Odanglesex Revisited: Some are more equal than others

After a break while I was holidaying up the East coast of England and (just) Scotland from Flamborough Head to St Abb's Head, here's another reposted Odanglesex adventure, this time on government pronouncements on equality law.


FROM: Edelbertha Spengler, Chief Executive
TO: Kenneth Spotlessnob, Director Of Transformational Excellence and Strategic Vision

Kenneth:

Could your people cast an eye over this excerpt from a speech by the Secretary of State and see if there's anything we need to do?

"...and another thing. It's about time we stopped poncing around burbling on about equality and human rights. People in the Isle of Brent aren't bothered about that highfaluting nonsense any more than they are in Heckmondwike. Get the streets cleaned. Get the milk put out. Put vandals in prison. Those are the things that count. If I find any local authority wasting money on political correctness like equality monitoring I'll bloody have them tarred and feathered, and if my colleague Ken Priestley hasn't announced that last bit yet, he will, or my name's not Fred Lardly".

FROM: Kenneth Spotlessnob
TO: Neil Balderson, Senior Transformational Excellence Manager

Neil: Please look into this asap for Ed.

FROM: Neil Balderson
TO: Kenneth Spotlessnob
cc: Hamish Carpenter, Transformational Excellence Manager

Kenneth:

Street cleaning is a district responsibility and milk transit pathways sit in the private sector. Imprisoning vandals is a matter for the police and the courts. So I think we're all right on this one. but I'll check with Hamish we're not doing anything the Secretary of State could judge to be politically correct.

FROM: Kenneth Spotlessnob
TO: Neil Balderson

Or politically incorrect.

FROM: Silesia Jones, Equality Consultant
TO: Neil Balderson; Hamish Carpenter

Neil/Hamish:

"Politically correct" is not a precise term. I certainly cannot reassure you that we aren't doing anything towards equality or human rights: for example, Councillor Wayneflete recently approved the reversal of a decision not to grant-aid the Isle of Brent Domestic Abuse Crisis Centre after lobbying by the Right Hon Fred Lardly, PC, MP, and also wrote a supportive foreword to our Equality Action Plan.

Fred Lardly's remarks should be put in the context of his speech four days earlier to a meeting of university vice chancellors:

"...now if you think that standing up for fair treatment for everyone irrespective of whether they're black, white, yellow or bloody purple with orange bits is a luxury that we can do without in hard times - think again. It's essential to the Big Society, civilisation and business efficiency, and that means knowing what's actually going on, so you'd better be able to tell me, or my friend Liz Fluffstone will be round, and let me tell you, she's pretty serious for a Lib Dem and a woman."

FROM: Kenneth Spotlessnob
TO: Edelbertha Spengler

Ed:

I've made exhaustive enquiries concerning your query about the implications of Fred Lardly's speech, and there does not appear to be anything we need to do, especially in the light of his remarks in the House last night about "letting local authorities get on with the job and not interfering, not like that other bloody lot".

Kenneth.

The Odanglesex Chronicles: The Away Day (8)

Up until now, the away-day had been indoors - but everyone knew that, rain or shine, the afternoon sessions would be outside and energetic. A few people had come with notes from doctors and one had got pregnant, but no ther excuses were allowed by Kelly Pattrick, supervising the creation of teams with a zeal that suggested Girl Guides meet Hitler Jugend. That was Mike Finnegan's thought and he promptly filed it away as a potential book proposal.


Outside, the sun shone on grassed areas,a stream and bare-floored woodland soggy with the morning's rain. The Outdoor Centre's Director, a bald, heavy-bearded goblin, had appeared and Kenneth Spotlessnob buried himself in conversation with the man while the teams received their instructions from Kelly and her cohorts.


The first event involved two people in each team lying on their backs in the middle of the woodland holding hands. The rest of the team had to lift them up and carry them over various obstacles, over the stream by a bridge and out to the open grass without the hand contact being broken. Reema's team triumphed, as did most of the others, though one carrier tripped, lurched forward and brought down the load, breaking the contact, while another team came to grief entirely while trying to traverse the narrow bridge.


The second was more competitive. Each team had to get five full buckets of water across the stream, aided by a rope, stout wooden stakes and a chunky plank long enough to stretch across two thirds of the stream. The exercise was time-limited to twenty minutes and the water each team had conveyed would be measured at the end. Various ingenious solutions were tried with varying success and Dale Brashcon, who seemed to be entirely in his element, fell in while reaching for a bucket from the far side. The Napoleon of the event was Gwilym, who stuck one of the stakes in the stream to measure its depth and then organised his team to stand in a line in the stream passing the buckets across. Even the goblin seemed surprised.


The third event was familiar to some. People paired up and one was blindfolded: he or she had to tranverse the area guided by the other's instructions. Then the roles were reversed. How exactly it happened that after Neil Balderson had guided Scott Fitzwilliam across, a misunderstanding had led to Neil stepping into the stream, would be a mystery for all time.


The fourth event was a treasure hunt. Having finished his discussions with the goblin, Kenneth Spotlessnob joined in this, mimicking Dale's undiminished enthusiasm. One item of treasure was lost and never recovered. For the last activity, Kenneth, Kelly and the gnome acted as observers.


The fifth and last event took them to the assault course. Each team had to traverse the course and was timed. They could complete the course only if everybody had overcome every obstacle, which involved teamwork and improvisation. Gwilym, abandoning all thoughts of what the whole business cost if you totted up the pay of those participating, had started enjoying himself - but he was about to face a moral and practical dilemma.


One stage of the course involved a high wall made of a series of planks laid horizontally. Only the best of climbers could scale the thing unaided, but the worst could in principle make it if pushed from below and caught and pulled from above. Lucy Marlowe was organising at ground level and so it happened naturally that she was the last to ascend and had to do without help from below. She was young but not of athletic build. She made it most of the way and then froze. Reema had grabbed her arms, but she was small and slight, so found Lucy's weight too much to cope with. Gwilym could see that shortly Reema would either let go or be dragged over the edge. He could see a solution - one solution and one only - but there was a problem.


"Help!" cried Reema. It was now or never. Gwilym reached down, clasped Lucy's backside and hauled her up. He was not in the habit of touching work colleagues inappropriately, but it had worked, but he was having trouble with his Methodist upbringing, but Kenneth had noticed and was making notes... He could of course broach the subject with Lucy afterwards, but the chances of that being misunderstood seemed around 50%. He was also a bit embarrassed about being forced into the he-man role: he was bigger and stronger than Reema, true, but probably had no more muscle power than Kelly. Anyway...


"Get through that hoop, Gwilym!" yelled Reema. And so it was finished; and Kenneth and Kelly compared notes; and the rain came back; and Kenneth sent an e-mail the next day saying how much he'd enjoyed participating, how much they'd learnt about working as a team and how he knew they had too.

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NOTE; THE ODANGLESEX CHRONICLES. I know some people have followed this, so I'm letting you know that I'm resting it for a while because I've run out of inspiration. Of course, I'd welcome new ideas for it. I received one that worked very well. In the meantime, though, I'll dredge up and repost some old episodes bit by bit, reworking them a bit if I see the need.

By the way: Gwilym's dilemma was based on reality.

Politically Correct

Once upon a time, "PC" in Britain meant "Police Constable". It still does. However, now it may also mean "Personal Computer" or "politically correct", so you could have a PC PC with a PC. Interesting though police constables and personal computers are, I want to focus on those two devious words "politically correct". I believe the term originated in the U.S.A. as a reaction against tight social or organisational control on what people could say. While essentially the same issues of racism, sexism, disablism and so on exist in the U.S. and the U.K., together with the same approaches to opposing them, it seems clear that the U.S. culture has been more prescriptive and restrictive than the U.K.'s: things that very few people would object to someone saying in the U.K. would meet with shock and condemnation in the U.S., and I'm not talking about grossly racist or sexist language. In its origin, then, the term may have been a healthy revolt against too much unthinking prescription. The culture of "political correctness", correctly understood, is not a matter of challenging possibly hurtful or contemptuous words, but of ruling them socially inadmissable, thus preventing debate and open learning. The term crossed the Atlantic at a time when we in the U.K. had come nearer to an orthodoxy of language on sensitive issues than before or after. It was used vigorously in the media to hold up to ridicule people who said terms like "manhole cover" or "history" were sexist or that a local council should not talk about "Christmas". However, most of the examples which hit the tabloid press were invented, the ban on talking about manhole covers being a classic example. There was indeed, I know, an attempt to rename women's history as herstory (a misunderstanding, as "history" is from Latin "historia", a story, and nothing to do with male gender) - but the draft council document concerned was promptly changed, with down-to-earth criticism, by the committed feminist councillor it went to for approval. History survived. The orthodoxy of language declined, except in the field of disability issues. Now on both sides of the Atlantic it's used almost entirely to sneer. Object to offensive language and it's very likely someone will say, "Oh, right - political correctness!" To question why there are no Black people working in reception, or no women in senior management, is "politically correct" - and as soon as the dread two words have been uttered, people think the argument can be dismissed. So what started as a challenge to unthinking orthodoxy has become unthinking orthodoxy itself. Such is life. This is not to say that there aren't still reasonable points that end to get frowned at (the unreasonable ones should be easy to rebut in argument). For example, there is undoubtedly racial and religious discrimination in the U.K., but does either explain why the socio-economic profile of ethnic Bangladeshi Muslims has been improving while that of Pakistani Muslims has flatlined - or in particular why Bangladeshi women are improving their work status faster than their Pakistani counterparts? Might there not be a factor to do with those communities? I can think of places where saying this would make one to be looked at with great suspicion - but far more places where challenging the term "Paki" would be unpopular. Now the term "political correctness" is being used to disparage any kind of political values or commitment. I recently went on a trip to a brew-pub which was strongly committed to environmentally responsible practices. On the way back someone commented that the brewer's methods were "not just politically correct, they make money." From the way "politically correct" was pronounced, I gathered that it was odd or ridiculous to want to reduce your negative impact on the environment, but fine to be motivated by profit. So it may be politically incorrect to say so, but I wish we'd stop taking about political correctness.