29 October 2020
Scum?
Not rude enough.
By John Watson
Occasionally you get called on more quickly than you thought. Last week in my article Ferrier’s Fault attacking the current mood of intolerance I said, perhaps a little sententiously:
“Meanwhile it is hard for those in work to stand against it because the fact that the posse moves quickly from the victim to those defending the victim exerts commercial pressure. It is therefore up to the blogosphere, the amateurs, the Shaw Sheets of this world, to stand up against unfairness and intolerance where they see it.”
Yes, that’s our duty. Whack a mole. Hit intolerant stupidity when it arises without fear or favour.
This time the incident was a very minor one and the offender was on the Conservative side of the house. The deputy Labour leader, Angela Rayner, called Tory MP Chris Clarkson “scum” in the House of Commons. The deputy speaker told her off and she duly apologised for using the word in the heat of debate. Fair enough. So far everything was as it should be. All that was needed for Mr Clarkson to say that he really didn’t take the matter seriously and we would feel that on this occasion at least he had justified his position as an “honourable gentleman”. Unfortunately Mr Clarkson didn’t quite make it on the “gentleman” stakes, his exact words being:
“It’s disappointing but not surprising — I’m afraid every so often the mask slips. As elected leaders we should set an example. This kind of behaviour helps no one and achieves nothing.”
What pompous nonsense. Ms Rayner forgot her manners because she was angry. There is no more to it than that. Yet there was a lot of nonsense talked, even a suggestion that Ms Rayner should be reported to her chief Kier Starmer if she did not apologise, and you have to ask why. The answer lies in the current wisdom that you must not be rude to anybody for fear of causing offence, a wisdom which has gone a long way to undermine proper communication in Britain.
As a general rule, frankness and bluntness are a good thing. They involves courage, clarity and realism, three qualities which most of us would say we admired. And yet they often involve travelling close to, or crossing the border with, rudeness and if we get too antsy about rudeness we will lose the habit of frank and blunt communication and that can be a disaster.
None of us have heard how the Duke of Wellington gave an order but I imagine that his manner was terse and blunt and that a sensitive officer might have regarded him as rude. No surprise then that his military secretary, Fitzroy Somerset, should have been a diplomatic sort, soft spoken, good at smoothing ruffled feathers, charming those who the Duke’s gruffness had put out. The terrible mistake was to put Fitzroy Somerset (by then Lord Raglan) in charge of the Anglo-French expedition to the Crimea where, instead of kicking the fractious and conceited generals into line, he tried to hold his army together through charm and compromise. The result: a veil of politeness which meant that no one could be quite sure what orders he had given; the result of that – the Charge of the Light Brigade.
The importance of clear command to the military has been understood since the days of Sun Tzu but in management or politics it is important that other messages get delivered clearly as well. That means blunt speaking which will sometimes come across as rudeness. From time to time it will cause offence. But, if each time something causes offence we get excited about the possibility that the recipient has been upset, frank communication will gradually dry up.
Those who have worked in busy successful companies will often tell you that people get more abrupt and ruder when they are under stress. No doubt that is some Darwinian response mechanism from the Jurassic age but, whether that is so, it is the way that many people are and an element of it has to be accepted if communication is to be kept fast, accurate and efficient. One of the features of the modern public service is how polite everyone is and how people are criticised for speaking in a way which could cause offence. Perhaps that has been one of the contributing factors behind the poor performance of the state in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
When I originally wrote this article it stopped there, but the weekend press has brought an example which makes my point in spades. According to an article in The Times, The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse which has been sitting since 2015 at a cost of £143 million “refused to investigate Britain’s most notorious sex-grooming scandals and barred key witnesses from giving evidence” because they were afraid that the focus on the Pakistani community to which many of the perpetrators belonged would mean they could be regarded as racist. Leaving aside any issues of cowardice, this, if correct, amounts to allowing the “right” of a community not to be offended to prevent the truth being told about abuse and suffering on a huge scale. It also makes it more likely that it will all happen again. Not a great result!
