The words that exalt the private sector

It is a truth not so much universally acknowledged as monotonously repeated, that they order things better in the private sector.

It was a case forcefully put in the recent US elections, where many Romney supporters argued that a tried and tested private sector executive was just what was needed for the most powerful public sector post on earth. 

Not forcefully enough, as it happens, but that wasn’t for want of trying.

Mitt teaching a less which, fortunately, not too many learned

Nothing supports a claim to competence better than evidence of clarity of thought, and nothing proves clarity of thought so much as precision in expression. It is therefore with the sense of fulfilling a public duty that I put before you today some linguistic gems that I’ve been collecting from senior private sector executives in recent months.

Marvel at this small selection of words and sayings:

Antidotal: ‘I only have antidotal evidence for this.’ Some day I hope to hear this said in connection with behaviour described as poisonous.

Harbour: ‘I don’t want to harbour the point.’ Presumably because to do so might lead to our being wrecked at the labour’s mouth.

Plassate: this is a useful word describing the process of calming someone, perhaps a client complaining about poor service. ‘We should do what we can to plassate him.’ Though not, of course, if we have to push the shop out too far.

Amiable: used of someone who has no objection to a course of action. ‘I told him our suggestions and he seemed perfectly amiable to them.’

Catharsis: occurs when an obstacle leads to a momentary halt in progress. ‘They were moving ahead quite quickly, but they seem to have hit a bit of a catharsis.’

It turns out that certain fears tend to justify themselves if you spend too much time worrying about them: they become, in effect, ‘self-proclaiming’.

Sometimes a message can be hopelessly distorted if it passes along a chain of too many people. If trainers train trainers who train users, what they present at the end of the line may bear little relationship to the starting point. This phenomenon, I’ve been assured, is known as ‘Chinese Walls’.

That appeals to me, because it’s a phrase often used by such organisations as the big Consultancies, to explain how they can work with competing companies without a conflict of interest. We might say, in the spirit of this post, hunting with the hare while running with the haddock. Call me a cynic, but I’ve always suspected that things can’t be kept that separate and there are Chinese whispers through the Chinese walls.

And finally, of course, we have the old chestnut: ‘I don’t like the message Peter put out because it inferred that we were doing something wrong.’ Just like this post might be taken to imply that certain managers couldn’t tell a bark from a bite.

Not all of senior businessmen mangle language like this, of course. Many are as limpid in speech as they’re far-sighted in vision. I wouldn’t want to tar them all with the same pencil: that would be like tossing out the baby with the ball court.

Blowing up parliament, occupying the White House

407 years ago today, Guy Fawkes was arrested as he prepared to blow up the British Parliament during its official opening by the King.

The flower of the Kingdom would have been wiped out, if by ‘flower’ we understand a bunch of characters who owed their position to (a) descent from characters who had proved themselves quite good at killing other people and not being killed themselves, (b) had made sure they’d curried favour with a fairly unpleasant king, or (c) had made a lot of money from something holy like helping convert heathens by forcibly transporting them to lives of slavery in the New World.

Fortunately, Fawkes was stopped and London was saved from a major act of terrorism. He was also tortured and eventually burned, giving rise to the gentle tradition by which in Britain we all, and especially families with young children, foregather every 5 November to watch a bonfire blaze with a ‘guy’ – a human effigy of Fawkes – on top, all enriched by a glorious firework display.

‘Remember, remember, the fifth of november,’ we like to say, ‘gunpowder, treason and plot.’

Well, today the wheel has turned. The face of Guy Fawkes, or a face purporting to represent him, has become the symbol of the ‘Occupy’ movement, today’s challengers of the wastrels who inherited the privileges of James I’s courtiers and with it the power to dictate and undermine all our destinies.

Guy relives

Besides, this year the fifth of November falls on the eve of the US elections. An election in which one of the more egregious representatives of privilege and power unconstrained by morality (a man who likes to be able to fire the people who serve him) is trying to seize the White House from an incumbent who, for all his failings, has at least attempted to do something to lighten the burden that privilege lays on the most vulnerable.

A more interesting Guy Fawkes night than many, then.

‘Remember, remember,’ I’m inclined to say to my American cousins, ‘the sixth of November: a good day to help stop the rot.’



Postscript: The 5th is also the member of one of my charming daughters-out-law. Happy birthday Nicola, and still more success in the coming year with your great purses, cushion covers and other pieces of great embroidery at Cover Stories.

Government and churches: best kept out of bedrooms

Interesting times. The world’s most important election is only a few days away, and the general view is that if the world could vote for US presidents, Obama would be home in a landslide. Sadly, however, selecting the holder of the most powerful office on the globe is left to Americans alone, so the rest of us just have to wait and hope.

Ah, if only the rest of the world had a say.

What makes it particularly tense is that the battle is far sharper than it has generally been in the past. As the Economist wrote last week, the nature of Conservatism has changed:

‘This newspaper yearns for the more tolerant conservatism of Ronald Reagan, where 'small government' meant keeping the state out of people's bedrooms as well as out of their businesses.’

It’s always pleasant to find some common ground with a voice of the right, even though in this case it’s only half-way common. Keeping government out of business doesn’t strike me as a recipe that works particularly well: when that same Reagan began to roll back the Glass-Steagall act, he got the government out of the banks and let the gambling side of the business, investment banking, play with the money of ordinary customers, in retail banking, and we all know how well that turned out.

But getting the government out of bedrooms is certainly something that would get my support. It’s bad enough that down the ages the Churches – and when I say ‘Churches’ I’m including mosques and synagogues too – apparently obsessed with sex, have never been able to stop talking about what goes on in bedrooms, but now a certain conception of conservative politics would have supposedly lay governments getting in on the act too.

What on earth business is it of theirs? It’s not as though anyone is talking about making gay marriage obligatory. There is no sense in which men are going to be paired up with other men and forced to marry them. The aim is simply to allow those who wish to have that option, to exercise it.

The same is true of abortion. No-one likes abortion, or at least I’ve never met anyone who does. Painting the pro-choice side of the argument as in favour of abortion is a travesty. It’s not hypocrisy that makes it present itself as supporting the right to choose: that’s precisely what it asks for. Leave any woman facing the decision free to make her choice. No-one’s going to promote abortion, least of all a woman about to go through one.

The Economist’s conclusion was that, with regret, it had to endorse Obama. For that conservative paper, Romney represents that too intolerant a strand, and that means they have to back the Democrat.

This comes on top of endorsements by Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York and a nominal Republican, and Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey, and considered a possible future Republican candidate for President himself.

Is that the beginning of a fight-back by a different kind of conservatism, a conservatism that actually believes in conserving, rather than in radical ultra-right wing change? We’d all be a lot better off if it were.

One thing’s for sure, though. As the Economist, Bloomberg and Christie have discovered, if that fightback is to succeed it has to start with the defeat of Romney next Tuesday. As a recent Twitter comment claimed, Republicans wouldn’t enjoy living in the kind of United States Republican candidates want to build.

And there’d be little to celebrate around the rest of the world either.




Postscript. Churches have be no means got out of the business of dictating what happens in bedrooms, just because lay politicians have started to do so too.

On the contrary, we still get solemn pronouncements on other people’s sexual behaviour by exponents of Christian love such as Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, and leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland. He described gay marriage as ‘grotesque subversion’.

Cardinal O'Brien:
long on gay marriage, short on humour

Now he and his Church are terribly upset that Gay Rights group Stonewall have chosen him for their coveted ‘Bigot of the Year’ award. 

Ah, well, the Churches were never really known for their sense of humour, or their openness to other points of view. After all, the congregation has no right of reply to sermons, does it? I’ve often wanted to hold up my hand and say ‘yes, but...’.

Must come as a shock that these days people give them as good as the Churchmen hand out.

Romney and Cameron: the platonic view

It’s a commonplace in the West, accepted by virtue of being so frequently repeated by so many people, that the great philosophers of antiquity have moulded and formed the cultural structures on which our societies are based.

I rather suspect many of those who hold this view are of the kind who regard certain literature as ‘good’, though they may not have got round to reading the books themselves. Busy people, you know, but they know what’s good for others. Like, say, reading Plato.

On the basis that it’s never too late for a good resolution, I’ve recently been trying to remedy that great void in my own education, and fascinating I’ve found it. There are certainly aspects of Plato which have inspired much (relatively) recent history, such as what he has to say in The Republic about children with disabilities:

‘...the offspring of the inferior [parents], or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be.’

Hardly a very Paralympian spirit, one can’t help. Not a view to find favour with the founder of that fine movement, Ludwig Guttmann, though it would not have been out of place in the mouth of his persecutor, Adolf Hitler.

So in this respect at least I’m disinclined to join in the general chorus of admiration for Plato. There are however other passages of the same book that strike me as far more useful. Take what he says about different types of government.

For Socrates, the main speaker in Plato’s dialogues, aristocracy is the best government because it is the government of the best people. Which would be fine in my view except that I find that in most such governments, the people who choose the best are, coincidentally, generally the very people who get chosen.

Oligarchy, on the other hand, was much less appealing.

‘And what manner of government do you term oligarchy?.

‘A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it.’.

No good, Plato reckons, can come of this arrangement:

‘And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man.’

Overdoing respect for the wealthy, dissing the poor. If they could see in Athens two and a half millennia ago that this was a pretty bad show, maybe it’s time we relearned the lesson now.

Is that something to bear in mind in the States this autumn when voters on ordinary incomes take a look at Mitt Romney and his near quarter billion dollars? 

And in Britain when David Cameron, with the wealth he inherited and the wealth he married, decides to slash a load more benefits?

Mitt and Dave: a Platonic couple but not an ideal one?