Watch out: the office management people are going to bully us into being nice
ROD LIDDLE
1 t was one year ago this week that I left the BBC. At the time, people thought it was because I'd written something unflattering — and therefore redolent of bias — about the Countryside Alliance. And that was, indeed, the official reason. But at the back of my mind there was something else, a growing fugue of disquiet inside my head and the feeling that I might not last much longer in the job, no matter what I wrote for the newspapers. I thought I was about to become a victim, you see. A victim of Greg Dyke's Nice Police.
The Nice Police were created to hunt down and exterminate, in the nicest possible way, managers who were beastly to their staff. They wandered the floors listening for telltale signs of managerial transgression. Bosses who shouted things like 'How did you get to be such a staggeringly useless bastard?' would be reported and summarily dealt with. Nobody, the argument went, should be subjected to nastiness, not even the most boneidle congenital imbecile — of which the BBC, like most large corporations, has a fair smattering. The idea was that we should all work together in a spirit of peaceful, mutually uplifting benevolence, a bit like the Branch Davidians at Waco just before the siege.
'So,' I thought to myself, darkly, at the time. `We can't sack anyone unless they actually kill a person. And now we can't even tell them they're bloody useless. We can sneak on them to the personnel officers, behind their backs, but we cannot allow our anger or exasperation to show in person, and we cannot upbraid them on the spot.'
As I say, the Nice Police were, I think, Greg Dyke's idea. Greg's a likable man and a very good director-general. Perhaps all he wanted was for everybody to be happy. But I suspect his reasoning on this occasion was rather more pragmatic. I suspect that he was sick of seeing the BBC being stuffed by employment tribunals, during which useless staff members would complain of being 'bullied' (because of their race, their sex, their disability, their uselessness, etc.) and consequently awarded large wodges of licence-payers' money. We've seen an excellent example of this in the last week or two, with the BBC Newsroom South-East presenter Laurie Mayer moaning about 'bullying' during his own employment tribunal. It is quite true that his various managers, so far as one can judge, do seem to be quite ghastly human beings, but 'bullying'? Are you sure? I suppose it is a bit antediluvian of me to ask: why don't you just read the bloody news, Laurie, and shut up?
The thing is that 'bullying' has become an indispensable part of this decade's political lexicon and something which, like paedophilia, we can all become terribly worked up and angry about, quite out of proportion to its actual occurrence. Bullying these days does not mean getting your head kicked in by someone bigger than you, as I seem to remember it once meant. These days it means a raised voice or a harshly articulated imprecation, a quietly uttered oath or even an inopportune glance or injudiciously raised eyebrow. It means — in a multitude of ways, all defined by the victim — being not very nice. And there are large industries dependent on this warped definition of the term: the employment-tribunal monkeys, the massed legions of human-resources managers, lawyers and counsellors and so on. The cultural hegemony enjoyed by these people is one reason why it is impossible to talk about bullying without feeling required immediately to issue a full statement pledging your fundamental opposition to bullying in all its many and various forms. As soon as anything is described as 'bullying', it becomes almost impossible to defend and the argument is given up.
And we are all encouraged these days to feel that we, too, are the victims of bullying. It is one of the few victim isations open to almost all of us, regardless of class, colour or sex.
I wonder if the constant growing drone of complaint about workplace bullying — and the concomitant reports of more and more days being taken off each year through stress-related — may in part be a result of a greatly feminised workforce. It strikes me that there is a culture clash between the way in which women would run things, given the chance, and the way men like to run things now. It is not true of all men or all women, of
course, but at the least we might generalise that men are less prone to adopt the — how shall we put it? — consensual approach to problem-solving. Nor do women generally have much affection for notions of hierarchy. Just this week, the Times reported various anonymously sourced examples of workplace bullying. One woman, an office junior, described her experiences thus: 'There was a deification of the boss, which meant you fell into a slave-like strata when you joined on the bottom rung. , . nobody would ever deign to talk to you . . if you deigned to talk to a director you would be shooed away like a beggar pestering a businessman for change.'
Does this vignette come as a profound shock to you? Or is it exactly how you remember your first few weeks or months or years of working life? Is it, by any stretch of the imagination, bullying?
Concurrent with our obsession with bullying has been the recent conviction that everything in this world of ours should, by contrast, be 'nice'. That is why those wellmeaning BBC people were called the 'nice' police. It was also the conviction which perhaps lay behind poor Theresa May's wellmeaning address to last year's Conservative party conference: the Conservatives should cease to be the nasty party — they should become the nice party. It is, in a way, the ideology lying behind the frozen teeth of Tony Blair's increasingly weird smile. It is the curious notion that anger, irritation and even solemnity can be banished from our lives because they are uncomfortable emotions which people find awkward to deal with. But of course these things cannot be banished from our lives and sometimes we need them, so what we're left with instead is a confected 'niceness', something devoid of sincerity and honesty. In effect, a sham. An office manager who does not shout at his staff but instead shafts them good and proper through the tortuous, labyrinthine corporate process approved of by such mysterious institutions as Investors In People is not, actually, very 'nice' at all. But I suppose that he or she has given the impression of being nice, which seems to be the point.
I suspect that this is all an unwelcome byproduct of our obsession with the surface — the style of things — and an abiding fear of substance. Niceness, these days, is about the highest aspiration one can have.
Previous page
