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.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

February 22nd, 2009

I’ll spell it out: if children can’t read, lives are ruined

This country’s education system is a betrayal of this country’s children. It blunts their intelligence, narrows their perspectives and blasts their future prospects. How often does that need to be said? Of course it is not universally true; many children defy the system, one way or another. But the point is that the system is bad. If the word “institutionally” means anything, this country’s education system is institutionally unfit for purpose. Those who assume that I am exaggerating, as columnists do, should consider the interim report published last week by the Cambridge Primary Review, the biggest independent inquiry into state primary school education in England for 40 years, led by Professor Robin Alexander. After three years of exhaustive research by his team, he says “our argument is that [primary school children’s] education, and to some degree their lives, are impoverished if they have received an education that is so fundamentally deficient”. At last a knight in shining educational armour seems to have come galloping over the hill. His review finds that the curriculum has been politicised, that the education department and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority have been excessively prescriptive in their micro-management of schools, that their focus on “literacy” and numeracy and testing has squeezed out other learning, and that children are being denied a broad and rich curriculum – with history, geography, music, art and drama the greatest losses. Alexander insists the arts and humanities “help to hold the line between civilisation and philistinism” but “in these severely utilitarian and philistine times” this argument “no longer cuts much ice”. Fundamentally deficient. Impoverished. That’s telling them. The government is understandably furious. However, the professor’s armour is not quite so spectacularly shining as it might be. I feel he is missing some centrally important points. Of course we should return, as he says, to a broad, rich, varied curriculum tailored to the individual child and its ability. Of course it’s wrong to harry children though a narrow and painful thicket of pointless and politicised exams. Of course it is a tragedy that we are becoming a nation of philistines. However, there is no point in proposing a wide and imaginative course of study for children who cannot read well. A child who cannot read well cannot learn. He or she cannot possibly share the riches of a wide education or the freedom of the literate mind to teach and enrich itself when others can’t or won’t. And the reason our schools fail so badly, the reason teachers teach narrowly to the dubious “literacy” tests, is that they have failed to teach little children to read properly in the first place. That failure is what originally prompted all the hated micro-management from both political parties. Politicians just wanted to stop the rot in schools. The cure – extreme interference and its unintended evil consequences – may have proved to be as bad as the condition, but both Conservative and Labour governments had good intentions. The Conservatives’ national curriculum and league tables and then new Labour’s minute-by-minute intrusion into every school and into every teacher’s head were efforts to highlight and to resist the mysterious forces of educational failure. These forces have somehow defeated the government’s best intentions. Children are still leaving their primary schools without being able to read properly, which means they are ineducable. There is constant dispute about figures and definitions, but it’s now commonly agreed that 20% of children leave primary school unable to read at the appropriate level for their age and that in many inner-city problem schools up to 40% of children arrive at 11 with a reading age of less than nine. It’s like putting a child who can’t swim into the deep end of a pool. Those who can’t swim, sink, as we see. Evidence that I am not exaggerating comes, again, from an earlier report put out under the umbrella of Alexander’s Primary Review. In 2007 a study questioned whether the “massive investment” in national literacy and numeracy strategies for primary schools had produced value for money by raising standards. Professor Peter Tymms and Dr Christine Merrell, two researchers at Durham University, argued that the rise in standards claimed by the authorities could simply be the result of teachers tailoring their teaching to the test. Worse still, the study suggested the results of the tests were often wrong anyway. As many as one in three primary school 11-year-olds (about 200,000 children) may have been awarded the wrong grade in their all-important maths and English national curriculum tests. This undermines the government’s claims that standards in the three Rs have gone up. To return to the central question, why do so many children read so little and so badly, there are some glaringly obvious answers. First of all they are not being taught to read – to decode – words in the quickest, most efficient, most teacher-proof way. Every child, apart from a minuscule minority with serious disabilities, can learn to decode words through any good system of synthetic phonics – CAT spells cat. The huge resistance to this idea in the educational establishment is a constant mystery to me. Another reason for this failure is that teachers are all too often not taught in their training how to teach children to read. There are also some very poor teachers around. And as any head teacher knows, it takes a lot of time, courage, persistence, money and support from the LEA to sack them: there’s every incentive to leave a bad teacher in place. But it takes only one bad primary school teacher to ruin a child’s chances for life. Last week the head of admissions at Cambridge University said very publicly that state school children are being handicapped academically by poor-quality teachers. Finally, the government’s many reading schemes are rather dubious. And the reason, once again, is the deeply ingrained resistance at all levels in the education world to phonics. The original national literacy scheme, with its literacy hour, was undermined from the start by those determined to use several different reading systems as well as phonics. The Every Child a Reader scheme and its vastly expensive Reading Recovery initiative (£5,000 per child per year) are very questionable. What’s needed is a radical review of all these schemes. Until then, wishes for educational utopia will remain just that.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

February 1st, 2009

Watch out, quangocrats – our patience is running out

Beware the fury of a patient man, as the poet said. The British are patient, surprisingly so. We are slow to fury, and slow to public demonstrations of rage, unlike the French, who are quick to man and woman the barricades, as we saw last week in the mass demonstrations all across France. But we too are capable in the end of fury, as we also saw here last week, and when British patience is finally thoroughly exhausted, and when British fury is really aroused, I suspect we will see widespread public unrest. The author of those famous words about the fury of the patient was John Dryden, writing only 30 years after the end of the English civil war; he saw the beginning of it as a young boy of 11. Dryden’s warning that rage which has overcome years of patient repression will then burst out with particular fury makes all too much sense. Last week hundreds of workers all across the UK rallied together in demonstrations, sympathy strikes and walkouts. They were protesting about the employment of foreign workers at an oil refinery in Lincolnshire, and about the betrayal of Gordon Brown’s empty and dishonest promise: “British jobs for British workers”. Angry faces appeared on television, talking with a rage that I haven’t seen for 30 years. Public sympathy for these workers may be muted, even though many other people are now afraid for their jobs. Fellow feeling is undermined by the fact that it is not illegal to employ EU workers here, that many British workers get employment abroad, that protectionism is not good for the economy and that an employer has a right within the law to make the best contract with the best workers, painful though that may be to some. However, even though this uprising has failed to arouse much public indignation, except among those closely concerned, there are other things that certainly will. Sooner or later these things will exhaust the patience of great masses of people, and rouse them to profound anger. I don’t mean the repeated lies of the government, or the folly of a prime minister who appears not to understand the destruction he has brought upon us, or the shameless greed of the bankers who have ruined us, or the corruption of parliament, the profligacy of Eurocrats, the rape of the voting system, though there is enough of it about to make us all feel sick with fury. Those things don’t exactly have a great unifying theme, a clear indication of Them and Us. The people responsible are all over the place; they don’t have an easily identified status, occupation and address at which to direct united public fury. There is one group that does, however. It is the vast and growing army of state sector workers – public servants, civil servants, whatever you call them: I mean the actual providers and arrangers of public services. You can find them in any town hall or local authority premises and in the bloated offices of quangos. Of course, I know that some of them are indispensable and truly inspiring and we are all grateful to them – good nurses, social workers, doctors, teachers and good administrators as well. Others are pretty much good enough, and conscientious. But there are all too many who are not. Whoever they are, however, and whatever they do, these public servants are distinguished by three facts, unique (when united) to them: first, the taxpayer pays for them, second, their jobs and their pensions are protected (by the rest of us) and third, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to sack them. Some of them do crucially important things, and some of them do those important things well; but many of them do important things badly, and a lot of them do things that do not need to be done at all, least of all at public expense, and with impunity. Think of those transgender sexual inclusion outreach workers, that potato promotion quango and the irresponsible mentality that promotes such waste. Predicting public unrest is usually best avoided. All the same, I’d like to put a case in which one might well expect it. (Supporting evidence available upon request, or indeed upon regularly following the news or looking at the TaxPayers’ Alliance website.) If, for example, very large numbers of state sector people are indeed doing wasteful non-jobs, which we don’t want to pay anyone for doing; if the government keeps on creating these jobs despite constant, informed protest; if so many state sector people are so deeply, institutionally incompetent and yet very rarely face the consequences of their failure and indeed can sue for large payoffs (as in the case of Baby P in Haringey); if they get secure pensions and security of employment; if they can take early retirement; if they do regularly take such very early retirement on full pensions; if more and more of them are getting as good as or better pay than private sector workers; if our earnings will soon be very highly taxed to pay for public sector pensions; if (unlike public sectors workers) we are forced to carry on working, in any job we can get, by the disappearance of our pensions and savings; if therefore our retirements will be impoverished while theirs are safe; if they in their swollen numbers vote for the government that hires and backs them, depriving us of political redress; and, finally, if we are in the beginning of a very serious long-term recession, and Britain faces the highest debt in Europe as a result of throwing many billions at the public sector, without very much result, then what would you expect? A sense of Them and Us? A sense of institutionalised injustice? A sense of something wholly unacceptable? The kind of thing that drives a patient man or woman to fury? I think so. Let’s not exaggerate. This is not Zimbabwe or even Italy. This is a free and and relatively honest country. It is true that we are fast slipping down all the international league tables of things that matter, but ours is still a good country. However, non-jobs and make-work in our state sector are a terrifying waste of public money, and, worse than that, they lead to more of the same. Those who deny this should look carefully into all the “positions” that any town hall or any quango is filling or creating. I can hardly believe the point still needs arguing. These things are a national threat in themselves. What’s more is that the whole state sector is institutionally incompetent and institutionally unfair to the rest of us. We may not continue to be patient about it. Those who impose it upon us and those who are part of it should beware.

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

January 25th, 2009

Our best hope is that Barack Obama can resist the rabble-rousers

Life is blighted by the tyranny of the urgent over the important, as someone said. That is why, at the time of Barack Obama’s global triumph in Washington, I wasn’t watching the proceedings live on television but dealing with some urgent minor errands. It was very annoying, particularly when someone asked me why I wasn’t sitting enraptured in front of a television somewhere. Without thinking I replied that it wasn’t really important anyway: I was sick and tired of all the hoopla. Then I realised I wasn’t just being irritable: I really meant it. I don’t mean that I am sick and tired of Obama. On the day when he was elected as the future president – more than 11 weeks ago now – I felt just as much joy as many millions of other people. The happiness of that moment hasn’t faded, nor has the reminder that politics can occasionally throw up someone who appears to be truly inspiring. What has changed is that the public good feeling has, one way and another, been whipped up, day after day, into an excess of feeling. Excessive emotion, particularly the inflated emotion of the crowd, is something that should always be distrusted, especially in politics; there are plenty of sombre historical reasons for such misgivings. By the time Obama’s inauguration day had finally arrived, these feelings had in many places reached a pitch that was almost hysterical. Quite apart from the razzmatazz all over the United States, people in this country had been behaving for days as if we were about to witness the second coming. The hysteria was particularly marked among journalists and commentators, who were gripped by Obama mania. Those who couldn’t actually persuade their bosses to send them to Washington wrote think pieces in the tones of humble acolytes in a sect. Those who did get to America seemed to think the British public really needed to be exposed to hour upon hour of excited, repeated, boring, trivial detail; it was almost pathological. And squillions watched. At the same time as losing their hearts to Obama, masses of people seemed to be losing their heads. The media have played an enormous part in this; it is dangerous. It is true that some people have publicly and privately pointed out that Obama, however remarkable, cannot walk on water and it is a mistake to encourage any expectation that he can. But that hasn’t stopped the hyperinflation of mass expectation and mass feeling, both over there and over here. There seems to be in the darker recesses of the human pysche a constant yearning for hero worship. No ordinary mortal, however exceptional, can meet the requirements that mass adulation makes of a hero, and when he hesitates or fails, the risk is that the masses will turn to equally irrational extremes of anger and disappointment. Such worship is likely to turn a person’s head, too, and tempt him to imagine that perhaps he might walk on water and should be treated accordingly. If anyone can resist – and perhaps restrain – such mass adulation, it is probably Obama. No blame attaches to him, I believe. His inauguration speech struck me as a heroic model of self-restraint. Although Obama can speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and has given speeches of heart-stopping, almost classical rhetoric on the campaign trail, he chose not to use his power. At such a tempting moment for a great orator, he chose not to stir up the passionate feelings that it needed only a touch of his honeyed voice to arouse. Instead he spoke gravely of the power that lies in humility and restraint. In the context it was positively un-American and it was wholly admirable. It was exactly the corrective tone of voice that was needed, which a lesser man might not have been selfless enough to use. Imagine, to suggest a ridiculous comparison, what a man like Tony Blair would have made of such a moment. He would have taken off into the ether on the wings of mindless poesy. I’ve always thought that what went wrong with Blair was his seduction by American presidential glamour, by the machismo of the motorcade, the great power of all that mass attention. I think that as soon as he got to Bill Clinton’s Washington, the unsophisticated boy from Islington was corrupted by the thrill of outriders, snipers and surround-sound imperial razzle-dazzle on a world stage; it turned his head, with results that we now know. There is a great tradition in British thought, to which Obama is heir, just as he is heir to the disciplined classical rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln, of not saying more than you mean. One of the most famous expressions of this restraint was given by Shakespeare to Cordelia in King Lear. When her vainglorious father demands to know how much she loves him, she will say no more than is strictly true: she will not exaggerate to advance her own interests. “According to my bond, no more no less,” she says. Her sisters make overblown protestations, but betray him. Cordelia remains quietly loyal. This is the honourable tradition to which Obama seems to belong. The opposite tradition, which informs so much of the media and politics, is excess – an excess of exclaiming, promising, demanding, mythologising, misunderstanding, mindless gabby ignorance and general emotional incontinence. Look on the blogosphere – Obama has been subjected to all this in unprecedented volume. The new president faces problems at home and abroad that may well be insoluble. He is very inexperienced and most of us know little about him. Historically speaking, few individuals make a difference for the better, yet individuals in power can and do constantly make terrible mistakes for the worse. Whatever Obama’s virtues, the truth is that no president could possibly be sure what to do about the global financial crisis. Even the wisdom of Solomon could not decide what Washington could or should do about Gaza, or Afghanistan, or Iran’s nuclear capabilities, or North Korea’s, or world poverty, or domestic debt, or drugs, or the American poor. And even if anyone knew what should be done, it might still be impossible to do very much. The almost religious expectations laid upon Obama will necessarily be disappointed. That is why the hysterical hoopla that has built them up is indeed important, because it is dangerous. We’ve had the circuses, the masses will soon say. Now we want the bread. And what will happen to the emperor who cannot provide it?

The Sunday Times, Uncategorized

November 30th, 2008

Parents of a Down’s child must make painful choices

Eugenics is one of those knock-down words used to silence argument. It was used several times last week, in radio discussions and articles about women choosing to give birth to babies with Down’s syndrome. The subject came up partly as advance publicity for a Sky Real Lives television documentary this Wednesday about a heroic young woman who adopted seven babies with Down’s, whose mothers had rejected them. There was also a BBC news story last week suggesting that more women these days are knowingly choosing to give birth to babies with Down’s. In fact the news story was misleading. Actually, the proportion of pregnant women who choose to abort their foetuses when antenatal screening has detected Down’s syndrome has remained constant since screening started, at about 91%. Also the number of Down’s abortions has tripled since 1989. The total number of babies born with Down’s each year has indeed increased since then, but not by much. This small increase may be due in part to the fact that many women have children when they are much older these days, and some of them refuse antenatal screening. This misleading news story provoked an impassioned response. Several parents of babies and children with Down’s, and representatives of pressure groups, said publicly how much love and happiness such children bring, despite any “challenges”, and how they can, with support, live happy, independent lives. More or less disguised was a strong tone of moral disapproval of anyone who feels that the birth of a Down’s baby is a misfortune, to be avoided if possible. Hardly anyone now dares to say so. The word “eugenics” is often used by Down’s lobbyists to make the nasty suggestion that people who think it is right to abort a foetus with a Down’s diagnosis are as bad as Nazis. This is argument by abuse. I protest out of long personal experience. Someone close to me in our family has a learning disability, which has been a handicap and a sorrow to her, and my lifelong experience of children and adults with learning disabilities, including many with Down’s, as they have grown older has given me a different perspective. I am convinced that it is a grave misfortune for babies to be born with Down’s or any comparably serious syndrome. It’s a misfortune for their parents and their siblings as well. Sad observations over decades have convinced me: a damaged baby is a damaged family, even now. I resent the moral condescension of those who claim that people who think like me are not only wrong but hateful; there have been vicious attacks on me in the blogosphere by disability-lobby extremists. My point of view does not make me a heartless eugenicist. For one thing I do not think that any woman should be pressed, for any reason, to have an abortion. To do so would be wrong. She must be free to choose and free to make a bad choice. What’s more, I firmly believe that people with disabilities should get all possible help and understanding to lead fulfilling lives, from society in general and from the taxpayer. My belief that certain foetuses would be better not coming to term has nothing, logically, to do with my belief that everything possible should be done to help babies who do come to term and are born among us to share our imperfect world. There are some strange contradictions surrounding the question of abortion. People who reject abortion as always wrong are consistent and one cannot argue with them. But anyone who thinks abortion is acceptable under some circumstances, and who yet disapproves of what’s emotionally seen as “eugenic” abortion, is in an untenable position. After all, people accept abortion for certain “social reasons”, and what more powerful “social reason” could there be for an abortion than the virtual certainty that the foetus would be condemned to a life of frustration, disappointment, dependence, serious illness and poverty, to the great sorrow and hardship of its family? I listen with amazement and sadness to new parents of Down’s babies describing a rosy future of love, acceptance and independence (with “support”, of course). The truth is, though people are too compassionate to point it out, that support is in short supply and is expensive. With or without it, Down’s children face a future blighted by low or very low intelligence and by a high risk of heart defects (30%-50%), intestinal malformation, leukaemia, kidney and thyroid disease, poor hearing and vision and early-onset Alzheimer’s (25% as opposed to the normal 6%), as well as increased chances of diabetes and seizure disorders, including impaired executive function. In a hyper-sexualised culture that worships bodily perfection, beauty and sexual success, adult life is also bound to be painful for people with Down’s. When they are babies and children, that may not be a problem. What happens, though, when the Down’s child becomes a teenager, interested in how he or she looks and keen to discover love and sex? It is all too predictable – a growing sense of sexual rejection. Any babies born will be taken away, probably rightly. It is heartrending. In every other way the doors to adult life will seem all but closed, despite everyone’s best efforts to push them open. Without a great deal of help, a person with Down’s will find it hard to get and keep a job. At a time of recession, with social services understaffed and underfunded, there will be little money for social care. Even now there is nowhere near enough money to help everyone with learning disabilities lead a full and semi-independent life. Then comes the hardest question of all – what happens when the parents die? The best of social services can do only so much, and it is never enough. Loving brothers and sisters may help, and help a lot; they may well have to, until they die, though they themselves did not choose to take on such a time-consuming, lifelong responsibility. Most pregnant women instinctively understand all this. That’s why nearly all choose abortion. Those who choose differently should understand they are choosing hardship, perhaps great hardship, for their child and for their other children. This has nothing to do with eugenics and everything to do with the painful complexity of moral choices.