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A Daniel come to judgment – Part II
January 23, 2012 – 11:51 pm
The decision of a court in the US to uphold the removal of a prayer from the walls of a public school may be constitutionally correct but is it right?
In Part I, I had concluded:
Well, the judgment in this case belonged to the Judge, as long as he remained within the bounds of reasonableness, and, by failing to distinguish between them, he found too close a proximity between enforced prayer and a poster on the wall. It is not for me to say he was wrong. Short of an appeal court taking a different view, so far @jessicaahlquist appears to have the law – the US Constitution – on her side.
That’s enough, isn’t it? All we need to know is that she is vindicated by the law of the United States of America in taking her stand against this relic? We can stop there.
“For the intent and purpose of the law hath full relation to the penalty which here appeareth due upon the bond”
Portia, Act IV Scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare
To continue:
Yes, well, actually, that’s where my worries start.
Earlier in that scene, Portia, disguised as the young lawyer, and Shylock share this famous exchange:
“Portia: Then must the Jew be merciful.
Shylock: On what compulsion must I? Tell me that.
Portia: The quality of mercy is not strain’d – it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath: it is twice bless’d, it blesseth him that gives and him that takes: ‘tis mightier than the mightiest,: it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown…”
Can I really be seeking mercy for a time-stained piece of paper? Yes, and no. Yes, because it seems to me that this document, or, more properly, what it conveyed, was a pretty harmless, even a benign, thing in itself. And let me be clear: according to the judgment at least, @jessicaahlquist says she herself did not find the prayer offensive, in stark contrast to the offensiveness she understandably did find in the viciousness of the response to her protest.
But no, because what I am asking for here is a wider mercy, compassion: the compassion that before it asserts its unassailable right to do harm, stays its hand and says, it is enough that I know I have right on my side. I do not need to bludgeon to prove it to the world. I can let this go.
It just isn’t enough in a humane society to say “It’s the law. You can’t breach the Constitution. I know my rights.” You have to ask “What are my motives?” “Where’s the harm?” “Is this proportionate: does it merit bringing down the force of law?” “Will my action hurt or help? Will it embed or resolve conflict?” It is for each of us to temper our rights under the law with mercy. That is no surrender. That is how we achieve justice, that is how we strengthen and improve the quality of our society and that is how we find our own sense of integrity and decency.
“Dammit, you’ve got to stop them somewhere.”
That was one of the responses I saw on Twitter. It echoes that play, Inherit the Wind, cited above –
“Drummond: All I want is to prevent the clock-stoppers from dumping a load of medieval nonsense into the United States Constitution.
Judge: This is not a Federal Court.
Drummond: Well, dammit, you’ve got to stop’em somewhere.”
But Drummond was fighting a piece of legislation that prohibited the teaching of evolution in schools, a clear breach of the First Amendment, for refusal to comply with which a man stood in jeopardy of imprisonment by the State.
What @jessicaahlquist says, or what it is said she says, is that once she became aware of the poster prayer, “it made her feel ostracised and alone”. I do not wish to call her honesty into question but I find that remarkable. Here is a modern 16 year old girl who has been brought up in the Catholic faith where, presumably, she has lived with all kinds of pernicious mumbo jumbo, some of it threatening, demanding unquestioning loyalty and offering the prospect of damnation for those who fail to give it in the requisite measure and form. Yet she has had the courage and the strength of mind to walk away from it. Did she then feel an outcast? Did she then feel the fear of walking alone? Yet if we are to believe what we are told, one look at an old piece of paper hanging on a wall which happens to ask the Lord she has rejected for help with being good and she suddenly feels ostracised and alone. And according to her, this unchanging piece of paper “made her feel” this way?
To be ostracised is to be excluded – shut out – from a group. Yet nothing in the environment around her changed in fact when she read the poster prayer. She was already aware that she was surrounded by believers. She remained a member of her school and of her community. Her friends and her enemies remained in that moment the same. To be alone is to be isolated and lonely. She was in fact no more alone than she had made herself by choosing to leave the circle of the Catholic church, from which she had not been excluded but had excused herself. Whether she felt excluded and isolated, whether she had a sudden realisation that she felt excluded and isolated, the reality was that she was no more isolated or excluded than she had been moments before reading the prayer. The poster, the inert piece of paper which had hung there unnoticed by her, apparently, for so long, with its gentle message, altered nothing in the world outside her head. At most, her awareness of it triggered a response in her to something she had left behind.
With that thought, I want to suggest another explanation. Many of us, rather than take responsibility for how we feel, want to attribute the feeling to someone or something else. So often “you make me angry” is used to pass the blame, and with it the responsibility for changing, to you when the truth is “I feel angry with you” and I need to ask myself why and what I should do about it. Is it possible that @jessicaahlquist felt ostracised and alone as an aspiring atheist in a predominantly religious community and that reading the prayer poster simply brought to the surface feelings that she already harboured? Feelings that she had put herself outside the community of religion and the attendant loneliness that brought?
Since I realised that I could not hold to the faith in the god that I was brought up with, there have been many occasions on which I have longed to be again a part of the community and the affirming ritual that I had to leave behind as a consequence of that realisation. It seems hard to say it was my choice when in all honesty there was no other choice. But the same honesty demands that I cannot say I was excluded. My own beliefs and inability to believe put me outside the group; my loneliness followed. It was the price I had to pay; my personal Calvary.
I do not blame @jessicaahlquist if she needed to attribute her discomfort to a source or event outside herself. It takes a special courage and maturity to step back and appreciate how much of our response is our choice and therefore ours to deal with. And in Western culture where the one true god is now the corporation, the one true religion consumerism, and its icon is the inflated self, there are precious few role models for casting out the beam in one’s own eye before attacking the mote in someone else’s. If you hold yourself to be entitled to your feelings per se then inevitably you will see it as other people’s job to change their behaviour to mollify you.
But if I do not blame her, I cannot bring myself to congratulate her either.
It may be too that all this just got out of hand. That a momentum was achieved in the conflict brought about by @jessicaahlquist’s protest that was unstoppable. The recorded behaviour of many of @jessicaahlquist’s opponents was as despicable as it was fierce. They have besmirched and defiled their own purported Christianity. They should be ashamed, though I doubt they are. Those who did so from positions of authority should be removed from those positions, not out of vindictiveness but because they showed themselves unfit to hold them.
That is where you stop’em.
But is that sad old prayer poster answerable for all of this? Is it to be the scapegoat? That, ultimately, is how the Judge argued it: Guilt by association with bigots. But if so I beg leave to object. The prayer poster, it seems to me, seen in a proper perspective, was all along a mere mockingbird: a harmless creature just singing a simple song of human aspiration couched in the language of those who, with good intent, gave expression to those hopes. And as Harper Lee has Atticus Finch tell his children,
“It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
Perhaps if, instead of supporting her action, @jessicaahlquist’s father had read the book to her (maybe he had) she might have understood that, and might have thought that her bravery and determination might find an adversary more worthy of challenge and despatch.
Nobody, it seems to me, comes out of this well, not @jessicaahlquist, not her parents who supported her legal action, not the school board, not those around her, not the judge. The road travelled here was the one paved with in people’s belief in the goodness of their own intentions. So often, I find myself asking how, HOW have we lived so long and learned so little?
Compassion is not the preserve of religion, still less any one religion. Compassion is a human quality, to be found along with decency everywhere that our species lives and among people struggling to survive under every kind of political order or religious creed, no matter how benign or oppressive. Compassion is empathy, emotional intelligence, the ability to see things from another person’s point of view. Seeing its universality and the universality of decency’s mocking oppression by those who measure their strength by their ability to crush, we should welcome it wherever it surfaces and celebrate with those that practice it. If our best response to finding decency associated with religious observance is to tear it down and silence the practitioners, in our rejection of compassion we do humanity and ourselves a great disservice.
We atheists and humanists have, throughout history, suffered at the hands of organised religion. We should know better than to use the same forces of oppression when given the chance. But, like compassion, the power to rationalise to our own advantage is a human characteristic. It has a good deal to do with why we humans have survived at all. It also has a good deal to do with our adherence to religion and superstition. All too easily atheism itself becomes a holier-than-thou religion vying for supremacy with the others.
We need to be the master of our make-up not its slave. We owe the world a special duty to eschew zealotry and bigotry, not to follow religion, or the secular religion of ideology, down that road. We owe the world a special duty to espouse our compassion, a duty of to seek and deploy human understanding and emotional intelligence alongside our commitment to reason and evidence. We owe the world the deliberate choice of tolerance of other beliefs because we know that all people are essentially the same and that all that is worthy about humans comes from what they are, whatever they believe to be its source. We should not submit to tyranny, exclusion or discrimination but neither should we be gratuitously cruel or divisive. Nor should we use the oppression and discomforting of others to pump up our own egos. We owe all this not to show we are better than others but to show that it is possible for humans to live that way without divine intervention.
A Daniel come to judgment – Part I
January 23, 2012 – 7:05 am
The decision of a court in the US to uphold the removal of a prayer from the walls of a public school may be constitutionally correct but is it right?
I used to wake up to the sound of birdsong. Now it is more likely to be the ping of another tweet landing in the virtual foliage of my phone. Thursday was a day like that.
The tweet was from Tim Minchin. So much more than just a modern court jester, so much more even than a rampant self-publicist, Tim Minchin displays such intellect, passion and depths of humanity that I have come to admire him even though I have never met him and have only twice managed minimal, on-line, communication with him. He would probably prefer it that way. I “follow” him because he so frequently takes me where I want to go, into debates about issues that matter on a human level and because he is so steadfast and honest about what he thinks and believes.
The morning’s tweet was brief: “Congratulations, @jessicaahlquist!” I was wondering who @jessicaahlquist might be and what she had done to merit Tim’s congratulations (no hint of envy, I knew I had done nothing to deserve them), when, as if reading my mind (not a gift he would claim to possess, I am sure) – enough of these damned parentheses, begone -, Tim retweeted another message, from Hemant Mehta, containing a link to a website [Jessica Ahlquist has won her lawsuit] which explained everything.
Well, nearly everything. Because when I had read the contents of the page and had grasped what @jessicaahlquists’s achievement was, I was left with one question: why? I knew now what she had done. I knew what she had been subjected to as a consequence. I knew what the US District Court had ruled. But I did not know why she had thought it was the right thing to do and I did not know why Tim had congratulated her for doing it.
The essence of what had happened is this. At @jessicaahlquist’s school there was an old wall hanging, a poster. It took the form of a Christian prayer, seeking their god’s intercession in making them good people. @jessicaahlquist had taken no exception to this for some time. Then she decided that “it made her feel ostracised and alone”. This, I should hasten to add, was not, so far as I can discern, because she did not want to be good but because she had changed from wanting to be a good Catholic to wanting to be a good atheist. She petitioned to have the prayer removed. When the School Board refused, she went to law and the US District Court upheld her right to have it taken down.
So I asked the question I hadn’t found an answer to. I replied to Tim and @jessicaahlquist: “Though an atheist, long opposed to religious indoctrination, particularly in schools, I have to ask why?” Then I reached the 140 character limit. Perhaps if I had left out the preamble, I could have been more explicit but I thought it important for them to know where I was coming from. It turned out not to matter. Neither Tim nor @jessicaahlquist responded.
I suppose I could have let it go but I found that across the day I was distracted by an argument in my head. Why did I not think she had done the right thing?
I started to work it through.
I decided to read the transcript of the court’s ruling. It was a workman-like document: a careful assembly of evidence and precedent. If one of my younger colleagues had produced it, I would have regarded it as a “student piece” – an essay meant to impress the reader with quantities of garnered knowledge and analysis while abdicating from the assumption of any responsibility for the conclusion. But I know that it is important to upholding the rule of law, especially when handling issues where emotions are running high, that a judicial decision should be shown to be rooted in the best and highest authority. We look to the courts for something which we call justice but which is in fact only our skewed subjective impression of fairness set on a pedestal; when all they can dutifully dispense – and all we should ever ask them to dispense – is the law.
So what is the law here? It is the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The Founding Fathers of the country that became the United States, though Christians in both the best and at times the worst sense, had the vision and, for their day, the courage to see and to enact (even if it was an afterthought – as we can see, it did not figure in the original constitution) that the State’s business should be free from religious taint.
What the First Amendment actually says is this:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; …”
How did the hanging of a prayer poster breach this edict? Let’s see.
This is the prayer:
“School prayer
Our Heavenly Father, grant us each day the desire to do our best, to grow mentally and morally as well as physically, to be kind and helpful to our classmates and teachers, to be honest with ourselves as well as with others, help us to be good sports and smile when we lose as well as when we win, teach us the value of true friendship, help us always to conduct ourselves so as to bring credit to Cranston High School West.
Amen.”
Shorn of its opening entreaty to a “Heavenly Father” and its final “Amen” (literally, “So be it”), no decent, honest person could take exception to the poster and the wall of a school would seem an entirely appropriate location for it. Don’t take my word for it. The judge himself commented that
“the Prayer espouses values of honesty, kindness, friendship and sportsmanship.”
The aspirations are not particularly original, unsurprisingly: take, for example, the Scout’s Oath –
On my honour I promise that I will do my best— To do my duty to God and the King (or to God and my Country), to help other people at all times and to obey the Scout Law.
The Scout Law requires, amongst other things, that: a scout’s honour is to be trusted; scout is loyal; scout’s duty is to be useful and to help others; a scout is a friend to all, and a brother to every other scout, no matter to what social class the other belongs; a scout is courteous.
And it is so much less objectionable than the jingoistic and militaristic US Oath of Allegiance, which predates but has also managed for some 230 years to survive the First Amendment which, you might think, would have required its alteration. Is it then in fact just those words “Heavenly Father” and “Amen” that are the problem?
By these words, the prayer is fixed for all time as a testament to a section of humanity who believed in one supranatural entity with powers to order men’s lives and to whom they could look for help. And we know that a lot of people did, when the prayer was written and hung, and still do believe in that deity.
We, the supposedly free and enlightened people of the world, are so convinced that such people should have a right so to believe, regardless of evidence, that we have written protection of the right into constitutions and into Bills of Rights and into international conventions and asserted that it is a human right to do so. It must surely follow that for the authors of the prayer to invoke their god could not of itself be regarded as offensive: that is to say that it could only be offensive to a person who found the mere expression of a personal belief that was not their own offensive: a person, it might be thought, who put their own righteous belief above respect for the same First Amendment to the Constitution and for basic human rights. But at the same time it cannot be denied that these words are associated with a religion.
The problem, of course, is not just with the words. It is the words coupled with the fact that they are located in a school. Not just any school. Private schools are entitled to deck themselves out with all manner of demonstrations of commitment to the existence of gods. This school was a state school, a learning establishment for the young funded by public money and run by public servants.
But that still leaves the question how a requirement not to establish religion in law or to prevent its free exercise becomes a requirement not to hang a prayer on a school wall? Its posting was not prescribed by law. Its message was not proclaimed. No-one’s actions were measured by it. No penalties were exacted by reference to it. No-one was compelled to join in reciting it. No-one was tested on their belief in it. It was simply the record of how its authors believed pupils should behave coupled with an entreaty to their god to help them with that behaviour. This prayer just sat there mutely and passively for nearly 40 years.
As the Judge remarks, “the words [of the First Amendment] are simple”. But lawyers don’t like simple. There’s not enough in it for them so, as the Judge again puts it, “their application to the circumstances of our evolving nation has been complex and contentious.” Between them, the Judiciary and Counsel have taken the idea that Government must not establish a religion in law or prevent its exercise and teased and stretched and bent it until it comes down to a requirement of “neutrality”, -
“The touchstone for our analysis is the principle that the First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion. When the government acts with the ostensible and predominant purpose of advancing religion, it violates that central Establishment Clause value of official religious neutrality, there being no neutrality when the government’s ostensible object is to take sides.”
Supreme Court in McCreary County v. ACLU
That is quite a broadening of the proposition that a Congress may make no laws establishing or prohibiting religion, but, as an expression of intent I can go with it. However, there still seems a long road between this principle and the hanging of the gift of a prayer poster on the wall. And it should present those who try to travel that road with a dilemma. If merely hanging the poster gives you a “predominant purpose” of advancing religion, take the poster down at the behest of non-religion and you lose your neutrality just as surely. Take the “offending” words out – secularise it – and you do the same.
Perhaps this is what has prompted the generation of another set of “tests”, ostensibly to discover whether the principle of neutrality itself has been breached.
The “Lemon test”, in an odd break from normal rules of proof, rather than require the accuser to demonstrate Government’s breach of the First Amendment, places the onus on the Government to –
“1) reflect a clearly secular purpose; (2) have a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion; and (3) it must avoid excessive government entanglement with religion.”
Lee v. Weisman
The “Endorsement” test asks whether the State’s action has –
“the purpose or effect of endorsing, favoring, or promoting religion.”
As the Supreme Court has sought to explain –
“School sponsorship of a religious message is impermissible because it sends the ancillary message to members of the audience who are nonadherents “that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.””
Santa Fe Independent School District v Doe
The “Coercion Analysis” has been expressed like this -
“What to most believers may seem nothing more than a reasonable request that the nonbeliever respect their religious practices, in a school context may appear to the nonbeliever or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the State to enforce a religious orthodoxy.”
Weisman
From a reading of the judgment, I think it is fair to conclude that the development of all three tests has come about in circumstances in which the people have had no, or effectively no, alternative but to participate actively in a religious act. Typically, they have been expected to pray or take a religious oath. It is easy at this level to see: the coercion; the endorsement; the entanglement.
Is it ever possible for mere dumb writing to achieve these conditions?
“Drummond: It’s bad enough that everybody coming into this courtroom has to pass underneath a banner that says: “Read your Bible!” Your Honor, I want that sign taken down! Or else I want another one put up, just as big, just as big letters – saying “Read your Darwin!””
Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee
That of course is a fictional circumstance, though one based in fact – the Scopes (“Monkey”) trial of 1925. Henry Drummond was the dramatised personification of the great lawyer Clarence Darrow and much of the argument of the play is taken directly from the transcripts of the trial. In the actual trial, the debate was over the opening of proceedings with prayers. But the point is well-made. The words “Read your Bible” are an instruction. Hung in a public place they imply the authority of the State. The State either requires you to read your Bible or endorses the requirement. Hung in a courtroom where the issue being tried is the freedom to teach evolution and you can see the prejudice, the harm that is likely to follow.
There are other words, not directory, whose association with place or history will forever burden them with additional resonance: think “Arbeit Macht Frei”. Try to imagine a circumstance in which they could be raised over a school gate. Though not themselves religious, they are so stained with religious and political intolerance that they would be a foul oppression to many and cause offence to most.
How far, though, have we to travel along the road of non-neutrality before we get to the place where a prayer to a “Heavenly Father” for help in being a decent human being, hung on a wall with other, non-religious, works is coercive or implies endorsement of the religion. Can a public museum not display an open copy of the Bible for fear that a passing non-adherent to the Abrahamic faiths will feel excluded by exposure to its words? Can a school lesson not call on a Buddhist to describe the tenets of Buddhism? Can a public hall not be used for a performance of Berlioz’s Te Deum because the words mean “You, Lord” (a shorthand for the hymn “Oh God, we praise thee”)? Is that enough “sponsorship”?
Can a school not stage a performance of Guys and Dolls? After all, it contains that most insidious of prayers, “Luck, be a lady tonight”. Those who do not believe in Lady Luck may feel excluded. Are we, in a reversal of the popular song, to have no-one to bless us whenever we sneeze?
Well, the judgment in this case belonged to the Judge, as long as he remained within the bounds of reasonableness, and, by failing to distinguish between them, he found too close a proximity between enforced prayer and a poster on the wall. It is not for me to say he was wrong. Short of an appeal court taking a different view, so far @jessicaahlquist appears to have the law – the US Constitution – on her side.
That’s enough, isn’t it? All we need to know is that she is vindicated by the law of the United States of America in taking her stand against this relic? We can stop there.
“For the intent and purpose of the law hath full relation to the penalty which here appeareth due upon the bond”
Portia, Act IV Scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare
To be continued
Reigning cats and dogs
November 10, 2011 – 4:28 pm
Nottingham Man’s human rights threatened by pet cat. Attack dog subjected to terrible cruelty
Just over a month ago we witnessed the opening of a new farce.
At the fall of the curtain on the first act, a Nottingham man had been forced to apologise, and by several accounts faced the sack, for pointing out that his colleague had made an assertion that was wrong. The farce centred upon the delicious irony of the situation: the colleague’s assertion had been made to demonstrate that the Human Rights Act was protecting bad people from paying the price of their wrongdoings: and it was utterly bogus. Nottingham Man’s correction, in terms that were quite temperate in the circumstances, was, on the other hand, entirely legitimate, but in voicing it he found his own human right to freedom of expression genuinely imperilled.
At the centre of it all was a pet cat: or possibly two pet cats. One pet cat had allegedly prevented the deportation of a proven threat to our decent and tolerant society. But it turned out that it hadn’t. Anyone with a grain of judgment in their head would have known this story was bunkum, of course, or at the least doubted that it could be true, and when asked to go on a platform and make the assertion, would have said to their speechwriter “You must be joking. What kind of a fool do you think I am? No don’t answer that, just tell me what sort of a fool do you want to make me look?”
But we must remember that this is political farce and the characters are politicians, and in particular the kind of politician who thinks that what the Daily Mail peddles without regard to truth is important. They probably also believe East Enders is real life.
Enter our Man from Nottingham. In earlier scenes we have been introduced to his character so we know he is a lovable clown with a comic tendency to say what he believes. He has upset a grocer’s daughter and hilariously ruined any chance he ever had of becoming secretary of the golf club. When Nottingham man hears the claims about the pet cat, he cannot stop himself. “Childish nonsense!” he blurts, only realising when it is too late that his remark has been overheard by everyone in the bar at the 19th hole, people who spend much of their time head down in bunkers from where they blame human rights for the state of the fairways and greens and health and safety for having to use orange balls. For a moment, the stage is a tableau of indignation straight out of a Bateman cartoon with Nottingham man at its centre.
Let’s use the interval to take a look at what we have just witnessed.
We know that the story about the pet cat swaying a set of judges in favour of refusing the deportation of an illegal immigrant was a malicious fiction.
Fiction? Precisely. Had the claim been true, it would have been an indictment not of the human right to family life but of the judgment of the judges in question, but it wasn’t even true. The existence of the pet cat was simply a small detail in the context of a larger submission made with the purpose of demonstrating that the immigrant in question had established a family life in this country.
Malicious? Yes, I think we can say that. It was a deliberate distortion of the facts to support an otherwise unmeritorious attack on a set of principles that, because they are fundamentally important safeguards of the quality of life we have come to regard as the foundation of human decency, are espoused and promoted in all democratic states and by all good people. If the ordinary definition of malice is the desire to do harm then the fabrication of a smear story for the purpose of trying to undermine respect for principles which protect people from harm can reasonably be characterized as malicious.
And let’s also be clear: the fact that the person gets someone else to write his or her speeches in neither here nor there in this context. Unless you are a dummy – I mean of course a ventriloquist’s dummy – you have to accept personal responsibility for the things you choose to get up on a stage and say. If you choose to be the mouthpiece for the malice of others, you must expect to answer for it, surely?
Claims based on human rights are not of course above scrutiny and challenge. It’s just that people placed in public offices of great responsibility should not be a) pandering to prejudice and b) making things up simply to court personal popularity.
If any apology was due, you might think it was due from the person who has been caught doing this, not the person who points out the misconduct.
But there goes the bell for the end of the interval and we need to take our seats for Act 2.
Time has moved forward a couple of weeks and the curtain rises on the nicely furnished front room of a middle class dwelling. On a rug by the fireplace, lies a large dog, a Rotweiler, sleeping soundly. The front door is wide open and all sorts of gaily-attired people are streaming in and out (but mostly in).
A well-scrubbed man in a beautifully cut suit forces his way through the throng, looks perplexed and, crossing to the French window, stage right, hollers “I say, Terry old girl, there’s all kinds of frightful people in our living room!” Enter Nottingham man’s colleague, stage right, through the French window. She stops short, goes through a very theatrical display of shock and horror, and feebly attempts to herd the intruders back through the door. But even as she tries, they disperse through many other stage exits leading, we assume, to the rest of the house (this is, after all, a farce).
Terry then picks up a poker and lays into the dog, driving it out of the door before slamming it shut. She wipes her hands, pats her hair and calmly announces to the scrubbed man, “That damned dog, I told him to guard the door and only let in people like us. I just had the door open a teensy bit, you know, to see if I liked it …”
The scrubbed man is consoling. “Of course you did, old girl. Anybody would. Damned useless dog. Good riddance. I say, where did all those horrid people go?”
Terry collapses melodramatically into a chair, “Oh I don’t know. I’ll get the maid to look for them later.” “That’s the spirit,” says the scrubbed man, “No sense in worrying. No harm done.”
Offstage, the dog is heard howling miserably. “Damned dog,” says Terry, “I bet he’s telling all his mates that I opened the door.”
They laugh uproariously and the curtain falls on Act 2.
Things, it must be said, do not look promising for the third act.
I don’t know about you, but if I find someone has been economical with the truth once, I find it difficult to trust what they have to say the next time. I try, of course. Generally, I’ll give anyone the benefit of the doubt, but as the old adage goes, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me”. And if, say, that person had been appointed to a position of trust, put in charge of protecting the most sensitive and significant aspects of the national interest, actually to be allowed the opportunity to “Fool me twice…” might seem a bit generous. It’s not as if people have any right to hold on to these high-ranking offices.
But of course, politicians are by definition honourable people: it’s in the job title. Unless they are Right Honourable, which is like honourable with a triple A rating. Civil servants are not Honourable as politicians are, still less Right Honourable. So when a Minister says one thing and a civil servant says another, we know who we must believe, don’t we?
But how far does that take us? We all know the expression “don’t keep a dog and bark yourself” but in the real world if you keep a dog you are responsible for its actions, from pooping in the park to savaging sheep. Even if the damned dog did open the door it’s your door and your dog and you answer for the consequences.
Dogs and cats, cats and dogs: it’s an interesting symmetry so far.
In politics they have arranged things a little differently, however. If you want to succeed in politics now the trick is that if anything goes wrong it must always be “someone else’s fault”. That’s why “Executive Agencies” were invented: so that, when anyone came knocking you could say “I may be the Minister in charge. Who wants to know?”
Imagine slapping someone in the face then saying “Oh, terribly sorry, that was just my hand” and expecting to get away with it. Well, that is just what the Government has achieved for itself. It’s all smoke and mirrors. Agencies don’t formally exist. But that is just enough of a distinction to allow them to carry the can.
“On the right hon. Gentleman’s third point, it is true that I am responsible for all the Home Office’s activities and for the Prison Service. I am accountable to Parliament for the Prison Service. The director general is responsible for the day-to-day management of the Prison Service.”
Michael Howard, Hansard 19 December 1994 vol 251 cc1397-412
Heard anything like that recently?
That is as it has become but is it as it should be? When those entrusted with high office take power to be their right and seek to offload the attendant responsibility, when collective responsibility has been perverted so that it simply means “closing ranks” against those who dare to speak a different truth or correct a falsehood, where is the accountability that reminds the government that it is the servant of the people and owes them the duty always to act in good faith and in the national interest?
Thomas Jefferson said "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." He did not, so far as I know, venture an opinion as to what happens when politicians treat the people with disdain, as dupes to feed their ambition and arrogance. We are in danger of finding out for ourselves. Every dog shall have its master but cats, of course, recognize none.
Zero tolerance: a pointless answer
August 23, 2011 – 11:30 am
Some things people say just stick in your mind. There was a lecturer in Constitutional Law at my college, a man called Locke-White (appropriately, his locks were indeed white, and flowing in just the way I had envisaged the hair of an ancient academic flowing). I regret to say I have forgotten most of what he attempted to teach us but I do remember two things.
I remember him turning from the board where he was writing the name of some ancient case and telling us, without apparent context or connection, “Always remember, there are two things that will rise to the surface: one is cream; but the other is scum.” In my subsequent career, I have often had occasion to recall this warning.
The other was also in the nature of an admonition and has also resonated with me throughout my working life. “There is nothing worse than an unenforceable law, for it brings every other law into disrepute by its company.”
I found myself thinking about it again when members of Parliament were lining up to condemn the recent looting and out-threaten their colleagues with promises of bringing down the full force of the law on the lawless: and again when the new mantra “zero tolerance” was being tried out.
It is perhaps understandable that those who fill the chambers of our Houses of Parliament should think in terms of law-making when faced with societal problems. Making speeches and making law are what they do. And the way things are arranged, there is little else that they can do in these conditions. The armed forces can defend our security. The police can try to apprehend and prosecute our law-breakers. The courts can try them and determine how to punish them. The prisons can shut them up and make their lives more or less uncomfortable. All the active enforcement belongs elsewhere. In such a situation, people who are where they are because they want to be associated with power and control will need to exercise all the self-discipline they can muster not to use the only tool at their disposal simply to assert their own claim to dominance in the scheme of things but to reserve it for where it can help.
And regrettably they don’t. The statute books are littered with laws and amendments to laws and amendments to amendments, Orders, Regulations, Directions… Successive governments have claimed for themselves a crusading mission to “de-regulate” and to “clear out the statute book” but the grim truth behind the bravado is that they have been making law faster than ever they get rid of it. Over the course of my adult life, the amount of law has doubled and redoubled and redoubled.
You get the feeling at times that it is a competitive sport played among ministers. You can imagine a Secretary of State stomping into his Private Office and demanding “So-and-so’s got a 30 clause Bill. I want a 60 Clauser plus Schedules by Friday. See what you can find to put in it.”
But it is not just how much but how they legislate. It used to be that Acts of Parliament affecting the rights and liberty of people had to be clear and certain on their face as to the scope of offences and defences. But in 30 years I have seen successive governments, realising the true extent of their dominion over Parliament, take more and more to the lazy course of “enabling legislation”. Pick any recent Act and turn to one of its substantive provisions. The chances are that within a few lines you will find yourself reading “The Secretary of State may, by order, prescribe …” And what will follow is a list of all of the details you won’t find in the Act and that you need to know in order to work out whether it applies to you and whether you are complying with it. And so, if you know how to search, or can afford to pay someone to search for you, begins a journey through the dark forests of statutory instruments to find what a Secretary of State has for the time being decided to set as the parameters of your freedom to act. And if you think you are in the clear then, think again. The probability is that the Secretary of State will have taken unto him- or herself the further power to “direct” and to issue “codes of practice” which the courts will have to “take into account”.
The impact of this upon society is that people by and large have given up trying to keep pace with what the Law says. All they can manage is a broad, impressionistic sense of where the boundaries are. The detail has to go by the board, until they find themselves transgressing or feeling transgressed against. And so the wannabe law-abiding majority gets pushed into a relationship with the law that is at heart expedient. Life is too short to work out what They want us to do. What is the risk of being caught? What are They going to do if they catch you? It is hard to respect laws that seem designed just to make your life more difficult if you comply or hazardous if you don’t. It is even more difficult to see all around you people getting on with their lives in spite of what the law says, because they have come to the conclusion that they are unlikely to called to order and even if they do the penalty will be smaller than the profit to be made by ignoring it and still to maintain a respect for the law. And with that, the thin end of a wedge of disrespect has been driven between citizen and law.
We have always had – any society has – a small minority of those who regard compliance with the law as optional: we call them criminals (unless they are very rich, when, if we call them anything, it will tend to be sir, or boss or my Lord). But when the majority of the people are put in the position of making a risk analysis over whether to comply with the law or just feel “What the hell, if it’s got your name on it…” then the foundations are laid for anarchy.
Now I need to pause here because I think I am catching a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of elements of the right wing of this country jumping up and down with approval at what they assume I am saying as their frothing mouths chant “Yes! Yes! End Burdens on Business! End the Hunting Ban! Smoke where I like!” So I need to make myself clear. We NEED laws. In an ideal world we might all be able to rub along and behave decently with only a few cross words and sharp looks needed to pull the straying back into line. This is not an ideal world. It is a human one and, as I have remarked elsewhere, the human mind, glorious as it is, is ever watchful for stealing a margin on other minds. We need laws that we have agreed upon and that can be enforced justly because if we don’t then the rich and the powerful will make their own to suit themselves. History shows this. But we don’t need laws for everything and the laws we do need are good laws: laws that underpin and reinforce the values that are needed to sustain but not overly constrain a decent and enterprising population: correction, a decently enterprising population.
What is a good law? A good law is one that is necessary or desirable to achieve or support a legitimate societal objective, adopted by due constitutional process, clear in purpose and language and proportionate in its application. There, not much to ask.
A good law does not need to be perfect. A lot of modern drafting is analytically perfect but no more capable of ordinary understanding than the wiring diagram for a space shuttle. If we have arrived at the need for laws so complex that they can only be expressed in algebra then we have failed. How we have arrived here is of course in part a tribute to our legal profession, wizards of discombobulation: men and women who cannot see an “and” without making an “or” of it. But while appreciating their talents, much as we do those of our children when, in order to paint a bizarrely coloured stick-fairy on a sheet of paper, they contrive to splash the walls, stain the carpets, spill dirty water over the antique table and stick a brush in one of several orifices, either their own or the cat’s, we need sometimes just to be able to step back and say “nice try, but we’ll just have the meaning any sane and rational person would attach to these words if its all the same to you.” That, dare I say, is what we keep judges for but politicians seem ever reluctant to leave these things to the people whose job it is. So every time it appears that the law isn’t producing the results they had in mind or is grabbing the wrong kind of headlines, they want to tinker with it some more.
I recall during during the 80s being treated to a tirade from one over the increasing presence of lawyers and legal argumentation in the industrial (now employment) tribunals. “We should never have let them in,” he railed, “This was supposed to be swift and informal justice.” There had, at this point been at least 5 pieces of “employment” legislation in about as many years, each one shifting the goalposts one way or another until the poor things were hardly able to stand up and goodness knows how many orders and amending orders. When for a moment, the owner of the tirade paused, I suggested to him that perhaps if he and his kind were to stop amending and complicating employment law, there would be less for the lawyers to make arguments over. He stalked off and never spoke to me again. My loss, I am sure.
I am in danger of digressing and why not? Well, because there is a point that I set out to make a while ago and it seemed to me to be rather important around here. Let me see if I can capture it.
Over the past few weeks we have headr a number of people – I am tempted to say a number of people who should know better, but on reflection I can’t – chanting the mantra “zero tolerance” as their bid for credibility in the “bash a looter stakes”. Apparently, the theory is that if you come down hard on petty crime you destroy the environment in which more serious crime can incubate. It’s a bit like steam cleaning the Petrie dishes to stop the spread of cultured viruses. Well, I can see this as a theory but what happens if you have created an environment in which it is the ordinary, decent, or would be decent, people who are the most readily identifiably involved in petty crime?
By far the most important task facing us as a society is to regain our confidence in our ability to live decent lives without compromise. One of the biggest impediments to our doing so is that we no longer know with any assurance how to do it. We are strangers in our own constitutional landscape. Introduce zero tolerance into this landscape and it will not be those who are confident in their own iniquity that we catch but those who should be our bedrock.
Zero tolerance is wrong in principle because it lacks proportionality and therefore denies justice but it contains a bigger threat: the threat that it cannot be enforced without putting most people on the wrong side. All that it is likely to achieve is the final hammer blow that drives the wedge of disrespect between people and the law by which we survive.
“Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” (When they make a wilderness, they call it peace)
Before we go down this road, we need to rethink how we legislate, whether we need all the legislation we have and whether we can, and how we will, enforce it.
Note to Cameron: be careful what you wish for.
“He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.”
The Empress’s New Clothes (Part 6)
August 23, 2011 – 10:45 am
Chapter 6
There was, it must be said, an initial collective gasp as the newly, if only partially, robed Empress came in view. Then, as if the sluice gates had been released on an outfall pipe, comments poured forth in a stream of heavily accented admiration.
“Oh, the imaginative use of open plan!”
“How wondrous the application of the latest concepts of hot sleeving!”
“So daringly innovative, the self-supporting embonpoint!”
“What joyful expression of trust in the shimmering crown!”
And so on, many times over.
And so the Empress was persuaded.
Chapter 7
The robes had their first fully public outing, later that week, when one of the Kings of Never Never Land came to pay homage.
There wasn’t much of a crowd, unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately. The Gangmasters, having been cast into the role of Champions of the New Robes had lost so much credibility (which had, of course, been founded in honesty and earned trust, as all credibility is) that their authority had dwindled, so that when they asked for a good turn-out a goodly proportion of the people felt newly empowered to stay home and watch Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway instead.
And there was of course no little boy to point out the Empress’s embarrassed state, because Jim, to whom Fate had awarded the part, was, as we have already explained, at this point being developmentally up-skilled a long way from the palace.
The King of Never Never Land was seen by a few to raise an eyebrow and was heard at one point to whisper to his aide that if this was the best the Empress could do with all the tributes they were paying her, he didn’t think much of her business planning and that, cheap as she was, he might have to revisit the terms of his vassalage, he thought it could be reputationally damaging to be seen to associate with an Empire so clearly lacking in self-esteem.
But apart from that, things carried on pretty much as before, because that is what happens. The workers work, the courtiers court.
Oh, but the tailors were said, by someone who met them as they were hauling their booty across the Empire’s border, to be well pleased.
The End
Cable to Cable: stop the cold callers
August 23, 2011 – 10:35 am
Dear Mr Cable,
One of the iniquities of modern politics is how it puts business before people. Businesses have no vote. Parliaments are for people. And yet, rather as pedestrians have come to take a poor second place to motorists on our highways, businesses have been raised above people by successive governments.
It’s an extraordinary thing. Clearly business is important. It is what people do. But by its own creed it should not need specially favoured status. Whereas the purpose of politicians is to represent the interests of the electorate.
But attacking business is, I know, a dangerous business, especially if you are the Secretary of State for Business. Here, however, is one small area in which you could make a difference before you either recover your sense of smell and depart the coalition or spontaneously combust fuelled by all the contradictions you are being asked to swallow. Cold callers.
Cold callers are a huge nuisance for most of us and a menace to the weaker and more innocent. They range from major corporations to spammers but they have one thing in common. They have been given the right to invade our private spaces, misuse our private data and make our lives poorer and more miserable. None of this is justified.
The attitude of government and the so-called regulators is ineffectual to the point of offensiveness. “Don’t answer”. “Sign up for Telephone Preference”, “use “block number””. It’s like phoning the fire brigade to report your house on fire and being told “Just don’t strike any matches.” None of it works and they know it.
Why is it acceptable for conmen to use their knowledge of my phone number, illicitly gained, to make an assault on my private life? Why are they protected and why am I told it is up to me to sort it out? What do I pay a government for?
Why is it acceptable for my evenings to be broken into by utility companies who simply want to use my living room as a battleground for their trench warfare? They have TV adverts, press adverts and mailshots at their disposal. Why are they permitted to trespass on my property and time? What am I paying Government for?
Why must the 21st century be a spiral of decline for the comfort and integrity of ordinary family people while the marketing men prosper? Is that what you entered politics for?
It’s Murdoch syndrome, though, isn’t it? “Ooh dear, mustn’t annoy the Business Community.”
You have the unique position to make a difference right here and the people would love you for it. Have you ever heard anyone say “Oh, I so look forward to those cold calls of an evening”? Come on. Find your courage. Rediscover your purpose and sense of decency. Make the bastards illegal. Set the dogs on them.
Your humble and obedient servant,
Iain M Spardagus
The Empress’s New Clothes (Part 5)
August 11, 2011 – 2:09 pm
Chapter 5
The spotty adolescence of May became the resentful, mumbling drabness of June before decking itself out in the cheap and showy finery and self-regarding decadence of July and then it was August and the day of the Great Fitting was upon us.
Behind closed doors, with every curtain drawn, every keyhole blocked and even the portraits of long dead family turned to the wall, the tailors made their presentation of the new robes exclusively for the Empress.
And a very strange garment it was.
For it consisted, if you would believe it, dear reader, of but a long and heavily accoutred sleeve attaching at the shoulder to a quadrant of tall, gilt-embroidered collar. Much ceremony went into the tailors’ presentation of the garment and with the dressing of the Empress in it and, when this was done, the tailors stood back and looked at their creation with the undisguised pride of craftsmen seeing a job well done.
The long silence that ensued in no measure dimmed their evident self-satisfaction.
“Well,” said the Empress, at last, looking down at the expanse of rather mottled gooseflesh exposed before her, “It certainly does show off one’s embonpoint”
“We call it “open plan”, Majesty,” said the sly spokestailor, quickly. “It is, you understand de rigueur in all the finest courts in the known world, but only for those of the highest status. It bespeaks transparency and candour. It also has the advantage that at any time one can see how the essential parts of one’s Imperial Majesty are, as it were, performing.”
“But will one’s embonpoint be adequately supported?”
“Ah, Majesty, the generosity of the Imperial heart sees such a thing as an embonpoint apparently in need of support and yearns instinctively to provide it. But is that in the best interest of the embonpoint in question? Should it not be encouraged to find its own support? The most sought-after leadership consultants are now in agreement on this. It is the modern approach. Our design therefore incorporates the objective of self-support for the embonpoint. It will be henceforward be both a competence and a point of performance measurement that your Majesty will be able to review, we suggest quarterly, with your Majesty’s embonpoint and agree appropriate remedial or developmental strategies in the, er, event of any, er slippage.”
“But there is only one sleeve,” the Empress fairly pointed out.
“Ah, how perceptive your Majesty is, to spot the pivotal design feature of this most modern of creations,” said the sly spokestailor, “By concentrating all the resources your Majesty’s Exchequer was able to muster into just one sleeve instead of the more commonplace two, we have been able to maximise elegance at a great saving on project disbursibles.”
“But one sleeve,” began the Empress.
“Indeed, your Majesty. Our extensive researches and efficiency studies revealed uncontrovertibly that, by a factor of nine to one, your Majesty is most frequently viewed from the side ~ from carriage windows, for example. This showed categorically that a saving was not only possible but essential to a proper regard for maximising cost benefit. Two sleeves, one too many. Your Majesty knew this instinctively, of course, and will be pleased that we, your humble servants, have at last stumbled upon an appreciation of it and the solution to a clear and unconscionable waste management failure.
“But is it always this side that people see?” asked the Empress gesturing with her unclad arm to its more happily enrobed sister.
“Therein lies the beauty of our design, as your most Imperial Highness has doubtless perceived, for, if I may demonstrate,” the spokestailor said, taking hold of the cuff, “With but a swish … the other arm is now adorned for the return journey. We call this concept “hot sleeving”. The value additionality of the flexibility, has been looked on with great favour among all the other Imperial houses we have worked for.”
“But when we sit upon the throne, in full view of our people …”
“We of course at once perceived this as a possible change management issue and so we took the liberty of putting it to our “New Ways of Robing” working group. They assure us that it is a mere matter of turning the throne through 90 degrees and addressing one’s people over one’s left, or, as it may be, one’s right shoulder. There should be no negative impact on effectiveness. Presentationally, in fact, quite the contrary. A small accommodation for a great gain.”
The Empress shivered, as well she might, standing all but naked in the middle of a large, draughty palace room. It reminded her. “We made it very plain that we required a collar. For the draughts.”
“Again, Majesty, the sheer adaptability of this garment and its intelligent solution based approach to the problems of Your Majesty’s workplace speaks for itself. Here we have the tall, regal collar, for the setting off of the Imperial head and for the protection of the neck from draughts. The thing about a draught, of course, is that it only comes from one direction at a time. Hence, with the conventional collar, a good half of it is performing no useful function at any moment. We have thus perfected a collar that can be properly focused on the task of draught alleviation at any time, at another significant saving.”
“But where is our train? We distinctly recall that you promised us a train.”
“Ah, yes. Trains are a specialism into which we do not seek to diversify, Majesty. Therefore we put the provision of trains out to private tender on a performance contract that clearly stipulated a train of imperial magnificence, at least every 20 minutes. The supplier has failed to meet any of his targets. Regrettably, he also was unable to meet the financial penalty called for in the contract in case of underperformance and went into receivership. But we are satisfied that our action has sent a strong signal to other train companies. We have, as a consequence, taken the liberty to award ourselves a performance bonus in recognition of our stewardship of this aspect of the project. We felt sure your Imperial Majesty would see this response as appropriate in all the circumstances.”
At this point the sly spokestailor was gently nudged by one of his colleagues who was carrying a cardboard box. “Ah, yes, of course, how foolish of me to forget. The crowning glory. Literally. Majesty, so contemporary a robe requires and deserves to be set off by an equally modern crown.”
“But the Imperial Crown … It has been passed down through the ages. It is the very symbol …”
“… of the dead hand of tradition. I do so agree, your Imperial Majesty,” interrupted the sly spokestailor. “We could be in no doubt, therefore, that your Majesty was looking for a complete break with those old notions and in favour of something that reflected the new Imperial order, which will blaze your Majesty’s name clear into the future.”
And with that he pulled from the box a contraption so bizarre that it made the new robe seem positively reasonable. For it was, or appeared to be, nothing more than a hoop of bright green plastic, of the kind children dive for in swimming pools, when they are lucky enough to live in places which have swimming pools and to have parents who take them there to learn to swim and not to the woods to be hunted, as the only unprotected species remaining in the kingdom, or to the market to be sold into slavery (or “unregulated employment”, as it was now required to be known, as a mark of respect for the diversity of those who practised it), onto which had been tied, on different lengths of string, a large number of polished metal bottle tops. He quickly placed the hoop on the Empress’s head.
“Permit me, your Majesty.”
The metal bottle tops hung down around the face of the Empress, dancing in the breeze and winking in the light of the candles of the room. At a quick glance, and from a distance, in a dim light, one could have concluded it was really quite charming. Daft, but charming.
“W.. what on earth, pft, pft, are these?” stammered the Empress, struggling to keep the nearest of the metal bottle tops out of her mouth as she spoke.
“Ah, yes,” said the spokestailor, affecting an air of total obliviousness to the Empress’s obvious discomfort.
The sly spokestailor’s enthusiasm was infectious.“The imagery. We are very proud of this, your Majesty. Each of these shining discs represents one of the glittering assembly of the Imperial court ~ 165 in all. We counted. And here they dance around your Majesty like stars around the Imperial sun. They will be an ever-present reminder to you of your Majesty’s most blissful creation. A court that in every respect befits its Empress.”
“But, pft, we can hardly, pft, see.”
“Again, your Majesty cuts to the heart of the matter. For in seeing with her own eyes would she not be at risk of prejudice, or at least, the perception of prejudice, whereas to make a point of not seeing is to convey her absolute faith in accepting the visions that are conveyed to her through the medium of her most noble, most respected and most trusted aides?”
Seeing now that the Empress’s credulity had been stretched to the point where even it might soon snap, the spokestailor quickly made his move.
“But your Majesty would not wish to accept the judgement of humble artisans such as ourselves on such high matters of taste. May we suggest that the time has come to invite the opinions of others: we speak of your Majesty’s most cultured and wise courtiers.”
And before she could prevent it, the sly spokestailor flung wide the doors that separated the room from the court, where all the nobility were waiting in an urgent buzz of anticipation.
To be concluded …
The Empress’s New Clothes (Part 4)
August 10, 2011 – 7:30 am
Chapter 4
In the town, far below the walls of the palace, so far indeed that there was no appreciable danger that the concerns of the Empress’s loyal subjects would ever assail the delicate and refined ears of the court, should ever any be so impertinent as to seek to give them expression ~ from the faux-battlements, even the greatest hubbub of dissent could be construed as the mere melodious humming of industrious bees ~ one of the aforementioned Gangmasters had just arrived at the hovel of a poor family, bearing news that all but broke his heart to deliver.
Having stooped to enter through the cracked and creaking door, the Gangmaster sought to pull himself up to his full height, so far, that is, as the low ceiling would allow, and addressed himself to one of the nine children in the room, a boy whose thin, short frame and pasty complexion belied both his eleven years and his status as the major breadwinner in the family.
“Now then, Jim,” began the Gangmaster, “Lord knows, I had hoped it would not come to this, but I am forced to send you off for a developmental up-skilling secondment to the salt mines.”
At this, Jim’s mother, on whom the works of Dickens had made a considerable impression when, at five years of age and already in the service of a grand family, she had heard them read to the children of the house, burst out with a flurry of bawling and Lorks-a-mercying and What-ever-is-to-become-of-us-ing and Oh-my-poor-heart-ing, which took a full five minutes to subside.
“It’s not right,” said Jim, defiantly, as soon as he could make himself heard, “I done what I was told. For ages, I been one of the highest performing chimneysweeps in the whole crew up at the palace. You seen my timesheets.”
“Yes, Jim, I knows,” said the Gangmaster, struggling to keep his own misery out of his voice, “”Your figures is great, very impressive. I told’em as much. It’s not that.”
“Well, then…”
“Jim, you knows how things are, these days. Being a great chimney sweep ain’t enough any more. They says … they says you ain’t sufficiently … corporate. You ain’t on message in the client care department. You ain’t fulfilling your customer-outreach objective.”
Jim was once more defiant, “Who says? Who’s been putting it about that I’m not cor… cor… what you said?”
“There’s been reports, Jim. You know what the Care Manual says. Every client has to be left with a note saying “We thank you for choosing us to attend to your flue de-carbonisation requirements. It is imperative that we assure you the cleanliness of your chimney is more important to us than our own lives.” Not, Jim, “Chimney swept, Tuesday.””
“It’s what they need to know.”
“Not the point. Then there’s your customer satisfaction questionnaires. You ain’t been leaving them with folks.”
“People I sweep don’t want them. They says so. They tells me “You think I got time to fill in four pages of answers to damn fool questions, boy?” They says “I’ll jolly soon let you know if you ain’t swept my chimney right. Meantime I pays you to sweep not to find me jobs to do.””
“I know, I know, but the Manual says you got to leave them, right?”
Sensing that the boy remained unpersuaded, the Gangmaster was concerned that his inability to hide his own doubts might be failing the lad. He struggled to recall the official version.
“How else can we get feedback on important matters ~ like whether the brushes should be dressed left or right or whether they are getting sufficient informational material about our new Prototype Reverse-Intuition Counter- Kinetic Account Storage System? And as if that ain’t enough, you fell asleep half way through day one of the compulsory two-day Chimney Refurbishers Appraisal Process Specification-Handling Introductory Training.”
“Have a heart! I’d come straight from a 12-hour shift. I’d had nor lunch nor supper. I was whacked.”
“But these things get noticed. Then it’s “Not corporate-minded” and there’s no stopping the thing once that’s been said. You know the way of things. I did all I could.”
But in the end, of course, it had to be as They had said it had to be.
To be continued …