Even the Kremlin wears Prada now. But can't we be better than that?

I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a neo-liberal market economy which tolerates grotesque inequalities, despoils the planet and debases standards everywhere in the pursuit of shareholder value whilst ALSO mass spying on, controlling and harassing its citizens and its journalists like it's the Soviet Union on acid.

Not that anyone is asking. It used to be called 'elections' and you voted for the side whose programme you liked better but it turns out none of the real policies are publicly stated in advance (and the 'secret ones', of course, not even afterwards).

It was bad enough under the last Labour government,  with its obsession with curtailing basic freedoms and rights in an Orwellian perma-war against unknown terrorists under the bed and its expensive tab-keeping  and mass data gathering follies, (ID cards, NHS database etc ).

But the current coalition Government manages to be in supine agreement to secret US mass spying, engage in more than a dollop of its own indiscriminate eavesdropping, persecute newspapers and individual journalists who dare expose it and ask questions, set its media lapdogs against them while ALSO libeling the unemployed as scroungers, the immigrants as illegal scroungers, dragging the dying from their beds to sign up for non-existent, sub-minimum wage jobs and outsourcing the feeding of the already working poor to food banks.

I mean, really???

It seems to me that all power generates its own form of ideology - one that requires more and more power to be amassed for reasons too secret for the mere mortals to be entrusted with. 

Once power has tooled up with even more power (for our benefit, remember, so it can serve us better, save us from harm, protect our way of life), it turns out, wouldn't you know it, that the definition of our way of life has been brutally and unilaterally updated.

All efforts towards maintaining a civilised polis, where citizens have rights as well as responsibilities towards each other, is now something on the spectrum from unaffordable to blasphemous - via hopelessly naive/unpatriotic /Marxist-Stalinist, according to which newspaper is reprinting the press release on its front page today. 

In fact power is a lot like the wolf in Little Red Ridinghood - the wig changes occasionally, the lacy nightgown gets the odd fashion makeover but it's still not grandma and it still just wants to eat you! Be afraid, very afraid.

Promised Land

When the scale of a disaster is too mind boggling, too incomprehensible, the eyes takes refuge in a smaller detail, something the mind can wrap itself around.  

This footage of the unfolding Lampedusa rescue ending with the disconsolate sobs of a female rescuer have stabbed many Italians like me in the heart - the heart our political class has done so much to harden and coarsen in the ongoing immigration debate. 

Here is someone whose life I can sort of imagine, whose language and somatic traits I share, who went out to deal with an emergency as a professional and found herself defeated by the challenge as a human being.

On the same day when the scale of the massacre was revealed and my nation belatedly found the strength and the humanity to shed some tears, I went to the Royal Court theatre here in London to see Routes, a  powerful new play by a very talented young playwright, Rachel De-lahay. The play explores the plight of migrants and refugees here in the UK - the dream of escape, the politics of belonging, the lottery of qualifying, of counting, of deserving the application of existing and seemingly universal rights - or not. 

The hardest thing in the play for me was the inability of officialdom, in the shape of an otherwise sympathetic and quite reasonable immigration officer (a struggling mother, a poorly paid worker, a jilted wife) to blink this particular category of human beings into focus and see them as people.

After war, civil strife, terrorism and famine, after the ravages of global warming and droughts and trade sanctions, after perilous journeys, narrow escapes, unbelievable cruelty and exploitation, the final blow, the final strike of the malignant wand that turns desperate people into a despised alien mob - to be fought back, detained, deported, bureaucratically and judicially eliminated - is our profound inability to empathize. 

Aside from a small percentage of particularly dumb Tea Baggers and Ukippers we - by and large - understand the issues, we know facts and stats, we are perfectly able to reason about the whys and whats and the what ifs. We just don't seem to be able to feel what's at stake unless 300 bodies wrapped in plastic can be physically lined up on a western nation's harbour under the gaze of TV cameras. 

Aren't these human-shaped bundles now dead because what they escaped from was in itself worse than death? What else do they need to qualify? How exactly is their desire to survive a way of taking advantage of us, the lucky, ageing, First World few? Why should we, by geographical accident of birth, have more right to feel, be seen and treated as human, whether this means not to be tortured or being able to feed one's children?

Keep Calm and Carry on Lunching (and keep the ironing to a minimum)

  The "Keep calm and carry on" metal plaque used to hang in my office (my vast, spacious office with two windows, two windows people!) as a tongue and cheek allusion to the daily craziness involved in keeping 25 aging and cranky pro-Europeans happy and 2 million young, enthusiastic Europhobes at bay. Yes, I was busy and important.

I do not miss the craziness at all. I now rarely find myself having to reply to 200 emails in the middle on the night, newspaper stands hold no terrors for me and I can go a whole day without once agonising over the next European Elections' likely dismal turnout. I'm, like, a totally normal person again.

And yet. In the gilded garden leave of my current life, spent mostly scribbling at home in a room with one measly window (one window, people!) I sometimes miss the implied frenetic excitement conveyed by that sign. I was the person juggling those plates, pacing and making those phone calls, writing those pithy rebuttals and saying things like "God, I've really earned a drink tonight."

This, you understand, changed the world by not one single iota, in the great scheme of things. Or, as I used to reassure the terrified intern on his or her first day, "no baby will ever die because we made a mistake. No baby will ever be saved either because we had a good day at work. At most it means getting an MEP on Radio4 ".

Still it's the thought that counts, isn't it? Specifically the self-image you get when you are extremely well paid to take on a lot of pointless stress. You feel...alive. With no time to actually partake of or enjoy life, of course, but deeply embedded in its flow.

I still have the plaque however - I brought it home on my last day together with piles of articles and files I was saving to read 'one day' and never managed to (they were recycled by that same evening) and a box of now uselessly out of date business cards which I have since managed to completely displace.

The plaque now lies propped against the window of the study but - as no room in my tiny house and no surface in any room is allowed to perform only one task - the study is the wardrobe, ukulele, bookcase and ironing room and the iron too sits on the windowsill. 

Yes, reader, the jokey, 'isn't this awful and exciting' sign has become an ironic backdrop. Literally. I now keep calm & carry on ironing - an activity I was a genuine stranger to these past 20 years - often while listening to Radio 4, a luxury no amount of MEPs' droning on can ever mar.

I'm still baffled by my new found status of Lady who lunches (a term readily deployed by myself and others as the least threatening definition for this limbo of well-funded idleness not following a sacking and hopefully preceding a spectacular new appointment), but I'm easing into it.

I'm crap at it ( the ironing, people, I'm talking about the ironing!) but on the plus side that rarely makes the news.

Those who can do. For the rest there's always middle management

As Tolstoy himself would no doubt have observed, had he not been too caught up on boring subjects such as marriage and land reform, all good managers are good in the same way (more about this later) but all bad managers have their own peculiar brand of badness. And  bad management, specifically bad middle management, rather dominates the field.

I’ve only been working in various careers for 20 years so it’s perhaps too early to judge. But in all this time I've had perhaps two bosses a decade who had some clue  about how to their primary job: optimally to manage the people and resources trusted to their leadership and supervision for the accomplishment of a common goal. This strike rate doesn't bode well for my next 45 years of work.

So, let's see, I’ve had the misfortune of working for bullies and skivers, self-interested and ferocious careerists, bumbling incompetents, kisser-upper -kicker-downers, neurotics  micromanagers and negligent don’t-give-a-toss-ers, ‘good Germans’ obeying orders, conspiracy theorists , zealous turbulent priests hunters and the kind of fools who look at the finger when you point to the sky (what’s the name for those?).

It’s hard to discriminate among this rich and varied fauna but if I had to rank them , from downright evil to merely hopelessly bad, I’d say the worst kind of bad manager is not the ambitious careerist who’s comfortable firing people and shouting at them to accomplish a set goal. That by itself doens’t make them the worst at the job,  although they are doubtless scary, stressful and unpleasant to work for.  But they at least display a scintilla of direction, will and pride in accomplishing something, which might sometimes translate into leadership qualities capable of carrying others with you towards the realisation of something that might turn out to better than nothing or the status quo.

So, no, I think the worst kind of bad manager is the nincompoop who deliberately chooses to stay well clear of any direct knowledge of what is actually involved in the jobs performed by people under him or her as ‘too much information’ of the wrong kind might lead them to have to make intelligent (and not just easy) decisions, to raise uncomfortable objections to misguided policies rained down to them from their hierarchy, or to have to admit that the work they manage is harder and the world it’s taking place in is more complex than they wish to believe, in their (universal to all managers) urge to tick boxes, juke stats, stretch goals and so on for their sake of their own personal advancement.

The thing they emphatically do not teach in business school is that most normal people are intrinsically motivated. They would, if it wasn’t beaten out of them pretty early on in the workplace, respond to incentives other that greed and fear: a feeling of one’s own usefulness, the satisfaction of using one’s skills and talents, the possibility of personal growth, social interaction, team spirit, seeing a project through, constructive feedback and a modicum of encouragement are all tremendously important to most normal people.

But managing such people, i.e. most normal people, i.e. people would then involve a sense of personal responsibility towards their wellbeing, respect for their efforts , awareness of their skills, cognisance of how the wider world works and finally – last but not least – a desire on the part of the managers to themselves perform  a job well done, accomplishing those aims instead of disingenuously misconstruing  them,  lying about their results and so forth.

Managing people, in other words, would turn out to  be a job in itself -  imagine that - and not just a desk and comfy chair from which one is allowed to further one’s own career, or sleep behind one’s newspaper, or harass one’s intern, (whatever your particular brand of manager evil might be). But frankly, who’s got the time these days?

The nincompoop is the most dangerous because people with specific skills who’ve somehow managed to rise through the ranks still find it difficult to completely fool themselves and others about what it takes to get from A to B or achieve X given Y, or turn off all sentient reasoning about the desirability of Z.

The nincompoop, refreshingly unencumbered by any knowledge of otherwise, can carry on living in, and leading others, in a Wizard-of-Oz, Emperor-without-clothes-type alternative universe where all his/her other bosses already live. He/she will then select  and  promote similar nincompoops to make sure that this never ever changes. They are in fact the perfect managers: they make life easier for the people above them , sustaining their Soma-induced optimism, their corporate blindness and, as the lying takes care of the truth, they are - TA-DAH! -always on target .

And when they are not they are wonderfully  efficient and unsentimental about getting rid of (lesser) people once the blame-storming has subsided. They are the perfect expression of a deadly but resilient ecosystem , the cockroaches of all dying civilisations, no matter how advanced, including finally our own, I fear.  Those Mayan temples did not tear themselves down, you know?  And who do you think persuaded  Easter Island dwellers to cut down that last tree?

Finally, a word on good management. Good managers are all the same: they regard the people above them with healthy scepticism and treat those below them with respect. They come in early, leave late and work at least as hard and preferably harder than their worst paid underlings. They are curious, engaged and reactive.

Good managers want problems solved, sure, but crucially they want problems to be identified and brought to their attention. They are more interested in accomplishing the stated aim of the thing they do/run/represent than in covering their asses or paint the world a pretty pink colour for their bosses. When you point to the sky they look at the moon/that plane/ the freak asteroid hurtling your way not, I repeat not, at your finger.

Helpless pensioners will never die of thirst on a ward under the watch of a good manager. Libor rates won't be fixed. Hacks won't hack into phones and policemen won't sell stories in return for posh spa stays. Soldiers won't torture and tax men won't cut international corporations obscenely cushy deals. Trust me. It's true. It's just hard to close your eyes and believe because there are so few of them around.

Les mots pour le dire (aka, le parole per dirlo, aka the words to say it)

Sassy/street:

Talk to the booty 'coz the hand's off duty and the face don't wanna hear ya!

Answering machine:

Hello, you have reached the face. I don't wanna hear ya right now. Please relay your message to the hand. Should the hand be off duty, the booty will get back to you as soon as possible. Goodbye.

Corporate:

At Bank Of Daylight Robbery we are always looking for ways to Create Value for our Clients and Stakeholders. We are full of exciting Ideas for further uptake of our Listening-in Mode. However, recent restructurings in our Teams have lead to the Face being unavailable to hear you. So, going forward, please refer all matters to the Hand. Should the Hand also be unavailable, please escalate to the Booty. And remember: we really care.

  

Passive aggressive work email:

From: The Boss

To: The Gullible Employee

Dear Booty,

When Hand went off duty/ on maternity leave/ checked himself into rehab he/she handed over his/her tasks to Face.

However, it has become very clear from Face's attitude both at our team meeting and during the visio-conference that she just does not want to listen.

But there is an upside: I'd like to offer you what I think is a great opportunity to step up, stand out and make yourself indispensible.

Do you want to be our team hero and take up the challenge of helping us deliver our stretch goals at this difficult time? Do you, Booty, do you?

Little boy lost and the Italian Mammas

Last week-end Little Sis came to town with a bunch of female friends. Because they had mainly met at the school gates Mild Mannered Intellectual Husband, who thinks he is witty, dubbed them "the yummy mammas".

The group was a vivacious, gregarious bunch - much fun was had, drink taken, criticism and blame apportioned on the male half of the human species - you get the picture.

In between we also had some pretty sobering conversations about the state of Italian politics (dire), economy (appalling) and levels of gender equality (ghastly and getting worse, since you ask).

Here was a group of articulate, intelligent working women with their fair share of deadbeat husbands, appalling employers and so forth, shouldering the lion's share of childcare (although at the age of nine their children seem to need social secretaries rather than babysitters), sometimes counting on grandparents, rarely on the actual fathers, who after all, as they never tire of reminding them, go to work, (a protestation growing ever more poignant the less they actually fulfil the role of main breadwinners).

But I digress.

Initially the mammas seemed to me, a childless harridan, the living proof of how motherhood really does not pay : you get to do what they do but backwards and in high heels, so to speak. You get to slave at school for better grades and work hard at those first jobs for careers that melt or stall as the first sign of maternity leave, part time and so on.

Later when even the children start getting a life they still struggle to go back to the lives they once had as  autonomous individuals, say the ability to make plans for an evening out or a week-end away that do not involve gargantuan organisational efforts and  Faustian pacts with other halves, mothers, in-laws and so on.

Caring sucks, you say to yourself. It doesn't pay.

Then one afternoon a few of us were sitting in one of Harrods' 27 cafes/restaurants waiting for a couple of the others who were on a last-ditch souvenir shopping mission.

A little boy of 6 or 7 was sitting by himself at the table facing us, surrounded by jackets and bags, an untouched salad cast to one side, an iPad in front of him.

I saw the mammas clocking him.

A few minutes went by, we tucked into our hot chocolates, I tried to engage them on the important subject of dinner. But I could tell my sister was tense, she is the one I know best after all, and I realised they all were. They were watching the boy. The boy was still by himself.

All along the mammas had kept a discreet watch for the absent parent - but by now an innocent bathroom sortie was out of the question. The boy had been left alone while the adult(s) with him went shopping.

By now even I could see the little boy was bored and distressed. He was wriggling in his seat, looking up and around from his iPad and at one point he seemed to ask a waitress for directions to somewhere. My sister and her friends were white faced, thin lipped, fuming, ready to spring into action if the boy had started wondering off on his own.

The other two mammas arrive, sit a table nearby, blissfully unaware of the little drama. They order and settle in. My sister says: "How long till they notice?"

Two minutes later discreet but eloquent Italian gesticulation from their table: what is this boy doing on his own???  I shuttle between the two tables, as they both begin to simmer with indignation and palpitate with concern.

As I move about I lean towards the boy's table and make an important discovery: the writing on the Ipad is in Russian. The little boy probably doesn't speak English. The mammas are ready to burst.

At this point addressing the boy is out of the question: they don't want to alarm him further. But they are determined to stop him wandering off, routed to the spot till a parent appears and should some peadophile try his luck and attempt to lure him away I would not rate his chances of actual physical survival. These mammas are ready to kill.

Forty five minutes later ("Forty five!!!!" they will tell each other for the rest of the evening, still incredulous), Russian dad appears, muttering something apologetic, to the son's obvious relief. If looks could petrify and if men ever noticed any social signals the guy would be a sodding oligarch statue by now.

I look at my little sister and her friends and can feel my heart swelling. Women are great but mothers are special - they marry all the superior qualities women have ( aversion to conflict, ability to work as a team, reasonableness, desire of good outcomes, not just selfish ones, ability to spot the butter in the fridge without sat nav) with the ability to care - not just for their children but other people's, instinctively, reflexively, whether it pays or not, the hell if it doesn't pay.

That caring, it now seems to me, cannot be controlled, modulated, switched on and off as convenient - this is the end of my shift, this is your child, not mine. It's like the ability to hear an impossibly high note - a talent, a blessing and, yes,  a curse.

And it seems to me that this means women, the vast majority of whom are mothers, will never really have a shot at ruling the world, or even getting on in it, the way the world works now. It also sees to me that if they weren't there, or turned into tone-deaf men, the world would go to hell. Not at a glacial, global warming kind of pace. I mean tomorrow.

The abyss between these two extremes is our room for action.

Capitalism isn't broken, it just doesn't give a shit

This is for fellow long-suffering Virgin Media customers but also for anyone who might one day have to rely on Richard Branson for their health care if the pirate ever succeeds in getting his hands on the bits of the NHS this government is putting up for sale.

Our "package" with Virgin media comprises TV (including on-demand services), telephone and broadband , and costs us nearly £50 a month before we make a single phone call or rent out a single film. Since the summer we have had a really poor (slow and intermittent) internet connection and no on-demand at all.

At first we phoned customer service, following the instruction on the error message on the screen. It's always nice to chew the fat with someone in Bangalore who is reading mechanically from a script - don't you find?- so we kept calling, and kept being told to "switch it on and off again". We did each time, because you could not progress through the phone call without abiding with this ritual first,  and nothing ever changed, apart from the explanation for the fault: sometimes there was a fault in the entire area that was being dealt with and sometimes it was just...our fault.

Eventually the Indians must have got tired of speaking to us and agreed to book an engineer's vist.

The chap duly turned up last Saturday and competently enough diagnosed that the strength of the broadband signal was too low because a box outside our house (shared by many other subscribers) needed to be upgraded by " a network team". He said that he would pass it to the team and expected the issue to be dealt within two business days.

When nothing happened on the Tuesday we called the chap again and he put us in touch with Keith Best, who apparently deals with complaints once they have been escalated all the way up from Bangalore to the office of the CEO, Neil Berkett.

Keith Best fobbed off my husband several times : he said the work would be carried out on Wednesday, then on Friday, each time promising to phone him back to keep him in the loop and never doing so.

So far so grimly familiar and banal.

But here's the kicker people: when you call Keith Best at the work number he gives out to customers, permanently switched off of course, he invites you to "please leave a message and I will get back to you at my earliest convenience".

This illiterate chump who, let us not forget, works for the CEO of Virgin Media, is the highest authority figure the humble engineer who came to our house can escalate our problem to.

So we have now gone full circle: we are currently paying for hot air (what else do you call non-flowing internet juice?) and, after months of conversational niceties with Bangalore,  having managed to get someone round to diagnose the problem, are now in the hands of British-based but unavailable customer service chumps who may call us back at their earliest convenience but on the whole do not.

Believers in the magic fairy dust of the free market would at this point encourage us to switch to a different operator but there is no other operator covering our area. We were with the dismal NTL because there was no choice and we are now with the dismal Virgin Media (which took over from the dismal NTL) because there is still no choice, bar getting SKY involved (huge dish, money to Murdoch, nah...).

Should there be two operators, or even three, you can be sure that, like with the energy companies, they would only ever be inspired to be as expensive and as bad as each other, not  a penny more, not a fruitless call to Bangalore less. Another note for those innocent fairy dust believers: there is no meaningful competition when there is little choice, untransparent price structures, impossibly complex 'packages' and, under any circumstances, no redress.

All of this means that there is no incentive whatsoever (given that pride in a great product and customer satisfaction  are alien concepts for these empty corporate suits) for Virgin Media to shape up, improve its service or even just provide the service they so efficiently take our money for.

They will call us back at their earliest convenience - when you actually think about it, it's not a Freudian slip, it's an unapologetic statement of fact, the only time in fact we have been told the truth.

Please reflect on this and join whatever campaign you can find, write to your MP etc etc to avert a situation when, in a not too distant future, as a patient whose cancer is metastasising and whose operation has been put off three times, you might find yourself at the receiving end of one such phone messages from the chimp put in charge of the Virgin NHS Customer Service, ooops, I mean Patient Care team.

Please also note that there is nothing broken with this model of capitalism. It does what it says on the tin. It delivers huge profit margins to shareholders and grotesque salaries to its CEOs. Just don't trust it to ever run anything you care about or on which your life depends. Whether you are a paying customer or a patient the cost of whose treatment still comes out of the taxpayer's pocket, you do not count. It doesn't care about you. It doesn't have to. No one and nothing is making it do so and it will never change if left to its own devices.