The Sunday Times

June 6th, 2010

Fair pay can’t be defined, but still the snoops are after our wallets

There is no such thing as a just price. That is what my O-level history teacher said years ago, shocking me out of my schoolgirl boredom with this startling idea: I had, without thinking, assumed prices were fair, like sixpence for every Mars bar.

At some time in the early modern period, she said, people began to realise that the price is never absolutely right: it is a relative question of supply and demand and, of course, of political constraints and other circumstances. The price of something is what, in those circumstances, people can and will pay for it.

If so, the same must apply to pay; there is no such thing as just pay or fair pay. A worker may well be worthy of his hire, but what does that mean in practice? I was reminded of my late, great history teacher by all the agitated discussion at the moment of fair pay.

David Cameron said before the election that nobody in the public sector should earn more than 20 times what the lowest-paid employee was getting (which would mean a cap of about £200,000). And since the election he has set up a fair-pay review into public sector pay under Will Hutton. Last week there was outrage, in some quarters at least, at the government’s publication of top civil servants’ pay: 170 of them earn a great deal more than the prime minister (£142,500).

Somehow the revelation that John Fingleton, the chief executive of the Office of Fair Trading, takes home between £275,000 and £280,000, seemed to stick in most people’s throats, while those who resent the money being thrown at the Olympics had further cause for grievance in the £225,000 salary of Jeremy Beeton, head of the government’s Olympic executive.

Many people are already horrified at the vast salaries of top BBC executives; it is hard for even the most rugged of free marketeers to understand what Mark Thompson, the director-general, can possibly do to deserve £800,000 or so of public money, plus lavish perks.

Underlying all the anger and resentment, there seems to be a sense that there really is or ought to be a notion of fair pay, and that in the public sector at least it could be achieved. There are plenty of people on the left, politically, who think fair pay could and should be imposed on the private sector too. The pay ratios there, as everyone knows, are vastly greater than in the public sector.

In the FTSE 100 companies the ratio between the highest and lowest pay rates has more than doubled in the past decade to 81:1, while in middling companies it is 34:1. There is disquiet about pay levels in some charities: the trade union Unite has asked Hutton to investigate “glaring pay differentials” in the voluntary sector. Last year Unite publicly objected to the £391,000 annual salary paid to John Belcher, then chief executive at the residential care charity Anchor.

What I think people are really arguing about, unless they are unreconstructed Maoists, is not fair pay, but unfair pay — unjust pay, unjustified pay. It is impossible to come up with a workable notion of fair pay in a free society, but most of us have a lively idea of unfair pay. Starvation wages are unfair. And I cannot be alone in muttering to myself about unfairness at the news on Friday that Adam Crozier, chief executive of Royal Mail, was given a package of £2.4m in his final year with the company, of which £1.5m was a bonus: Royal Mail has not exactly distinguished itself under his command, to put it mildly.

In the new resentment about all this — first prompted by the shocking revelations about bankers’ so-called “compensation” — there are signs of a cultural shift.

A feeling is developing, perhaps in line with the growth in public nosiness, that we should all be told much more about other people’s affairs, including what they earn. The annoying buzz word for this is transparency. The new government is a true believer in transparency — its latest offering at the altar was the public posting on Friday of everything that government spends — the entire contents of the Treasury spending database.

But while transparency about public money and public servants is as welcome as it is proper, it might not be so welcome on all sides if the popular demand for information were to spread to the private sector. That might happen. One or two commentators have suggested that all our tax returns should be made public, as in Sweden. And without going that far, Polly Toynbee of The Guardian, weather vane of the old egalitarian left, hopes that at the least the proposed 20:1 pay ratio in the public sector will “fix a benchmark to nudge the private sector into reform”.

Revealing what private sector employees earn might well have some advantages. For most people — although clearly not for some of the greediest bankers — public exposure is a good corrective. Fat cats may be quite impervious to shame and to other people’s righteous anger, but most people aren’t. A new definition of fair pay might emerge; it is a salary you wouldn’t be embarrassed to have publicly known, either as employer or employee. Before long, under the prurient gaze of public opinion and the scrutiny of colleagues, an individual’s pay would be neither too high nor too low to justify — pay that is not obviously unfair.

All the same, whatever the benefits of revealing private sector pay in public, they are outweighed by the obvious disadvantage. It is an attack on privacy and on freedom.

People entrusted with public money cannot expect privacy or freedom — public scrutiny and state control is in the nature of their work. The same is not true of the private sector; there we are entitled to the freedom and the privacy, within the law and under the eyes of the tax man and the regulators, to make whatever commercial arrangements we like. If we are exploited, there are industrial tribunals.

In times of public resentment and anxiety, it is easy to forget that freedom and privacy are precious. They should not lightly be given up for the sake of something so elusive and intractable as the idea of fair pay. Jobs are not equal, the same job is not equally well done by all employees, employees are not equally good. When it comes to footballers and film stars, people are quite prepared to acknowledge that.

The private sector market in jobs is not entirely free, nor should it be — it’s constrained by social norms, mostly expressed in law — but it should be free of threats to the privacy and freedom of those who work in it, for what they see as pay that is not unfair.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

The Sunday Times

May 30th, 2010

Free schools will mean better schools. Nothing unfair in that

It’s funny how you miss them when they’re gone. I am beginning to feel the lack of John Prescott and the Dickensian quirkiness with which he expressed the true spirit of Labour. Remember “We created the green belt and we mean to build on it”? Last week Two Jags sprang to mind again with his sublime pronouncement of yesteryear on education: protesting against Tony Blair’s city academies programme, he had spluttered indignantly: “If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that’s the place they want to go to” — “they” being the middle classes. That, of course, would be unfair. As ever, this Prescottian ejaculation spoke volumes about the confusion, the conservatism and the angry egalitarianism that have blighted his party, our public services and our schools.

The current outcry against the new government’s new schools policy is very much in the spirit of Prescott: Michael Gove’s ambitious plan to turn all successful state schools into academies and make it easier for people to set up new state sector free schools is something the old left establishment regards with deep suspicion.

Ed Balls, the former Labour schools secretary, claims it will create a “two-tier” education system with the best pupils and teachers being “creamed off” and “poached” for academies and free schools, while money would be siphoned off from existing schools to pay for them and children in struggling local authority comps would be yet further deprived. “I fear”, he said piously, “that it will turn out to be deeply, deeply unfair.”

Luckily, the fears of Balls are balls.

Whatever reservations one may have about the free schools policy, it is not unfair. Anyone not befuddled by the spirit of Prescott need only go through the protests, one by one, to find they are unfounded. (By “free schools”, I mean both academies, existing and future, and free schools set up by parents, teachers and others, because there’s little difference: all will be free of local authority control and largely independent.) The left has always been allergic to independence from the state, on principle and out of self-interest, but in this case it cannot claim that independence means unfairness. The reverse is true.

Most critics say free schools are unfair to children left behind, so to speak, in schools still under local authority control, because the councils would lose money to the free schools that otherwise would have gone to council schools. That is simply untrue. The free schools will be funded directly from government, with the same money per pupil as other local schools get, along with some of the money the local authority normally holds back for services such as payroll and human resources — about another 10% of the total. The council will no longer have to provide those services for free schools, so its net loss should be zero.

Critics also claim new schools are unfair because the capital cost of setting them up — buildings, refurbishments, equipment and so on — would come out of the council’s existing education funds, again reducing its services to its own schools and children. Again this is quite untrue. The capital and start-up costs for free schools would come out of other government budgets.

Unfair, critics insist, to underprivileged children from poor homes: the brightest children and their pushy parents will be “creamed off” by the free schools, thereby reducing standards in left-behind council schools. Untrue. The free schools, like all state schools, will have to abide by the statutory admissions procedure, which forbids selection of any kind (apart from the tiny amount permitted at some specialist schools). Any child can go to a free school, with as good a chance of getting a place as anybody else. A curious proof of the fairness of the system is that parents who struggle for months to set up a free school may find that their own children do not get places in it.

Unfair, critics continue, because the best teachers would be “poached”. There does appear to be some truth in this, but only superficially. It’s true that free schools are able to ignore teaching unions’ collective pay bargaining and therefore can pay teachers what heads and governors think best. Of course that means free schools can tempt excellent teachers with excellent conditions. But council schools could do just the same, if only they dumped collective bargaining and union restraints. It is that, not the freedom to reward good teachers and sack bad teachers, that is unfair and wrong.

Unfair, critics persist, because the neediest children from the poorest backgrounds would be left behind in second-tier schools. And perhaps the most disruptive children would also find themselves there, after exclusion from free schools. That ought not to be true, because of the admissions policy, and free schools ought, with new energies and freedoms and cash incentives, to find new ways of helping such children. But even if it did prove to be true that the most troubled and underprivileged children were left behind in the council sector, that might actually be to their benefit. Such children will bring more money with them to their schools, under the new Liberal-Conservative policy, to help meet their needs; that will make their schools richer. Such schools could specialise and become centres of excellence.

More important, every council exists, surely, above all else to serve those who are most needy. The education department’s first duty, like the social services department’s, is to children who are not thriving in school. Besides, it ought to have occurred to opponents of free schools that idealistic teachers and parents might, as in the private sector, deliberately set up schools devoted to children with various problems, rejected everywhere else. Given a choice, parents would flock to them, as they do in the private sector. The squeamish might detect a faint whiff of selection, but why not in such cases? The government has specifically said it believes the most vulnerable children deserve the best of care.

“Unfair” is the final cry because free schools might be better than council schools — Prescott’s famous argument. That is ludicrous. What is truly unfair is denying all children a chance to go to a better school and stopping the creation of good new schools simply because a lot of children are still at bad old schools — the old socialist vision as memorably expressed by the newly ennobled Two Jags, Lord Prescott.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk Pupils win – no strings attached, News Review, page 7

The Sunday Times

May 23rd, 2010

Name rape suspects and justice becomes the victim

A false allegation of rape can ruin a man’s life. Even if he is tried and found not guilty, he will still remain suspect in many people’s eyes and perhaps at home, too. Rape is notoriously difficult to prove, even when the defendant is clearly guilty, and people always say there is no smoke without fire. So it is almost impossible for a man to survive an accusation of rape without a stain on his name: there will be whispers and worse for the rest of his life. Only a false allegation of paedophilia could be worse.

That must be obvious. So one might imagine that the government’s proposal last Friday to grant defendants in rape cases anonymity until proved guilty would be welcomed. On the contrary, activists in the rape lobby were furious. Ruth Hall, of Women against Rape, angrily described this new policy as an insult. It would stop women reporting rape, she claimed, and reinforce the misconception that lots of women who do report rape are lying.

This is nonsense. The subject of rape has a curious way of making the most rational people throw away the most basic principles of justice and sexual equality as well. Surely the most misandrist of feminists would accept that the principles of equality before the law and equality between men and women are not lightly to be dismissed. After all, equality is what the feminist movement has fought so hard for, and the rape lobby is one of the daughters of feminism. And surely they would agree that the presumption of innocence until proved guilty is a central principle of English law.

What is legal sauce for the goose ought to be sauce for the gander. The law rightly protects women in rape trials from the particular miseries involved; it should equally protect male defendants from the corresponding miseries, because every man is innocent until proved guilty.

Of course the man’s name should be made public if he is found guilty, just as the woman’s name would be made public if he were found not guilty. It is only right that a convicted rapist should face the hatred and contempt people feel for him: that is part of his punishment. The government’s proposal would simply mean that a man faced these penalties only after conviction. It would avoid advance trial by media lynch mob.

It’s very difficult to understand why anybody should oppose such a just reform. Baroness Kennedy, who does, explained on Friday that although it is a principle in law that there should be no anonymity in a system of open justice, a number of exceptions have been made for cases in which the victim is particularly vulnerable, such as those involving children or rape. But surely the male defendant in such cases, if innocent, is also particularly vulnerable. However, Kennedy says to equalise this would be quite dangerous: it would be detonating the principle of openness.

This logic defeats me. Surely the principle has already been tweaked — if not detonated — in favour of women and children, and tweaking it equally for men in such cases would make no difference. Kennedy’s other argument was that public exposure of the rapist encourages other victims to come forward. But under the new policy he would still be publicly exposed, if and when convicted, and with the same effect on other victims. They might be more likely to come forward if they knew a case against him had already been successful.

Clearly what angers the rape lobby (and the rest of us) is that a lot of men get away with rape, either because women can’t or don’t report it, or because the courts can’t or don’t prove it. It is also true that for years the courts and the police were offensively unjust to many of those women who did find the courage to report rapes and subjected them to ordeals almost as distressing as the original attack. But these facts do not justify ignoring the truth that some men are innocent of rape and some women are lying. Even if the numbers are very small, that tiny number of innocent men is entitled to due process and equal protection; that means, of course, extending it to everybody, including the vilest of rapists, as it does to liars.

The rain falls upon the just and the unjust. So should the proper protection of the law.

No one knows, however, what the numbers are. Women against Rape states that false accusations of rape are “extremely rare”. Yet the Stern report on rape complaints, commissioned by the Equality and Human Rights Commission under Harriet Harman and published earlier this year, made it clear that it is not known whether there are more false allegations of rape than for other offences and recommended independent research.

It may well be, as Hall angrily claims, that there is a misconception around that women who report rape are lying. I rather doubt that, but even if there is, police and the courts are no longer allowed to take that attitude and usually don’t. As the Stern report said, “attitudes, policies and practices” among the public bodies concerned “have changed fundamentally and for the better”.

One of the main misconceptions concerning rape is, rather, to be found within the rape lobby about the conviction rate, as Baroness Stern pointed out. Many, many people “in the field” believe that the conviction rate for rape in England and Wales is 6%. Some, she remarks, find this figure helpful as a campaigning tool; others think it dissuades victims from coming forward. But this figure is quite wrong.

The true figure is 58%: that is the percentage of people standing trial for rape who are convicted. It excludes, of course, all those allegations that did not get to court, that may well have been true but were difficult to establish, or possibly mishandled. Nonetheless, it’s very misleading to use a conviction rate of 6% to dominate the public discourse without explanation or analysis, and it has, as Stern drily says, “been to the detriment of public understanding”.

In any case, the numbers, whatever they are, make no difference to the principle of equality under the law. Nor does any failure of public understanding. The law is the law and it should treat men and women equally dispassionately, or equally protectively, particularly in the nastiest cases — such as rape.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

thesundaytimes.co.uk

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The Sunday Times

May 16th, 2010

Waste not, want not: here comes the new austerity chic

Waste not, want not. Make do and mend. A stitch in time saves nine. One slice with marge and one without. There’s plenty of children would be grateful for that bit of gristle. Those were the phrases I heard constantly in my childhood, on the lips of women who had been marked for ever by wartime and post-war austerity Britain. Some even used to say, when confronted with a particularly fat slug on a raggy bit of lettuce, “extra meat rations”. These phrases lasted long after rationing: the anxious habits of hard times are difficult to break.

Women of that generation found it almost impossible to throw things away. It was only in the late 1960s that I persuaded my mother to throw away a large cache of ancient tins of food, which her own long-dead mother had bought during the war, nearly 30 years before. Nothing was too badly frayed or torn to mend, no bit of binder twine or chicken wire too short to save, nothing too useless to be labelled and packed away just in case, no clunking hand-me-down lace-up shoes too hideous for her to press upon her children, even though we were not badly off.

Countless other women and men of those unlucky generations felt just as she did. I am sorry to say that I thought it was all ridiculous at the time. Now, these attitudes will be needed again, as we face hard times in a new austerity Britain. Gordon Brown’s dreadful debt, the banking crisis and the international financial uncertainty all mean that most of us will soon find ourselves a great deal poorer. We are all going to have to make painful cuts in our spending. After years of borrowed plenty, it’s difficult to face.

It was recently reported that in countries such as Latvia and Ireland, where people have very recent memories of austerity and poverty, they have found it easier to accept radical cuts in their salaries and standard of living than Europeans who don’t remember hardship. Experience helps. In this country most people haven’t had such experiences since the 1950s, but there are still people in their eighties who remember austerity scrimping and saving, and many others who, like me, have lived in the shadows of such memories, and with the mentality of making do. My late mother and the dear departed women of her generation would have had several helpful hints for today.

The first would be to consider how astonishingly wasteful we have become. Like the public services, most of us could be far more economical, as they used to say, and even feel better for it.

We should spend less by doing less. Eat less, as they did. Less on the plate, and never left uneaten, less meat, no snacks and much less eating out. Less slathering of olive oil and butter and less overstuffing of sandwiches and competitive cooking. Abandon diets; they are all expensive and time-consuming. Eating much less usually works better and at no added cost. Avoid supermarket pre-prepared food, and imported out-of-season delicacies. Learn how to cook vegetables and discover the protein in pulses and bean curd. Buy seasonal and local food when possible. Sales of tinned corned beef and Spam, the staples of austerity Britain, are already soaring. Buy cut-price items close to sell-by dates and look for slightly damaged fruit and vegetables. Avoid air-conditioning except in heat waves. Turn down the heating: most people’s homes and offices are ridiculously overheated compared with the glacial rooms and schools of my childhood. Avoid train and air travel, unless very important (holidays are important; most jetting-about is not).

It’s much easier to cut back on non-essentials. Buy fewer clothes and forget about fashion; think austerity chic. Have fewer shoes. Exchange good hand-me-down shoes and clothes with friends and their children. Learn to darn and how to make clothes; my daughter wears a beautiful dress my mother knitted during the war, and a 1940s jacket she made out of old brocade curtains. Forget higher body maintenance; we will get plenty by walking and bicycling more to avoid the cost of transport.

Abandon some of all that professional buffing, depilating, exfoliating, waxing, re-energising and massaging at vast expense. However, I believe that for most women over 40, professional hair colouring will be one of the last things to go, as it will be for me. But avoid the more expensive lotions and potions and slap: all these products are pretty much the same.

On the home front, don’t buy all those expensive cleaning products in non-degradable plastic tat: plain detergent, bleach, washing soda and vinegar will see to most household dirt. Avoid silly gadgets, like gizmos to produce square hard-boiled eggs, or battery nose-hair clippers. Above all, don’t throw things away, as we did with abandon in the days of high living: find a new use for them. But when you do buy, buy British.

One thing that will certainly have to disappear is conspicuous consumption. With people facing big pay cuts or unemployment, it will simply be unacceptable to go around showing off a designer bag costing well over £2,000. In 1947, after years of fabric rationing, Christian Dior‘s models wearing 60ft or more of material in “new look” dresses had them ripped from their backs in protest against the outrageous extravagance flaunted in the faces of women long starved of pretty clothes. That mood may well come back.

In some ways it might be rather positive.

Embracing the new thrift might bring on a pleasant feeling of virtue. And there will certainly have to be a new spirit of sharing — one of the sweetest uses of adversity. People will be obliged to share their petrol, their childminding and their best hats. We will have to get together for home entertainments. At any rate, the terrible anxiety we’re now supposed to feel about our status, appearance and taste, and generally speaking the struggle of having it all, will give way to the calm of nobody having very much anyway, or hiding it if they do.

We won’t have to try so hard. Less will be calmer; at least we won’t have to suffer from choice fatigue. The pursuit of status will seem unkind — unpatriotic almost — as will the relentless pursuit of fashion and style: austerity is a great leveller. Waste not, and in the other sense of the word, want not.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk thesundaytimes.co.uk

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The Sunday Times

May 9th, 2010

Cut Scotland loose and then we’ll have a fair voting system

‘Wow,” said a wide-eyed young Liberal Democrat voter babe, staring over my shoulder on Friday at a coloured election map of Britain. “England is, like, totally blue.” How true. Huge swathes of England are Conservative. And, she noticed in the next instant, Scotland is, like, totally red and yellowish gold. Only one single constituency north of the border is blue.

As Alex Salmond of the Scottish National party said in the wee hours of Friday, it is “overwhelmingly clear” that Scotland does not want a Tory government: “I don’t believe they’ve got a mandate to run Scotland from fourth place.” Again, how obviously true. Yet, equally obviously, the Tories have got a genuine mandate to run England.

Last week’s strange election has convinced many voters that our electoral system needs reform. That question will be central to negotiations between party leaders this weekend as they compete for power in these impotent times.

While the psephological sophisticates discuss the arcana of proportional versus alternative voting, I have a simple suggestion that might have democratic appeal all round. And it would not stand in the way of any other electoral reform. It’s simply this: we Sassenachs must say no to the Scots. We must accept that we are united by geography but divided by politics: we cannot vote together any longer.

The reason is again blindingly obvious. As Nick Clegg has pointed out, David Cameron’s Conservatives got the most votes and the most seats. As Cameron himself pointed out, his party got a higher share of the vote than Labour achieved at the last election, when Blair won a majority of 66.

This remarkable Conservative success was won despite the enormous disadvantage that Tories (and Liberal Democrats) suffer from the way constituencies are currently divided, so that they must win far more votes than Labour to win as many seats, as voters now appreciate. Yet despite their success, the Conservatives cannot form a government. Although Labour got a disastrous drubbing, Gordon Brown is still in Downing Street and Clegg, whose political bubble burst, is to be kingmaker. This is, like, so totally wrong.

Look to the map and towards Hadrian’s Wall for both reason and solution. Cameron got 306 seats (against Brown’s 258), just 20 seats short of an overall majority. But Brown’s 258 included 41 from Scotland (out of 59 Scottish constituencies). Without these Scottish seats, the Labour party would have got only 217 to the Conservatives’ 305 and Clegg’s 46 (to which he would be reduced if he did not have his current 11 Lib Dem seats in Scotland).

This injustice could be put right simply by saying politely to the Scots that we would like to separate, psephologically and politically. Let them run Scotland their own way. They are perfectly well equipped to do so. They could even turn themselves into a rich tax haven, a mini Switzerland, given their wealth of world-beating financial services, lawyers and golf courses.

They already entice the super-rich with their castles and grouse moors. And they have their oil wealth, insofar as it belongs to them, their deep-sea ports, their shipbuilding, their IT, their magical Highlands and islands, their arts festivals and an abundance of game, fish and marketable tourist tat.

The Scots have two highly developed important cities and several great universities and medical schools; their intellectual and entrepreneurial tradition is second to none. They don’t need us.

Nor do we need them. Above all, we would be much better off without the notorious Barnett formula; it is obviously unfair that the Scots should receive more public money per head than the English, especially when their taxes and benefits are so different. Let them get on without us.

All the talk during this election about mandates and the people’s voice means little if politicians are still unwilling to admit to the glaring Scottish democratic deficit. At the end of 2006 a famous ICM poll found that 52% of Scots wanted independence from Britain, but also — startlingly — that 59% of the English favoured separation from Scotland. As far as I know there have been no polls about this thorny issue since.

Personally, I have never quite understood the sentimental attachment to the union. Its historical and political underpinnings are clear enough and so much blood and anguish have been spent on the idea of the union that it’s perhaps disrespectful to make light of it. All the same, those emotional ties are weakening and, according to the 2006 ICM poll, particularly among the young.

That may, of course, be because they study so little history these days, but equally it might be a feeling, shared by me, that the union is a political construct whose time is over. The growth of the European Union and this country’s general decline — and perhaps multiculturalism as well — all mean that it is hard to rally fervour round a concept such as a United Kingdom. United we aren’t. And kingdom means less and less, especially to those on the political left.

Years ago I lived and worked in Hong Kong (then still a crown colony) and was at first astonished to hear Chinese people constantly talking about something called “Yoo Kay” and how they longed to get proper Yoo Kay documents. It was several days before I realised they were talking about my country and several weeks before I realised that many of them had no idea what the Yoo Kay was like, or what the initials stood for. It was just the third-best place to go, if you couldn’t get to California or Vancouver — a bit of a disappointment, really.

I love Scotland and have spent many happy summer holidays there. But I can’t help noticing that the Scots don’t love us; some actively dislike the English. The time has come for an amicable divorce, making Scotland no more than a good EU neighbour.

Obviously there would be practical problems, as in any divorce. Defining who is Scottish and who is not (for voting purposes, if nothing else) might be one. But all of these problems could be overcome if there were a mandate to do so. I suspect there is. And that would be, like, so totally super.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

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The Sunday Times

May 2nd, 2010

The best tip for women wanting to have it all is: don’t bother

A wave of sympathy broke over the media sisterhood last week when the writer Allison Pearson confessed in her Daily Mail column that she was suffering from depression and was therefore no longer able to carry on; she said goodbye to her readers. The Guardian was quick to respond with dramatic headlines: “Women on the verge”, “Why do so many women have depression?” and “All too much”.

The drift of Pearson’s column and of the long Guardian piece by Kira Cochrane is that women these days are driving themselves into depression by expecting too much of themselves and taking on too much. The demands of being career woman, domestic goddess, yummy mummy and pillar of family and community are all too much.

According to Cochrane, a recent NHS study found that mental disorders such as depression and panic attacks rose by 20% among women between 1993 and 2007, whereas they did not increase at all among men. “Is it women who are mad, or is it the society we live in?” Pearson asked. “We always suspected there would be a price for Having It All, and we were happy to pay it; but we didn’t know the cost would be our mental health.”

The good news is that Pearson’s mental health does not seem to have broken down completely under the strain of her own perfectionism. She has accepted a demanding new job on another paper, where she will be both columnist and chief interviewer: clearly her depression is not severe enough to be disabling. All the same, she has a point.

Trying to excel on every front is impossible and is bound to drive almost any woman to distraction, if not to serious depression. Pearson’s bestselling novel of 2002, about this very subject, was entitled I Don’t Know How She Does It. My feeling is that I don’t know why she tries — it is bound to end in tears.

Unless a woman has a huge amount of money and help, and perhaps not even then, she cannot do it all. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to do a demanding job, pay attention to family and friends, preserve a competitively toned body, maintain an elaborate beauty programme, including trips to dermatologists, depilators and assorted beauty bandits, keep up with tweets, emails, telephoning and aggressive networking, dress stylishly, shop for food, cook elaborately, entertain regularly, attend school functions, keep up with reading, listen to music and remember jokes. It can’t be done, unless you have a Team Cupcake like Nigella Lawson.

Somehow two things have got confused in all this. The enormous pressure on working mothers is largely unavoidable. But the other is different. It is the competitive consumerism that makes women constantly discontented with themselves and, while it does cause painful pressure, it is largely self-inflicted.

Nor should consumerist distress be confused with mental illness, unless it triggers serious depression. No one asked us to be yummy mummies or Botoxed High Court judges. We try to be because we are competitive, not because we must, and it seems to make many of us miserable.

There is certainly something that can be done about this modern malaise. Women should just stop. I don’t mean they should stop working or having babies or trying to do things they really love. They should just stop being so unrealistic (unless they are very rich). They should do less. Drop their standards. Accentuate the negative.

Fortunately, doing a lot less is quite easy when you try — or, rather, stop trying. It can even be pleasurable, which is just as well because with the coming austerity we will all have to make a virtue of necessity and aspire to a great deal less of everything.

The secret is to look at everything as an opportunity cost. This horrible City phrase simply means you do any one thing at the expense of doing another. You cannot do it all. If you spend the hours between five and seven with a lover or a law report, you won’t be able to give your baby a bath. If you spend a lot of time on competitive cooking, you won’t have much time to phone Granny or touch up your toenail polish. What we need now is to think of giving something up as an opportunity gain. Whether that is to be the lover or the scallop ceviche or the Bank of England quarterly bulletin is a matter only for you.

I have a few suggestions. Never read fashion magazines if they make you feel fat or frumpy or if they make you long for things you can’t be or have. Avoid gossip columns about the beautiful people and ignore anything labelled “lifestyle”, unless it makes you feel good. Such things are intended to whip up insatiable competitive appetites for Prada handbags and Balinese hotel suites and a feeling of acquisitive failure. Don’t read decorating magazines and don’t restyle your home more than once in 20 years. Don’t read the health pages if they make you feel anxious, guilty or ill; they are always changing their bossy advice anyway.

Don’t cook unless you really must: think catering rather than cooking. Give up worrying about frozen or tinned or pre-prepared. Never cook cakes, puddings or cupcakes — they aren’t good for you anyway.

Avoid choice fatigue. Don’t go shopping unless you have to. Give up buying things and keeping things. Don’t have lots of clothes; have only a few that really suit you. Give up any exercise you dislike. Avoid amassing objects — shoes, bags, bracelets, kitchen gadgets and so on; things take up headroom and energy, and time spent wondering which to use, remembering where it is and putting it away later means less time for talking to your teenage son or writing a report.

Stop worrying about skincare and don’t buy more than three or four products. It’s all pretty much the same and I say this as someone who wrote an anonymous column about the beauty bandits for years. Don’t spend time with people who boast, either about their beautiful lives or their talented children. Don’t compare your children with other people’s offspring. Avoid all parents at exam results time. Give up answering the telephone just because it’s ringing.

I have the greatest sympathy for overburdened women. I have all possible fellow feeling for women (and men) who suffer from disabling depression. But I have less, I admit, for people who are suffering from the trials of affluence.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

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The Sunday Times

April 25th, 2010

Careful, Nick, change can be sharp and you’re just a boy

Change. That seems to be the holy grail of this election and of the television debates. David Cameron has been confidently promising it for some time, but suddenly Nick Clegg is trying to grab it from his hands and offer it to us himself. A nasty shock for Cameron, this is even more depressing for Gordon Brown, who cannot after 13 years pretend to offer change at all and has been forced to glower at the two younger, prettier men squabbling on air over who can, while sipping his own poisoned chalice.

Change is indeed in the air: the sudden rise without trace of Clegg, the emergence of a viable third party and the prospect of a hung parliament are all important. But the truth is that politicians are deluding themselves when they try to peddle this or that change and we are deluding ourselves if we believe them. Change will certainly come, both fast and hard, but it won’t necessarily have anything to do with the promises politicians make.

Tony Blair and Brown have discovered this the hard way (and at our expense). They promised enormous change in education, the National Health Service, employment and social equality. And they failed to deliver, despite 13 years of massive expenditure. Unemployment is up, social inequality hasn’t narrowed, education is worse and one hospital even turned away a woman in labour.

More important, the supposedly brilliant Brown failed in his unsophisticated promise to put an end to boom and bust: instead we have truly frightening debt, thanks to his splurge. He, of course, would blame every economic ill on a “global” crisis. But in so doing he only supports my point. Politicians may propose, but something entirely different usually disposes.

One of the biggest changes that has taken place is a sudden realisation of how little anyone knows about most things. The plume of volcanic ash that wafted above us was a perfect metaphor for our cloud of unknowing. We couldn’t predict it, we don’t understand the risks and we don’t know whether it will return. No one predicted the eruption of Clegg or knows whether he’ll just blow over like a puff of hot air. Few people saw the banking crisis coming. Now we are beginning to realise how difficult it is to understand complex economies and societies or to foresee the consequences of political intervention.

Many of Labour’s new social policies turned out to be just experimentation. Sure Start, for instance, was meant to offer directly to the poorest children some of what was lacking in their deprived backgrounds. Instead it developed into a system of pleasant nurseries for the better off, while independent academic research into its results showed that it was achieving almost nothing for the children it was designed for.

Other problems, such as the misery of children in care or the national illiteracy scandal, have defeated this government for reasons it cannot explain and despite all the early promises of change. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan also turned out to be an ill-considered mess, bedevilled by constant mission creep and doubt. What we’ve seen on every front is a mass failure of knowledge, understanding and anticipation and a disastrous, destructive lack of modesty in the face of life’s complexities and uncertainties.

What has been particularly shocking about the banking crisis is that most governments did not know about the risks the money men were taking; nor, apparently, did some of the money men themselves. Earlier this month it emerged that Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, a Goldman Sachs banker and collateralised debt obligation expert, did not understand the highly risky debt packages he himself was creating: he confessed as much in a terrifying email of 2007 to his girlfriend about the imminent collapse of the “system”, describing himself as the “only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab Tourre … standing in the middle of all those complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities (sic)!!!”.

In the painful aftermath, the most brilliant and respectable economists are genuinely divided about whether to deal with debt now or later, how best to regulate banking, or what is the least worst trade-off between tax and public spending cuts — and this, of course, without necessarily allowing for the brute force of vested interests, human error and plain incompetence. The only point on which well informed people seem to agree is that huge numbers of people will probably lose their jobs as neither state sector nor private sector can afford to employ them any longer. The only certainty in public affairs seems to be uncertainty.

In these particularly uncertain times, it is character that matters. It’s impossible to say what will be thrown at the next government, so manifestos hardly matter, except insofar as they show any caution about excessive promises and excessive government. The voter can only really choose the man who seems most likely to show judgment, restraint and courage. So political beauty parades, normally something I hate, do for once have a certain value in this election. Three sessions of 90 minutes’ staring at Clegg and Cameron strutting their stuff — I exclude Brown as someone whose character defects are already as well known as his disastrous debts — do at least give some impression of what they are made of.

Clegg is tall, handsome and agreeable. Standing beside Vince Cable, he has sometimes looked ineffectual and lost, but on his own he has displayed a confident, boyish candour, with a beguiling optimism, possibly due to inexperience. Instinctively I remain unconvinced. Cameron has easy charm too, but he has chosen not to show it in the TV debates: he stands and speaks like a sadder, steelier person, prepared for difficulties. All this is in effect show business, but there’s some truth to be discovered in it. To judge purely from their manner, Clegg is the more appealing. To judge from their attitudes, Cameron seems to understand far more clearly the limitations of what the state can or should do. And that really is the big change we need in politics.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

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The Sunday Times

April 18th, 2010

The army is no place for Private Single-Mum

The story of former Lance-Corporal Tilern DeBique, MySpace glamour puss and soldier single mum, is a cautionary tale that almost defies belief. It would be impossible to dream up a better parody of the idiocy of today’s rights and compensation culture.

DeBique was recruited by the British Army in 2001 from her home on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, came to Britain and became a technician in the 10th Signal Regiment. Only three years into her term of service she had a baby and, without much evidence of a father, became a single mother. At first she left the child with her family in St Vincent, but about a year later brought the baby to Britain to live with her.

Having difficulties with childcare, she failed to turn up on parade, for which she was formally disciplined. Her commanding officer, she complained, told her that the army was “a war-fighting machine” and “unsuitable for a single mother who couldn’t sort out her childcare arrangements”.

Her response was to resign and to bring a case for sex discrimination against the army, claiming she had been forced to choose between her career and caring for her child. For good measure, she made a claim of race discrimination, too, because the Ministry of Defence refused her request to let her half-sister from St Vincent come and live with her on base as a childminder.

The astonishing fact is that DeBique won both cases at an industrial tribunal last year; last week she was seeking £1.14m from another tribunal in compensation for her loss of earnings, loss of army benefits and loss of pension rights, along with £10,000 for hurt feelings — and this at a time when fellow soldiers wounded in combat in Afghanistan receive infinitely less compensation for lifelong disabilities.

What makes DeBique’s effrontery even worse is that the army had most unusually tried to help her by offering her an easy posting for five years at a Dorset garrison with childcare facilities. Unaccountably DeBique refused this exceptionally single-mother-friendly offer and resigned. The one faint ray of common sense in all this is that the tribunal on Friday awarded DeBique only £17,000, if “only” is the right word in this context.

In all this nonsense it is hard to know who is most at fault. DeBique seems to be much to blame. Despite making all this fuss about looking after her little girl, she was, even before she resigned from the army, applying for civilian jobs in Afghanistan. One can only wonder who she imagined would take care of her daughter while she was away or what would have happened to her if she didn’t come back.

The kindest thing one can say perhaps is that she lacks judgment. For instance, she displays herself on her MySpace page as “Sexy T” in a pouting pose on a big brass bed, wearing a see-through top.

Nor was it wise of her to imagine that in her situation she could combine single motherhood with a career in the army. I find it difficult to imagine how any woman can do so, even when she has a husband and extended family to look after her child, particularly if she is sent to a war zone.

Whatever one may think of Debique’s judgment, however, she and her advisers are only playing the system — a system that has come to encourage such unreasonable expectations as rights and to make people lose all sense of proportion — and she can hardly be blamed for grasping what is lawfully due to her, even if it wasn’t quite £1.14m. She did, after all, win her two cases.

That is the great mystery. What on earth was the tribunal thinking of? Any fingers of blame ought to be pointing firmly in that direction.

DeBique’s accusation of racism is simply laughable — the tribunal’s support of it is a perfect example of the mind-numbing panic that the very thought of race induces in those who work in the discrimination industry.

More importantly, how could the tribunal possibly have found the army guilty of sex discrimination in this case? What has it got to do with DeBique’s sex? If anything, it has to do with her single parenthood and her childcare problems, which these days are supposed to be gender-free. And why should the social handicap of single parenthood be something that the army — a fighting machine at war, with not enough resources to equip its soldiers — should be expected to put right? As Major David Laycock told the tribunal: “Part of the military covenant is that the army does come first.”

Surely it is right and proper for army officers to expect soldiers of both sexes to obey orders and appear on duty night and day.

There cannot be any exceptions in military discipline or any allowances made for individuals, not even for mothers. Otherwise we’d have breastfeeding on parade and Sure Start tents for toddlers in Helmand.

The armed services are no place for single mothers or single fathers. I would go further and say they are no place for mothers at all, but I accept that there are women who can make good arrangements for their families and combine motherhood with a total commitment to the army, the navy or the air force and, while they can, they are entitled to do so. When they can’t, they should leave.

Women do often have to choose in civilian life as well between a career and caring for a child. That is not the army’s fault. It should not be the responsibility of the armed forces to move in as childcare managers or social workers or flexitime consultants. Sergeant majors shouldn’t have to kiss any kiddies goodnight. If the law requires it, then the law is an ass.

The armed forces should be specially exempt from equalities legislation where such laws prevent them putting the ethos of the fighting machine first. Special consideration for individuals can and does put that ethos and that harsh tradition at risk. It also points out the silly extremities to which the contemporary obsession with discrimination and equality has brought us all. It is a cautionary tale.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk”The armed services are no place for single mothers or single fathers

The Sunday Times

April 4th, 2010

There is another miraculous tale this Easter – British theatre

Easter is a time of celebration, even for heathens such as me. This time of year brings the first signs of spring, my children’s birthdays, happy memories of Easter egg hunts and family rituals and altogether a feeling that the miserable grip of winter is loosening. And there’s something wonderful still, even for the irreligious, about the punctuation of the year by ancient religious festivals. Humans seem to feel a need for such rituals of the imagination, and that need does not disappear with the loss of a particular faith.

Something else that partly meets that need, and is also true cause for celebration in this country, is theatre. Theatre arises out of religion obviously enough. Professional English theatre developed from the medieval mystery plays performed by craft guilds to teach and celebrate Christian miracles. And now in this country we have theatrical traditions and talents that are truly dazzling.

In the midst of our national self-doubt and economic decline, it is worth remembering that British theatre is a national and international treasure, from the great state-subsidised temples of culture down to the smallest experimental one-woman show under a railway arch. If you cannot honestly celebrate the resurrection of Christ, you can at least celebrate the enduring miracle of British theatrical talent and see a play.

My enthusiasm is the result of having worked for the past couple of years as a theatre critic for the magazine Standpoint.

In the course of my pleasant duties I have to see lots of plays and as a result my feelings of gratitude and national pride keep swelling. I have always liked going to plays, but have now come to feel a much deeper admiration for everybody and everything that goes into getting one onto a stage.

The competition is ferocious. Countless writers, designers, directors, costume makers, artists, actors and all the rest face lives of insecurity, rejection and poverty in pursuit of the holy grail of a real production; the sacrifices they make in the name of their vocation are astonishing. It is often said that ars longa, vita brevis — life is short but art is long. I feel it is the other way around for struggling talents in the theatre: ars brevis, vita longa — life is long and moments of art are all too brief, for artists at least.

As a result of all this competition, it is rare to see a production here that is bad and common to see one that is very good. Even those that don’t entirely work are often full of talent and energy and well worth seeing. Given the ferocious competition that theatre faces from cinema and television, this is truly remarkable.

In the past few months there have been several productions that have given me the sense I had as a teenager of the transformative magic of theatre. One was Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth, the prize-winning writer, now at the Apollo after a successful first showing at the Royal Court. This is a good example — like the equally successful Enron, which is now at the Noël Coward theatre after a big success at the Royal Court — of a new play proving itself first in the subsidised theatre and moving on to commercial success in the West End.

As a result of my recent theatre-going, I’ve become a late-life convert to the idea of subsidised theatre generally, both inside and outside London. Without it we would not have the great blossoming of British drama and all the talent that depends on it, which feeds the success of cinema, television and tourism, to say nothing of feeding the imagination of the general public.

Jerusalem is about England’s green and pleasant land, ancient and modern, centred on a mesmerising gypsy drunk played by the great Mark Rylance. It is truly remarkable. Anyone who has the chance should go and see it — such plays and such performances, even here, are rare. Another production that cast the true spell of theatre was Complicite’s dazzling production of Shun-kin at the Barbican last year. The Barbican is a treasure house of interesting productions and events, many of them international (Shun-kin was performed in Japanese by a Japanese cast).

Another exceptional show at the Barbican, for a few days only last year, was Raoul, entirely designed and silently performed by the mime artist James Thiérrée (a French grandson of Charlie Chaplin). Like Shun-kin, Raoul crosses so many physical and imaginary boundaries that it keeps the audience as raptly intent as fascinated children.

There is almost always at least one good production of Shakespeare in London and regularly outside London, too. The geriatric Romeo and Juliet at Stratford is not to be missed. The most dazzling Shakespeare production I have seen recently was All’s Well That Ends Well at the Olivier last summer; even though it’s an unsatisfactory play, the wealth of imagination that went into creating it in the idiom of a quirky fairy story, which compensated for the weaknesses of the play, was among the best of British theatre. Jude Law’s Hamlet was pretty good, too, and a touching interpretation.

People are inclined to say our theatre is insular, but that is not my experience. Apart from Helen Mirren’s Phèdre last year, in a version by Ted Hughes, I’ve seen several Russian and German plays, including Brecht and Mikhalkov at the National Theatre and Chekhov’s Ivanov at the Donmar, Horvath’s Judgment Day at the Almeida, with a couple in Russian at the Barbican. Bulgakov’s The White Guard, about post-revolutionary Russia, has just opened at the Lyttelton with exceptionally fine sets; when the National lets loose all the talents it has on a production, in the way of set design, lighting, scene shifting, costume, speech coaches and choreographers (not to mention the directors and actors), the result is dazzling.

London Assurance, the early 19th-century comedy at the Olivier, is dripping with talent; two of Britain’s starriest actors, Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw, ham up two comic roles with obvious delight. He plays an ageing effeminate exquisite in search of a rich wife and she plays the indomitable and tricksy Lady Gay Spanker in what is a silly romp — but what a romp.

One can only say, to borrow Dr Johnson’s famous remark, that anyone who is tired of British theatre is tired of life. Happy Easter.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

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The Sunday Times

March 28th, 2010

Science is close to erasing minds; morality will be next

‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain?” asked Macbeth. The answer may soon be yes. Last Thursday the BBC’s Today programme reported the first steps in erasing specific memories from a person’s brain. Neuroscientists are beginning to envisage plucking from the memory a rooted sorrow, in people tormented by traumatic recollections.

Admittedly these were only first steps in experiments on rats, but brain science is making giant strides. Dr Todd Sacktor of the State University of New York described how a certain protein, PKMzeta, plays a pivotal role in the consolidation of memory in the brain, and how by interrupting this process with a drug rather implausibly called ZIP, his team can make rats permanently forget an electric shock they have received. It seems to be a true erasure, he says.

Other scientists have other approaches and other ideas, but it seems that enough is known about how the brain lays down and solidifies individual memories to be able to work on ways of interfering with it.

Like many great scientific advances, this one is beginning as therapy. It is intended to help the countless people tormented by their memories, some of them unspeakable. Only the day before the Today report a Rwandan woman was talking on Radio 4 about the horrifying experiences that survivors of the Tutsi genocide cannot forget, which invade and overwhelm their minds. Most of the details she described are too horrible to repeat, let alone survive with day and night.

Some people, not surprisingly, are driven to suicide. I have always imagined that the suicide of the Italian scientist and writer Primo Levi was an attempt to pluck out the horrors rooted in his memory during the Holocaust, which he found could be done only by ending his life. It would clearly be right to offer to put a gentler end to such horrors, if it could be done safely and precisely.

However, like all extreme scientific change, memory erasure poses serious ethical questions, or will do when it becomes a practical possibility. Most obvious are the doubts it raises about identity. What has happened to us and how we remember it is central to our ideas of ourselves. That’s all too painfully obvious from watching people with dementia slowly losing any sense of who they are. And the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind gives a frightening depiction of what happens when a woman deliberately erases her memory of a love affair. One should not lightly interfere — or let anyone else interfere — with the foundations of our identities.

Even so, it seems at first obviously right to use this science to relieve serious suffering, though even that might cause problems. The survivors of genocide and atrocities or high-school shootings have unquestionable rights to relief, but those who inflicted their pain may also be suffering. After all, Macbeth’s question is about Lady Macbeth, who has been driven to distraction by the blood on her hands and is certainly suffering torments. But it is doubtful whether she, or other murderers and torturers, should be relieved of the pain of their guilt.

Just as memories are essential to identity, so memories are essential to morality. Without memories of experiences of good and evil there can be no moral learning and understanding. Something forgotten is something that never happened and never made any moral difference. Forgetting is a kind of bogus innocence. Though a woman whose baby has been hacked to death in front of her has nothing to learn from that memory, for the man — or the boy — who did it, that same memory could bring its own punishment and might, perhaps, lead to repentance and understanding. It is not something he should be relieved of.

No doubt (to take a hard case) the African child soldiers, forced to do unspeakable things by their kidnappers, would prefer to be rid of their atrocious memories. But however much sympathy one has with these children, it seems to me questionable whether it would be right to allow them to erase all such memories.

That is because memories are not only personal. There is such a thing as cultural memory or folk memory, to which individual memories all contribute, and there are things that cultures perhaps should not forget. The people with guilty shared memories are legion. To refuse to remember is to deny responsibility — a well-known psychological defence mechanism. It is bad enough when individuals do it but when whole cultures are able to do it they are at risk of committing the same crimes again.

For this reason, painful though it is for generations of Germans born during and after the Nazi period, many people outside and inside Germany are determined to keep the memories of the Holocaust and the two world wars most vividly alive. By popular consent, nobody is allowed to forget.

These unspeakable memories are valuable.

It is horrifying that in China there is a growing tendency to forget the horrors of Maoism and even to restore Mao to something of his former divinity. Similarly there are reports of revisionism in Russian history teaching, airbrushing the facts of the Stalinist terror. Popular memory is being deliberately adjusted and partly erased; it is something that totalitarian regimes have done time out of mind; now, with modern communications, they can do it effectively.

In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera describes a historic moment in 1948 when the communist leader Klement Gottwald comes out onto a triumphal balcony over the Old Town Square in Prague, to announce to the nation the beginning of communist Czechoslovakia. Standing next to him is his ally Vladimir Clementis. It is cold and Clementis generously puts his own fur hat on Gottwald’s head. The party propaganda machine spews out hundred of thousands of copies of this uplifting image. But before long Clementis is denounced, hanged for treason and airbrushed from the photograph.

As George Orwell put it, in his analysis in Nineteen Eighty-Four of the manipulation of public memory, Clementis becomes an unperson. All that remains of him for posterity is his fur hat on Gottwald’s head.

The point, as Kundera writes, is that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. The same could be said of the struggle of the self against obliteration, or of morality against chaos.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk