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Why I’ve gone from porn to politics | Anna Arrowsmith
Mar 14th
I started making pornography for women because there was a need. And now I want to do something about the need for more female MPs
I’m Anna Arrowsmith, the Liberal Democrat PPC for Gravesend or, as many will know me, Anna Span, the UK’s first female porn director. Take your pick.
Since news of my selection broke on Thursday, many people have asked me why I want to be an MP. The answer is: for exactly the same reason I decided to start making pornography for women more than 12 years ago. Someone had to do it and it didn’t look like anyone else was going to – at least not with the drive, enthusiasm and determination that I could offer. The unfortunate truth is that there are far too few female MPs in this country compared to the rest of the world.
Did you know that Rwanda has the highest number of female MPs of all countries at 53%? Imagine living in a country with a female majority! Well, here I am again thinking that another male-dominated field needs challenging.
Back in 1998 I was in the final year of my degree, studying film at Central St Martin’s College of Art & Design. I had decided to write my dissertation on what fundamental changes would need to be made to mainstream pornography in order for it to be enjoyed by women. I called it Towards a New Pornography, intending it to sound like a manifesto, more for my own amusement than anything else. Then came lesson one in the British psyche. Even the so-called experimental filmmaker lecturers at this outstanding college were actually conservative with a small ‘c’.
My adverts for performers to appear in my graduation film were defaced and torn down by members of staff and my final film was refused a public airing “for fear of upsetting people’s grandparents”, according to the head of the department. All this for a film where the sex was actually simulated due to lead actor issues.
Twelve years later I have won many awards, including Indie Porn Pioneer at the international Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto and best director for two years in the UK.
I have fought long and hard for women’s right to sexual expression and consumption, as well as for freedom of speech. I have long since felt vindicated about my choices back at college and know my pro-sex feminist argument is based on sound principles and logic.
So why don’t I stay in my industry and continue to reap the rewards of my efforts? Because I am the type of person who needs a challenge. I achieved much in my last career and now I want to broaden my campaign to other pressing issues such as why this or previous governments don’t think they have a responsibility to give young people something productive and engaging to do with their spare time. I lived on a council estate in Bermondsey and saw first hand why the kids were taking drugs, fighting and committing crimes.
They are simply bored. I want to campaign to give young people in Gravesham the help they deserve.
To do this I have to fight yet another old man’s club – only this time without the dirty raincoats. Some won’t like it; they’ll assume that my selection means the world is going to hell. I’ve been here before; last time I changed my industry for ever.
That, among other issues, is why I am making the transition from porn to Parliament.
Watch this space; I’ve got a lot of – for want of a better word – balls.
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Catherine Bennett | Talk to us about politics, not your lovely home life
Mar 14th
The Cameron and Brown personality parade misses the point that voters care about issues, not character
Recently, on a day when no cameras were looking and he was surrounded by political nonentities, mainly mothers, an off-duty David Cameron was amazingly haughty to a friend of mine. Maybe it was just an off-day. Or maybe, what with all the nation’s mums to think about over, a stressy Mr Cameron had important political things on his mind. What do mums feel about Lily Allen? Would they like him to drink Guinness or bitter? Enjoy gardening or football? Shopping-wise, which out of Primark and Marks & Spencer do mums think more appropriate for a national leader? Examined by Titchmarsh, he came out for the latter.
Lucky Gordon Brown: though pressed on his retail experience by an insistent Piers Morgan, he was never forced to admit to a supermarket preference. But the prime minister confessed, and a cutaway to smiling Sarah Brown confirmed that this was a positive anecdote, that he once accompanied his wife to a supermarket, but stayed in the car.
Admittedly, it’s unlikely she would have stood up and added that they were not, at the time, on speaking terms. We just have to take Brown’s uxoriousness on trust, like his grumpiness-denial and a claim that he once drank “half-a-dozen” pints a night. Are there any witnesses to this excess? The more political parties urge us to go out and vote on the basis of their leader’s characters, the more, if they want to avoid complicity, broadcasters might want to think about testing these auto-eulogies for accuracy.
Does Cameron really play darts? Does Brown, yet more implausibly, never throw anything more substantial than newspapers, and “wake up in the morning thinking what I can do to help people looking for jobs”? Stringent investigation of these claims could provide fabulous light entertainment. Although, inexplicably, waterboarding has yet to feature on daytime television, Jeremy Kyle routinely uses a lie detector to expose disingenuousness, even though all that is generally at stake, for survivors, is not a position at the helm of government, but a chance to “save your relationship”. Once Brown and Cameron were wired up they could even be asked a few supplementaries, about banking regulation, or the size of coming cuts.
Last week, invoking the more urgent electoral issue of himself, Brown gave voters a few tips for personality assessment. “It is for other people to judge,” he said, “but I believe that character is not about telling people what they want to hear but about telling them what they need to know.” And another hint, to help the public succeed where generations of divorcees have failed: “For better or for worse, with me what you see is what you get.” But like a Cretan, who thinks it worth adding, “just ask my wife” to the line “all Cretans are liars”, Brown accepts that the public might, occasionally, feel the need for corroboration.
Over to Sarah Brown. “What you see is what you get with him,” she said, in response to the bullying stories. A comment which only confirms, like an earlier line, “I know he wakes up every morning thinking…”, that here is a couple so close that their “mirroring” has reached the exemplary, automatic stage.
Even so, it’s worth noting Mrs Brown was not speaking under oath. Here is a loyal spouse who stands to be evicted, if she is disbelieved, then rehoused in Kirkcaldy; albeit with support from Naomi Campbell. Nor, perhaps, should the cautious voter believe in Samantha Cameron’s purported diffidence about Number 10, on the basis that she is already a rich baronet’s daughter and a big name in the world of handbags. She still wants to win enough to deploy her children and, in tonight’s profile of Cameron by Trevor McDonald, to throw down this gauntlet about her own Mr Wonderful: “He’s always been incredibly strong, and kind, and supportive.” How do we know this is true? Because the rules of all-political Mr and Mrs now require that candidates provide character references for the wives, as well as themselves.
Dave guarantees, in Samantha, “an amazing woman, a working mum, a very successful career woman” – so a leetle bit more modern, maybe, than Gordon’s “beautiful, elegant, compassionate, dignified” Sarah. Whom he proposed to on a beach. And loves ever so, Piers: it “just grows and grows”. Will he be sure to tell us if it stops? “I’m an open book as far as people are concerned,” Brown says. “Anything they want to know, I’m happy.” Actually, politics aside, it’s hard to think of anything he’s left out. Most of us probably know more about Sarah Brown’s proposal of marriage than we do about our own mother’s.
Presumably, given there has never been disclosure on this level, that the media did not demand it and that no one in their right mind would volunteer such intimacies, Brown and Cameron’s advisers believe that a public hardened by tales of Prescottian bulimia and Mrs Blair’s neglected Dutch cap will respond only to enhanced levels of authenticity stimulus. Heath’s yacht, Mrs Thatcher’s larder and Kinnock’s Welsh idyll have given way to a televised account of his baby’s final moments by Brown, a father who thereby enters an almost obscene contest for public sympathy with his rival, another bereaved father.
On each side, the strategy looks as risky as it is undignified. Their particular brands of insincerity – agonising awkwardness in Brown’s case, supreme smarm in Cameron’s, phony WAG stuff from both – could easily be the strongest impressions created by protracted exposure. More important, this belief in the electoral power of character may be misplaced.
Evidently Brown and his manipulators have evidence, or instincts, that tell them the contrary, but there are doubts about the significance of leaders’ characters in elections, even in an age when it is common to argue that presidential politics and a celebrity-obsessed media have increased their impact. And it is not, anyway, as if charismatic politicians are new. Winston Churchill was a celebrity, and he was rejected. So was Neil Kinnock, even though he was more appealing than John Major. Look at Berlusconi’s behaviour, and you could even argue that voters don’t pay as much attention to character as they should.
Concluding a 2002 study, Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections, the psephologist Prof Anthony King said the conventional political wisdom on character is wrong. Research, he wrote, “indicates that relatively few voters are swayed by candidates’ personal characteristics”. So Brown musn’t worry about being snubbed by Match of the Day.
“Far more important,” King writes, “are voters’ long-standing party loyalties, their views on issues, and their judgments of how well or badly presidents and parties have performed – or will perform – in office.” Ah. Maybe, given the economic tumult Mr Brown has just prophesied, it is a bit early to give up on football. Any port in a storm.
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Lehman’s advisers were guard dogs that didn’t bark
Mar 14th
By their silence, the failed bank’s lawyers and accountants gave highly questionable practices a sheen of respectability
It’s good to know we still lead the world in something. “Business services” is often cited as one of Britain’s proudest export industries, and last week’s postmortem on the collapse of Lehman Brothers from the US “examiner” brought some formidable examples of its recent triumphs.
“Magic circle” City law firm Linklaters gave the thumbs-up to “Repo 105″, the complex manoeuvre that allowed the ailing Lehman to book short-term loans from other banks as “sales”, effectively disguising billions of dollars of assets, sometimes conveniently just as the end of a quarter approached. Herbert McDade, the man known inside the bank as its “balance sheet tsar”, described the instruments in an email as “another drug we’re on”.
(And, having opined that “Repo 105″ was legal, at least under UK law, Linklaters is advising PWC on the Lehman administration.)
Auditor Ernst and Young is even more firmly in the examiner’s sights. He says it was “professionally negligent” in passing the Repo 105 arrangements, which will be music to the ears of the many creditors and shareholders itching to take class-action cases against anyone they might be able to blame for the firm’s catastrophic bankruptcy.
The examiner also reports that senior Lehman banker Matthew Lee sounded the alarm about “accounting improprieties” in the summer of 2008, referring specifically to $50bn of repo arrangements, but Ernst and Young “took virtually no action to investigate”.
Of course, Linklaters and Ernst and Young will say they were only following the rules, but auditors and lawyers are professionals and they gave Lehman’s highly questionable practices a sheen of respectability.
Lehman’s chief Dick Fuld could not have spun this web of self-delusion without having a team of advisers on his side. After Enron’s collapse led to the annihilation of its auditor Arthur Andersen, the industry was meant to have been transformed. It’s about time lawyers and accountants were subject to the same searching scrutiny as ratings agencies, regulators and the banks themselves.
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It’s Nick Clegg’s chance to shine, so he’d better not fluff his lines | Andrew Rawnsley
Mar 14th
The Lib Dems have a fabulous opportunity, but will need exceptional discipline during the campaign
In conversation with friends about the forthcoming televised election debates between the party leaders, Nick Clegg was heard to say: “I’d better not screw up.” That self-deprecation is an attractive side of his character. If Gordon Brown entertains for a moment the possibility that he might fall flat on his face before 10 million or more viewing voters, you can’t imagine him saying it out loud.
Nick Clegg is right to be nervous that he doesn’t fluff his chance to shine in the TV arc lights. This general election is a golden opportunity for him and his party. A whiskery government asks for a fourth term under a disliked prime minister who has presided over the deepest recession since 1945. An unconvincing Conservative party hasn’t persuaded the country that its air-brushed leader can be trusted with power. If not now for the Lib Dems, when?
The usual case made against them by their opponents is that they are a dilettante party. This time they can say that, when it came to two of the big calls of the last decade, they got it right and their larger rivals got it wrong. Labour and the Tories were united in supporting George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. The Lib Dems opposed the war. Iraq is in a better place today than it was five years ago, but there’s no escaping the epic amounts of blood and treasure squandered because the aftermath of the toppling of Saddam was so calamitously mishandled. The Lib Dems can contend that they also displayed superior foresight at home. Labour and the Tories were as one in encouraging the reckless gamblers of high finance during the bubble years. The Lib Dems were the lonely and now vindicated voice which warned that the debt-fuelled boom would ultimately implode in a ruinous bust.
They can also argue – though it would be best for them not to be too sanctimonious about it – that their parliamentarians came out of the expenses scandal looking less mucky than either Labour or the Tories. Not a single Lib Dem MP has been found guilty of “flipping” to bilk the taxpayer for mortgage payments and home refurbishment while avoiding capital gains tax.
Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and other members of the leadership team have also worked hard to enhance their credibility in straitened economic times. They’ve abandoned the party’s tiresome old habit of offering wish lists of goodies to the voters by ditching as unaffordable previous promises to give free care to the elderly and to scrap immediately student tuition fees.
Now to their handicaps. The first is that the Lib Dems can’t credibly claim that they have a chance of forming the next government. The second is that they can’t say who they would govern with in the event that the election produces a hung parliament – what they prefer to call, because it sounds less unstable, a “balanced parliament”.
That outcome could finally give the Lib Dems their long craved chance to shape government to their agenda. At the same time, the prospect of a hung parliament turns the election campaign into a minefield which they will have to safely traverse between here and polling day. Nick Clegg is enigmatic about precisely what he would do in the event that the election does not give a parliamentary majority to either David Cameron or Gordon Brown. I don’t blame the Lib Dem for his muteness on this subject. He is not Mystic Meg. A “photo finish” – in which Labour and the Tories have an equal claim on power – is just one of several possible scenarios. There is a variety of ways in which parliament could be hung and the Lib Dem leader has no more idea than anyone else what may confront him on 7 May.
His reluctance to spell out how he would jump is explicable for plenty of other reasons. To express a preference now would be to take a big risk that his party would split under him. Some of his most senior colleagues believe they would be crucified by much of the media and subsequently immolated by the voters if they try to sustain Gordon Brown in office after he had been rejected by the country. There is interest in the idea, first floated in this space some months ago, of sustaining a Labour government on condition that there was a new prime minister. Step forward, say, Alan Johnson with his long-term commitment to changing the voting system. But there are formidable obstacles in the way of such a deal – not least the likely reluctance of Gordon Brown to go gently into the night.
Many Lib Dems, a party instinctively on the centre-left, would be viscerally hostile to any sort of arrangement with the Conservatives. The Tories are flatly opposed to electoral reform, surely the sine qua non for the Lib Dems of doing a deal with anyone.
In the event of a hung parliament, an understanding which allowed orderly government – the passage of the budget and other key elements of business – looks a more likely outcome than a full-blown coalition. This is not least because the Lib Dems have cramped the ability of their leadership to deliver them quickly and smoothly into power with another party. Long ago, when his members became suspicious that Paddy Ashdown might do a deal over their heads with Tony Blair, the party imposed a complex “quadruple lock” which makes decisions dependent on bewildering permutations of votes by the party’s MPs, its federal executive, a special conference and a ballot of its members. How wonderfully Lib Dem to shackle their leader with more checks and balances than the constitution of the United States imposes on an American president.
Any hint from Nick Clegg that he has a preference between Gordon Brown and David Cameron would hand a massive gift to his opponents. Labour is already trying some elemental blackmail by telling voters that support for the Lib Dems could let in the Tories by the back door. The Tories are likewise trying to scare other voters with the idea that support for the Lib Dems could allow Gordon Brown to cling to office even if he has been clearly rejected by the country.
Nick Clegg’s current formula is to say that the party with the strongest support will have the “mandate” and the “moral right” to form a government “either on its own or with others”. What he has not spelt out is how he defines mandate. Does this mean the party with the greatest number of MPs or the party with the greatest share of the vote? That opacity is deliberate. If he says most votes, that will be taken as a wink that he leans towards the Tories. If he says most seats, that will be taken as a nudge that he is keener on Labour.
The Lib Dems will be intensely pressed during the campaign to jump off the fence, especially when opinion polls put us in hung parliament territory. It’s really not reasonable that the media treats this as a question to which only the Lib Dems owe an answer. It can equally well be asked of Gordon Brown or David Cameron what they will do to ensure stable government in the event that the country declines to give either of them a parliamentary majority. But there’s not much point Lib Dems moaning about that. They ought to be accustomed to life not being fair. They will need to demonstrate exceptional, not to say uncharacteristic, discipline if they are not to be impaled on this question. If his MPs start letting slip opposing preferences, Nick Clegg’s campaign will fall apart.
He has been trying to switch the emphasis to what he would demand in return for support in the hope of redirecting attention to his party’s policies. Today, in a speech to the Lib Dem spring conference, he will set “four tests” for Labour and the Conservatives: reforms to tax, schools, the City and parliament, including changes to the voting system. Some people, among them his own activists, will lament that global warming is not on his list of deal-breakers. Others, including his opponents, will ask why he has left off protecting the health service. This approach is not without its risks.
Most voters have a formed view about Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Their wives have also begun a toe-curling competition to win votes which is not much more edifying than had Sarah and Sam decided to settle it with a wet T-shirt contest.
By contrast, Nick Clegg has a very fuzzy profile with the public. If they’ve even heard of him, they don’t think they know him. If they know him, they don’t think they know him very well. The leaders’ debates will be his great opportunity to change that. He has won the same airtime as his opponents. The big two could have tried to insist that they got a larger share than the third man, but they feared that wouldn’t be tolerated by the broadcasters and wouldn’t be seen as fair by voters. So the Lib Dem leader has been given equal exposure and status with Gordon Brown and David Cameron which treats him as a candidate for prime minister even though he is not. This is a privilege neither Charles Kennedy nor Paddy Ashdown ever enjoyed. It is a fabulous opportunity for Nick Clegg. Yes, he really had better not screw up.
The End of the Party is the number one best-selling non-fiction hardback. To order signed copies of Andrew Rawnsley’s book for only £17, visit guardianbooks.co.uk or call 0845 606 4232.
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Don’t celebrate these billionaires, be horrified by their existence | Will Hutton
Mar 14th
It’s just accepted that more billionaires of any hue is a sign of economic vitality. Wrong
Last week offered a chance to collectively gawp at the super-wealthy. Mexico’s Carlos Slim and the US’s Bill Gates were in a run-off to be the world’s richest billionaire in the Forbes list of the 1,011 people with personal wealth in excess of a billion dollars. In the event Slim’s $53.5bn just pipped Gates’ $53bn. It was a moment of symbolism, opined the global commentariat. The economic baton was passing from the US to countries in Asia and Latin America. And we all could relax; the numbers of billionaires was growing again – proof positive that the global economic machine was picking up.
It is the ultimate degeneracy of the age. There is little critical appraisal of billionairedom. It is just accepted that loadsamoney, capitalism, jobs and economic progress are indissolubly linked. More billionaires of any hue is a sign of economic vitality. Lucky Mexico for coming up with the winner. But wealth is not connected to economic progress in a linear way. Wealth can come from productive or unproductive entrepreneurship. Society wants the former and deplores the latter. If you want to be seriously wealthy the message from the Forbes list is clear. One way or another you need to have played the system, played the financial markets, been born to the right class or manipulated government to have got rich. This is a list of expropriated wealth on a Midas-like scale. Marx will be grimly smiling in his grave.
Too few of the world’s billionaires can claim to be honest-to-God productive entrepreneurs who have enlarged the economic pie by dint of hard work, imagination, risk taking and innovation – although thankfully a useful proportion do populate the list. But a depressingly large number constitute a ragbag of monopolists, oligarchs gifted assets and profits by the state, mega-financial engineers or just family plutocrats. And once on the list you tend to stay there; there is little churn. The arteries of capitalism are hardening.
Sixty-two of the 1,011 are Russian oligarchs. Twenty eight are Turkish oligarchs. Even Carlos Slim made his fortune from being the monopolist who controls 90% of Mexico’s telephone landlines and 80% of its mobile phone subscribers. The OECD notes that he charges among the highest usage fees in the world. But hey! He is a billionaire and what matters today are his riches – not the manner in which the money is made. He may have started out as a productive entrepreneur. Today he is using his power to expropriate wealth on a mega scale.
The contrast with his rival Bill Gates could hardly be greater. Microsoft may have had its head-to-head confrontation with the EU Commission over anti-competitive practices, but Gates built his company by innovating around one of the great historic general purpose technologies. Information and communication technology is like the railway, internal combustion engine or air travel – a technology with massive spill-overs and implications for society. It is a classic example of productive entrepreneurship. Gates may not deserve $53bn, he was lucky to be in the right place at the right time with a great university system around him, but he undoubtedly deserves to be rich. Both Gates and Slim are exploiting their market position to get above average profits, but one is more overtly political than the other. Put another way, Gates has grown the economic pie. Slim represents a tax on it.
The good news for the US is that even if its share of global billionaires has fallen to 40%, a disproportionately high share are still productive entrepreneurs. There are figures on the list – like the Walton family riding high on Walmart – who have inherited their money, but most have made their fortunes from socially and economically useful activity and whose profits and market position are being actively challenged in the market place. A large proportion of the Indian entrepreneurs are in a similar position, although the relationship with the Indian state is sometimes more murky. Mukesh Ambani, complete with his 70-storey home in Mumbai, may be extravagantly wealthy at number 4 in the list, but like the number 5, Lakshmi Mittal (who has British residence) he has spawned an industrial empire that is generating jobs and wealth. The productive entrepreneurship spells long-term good news for the US and India – less so for the countries whose billionaires are politicised oligarchs and monopolists.
But strangely not even Forbes magazine makes much of an effort to distinguish how the billions are made. The great truth of capitalism is that it took off only once the European Enlightenment created the great institutions that kept it honest – the rule of law, a free press, accountability mechanisms, ways of forcing monopolists to give up their ill-gotten gains, creating competitive markets and elections. Before that there was tax-farming and the buying and selling of monopolies – rather as in China today. The Enlightenment offered the means, however imperfect, to challenge all that. The great mistake of the free-market revolution was to argue that all that was needed to make capitalism work was free, lightly regulated and flexible markets – and that institutions imposing ethics, transparency, accountability got in the way. We now know better.
Britain’s representation in the Forbes list is particularly depressing. Our members include a bunch of property developers, tax-avoiding retail magnates, the Duke of Westminster, a hedge fund manager and Richard Branson. Branson is probably the closest we have to a billionaire productive entrepreneur, but his companies are hardly at the forefront of technological innovation or employment generation. He glamorises – but does little to grow the economy. We do not have one genuinely productive entrepreneur on the list.
In many respects this forms the heart of the British crisis. Our political class bought the proposition that whatever the source of wealth economic progress would follow, celebrating the Mayfair hedge fund manager more than the genuine innovator. Watch the British government now fight on behalf of hedge funds against EU regulation. Only at the eleventh hour, with some of Lord Mandelson’s speeches and initiatives, together with David Cameron commissioning a useful report from the entrepreneur James Dyson, Ingenious Britain, is there any sign of change. But it is a deathbed conversion. The electorate, angry and bewildered, want a conversation about creating wealth and jobs, rewarding those that do rather than those that speculate and rig markets. Instead they are offered platitudes and bromides.
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Fortis becomes ‘ageas’, to signify shift from banking, but was it worth it?
Mar 14th
Corporate rebrandings are almost always pointless, pompous or both. So it’s a relief that bailed-out Benelux insurer Fortis has provided a crib-sheet to explain why as of April, it will be called “ageas” .
Apparently, the a and g at the beginning “celebrate our roots” – the firm began as AG Leven; the e and a in the middle refer to its two key markets, Europe and Asia; and the “as” at the end stands for “assurance”. The absence of capital letters “heightens the sense of unity within our group” and shows that “we don’t want to force our opinions on anyone”. How very modest. To give Fortis its due, the pared-down, pure insurance firm that emerged from the £10bn cross-border taxpayer carve-up is a very different business from the banking conglomerate it had become. BNP Paribas got the group’s Belgian banking interests, while a chunk of the ill-fated ABN Amro that Fred Goodwin didn’t get his hands on was taken over by the Dutch state. What’s left looks more like a boring old insurer, give or take some toxic legacy assets from the credit crunch era, which its boss Bart De Smet has been able to return to profit. But wouldn’t it have been refreshing if he’d applied the same back-to-basics approach to Fortis’s name, instead of succumbing to the brand consultants? It could have been Fortis’s most sensible decision in ageas.
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Fortis becomes ‘ageas’, to signify shift from banking, but was it worth it?
Mar 14th
Corporate rebrandings are almost always pointless, pompous or both. So it’s a relief that bailed-out Benelux insurer Fortis has provided a crib-sheet to explain why as of April, it will be called “ageas” .
Apparently, the a and g at the beginning “celebrate our roots” – the firm began as AG Leven; the e and a in the middle refer to its two key markets, Europe and Asia; and the “as” at the end stands for “assurance”. The absence of capital letters “heightens the sense of unity within our group” and shows that “we don’t want to force our opinions on anyone”. How very modest. To give Fortis its due, the pared-down, pure insurance firm that emerged from the £10bn cross-border taxpayer carve-up is a very different business from the banking conglomerate it had become. BNP Paribas got the group’s Belgian banking interests, while a chunk of the ill-fated ABN Amro that Fred Goodwin didn’t get his hands on was taken over by the Dutch state. What’s left looks more like a boring old insurer, give or take some toxic legacy assets from the credit crunch era, which its boss Bart De Smet has been able to return to profit. But wouldn’t it have been refreshing if he’d applied the same back-to-basics approach to Fortis’s name, instead of succumbing to the brand consultants? It could have been Fortis’s most sensible decision in ageas.
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Jon Venables case reveals the dark side of online opinion
Mar 14th
Was the tabloid press telling readers what to think in the row over the return to prison of James Bulger’s killer? Or was it responding to what they thought already?
You could, in a sense, write the script the moment news of Jon Venables’ “serious offence” leaked out. Think murder on the moors. Think Myra Hindley – and her doomed efforts to regain freedom. Think grief-ravaged parents from long ago, and communities bent on implacable justice. Think rampant press and quavering politicians, too.
But not, in fact, all the press – and no frontbench politician from any of the major parties. The racketing row over our “right to know” what one of James Bulger’s 10-year-old killers had done now he was 27, and what he looks like today so we could hate him in person, was basically a case of tabloids against the rest.
“The chief enemy of British freedom at present is the British press,” declared Simon Jenkins in the Guardian. He despised Jack Straw and Alan Johnson for “sating themselves” on cheap publicity. He hated the Sun, Mirror and Daily Mail in “full outrage mode”. He argued that “transparency that contributes to injustice, failed rehabilitation and even greater secrecy is bad transparency”.
And Sir Simon was not alone. Brian Masters in the Telegraph, Terence Blacker in the Indy and a judicious leader writer at the Times all worked the same rich seam of distaste. The ghost of Lord Longford, champion of a rehabilitated Myra, could almost be heard clapping from a passing cloud.
Yet this time another voice opened another front. Hadley Freeman at the Guardian is a fashion expert turning into a terrific columnist. And suddenly her laptop had been taken over by hundreds of Venables-related groups on Facebook, “all hysterically screaming about how he ‘must be hung’, ’should rot in prison 4 eva’, should ‘die, die, die’”. These “portals into a brave new world are becoming little more than on-screen versions of the most retro pockets of the old-school media”, complained Hadley. Hang on to justice, she pleaded. Don’t confuse it with “vigilante vengeance”.
But there is deeper confusion here. For whatever liberal commentators think about the haunting aftermath of child murder, tabloid editors have always realised what grips their readers. They have the previous day’s sales figures on their desk when they decide today’s lead story. And the big question has always been, chicken or egg? Was this a press telling readers what to think – or a press responding to what readers thought already?
That question begins to answer itself in a digital world. The clicks of web readers choosing tales sends signals right around online newsrooms. The BBC (under attack from Simon Jenkins for ramping up the Venables saga) can discover in a trice what turns viewers on. Those hundreds of Venables sites that horrified Hadley sprouted spontaneously, not because someone at Bun HQ issued instructions. We’re on the dark side now.
Some of the most innovative and fascinating work in the online news world surrounds the “mutualisation” of interest between readers and journalists, a profound rebalancing of relationships. Once “we had the information and you didn’t”, said the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, in an eloquent Cudlipp lecture the other day. But “that state is now in tension with a world in which many … readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments, express their own priorities, create their own content, articulate their own views”. Journalism, he said, might remain one source of authority – but not in “an inert context, one that can’t be responded to and challenged”.
Here’s the rub, though, the Venables rub. Suppose “authority”, from Jack Straw to the quality press, is getting challenged instantaneously. Suppose readers of the Bun think themselves quite as good as readers of the Times. Suppose we’re not finding convenient scapegoats – press or politicians – but talking about ourselves, our communities, our own visceral instincts. Rot in prison 4 eva? Suppose I don’t want to have mutual Facebook friends?
■ We ought to be nice to Facebook, too. Turn to one paragraph on page 4 of the Mail. “In an article by a criminologist on Tuesday we wrongly stated that he had conducted an experiment by posing as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook with the result that he quickly attracted sexually motivated messages. In fact he had used a quite different social networking site for this exercise. We are happy to set this record straight.”
Well, happy or not, Facebook may get litigious. But there’s one quick point to make. The lead headline on page 1 of Tuesday’s Mail read “Facebook under fire”. That story ran on to page 6, facing five-sixths of page 7 devoted to a piece entitled “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you”.
Or at least mildly nauseate Mail editors who expect better fact-checking from the people they employ – and may covertly regret that the Press Complaints Commission code isn’t tougher about the need for due, equivalent prominence when somebody makes a debacle out of a straightforward yarn.
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Shareholders and targets won’t do the business
Mar 14th
Pursuing old-fashioned values is a more productive way to make a company successful than slavishly following shareholders’ demands
Throughout the stage play Enron, the blinking red numbers of a stock market ticker run unremittingly across the set, showing the rise and rise of the energy firm’s share price — the driving force for its relentless progress from old-fashioned oil production into energy trading, off-balance sheet finance, and ultimately all-out fraud. Jeff Skilling and his colleagues were so fixated with boosting their stock price that they lost sight of what the Texan oil firm was meant to do, or be. And ironically, it was their single-minded pursuit of “shareholder value” that led to Enron’s catastrophic collapse.
The approach of Skilling et al was the opposite of what the economist and writer John Kay calls “obliquity”. In an elegant new book (which is more than can be said for the term obliquity itself), he uses a web of examples to show how approaching problems indirectly can be far more successful than tackling challenges head on.
Kay applies his insight to art, politics, sport and family life, but his finest examples come from the world of business — and the central moral he draws is that, counter-intuitive though it may seem, a single-minded pursuit of share price growth is the wrong way to win.
When ICI – Imperial Chemical Industries as it was known in its more illustrious days – saw its job as practising the “responsible application of chemistry,” it became phenomenally successful. Later, under pressure from fractious investors, it declared its mission: “to be the industry leader in creating value for customers and shareholders through market leadership, technological edge and a world competitive cost base”. It then proceeded to go on a disastrous buying spree, which culminated in ICI falling into the hands of the Dutch firm Akzo Nobel three years ago.
When Citicorp merged with Travelers in 1999 to create the sprawling bank conglomerate Citigroup, John Reed, Citicorp’s CEO, declared: “The model I have is of a global consumer company that really helps the middle class with something they haven’t been served well by historically. That’s my vision. That’s my dream.” His joint-CEO, Travelers’ Sandy Weill, rapidly interjected “my goal is increasing shareholder value”. Reed and his old-fashioned, oblique way of running a business was sidelined. Just a few years later, Citi was in trouble and Weill was forced out; within a decade, Citigroup was forced into the arms of the US government.
Boeing went downhill when it stopped being excited about planes, and focused on returns; Marks & Spencer generated extraordinary staff loyalty by providing cheap hot meals for employees, not because of a cost-benefit analysis, but because Simon Marks knew the kind of company he wanted to run.
Even General Electric’s legendary Jack Welch, still seen as the most consistent generator of stock market returns ever, said last year: “Shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.” He might have delivered an extraordinary market performance – but not by trying to.
Welch’s scepticism is shared by Mervyn King. Appearing before Which’s commission on the future of banking last month, King found time to take a sideswipe at the relentless demands of shareholders. “Many of the best companies I have seen up and down the country are private companies, not subject to the so-called discipline of the stock market,” he said.
Obliquity tells us that by pandering to rapacious shareholders, firms are not just trying to come up with the goods too quickly – they’re actually pursuing the wrong goal. It’s not just about numbers and targets and synergies – it’s about great products, happy customers and loyal staff. As Kay says, no one will be buried with the epitaph “he maximised shareholder value”.
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Lord Ashcroft’s place in the sun
Mar 14th
Posted by Chris Riddell in Politics
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Chris Riddell on Lord Ashcroft’s living arrangements