jones shockingly tells us today. Not a psychosis which distances one from reality though but – rather – a brand new kind of psychosis which quite bizarrely reveals, uncovers and makes all too manifest to this or that individual a cruel reality of oppression that most will – for reasons best known only to themselves – choose to keep denying.

So yes, I do know what it is to experience society’s underbelly. I do know what being sexually abused must feel like. And if we should take anything away from the Jimmy Savile case, it is this: sexual abuse is common, widespread, prevalent and everyday. How do I know? Because sexual abuse has little to do with sex and far more to do with the abuse of power. And whilst our politicians, business leaders and other figures of importance are happy to continue publicly displaying – proudly displaying – their verbal and strategic violence in their own radii of action, it hardly takes a wild leap of imagination to understand that their sexual equivalents must be taking place somewhere and some place quite off-stage.

The problem really isn’t Savile, folks.

It isn’t even the possibility that there was a cover-up.

The real and shocking alternative is – precisely – that no one needed to cover up anything because nothing Savile was alleged to have done was anything out of the ordinary.

Neither then nor now.

Neither sexually nor politically.

They were all at it. They still are. Ripping into the powerless when the opportunity presents itself.

Politicians do it.

CEOs are paid huge sums of money to do it.

And grubby little Tube users do it … every day of the year.

Hit and myth – the real story behind progress

civilisation, class war, class warfare, old age, old and new, old boys' networks, poverty, poverty trap, power, Progress, unclassifiable, younger generation, youth No Responses »

Dec 232012

Two – related – questions which have been gnawing away at me today:

the battle that drives a fault-line deep into our civilisation – between the young who are willing but don’t have the power and the old who refuse to renew themselves and yet hang on to the bitter end;
the chimera that is this thing the old call progress – a concept which justifies those ways of doing stuff, concentrating wealth and creating a certain set of privileges in the supposed interests of a broader societal benefit;

As I get older, and yet continue to recall my youth with dear fondness, I become more and more convinced that young people in general judge far more accurately what’s important and relevant to our world as a global whole than do people my age. It must have been quite different when we lived in a time where life expectancies rarely led us beyond the age of forty. The memories and instincts would have been sharper; the regrets would have been fewer; the tendency to self-justify would have been far less incessant.

As a group, as a crowd, as a common intelligence … almost as an entity of shared common sense … well, that is how I see the young of today. And not only of today but of ever and always.

So much time and energy is wasted in that eternal battle between those who manage the levers of power, and can thus assert their truths over the rest of society through simple megaphonics, and those who are still in touch with their childlike ways of seeing and doing. The immediate urge to tell and bear witness to the truth is still present in so many young people – even as in people of my age it becomes dowdy, faded and somehow compromised by so many crossroads where recent wrong turnings only serve to compound the previous.

As we live beyond that moment of mid-life crisis, an unassailable reality of downhill dynamics which in other ages coincided with the burnished and contradicting bravery of the twenties, so we decide to hold onto the few privileges we have acquired in the hope that in some trivial way these will compensate our inability to win our arguments through truth. Bound as we are to leave our childlike selves behind, we can only build our right to rule on the basis of indisputable precedent and historical baggage. Starting from scratch, as the young are bound so to do, is a revolutionary act which elderly societies cannot permit.

And so we lose our early sense of absolute right and wrong – and replace it with quite another of imposed correctness and incorrectness.

Hit and myth – that is what people my age do to the young. Firstly, we physically and mentally attack our subjects and charges; secondly, we propagate stories about how the world should be and why. By doing the latter, we justify the former. And by doing the former, we make the latter a self-perpetuating – and self-justifying – piece of cake.

Progress as defined by people my age these days is a lie. There is too little about this concept of progress that benefits a wider society.

The concept of progress as defined by the compromises of our powerful elders is mainly designed to benefit their interests over the interests of the vast majority of us who survive in this latterday jungle of Darwinian behaviours. And you know what’s so wearisome about modern life? That this survival we are now getting accustomed to will take place over maybe seventy or eighty long years.

That’s what 21st century elders seem to be offering the societies they rule: misery, penury and the hollow comforts of painful perspective – that relative relief of the quite unjustly treated.

Not much, is it?

Not much at all.

Happy Christmas, if you believe.

And if you don’t, at least try to remember your youth.

On confusing sex and power

business leaders, leadership, politicians, power, sex offenders, sexual abuse, unclassifiable No Responses »

Oct 282012

I’ve been working these past couple of days, setting up a language-learning site. Thus, the moderate radio silence.

Meanwhile, the unhappy news about sex abuse and paedophilia at the heart of our most sacred institutions continues to unspool our perception of our childhoods and their – up until recently – complacently happy memories.

I wonder if history will judge the BBC as an especially bad egg in this matter. Or, alternatively, as a kind of measure of what the rest of society was doing.

Just one simple question today – and one simple post. Those political behemoths who have traditionally run our nations and their body politics – were they, indeed are they, any better than the Jimmy Saviles and Gary Glitters of this world? After all, what does the phrase consensual sex mean – if it involves the whiff of powerful people behind aphrodisiacally closed doors? Isn’t that just as substantial a distortion of what sexual relationships between, in this case, adults ought to be?

What I’m really asking runs as follows: what is the difference between paedophilia or more general sexual abuse – a question of someone exerting power over a manifestly weaker soul in a relationship – and that force which a powerful politician or business leader exerts over an individual, group of people or nation?

Aren’t all three of the above cases situations where those who have power use it to force others who don’t into doing things the latter otherwise wouldn’t?

That is to say, aren’t we confusing sex and power?

What, exactly, is the difference between a shallow celebrity destroying an individual’s peace of mind through a sexual powerplay and a shallow politician destroying an individual’s peace of mind through a political powerplay?

In fact, in essence, even that which we call consensual sex can take place against the better judgement of one of the parties involved.

To conclude, we don’t need less sexual abuse in society.

We need fewer people to abuse the power we award, delegate in and attribute them. Whether this be sexual, business or political.

A lesson for all our leaders, whatever their fields of endeavour.

Mr Jimmy Savile’s alleged crimes are a warning shot across your bows too.

Is insanity at the root of all power?

David Cameron, David Laws, Ed Miliband, in a hole, power No Responses »

Sep 092012

One of my favourite quotes – one I have squirrelled away on my “Odds & Ends” page – is from David Brin, science-fiction author and NASA engineer:

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

If we can fairly argue that money is at the root of all power – there is for example, after all, no point in being locally popular with the people if you cannot control what the council spends its income on – equally we should consider with care this clearly well-meaning thesis from Shibley this morning:

While Miliband’s new policy may not be officially redistributive in terms of its economics, his framework is unashamedly redistributive politically. [...]

I understand the desire to support Miliband’s approach, even as I myself find it difficult to share. But to argue that one can convincingly propose sharing out power on the one hand but not economic levers on the other is, surely, naive to a pretty fundamental degree. And whilst Shibley may be observing Miliband accurately and not prescriptively, it is Miliband who should shoulder the blame for such a smoke-and-mirrors approach.

Those of you who read these pages will know I’m not the most knee-jerkingly supportive member of Labour. But it’s not out of a desire to pick holes. Rather, it’s out of a desire to mend them. Plenty we’ve suffered over the past two decades for us not to want to fashion a new mode of doing society as well as we can this time.

Unless the real aim is to make us suffer even more. In which case there is little hope on the horizon.

There is, of course, a final thought we can extract from Brin’s quote. If sanity is to be found in other things than power, should we also conclude that insanity – as well as money – is the essence of wanting to be in charge? And if this is the case, and those in charge are bound to be a more or less off-beam, is this the real explanation for why they despise not only the so-called disabled but also almost everyone else so very very much?

The Spanish do, after all, have the following phrase:

Cree el ladrón que todos son de su condición.

Which loosely translates as: “Thieves believe that everyone’s the same as them.”

Perhaps, in fact, it’s not even insanity which is at the root of all those who would be powerful but an overwhelming urge – maybe a primitive and primeval urge inside the vast majority of human beings – to want to try and break the rules and get away with it whenever possible.

Expand the edge of the envelope. Stretch the rubber band. Do the very best you can to get one over on the law without bending it too awfully. What those with an entrepreneurial spirit do every single day of their lives. As, in fact, our government would like the whole of society to do.

On the other hand, isn’t that a kind of insanity too?

"La Red permite pensar lo que el Poder no piensa permitir"

Fukushima, Internet, latterday socialism, on a high, power, professional politicos, sorted, Tim O'Reilly No Responses »

May 312011

This popped up on the very Spanish version of Twitter which I believe my dear old friend – that is to say, the newspaper El País – is responsible for. It’s called Eskup, by the way (not a lot of English-speaking people will know this): the verb “escupir” means “to spit” – and though I’m sure it was a million miles away from its creators’ minds when they named it, it’s a mightily appropriate way of describing what meaningful tweeting should actually be.

I say very Spanish because it not only gives us twice the number of characters to play around with (Spanish is a beautifully verbose language), it also lets us add images as part of its original infrastructure (well, as you might imagine, the Spanish are very tactile, touchy-feely and full of the very real delights of multi-sensory perception).

Anyhow, the title of this post, loosely translated by yours truly, more or less runs as follows:

“The Internet allows us to think what the powerful don’t think they will allow.”

This is a wonderful way of looking at the power of cheap global interconnectedness. And that power, that ability to communicate selflessly, to think of the wider interest before one’s own individual circumstances, is truly what should define a 21st century socialism – a socialism precisely on the lines of Web 2.0 if you like.

If you don’t believe me, just take a gander at this story today:

A group of more than 200 Japanese pensioners are volunteering to tackle the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima power station.

The Skilled Veterans Corps, as they call themselves, is made up of retired engineers and other professionals, all over the age of 60.

They say they should be facing the dangers of radiation, not the young.

Suicide bombers are one example – and the very darkest side – of a foolish submission to a greater cause. But these elderly Japanese gentlemen and ladies are quite the other side of the coin: they know their lives will end before cancer can properly strike and are prepared to run the risks of contracting the disease in the interests of leaving a better world for the young.

As Tim O’Reilly pointed out today:

Clear, brave, public-spirited thinking: senior citizens offering to clean up Fukushima http://bit.ly/m8CX2N #chokesmeup #gov20

I don’t think there’s anything to add to that – except that those who criticise freedom of speech, as they often talk about how the oxygen of publicity provides the underbelly of society with the visibility we rightly despise, really should think twice when the latter kind of story whizzes so wonderfully around the world.

And this is why I firmly believe the Internet generation – this cheap and exemplary global connectedness I talk about – is where we should deposit our faith. When the barriers to communication are as low as they have become is when ordinary people suddenly acquire the opportunity to express their innermost feelings to other ordinary people – quite despite the interests, spin, control and general agenda management the powerful have, to date, had within their grasp.

Our future lies, then, in that honesty expressed in a certain Reagan-esque way – Reagan-esque that is, but quite in reverse: over the heads of the powerful in much the same way, without passing through their matrix, but this time from the crowd to the crowd – from the bottom of the pile directly to the bottom of the pile.

In this way, ordinary people are beginning to find their own voices through technology, software, virtual communications, start-up entrepreneurs the world over and, why not admit it, the US military – in a way that traditional politicking has never managed to deliver. And if such politicking isn’t very careful, it may become – sooner than we think – less than entirely relevant to the expression of our sociocultural desires.

So watch out famous politicos. The value you used to add when you crystallised our unspoken thoughts is no longer so definitive, no longer so justifying, no longer so convincing – now those thoughts are finding a direct channel for their exchange. We do not need you to mediate our communication in quite the same way as even a generation ago. But you don’t seem to have realised it as yet.

Ignore this at your peril.
____________________

Update to this post: this, from John Naughton’s Memex today, which came my way via Slugger O’Toole tonight, says similar things to the above, but far more succinctly and to the point. Oh, and it’s actually about businesspeople and their crass approach to customer needs, as expressed by customers themselves – but then most of us would probably be comfortable with the idea that between modern business and modern politics the dividing line is managing to be about as fine as it can get.

That is to say, it wouldn’t be the first time that consumer-voters like ourselves were in receipt of such a top-down and condescending double-whammy from both their business sectors and their elected representatives.

Meanwhile, this article comes to some rather unhappy conclusions – at least as far as my gut instincts in relation to this subject are concerned:

[...] we might do better to listen to the original biologist, Aristotle, who argued that human beings are nothing like ants, for the simple reason that human beings are political. They have an inbuilt tendency to create and debate political systems, and they do so deliberately, hierarchically and intelligently. In order to imagine a self-organising social group, we have to forget most of what we know to be true, namely, that organisers, leaders and visionaries inevitably arise, and start to exercise power over others.

And even with the kind of evidence wise words such as these provide, I find it impossible to give up on my pet hatred for hierarchy. So what say you?

On publishing, power and the intricate clockwork of government

a con, Andy Coulson, government, power, publishing, Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch No Responses »

Sep 082010

This paragraph from a Guardian report tonight confirms my suspicions about the corporately contagious nature of behaviours in large companies which go wrong:

He [Paul McMullan, deputy features editor when Coulson arrived at the paper as deputy editor in 2000] believes Coulson was right to allow his reporters to invade privacy in order to nail wrongdoers: “Investigative journalism is a noble profession but we have to do ignoble things.” He says that at the time, reporters did not believe it was illegal to hack voicemail and were quite open about it. “Most reporters did it themselves, sitting at their desk. It was something that people would do when they were bored sitting outside somebody’s house. I don’t think at the time senior editors at the paper thought it was an issue. Everybody was doing it.”

And there’s more:

“Coulson would certainly be well aware that the practice was pretty widespread. He is conceivably telling the truth when he says he didn’t specifically know every time a reporter would do it. I wouldn’t have told him. It wasn’t of significance for me to say I just rang up David Beckham and listened to his messages. In general terms, he would have known that reporters were doing it.”

And, as this report from a couple of days ago points out, if Coulson did know what was happening then the sky’s (essentially) (and perhaps also literally) going to be the limit.

This all smells much more like the final sad rotting from within of a massive empire of astonishing achievement than simply a small affair of parochial journalism gone bad. For this is what happens when you put a man like Rupert Murdoch at the very top of so many layers of responsibility and ask him to wield so much power judiciously.

There is a lesson here for our politics. I only wish that people like David Miliband were conscious of it.

There is a reminder – too – of another mogul gone ape. Mr Robert Maxwell, in some strange and apposite way, suddenly comes to mind.

Curious, that. How publishing, power and the intricate clockwork of government get all mixed up time and time again.
____________________

Update to this post: first, how the inner circles of News Corporation are apparently reacting to the scandal itself – not at all happily, at least according to Michael Wolff – whilst this video of an interview with Rupert Murdoch as per Wolff’s article (he seems to suggest it’s from a year ago and that it’s now going the viral rounds again) is at the very least revealing – and on more than one level.

How the nanny state under New Labour becomes the pappy state under Cameron

David Cameron, John Naughton, nanny state, New Labour, pappy state, power No Responses »

Aug 172010

This is a brilliant piece of analysis:

If we want a true picture of what Cameron’s government is about, we should look at another recent recruit to the tent: Richard Thaler, a Chicago University academic who is advising a ‘behavioural insight team’. This has been dressed up as another example of Tory de-Thatcherising, enlisting compassionate, interventionist approaches to social problems. Thaler claims to be what Americans call a ‘liberal’. Cass Sunstein, another Chicago man and Thaler’s co-author on a book called Nudge, which caused much excitement when it came out in 2008, works for President Obama. But Thaler is not quite what Cameron wants you to think he is.

Nudge provides Cameron with the academic cover that Anthony Giddens, the sociologist who wrote The Third Way, provided for Blair. It claims to set out ‘the real Third Way’, implying, conveniently for Cameron, that Labour chose a false path. Markets aren’t always right, the authors argue. Because humans don’t always make rational choices, markets sometimes operate inefficiently. From this (to anyone other than a Chicago professor) rather obvious premise, Nudge proceeds to outline a philosophy of “libertarian paternalism”. The state, without direct regulation or more than minimal costs to the advantaged, can gently persuade humans to act in their own and the wider community’s interests.

This quote came my way via John Naughton’s Memex this morning, and within Naughton’s always efficient blogging (in the most traditional and constructively utilitarian way possible) there is this neat extracting of the absolute essence of the question to hand:

Wilby points out that this libertarian paternalism bears “the same theological relationship to Friedmanite economics (Milton Friedman was also a Chicago professor) as intelligent design does to creationism. It strips out the demonstrably false aspects of the doctrine and gives it a makeover.”