A small little gang of us (let’s call ourselves the Moral Compass in Finance Massive for now) has been mulling over the future of banking while we’ve been mulling our Christmas wine. What happens, let’s say, when an American investment banker is also a Dutch civil servant? Even the Evening Standard on 21st November was asking itself about the City in a new age of moral capitalism:

Frippery has been abandoned. Companies are asking serious questions about their purpose and how they relate to others. Nobody believes capitalism is dead but it has changed.

The article cites the publication that week by the John Templeton Foundation of a Templeton conversation ‘Does the free market corrode moral character?’

It seems a strange and delightful coincidence that the crashing around our ears of material and capital assumptions should have happened on the very day that the Sparknow report on the relationship between museums, libraries, archives and business in London was launched. Smashing. I was already on the lookout for what I’m broadly calling ‘resilience’ or ‘cultural substance’ strategies – not CSR to spice up brand values, which I often find to have misplaced the cultural relationships into a place in the business where they can’t do much real day to day good. The mess of human and cultural encounter which triggers some raw and uncontainable emotion is surely essential to the formation of judgement, empathy and moral compass. Of course the measurable, sharply defined, tidied up targets for mobile phone component recycling or whatever are worthwhile, but how are the people whose conversations with each other and with suppliers and clients make up the swell, the meaning, the substance of to and fro, to act from a place of soul and substance if they don’t get their hands dirty and if their hearts don’t ache from time to time? To swell the coffers, surely you need to well up from time to time? So I’d offer that cultural strategy, or resilience, should place the archive, the history, the collections and traditions which are the heritage of the place into play as provocation, a key to employee engagement, a way to create interior monologue in the people, the place and ultimately the purpose.

The banking crisis has lured me back into the dark heart of the beast I left a long time ago. I suspect, with a pretty long background in derivatives, leverage and operational risk, I might understand a bit more than most about what’s gone on. I was playing with ideas of reinsurance futures before the crash of Lloyds. I was lobbying the authorities to make a case for portfolio insurance not causing the market crashes of the late 1980′s. We most certainly had it coming. And we had it coming because of all sorts of things I might write about another time. But the point is it has come. And it’s not all a story of Greedy Bankers. It’s a story of what’s gone awry at a much more fundamental level than that.

In any case, I find myself in the situation, for the first time in 13 or 14 years, of caring that banks care for themselves and their staff and those they serve in such a way that the insert themselves back into the role in society that my uncle, who was my bank manager, had in Hove, or Windsor.

So, very strangely indeed, I find myself willing to go back into the belly of the beast I came to detest, and see whether there are places there that I can put to work some of what I’ve learned about how organisations line up their internal and external conversations so that both come from a coherent, authentic and embodied place.

To that end, I’ve also started reading around debt, capitalism, moral capitalism, philanthro-capitalism, organisations as orchestrations of networks – to try and find the size and shape of the black hole, find it’s edges and then look at what’s needed to fill it. And in those wanderings, am reading Little Dorrit, following on from an article in the Guardian Review by Colin Burrows about what literature owes to debt. It traces the shift in the literary coverage of debt from being a lens through which to examine society to being a metaphor, in part because the nature of debt has become so complex that it’s difficult to put it at the heart of the writing.

The separation of the financial sense of credit from its various moral and social senses is the reason debt doesn’t figure centrally in fiction today. We have fictions about financial meltdowns and sudden losses of money. There is a vast number of films and thrillers about people who owe money to their drug-dealer or to the mafia. But debt no longer functions in literature as a subject through which to explore how people and societies connect together. The climax of Martin Amis’s Money is not a debt, but a loss of credit: John Self’s Vantage card is returned to him cut up into four pieces. Money treats money as the stuff that enables Self to be selfish, but it’s about how money comes from and returns to nothing, rather than about the ways in which debts link people together.

All of which leads me to the delights of the Circumlocution Office, which has little direct bearing on this blog, but which is the best description I’ve ever come across of beaurocracy sprawling, corrosively, out of control.

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.

Please note, Gordon Brown. To tackle the moral compass, the resilience, of the finance sector (and of London where the sector matters so much) is to tackle only part of the problem of the abdication of personal responsibility at every level in citizenship, government and business.

It’s a ramble, not very penetrable to the passing reader, but at least it upholds my commitment to myself to go exploring and parks what I’ve been thinking about somewhere I can find it again.

2009 is going to be very very interesting indeed.

As tributes, rituals and acts of memorial go, this was an honest testimony that reached beyond any private grief and brought the incredible acts of bravery of these young men and women right into a place where you had not choice but to listen, and look and feel, and feel fully what it means to live in this amazing, muddled democracy of our, and how we trash that privilege daily. It also showed how much we need private and collective rituals of remembrance.

I was very much reminded of Tony Parker , an oral historian who died in 1966, who gave his work and life over to making room for the voices of the marginalised and invisible. I first came across his work when I read a review of ‘May the Lord in his mercy say a prayer for Belfast’ and then tracked down everything I could, about lifers, lighthouse keepers, people who lived in a towerblock in North London. He had a way of being present and invisible and of just lightly twisting the words and shape of the stories so that there were small and shocking moments of surprise and realisation. No manipulation here, but a marriage of the best of raw voice and the honing that a storyteller can bring to it to help it be heard.

I was also reminded me of an as yet unblogged experience I had when I went to see Black Watch (which I did blog). This was Steve Mcqueen’s Queen and Country

Steve McQueen's tribute postage stamps

Steve McQueen, in collaboration with 136 families whose loved ones have lost their lives in Iraq, has created a cabinet containing a series of facsimile postage sheets, each one dedicated to a deceased soldier.

\The simple brilliance of the idea of stamps as a container for remembrance, used as political statement about how little we seem able to honour our dead is something I’ve been carrying with me.

There’s a French word, aider, which we don’t but should have in English, which means to be an accomplice in something simply by witnessing it. Aiding and abetting should have that meaning. It’s the job of the teller, the artist, the author, the actor, I think, to create spaces of witnessing from which we cannot step back. The privilege of access to an audience brings with it the responsibility to engage that audience in witnessing and becoming responsible both for themselves and for what they see over which they can have some useful influence.

This is something I feel strongly and have still, frustratingly, fully to bring to bear in my own daily practice. But I will never give up trying.

First, small stories, most especially those that fit on a postcard. For years, Sparknow has been playing with postcards as a way of carrying the stories at the edges of organisations back to their heart or telling tales that move from place to place. We’ve even written a paper on postcards as a way of folding organisational time and place to create new adjacencies and hold onto the spirit of the personal. Yesterday’s Guardian had an article about Michael Kimball’s life story postcards which delighted me. In it, the journalist wrote:

I can testify to what Kimball calls “the unexpected intimacy” of the Postcard Life Stories project, which includes a blog of the biographies. Recently he wrote my life story. It felt like being exposed, but also strangely satisfying; the postcard doesn’t sum up my life, but what got me to where I am now. It’s a snapshot of a moment. There’s a strong sense of hope and joy in it that, while I don’t identify with it every day, makes me feel happy when I read it.

We’ve felt that satisfaction too. Flash fiction has some of the same qualities. I’ve noticed too that posting a photo to facebook with a note on it has something of a sloppy postcard quality to it. I was ‘ere. Wish you were here. Reminiscencee work has a nice technique where you imagine a picture or a snapshot of a moment that lives with you and you seek to describe the picture to someone in such a way that they could be there too. That’s nice. No onus to tell a story. The marriage of story, with it’s plots and twists and turns and surprisings and unexpecteds with the wry smile or banality or breath taking scenery of a postcard with a meaningless message on it is an interesting thing to play with. For us it’s always been about the umbilical chord that holds the experience and ties it, however, lightly, back to the teller, while the teller invites you into a world that they’re experiencing. I’m rambling. It’s late, but I didn’t want to pass it by. Kimball doesn’t pass up anyone’s request, which I think is also a lesson in a organisational context:

I don’t want anybody to feel as if their life story isn’t interesting enough. I have found that everybody’s life story is interesting if you ask the right questions.

I think his blog will be worth a good look later this week.

In the same magazine, Sara Maitland writes of her addiction to silence.

Chosen silence can be creative and generate self-knowledge, integration and profound joy; being silenced can drive people mad.

My assumption had been that silence was monotone; that it would be very pure, very beautiful but somehow flat, undifferentiated. But the more silences I encountered, the more silent places I inhabited, the more I became aware that there were dense, interwoven strands of different silences. Silence can be calm or frightening, lonely or joyful, deep or thin. There is religious silence; a self-emptying silence, and romantic silence – what Wordsworth called the “bliss of solitude”.

The qualities she hears in silence are of course Cagean

Being silenced does drive people mad.

We come across a lot of silenced people in an organisational context. And not much silence in the thrumming of the organisational timetable and the need to be heard (even while silenced) or be disappeared from the political structures. We’ve tried to weave more a more small silences into the work that we do, or encourage silences within the telling of, and listening to, stories. Non-interruption. Room to draw breath. Moments when nothing happens. I’ve always thought that you know when you are learning a language not when you can hear the words but when you can hear where one word ends and the next begins.

That is to say, you can hear pause.

At the next Golden Fleece in Washington in April 2009, I think there’ll be some work around the silence in which story takes place, but meanwhile I’m remembering a bit of a book that Jeannine Brutschin sent me last year The Way of Council which has a lot of merit. It tells of one council meeting where the son could detect nothing going on but somehow a decision was arrived at. The father, when asked, told the son that the decision had been shaped in the unspoken stories present in the council.

We imagine that the narratives of work can be seen and heard at our peril. They must be sensed and there needs to be room for that sensing.

There needs to be silence

This is a fabulous example of using history to spring the future in leadership storytelling. It runs from 15:20 – 17:40 on the CNN Youtube. I don’t know how to extract the clip, but here also is the transcript. Just look at/listen to what he does in those 2:20 seconds. Through the eyes of one witness, a true witness, he gives us the sweep of history and of change over a century which puts the change of the next century into it’s right place. The past as a lens for the future. You can smell and touch and feel the past and the future in this speech. And look at his gorgeous Ciceronian rhetoric, simple repetition and reinforcement to grow the space of understanding, which any fule kno works every time. (I should add that it’s 345 words. 2 minute 20 seconds out of 29 minutes or so, so a bit under 10% I think, 345 words, something to bear in mind when planning your own Presidential acceptance speech, or just the story you are going to tell to your team tomorrow.)

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing – Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons – because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America – the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that “We Shall Overcome.” Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

Gullies running in orange alert weather in the Ardeche

At dinner with the neighbours last night we talked of the bewilderment of the summer tourist, who can make no sense of these great dry stone beds, with absurdly high bridges constructed over them. You need to winter here to understand, and then this Orange alert is making for weather rare even for the vrai Ardechois, born and bred to it.

We spent a long time, too, foraging for the right translation for combler la fosse, which in French is to fill in a ditch, to close a gap. In it’s context I went for building bridges, so with a twist of reconciliation, but in the dictionary afterwards it seems more likely it’s to bridge a gap. I wonder if there’s anything in the French effort to actually fill the gap, while the English blithely construct a bridge over it and leave it there? How high a bridge then.

Fred, who runs a supermarket near Toulouse, was talking about how easy it was, right from the beginning of the year, to detect the change in buying habits, although the sharp swing away from brands came in about May. Danone yoghurts down 9%, where before it was 3 freezer shelves stacked with President butter to one own brand, now it’s 2 and 2. Own brands have been winning out over the grandes marques for quite a while. For Fred, that’s fine, so long as he’s tuned early to the changes and can change his buying.

I was thinking about this in respect of some work on future story exercises I’m working on with Anecdote just now. Shawn, delightfully, uses William Gibson (science fiction writer)

The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed

Fred can see the future in the changed distribution of butter in his freezers, one tiny image which pretty much conjures up a whole picture of crumbling economies. Of course, for organisational visioning you’d like the picture to be rosier, in one way. But it is rosy too. The own brand comes into it’s own.

I wonder whether there’s something too in the ditch versus bridge difference. We’ve been imagining future stories as a way to build a bridge from the future to the present, using present anecdotes (Gibsons we’re calling them) about future signs as part of the construction materials. Perhaps we need to be thinking about filling in ditches, combler la fosse, rather than bridging a gap. Or perhaps we need to build very high bridges indeed, knowing that the winter rains will wash away lower ones.

My old markets and exchanges stuff has surfaced over the past few weeks with the friability of capitalism and the questionmarks now over whether a price discovery through a market mechanism is all it’s cracked up to be. More of that another time. I have views, she said darkly.

The behavioural economists (who’ve just got onto neuro-economics as I write) are talking though about something that matters a great deal for knowledge transfer and knowledge valuation. Here are two prisoners-dilemma-ish things on value which read across nicely to the whole question of illogic and the tug of feeling that affects action.

Two sets of people go to a place. The first set are offered a free coffee cup and at the end of the meeting sessions, the givers offer to buy it back off them at a price of their choosing. The second set are offered the chance at the end of the sessions to buy a coffee cup. It turns out that those selling back their gift want about twice the price as those offered the chance to buy a cup they weren’t given. It’s to do with ownership, possession, attachment, a bird in the hand.

Someone goes to the theatre, and on the way drops a £20 note. Someone else goes to the theatre and on the way drops the theatre ticket, priced £20. The firs person is much more likely to cough up for another ticket than the second.

Now let’s pick that up and drop it into the world of knowledge, and all sorts of interesting things about the circumstances in which people will transact or exchange start to get interesting.

I have to go and eat my readymade meal now, but there’s plenty of interesting work here about the emotions and feelings attached to value.

More on price discovery and value to follow. There’s much more to say.

]]> http://vward.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/whats-a-coffee-cup-worth/feed/ 0 vward http://vward.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/the-homecoming/ http://vward.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/the-homecoming/#comments Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:51:00 +0000 Victoria http://vward.wordpress.com/?p=63 Continue reading →]]> Well, I’ve decided to come home for a bit and get settled into my own nest. I’ve discovered that blogging at Sparknow is great, but I need to meander more wildly and experiment with stuff.  So I’ll blog a kind of fortnightly letter to Spark and use this, now The Mattress Factory, for me to play in.

I’d better start by heading off to read some Bachelard to get me in the mood. Dwellings. That’s where I fancy starting. I think it’s The Mattress Factory that’s started me off. More soon.

]]> http://vward.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/the-homecoming/feed/ 0 vward http://vward.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/your-numberplate-was-singing-to-me/ http://vward.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/your-numberplate-was-singing-to-me/#comments Wed, 14 May 2008 14:50:18 +0000 Victoria http://vward.wordpress.com/?p=60 Continue reading →]]> Such a long silence.

But I am blogging now more at http://www.sparknow.net and thought I’d start back up here to figure out the distinction between the two.

Two things, then, to start me back up.

Yesterday, a run-in with the garage which has had my car for 2 weeks, an extension because it was not ready before I left for Washington.  It was due back yesterday morning.  I called Monday, and about 3 times yesterday to be told, today, Wednesday, would be the day.  This reminded me, I said, of nothing so much as my father’s joke about the soldier, who, on his way to war, drops his shoes at the cobblers.  Four years later, he returns from the front and goes to collect them.  ’They’ll be ready next Tuesday’ says the cobbler.  Cobblers.

In any case, eventually a very helpful young man,  Chichebe – a Body Shop Adviser (always on the lookout for titles here) –  ran it home for me last night, so by way of thanks I ran him to the tube.  On the way he said ‘nice car – one of the old Alan Day courtesy cars.  Your numberplate was singing to me all day so eventually I looked it up to check.  You were lucky.  The other courtesy cars were bright yellow (gestures to front door of house as we drive past) and a kind of nasty green.’

I really liked the idea of a memory trigger ‘singing’, so I’ve been enjoying that today.

Another small sighting, most likely more for here than for the more serious blogging we sparkies must do, just came down in my bi-monthly noticeboard cull yesterday (along with the gorgeous Robert Downey Junior, and things about Mark Ravenhill’s latest work – sadly I can think of no way of getting RDJ into a blog, but I’ll do my darnedest).

“Scrunch Time”  in the Guardian Review recently put me onto Stephen Gill whose photographs and website are well worth looking at.  The series is A Series of Disappointments is a book of pictures of “betting slips…discarded in and around many betting shops (71 at the time of publicaton) in the borough of Hackney in north-east London.  Each of these papers began as hope, were shaped by loss or defeat, then cast aside. These new forms perhaps now possess a state of mind, shaped by nervous tension and grief. After these images were made, little autopsies were performed on the papers to reveal the failed bets held within. “

The variety of scrunching, folding, squashing, paper aeroplaning, rolling, twisting that is seen in each slip is poignantly emphasised by the titles (yielded from the autopsies): 

12.27 TRAP 2 £50 TO WIN

JUST BEWARD 3.30 FAKENHAM £20

OUTLAW PRINCIESS 3.05 S.HOUSE £5

LOCAL POET 2.20 £10 – REVERSE FORECAST

This is the most perfect storytelling.  Wish I’d thought of it.

Ian Sinclair is quoted, in relation to another book, as saying something which I think we might all learn from:

‘Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him. His photo-accumulations demonstrate a tender vision factored out of experience; alert, watchful, not overeager, wary of that mendacious conceit, ‘closure’.

 

 

 

]]> http://vward.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/your-numberplate-was-singing-to-me/feed/ 0 vward http://vward.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/like-a-samurais-sword/ http://vward.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/like-a-samurais-sword/#comments Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:24:47 +0000 Victoria http://vward.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/like-a-samurais-sword/ Continue reading →]]> Since writing an essay on knowledge work in the construction industry, I find myself unusually alert to questions of knowledge work. Not in the narrow sense that knowledge management sees knowledge work, but in a broader sense: what, in fact, is knowledge work, how does it come about, what does one need to understand about the conditions that make it knowledge work? In fact, I think probably I’m being nudged here too, because our work on museums, libraries and archives, which will report in June. This identified two things lost to the system of work and organisation, things which need retrieving in some way. One is discipline and rigour around information and it’s handling, and the other is the fruitful downtime of the employee: those moments of wandering to the library and having the empty space to make some new, and deeper connections which put the immediate decision or piece of work into context. Or those moments, de-blackberried, uncoupled from milestones and deadlines, where someone might have a moment of new inspiration that renews the spirit and changes the lens through which the immediate task is viewed. It might be a spark of innovation, or something smaller, but no less meaningful when accumulated with other such small moments.

(A side-comment here, related, but as yet untethered and floating free, is a previous observation, in work on office space, on how the social fabric of organisations has been ripped from them with different forms of nomadic working, hotdesking, open plan, project and matrix management. New organisational systems have crushed the life out of the small repetitions of informal encounter that allow trust to ripen. (I would once have added social capital here, but I’m having trouble with the capitalist metaphors which dress knowledge management up in the language of economic value creation just to get it attention from the numbers people – surely we can be bigger of that. I don’t much like the misappropriation of the word trust either, but it’ll do for now.))

And perhaps my other impetus is that my current enquiry is into the commissioning of horizon scanning and futures (i.e. uncomfortable) research into environmental issues in a government department, and how the policymaker can be better equipped to direct, manage and assure such commissions. I’m sure this will influence where I go and what I notice for the next few months. I’ve a feeling this is quite a long intense exploration, likely to sprawl into values, craft, labour versus work, all over the place, but it might going somewhere, but for now, and to restart some kind of blogging discipline, I’m going to just list a single noticing which seem to belong under this loose working classification.

I was trying some Doris Lessing (who in a her own way I’ve quoted about the conditions for knowledge work when I wrote about her Nobel Prize winning speech and the need for the storyteller to cloak themselves in silence). Short stories, gathered in a volume called ‘The story of a non-marrying man’. The first story, ‘Out of the Fountain’ is about a diamond cutter:

‘Ephraim was a middle son, not brilliant or stupid, not good or bad. He was nothing in particular. His brothers became diamond merchants, but Ephraim was not cut out for anything immediately obvious, and so last he was apprenticed to an uncle to learn the trade of diamond cutting.

To cut a diamond perfectly is an act like a samurai’s sword thrust, or a master archers’ centred arrow. When an important diamond is shaped, a man may spend a week, or even weeks, studying it, accumulating powers of attention, memory and intuition, till he has reached that moment when he finally knows that a tap, no more, at just that point of tension in the stone will split it exactly so.’

Here’s my knowledge question for today (and in the next few days I’m going to move on to a bit of Richard Sennett, in his new thinking on craft, to Lewis Hyde’s distinction between work and labour, and to Grotowski’s description of the relationship between him and the actor, but this will do for now, from which I infer that I’m interested for now in processes of apprenticeship, of leading and following):

How many of us, in the conditions of urgent work which press hard down on us, find room to spend ‘a week, or even weeks…accumulating powers of attention, memory and intution’? Do we give ourselves permission? Are we given permission? Do we, perhaps need to start taking permission rather than wait for it to be given?

]]> http://vward.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/like-a-samurais-sword/feed/ 0 vward http://vward.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/rejected-letter-to-sunday-times-about-jeremy-clarkson/ http://vward.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/rejected-letter-to-sunday-times-about-jeremy-clarkson/#comments Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:34:47 +0000 Victoria http://vward.wordpress.com/?p=58 Continue reading →]]> Complete with rejecting email and outline of my next plan of attack.

Dear Ms WardThank you for your interesting letter. We would like to have been able to publish it, but there is space in our correspondence columns for only a fraction of the letters received each week. A copy of your letter has, of course, been passed on for the information of Jeremy Clarkson and the News Review Editor.

Yours sincerely
Parin Janmohamed
Letters Editor

From: Victoria Ward [mailto:vixta@mac.com]
Sent: 21 January 2008 16:43
To: Sunday Times Letters
Subject: Mr Clarkson’s bullyboy tactics, this time with telephone number

Dear Sir,
Mr Clarkson’s views about the Arts Council cuts, expressed last Sunday, are sit very uncomfortably with me. I’m fine with him having strong views, even with him having politically incorrect views. But the distasteful, ill-informed and bigoted way in which he has chosen to express himself serves no useful purpose except to add another layer of ill-gotten gains to his already swelling coffers. And that’s really only useful to him isn’t it? It’s probably just as well that the only time we’ll see him on the underground is on posters. Otherwise he’d probably get a lively earful from a passing arty person of some kind of ethnicity which doesn’t appeal to him (or two, or three, or even some of us middle-class, middle-aged whities might join in). Oh, and perhaps we’d invite Benjamin Zephaniah along to write a poem about it.

Let me try and explain, more seriously, why this is so important to me.

Mr Clarkson is a man who could use his unreconstructed white, middle class comfy conservatism and well heeled, bully boyishness (with it’s inexplicable popularity), to engage all kinds of people, the kinds who don’t normally, in holding intelligent and lively conversation about the role of culture in a democratic society, and how this can best be supported by a mix of private and public backing. It seems a shame that all he sees fit to do is demonstrate an ugly, ill-considered and provocative ignorance.There is something here which we should be grappling with, in all it’s complexity, neither with simplistic ranting nor with the kind sentimental support for multi-culturalism which I find equally distasteful. Neither dilution through prize-days-with-no-prizes, nor polarised caricature and contempt are the answer for a democracy such as ours. Neither namby-pamby or nimby suits us.

Britain is a nation jam-packed with cultural entrepreneurship, festival and celebration expressed in the widest possible range of ways and it’s mature enough to have some pretty hard conversations about what should, and should not, be going on in the arts. We are witnessing the resurgence in all things art, (in which I include all kinds of art, music, multi-media, history and heritage, philosophies, debate, theatre, performance, events etc) as an important way to break down retrenchments and hostility associated with identity, violence and confrontation. And in more subtle, but exciting ways, there are many signs of attempts to relocate work and community in people’s lives as having some kind of cultural substance. In short, we are rediscovering meaning, and culture is a key vehicle for such rediscovery. (I should know, its a subject I’m researching at present.) In fact Mr Clarkson is proposing exactly the opposite of Mr Jenkin’s recent view in the Guardian that the British Council now take the lead in British diplomacy in all but the most politically sensitive countries. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2242835,00.html “Russia’s assault on the British Council reveals the true nature of diplomacy.” The first line says ‘Western democracies propagate their values more effectively through cultural exchange than through bullying rhetoric’ Perhaps Russia would suit Mr Clarkson better than the UK?)

By all means lets have a lively conversation about what kinds of cultural enterprise should be backed, and for whose benefit. This is not that conversation. It’s a self-opinionated, poorly researched rant by a man unqualified to offer any kind of commentary in this arena. Mr Clarkson should either get back behind the wheel and stay there, or step forward properly and use his public position and following to engage thoughtfully in this important subject and draw into it those who would not otherwise engage.

The BBC should be ashamed of having given him a platform from which to rant so ill-advisedly, and the Sunday Times should be even more ashamed of having published such an article.

Victoria Ward

So here’s what I said back:

Thanks for letting me know. I’ll put it in my blog instead then and have an unheard rant like a tree falling in the forest. I’m going to write to Mark Thomson too and have a bash at the BBC about putting the license fee towards things it’s needed for like the World Service and not wasting it on Jeremy Clarkson and Jonathon Ross. In fact I think, given the position that these figures have in society, and the salaries they command both of which far exceed political influence by any one politician, and these are salaries which we, the citizens pay for, the BBC Trust should insist on a kind of community service principle. Anybody contracted to them has an obligation to be political, with a small p and productive in engaging the politically disenfranchised in new forms of debate, across all platforms.

Good examples of this at work might be Monty Don and Jamie Oliver. Or of the BBC doing a cross platform thing on obesity.I haven’t quite worked out what I’m going to say yet, but I’m certainly going to be saying it.

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