My blog

Category: Features

  • Are we in the Age of Pointless Jobs?

    Christopher Jackson

     

    It is one of the most astonishing remarks ever attributed to a UK prime minister. The story, as told, by Harry Cole and James Heale in the recent book Out of the Blue: The inside story of the unexpected rise and rapid fall of Liz Truss, is that as Truss’ mayfly premiership wound to its helter skelter conclusion, Downing Street aides were crying as the then PM prepared her resignation statement. But Truss was in philosophical mode and not about to cry over spilt milk. “Don’t worry I’m relieved it’s over,” Truss said. “At least I’ve been prime minister.”

    With all due allowance given for the possible casualness of the remark, this is nevertheless revealing. It seems to mark the apotheosis of political ambition whereby holding a position is good in and of itself, regardless of one’s suitability for the role, and what one was able to accomplish in it. One might read the remarks aloud and place particular emphasis on the words ‘I’m’ and ‘I’ve’ and thereby better arrive at the truth of the matter.

    Truss aside, do the remarks tell us something broader about who we are, and what we’ve become? Of course, it is important to proceed with trepidation. It was Leo Tolstoy who, in War and Peace, pointed out that anytime you hear the words ‘These days’ prepare to hear a lie. There have always been people ambitious for position; in fact, it’s a safe bet that every prime minister of the past had precisely that same kind of ambition which animated Truss. As Gore Vidal once noted: “Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so.” Sometimes when one sees a politician assume the highest office, one notices a range of emotions, but often a certain relief is there: a remorseless itch has finally been scratched.

    It’s not just presidents who have ambition, but those who surround them. Reading Carl Sandburg’s magnificent biography of Abraham Lincoln, we find the president issue the poetry of his first great inaugural speech and then settle into the prose of governing. In that spring of 1861, job-seekers descend on the President in to the extent that Lincoln invented the humorous salutation: “Good morning, I’m very pleased to see you’ve not come here asking for a position.’

    Sandburg picks up the narrative: “Of a visit of several days in Washington Herndon wrote that Lincoln could scarcely cease from referring to the persistence of office seekers. They slipped in, he said, through half-opened doors; they edged their way through crowds and thrust papers in his hands when he rode.” On another occasion, Herndon quoted Lincoln directly: “if our American society and the United States Government are demoralized and overthrown, it will come from the voracious desire for office, this wriggle to live without toil, work, and labor, from which I am not free myself.”

    In these words it might be said, is squirrelled away a far-sighted prediction of the Truss administration, where the PM knows only one thing: that they want to be PM.

    Lincoln was too wise not to include himself within his own criticism, but also too humble to differentiate himself from all those office-seekers who hemmed him in during those first months of his presidency. History has shown abundantly that Lincoln did have a reason for being there: he is one of those people, like Churchill, with a historical mission to fulfil. In Churchill’s case, he was always the preserver the British Empire and the foe of Hitler before he was Prime Minister. Lincoln, meanwhile, was always the defender of the Union and the enemy of slavery before he was President.

    It’s possible that an advocate for Liz Truss might argue that she was the evangelist of lower taxes before she was the occupant of Downing Street, but it seems likely that this won’t quite wash. In a sense Truss also represented the real life embodiment of the comedy of Armando Iannucci, the leading satirist of our times. Iannucci is the creator of not only The Day Today but Alan Partridge, The Thick of It, Veep, In The Loop and latterly a satirical prose poem Pandemonium. The common thread of Iannucci’s comedy is that people in his world occupy roles which seem to lack real meaning: Alan Partridge wants to be TV star while having no talent to entertain or inform; the civil servants and spads in The Thick of It, are rushing around Westminster bereft of real political beliefs; in Veep, an entire position – the vice-presidency of the United States – has no discernible function.

    It is as if the world has itself turned into satire – making it increasingly difficult for satirists to mock. This sense of futility regarding the roles we need to carry out is far worse beyond Westminster than in Westminster itself. In his 2018 work of sociology Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, the late writer David Graeber identified the way in which numerous jobs have cropped up in contemporary society whose fundamental value is highly questionable.

    Graeber’s point is not just that many contemporary roles are pointless, but that their pointlessness is known even to those who carry them out. Furthermore, this lack of meaning is made to rub along with the contemporary tendency to tie work to status. He writes of ‘a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.’

    This, Graeber says, in what amounts to a searing indictment of contemporary life, is ‘profound psychological violence’. So what kind of jobs is he talking about? Firstly he refers to ‘flunkies’ whose purpose is to make important people feel more important: he is discussing the whole raft of receptionists, assistants and assistants’ assistants who populate the typical corporate setting. Graeber’s second category is ‘goons’, those who set out to deceive or do harm on behalf of their employers: he is thinking of lobbyists, some lawyers, telemarketers, and the like.

    Thirdly, there are ‘duct tapers’ – those who fix temporarily something which ought to be fixed permanently, like software engineers, or those working in computer science. Fourthly, there are ‘box tickers’ who create the appearance of utility without actually doing anything such as compliance officers, or survey administrators.

    Finally, Graeber refers to ‘taskmasters’, those whose primary function is to create unnecessary tasks for others: Graeber is thinking of the whole realm of middle management which is often blamed, with a degree of justice, on the Blair years.

    None of these calls to mind the prime ministership. Is it then that during the Truss administration we temporarily saw the Graeberisation of 10 Downing Street – a strange, fleeting glimpse of what happens when the highest office of state somehow cannot be injected with any particular meaning? This probably cannot be complete because the affairs of state will always have inherent meaning and so it is hard to see how the role of prime minister could ever become as numbing as Graeber’s other listed roles. Nevertheless the fact remains, that insofar as is possible, the spectacle of Truss holding the position of prime minister, predominantly for the pleasure of holding it, represented a nadir in the office, and makes one realise that a position isn’t a static thing, but a space which one fills – above all, an opportunity, around which one needs to deploy initiative.

    In general, it should be said Graeber’s target isn’t the public sector, where one imagines a fair number of ‘taskmasters’ not to mention ‘flunkies’ and ‘box tickers’ reside, but the private sector. And I think his reticence on that question is probably related to his solution for all these problems: universal basic income. This, in one (expensive) swoop, would get rid of the need to work for those who don’t want to, and in theory free people up for more meaningful activity.

    The jury is out on how sensible this is. We had a glimpse of how it might look like during Covid-19 when something almost resembling Universal Basic Income had a morbid parody of a trial run. The results for productivity are already there to see with the economy in recession, and some businesses struggling to find momentum amid the pervasive malaise. It would also likely lead to inflation, since earnings would increase while productivity would remain the same, or even decline.

    Therefore there has probably never been a time less propitious for UBI than the present one. It would appear we need an alternative.

    Happily, a recent film suggests it might all be rather simpler than we think. This is Living, starring Bill Nighy and written by Kazuo Ishiguro. This is remake, deriving from Kurosawa’s ‘Ikiru’ and tells the story of a middling civil servant, Mr Williams, played by Nighy, who discovers he hasn’t long to live. He is one of Graeber’s taskmasters. In the opening scenes, some women turn up lobbying to change a dilapidated part of East London, by building a playground in a disused slum. There follows a tragicomic scene where the women are – as they had been on the previous day – taken from department to department all of whom absolve themselves of responsibility. The playground won’t be built, not because it’s not a genuine possibility but because nobody is using initiative in their roles.

    But as Mr Williams begins to accept his diagnosis, it becomes clear that he hasn’t been granted so much a death sentence, as a heightened sense of life. In fact, he seems strangle in possession of a kind of superpower, all the more vivid because it is contrasted with what he had been before.

    He comes to realise that with the right mindset and creativity his role can be put to use. He begins to lobby for the playground with a mixture of persistence and smarts until, without giving anything away, his sense of himself and his role’s potential is transformed.

    It seems to me that many of us enter our roles in life with too much passivity, and that if we are significantly vigilant we can actually make a difference to those around us no matter what our title, or even our function might be. What if the right answer isn’t to unpick the whole world of work with a vast social safety net which might then be expensive and difficult to administer, but to find it within ourselves to do the jobs we do have with the right spirit and creativity? Living suggests that such a thing is possible. It’s also, of course, free.

    It can’t be a complete solution. Some people do jobs which beat them down, and the answer to that will be a mixture of technological advance and education. But the Truss administration, mercifully brief for both the country and, one senses, for Truss herself, has perhaps as much to teach us as a more successful administration. It asks us to look inside ourselves and ask what we’re fit for, and then to wonder what we’re capable of. It’s a reminder not to attempt what we cannot do; by getting that decision right, and with the right measure of modesty, we just might nudge the world a little in the right direction.

  • The Apple of his Eye: the case of Paul Cézanne

    Cézanne is the patron saint of those who don’t find their chosen path in life easy, writes Christopher Jackson

    If genius is to do with fluidity and effortlessness then Paul Cézanne wasn’t a genius at all. This isn’t meant to be derogatory to Cézanne. Sometimes in great achievement we can still see the graft that went into it – a sense that things were never straightforward, and that nothing was ever arrived at in a flash.

    That kind of achievement deserves a respect distinct from the awe we feel at genius when it has less hindrance attached to it. We can see in Van Gogh and Picasso that mark-making came unusually easily to them: mistakes were simply not in their nature and that there was an unusually easy relationship between world, eye and hand which almost always added up to something worthwhile.

    It wasn’t like that for Cézanne. A new show at the Tate shows how long it took for Cézanne to become Cézanne. If you’ve ever thought in your career that you have something to offer, but that it might be a long time coming to fruition, then visit this exhibition and make the artist your patron saint.

    The exhibition should be viewed in tandem with reading Alex Danchev’s marvellous Cézanne: A Life (2012), now experiencing a muted 10th anniversary. This book gives vital biographical detail which the placards in the exhibition don’t have time to cover.

    So who was Cézanne? Cézanne grew up in Aix-en-Provence where he would eventually die: he is one of those who doesn’t need to travel much because he suspects the substance of what he has to do lies not in travel but in stasis. To broaden the terms of reference of life would be to create an insoluble complexity; but to stay still and really pay attention might just lead you to a coup. That was the Cézanne wager.

    But early on in Danchev’s biography you learn that Cézanne was defined by a coincidence: he went to school with the novelist Emile Zola. This relationship – which isn’t paramount in the Tate Modern’s exhibition – is nevertheless the chief biographical fact about him. Many people who are creative or successful are influenced to an extent they might not wish to admit by chance. For the future painter, given to a certain sluggishness, one gets the sense it was important to have the rocket fuel of a close friendship with Zola right at the beginning.

    Cézanne had his influences among the dead too: Rubens, Leonardo, Puget, Delacroix. But a great friendship can be an accelerator of development and it appears to have been so in this case. It also reminds us that Cézanne’s talent wasn’t necessarily pictorial in the first instance. In fact, Zola appears to have always harboured a secret sense that Cézanne would have been a better writer than he was. Here is Danchev:

    On Zola’s side there was a certain sense of inferiority, perhaps early acknowledged and then long submerged. After leaving school he dreamed of writing a kind of prequel to Jules Michet’s L’Amour (1858): “if I consider it worthy of publication, I’ll dedicate it to you,” he wrote to Cézanne, “who would perhaps do it better, if you were to write it, you whose heart is younger and more affectionate than mine.”

    This is a fascinating letter, especially in light of the subsequent difficulties which would later beset their friendship. Danchev makes it clear that on Zola’s side, these feelings of insecurity were a sort of time bomb which would detonate far later with the publication of Zola’s L’Oeuvre. But it is also interesting in that it opens up onto the possibility that Cézanne’s first gift wasn’t painterly at all – instead, in the opinion of his friend, it lay elsewhere. Zola seems to suggest he was made of the sort of stuff that can turn itself to any task.

    Was this true? There seems to be something in Zola’s assessment. In Danchev’s biography, we read a fascinating description of Cézanne’s attainments at school. We glimpse a general talent which would find in the end a singular outlet, and not a unique aptitude for the thing for which’d eventually become known. Danchev writes:

    He [Cézanne] was a prize-winning pupil. At the ceremony at the end of the first year (when he was fourteen), he won first prize for arithmetic, and gained a first honourable mention for Latin translation and a second honourable mention for history and geography, and for calligraphy. The years rolled by in like fashion. In the fifth grade he won second prize for overall excellence (after Baille), first prize for Latin translation, second prize for Greek translation, a first honorable mention for painting…

    The fifteen year old who has a first prize in Latin can be a Latinist as much as a painter later in life, and there’s always the sense in Cézanne’s life that there was something arbitrary and quixotic about his decision to be a painter at all.

    But this arbitrariness itself goes into the mix and forms part of his achievement. The sense is that only someone with a certain amount of ground to make up would consider to focus with the kind of ardour which Cézanne did on just a few subjects: his bowls of apples belie a determination to really look at the world which are different somehow from Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’, wrestled with by an artist of genius and then not subsequently returned to.

    Paul Joyce, the brilliant photographer and painter, agrees with this assessment, telling me: “I think art came with difficulty to Cézanne and I have the impression he struggled a great deal with perfecting his vision. My guess is that he destroyed more work than he actually exhibited or finished.”

    This is certainly the impression one gets in the Tate exhibition. The first rooms see Cézanne groping for an identity as an artist, and while this is always the case with anybody’s early work, it could be argued that the greater the artist’s eventual achievement, the more unlikely it seems at the beginning. An image like The Murder, where Caravaggio-esque lighting and the ghoulishness of El Greco’s figures combines to make an image which teaches us in one fell swoop why Cézanne would never make a drama painter. The murder in this picture doesn’t matter to the painter as an apple or a mountain would later do. Ruction and disaster didn’t appeal to Cézanne as subjects. This isn’t to call him heartless; probably quite the opposite. It might be that he felt the calamity of murder too keenly to produce a valid picture depicting it; certainly he couldn’t look at it in the same way as he would find he could look at a bather. But then, aside from a murderer, who can?

    But if The Murder was a failure of sorts, it was a promising one. Crucially, it must have been sufficiently promising to Cézanne, since he kept going. This fact alone is a reminder that perseverance is rarely rational: without it, nothing would ever be achieved. Persistence needs to be innate: if we weren’t wired to dream, few would rationally continue with their first efforts, since in the ordinary scheme of things these tend to be extraordinarily unpromising.

    Success, then, is often against the grain. At the Tate Modern, a self-portrait of Cézanne against a pink background dating to 1875 seems to contain this knowledge. The colours of the face are applied with a delicate care which reminds you of the fragility of any human face, composed of little strokes which happen to be together, and which might just as easily rush apart. The eyes, tired as if with too much looking, also seem vulnerable: ambivalent about the tasks ahead, doubtful about the likelihood of self-fulfilment. It’s an arresting intimate image, bringing a fragile ego near. This portrait might give us our own permission to make inroads in our own lives, since we can see that one of the great names in history didn’t always seem confident of his value.

    John Updike once wrote a review of a Jackson Pollock show which began very unpromisingly and then transformed itself in round about Room Three, with the advent of the famous drip paintings. “Beauty, how strange to find it here!” Updike exclaimed in that article. One wants to exclaim the same in the Tate exhibition as the exhibition ripens in its last rooms.

    By this point, Cézanne has found his subjects: bathers, Mont Saint-Victoire and of course his famous apples. When I ask Paul Joyce what he has learned from these masterworks he replies: “There are really too many lessons to learn from Cézanne to simply list, and as you return to him and his work as your own career as a painter progresses, you realise that what you may barely grasp from him is that the closer you look, the more you see. Colour, balance, fluidity of brush stroke, command of the subject, ability to build “atmosphere” and movement into a still, flat canvas amongst many more things.”

    That’s a good summary of what these last rooms offer. One might add that Cézanne, though he looked hard at the world, always looked with a consciousness of the limitations imposed on looking. A humility pervades his work, which is a possible reason for his popularity today. It is the genius as everyman, which makes us wonder if mightn’t we be great too.

    His popularity may be set to grow again. Cézanne lived without too much pizzazz, and may therefore be an attractive figure in our own cost of living crisis. Danchev cites some evidence that the painter came to feel that his friend Zola, showered with plaudits in Paris, had come to live too grandly. Cézanne never did that; his was a quiet existence dedicated to work.

    Nevertheless, though Zola is less admired today than Cézanne, this work ethic was an example which he had had all along from Zola himself. The novelist wrote to Cézanne when he was 21 that ‘in the artist, there are two men, the poet and the worker. One is born a poet, one becomes a worker.’

    To some extent, Zola heeded his own advice: his complete works comprise a formidable number of volumes, most of them fat. He might be one of those writers who makes shelves groan more than he makes readers dream. The friendship between them reminds us that work for its own sake can lead to an inferior achievement: sometimes it can really be volubility. It was once said in relation to Proust that a bore is someone who tells you everything, and perhaps Zola was a bit like that.

    In relation to Cézanne, one senses a greater focus – a more coherent and patient mindset about the task which needs to be accomplished. This had also, to an extent, been pre-empted by Zola who wrote to his friend in 1877 regarding his work: “Such strong and true canvases can make the bourgeois smile, nonetheless they show the makings of a very great painter. Come the day when M. Paul Cézanne achieves complete self-mastery, he will produce works of indisputable superiority.’ Though this might have been to damn him with faint praise, something like this prediction did in fact come true.

    What was that legacy? Cézanne realised his own way of looking. Too often we tend to think of him as a staging-post in the history of art, but I don’t think this is quite right. All artists worth their salt do something unrepeatably unique. Too often, we compare them to those who came before and after, meaning we don’t properly take the measure of what’s in front of us. Maybe this is especially a problem with Cézanne, not only because he really does have antecedents and a legacy, but because something about his pictures feels hard to rise to. There are those whose opinion one respects, who would say: “Oh God, not another Mont Saint-Victoire”. We feel we cannot match his intensity and so we turn away.

    What is his art ultimately about? The great landscapes flaunt the strokes by which they were compiled and yet each individual stroke which seems so apparently simple, adds to the alchemy of the whole. This art then comprises more than just a series of fragmented strategies: they’re shot through instead with honesty about our predicament as creatures dwarfed by the scale and complexity of things. That means that his landscapes and his apples are really unusual kinds of self-portraits because they are as much about the insecure position of the painter – and his integrity to admit that insecurity – as they are about the mountain or fruit which he is ostensibly depicting.

    Van Gogh’s condition as a genius likely suffering from bipolar disorder was always impinging on his work. Cézanne was saying something else: that we’re all standing on shifting ground. It’s the kind of thing which, once said, has to be admitted by everyone. This accounts for his influence, and this has carried into the present day. There is some anxiety attached to high achievers: we think we might not be able to outdo them, and feel our own efforts likely to be paltry when set next to theirs. One can easily guess what Cézanne himself would have made of such a defeatist attitude. He would have liked the mantra of Sir Kingsley Amis: KBO (Keep Buggering On).

    Paul Joyce tells me: “Artists are always anxious whatever their reputation or state of maturity may be. Each generation is influenced by the previous one and the History of Art is simultaneously one of constant homage and theft. My answer would be “be anxious, be influenced, then set out on your own path, like Cezanne!”

    It’s sound advice – and you don’t need to be a budding artist to heed it.

  • An Interview with revered clinical psychotherapist Dr. Paul Hokemeyer about Get Back and workplace toxicity

    Finito World interviews Dr. Paul Hokemeyer about the Beatles film ‘Get Back’ as a study in workplace toxicity

     

    Psychologically speaking, how do toxic work situations arise and why is it that we find them so difficult to deal with?

     

    Toxic work situations mirror toxic family of origin situations. In them, we and our colleagues consciously and unconsciously play out unresolved patterns from our primary developmental relationships. In my work, I’ve seen this is particularly true in creative industries where there are fewer organizational boundaries to keep people operating with a modicum of decorum. Toxic work relationships arise because people feel threatened. They feel they are not getting what they need to feel safe and secure in the organization. The best way to look at this is through the lens of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In this lens, people can only be their highest and best self and produce their best work when their physical and emotional needs are satiated and they operate in a culture of psychological safety.

     

    We struggle to productively deal with toxic work relationships because they affect us on the most primal level of our being. In them, we are constantly feeling the whole of our being is under attack. In this state of being, our limbic system goes on overdrive. It keeps us in a state of hypervigilance and stress. Our central nervous system floods us with stress hormones such as Cortisol and causes our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that rules our rational behaviours and enables us to make smart strategic decisions, to go offline. Many times we can see these toxic patterns clearly, but because our neurophysiology is operating through a place of stress and danger, we are paralyzed from making rational decisions and taking reparative actions to change things.

     

    In Get Back, Paul McCartney emerges as a boss figure. He seems in some way a micromanager, particularly of George Harrison. How should we deal with micromanagers and ensure we retain our equilibrium in these situations?

     

    One of the defining features of anxiety disorders is a compulsive need to control what feels out of control. Micromanagers are operating from a place of heightened anxiety. Once we understand the etiology of their behaviours we can create a plan to address them. The best way to do this is to focus first on self and second on the other. Become conscious of what your manager fears most. Look for her triggers. Everyone has hot buttons that send them into states of emotional reactivity. Once you’ve identified these patterns in your manager, consciously strive to go above and beyond in your efforts in these areas. Also, address these issues directly with your manager. Ask her straight out what you can do to improve your service to her and the organization in these areas. The mere fact that you evidence awareness of her triggers and are diligently and intentionally striving to improve in these areas will go far in reducing her anxiety and enable her to put her focus on someone or something else.

     

    To be fair to McCartney he is partly in a position of authority due to a greater talent – his ability to play more instruments than the others for instance means that he invades their space more. How should CEOs and managers deal with extremely gifted individuals to ensure that they don’t alter the balance of a workplace setting?

     

    The construct of psychological safety is every bit as relevant in creative families as it is in traditional organizations. Through it, people feel safe to fail and have a voice that’s outside the norm. Studies show that a culture rich in psychological safety produces exceptionally innovative work and is made up of happy, healthy employees. Managers who are working with extremely gifted employees will be well served to look at the foundations of the construct. At its core, a culture of psychological safety ensures that people will not be humiliated or punished for challenging the cultural norm or speaking up against authority. It requires managers to have healthy egos and to have a mechanism for managing their own issues of narcissism, insecurity and self esteem.

     

    Contrastingly, Ringo Starr in the film seems to carry himself extremely well, and maintain excellent relationships with all people, even in an increasingly toxic situation. How is he able to do this and what might we learn from him?

     

    As in most challenging situations, successful resolution comes not from investing your principal energy in changing the system but rather on focusing on how you can change your reaction to the toxicity that exists in the system in which you are operating. In short, this means coming up with healthy ways to manage the toxicity that surrounds you.  The first step in this process is to accept the reality of the situation. Toxic work environments exist. Yes, you might be able to change them but the probability of changing major systems can be quite low and the return on your risk in trying to change them low.   Instead focus, like Ringo Starr focused, on that in which there is a high probability of success and a high return on investment. As we see in the film, Ringo had the most balanced life. He had a rich and rewarding personal life and invested his human and relational capital through a diverse intrapersonal and interpersonal portfolio. He manifested resilience, which is the capacity to make meaning from setbacks and grit which is the capacity to tolerate short term discomfort for a long term gain.

     

     

  • Christopher Jackson reviews Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song: “A great career has its basis ultimately in enthusiasm’

    Christopher Jackson

     

    ‘Curioser and curioser,’ said Alice.” The lines come from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland but might easily have been describing the career of Bob Dylan.

    In Dylan’s world nothing is ever what we might expect, and it’s this quality of oddity which has created the obsessiveness of so-called Dylanologists. And now, just as his recording career has settled down into the possible endpoint of 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, and his art career seems also established in a comfortable retrospective – called Retrospectrum – at the Frost Art Museum, we get something altogether different again. Indefatigability is an underrated character of high achievers: Dylan is stubborn and remorseless, able to find an audience while remaining tied to deliberate mystery.

    His literary career is brief, and occasional – a fact which alone makes it peculiar to consider that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. But his output in books shows in microcosm his essential strangeness. First comes an incomprehensible novel Tarantula, released during the height of 1960s mayhem. Dylan then releases in 2003, a magnificent memoir Chronicles Vol., only to eschew publication of a second. Now we have something altogether different to what we were expecting – except if we had recalibrated our expectations to anticipate the improbable.

    Strangeness will not always amount to genius, but it is impossible when reading this latest offering The Philosophy of Modern Song not to remember Schopenhauer’s remark that talent hits a target no other can hit, and genius a target none can see.

    There’s never been a book like this. The book consists of 65 essays on songs which have influenced Dylan, mainly by men – as numerous reviewers have pointed out – and predominantly emanating out of the 1950s of his youth. Most of them have essays in the second person. Many feel oddly pertinent. This riff, for instance, on Elvis Presley’s ‘Money Honey’ feels relevant to the inflationary status quo:


    This money thing is driving you up the wall, it’s got you dragged out and spooked, it’s a constant concern. The landlord’s at your door and he’s ringing the bell. Lots of space between the rings, and you’re hoping he’ll go away, like there’s nobody home.

    Dylan recently sold his back catalogue to Universal for around $300 million, but there is somehow an authentic note to this – a wisdom which has come his way through songs. It was Eddie Izzard who joked that fame tended to injure comedy as you can’t begin a joke with ‘My butler went to the supermarket.’ Dylan doesn’t always get it right; after this book was published, it emerged that copies of this book masquerading as possessing his unique signature had in fact been signed electronically. It was unacceptable, but in this book, the writer gives the impression of being able to get to the core of things, even when looking at the world through the tinted glass of a limousine.

     

    Sometimes, as in the extended riff on ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ – Dylan writes about the Carl Perkins and not the Presley version – the predominant note is comic:

     

    You get on with most people, and you put up with a lot, and you hardly get caught off guard, but your shoes are something else. Minor things may annoy you but you rise above them. Having your teeth kicked in, being pounded senseless, being dumped on and discredited, but you don’t put any weight on that, none of it’s as real to you as your shoes. They’re priceless and beyond monetary worth. 

    The chapter only grows more absurd until Dylan writes of these shoes: “They neither move nor speak, yet they vibrate with life, and contain the infinite power of the sun.” It’s writing which is a joy in itself but also transforms your listening. Spotify already has several playlists featuring the songs in this book: it is a transformative listen as well as a transformative read.

    Another aspect to this book is the curation of its splendid photographs which makes the book a luxury object and also ups the price to £35 at the same time. The collection is prefaced by a fascinating portrait of a young Elvis browsing in a record store; ‘London Calling’ by the Clash is illustrated by a picture of bobbies breaking up a riot; ‘Cheaper to Keep Her’ by Johnnie Taylor, includes an ad for a divorce law firm.

    That chapter also contains an intriguing invective against the divorce law profession which, having been through several marriages, is a topic close to Dylan’s heart. It’s not the only passage which feels autobiographical. Dylan’s love of London is brought out when discussing The Clash:


    London calling – send food, clothing, airplanes, whatever you could do. But then, calling is immediate, especially to Americans. It wouldn’t be the same as Rome calling or Paris calling or Copenhagen calling or Buenos Aires, or Sydney, or even Moscow. You can pass off all these calls with somebody saying, “Take a message, we’ll call you back.” But not with London calling. 

    Likewise a dissertation on the little known singer Johnny Paycheck delivers this thought from the man who began life as Robert Zimmerman: “And then there are those who change their own names, either on the run from some unseen demon of heading toward something else.”

    It all amounts to a new kind of colloquialised, aestheticized and poeticised music criticism. It’s a homage to all that Dylan has known and loved, and perhaps in that sense has a valedictory feel: but then once you’re 81 everything feels like a goodbye. Yet you’re also reminded that the book is at the same time a hello, and a gift. It reminds you of Dylan’s explanation of his songwriting: “Every song I’ve ever written is saying: ‘Good luck, I hope you make it’.”

    Despite a bit of padding here and there, taken in the round the book has the feeling of necessity: Dylan’s long career appears to have taught him to wait on the vital inspiration. His latest records, now spread further and further apart to the extent that one wonders whether to expect another, have the same quality this book has of things which had to be done, since they could only be done by Dylan – and only done by him at the moment when they were carried out. All great artists are opportunists in that then they end up claiming all the prizes going.

    Greed is an aspect of Dylan’s life – or perhaps hunger. Because alongside this selectiveness of projects is also the other side to him: profusion, growth, energy, and restlessness. These qualities are all encapsulated by the Neverending Tour which has just swung through the UK during the publication of this book.

    There are limits to this book: you can sense that by the last 10 songs or so, the exercise has been largely spent and that some of the tropes have become repetitive. But this sense is more than offset by the enormous impact which the first half has: it feels regenerative, and makes you want to listen again not just to these songs, but to all music.

    A great career has its basis ultimately in enthusiasm. What we glimpse here is the power of that early passion for music which the young Dylan had: it was this which propelled him forwards, changing popular culture along the way, and eventually entering the annals of the true greats. The value of this book is that it needn’t necessarily apply to budding musicians: its lessons are transferable across sectors.

    We also sense that it is just a tiny corner of a voluminous mind. Artists who Dylan knew well – most notably Leonard Cohen and The Beatles – don’t feature at all. So this books suggests other books which will likely remain unwritten – at least unwritten by Dylan.

    This is a book which doesn’t mind who you are or where you are. It only wants to grip you and never let you go until you succeed. In another sense it doesn’t mind what you do, provided you listen to the music.

     

    The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan is published by Simon and Schuster (£35)

     

  • Opinion: American education is beginning to steal a march on British universities

    Finito World

     

    America has seen its reputation seesaw in recent years. This was largely due to the Trump administration, and there is very little to say, at time of going to press, that there might not soon be another Trump administration to add to the noise of the last.

    But, if you look beneath all the bombastic headlines, the data shows that America continues to show considerable strength. It remains, for instance, streets ahead in all global power indices, measuring its cultural, economic and military strength. The dollar has never been stronger against the pound, and the Biden administration has also to a large extent rebounded from its unconvincing evacuation of Afghanistan by helping to orchestrate a strong NATO response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

    As a result of all this, it’s not surprising that many UK students are thinking of studying in the US now – a development which has, in the opinion of some commentators, been exacerbated by the poor outcomes many experience in their UK counterparts.

    We must be careful not to do down British education, which still has much to recommend it. However, a mixture of poor financial management, absent careers services, and wokeness is making some parents and students question the value of a typical degree.

    In some instances, this is leading students to consider apprenticeships as a possible route, with public figures as diverse as Robert Halfon MP and Multiverse head Euan Blair, espousing this route.

    The merits of this are clear: work comes first and the enormous expenditure – and in many cases, debt – which comes with a typical degree are avoided and a paycheck sought and attained with maximum alacrity.

    But it might be that something is lost without university experience. There is the notion that learning is sometimes worth pursuing for its own sake, and that not everything in life comes down to money.

    So if you want to retain the sanctity of that university experience, what are the benefits and drawbacks of heading to America to do so? That’s what Finito World recently set out to do in its exclusive report of the top Ivy League universities. We looked at location, campus culture, graduation rates, careers advice, and other factors in order to compile our exclusive list.

    Either way, the data shows that many students are looking at their options and deciding that the US isn’t so bad after all – and, in fact, this held true even during the tumultuous Trump years – with 1,095,299 students enrolling in the US in 2018-19. That number dipped below 1,000,000 in 2020-21 due to the pandemic, but it will no doubt rise again in the coming years. UK universities beware.

  • Dinesh Dhamija: Sunak’s win with CPTPP is a reminder of the importance of a UK-India trade deal

    Dinesh Dhamija

     

    When Rishi Sunak’s government hailed the new Asia Pacific trade deal as ‘the most important since Brexit’, it was putting an optimistic spin on a pretty marginal agreement.

    Official figures show a prospective 0.08 per cent uplift to GDP from the deal over the next decade – so small as to be almost statistically irrelevant.

    What’s fascinating is to compare it with forecasted benefits from a trade deal with India. This, says the Treasury, would result in a 0.22 per cent uplift over the same period. Almost three times as much.

    That’s why people like me, who have championed a UK-India trade deal for years, are renewing our calls for more energy and commitment from government.

    We reckon that a deal would help create upwards of 400,000 jobs in the UK and a million-plus in India. It would add tens of billions of pounds in export revenue each year, opening new avenues for entrepreneurs, students, businesses and investors.

    Still, credit where it is due.

    As a piece of geopolitical theatre, joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) is an impressive achievement. As Rishi Sunak says, it “puts the UK at the centre of a dynamic and growing group of Pacific economies,” which includes Japan, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand and Vietnam.

    Quite how the British Isles, which sits firmly in the North Atlantic, qualifies as ‘Trans-Pacific’ is a question for the group’s geographic assessment panel. But it’s always nice to join new clubs and some of these members have terrific beach resorts, with all the facilities needed for agreeable conferences and summits.

    Politically speaking, the UK now has the right to veto new members. China tried unsuccessfully to join in 2021, whereas the group would dearly love the US to reconsider its decision – taken during the Trump presidency – to withdraw from CPTPP’s predecessor organisation, the TPP, and come back on board. The prospect of Rishi Sunak sipping pina coladas with Joe Biden on a Mexican beach, while agreeing to keep China well away from the Partnership, might appeal to both men.

    What Britain joining the CPTPP does show is that Rishi Sunak’s brand of diplomacy and leadership is winning new friends. You can easily imagine that one or more of the 11 members would have been mortally offended by something Boris Johnson said or did during his premiership, causing them to blacklist the UK.

    There remain hurdles to a UK-India deal. In March this year, the Met police stood by while a pro-Khalistani protestor took down the Indian flag at the High Commission in London, leaving Indians feeling insulted.

    But if Rishi can stop colleagues like Suella Braverman from disrespecting the Indian community (she accused Indians of overstaying their visas more than any other group) when trade deal negotiations are underway, and the BBC doesn’t repeat its ill-timed intervention in Indian political life with another hatchet job on Narendra Modi, then the long-promised rewards of a deal with India could soon be realised.

    That really would be something to shout about.

    Dinesh Dhamija chaired the EU-India Delegation during his tenure as a Member of the European Parliament from 2019 to 2020, with responsibility for negotiating trade agreements. His latest book, The Indian Century, will be published later this year.

  • Sir Martin Sorrell: “You have to devote your energies to the essential’

    Sir Martin Sorrell

     

    Of course, it has been a terrible time. The 2020-2022 pandemic has been a disaster for so many people, especially the disadvantaged – and it’s been disastrous across all nations. Having said that, people don’t always realise the sheer scale of the digital transformation which took place alongside it.

    Consumers are buying healthcare online, and High Street retailers are struggling here in London. Habits have shifted dramatically: in the media, the streamers continue to gain market share, and free-to- air networks are under pressure, as are newspapers and traditional media enterprises.

    In this context, inflation ought not to come as no surprise. Clients will look for price increases to cover commodity increases. The big question is whether inflation is endemic or transient. We clearly have shortages of labour supply, as well as supply chain disruption, and that means that companies will be looking to cover those problems with price increase. That means inflation will be well above trend throughout 2022 and 2023.

    The priority in central bank policy to date has been on employment, and now there is more friction in the labour market. Employees have more power now: the pandemic has encouraged people to think about what they want to do and how they want to do it. That’s made inflation in wages significant. I expect wage inflation to continue throughout the year but that in turn means that employers will look at their cost structures.

    Crucially, it will also bring automation into the picture. If labour is in short supply and increasingly expensive, that will accelerate the technological changes around AI (artificial intelligence) and AR (augmented reality). The metaverse has been thoroughly hyped but listening to Bill Gates and others, it clearly will have a major impact.

    As we look ahead, I think people who underestimated Donald Trump are going to be surprised – and I also wouldn’t personally underestimate Ivanka. Trump’s moves on the media side with Truth Social are interesting.

    We are still talking to one another in our echo chambers. I spoke to a Chief Executive of a leading package company recently; he had just been holidaying in Alabama, Kentucky and Mississippi on a motorbike; there were Trump fans everywhere. Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, tells the story of the Tuesday before Brexit. He went to see Cameron and right up until the last minute Cameron’s polls told him he would win; Barber told him he was wrong. It is the same with Trump now; everybody underestimates his pull with voters.

    Lately I have been reading Ray Dalio’s book: The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail, and that’s an interesting read which I highly recommend. It contains some fascinating graphs on the rise of inequality; the book explains how there are forces at work there whose power we have a tendency to underestimate. It’s a book which makes you realise the importance of China, where his intellectual focus is.

    But I don’t see much reason to despair. Companies were better run during Covid; it meant that the entre was unable to interfere, and individual employees were given greater responsibility. By the end of 2022, we’ve begun to see some of the downsides, having been initially very positive about it. I’d say a digital fatigue began to set in towards the end of 2021, and so we’ve had to manage that.

    Sometimes, I think back on what we’ve lived through over the past few years. I think in retrospect Kate Bingham was the hero of that hour, and I see she has just realised her memoir The Long Shot: The Inside Story of the Race to Vaccinate Britain.  What she achieved with her procurement team ought to be a continuing source of inspiration. She was more focused on getting the product than the cost. That was crucial – that she realised she wasn’t buying sugar or commodities – but something essential. There are lessons there for business: you have to devote your energies to the essential.

     

    The writer is the founder and CEO of S4 Capital

     

     

  • The Sound of Productivity: Clockwise COO Alexandra Livesey on music in the workplace

     

    Alexandra Livesey, COO of Clockwise, leading flexible workspace provider across the UK, talks about their experience in using music to create productive spaces across their spaces.

     

    Post-COVID hybrid working policies are now standard across most industries, and we have seen a steep rise in the need for flexible workspaces. At Clockwise, we give businesses and individuals the opportunity to come together on a flexible basis, in line with this new working model.

    This is how it works. For the days that the team do come together in an office environment, it’s important to have the right spaces to do so. We pride ourselves on creating environments that inspire and generate a sense of community, drawing together people from different industries and market sectors, while also providing spaces without distraction. We consider all senses across key member touch-points; the look and feel, the scent, the temperature and of course the music; which all impact how people experience the space. We then optimise these to support productivity.

     

    That can mean many things but lately we’ve been focusing on the sounds of our work spaces in particular, for which we have partnered with music specialists Music Concierge, who use science to help with their curation process. They have created bespoke playlists for our buildings that drive productivity, motivate and inspire our members throughout the day.

     

    We have considered many elements including the changing mood of music across our spaces at different times of the day and different days of the week. We want not only to support our members in their working life, but in their social life too, and create spaces where they can connect and create with fellow Clockwise members, something that is hugely important to us as a host to many entrepreneurs and start-ups. For example, on a Monday morning it’s all about getting your head down and into gear as opposed to a Thursday or Friday afternoon, where music can aid us by stimulating social connection.

     

    We have also ensured that the mental wellbeing of our members has been considered and prioritised in our work with Music Concierge, and we have investigated ways that we can enhance the mental health of our members throughout the workday through music.

     

    It’s fantastic to be working with Music Concierge and manipulating music in a way that creates another medium through which we can look after our members and improve their lives.”

     

    Rob Wood, Creative Director and Founder of Music Concierge, dives deeper into the science behind office music choices.

     

    “We have been working closely with Clockwise to bring their flexible workspaces to life in a way that focuses, excites, motivates, connects and calms members depending on the time of day. Clockwise offices are multi-dimensional spaces that hold a buzz of activity in so many different forms, and we use music to support this. A working day often promises meetings, solo work, reading, talking on the phone, socialising and so much more.  Spaces, times, days, specific moments and moods all come into play as we curate and streamline one of life’s greatest pleasures, to create an uplifting working environment.

     

    One of the first things we did when we started working with Clockwise, was to look at their different layouts and zones and how music would mirror their uses in sound format. For example, quiet workspaces require linear music that doesn’t change in pace or tempo too much, doesn’t have hugely prominent vocals, and doesn’t have too many different verses and choruses. This keeps the brain from becoming distracted, and actually stimulates our ability to focus and hone in on a task.

     

    In contrast, their reception area required welcoming but calming music that makes its members feel at ease as soon as they walk in door, and likely ahead of stepping into a meeting space. Whereas within a meeting room, music must be linear but can be slightly more enthused to forge a creative, collaborative environment amongst colleagues.

     

    Our work hasn’t just been confined to space but also the time of day is a hugely important factor to consider when curating music for a workspace like Clockwise. From the morning coffee to the afternoon cuppa or occasional glass of wine, our workdays alter in mood and activity, and we work on creating a space where music not only reflects this but supports the flow.

     

    As Clockwise members stroll in to embark on their day, we fill the communal spaces with invigorating music that brightens and awakens the mind, getting us ready to take on the day. As the day goes on, we fade into productivity stimulating tracks and calming tunes. When five o’clock comes around, and we begin to wind down after a hard day’s work, we start to feed in a more vibrant vibe, allowing members to decompress and let go of stress as they move into their relaxing evenings. For those connecting on a social level in the early evening, we pump connecting upbeat music through the Clockwise social spaces.

     

    We all know that Fridays are a whole different ball game to Mondays, and we must reflect that in the sounds we channel into the office space. We want to promote that end of the week feeling ahead of the weekend when Thursday or Friday afternoon come around.

     

    Music brings people together, creating a sense of community and promoting solidarity, friendship and trust. There is nowhere more important to nurture these values than the working environment, as teams work to foster a group dynamic. We ensure to choose music that motivates and connects while dropping in familiar favourites to bring people together.

     

    Social interaction is hugely important in a job, but it is just as important a creating an environment that stimulates and calms in equal capacities and makes for a mentally and emotionally fulfilling workday. One strategy we implement to promote this is by providing pockets of stimulation throughout the day, by creating meaningful moments. We disperse widely unknown songs throughout playlists, allowing members to discover something new that they enjoy and can revisit. It breaks up heads down work and allows a moment to decompress and step back into the moment.

     

    Self-care and mental wellness are instrumental to what we aim to do at Music Concierge, as we orchestrate music to work for our clients and their clients alike. This has become a large part of our work with Clockwise with it being a key value of theirs also. Motivating mindsets are a huge part of what we strive to create through our work. We also want to help people to understand ways in which they can tap into inspiring themselves through music. The next time you’re knuckling down for a hard day’s work (whether it be in the office or at home) and need that extra push, our recommendation is to queue some contemporary classical, instrumental electronica and relaxed jazz styles of music for ultimate productivity.

     

    Clockwise are implementing motivating music across their workspaces up and down the country and they are blazing the trail in the workplace industry, setting the standard for how offices should be run. We hope to see more businesses in the industry follow their practises to promote individual and team wellbeing.”

     

    Founded in 2017, Clockwise provides contemporary private offices, shared workspace and meeting rooms with flexible membership plans in key business locations across the UK and Europe. They have 13 sites across the UK and recently launched their newest site in Bromley, which is their first mixed-use site alongside a restaurant and hotel offering. Their most recent site in Europe also opened in Brussels which aids their expansion plans as they hope to grow to over half a million square feet of office space in total by next year. For more information, please visit https://work-clockwise.com/.

     

    For more information about Music Concierge please visit www.musicconcierge.co.uk.

     

  • Film review: What does the case of Elvis Presley tell us about work?

    Christopher Jackson

    We sometimes talk as a society as though being successful were somehow the be-all and end-all – as if it were somehow all that mattered in and of itself. Some time in the 21st century, the cry went up that fame was all, and that a particular set of metrics mattered. In the world of music, it would mean that marvellous Holy Grail: the hit, the platinum disc.

    The history of rock and roll seems on the face of it to make it clear in bold italics that this entire thing was always a gigantic folly. Success as a musician, especially in an era of drug-taking and alcoholism made respectable, has with astonishing regularity meant premature death.

    In the light of the 2020s, the life expectancy of the rock star seems sometimes to veer wildly between those who die very young, such as Moon, Hendrix, Brian Jones, Michael Hutchence and so on, to the recent spate of octogenarians, including Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson. It is as if, if you can somehow manage not to die, then a hedonistic lifestyle can shade by gradations of mellowing into a pampered one, until a kind of creased longevity is achieved.

    Elvis, of course, did die – or rather didn’t manage not to. In fact, his death lacks the Chatterton-esque Romanticism of some of his peers, since he declined physically to such an extent before his eventual demise.

    But the fact that the Elvis legend persists is all to do with the enormity of his impact, and Baz Lurhmann’s excellent film, evokes that like no other biopic about Elvis.

    Listening to Elvis today can be a perplexing, even tame experience. Though we still to some extent inhabit the world of Elvis, we don’t always realise it: for one thing recording technology has come a long way since that time, robbing his sound of its original shock and immediacy. This state of affairs is to some extent exacerbated by the way in which the typical Elvis mix on Spotify or iTunes is a bewildering mix of his early stuff, which really was revolutionary, with the later Vegas work, which seems schmaltzy today.

    What lessons does the film have for a music career? In the first place, we see in the early scenes that great achievement is very often to do with being open to influence and to new information. Elvis’ real legacy was to listen to the great black music of the 1950s, and to open himself up to its influence – and insodoing to further it.

    There is a tremendous scene where the boy Elvis, is peeping through a window, and sees a black rock and roll band, and experiences the thrill and pulse of that music as a thing which he must have in his life – and the only way to do that will be to emulate it. It is often said that when Elvis first came on the radio, people assumed his vocal chords belonged to a black singer.

    In all our careers, there is knowledge which may have a forbidden quality; Elvis is a reminder of the potential benefits of running roughshod over that kind of prohibition, and of imbibing influence wherever it can be found.

    In the film, this idea that Elvis sounded black on the radio is conveyed to us through Tom Hanks’ performance of Colonel Tom Parker. The question of Tom Hanks in this movie is worth a small essay in itself. Hanks, an actor – and to the extent that one can be sure of these things – probably a man to admire is nevertheless the main problem with this movie. Some critics have pointed to his disastrous accent as the principal issue with Hanks’ performance and it is indeed a strange mishmash.

    I think the problem with the performance runs deeper in that Hanks, among major artists of our time, seems to me to be someone with an innate relationship to goodness. In this, he is similar to Paul McCartney, who can never keep optimism out of his songs: his inherent tendency is towards consolation. If you look at his performance in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood (2019) you can see him exploring a terrain – in that case, saintliness – which he feels a natural kinship with.

    Here, in Elvis, he is fatally severed from the subject matter of human evil, meaning that he is at an odd distance from the essential topic of the performance. It is like a singer choosing to sing out of range, or a writer with no ability for dialogue switching from novel to the drama.

    The resulting performance doesn’t quite derail the movie, though it comes close. Elvis himself seems to have been born with something opposite: an innate capacity to know what could and couldn’t be done with a song on stage. Luhrmann’s movie shows that this ability was something that he first had to learn to wield: nervousness is something everybody must overcome at some point, and it is interesting to see Austin Butler convey Elvis’ tentative first steps into his gift.

    The greatest question for anyone with a creative bent is how to make money from it. It’s quite rare that an ability with the arts comes hand in hand with a talent for administration; the two aptitudes must occupy different parts of the brain, and where the one is accentuated the other is likely to be in deficit. So it was with Elvis; an outsize performative gift opened him up to exploitation, and he met, in the shape of Parker, a master exploiter.

    The film consistently shows Elvis seeking his authentic self in the teeth of the man committed to falsifying that self – and to commercialising the image he has created. A TV show, which looks like it will be an embarrassment of Christmas cliché perpetrated by the Colonel, is pushed back at by Elvis. Later, we see him inaugurating his big sound in Las Vegas.

    Elvis sometimes appears here as a great artist – a man with an unfailing sense of what audiences want, but able to enact something at some farther point just beyond that vague idea.

    In one sense, Elvis is still with us. We still have our popstars identifiable by one name – Beyoncé, Drake, Jay-Z, and so on. They are, to some extent, his inheritors. But not entirely. In another sense, the world has moved past his obsessions, or begun to wise up to the danger of self-indulgence. Today’s young people are often teetotal, and as likely to wear sneakers and design an app as they are to pick up a guitar and take drugs: they’re the better for it. Some of the 1960s susceptibility to self-indulgence was probably an inheritance of the Second World War: when life has been constricted and dangerous for so long, who could resist that bright day when it came along? It was not a time for the stricture of virtue. It was time to live again.

    This is a film which does more than listening to Elvis’ records can to describe his greatness. It shows how the compulsion of the performer can rise to art, and how if that performance can be captured in sound, a memory lingers on.

    What Luhrmann ultimately does is regenerate Elvis, and remind us what he did. He dragged the past with him into the future, and though he died along the way, he is as much an aspect of our lives today as the atomic bomb, or Winston Churchill, or Martin Luther King, or any of the other seismic things of the 21st century.

    The film ends with footage of a magnificent performance by Presley himself of Unchained Melody. Desperately overweight, and sweating under lights, he nevertheless finds the notes as only the great entertainers do – the more so when the chips are down, and the world is difficult. They find the right notes because they have to, because it’s what they do – and because of decades of practice at doing so.

  • Baroness Anne Jenkin on Women2Win, JK Rowling and the ‘Animal Farm of our times’

    Baroness Anne Jenkin

     

    My prime role in life is as an advocate for getting more women in parliament. But lately I’ve found myself speaking out more and more about the trans question. Ever since the JK Rowling furore, I think the question of gender dysphoria and feminism have become impossible to separate – perhaps they always were.

    I have become interested, for instance, in the case of Sinead Watson, a Scottish ‘detransitioner’, who is a campaigner on this issue. She changed gender but now her argument is that she should never have been allowed to have a double mastectomy and hormone therapy, and she’s taking the Sandyford clinic in Glasgow to court.

    We’ll see the result of that case, but the 5,000% increase in the number of girls presenting with gender dysphoria is highly disturbing. The research seems to point to the fact that it relates in some ways to the amount of time young people spend on their phones. They are driven to consider the matter by influencer sites, and unfortunately it’s not possible to say that the influencer sites have no commercial interests in the fate of these young people. That’s why we have a 25 per cent year on year interest in puberty blockers and cross sex hormones.

    In addition to that we have the widespread availability of violent porn, which until 15 years ago you’d have to reach for from the top shelf of a convenience store – and pornography was in those days tame by comparison to what we see today. Today everybody has access to everything and that is not only screwing up relationships, it’s also making young girls very fearful about sex when they see what’s expected of them.

    It’s traditionally always been a traumatic period, when your body is changing from childhood into womanhood – or childhood into manhood. Traditionally, girls who struggled psychologically and emotionally with that might have become anorexic at that point. But today they have this other option which is to bind their breasts, and be injected with testosterone.

    In a way what we’ve done is to conduct – pretty much by accident – this huge social experiment on children without really having any understanding of what the long term implications are.

    At the centre of all this is the so-called JK Rowling cancellation. If you look at what Rowling said in her original blog, I challenge anybody to find anything remotely controversial in it. People who repeat it and say she’s transphobic, or a hater or anything like that – I don’t think any of them have actually read what she wrote. In fact, most of us are very proud of being women, and though it has its challenges, it’s also a tremendous privilege.

    We’re at the point now where women feel they have been understanding and sympathetic about the question of female single sex spaces for too long. This is especially the case as while they’re being nice, their sex-based rights are being eroded. So you’ve got this concern about safeguarding children on the one hand, and concern around single sex spaces on the other – and single sex spaces are single sex for a reason.

    Some people try and make the comparison that the plight of the LGBTQ community resembles the fight over Section 28 in relation to gay rights. What they don’t understand is that this is a clash of rights. Both women’s right and trans people’s rights are protected characteristics under the Equality Act. It’s not something we can turn away from – we need to sort it out.

    Fortunately, there’s a novelist out there able to satirise this – and insodoing make sense of it a little. This is the brilliant parody The End of the World is Flat written by Simon Edge. It’s the story of small charity which achieves everything it needs to achieve and then has to pivot into campaigning for the – exactly as Stonewall has had to do once it achieved its goals in the field of gay rights. It is the Animal Farm of our times.

    But Edge’s novel ends happily, and I don’t know where this particular story will end – I only know we need to sort it out.