Real men take responsibility

YASMIN ALIBHAI BROWN 

Friday 6 September 2013

Memo to our leaders: real men take responsibility

The people of Britain are heartily sick of macho posturing on the part of public figures

It is more electrifying and unedifying than really mean reality TV. The departed BBC Director-General Mark Thompson and current Trust chairChris Patten could be kids in Channel4’s fly-on-the-wall series Educating Yorkshire.  Come on you two, fess up. Stop this fighting AT ONCE. Oi, you, Markie – stop pulling Christopher’s nose. And you Christopher, don’t provoke him. You’re acting like big babies. Right, on Monday, to the head’s office, both of you. 

Real men, we are told, take it on the chin, do not shuffle off responsibility when bad things happen. Truth is they do.  The more powerful they are, the more likely they are to do a runner or impugn others without a smidgen of shame. Some masters of the universe, eh? 

Chris Patten, grandee and last colonial governor of Hong Kong, reproached everyone else but himself over the Newsnight Jimmy Savile debacle. He hired and fast fired George Entwhistle, a decent man and talented journalist who, new into the job, couldn’t handle the explosive revelations and failures of the corporation. Not the fault of the Guv, none of it.

This July, Patrician Patten insouciantly told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that he was kept in the dark by D-G Thompson about the immoral and unjustifiably high-pay offs to senior BBC executives. The Trust, he said, “would be as interested as you are about why we didn’t know”. Thompson, now the chief executive of the New York Times and a man not to be messed with,  has responded furiously in a detailed, long document.

He rebuffs Patten’s insinuations and accusations, claims the Trust was in on the deals, says he has emails to prove what really happened, and suggests the PAC has been misled by chairman Chris and some trustees. Patten calls Thompson’s assertions “bizarre” and denies any part in the huge payment made to Mark Byford, deputy D-G. Before his time, all that. The impression given is it was not his business. On Monday the two massive, combative male egos will be interrogated by the PAC again.

Other top dogs in our country are scrapping and rowing over the Syrian crisis, instead of coming together to help end one of the worst human disasters ever in modern history. Our Parliament was given the right to vote, a virtuous move by Cameron, whose own instincts have always been to go for military intervention. Parliament voted against such involvement. For being a good democrat and responding to public opinion, the PM was leapt upon by snarling party insiders and the implacable right-wing commentariat.

On cue, up popped warmonger Tony bloody Blair, looking for a fight with Ed Miliband for not backing action. Within days Cameron had turned on the Labour leader and his party and those dissenters or abstainers  in his own ranks – among them the erudite and personable Jesse Norman. The disgrace for Britain is not that we didn’t go for violence to quell violence, but that after the civilised process of sombre parliamentary debating and considered voting, our manly leaders can’t stop bickering.

The same male squabbles broke out in Iain Duncan Smith’s Department of Work and Pensions. His much heralded “welfare reforms” which promised to save millions of taxpayers’ pounds are badly managed, wasteful and thus far a chaotic mess. So says the National Audit Office (NAO). Does the Secretary of State accept the criticisms or apologise for personal or departmental failures? Is this a serious question?

When he talks incessantly like a manic preacher about the importance of taking responsibility, he means the little people, not the ruling elite. IDS, ex-soldier in Rhodesia and Northern Ireland, is never wrong, never weakened by self-doubts, never admits mistakes. His response to the NAO report is to dump on his officials, and in particular, Robert Devereux, the department’s most senior servant. Liam Byrne, his shadow, then lays into IDS with unseemly relish. The poor people squeezed to strangulation by benefit cuts must watch these combating gladiators and wonder how it helps them. 

It’s the same story with tax evasion, financial regulation, policing, risky banking, major failures in public services and government policies. The men in charge pass the buck, make fantabulous excuses, deny wrong doing, argue disagreeably, feel unappreciated and terribly let down by others, act up and never back down. Masculine success means never having to say sorry. (To be fair, a small number of women with power are just the same.) More serious perhaps is the predisposition of leading men to senseless rancour and aggression, even in our House of Commons, which should be a place of dignity, respect  and rational discourse.

On Monday, when Patten and Thompson face MPs, both sides need to think about their behaviour and responsibilities as public figures. The people of Britain – to whom they are all answerable – are heartily sick of their macho posturing and lack of humility. The PAC’s chair, tough and effective Margaret Hodge, knows that. Do the BBC bigwigs summoned by her committee begin to understand what the public now expects? We shall see. 

Austerity has hardened the nation's heart

by Yasmin Alibhai Brown

Under the arches in Waterloo, a man sits, his head bowed. A scarf is wound tightly around his neck, as if he wants to strangle himself. His hands are grimy and covered in cuts, one suppurating. As I give him some coins and antiseptic plasters, I ask him why he is out there. He doesn’t look at me, and seems unwilling to talk.

I am with a friend. We are going to the screening of a forthcoming BBC TV drama. My friend is impatient and then cross that I have stopped and wasted time (it is barely three minutes)  on “these people” – yet after a trip to India my friend told me how awful it was that well-off Indians simply ignored beggars all around them. I remind her of that and she told me: “It’s completely different. They have no welfare there. Here we do. People don’t have to be poor here. It’s a choice.”

I can’t be her friend any more. She is not a bad person but somewhere along this road we are travelling during the recession, she decided that the real enemies within were those who depend on the state or the goodwill of others, “charity pests” as she calls them.

According to the British Social Attitudes Survey (2011), 56 per cent of the British population think benefits are too high and stop people looking for work. In 1983, at the height of Thatcherism, the figure was 35 per cent. Today 63 per cent also believe that children are poor because their parents are feckless and lazy.

As life gets hard for the middle classes, they turn harder and the same is happening to those who define themselves as working class. Most of our people, it seems, approve of the benefits cuts, the bedroom tax, substantially reduced disability allowances and a drastic cull of local services. They are now persuaded that the needy are greedy and are a parasitic hoard responsible for our shrinking GDP and economic woes.

Look around you. Listen to the doctors, church leaders, local councillors and workers, homeless and children’s charities, those who run shelters and refuges, and others. They speak to our consciences, tell us what is happening and are not being heard.

A few days back, Stephanie Bottrill, only 53, killed herself because she could not afford to pay an extra £20 per week for her extra bedroom in a home she had lived in all her life. Did her death cause people to rethink their hostile attitudes to such people? I don’t think so. Their eyes are shut, ears deaf and hearts locked up to stop such emotional intrusions.

Here are some of the truths assiduously avoided. David Stuckler, senior researcher at Oxford University warns “austerity kills”. Suicides rise during times of high unemployment. Since 2011, they have risen dramatically, most of all in the areas where there are no jobs and among people badly affected by the Coalition policies. Stuckler is also concerned about the disabled, those who can’t afford homes, and the sick.

A new report by the British Medical Association (who are not a gang of lefties) warns that government policies are hitting the most vulnerable. A quarter of a million children are already failing to meet the basic standards of normal development. The GP Greg Wood, who worked for Atos, the company charged by the Government with assessing disability claimants, has just resigned because he thinks that the system is biased against the disabled. Food bank suppliers can’t cope with demand; Salford council, one of many, is closing shelters because it is unable to get state money to house the homeless.

The Centre for Global Education confirms, with some apprehension, that the debate on poverty has been redirected away from structural and political causes to opprobrium towards the unemployed and welfare dependents. The national sport of baiting and hating of the poor has been damned in The Lies We Tell Ourselves (Jan 2013) and The Blame Game Must Stop (March 2013), both commissioned by church groups.

In the foreword of the latter report the Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather writes: “Stigmatising people on benefits is politically popular, but it isn’t fair or right... it will make Britain less generous, sympathetic and willing to co-operate... It will make it more difficult for campaigners coming after us to argue for an option for those in poverty, because public opinion will simply not tolerate it.” How true that is, and too late already. Compassion is now a minority hobby in this great country where, remember, the welfare state was created during years of unimaginable  hardship and post-war devastation.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, describes austerity programmes as an “unethical experiment” on human beings. Public opinion can scare or encourage politicians. Today millions are backing this human experiment. They, more than the ruthless Government, are responsible for the blood and tears flowing among the unfortunate and disenfranchised. The savage tyranny of the majority, as history shows, destroys nations, social and human bonds. It is happening here. One day we will all miss the nation we once were, but there will be no way back.