Professional demands

I do not want to be called "professional."

Some of my friends and most of my colleagues think this is odd.  After all, the word "professional" is a term of praise - isn't it?  

But if you go back a little bit, you can find other uses of the term.  There are many theological attacks on those who are called "mere professors of religion."  They are seen as people whose entire concern is with formalities and outward show rather than real belief and action.  Within my lifetime the term "professional woman" signified a prostitute.  And the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary offers a sense in which "professional" is uncomplimentary, giving examples of people who treat themselves as commodities.  One of the examples is the old term "professional beauty."   


It may seem rather strange to go back to earlier meanings of the word.  We all know that language develops and words change their meaning.  But in an important sense, those older meanings of the words cling around the term "professional".  


I'm not so worried about the idea that people are paid.  I like my job - well, most of it - but I do it for money and I don't need to be coy about the fact.  If I weren't paid I couldn't do it.  But jobs - particularly those jobs that are labelled "professional" - can take more than the energy and dedication with which most employees perform their primary work.  They can, by degrees, sap the integrity of those who work.

Behaving in a "professional manner" often means acquiring a veneer of false confidence which creates a distance between the "professional" and any member of the public.  This isn't something that I would always criticize.  When I go to see my doctor, for instance, I accept that she will adopt a confident and reassuring manner, even if she's just had a bad weekend and is personally feeling a little unsure of herself.  I don't mind the distance either.  She really can't ask all her patients to be her personal friends.  But I hope her determination to appear confident never gets the better of her honesty.  If one day she can't work out what is wrong with me, she'd do best tell me so and send me for tests elsewhere. 

While professionalism distances professionals from the public, it also draws professionals together in their workplace and can begin to separate them from the world in which others live.  Here it can be closely related to the kind of corporate loyalty which leads employees to forget to question what they are doing and why.  An inside account from an unnamed bank suggests how easily a number of professionals forgot about the ethics of banking practice and their responsibility to the wider society.  Instead they showed their loyalty to the well-being - primarily the financial well-being - of their employer and, as a group of professionals, broke the law.  Manipulating the Libor rate had an effect on the wider economy and on numerous individuals but some of the professional employees of the banks involved put the banks' interests first.  They placed the good of a corporation and the good opinion of their colleagues above the good of individuals.  They may also have broken the law, though that isn't yet clear. 
 
Almost all employers have a rule somewhere that employees must not damage the reputation of the company or institution for which they work.  It's a vague rule which employees have come to accept - not that they have much choice.   But what does that rule really mean?  


I take for granted the idea that I shouldn't tell lies about my employer and that I should behave in a reasonable way and work hard at my job.  I worry that the reputation rule may give my employer the right to police my private life or my public life away from work.  Suppose I, acting in a private capacity, go on a demonstration against the government or the arms trade, and am recognized by someone who knows me through my job.  Would this be regarded as bringing my employer into disrepute?  If my employer were dependent on government funds and good will, or if my employer wanted to make money by hosting a reception for arms traders, I might find myself in a difficult position.  I hope the clause doesn't extend so far.  If it does, it gives government and global corporations a very easy way of stifling dissent.  And it means that an employer can control my free time as well as my working hours.

But what if I wanted to tell the truth about my employer?  There are circumstances in which honesty would be seen as "unprofessional."  So would whistle-blowing, although society as a whole owes a great deal to whistle-blowers who have seen where their wider loyalty lies. 


The best employers I have worked for have encouraged open discussion and haven't been afraid of criticism.  They create an atmosphere in which the workers do their best but know that they aren't perfect.  Anyone who needs help or advice can ask for it.  If a worker sees that something isn't working, that worker is free to say so.  The aim is not to hide behind the mask of professionalism but to do the work as well as possible.

These days, however, the market is more firmly and forcefully present.  Everything seems to be for sale: sport, arts, education, health.  Every public good is forced into competition and instructed to sell itself and explain its value in solely economic terms.  Organisations concerned with sport, arts, education and health are told that their primary aim is to acquire customers, and that the approval of those customers is the means to acquire and retain sponsorship.  Every school and GP's surgery is busy competing with others and every sports team and art gallery spends days and weeks writing funding bids, surveying customer opinion and producing the kind of jargon that will enable them to keep going. 

No-one tells employees to lie but the rhetoric everywhere is about "marketing," "branding," "presentation" and "networking."  Apparently these are key elements of professionalism.  In these panicked times they make employees look inward, focus their attention on the survival of their own jobs, and discourage them from looking at any question larger than the immediate good of their own company or institution.  When the competition is so fierce, there's a danger that the competition will focus only on the first impressions of the "customer," whether a patient, a parent, a pupil, an enthusiast for museums or the local football team.  There's no time to consider the longer term or the good of the "customer" in five or ten years. 

But humans have a tendency to ask questions and make ethical judgements.  I can't stop questioning what my work is for and what its value is, and should be, in society.  These are difficult questions and may produce answers that go against my personal interests and the interests of my employer.  It's a dangerous path.  If I think too much, I may find myself saying something my employer doesn't like.  I could even be accused of damaging my employer's reputation.  Yet I believe in freedom of speech and I believe in speaking the truth.  It's a matter of integrity - and, next to integrity, professionalism looks pretty hollow.


 I hope my employer agrees.

Pretty policemen and agents provocateurs

When I arrived at university, one of the first stories I read in a student publication was about police spies.  It said that for the entire summer vacation, two policemen, disguised as hippies, had been instructed to punt up and down the rivers watching out for students or other layabouts smoking pot.  They may have enjoyed their summer but they never managed to catch anyone.  A cartoon accompanying the story showed two policeman, dressed as stereotypical hippies but wearing policemen's helmets.

I don't know whether the story was true.  I do know that, in the three years of my first degree, I was never offered cannabis or any other illegal drug.

At the time, the story just made me laugh.  It fitted with the comforting view that the police were so incompetent at going undercover that, if they tried, they'd fail amusingly.

A little later I became aware of a more disturbing story circulating about the activities of some police forces - and I heard this so often and from so many different sources that it seemed quite evident that it was true.  This was all back in the 1970s when homosexual acts in private between consenting adults aged 21 or over had only recently ceased to be a crime.  I suppose this affected the arrest totals of many police forces.  However it remained illegal for a man to solicit sex with another man, raising an interesting question as to how gay men were ever to form sexual relationships.  Several police forces went beyond looking out for gay men meeting one another.  They sent policemen in plain clothes (known as "pretty policemen") to places where gay men met so that, if a man mentioned the possibility of sex, they could whip out the handcuffs and arrest the man.  There were stories of pretty policemen who did their best to ensure gay men would make advances to them.  It all seemed fairly disgraceful to the policemen and forces involved and I'm glad to say that the practice seems to have died out.  I don't think today's police would countenance such activities.  I don't think the government would allow it.


But I have been disturbed by what I've learned in the last year or so about the activities of undercover policemen.   There are plenty of cases of companies going under cover to spy on their opponents.  The McLibel case in the 1990s revealed that seven spies working for McDonald's had infiltrated the small London Greenpeace group so that at some meetings the infiltrators were in a majority.  The campaigning organisation Campaign Against Arms Trade was infiltrated by a man who worked with them first as a paid volunteer and then as their paid Campaigns Co-ordinator.  He was also being paid through a company working for arms muanufacturers British Aerospace.  According to the Sunday Times story which uncovered this espionage, he was one of half a dozen paid infiltrators.  Although it's a national organisation, CAAT is pretty small.  


At least when McDonalds or BAe engage in infiltration and spying they merely lower my already low opinion of them.  I had occasionally visited McDonalds with my children when the McLibel trial began but after I heard about the infiltration and spying, I initiated a family boycott.  Some people may find James Bond glamorous but I reckon there's something rather sickening about spies.


For a long time I've heard stories about state infiltrators in political groups.  I didn't think too much about who organised them.  I'd probably have thought it was the secret services, whoever they are.  I wanted them to be something shady because I didn't want to put a face to them.  I've been involved in some left-wing, mainly pacifist campaigning.  I don't want to discover that my friends aren't my friends at all - that they're pretending to like me and share my ideals so that they can spy on me, for money.  And I don't want to look at the people who really are my friends with suspicion, because if I began to do that, how could any friendship survive?

But in the past year or so it's become evident that that the state infiltrators might be quite close to home.  Mark Kennedy worked as a serving police officer by infiltrating protest groups, some of them near where I live.  I don't know if he went on the same anti-war marches but it's possible.  He looks vaguely familiar but that's all.  At least I wasn't one of the women campaigners with whom he had affairs, while concealing the existence of a wife and family elsewhere.  As the story of his spying became public, other spies were unmasked.  Some of them had affairs with activists too.  Some of them fathered children.


The police response to this was to say that the spies were "grossly unprofessional," "morally wrong" and "rogue."  My assumption was that at least, after this, the behaviour of police spies would be reined in.

I was wrong.  The Home Office minister Nick Herbert has stated that police acting as undercover spies should be allowed - in certain circumstances - to have sex with activists.  I don't know what that makes the government.  Paying someone to have sex with people as part of a job isn't quite the same as being a pimp, although morally it seems roughly equivalent.  In a few countries encouraging the deception might count as inciting rape - but this wouldn't be the case in English law.  I expect the women who have been deceived feel pretty damaged by it - especially if they have had a long-term relationship and a child with the spy.   But it's not something I want my government to permit, organise or encourage.  I think it's wrong.


I'm relying a lot on instinctive reactions here.  So I thought I'd better consider other circumstances.  What if the police spy was infiltrating an extreme right-wing group?  Would I think this worthwhile?


I dislike extreme right-wing groups, particularly those which incite racism and carry out racist attacks.  I want them to stop doing this.  It's possible an effective infiltrator would find a way of stopping them.  But I'm still not happy about the spying.


Anyone who infiltrates a group has to take part in its activities.  Police spies risk arrest when they break the law - Mark Kennedy was arrested on more than one occasion.  If they reach a position of power - which must be their aim - they need to suggest activities and encourage them.  So the police spy infiltrating a racist group might need to establish his or her credibility by abusing people on the grounds of their race, by spraying racist graffiti on walls, by suggesting groups to be targeted on a demonstration - even by initiating or taking part in racist violence.  This comes close to acting as an agent provocateur by encouraging people to break the law.  I don't want any police officer to do this, however noble the initial aims.  Nor do I want any police spy to be expected to have sex with a racist as part of his or her job.  


Doubtless some people - including members of the government - will say I'm being naive.  But I think members of the police who go undercover as spies cease to act as upholders of the law and move into a shadowy area of questionable morality.  When Nick Herbert endorses undercover policing and says that police spies may have sex with activists to reinforce their cover, he may speak for the government, but he doesn't speak for me.  I wonder whether the majority of voters - or the majority of police officers - would agree with him.
 
 

Millennium dreams

The children stayed up to mark the moment when 1999 slipped into 2000. I think we toasted the new millennium. There was a crash of fireworks and a splatter of colour in the sky. Then came the sound of people laughing and singing. I opened the door and saw a dancing procession of neighbours and friends doing the conga round our cul-de-sac. We left the door open and joined in. Suddenly it seemed that the future could be filled with trust and friendship.

Before that, we'd been watching the celebrations from the new Millennium Dome and flashes from around the world. I recall Tuvalu, Sydney and Paris. I remember little of Britain's Millennium celebration. Tony Blair and his family were there, still glossy with the people's love and trust. I noted that, of all the celebrations shown from all over the world, ours was the only one with a guest list and entrance fee - others were free and open to the public. George Carey as archbishop of Canterbury had insisted on a Christian element to the event. He was a late addition to the programme and was squeezed in long before midnight. He stood in the centre of the vast dome and the words of the Lord's prayer echoed emptily. The audience seemed rightly embarrassed - religion was out of place in this monument to commercial sponsorship.

At some point before going to bed, I rang my brother in Canada. "This is the voice of the next millennium," I declared. Looking back on the 20th century, it seemed possible that I'd reached a better time. The Berlin Wall had come down, apartheid had ended and it still seemed possible that the divisiveness and hatreds of Thatcherism would be pushed back. The afterglow of the 1997 election still shed a little light, even though I hadn't brought myself to vote New Labour. I mistrusted the surface shimmer and worried about the number of times Blair urged the voters, "Trust me." Honest people rarely insist that they tell the truth - they simply speak.

On the morning of 1st January 2000, hope persisted. Nations and people could work together. If we couldn't save Tuvalu from global warming, surely we'd welcome its dispossessed people. Perhaps as a world we could learn to love the stranger, just as the dancers in the streets welcomed all comers, regardless of origin or ability. I chose to take the conga as my symbol of the millennium rather than that exclusive, expensive party in London which I'd watched at a distance through the glass of my TV screen.

I don't know when hope dispersed.

I'm not sure it's possible to recover that hope. But the people I meet are so much better than party politicians, gearing up for the election, suggest. There's much more to human beings than the hatred of strangers and blind pursuit of personal profit.

I don't think I'll be able to celebrate the new decade. But, when midnight tolls, if I'm still up, I'll toast it with a small glass of Jura malt, hoping for hope in 2010.

To whom it may concern

I heard Adrian Mitchell perform only once, back in the 1970s. Then it was his poem about Victor Jara (later set to music) that made an impression.

I'm hesitant about political conviction as I am about religious conviction. Both have the capacity for evil as well as good and justified anger can lead swiftly to the cruelties of hate and vengeance. But Adrian Mitchell's poem for Victor Jara didn't call for vengeance. It simply insisted that we listen to what had done. Victor Jara was a folk singer who had supported the socialist President Allende. In the wake of the CIA-backed coup (on September 11, 1973) that toppled Allende and installed the dictator Pinochet, Jara was one of thousands taken to the Chile Stadium. His captors tortured him before they killed him; the broke his hands to make sure that he could never play the guitar again. Sometimes it's the details of cruelty that appal - it's easy to let the wealth of statistics sweep over me. But I couldn't forget about Victor Jara's hands.

These days, like most people, I've become infected by a kind of cynical helplessness. There is more I could do to oppose injustice, cruelty and so forth, but it's hard to believe it will do any good. But when I heard that Adrian Mitchell had died, I sought out his most famous poem, "To whom it may concern," and found a youtube video of his performance at the Albert Hall for the Poetry International. When Adrian Mitchell performed in 1965, he seemed like the voice of an angry hope for the future. The huge audience included Alan Ginsberg. The Vietnam war is long over but the there are still wars and safe, convenient, public lies. Adrian Mitchell went on campaigning and writing, though the audiences were smaller. But something seems to have vanished from the world since the campaign against the Vietnam War. Perhaps it was lost when our government refused to listen to the people who marched against war in Iraq. These days the innocence of hope is almost dead.

The world is a poorer place for the loss of Adrian Mitchell.

Disqualified

I couldn't do that. I couldn't take an oath while crossing my fingers and believe that gave me an excuse to lie. That's what little children do. It's not proper for adults - certainly not for adults who become MPs and magistrates.

I'm disqualified from being either. Plenty of MPs and magistrates lie when they take the oath, or make a mental reservation that, if they had the chance, they would vote against a monarchy or call for a referendum to let the people decide.

I don't think I'd make a particularly good MP, though once I would have liked to stand for parliament. I briefly thought I could consider being a magistrate but didn't have to investigate further. I'm disqualified. If there were a referendum I would vote for a republic and that means I'm disqualified from a range of positions. I couldn't even join the police although, oddly, the Royal Navy is exempt from the oath of allegiance.

Of course, I can lobby my MP and ask him to vote for the abolition of the monarchy. But my MP was only able to take his seat after swearing allegiance to the Queen and her heirs. Moreover, even if he changed his mind and became an ardent republican, Members of Parliament aren't allowed to pass any laws affecting the Crown without the Queen's express permission.

There's criticism of royal expenses but, on the whole, the Queen is admired. I don't think republicans would win if there were a referendum to abolish the monarchy. Although I would almost certainly vote for abolition, I don't make a great deal of fuss about the matter. I have many more urgent political concerns.

Yet it irks me that I, and other honest republicans, are banned from so many posts simply because we would be unwilling to comence our public service with a public lie. It worries me that, were people to vote for an honest republican in such numbers that he or she were elected, the new MP would be banned from the House of Commons. And I'm really annoyed that MPs aren't allowed to debate this unless they first ask for the Queen's permission.

There's a simple petition on the Downing Street website which urges a change in the law. It asks that MPs and lords should no longer be required to swear allegiance to the Crown. In my opinion, it would be a good first step in making this country a proper democracy and opening public service to all who care about it. It would widen the choice for voters and put honest republicans on equal terms with those who swear dishonest oaths.

The petition closes tomorrow (5th July, 2008). It already has sufficient signatures to gain a response from the government. If you would like to sign the petition and receive that government response when the petition closes, click here. Monarchists can sign as well as republicans. The petition seeks honesty, responsibility in public life, and true democracy - that is, giving all the people the right to choose.