When today’s left speaks it is right-wing bigotry we hear

Bigotry, like poverty, is always with us. It is not often in this country that you come across open, unselfconsciously brutal bigotry, but it is always there somewhere, lurking in the most respectable of places, and sometimes it drops its mask and bares its vicious teeth. Twice last week I was astonished by glimpses of this vindictive grimace. I had begun to think this country was largely free of the ideological hatred and class war that so disfigured it in the 1960s and 1970s. Even the ban on foxhunting has failed. But now I realise that impression is all too superficial. Bigotry will out, and it wants to condemn, punish and control. It is the mindset of the totalitarian. The Guardian published a column by Zoe Williams on Tuesday that ought to make any right-minded person gasp with shock, no matter what his or her political views. Quite a few Guardian readers were indeed shocked, to judge by their comments online. Williams was discussing the fact that many parents who would prefer to send their children to private schools – she calls them privateers – are obliged by the economic slump to send them to state schools. Her view is that the children of such privateers should be forced to the bottom of the waiting lists for state primary schools. Never mind, she says, whether such children are “swamping” state primaries, or might do in the future, or not at all: this has nothing to do with the availability of school places and everything to do with ideology – such children must be put at the back of the queue. Her view, unpleasant though it is, might be worth rational discussion. But Williams’s tone is far from rational. It is frightening. She writes like an old-fashioned class warrior who believes children must be punished for the class guilt of their parents, and if that sounds vindictive, she admits she means it to. “Ha! Good,” she exclaims unselfconsciously. Perhaps this is an opportune moment to point out that Williams was privately educated at the expensive and selective Godolphin and Latymer school in west London, which no doubt helped her to get a place at Oxford and a job at The Guardian; should she, too, be punished for the class crimes of her parents in educating her privately? Which queue should Williams be shoved to the back of to atone for her inherited class guilt? What horrifies me more than her general approach is the totalitarian detail in which she indulges her class hatred. Her list of exclusion for privateers’ children is precisely graded. To the bottom she dispatches those who have been recently removed from private schools; “above them but below everybody else” should be children with siblings at private schools; and somewhere near them should be children whose parents’ first choice was a faith school. It reminded me at once of the careful protocols of Nazi selection systems, or the elaborate plans put forward by Stalinists and Maoists; it reads like those chilling, heart-rending accounts of life in the USSR and communist China, from Solzhenitsyn to Jung Chang. “There are other questions”, Williams goes on, apparently ignorant of similar interrogations during the worst of 20th-century totalitarianism, that “an admissions process could use to whittle out privateers. Do they have a 4×4? Can parents provide a letter from any local left-wing organisation attesting to their commitment to open-access state education? Did they go to any meetings? . . . come on, you lefties . . . what happened to your sharp elbows?” I rest my case. This is hate speech, class war and political bigotry of the most vicious sort. What is one to make of the suggestion that “local left-wing organisations” should stand in judgment on parents and their thoughts? Just as astonishing was a comment made in a guide to adoption published by a state-funded national agency, the British Association for Adoption and Fostering. Its new booklet, the Pink Guide to Adoption for Lesbians and Gay Men, describes people who oppose gay adoption as “retarded homophobes”. The association repeated this choice phrase on its Be My Parent website, although it has since been removed. This again was a shocking glimpse of the unmasked teeth of vicious bigotry, made even worse by unselfconscious hypocrisy. “Retarded” is a word that no decent person would now use to describe another. It was a cruel and largely American expression for people with intellectual impairments. For years it has been considered inaccurate, ignorant and offensive and demeaning to people with learning disabilities. I find it amazing that anyone would use it at all, let alone in public or in print, let alone the people in the adoption association, which is about as politically correct as an organisation can be, and still less in a booklet aimed at a minority that has good reason to notice and resent demeaning words. It seems the phrase was written by a contributor, not by the association, but that is no excuse – the word “retarded” should have leapt out at those responsible for producing the booklet. And how much worse it is to use the word “retarded” as a conscious insult. How can any outfit subsidised by the taxpayer and run by the supposedly politically correct use any disability as an insult? And how much worse again it is to use such bizarre insults against people to discredit their arguments and their beliefs. Does the association think that people who disagree with it are, ipso facto, “retards”? Is disagreement with it a sign of cognitive impairment? Does it perhaps think that people who disagree are not merely mentally handicapped (in another old-fashioned expression) but mentally ill as well, in need of locking up in an insane asylum as in totalitarian countries? Whether people who oppose gay adoption are right or wrong is not the point. I happen to think they are wrong, but it will not do to dismiss their arguments with insults – insults that are not only offensive to them but also even more insulting to innocent bystanders. I am glad, however, that these bigots have done so, because those who wrote these words and published them and publicised them on the internet have revealed themselves in their true colours. For the same reason I am glad that Williams felt free to publish her spiteful rant and that The Guardian printed it. By their words shall ye know them. That is one of the great beauties of free speech. If we must have bigots and totalitarians in our midst, it is good to know who they are and what they think, so we can beware of them.

Spare the public purse – bulldoze this equality maze

Hard times mean hard choices. It is very hard, now that the public coffers are empty, for any party to decide which public services to cut. All the same, not all hard choices are equally hard. I have a suggestion. It is to cut the whole of new Labour’s equality agenda as it affects public services. This is not as inflammatory as it may sound. Of course there are those in the equality industry who could not possibly accept that what they do is not an absolutely priority for public spending. Only 10 days ago Harriet Harman introduced an equalities bill with which she hopes to impose astonishingly heavy and expensive obligations on public bodies in the name of equality, if it becomes law. But there are many more thoughtful people, wholly committed to an ideal of equality, who might be persuaded to reconsider whether this agenda is really essential at a time of financial crisis, especially if they knew what it actually involved. Surely they would not argue that this vast agenda, with all its elaborate provisions, is anywhere near as important as looking after lost and damaged children, or protecting them from abuse. Nor can it be as urgently indispensable as paying for halfway decent nursing care homes for the elderly, or looking after people with mental illnesses. Our social services and mental health services and our care homes are quite horribly underfunded. Compared with these burning needs, the costly details of Labour’s equality agenda pale into insignificance. As things stand under legislation introduced in 2000, 2006 and 2007, public sector bodies, all 43,000 of them, are subject to statutory public sector duties. These formal duties place upon them wide-ranging legal obligations to promote race equality, disability equality and gender equality in everything they do or plan; all this is, in effect, driven and policed by the new mega-quango, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). I suspect many people don’t appreciate how hugely this has all developed since the Macpherson report of 1999 into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Post-Macpherson, according to the EHRC, it was clear that a “radical rethink” was needed about the way the public sector approached discrimination. That rethink was a great deal more radical than many of us have ever quite appreciated. A rejection of wrongful discrimination has somehow been transformed into a compulsory imposition of equality – an endless task, in any case, since it is quite impossible. The EHRC itself explains that those trying to drive forward radical change post-Macpherson felt that the emphasis of existing legislation on equality was on dealing with cases of discrimination after the event, not on anticipation and prevention. And they felt existing legislation was aimed at dealing with individual cases, rather than with issues within organisations such as institutional racism. So the new race equality duty of 2000 was designed to shift the emphasis: public bodies would now have a statutory duty positively to promote equality, not merely to avoid discrimination. “The effect of this was to place race equality at the centre of all policy development and decision making, resulting in organisational change.” In the same spirit a disability equality duty was imposed in 2006, followed by a gender equality duty in 2007. All this was imposed on top of existing legislation against racial and other discrimination. Whatever one might think of the underlying intentions, the effect of all this was to create a bureaucrat’s paradise – a maze without any exit, winding among compulsory equality schemes, policy statements, codes of practice, statements of objectives, impact assessment, “enforcement toolkits”, confessions of failure, internal consultations, restatements, information-gathering, ethnic bean-counting (as if that were really possible), gender bean-counting, the pursuit of numerical representation, interaction with stakeholders, external consultations, new plans, revisions of plans, reassessment of plans, networking, disability monitoring, training, self-assessment, review of progress, compliance and external inspection and all the correspondence pertaining to the above, in order to “pay due regard to the need to take action on race, disability and gender equality”. That, as anyone can see, is a requirement as long as a piece of string. One’s head aches at the thought of all the tedious, repetitive reading and writing and discussion involved for countless men and women, not to mention the incessant meetings. The cost is not merely astronomical – it is infinite. For when could any local authority put its hand on its heart and say its equality duty was done – total equality had been achieved in the new Maoist heaven of West Barsetshire? Surely it would be better, at least while public money is so scarce, to rely on the earlier legislation, pre-Macpherson, and on the goodwill of public servants, who, after all, are better known for political correctness in such matters than its opposite. It seems to me rather insulting to them to suggest that they need constant surveillance to do their jobs like decent human beings. I cannot imagine there can be many nurses or teachers or social workers who have racist or sexist inclinations and, if they do, they will soon be faced down by the anger of their colleagues, their bosses and their clients, not to mention the massed forces of unions, campaigning charities, advisory charities, industrial tribunals, the attention of the media and the majesty of the law. To say the equality agenda should be scrapped is not to suggest that anyone ought to abandon his or her ideal of equality. And it is most certainly not to suggest that we as a society should abandon our shared belief that unfair discrimination against people on the grounds of race or sex is wrong. Of course it is. I firmly believe that we are almost all united against unjust discrimination. That, of course, is not the same as being united in favour of a proactive equality agenda; many people have grave doubts about that, if they are not entirely opposed. But that is not the point here. The point is that this agenda, right or wrong, is dispensable. Just how much dispensing with it would save is difficult to discover. I challenge the National Audit Office to tell us. For if the great British public did know, I suspect there would be no political difficulty for any party in axeing this agenda, to make a huge and popular saving.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

April 19th, 2009

One song and she breaks the grip of this sneering world

If you haven’t seen it already, watch it now. Don’t miss it. If you don’t have a computer, see it on someone else’s. I was sent the link last week, without explanation, in a short e-mail from a friend, and idly double-clicked on it, imagining it was another of the internet jokes with which friends distract one another from working. In fact, this short video clip of a middle-aged spinster singing, posted on YouTube only a few days ago, is one of the most moving and astonishing things I have seen for months. It made me cry. I’m not alone: the film star Demi Moore tweeted that it made her “teary”, and everyone I’ve shown it to has clearly been very moved, from girls in their early twenties to several late-middle-aged businessmen at a dinner party on Thursday. What I saw on their faces as they watched was incredulity and a dawning, I truly think, of joy. The public response is making internet history. By this weekend more than 25m people had hit YouTube to watch. For the few people who don’t know about this clip, I should explain. To me, watching without any idea of what was coming, it was at first rather puzzling: an odd, dumpy, middle-aged woman, wearing an old-fashioned frock and unfashionably cut grey curls, is being interviewed, casually, in a busy TV studio by two patronising young media men. It quickly emerges that her name is Susan Boyle; she is nearly 48, unemployed and just about to sing on a huge stage in the Britain’s Got Talent show. There is something quaint about her manner, or, as people used to say, a bit simple, and something vulnerable too, as she keeps hitting slightly the wrong conversational note. She reveals that she lives alone with her cat Pebbles and has never been married nor ever been kissed, with a strange, self-deprecating smile that I recognised in retrospect: it’s the secret smile of someone who has often been laughed at. But she is full of a surprising confidence. “I’m going to make that audience rock,” says this most unlikely person. Anyone of any sympathy would at this point have felt sorry for her – sorry for her misguided confidence, sorry for her delusion that she could possibly hold her own performing in a talent contest and sorry about the growing obsession with celebrity among people who can only be hurt and disappointed by their immeasurable distance from it. An unsympathetic person, by contrast, might have sneered slightly, but the derision and jeering contempt that actually met this poor woman, seconds later, when she appeared on stage was quite shockingly brutal, especially for these sentimental times. She might as well have been a martyr in a Roman arena. As she clumsily answered a few questions, and said she wanted to be like Elaine Paige, TV cameras filmed open contempt on the faces of the young audience and there were audible boos and jeers. Worse still, the judges were also laughing at her, Simon Cowell rolling his eyes in affected disbelief and Piers Morgan openly sneering. All this because a plain and middle-aged lady, the living antithesis of youth and cool, had the effrontery to enter a talent contest. Yet Miss Boyle, with her strange serenity, seemed oddly untroubled. Then she began to sing, and after only two or three notes of I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables, it was absolutely obvious that she was a star. As one of the judges said later, and most revealingly, they knew at once that they had “found gold”. She has, without any doubt, a beautiful and powerful voice, and all the confidence, the authority, the self-discipline and the presence of a great performer; her talent transforms her. The judges and audience could not fail to recognise this and very soon they were standing and cheering rapturously, astonishment all over their faces. What really interests me about the clip is not so much her talent as her story and people’s passionate reaction to it. Susan Boyle’s experience has all the symbolic power of a fairy story. It’s a story of transformation – always one of the most powerful – both for her and for her studio audience. She, in fairy-story terms, is the ugly old lady, despised by all, who turns out to be a beloved and powerful princess; the spell that sets her free and makes her great is her magic talent. And the special magic of this talent is that it is makes no distinctions of age or beauty or disability; anyone might have this magic power, whether or not anyone else knows. Aspirations and dreams need not always grow old, though we must. It is a fairy story to make grown men and women weep, and it did. Similarly, the jeering audience of vain young people trying to catch the camera’s eye and the preening judges of this contest are the nasty boys and girls of fairy stories who mock the poor old lady because she is not young and beautiful, only to be punished when her real self is revealed. And their punishment is to be revealed as they truly are – heartless, thoughtless and superficial – the flotsam and jetsam of the polluted seas of celebrity, likely to sink without trace into toxic foam. They will grow old too, to be ignored in their turn, and then they will understand that appearances are not everything. And those who despise people who are not thin, not young, not beautiful and not cool will one day find themselves despised in exactly the same way, by people just like their younger selves. That is enough to make young people think. This side of the story became even more forceful for me when it emerged that Miss Boyle suffered mild brain damage at birth, causing problems that meant she was bullied and belittled at school. In retrospect I think that is enough to explain her slightly unusual manner, and the bullying and belittling sneers of the studio audience; it’s what they were laughing at. But Susan Boyle managed to rise above people like them. She found herself in church choirs and karaoke, restored and triumphant in music; it’s a story of the undefeated spirit. Hers is also finally a story of the astonishing power of music to bring people together, transcending all differences. Everyone should sing. Everyone certainly can sing – there is almost no one who cannot learn to sing in tune. And the joy of singing in itself, or in a choir, is one of the best consolations I can think of for life’s sadnesses; I started singing lessons a couple of years ago and am amazed by what it has come to mean. As a nation, as individuals, we don’t sing enough. We should be inspired by the surprising Susan Boyle.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

April 12th, 2009

Public opinion gets burnt to a crisp by the Chelsea Toaster

People are angry, increasingly so. The new rage has to do with a growing sense of unfairness and powerlessness and it expresses itself about all kinds of concerns, both large and small, from Mr Jacqui Smith’s rude videos to the army’s inadequate equipment. What happens to the site of the old Chelsea Barracks in west London is a small matter, relatively speaking. One could say that whatever is finally built there will affect only a few Londoners who live nearby and even fewer plutocrats who want a luxury flat close to Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal hospital. I would say it will affect a great many more people, and for generations to come, but whatever the number, the cause is one that rallies people all over the country in spirit. That’s because the proposal for Chelsea Barracks is a perfect symbol of the contempt in which the Establishment holds us. To start from the beginning, the land on which Chelsea Barracks used to stand is our land. It was held by the government in our name to house soldiers. When the army moved out, the government could easily have kept the land in our name for some other good purpose: school playing fields, for example. Instead, it flogged the site last year for as much as it could get from some Qatari developers, who in turn planned to cram every possible inch of the land with buildings for the best return on their huge investment. A brief glance at the original proposal, designed by the architect Richard Rogers and team, will explain why it was nicknamed “the Toaster”: it shows a line of ugly, utilitarian multistorey metallic buildings, crammed in such close parallel lines onto the site that there seems only just room to toast a thin slice of bread between each of them. After prolonged public objections, the architects made some of the buildings a bit lower and some smaller. Even so, the whole thing remains an offence against the eye and the spirit. It is a predictable design of huge, harsh, soulless glass and steel rectangles – too shiny, too tall and entirely impersonal. Cities all over the country have been made desolate by these inhuman buildings. But the ordinary person can do nothing. Petitions and consultations mean nothing. Planners do their worst and local elections make no difference. We just have to stand by while these buildings go up. Not only that. We have to accept the contempt of architects and planners for our philistine lack of taste. They make it quite clear that we, the public, are too ignorant to appreciate good architecture. We must leave such things to those who know better, such as those who make their money out of designing or building these monstrosities. Which of these buildings is lovable, though? Which raises the spirit, as you walk about or cross London’s bridges? They merely interrupt the celebrated view from Westminster Bridge, unwelcome in themselves and a reminder of worse to come. Earth hath not anything more unfair, one might say. I don’t think I am opposed by nature to modern architecture. There are a few modern buildings I like, particularly in other countries. But ask anyone, even someone who claims to like new buildings, to name a couple they particularly love in this country – as one loves Sherborne Abbey or a 19th-century terrace in Bristol – and it is surprising how few they will come up with. In London, some mention the Lloyd’s Building, which is at least interesting, but the Gherkin is vulgar, suggestive and pointless – there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it to be that silly shape. The Barbican is ugly and depressing but at least not as hideous as the South Bank complex. Canary Wharf will be seen before long as a monument to all that was greedy and ignorant about the derivatives bubble and the masters of the universe of our time – oversized, opulent and heartless. The Islamic Centre opposite the Natural History Museum is shuttered, blind and psychologically closed, despite its eye-catching veneer. As for the Millennium Dome, it is a ghastly reminder of the worst of bad planning and bad design. These are, of course, public buildings. The record is far worse when it comes to places where people live – machines for living in, as Le Corbusier said, in a phrase that encapsulates the inhumanity of modernism. I can hardly think of a single beautiful housing development in the country, apart from a few four-storey council flats in 19th-century streets. On the contrary, most modern housing estates express a desolation that would have astonished even Dickens. So now we have a particularly charming part of London, loved for its low-rise, human scale, its easy elegance and its history, about to be overwhelmed by the type of edifice that has blighted so many other pleasant places. For once, at least, not all leading architects are united in favour. The highly regarded Will Alsop has said he is not a great admirer of the Rogers plan, and David Chipperfield has expressed concern too. But public protest will achieve nothing and the government’s architecture watchdog has just announced its support for a new, improved Toaster scenario. When looking for a representative of the people to stand against all this, one would not automatically turn to the Prince of Wales. He is uniquely unqualified for the role; his inherited position prevents him from taking sides and using his influence to do so. That – although he doesn’t seem to recognise it – is part of the understanding accepted long ago by the Windsors: to stay in office they abandoned all power, including power they might exercise through taking sides in public. So it was wrong for Prince Charles to speak out against genetically modified crops, a controversial political issue. And it’s wrong for him to speak out against this architectural proposal, even though he is quite right. Yet he alone seems to have captured the public mood. He cannot tell the planning department at Westminster council what to do, but he has asked his royal friends in Qatar to dump Rogers’s development and, one way or another, he’s proving a powerful supporter of what most people want. I can’t feel this is right, although I am grateful nonetheless. How odd it is that the growing democratic deficit in this country should, in this case at least, have been filled by a most undemocratically chosen prince.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

April 5th, 2009

Divorce, the one bad bet a City tycoon is unable to shrug off

‘Mummy, mummy, mummy, I want my toys back. I know I said I’d share my toys with that girl, but now mine are all broken and I want hers. Please, Mummy.” That is the infantile position of the City tycoon Brian Myerson, the unhappy ci-devant multi-millionaire who has just tried, and failed, to get the Court of Appeal to renegotiate his divorce settlement with his ex-wife, now that his share of it has plummeted to next to nothing. How I laughed when I read about it. One doesn’t usually look to court reports for a good giggle, but Myerson’s story is painfully funny. It has an agreeable little moral lurking within it as well. I don’t mean a sexual moral: I know absolutely nothing of the details of their divorce, or of their very long marriage. One of them may indeed have been guilty of home-wrecking in some sense, and I am old-fashioned enough to think that makes a difference. However, all that is irrelevant. The point is that last year, after 26 years of marriage, he agreed with her on a divorce settlement. It was not imposed upon either of them. Admittedly, the settlement sounds entirely daft to me. I cannot see why, however fragrantly marvellous she may have been in every respect, Mrs Myerson should have got 43% of the assets of the marriage, which were then nearly £26m. And if 43%, why not 50% or 40%? Is there some sort of check list for the very rich when they break up, with so many hundred thousand for having been particularly cooperative in bed, so many half-millions for not having had a live-in nanny, a ski chalet for having forgiven an affair and so on? How does one estimate the worth of the poorer spouse, usually a woman? Actually, if one does the sums carefully – so much for sexual availability (divided by two, as that works both ways), so much for childcare, so much for housekeeping – it comes to thousands, not millions, as my husband once proved in an argument with a very rich man’s wife in the 1980s. Her worth for the services she claimed she provided was, he reckoned at that time, at commercial rates, about £40,000 a year at the very most. Divorce settlements among the rich are truly incomprehensible to most of us, and probably to all concerned. But again, that’s not important. What matters is that the Myersons agreed upon a full and final settlement, “full” and “final” being words that most people find easy to understand. She chose to accept a South African beach house worth £1.5m and £9.5m in cash (to be paid to her over four years) while he chose as the bulk of his deal to keep his shares in his excitingly ambitious and “activist” company, Principle Capital Investment Trust. How words such as those frighten the horses these days. However, in those bright and confident times, only a year ago, Mr Myerson’s shares were worth £3 each, and his total divorce settlement worth £14.6m. No longer! Principle Capital Investment Trust shares are now worth less than 30p,and Mr Myerson has been largely wiped out, at least on paper. In these circumstances – and he has also just been thrown out, after a shareholder revolt, as chief executive of Principle Capital Investment Trust – he is going to find it a bit of a stretch to pay his wife the rest of the money he owes her. In fact it would, as things stand now, leave him in the red. So he is solemnly trying to get out of it, in the Court of Appeal, no less. What does this remind you of? Myerson reminds me of all those masters of the universe, bound up in their financial fantasies and their alpha-male delusions, their infantile sense of entitlement and their curious blindness to anyone unimportant to them, who think that reward is for them while risk is for other people. These are the men (usually) and this the mentality that have almost destroyed the world’s financial systems and brought us to extremities of debt and unemployment, worldwide, that we are only just beginning to appreciate. Such men expect the shareholder or the investor or the taxpayer or anyone but themselves to suffer the cost of the risks that they alone, in their arrogance, took on. Such a man is Myerson – a man who simply could not see that he could get anything wrong, or that high rewards almost always involve high risks. And yet he has often seen – has sometimes been involved with – the downfall of others. Whether he was intelligent enough to appreciate it or not, Myerson took risks, through his business, with money that he knew he owed his wife. There is no reason she should suffer for his folly or even for his bad luck, after a full and final settlement. Perhaps he was encouraged, in his attempts to bilk her of her money, by the way that taxpayers and shareholders have in so many other cases recently been made to suffer for the failures of international investor types like him; perhaps he was tempted to believe he could shuffle the costs of bad risk off onto others, just as countless others are doing. Fortunately, the Court of Appeal wouldn’t let him. “When a businessman takes a speculative position,” said Lord Justice Thorpe, one of the appeal judges, “in compromising his wife’s claims, why should the court subsequently relieve him of the consequences of his speculation by rewriting the bargain at his behest?” It shouldn’t, of course, and it didn’t. Myerson’s argument is that his divorce settlement has been rendered unfair, in retrospect, because he is the victim of “an unforeseen combination of forces at play within the global economy”. Well, tough, one can only say. Besides, he cannot be very much of a high-flying investor if only a year ago he was really unable to anticipate any downside or downturn in the markets – most people I know were already anxious about it. But that’s irrelevant. When he made the settlement, presumably he could have paid her in full or put the money aside, but instead he chose the path of risk, without, it seems, being willing to accept responsibility for the consequences to his wife. It may be unfair to be so harsh on Brian Myerson. It may be wrong to see him as typical of a much wider phenomenon, a sign of the times, a small exemplar of one of the nastier creatures in the human bestiary. However, it is hard not to enjoy the homespun little morals of his tale: in this country, in the courts, even today, a man’s word is still his bond, so he should bear in mind that what goes up may come down, just as pride goes before a fall.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

March 29th, 2009

Do the maths to see whether your marriage is doomed

Are you a validator or an avoider? Or are you a volatile? Your destiny, if you are married, might well turn upon the answer. According to Professor James Murray, who addressed the Royal Society on the subject last week, all marriages fall into one of five kinds of partnership, some of which are “stable” and some of which are not, between “validators”, “avoiders” and “volatiles”. This can easily be clinically observed and quantified and then the men in white coats can apply the maths and predict whether any particular marriage will last or end in divorce. Murray has come up with a simple algebraic formula for the purpose and he claims a 94% success rate. Titter ye not, as the late, great Frankie Howerd used to say. This may sound like those articles asking “Could you be a love rat?”, complete with idiotic questionnaires, but Murray’s universal predictor appears to be a great deal more respectable than that. Emeritus professor of mathematical biology at Oxford and emeritus professor of applied mathematics at the University of Washington, he is loaded with international academic scientific honours. So his work cannot be dismissed as soft science. We are so used to soft science and bad science, sensationally reported in the media, that we are bound to be sceptical. Think of the pseudo-scientific scares we have suffered, such as the terror so irresponsibly whipped up about vaccination and autism. It is surely quite natural to resist the idea that the many mysteries of marriage can be reduced to five easily identifiable types; we know how incomprehensible our own marriages can seem, quite apart from other people’s. And how one resents it: as Hamlet said, when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were clumsily trying to figure him out, “Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery . . .” Hamlet thought it couldn’t be done. It seems he may have been wrong, so far as marriage goes. There may not be much mystery at all, whatever poets may say. Validators, according to Murray’s view, are spouses with mutual respect and shared attitudes. Avoiders are people who avoid conflict and agree to disagree. Volatiles are what they sound. According to the Murray marriage equation — the name alone makes one think of snake oil – a partnership of two validators is stable, as is one of two avoiders. When a validator is married to an avoider or to a volatile, their marriage is unstable and unlikely to last. Marriages between volatiles could go either way, it seems; as everyone knows, some people thrive on throwing things at each other. So that makes five types – it seems volatile-avoider matches are so unstable, Murray didn’t find any for his study. All this can be observed and quantified from the signals in 15 minutes of videotaped interview, in which husband and wife talk about something contentious such as money or mothers-in-law. In a 12-year American study of 700 newly married couples, Murray’s formula has been right in 94% of cases and, where divorce was predicted, 100% right. That makes it impossible to ignore. Nonetheless I find myself resisting it. Looking at a list of Murray’s marriage partners and partnership types, it’s obvious to me that my husband and I and our marriage are all these things, in all these combinations, all the time, and so are many of our friends. How we might have appeared in any 15-minute videotaping in all these years would have been a matter of chance. For instance, I quite often try, against my worse nature, to be a validator, saying nice things whenever I think of them, but I regularly get sidetracked into volatile mode and when I can’t think of anything nice to say I very often say it anyway. What’s more, busy women validators and volatiles are often forced to slip into avoidance simply to get things done, when there just isn’t time enough for volatility or validation or generally stoking the marital embers. Meanwhile one’s other half might be lurching from one role to another, for better or worse, from Superman to Badger to Eeyore. The whole of marriage seems to me to be institutionally unstable. Men and women change, their circumstances change and the power struggle between them is constantly shifting – even the sunniest of validators would admit that. The changing of the climate in a long-standing marriage is rather like one of those old wooden weather-vane toys: when the little man comes out into the sun, the little woman goes back in, and vice versa. And I believe very firmly that external factors have a powerful bearing on divorce. The great rise in divorce since the war must be explained in part by externalities; human nature cannot have altered much in 50 years but circumstances, including divorce law, have changed radically. When divorce isn’t socially acceptable, or financially possible, it doesn’t happen very much, and I think the credit crunch may well wobble the variables of Murray’s algebra. However, underlying his findings is an awkward truth, and beyond it, perhaps, is something faintly encouraging. If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were right, that may not be such a bad thing. Like Hamlet, we are culturally encouraged to believe that the complexities of each person’s life and relationships are both infinitely various and also peculiar to him or her. Everybody’s different, we are told. Perhaps to an expert observer we are not actually very varied and are quite easy to understand, as an entomologist might say of a nest of ants. Most GPs, psychologists, teachers and child protection workers will quickly observe certain types and certain typical behaviour, which the rest of us, with less concentrated experience of fewer people, will not notice at all. If Murray is right, we could learn to recognise which people we should probably avoid marrying and which would probably suit us. The same might also apply in principle to all kinds of recognisable personalities and behavioural syndromes about which we usually learn the hard way – personality disorders, certain kinds of mental illness, anorexia, extremes of introversion and extroversion and so on. It applies even to the significant differences between men and women. Understanding such things and learning about them when young might make an astonishing difference to the sum of human happiness, to validators, avoiders and volatiles alike.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

March 22nd, 2009

We buy into beauty even as the state wields its ugly stick

The touch of spring in the air in the past few days has aroused a longing for beauty and a remembered love of beauty in almost everyone. That was the view of Germaine Greer, speaking poetically at the Royal Geographical Society last Thursday at a debate sponsored by the National Trust, The Sunday Times and Intelligence , in a packed auditorium. The occasion was the first of a series of National Trust debates on the “quality of life”. Greer spoke with lyricism, touchingly for so aggressive a woman, of the great pleasure most ordinary people find in the beauty in the play of light on a stretch of dark water with weather clouds forming above it. And with those sentiments alone, I think, she resoundingly defeated the motion “Britain has become indifferent to beauty”. It is self-evident to me that Britain has not become indifferent to beauty, if Britain means us, the people of these islands. We have become not less but more aware of beauty and more anxious to preserve it, particularly the beauties of the countryside. Membership of the National Trust – the organisation that protects beautiful houses and landscapes in our name – has grown from 225,000 in 1970 to 3.6m today. That alone suggests the British, or at least a critical mass of us, are far from indifferent to this kind of beauty. And the explosion of interest in hiking, biking, rambling, camping, twitching and rock climbing suggests a deep and widespread love of the beauties of nature, or what’s left of it. That explosion is part of the much wider democratisation of beauty: millions of Britons, since the austerity of the 1950s, have had enough money to indulge their tastes and to develop them – their taste not only for natural beauty but also for other kinds. Stephen Bayley, Greer’s partner in victory against Roger Scruton and David Starkey in last week’s debate, pointed out that Britain has some of the best art schools and museums, some of the best musicians (and a newish mass interest in classical music), some of the most outstanding theatre productions, exceptional chefs, passionate gardeners, the best media (including film postproduction) and some of the best designers in the world. London (despite its many uglinesses) still is an aesthetic mecca. I remember that in the 1980s the words design and Britain were almost synonymous and to be British was pretty much to be stylish in the minds of foreigners; the French used English in the phrase “très design” to mean anything that was beautifully conceived and made, whether it was a piece of clothing, mass-produced furniture or graphic design. Bayley described the success of the iPhone (in Britain as elsewhere) as proof of the mass success of beauty; it isn’t substantially different from its competitors except that it is so much more beautiful and that is why it is so desirable. Beauty sells, and people pay more for it and always have, for the obvious reason that they are not indifferent to it. That is true of the status-driven rich patrons of Botticelli and the buyers of Audis. Most people would rather have a beautiful toaster than an ugly one. The problem with the arguments of Scruton and Starkey, trying to persuade us that this country has become indifferent to beauty, is that they sounded as though they were inhabiting a time warp in which the only standards of beauty were those of the ruling classes of long ago. It seemed clear that, as between toasters, they would infinitely prefer an old-fashioned one used by gentlefolk to the most elegant and efficient of modern creations. It was they who seemed to be indifferent to the beauty – new, dazzling and hugely diverse – of contemporary television sets, buildings, typefaces, photography, cars, textiles, dental installations, packaging and shoes, most of which I think they would consider vulgar. Their line was that the true standards of beauty are being ignored or flouted by modern vulgarity and commercialism. Starkey seemed to be dismissing design as distinct from beauty, as something merely commercial and meretricious and arguing that as a well known international “style guru”, Bayley is an aesthetic pimp. Strong stuff like this added to the gaiety of the proceedings but did nothing for Starkey’s arguments. Good design is necessarily beautiful; that’s why it works. One could argue at length – and they all did – about good taste, debased taste and the arbiters of taste. But that is really hardly the point. Beauty is to an important extent in the eye of the beholder, from within his own particular culture or subculture. Most people see it in a great landscape left over from the 18th-century Enlightenment – hence the passion for visiting National Trust properties – but many also find it in a suburban back garden filled with naughty gnomes and fairy lights as well as lupins and chrysanths. That may be bad taste to some minds but it does not mean garden-gnome-lovers are indifferent to beauty; it simply means they have a different idea of what beauty is. One of the greatest social changes I have noticed in my adult life is that the more money and leisure people have, the more they develop their taste in a sense of which Scruton and Starkey and indeed Bayley would approve; they become more discriminating about, say, food, in a way that corresponds more and more to the standards of the leading cooks. However, there is one sense in which Britain either is or has become truly indifferent to beauty – that is if Britain is taken to mean not the people but the state and the powers that be; those that have control over us and our public spaces. British postwar housing and inner cities, down to the bullying street furniture, are an international disgrace; they positively invite desecration and litter, as an unconscious protest against their ugliness, their brutality and their disempowering inhumanity. As Starkey rightly said, there is hot competition for the ugliest place in Britain, and Stoke-on-Trent probably takes the palm as the ne plus ultra, particularly the cultural quarter – the cultural quarter! An obituary of a phrase. An outsider might ask how we, the people, have allowed planners and governments to impose these many atrocities upon us in a democracy. That is evidence enough, surely, of our indifference to beauty, of our “uneducated eyes”. The true answer is political, not aesthetic: it is that these things are not done democratically; they are forced upon us by unaccountable and incorrigible authorities. We need independent organisations such as the National Trust to stand for us against the dark forces of ugliness in our lives.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

March 15th, 2009

Labour bares its appeaser’s teeth to unbending Muslims

Has Jacqui Smith for once done something right? Was our beleaguered “second home” home secretary wise to drive away from our shores the unappealing Dutch politician Geert Wilders? Surely the government has a duty to keep out any troublemakers it chooses, if that appears to be in the national interest. Those who mutter indignantly that the eccentric Wilders is a democratically elected politician in a European Union country miss the point. At a time of real danger no one cares about niceties like that, not even those who are protesting about it. Besides, all kinds of wholly undesirable people have been elected to European parliaments. Being an elected European politician is not the best of calling cards. Those who insist that freedom of speech within the law must be absolute are also missing the point; there are times when public order trumps free speech, as the wildest of libertarians must agree. Careless talk can cost lives and grown-up governments have a duty of pragmatism. So if the home secretary rightly judged that Wilders is a man likely and possibly anxious to stir up serious trouble, then she was right to have him put on the next plane home at Heathrow last Thursday. But did she judge rightly? Or was she guilty of the poor judgment, moral funk and cultural appeasement that we have come to expect of new Labour? Wilders was told in a letter from the Home Office that he is not welcome here because his statements about Muslims and their beliefs “threaten community harmony and therefore public safety”. He may not be entitled to know what that means, but we certainly are. Yet the government has been very coy about explaining. What I think it means was that some British Muslims – enough to cause trouble and bad publicity for the government – would get upset and angry if both Wilders and his film appeared; there were protests worldwide when his film was released in Holland last year and, reportedly, threats of organised protest here. So Wilders was kept away because of tacit threats from some British Muslims who won’t accept criticism of any kind. I don’t think the ban had much to do with the equally, but differently, agitated feelings of the non-Muslim majority: if Smith had considered them, she might have realised that it was equally inflammatory not to let Wilders in. Admittedly Wilders is not the kind of visitor most people would want. It is difficult to avoid thinking the man must be as aggressively silly as his preposterous cockscomb hairdo; he has urged the Dutch government to ban the Koran as “fascist” and he is facing prosecution there for incitement to hatred and discrimination. He seems to be entirely the wrong man to make a balanced, thoughtful case about anything. But freedom of speech is not only for the sensible. And there seems to be no suggestion that his film Fitna breaks any laws here. Indeed it has, in his absence, been shown to a tiny audience in the House of Lords, without any interference from the police. Many of those who so passionately denounced Wilders’s film here last week haven’t actually seen it. We can only suppose, therefore, that their indignation was fuelled by a desire to display anti-racist credentials. David Miliband, our gaffe-prone young foreign secretary, was quick to point out that Fitna is “ a hate-filled film designed to stir up religious and racial hatred and is contrary to our laws”. But he then had to admit that he hadn’t seen it either. I have seen the film, twice. It is very short and anyone can find it easily on the internet. It did not strike me as contrary to our laws, stringent though they now are, and no one but Miliband seriously makes that claim. It is unsophisticated and one-sided and likely to upset people, yet I do not think it is factually untruthful. It juxtaposes certain texts from the Koran, commanding the faithful to kill infidels, apostates, homosexuals and so on and to take over the world, with news footage of Islamist terrorists carrying out these commands and film of Islamist supporters cheering them on. Admittedly the film does not try to distinguish between Islamist terrorists and ordinary law-abiding Muslims, or to show how Muslims have lived together peacefully with others all over the world for centuries. So Fitna is extremely unbalanced and, in that sense, misleading. However, what the film does show are precisely the things, I believe, that deeply worry a lot of non-Muslims. Again and again we are told that Islam is a religion of peace and equality; how does that tally with some of what the Koran says? What makes such anxieties really toxic is the feeling that they are suppressed and ignored by our government. Critics of Islam, however reasonable, know they are likely to fall foul of the many new Labour laws against freedom of expression, in particular against incitement to religious hatred, which was enacted under Muslim pressure. Yet despite these laws, which silence critics of Islam, Muslims are allowed to teach views that are illegal in public mosques. The awkward truth is that certain teachings in the Koran are against the law in this country – teachings about homosexuality and the position of women, for example. In some places the Koran and some other Muslim teachings are sexist, homophobic and likely to incite religious hatred. To call the Koran “fascist” as Wilders has done is stupid, empty and needlessly offensive. However, to say that some of its teachings, taken literally, are unacceptable in this country is merely to report a fact. Wilders’s visit was a disastrously missed opportunity. Keeping him out will anger many of the silent majority. Had he been allowed in, his silliness would have been exposed. More importantly, thoughtful and sophisticated British Muslims offered to debate his film. They could have discussed publicly what Muslims believe and whether they take literally the bloodthirstier parts of the Koran – although how they square these theological circles is beyond me, as is the mystery of how Christians dispense with the nastiest bits of Exodus and Leviticus. But this was a perfect moment for British Muslims to educate the public about themselves. And it was an opportunity for the government to prove that it is not prepared to appease any threatening minority, but will stand up for freedom and tolerance. But it was an opportunity this government was incapable of taking. It doesn’t even understand the importance of it.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

March 8th, 2009

Her son was betrayed because she’s a writer first, mother second

A family into which a writer is born is a ruined family. That, or words to that effect, is something Philip Roth said many years ago. I have never forgotten it, since it captured so mercilessly the problem of being (or wanting to be) a writer. Writing is about betrayal. Betrayal is what writers do. In the name of the art of fiction, writers ransack not just their own experiences but also the private moments of their parents and siblings and the confidences of their friends and lovers. They listen, they watch, they remember and then they kiss and tell for money and fame. It’s a dirty trade, and I say this as someone who has always felt born to be a writer. Contrary to what many people think, most writers don’t make much up. The curious thing about fiction is that it usually isn’t. Perhaps most writers can’t invent very much – it is, after all, difficult, and a great imagination is much more rare a gift than a lucrative way with words. Not surprisingly, those close to writers often feel furious about the betrayal of their private lives for the writer’s gain. Even the greatest writers have outraged their families with their disloyalty. This is something I have thought about often, while busily not writing novels because of it. Not to write, or not to betray – this is a real dilemma for the writer. And I was reminded of it forcibly last week when Julie Myerson, the novelist, gave an interview explaining that her new novel, The Lost Child, is in fact about her own teenage son. According to Myerson’s account, when her son was just 17 she and her husband threw him out of their house, changed the locks and told him he was not welcome. They took this painful decision, she explained, because he was addicted to skunk, abusive, sometimes violent and a threat to their younger children. She and her husband felt the only solution, if he wouldn’t change his ways, was to cast him out altogether. Fortunately he was taken in by the parents of a schoolfriend. Although my opinion of novelists is not high, I was astonished by this. This isn’t even an understandable case of the writer’s dilemma; there is no dilemma here. For a woman to cast out her adolescent son and then to write a novel about it, and then to announce to the world that the troubled, destructive boy in her so-called fiction is in fact her son, is a comprehensive betrayal. It is a betrayal not just of love and intimacy, but also of motherhood itself. Unsurprisingly, the son’s account is very different from his mother’s and he – now 20 and still estranged – has responded with angry interviews of his own. “There is a very big difference between smoking a spliff and being a drug addict,” he says. “Basically, my parents are very naive and got caught up in the whole US anti-drugs thing . . . They are very naive people and slightly insane. They overreacted.” Whatever the truth in all this, however, it is not important. What’s important is that Myerson’s son firmly denies he gave his mother permission to publish this book about him, whatever she may say; he feels she has exploited his personal life to make her book sell. Even more important is the fact that Myerson gave herself permission to write about him; even if he had agreed, even if she thought he had agreed, she as his mother should not have let herself give in to what she herself called her “guilty impulse” to expose her own young, vulnerable and needy child. A mother should above all protect her children, not least from her own ambition. All writers, good and bad, want to reorder the world by imposing their own narrative upon it, in the process distorting other people’s. That’s hard enough for an adult to accept, even in a great novel. To a young son it must seem monstrous. In writing about her son at an age when adolescent boys struggle most to establish their own identity, she has superimposed her story on his for as long as her book is read, exercising a form of maternal control. There are several standard lines of defence that writers use when under attack. The first is that the novel is fiction. Any resemblances in it to real people and real events are coincidental. However, Myerson has jettisoned this defence by choosing to come out in public and explain that her novel is indeed about her son. She has resorted instead to the public-interest defence, which in her words is that “people need to know”. I cannot imagine how a mother could persuade herself that any needs of unknown strangers in WH Smith could mean anything at all in comparison with the obvious needs of her own child – a boy who by her own account was terribly troubled, disturbed and under the influence of drugs, who needed help then and who now, presumably, needs to recover from this trauma on his own terms. “People need to know this happens to families like ours.” But we all know that already. Everybody knows that terrible things such as drug abuse, psychological abuse and madness happen all the time to families just like everybody else’s. It is the characteristic narcissism of a writer to assume that her experiences are highly unusual, or indeed that the public imagines her family – insofar as anyone has heard of it – to be above such common problems. Myerson persists in her attempts at justification by public good works. “When we were in our darkest, loneliest place,” she said, “it would have been helpful to have read a book like this.” Actually, there are quite a lot on the market already. What’s more, if her plan was to write a helpful how-to novel – a curious genre – it would have been every bit as helpful if she had not outed her poor boy, but just not so much of a bestseller. Another defence is the one hastily offered by Myerson’s publicist: “Julie hopes people will refrain from making any judgments until they have read the book, from which they will see that she loves her son very much.” I don’t doubt that she does, but clearly she doesn’t love him enough not to publish – the real test of the heart for a writer. Writers are often as loving and kind as anyone else, except when it comes to writing; when the muse calls or when they taste the drug of literary success, they turn from Dr Jekyll into Mrs Hyde, from woman into werewolf. It is an intermittent professional deformity. Writers may not always be wreckers, but I think people should be very wary of them. Of us.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

March 1st, 2009

Send the filthy rich culture packing – with no pension

The filthy rich, as Peter Mandelson affectionately calls them, are different. It is not just that they’re rich but that there’s something about being extremely rich that blurs ordinary perspective in all but the most exceptional people. Power may corrupt, but extreme wealth blinds and deafens. One of the many glaring pieces of evidence for this, available in abundance these days, is the inability of Sir Fred Goodwin to see himself as others see him, or to see his astonishing payoff as others see it. Fred the Shred quite clearly does not feel any of his vast pension pot is undeserved, even though he presided over record losses at the Royal Bank of Scotland. He is not ashamed to demand huge sums of money, as of right, from taxpayers on low and modest incomes; he seems to feel they ought to reward his incompetence. Thoughts of shame or making amends don’t seem to enter his mind. He even feels he has made several sacrifices or “gestures” in his severance agreements, which squares it. In this, Goodwin displays the same plutocratic blindness as another top banker currently receiving unwelcome public attention – Eric Daniels, the chief executive of Lloyds, who, defending bonuses in front of the Commons Treasury committee last month, appeared to consider his annual salary of more than £1m as “modest”. When asked why banks such as Lloyds, rescued by the taxpayer, should pay any bonuses at all, he said that “the recipients of bonuses that I am referring to are people like you and me. They have relatively modest salaries”. Modest? Like you and me? Not. Like Goodwin, Daniels appears to have parted company with reality as most of us see it. I can well imagine that Daniels may have felt a bit peeved at times by the thought that there are lots of bankers and businessmen out there who are indeed paid hugely more than £1m a year. He must meet them constantly at smart parties and convocations of the great and the good in sunspots. It must be quite irritating. No doubt Goodwin, too, knows lots of people who can expect to retire on a great deal more than £693,000 a year; I don’t suppose that puts him near the top of the league at all. A man could almost feel hard done by under such circumstances. That is what happens when you are surrounded by people who get paid such enormous sums – when you live in the world of the filthy rich. I first came across the filthy rich just after I was married and went to live in Hong Kong in the 1970s. Leaving poverty-stricken Britain, my husband and I joined a gold rush of bankers and brokers to what was then still a crown colony. What we saw was wealth and conspicuous consumption beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. When I look back it seems like a dream – yachts and junks with boat boys, diamonds, gold, jade and bling, extravagant Chinese banquets, servants with bare feet and pigtails, pink and gold Mercedes, racing, gambling, water-skiing, jetting about and generally getting through loads of money because there was plenty more. Though we weren’t extremely highly paid, we spent a lot of time with people who were. Some were entrepreneurs and others were employees of banks and trading houses that, as today, offered them ways of making megabucks. Soon it became obvious that being very rich is like catching an insidious virus. Some people are able to resist it, but with most people the super-riches virus burrows into your nervous system for life. It blurs your perspective, weakens your grasp on reality and changes your identity into someone who is entitled to be very rich. When we left this vanity fair, gladly in my case, the man who took over my husband’s job there in a merchant bank was Paul Myners. Since his Hong Kong days he has been an outstandingly successful fund manager and nonexecutive director and has made a lot of money. He was advising the government on pensions in the private sector recently until he resigned to take ermine and become a minister. Lord Myners now finds himself in a spot of bother with Fred the Shred, though there has been no suggestion that he has acted improperly. It now seems that the precise terms of Goodwin’s huge pension pot payout must have slipped Myners’s attention when as City minister he was overseeing the government’s plans to take control of RBS last October. Myners okayed the terms on behalf of the government, and now explains that he was told by the then RBS chairman that the pension payoff was contractually binding. In fact that was wrong; the board of RBS had some discretion over it. However, Myners did not question this information. The glaring question is why not. He actually knows about pensions. The simple thought that immediately occurred to me – and it is only a theory – is that Myners wasn’t particularly struck by the size of Goodwin’s pension. It didn’t hit his radar as a glaring problem, financially or politically. Had Myners been instantly shocked by the size of it, he would no doubt have asked searching questions (he was once a Daily Telegraph journalist) and he would then have discovered that it was not legally binding on anyone to cough up the whole amount, at least not at that time. But, I suggest, this stonking pension might have struck Myners, in that world of stupendous salaries and bonuses that he knows, as more or less what a top chap might expect. I may be wrong, of course. But I do know things are done quite differently on the parallel planet inhabited by the filthy rich. Remuneration boards unselfconsciously award each other astonishing packages, wrapped up in euphemism. Recently, for instance, Bob Diamond, the highest-paid director on the board at Barclays, defended the bonus culture – Barclays was about to hand out £600m in bonuses to investment bankers – and said he doesn’t like to use the word “bonus”: “I prefer the phrase ‘incentive compensation’.” Compensation? What do these bankers think the word means? A consolation prize for a “relatively modest” salary? Diamond’s “compensation” for 2007 was, incidentally, £21m. The public loathing of Fred the Shred is a distraction encouraged by the government in its wish to bury other bad news along with Goodwin. But his downfall does make certain things clear. The filthy rich culture that has developed in the past 20 years is sick. It needs strong medicine, fresh air, open windows. Above all, what’s needed is a cold dose of fear – fear of failing, of being sacked and of losing the lovely money. Here is an excellent antidote to greed.