The real cultists are CEOs

The real cultists are not Maoists, they're CEOs

It is not only in religious or political circumstances where people are made to follow a leader unthinkingly

• 
• • Nick Cohen
  • The Observer, Saturday 30 November 2013 18.04 GMT

Fred Goodwin is portrayed as a tyrant in a new biography. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer

The great leader's followers know he goes "absolutely mental" at the tiniest deviation from the party line. He screams his contempt for the offender in public so that all learn the price of heresy. Go beyond minor breaches of party discipline and raise serious doubts about the leader's "vision" of global domination and that's the end of you. "You're toast," he says, and his henchmen lead you away.

In private, his underlings mutter that the leader is a "sociopath" with "no capacity for compassion". Even though he terrifies them, their hatred of him is far from complete. When he relaxes, the great leader can be charming. His favour brings reward. The further you move up the hierarchy, the more blessings you receive, and the more you believe the leader's propagandists when they hail his "originality" and "rigour". History is vindicating the leader. His power is growing. The glorious day when the world recognises his greatness is coming.

I could be describing Stalin's Soviet Union or the "Church" of Scientology. With last week's allegations that Maoists in south London kept women as slaves, I could be going back into the lost world of Marxist-Leninism. The British Communist party demanded absolute intellectual conformity. Vanessa and Corin Redgrave's Workers Revolutionary party and the Socialist Workers party wanted absolute submission, including sexual submission from women. The UK Independence party meanwhile is looking like a right-wing version of a Marxist sect. Nigel Farage's cult of the personality allows no other politician to compete with the supreme leader and no Ukip official to talk back to him.

As it is, the portrait of a tyrant comes from Iain Martin's biography of Fred Goodwin(one of the best books of the year, in my view). Like a communist general secretary or religious fanatic, he was enraged by the smallest breach with orthodoxy: not wearing the company tie; fitting a carpet in a Royal Bank of Scotland office that was not quite the right colour. The propagandists who praised his rigour and independence worked for Forbes magazine, the Pravda of corporate capitalism. Goodwin took RBS from being a sleepy Scottish bank to a global "player". So history did indeed seem to vindicate him – for a while.

With Britain hobbling in to 2014 like a battered beggar, we should accept that corporations can be as demented and dictatorial as any millenarian movement. People resist the comparison because businesses seem such modest enterprises. The godly persecuted heretics and apostates and the communists punished all dissent because they believed the kingdom of God or workers' paradise could be theirs if believers followed the one true course.

Businesses don't want Utopia. They just want to make money. Dennis Tourish, Britain's best academic authority on how hierarchies enforce obedience, has no problem with the comparison, however. His latest book, The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership,puts the Militant Tendency alongside Enron, the mass "revolutionary suicide" by Jim Jones's followers at Jonestown with the mass liquidation of Britain's wealth by the banks. The ends of an L Ron Hubbard or Fred Goodwin may be incompatible, he says, but the means are same.

In any case, the language of business has become ever more cultish. In the theory of "transformational leadership", which dominates the business schools, the CEO is a miracle worker. In Transformational Leadership, by Bernard Bass and Ronald Riggio, he is described, not by some gullible Forbes hack, but by two supposedly intelligent American academics. The transformational leader "inspires" his follower to "achieve extraordinary outcomes", they say. He "empowers them" to "exceed expected performance" and show ever greater "commitment to the organisation".

I don't see why anyone should find the comparison with fanatics so hard to accept and not only because the idea that CEOs can manufacture new and better subordinates matches Trotsky's belief that the revolution would create a "new man who raises himself to a new plane".

The nearest you are likely to come to experiencing life in a dictatorship is at work. Unless you are fortunate, you will discover that the management is the source of all ideas and all power. Executives will have privileges that bear no more relation to real achievement than the fat and ugly cult leader's expectation of sex. In 2012, the median pay for CEOs in the USA was $14.4m, the average salary for employees $45,230. In Britain, the High Pay Commission found that the average annual bonus for FTSE 300 directors had increased by 187% in 10 years even though the average year-end share price had gone down by 71%.

Above all, whether you are in the public or the private sector, John Lewis or Barclays Bank, you will learn that if you challenge authority you will lose the chance of promotion and if you challenge it in public, you will lose your job. To prosper in the workplace, as in the dictatorship, you must tell leaders what they want to hear.

Since the richest executives on the planet brought the west down, there has been an understandable interest in the psychology of corporate power. One experiment stays in my mind. Researchers divided volunteers into groups of three and gave one the title of "evaluator". Half an hour later, they gave each group a plate of biscuits. The evaluators grabbed more cookies and sprayed crumbs as they ate with their mouths open. After just 30 minutes, the conviction that they were managers produced greed and the belief that normal rules did not apply to them.

I do not doubt that, if required, the courts will deliver justice to the alleged victims of the Brixton Maoists. Justice is harder to find elsewhere. It is not merely that the banking scandals have not led to one prosecution. With the honourable exception of the coalition's push to protect NHS whistleblowers, there has been no interest in making public and private hierarchies less cultish. The left is not saying loudly enough that we need worker directors on all boards as a non-negotiable minimum. The right does not admit that the old way of doing business failed.

In these dismal circumstances, you must look after yourself. If you work in an organisation where you cannot challenge your superiors without fear of the consequences, get out. Stay and you will become a paranoid flatterer. You will suffer all the psychological consequences of living a frightened life in a playground run by strutting bullies. Dennis Tourish's words should be your prompt: the corruption of power may be bad, but the corruption of powerlessness is worse.

Is Britain's economy really on the path to prosperity?

Osborne's autumn statement will likely present a rosy picture of growth. But is it to be short-lived?

• 
• • Heather Stewart, economics editor
  • The Observer, Saturday 30 November 2013 23.12 GMT

George Osborne is expected to be in bullish mood when he delivers his autumn statement on Thursday. Photograph: Goh Chai Hin/AFP

Brightly coloured New Balance trainers are beloved of celebrities, from Ben Affleck to Heidi Klum. But if you buy a pair of the US firm's shoes in Europe or Asia they are most likely to have been made on the edge of the Lake District. From its British factory in Flimby, on the Cumbrian coast, the hi-spec trainer-maker will turn out more than a million pairs of shoes this year, with more than a third of those made from scratch – cut out and intricately stitched by its 245 skilled staff, who spend more than a year learning their trade.

Since the great recession of 2008-09, when production of the high-value "lifestyle" lines that occupy most of its machinists' time was slashed in half, factory manager Andy Okolowicz says things have gradually improved: "We have had three or four years now of very steady business, both in the UK and for export." It has stepped up output of these fashion shoes by 24% this year and hired more than 10 new staff.

This is the US firm's only European factory, selling to markets across the world, including Germany, France, Japan and Australia – and with the union flag stitched prominently on to the back of many of the models, it's exactly the kind of Made in Britain success story the chancellor hopes to see more of as economic growth picks up.

In George Osborne's 2011 budget speech, he laid out a stirring picture of a new model for the British economy: one driven by a "march of the makers", such as Flimby's trainer-stitchers, instead of what he called "debt-fuelled" growth: buy-to-letters, non-stop shoppers and high-rolling City gamblers.

Two-and-a-half years later, as he prepares to deliver his autumn statement on Thursday, the chancellor can finally boast that the long-awaited economic recovery has arrived: growth has rebounded sharply, unemployment is falling, and business surveys suggest confidence has been restored. As Simon Wells of HSBC puts it, the economy has moved "from a state of despair, to repair".

In March, the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, which draws up the forecasts Osborne uses to plan his tax and spending policies, was expecting negligible growth of 0.6% this year. City experts now forecast more than double that. Similarly, the OBR's 1.8% projection for 2014 now looks far too pessimistic. New forecasts, to be published alongside Osborne's statement, are expected to be rosier and the chancellor is likely to repeat his claim that the UK is now set firmly on the "path to prosperity".

In fact, with a number of eurozone countries barely out of recession, it would hardly be surprising if the chancellor allowed himself a Gordon Brown-style bout of economic Top Trumps, comparing the relatively upbeat outlook for the UK with the gloomy prognosis elsewhere.

"Osborne is probably looking forward to this autumn statement, because he doesn't have to announce that growth forecasts have been revised down for the umpteenth time," says Lee Hopley, chief economist at manufacturers' group the EEF.

Yet, as James Meadway of the New Economics Foundation puts it, "this is definitely not the recovery the coalition wanted or forecast". The breakdown of the latest growth figures showed that business investment – critical for rebuilding a new-style, more productive economy – is down by more than 6% year on year; exports are all but flat, despite the 20% fall in the value of the pound since the crisis; and manufacturing output remains 9% below where it was in 2008, despite the successes of the likes of New Balance and Britain's rampant car-makers.

In Flimby, Okolowicz explains that, while it's undoubtedly a success story, his factory is the final remnant of a much larger shoemaking industry in the area: K shoes and Bata once had plants locally, employing several thousand staff, instead of fewer than 300 at New Balance. Britain is a long way from recapturing its role as an industrial powerhouse.

Hopley, of the EEF, says for her members, this year has been, "good, but not spectacular".

Meanwhile, consumer spending is expanding strongly, borrowing is up and house prices are reviving across a swath of the country. Meadway says: "This is not a recovery, it's essentially a reversion: we're going back to the same kind of economy we saw in 2004 or 2005." Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, recently said he expected three-quarters of growth over the next year or so to come from consumption or housing – but many economists fear that's a risky model.

In the capital, some of the worst excesses of the property boom years are back. Aggressive estate agents are pushing leaflets through homeowners' doors and lining up scores of buyers to jostle with each other at "open days". Penthouses in the lavish Battersea Power Station redevelopment are expected to go on sale – most likely to overseas buyers – for £30m. And official figures show the UK now has a record number of estate agents.

In many parts of the country, the housing market is barely stirring from a five-year slumber. But the Bank's financial policy committee – the 10 people with the job of bursting future bubbles – have become so concerned about signs of froth that they have scaled back the government-backed Funding for Lending scheme so that it will no longer subsidise mortgages.

Some lenders have said the removal of the Bank's support, which Carney described as "taking our foot off the accelerator", will make little difference because the market has now gathered momentum of its own. But others believe the rise in mortgage rates that is likely to result will be enough to pour cold water on the growing mood of optimism.

As for consumer spending – the other major support for economic growth over the past six months – since wages have continued to lag behind inflation this latest shopping spree appears to have been fuelled not by consumers' growing spending power, but households dipping into their savings or taking out loans – including the short-term, high-cost payday loans that have caused growing political controversy.

"It feels as if there's a significant lag factor between the economic indicators and what it means for real people in their real lives," says Gillian Guy, chief executive of Citizens Advice, whose advisers see two million people with debt problems each year. She says that the spread of insecure, short-term contracts and part-time work, together with benefits cuts and paltry wage growth, have meant that many people in work are struggling to make ends meet.

That's a picture echoed by Chris Mould, executive chairman of the Trussell Trust, which runs 400 food banks up and down the country, providing three days' worth of emergency produce for people in dire straits. "We're seeing more and more people in crisis coming to food banks and we anticipate the numbers of people who find themselves in financial crisis as a proportion of the population to go up in the next few months. Generally, people are being severely squeezed by price rises – energy costs, rent, food – and the price rises in these areas are running way ahead of inflation."

Osborne hopes that, as the recovery gathers pace, employers will start to loosen the purse-strings, hiring new staff and offering more generous pay, helping to ease the squeeze for consumers and validating the mood of rising optimism. But both Guy and Mould fear it may be a long time before the people who come through their doors are able to make ends meet; and if rising real wages fail to materialise, the consumer upturn could prove short-lived. There's no doubt that the backdrop to the autumn statement is far rosier than anyone, not least Osborne himself, could have hoped six months ago. But Britain's economic resurgence is far less of a victory for the likes of Flimby's highly skilled machinists, and more of a blast from the "debt-fuelled" past than the coalition would have wished – and, as yet, there's no telling how long it will last.

Heard a thinktank on the BBC? You haven't heard the whole story

When the BBC interviews someone about smoking, it's supposed to reveal if the thinktank they work for receives funding from tobacco companies 

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • theguardian.com, Friday 29 November 2013 14.58 GMT

Mark Littlewood of the IEA spoke about cigarette packaging on Radio 4 this week. Not mentioned was that the institute receives funding from tobacco companies. Photograph: Alex Sturrock

Do the BBC's editorial guidelines count for anything? I ask because it disregards them every day, by failing to reveal the commercial interests of its contributors.

Let me give you an example. On Thursday the Today programme covered the plain packaging of cigarettes. It interviewed Mark Littlewood, director-general of the Institute of Economic Affairs, an organisation that calls itself a thinktank. Mishal Husain introduced Mark Littlewood as "the director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and a smoker himself".

Fine. But should we not also have been informed that the Institute of Economic Affairs receives funding from tobacco companies? It's bad enough when the BBC interviews people about issues of great financial importance to certain corporations when it has no idea whether or not these people are funded by those corporations – and makes no effort to find out. It's even worse when those interests have already been exposed, yet the BBC still fails to mention them.

Both the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute have been funded by tobacco firms for years. The former has been funded by British American Tobacco since 1963, and has also been paid by Philip Morris and Japan Tobacco International. It has never come clean about this funding, and still refuses to say which other corporations sponsor it.

Yet, as you can see from its lists, the institute's spokespeople appear all over the media, arguing against any regulations tobacco companies don't like, without ever being obliged to reveal that tobacco companies help pay their wages.

Most of the so-called thinktanks flatly refuse to reveal their interests. I see the IEA, the Adam Smith Institute and other "thinktanks" which refuse to to say who funds them asindistinguishable from corporate lobbyists. I see them as doing the dirty work of corporations which won't put their own heads above the parapet because of the likely reputational damage.

I'm not the only one who sees them in this light. David Frum was formerly a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a rightwing pro-business thinktank. Drawing on his own experience, he explained that such groups "increasingly function as public-relations agencies".

The veteran corporate lobbyist Jeff Judson explained why thinktanks are so useful to corporations: "Lobbyists often work for specific clients who operate at the mercy of a regulator or lawmaker, making them vulnerable to retribution for daring to criticise or speak out. Thinktanks are virtually immune to retribution … Donors are confidential. The identity of donors to thinktanks is protected from involuntary disclosure."(Judson's confessions used to be available here. They have since been removed.)

Here's what Mark Littlewood said on the Today programme: "The evidence out of Australia, who, in their extreme unwisdom in my view, have offered to be the guinea pigs for planet earth on whether this policy works, having had plain packaging or standardised packaging in place for a year over there, the early evidence suggests no change at all on smoking prevalence. And, lo and behold, the black market in cigarettes has jumped markedly."

Mishal Husain then remarked, "Well that's one view, in a moment we'll hear that of the public health minister ..."

Yes, it is one view. The view of someone being paid by big tobacco. Should we not have known that?

Here's what the BBC's editorial guidelines say about such matters:
3.4.7: "We should make checks to establish the credentials of our contributors and to avoid being 'hoaxed'."
3.4.12: "We should normally identify on-air and online sources of information and significant contributors, and provide their credentials, so that our audiences can judge their status."
4.4.14: "We should not automatically assume that contributors from other organisations (such as academics, journalists, researchers and representatives of charities) are unbiased, and we may need to make it clear to the audience when contributors are associated with a particular viewpoint, if it is not apparent from their contribution or from the context in which their contribution is made."

Every day people from thinktanks are interviewed by the BBC's news and current affairs programmes without any such safeguards being applied. There is no effort to establish their credentials, in order to avoid being hoaxed into promoting corporate lobbyists as independent thinkers. There is no effort to identify on whose behalf they are speaking, "so that our audiences can judge their status." There is no attempt to make it clear to the audience that contributors are funded by the companies whose products they are discussing.

I would have no problem with the BBC interviewing people from these thinktanks if their interests were disclosed. If these organisations refuse to say who funds them, they should not be allowed on air. Their financial interests in the issue under discussion should be mentioned by the presenter when they are introduced.

I've been banging on about this for years, with no result at all. It seems that the only thing the BBC responds to is formal complaints. So please complain.

Here are three things you can do:
• Use the corporation's online complaints form
• Take the issue to the BBC Trust
• Complain to Feedback on Radio 4

Otherwise, expect our bastion of editorial values to keep collaborating in the time-honoured tradition of hoaxing us on behalf of corporate money.

Sledging is an art, and here are the secrets of it

HOWARD JACOBSON 

Friday 29 November 2013

You'll need a ripe vocabulary, an ear for cadence - and respect for your opponent

 

Today I write on “Sledging Considered As One of the Fine Arts”. Sledging, for those not familiar with the term, is the practice of on-field verbal intimidation much favoured by Australian cricketers though by no means confined to them. Every cricket team sledges, though some do it with more aplomb than others.

As with all aspects of sport, national character is the first determinant of success. The more refined and well-mannered the culture, the less accomplished its sledgers. I don’t say the corollary follows – I am too fond of Australia to put its love of vilification down to something primitive in the country’s psyche – but you only have to read Australia’s national poem, “The Bastard from the Bush” (“Fuck me dead, I’m Foreskin Fred, the Bastard from the Bush”), to see an essential connection between verbal violence and a remote colonial lifestyle.

That said, it’s important to place sledging in a tradition of insult-flinging to which even the most sophisticated literature owes a debt. Drama, we are told, originates in the sacrificial, propitiatory rituals of ancient communities. We put on a show for the gods and hope they applaud. Poetry originates in the impulse to exchange insults with fellow mortals. “Get back to where you come from, that’s somewhere in the bush” is how the Captain of the Push responds to the challenge to his authority thrown down by Foreskin Fred. “May the itching piles torment you, may corns grow on your feet,/ May crabs as big as spiders attack your balls a treat./ Then, when you’re down and out, and a hopeless bloody wreck,/ May you slip back through your arsehole, and break your bloody neck.”

Indistinguishable from the satisfaction of getting your own back, hurling abuse and imagining someone else’s suffering is the joy of deploying rhyme and rhythm. We never curse better than we curse in verse. Primary school playgrounds resound with the scurrilous ditties small children make up about one another. My best friend Martin Cartwright couldn’t leave the classroom without hearing “Farty Marty/ Spoils the party”. For years I had to put up with “Howardy Cowardy Custard/ Thinks his pants have rusted”. And a poor religious boy called Manny was yoked with such tireless invention and horrid ingenuity to fanny that his parents had finally to remove him from the school.

Flyting, it’s called in Scotland – where poets would formalise the loathing they felt for each other into a contest of invective strictly governed by the laws of poesy. “Come kiss my Erse,” was how the 16th-century poet Montgomerie began his assault on the poet Polwart. “Kiss the Cunt of the Cow,” Polwart retorted in kind. We can perhaps look forward to a resumption of such well-honed hostilities when the campaign for Scottish independence begins in earnest.

At carnival time in Trinidad, some of the country’s smartest poets, singers and comedians take to the stage to compete in Extempo War, an off-the-cuff battle of wits in which the grosser they are to one another, the more the audience likes it. Whether the Dozens – the game of dissing, snapping and toasting played on the streets of Harlem and St Louis – is an offspring of Extempo War I don’t know, but it seems likely. It values the same qualities of quickness of wit and coarse discourtesy.

Another name for it is Ya Mama – unmannerliness to one another’s mothers being part of the fun. “You wanna play the dozens, well the dozens is a game,” rhymed the comedian George Carlin, “But the way I fuck your mother is a goddam shame.”

Which is a bit ripe even for the Gabba where the Australian captain, Michael Clarke, was heard to say to say to an English player, “Get ready for a f****** broken arm.” I resort to asterisks, not because Clarke did, but because that was how most of the papers reported it. Myself, I think asterisks make what he said even worse. Clarke himself has a baby face, so his outburst appeared doubly shocking, but some among his team look as though they were born with asterisks in their mouths.

What concerns me most about this incident, however, is the placing of the expletive. What Flyters, Extempo Warriors and kids in the school playground all know is that word order matters. Put a fucking where a fucking shouldn’t be and you take fatally from the affront. “Get ready for a fucking broken arm,” doesn’t work for two reasons. 1: It doesn’t scan. And 2: The epithet’s misaligned; it’s not the “broken” you’re meant to be cursing but the “arm”.

I haven’t played much cricket myself. Table tennis was my game. But I was always careful at the table to be precise when I swore. Attentive to both the music and the meaning, I’d have said to my opponent, “Get ready for a broken fucking arm.” Except that I wouldn’t, of course, have said that because it’s pretty difficult to break someone’s arm with a celluloid ball measuring 40mm in diameter and weighing 2.7g.

This could be the reason so few words are exchanged between players in the course of a game of ping-pong. You look ridiculous issuing threats when you don’t have the equipment to carry them out. Or the will, come to that. Somewhere at the back of every table tennis player’s mind is the knowledge that your opponent is as sad as you are. Why compound the lack of self-esteem that made him a table tennis player in the first place?

So humanity comes into the equation after all. To sledge with style requires a ripe vocabulary, an ear for cadence, a fastidiousness as to the positioning of epithets and respect for your opponent. You want to topple him from high estate to low. You don’t want him down and out to start with. Australians don’t always get that.

Happiness: the silver lining of economic stagnation?

A study suggests that national wellbeing peaks at £22k average income. But that doesn't mean there's no point in pushing for wealth

• 
• • Julian Baggini
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 28 November 2013 16.56 GMT

More money, more problems? Photograph: Roger Tooth for the Guardian

It's time to rewrite the story of the financial crisis. Far from being a disaster movie, it was in fact a tale of salvation. As for the green shoots of recovery we are now seeing, they are virulent weeds to be stamped out.

That would seem to be the conclusion to draw from a new study that suggests ever-rising national wealth is the source of decreased life satisfaction. Looking at data from around the world, Warwick University's Eugenio Proto and Aldo Rustichini of University of Minnesota conclude that average wellbeing rises with average income only up to around £22k per head per annum. After that, it slips back again. Britain is more or less at that sweet spot, which suggests economic stagnation may be an excellent way of avoiding the problems of poverty without acquiring the problems of wealth.

You may well be sceptical. Even the authors acknowledge that many people "still prefer to live in richer countries, even if this would result in a decreased level of life satisfaction". In other words, people are overall more satisfied by less life satisfaction, which suggests we should take the whole concept of "life satisfaction" with a pinch of salt.

Any attempt to measure wellbeing in a robust way is fraught with problems. One of the most obvious is that people naturally rank their contentment relative to what appears to be a reasonable expectation, and that varies with time and place. That's why, when offered to rank their life satisfaction a scale of one to 10, most choose around seven or eight, irrespective of era or nation.

Even setting aside these doubts, there are more important reasons to be cautious about how we interpret the data. What it does appear to show, and which almost all studies support, is that having a low income is more of a problem that having a high one is a benefit. From a public policy point of view, that suggests the priority should continue to be raising the life chances of the worst off, not those of the better off, or even the "squeezed middle".

If we achieved that, is it really the case that there would be no point in then increasing wealth even more? Not so fast. We have to ask what explains the levelling-off in perceived quality of life. Proto and Rustichini suggest that the key is "higher GDP leads to higher aspirations … driven by the existence of more opportunities or by comparison with the Joneses". But this "sets up a race between aspiration and realisation; when realisation is lower than aspiration, the psychological cost paid is disappointment". Worse, this creates a feedback loop, as the let-down further widens the aspiration-realisation gap.

What should be clear is that this is not an inevitable consequence of greater wealth. Some individuals learn to treat their material comfort as a blessing and are not concerned by the prospect that they could have yet more, or that others already do. The materialist treadmill is not one we are obliged to get on once we reach a certain level of income.

In short, the problem is explained by the familiar idea that money is not valuable in itself, but only for what it can do. The failure of western societies to convert greater wealth into greater wellbeing is in essence a failure to use our wealth wisely. This should not surprise us. The majority of people alive today and throughout history have not been accustomed to plenty. Humanity is on a steep learning curve and many of the lessons we need to learn go against our natural tendency to acquire first and ask questions later.

That's why the debate about the relative merits of increased GDP and "gross domestic happiness" are misguided. They are not mutually exclusive options. The optimal strategy would be one in which we grew wealth but harnessed it better to enable people to really flourish, rather than just have more stuff. What we should be afraid of is the pointless march of a narrow materialism, not the resumption of economic growth in itself. A richer world in which the money was well spent is something with which we should all be well satisfied.

How did sledging become a sign of manliness?

Michael Jeh in Cricinfo 

It's hard to compete with messages that say real men don't walk away from a fight © Getty Images

Enlarge

The bubble. It's a buzzword in sport today. This morning I attended the media launch of a new book called Bubble Boys, by Michael Blucher, a prominent Brisbane identity in the sports media community and a respected mentor to many elite athletes, especially when it comes to the matter of brand perception and image management. The author ruefully claimed that the book was seven years in the making and out of date within ten minutes! He was referring, of course, to the Michael Clarke sledging incident and its impact on the Clarke brand. (Incidentally Clarke's previous manager Chris White was also at this book launch, a wise, decent man whose advice might serve Clarke well right now.)

Picking up the Australian, I then read Gideon Haigh's excellent piece, which also refers to the bubble, this time in reference to Jonathan Trott, and is proof that the best cricket writers need not necessarily have played Test cricket. A quality writer who has distinguished himself in the Test arena, Michael Atherton, added to my enjoyment of the morning newspaper with his erudite and informed perspective, made more poignant by his first-hand experience of playing (and being sledged) at this level. He cautiously chided all parties involved, reminding them that at the end of the day, this is still sport and it behooves us all to not lose sight of that amidst all the trash talk. 

Bubble Boys takes a balanced look at the pressures, both internal and external, perceived or real, that elite athletes have to now contend with. My professional life is centred firmly in this space, so I have some insights into bubble boys and it is with some caution that I offer my opinions on the fall-out from the Brisbane Test, conscious of my own personal leanings but not oblivious to the hard-nosed realities of modern warfare, which is what this Ashes series threatens to descend into unless both teams and the media change the mood.

For some, the series has come alive. For me, some of the joie de vivre has died. The cricket was high-quality but I prefer my sport, no matter what the stakes are, to be served in more genteel fashion. I expect the inevitable vitriol from some bloggers, but the tone of their response may just underscore the point I'm making - that sometimes players, media and fans lose sight of the raison d'etre of sport. If this is sport, it doesn't push my buttons, despite my proximity to and familiarity with the bubble boys.

The fact that England have now withdrawn into their shell and refuse to engage with the media is a sad indictment of where things are at. The media played its part in creating this siege mentality, especially the Brisbane tabloid that refused to name Stuart Broad in its reports. The players' behaviour in refusing to talk to the press makes a lie of their claims that sledging never affects them. Clearly words hurt. Or are they only impervious to on-field sledging? That the Ashes media coverage has descended into a race to the bottom, with players hiding behind headphones, is schoolboy stuff. It's like being sent to Coventry in some Enid Blyton boarding-school story.

Clarke is the ultimate bubble boy. Often misunderstood, carefully image-managed, groomed for the captaincy at a young age, living in a goldfish bowl (replete with supermodel female partners), reputation damaged by some team-mates, and now suddenly facing a new reality that is both ambrosia and arsenic. On one hand, his behaviour at the Gabba has been described as unbecoming of an Australian captain; on the other hand, his much-maligned reputation as a pretty boy, a metrosexual (whatever that is supposed to connote, presumably negative, as described in yesterday's Australian), a brand that hasn't resonated with the VB-swilling public - unlike how those of AB, Tubby, Tugga and Punter did - has now apparently been transformed: from pup to mongrel. And according to many, this is apparently the best thing for his image. It took a threatening expletive and a sanction from the ICC to get him into that club! His fantastic batting wasn't enough for us?

It's a concept that I struggle with personally, but I daresay I'm in the minority. I find it disturbing that we equate manhood and toughness with what we've just seen from the captain. The captain no less.

I've always been a Clarke supporter thus far, but not this time. The other main protagonists, Jimmy Anderson and David Warner, splendid cricketers both of them, played their part in the drama, but does that surprise anybody? Brand consistency they call it.

One of the programmes I run is called A Few Good Men, and it is aimed at getting the good men of sport (and there are many) to take a leadership role in confronting the growing problem of violence in society, specifically violence against women. To think that the national cricket captain is being praised in some quarters for enhancing his brand with a threat to someone to expect a "broken f***ing arm" just speaks to the hopelessness of trying to start a counter-revolution that flies in the face of what our sporting leaders are promoting, even if only in the context of a sporting sledge. It's hard to compete with messages that say real men don't walk away from a fight (the Australian rugby league coach implied as much recently when his star player was involved in a punch-up at the World Cup in Manchester).

Michael Vaughan was quoted today as saying that the Lillee-Thomson era was much worse, so there's nothing to worry about. That doesn't really address the core issue of whether we think it is edifying to watch our cricket stars behave like hooligans or not. Just because it has been worse in times gone by doesn't necessarily make it right. The penalties may vary but a wrong doesn't become a right because it's less bad.

Many people not familiar with the environment of professional sport shake their heads and wonder how this sort of behaviour can occur in what is effectively a workplace. Some of the invective hurled by both teams would constitute workplace harassment in most cases. At best, it would be seen as abysmal etiquette to colleagues or competitors. Yet in sport these bubble boys proudly sing the national anthem, represent their countries, are heroes to kids (and cash in handsomely for that), and then reckon that the rest of their behaviour can exist in a moral vacuum. Maybe sport does live in a bubble after all, and so do all those who work in this special industry

My ten-year-old son posed a question to which I had no definitive answer. It was in relation to a Powerpoint slide I use in my work on respect for women that goes something like this: A male librarian says, "We've agreed to put the magazines which are degrading to women out of the reach of children", to which the female librarian says, "I see. And how old do they have to be before degrading women is all right?" In the context of recent events involving verbal and physical violence, my son wanted to know about the shift from being told not to sledge, not to use foul language, not to threaten opponents, to these things suddenly being perceived as a positive sign of manhood. In junior sport, all of these are frowned on. Judging by the endorsement of the new, more masculine, Michael Clarke, my son wants to know when you go from being boy to man, where the sins of boyhood become the proud tattoos of manhood. The only answer I could offer him was that in our family there was no invisible line.

Leadership is turned upside down when grown men are excused for behaviour that would earn a young cricketer a suspension. We expect so much of our boys but should they display those same decent qualities in adulthood, society demands we burst that bubble. Bubble boys indeed!