Colonel Gaddafi, erstwhile friend of the LSE

Sir Howard Davies, Director of the LSE, defending the LSE’s acceptance of a £1.5 million donation from Saif Gaddafi makes for interesting listening.

Today, it is uncontroversial to point out that a leading university of the social sciences might be compromised by accepting money from the family of a pernicious dictator. Saif Gaddafi’s bellicose statement last week in support of his father’s regime in Libya has seen to that. But when the decision was taken – only seven weeks ago – the calculation must have looked very different.

The LSE’s student newspaper provides an account of a carefully-weighed, process by the LSE’s governing body. Reading the report, it is easy to imagine how a committee could rationally reach the decision it did – even though Professor Fred Halliday, the LSE’s own authority on the Middle East, had warned against it. Britain was at at the forefront of a rapprochement with the Libyan regime. The LSE, which prides itself on its internationalism, was an enthusiastic participant in the process. Saif Gaddafi, an alumnus of LSE, was regarded as a force for progressive change. Given the global competition for funds to higher education, the LSE’s council would have seen the benefits of receiving the funds, with the necessary guarantees of academic freedom. But it saw no particular reason to explore the contradictions between its aspirations as a seat of learning and debate and the provenance of the Gaddafi money (“which by definition had to be stolen from the Libyan people” according to Nick Cohen in The Observer). Indeed, Professor David Held, of the LSE’s Centre for the Study of Global Governance, assessed that “the principal risk of acceptance was reputational” – as if this was a negligible matter set against the financial upside.

In his interview on Radio 4, Howard Davies executed a classic attempt to contain the damage to the LSE’s reputation that is now unfolding:

“We looked at the pros and cons of engaging with someone like Saif Gaddafi and with the problems in North Africa and we decided that we would do so. In retrospect we can say that, knowing what we know now and how he has behaved in this crisis, that’s a judgment that we might have made differently.”

His use of the urbane language of risk assessment tries to minimise the significance of the decision – it was a business calculation which didn’t pay off. But it conveys no sign that the LSE has learned any lessons about the appropriate boundaries of its relationships with autocrats. As a result, as Times Higher Education notes, the LSE is caught in “an ethical and public relations quagmire”. Even the integrity of the PhD conferred on Saif Gaddafi has been called into question.

The suspicion is hard to dispel that the LSE allowed its financial interests to cloud its moral and academic judgment. The longevity of Gaddafi’s brutal regime stands against Howard Davies’assertion that it is only what we now know that makes the LSE’s relationship with Libya inappropriate. Of all institutions, one might expect the LSE to recognise that the dynastic nature of despotism would make association with Saif Gaddafi risky. Here’s Gideon Rachman in the FT:

“The whole episode suggests that the hope that a western education will convince a despot’s children to change the system they have inherited is often misplaced. Bashar al-Assad spent many years in London training as an eye doctor and working in unglamorous NHS hospitals. He is clearly an able man, who was prepared to eschew the playboy lifestyle. But when the time came to assume the mantle of the Assad dynasty, Assad junior did almost nothing to dismantle the dictatorial, Syrian security state.”

The unease about the cosiness of its relationships with the Gaddafi family will not be allayed by this video of the LSE putting out the welcome mat for the Colonel.

The inevitable role of social media in bringing to light the skeletons in the cupboard is possibly something the LSE council didn’t factor into its deliberations on reputational risk. As John Naughton comments, the LSE must be wishing YouTube had never been invented.

Image courtesy Abode of Chaos.

The report highlights the cases of ten people who suffered grievous neglect. Many of them were fit, active and healthy before treatment but all but one died during or soon after the events they experienced in the care of the NHS, and in circumstances which caused distress and anger to the patients and their families.

Four examples taken from coverage of the report in The Guardian:

• Alzheimer’s sufferer Mrs J, 82, whose husband was denied the chance to be with her when she died at Ealing hospital in west London because he had been “forgotten” in a waiting room.

• Mrs R, a dementia patient, who was not given a bath or shower during 13 weeks at Southampton University Hospitals NHS trust. She was not helped to eat, despite being unable to feed herself, and suffered nine falls, only one of which was recorded in her notes.

• “Feisty and independent” Mrs H, who had lived alone until she was 88, was taken from Heartlands hospital in Birmingham to a care home in Tyneside but, when she arrived, was bruised, soaked in urine, dishevelled, and wearing someone else’s clothes, which were held up with large paper clips.

• Mr C suffered a heart attack soon after undergoing quadruple coronary artery bypass surgery at Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS trust. Trust staff turned off his life support machine even though his family had asked for them to wait for a short while longer.

Why does this happen? Reaction to the report has focussed on “the need to modernise the NHS” (a health service minister), staff and funding reductions (the Royal College of Nursing) and a lack of matrons to supervise standards of care (the Patients’Association).

A more fundamental question for me is: does the NHS know why it exists? In the introduction to her report, the Ombudsman, Ann Abraham, points to the wide gulf between the values and practice of the NHS that is revealed by the stories:

“The investigations reveal an attitude – both personal and institutional – which fails to recognise the humanity and individuality of the people concerned and to respond to them with sensitivity, compassion and professionalism. The reasonable expectation that an older person or their family may have of dignified, pain-free end of life care, in clean surroundings in hospital is not being fulfilled. Instead, these accounts present a picture of NHS provision that is failing to meet even the most basic standards of care.”

She says that 18 per cent of complaints to her office about the NHS concern the care of elderly people and she upholds more than twice as many complaints as for other age groups.

The experience of elderly people is extreme.  But it’s not hard to find signs that the tendency to treat patients as technical problems, rather than as human beings deserving firstly of respect and dignity, is woven into the culture of the NHS. I observe this routinely at my local health centre, where patients approaching receptionists are interrogated about their symptoms in a public and humiliating manner. I observe it at my local hospital where patients can wait half a day for a simple blood test. The people who use the NHS in north London are treated as petitioners, fortunate to be granted free health provision, rather than as the paymasters of the health staff that they actually are.

I suspect some of this culture has its roots in the very origins of the NHS in 1945.  An expectation that patients should both respect the authority of medical professionals and feel gratitude for the socialised model of healthcare was institutionalised into the relationship the NHS established with its users. But the culture also reflects the market ideology that was introduced later, that embedded too narrow a focus on financial efficiency while losing sight of what constitutes effectiveness – the real experience of the NHS for those it serves.

Ann Abraham is right to point out the need for the NHS to live up to its professed values. In practice, this begins with those who lead NHS institutions complementing their focus on the rational and technocratic aspects of delivering health outcomes with serious attention to the emotional and experiential characteristics of health care.

Empty gallery

I’m writing a series of pieces for ArtsProfessional on how arts organisations can focus on delivering their mission. Part 1, on the gap between the organisation’s purpose and its actions, appears today and is reproduced below.

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A theatre won funding to improve its engagement with disadvantaged groups. It approached the challenge as the chance to spread the word about its work. But it discovered that to get the target groups through the doors, the work would need to change. What the theatre was doing from day to day turned out to be irrelevant to a section of the community it was meant to serve. This is an example of the gap that can occur between the way an organisation behaves compared to its avowed mission, one that provides the sense of purpose from a shared understanding among everyone who works in a company.

The mission statement should inform everything people do in their jobs. Often, though, there’s a nagging doubt about whether a company is fulfilling the potential that marks its reason to exist. Arts organisations are particularly vulnerable. Being values-driven, they tend to be more vulnerable to falling short of a high ambition – and they are more likely to resist change. It’s not surprising that the purpose and actions can be misaligned. Things change rapidly; it’s easy to lose one’s bearings.

New technology transforms people’s expectations of the relationships they expect to have with companies. The global recession and the new government’s spending cuts are transforming the economic outlook for the arts. As austerity bites, it’s not just public funding but also consumer spending on the arts that will decline. The coalition’s broader policy changes for the arts are, as yet, unclear.

Change is the one given. The underlying purpose may stay the same, but the way to deliver it will always need to evolve. An organisation that fails to keep pace can quickly begin to lose relevance.

You might spot the gap around the artistic purpose: a gallery that measures success in terms of footfall, but whose traffic is consistently to its cafe not the exhibition space; a theatre that exists to promote new voices buts retreats in the face of intimidating protests. This kind of gap drives away audiences. Or the gap may open around a company’s business practices. Arts companies can be far from model employers. People may be expected to work for long hours in poor conditions. Occupants of senior roles might find their initiative stifled. There may be a culture of bullying which goes unchecked. These are behaviours that contradict the championing of creativity and respect for human potential that involvement in the arts might lead you to expect. This kind of gap damages retention and recruitment of talented staff. It leads to ossified processes and reduced ability to generate fresh ideas. Ultimately, the gap between performance and action drives away funding. When arts budgets are under pressure, companies can suffer capricious cuts. But those with clarity of purpose and a good narrative about delivery will better weather the storm.

Board members must understand the company’s role and their own part in holding the organisation to account. Management teams need to grasp how the organisation’s values should be manifested in practice. This begins with honest, reflective scrutiny of the artistic purpose. How well is it delivered? How well does it connect with an audience beyond the organisation? It extends to searching questions about running the company in a way that is congruent with the artistic purpose. How effective is the stewardship of public money? Is the cost of delivering the purpose appropriate? How motivated is the organisation to mobilise other sources of revenue? Managers also need to be clear about broader issues, such as how creativity is valued and fostered throughout the business. How are staff treated? What are the social and environmental responsibilities?

Purpose and action are aligned through an organisational culture that transmits respect for the purpose in everything it does. This is most easily evident in how recruits are inducted. If new recruits learn from their peers what people should do and why, the culture is probably in good shape. Where it’s not, managers must find ways to create new cultural imperatives. At the BBC, when Greg Dyke was in charge, he banned biscuits at meetings. A relatively trivial financial saving, but one with a powerful message: that every employee had a part to play in ensuring that the BBC’s use of licence fee money should be focused on delivering great services to the public.

An organisation that consistently asks how well it serves its purpose develops better clarity of purpose and better alignment of behaviour behind it. This kind of reflexivity creates a self-renewing culture, which promotes effective action and communicates its purpose in what it does. It makes staff more empowered, more motivated and more creative. And these are the conditions which foster experiences which delight audiences.

Image courtesy Mr. T in DC.

Lord Reith

Goodness gracious, what would Reith have thought?

Lord Reith, the founder of the BBC, would certainly not have shared the bemusement that many have felt at the extent of media coverage and public outrage focussed on the Sachsgate scandal.  He would have viscerally appreciated why the national conversation has been dominated by reaction to two boorish entertainers, handsomely paid by the public purse, using the public airwaves to humiliate a young woman in obscene phone calls to her grandfather, a much-loved actor.

The clarity of Reith’s original mission for the BBC to inform, educate and entertain pointed to some degree of moral purpose which still shapes people’s expectations of the organisation.  Since the last renewal of the BBC’s charter at the beginning of 2007, the Reithian mission has given way to six, rather more mushy, “public purposes“.  These could justify almost any activity the BBC chooses to undertake – and, inside the BBC, they do, if we are to judge by Russell Brand’s and Jonathan Ross’s antics and the tardiness of the management’s response.

What is strange is that this is still the case, given everything that has happened in recent years: Hutton, Queengate and the phone-in scandals.  Last week’s events are an object lesson in how an organisation in reputational crisis fails to learn the lessons of its previous mistakes.  Banks, take note.

The first point to make is that the BBC is increasingly suffering the downside of its own twin-strategy of expansion of services and pursuit of younger audiences.  Its reputation was built on years of careful programming characterised by high craft skills and uncompromising editorial standards.  The rapid expansion of services that began in the mid-1990s necessitated three developments which would undermine these foundations: the loss of experienced but expensive older staff to create the savings to invest in new services; the rapid intake of inexperienced younger staff to produce the content for the new services; and management spreading itself too thinly to be able adequately to oversee the exponentially greater volume of output.  To put it more simply, the culture walked out the door at just the time that it needed to communicate itself to a new cadre of producers.

If you combine this with the pursuit of younger audiences, it begins to create an explosive cocktail.  As in the banking sector, time-worn managers began to sanction risks they didn’t fully comprehend as producers were encouraged to innovate and make the BBC relevant to audiences who were left cold by its traditional values.  If managers were fully across the output at all, they were inhibited from reigning in edgy, blokey or even offensive content on the grounds that their sensibilities were a poor basis on which to evaluate programmes aimed at the elusive youth audience.  Somewhere along the way, the Reithian vision of raising the horizons of the BBC’s audiences gave way to appeasing the tastes of promiscuous media consumers who would find what they wanted elsewhere if the BBC didn’t give it to them.

The second point is that this was and remains a systemic crisis in a way that the Director-General, Mark Thompson, seems unwilling to acknowledge.  In an interview last week, he blamed the affair on misjudgments by individuals:

What our investigation of this incident suggests is not a failure of our systems.  But, I’m afraid, our systems rely across the BBC on the judgment of programme editors, executive editors and producers who are deciding in the context of our guidelines, in the context of our compliance processes, what should be broadcast.  This was a failure of judgment.

So it’s all the fault of the people on the front line.  This is the same mindset that last year created a massive training initiative for all BBC editorial staff in response to the trust scandals, and did the same before that following the Hutton inquiry.  The mindset emphasises procedures and compliance.  But it fails to take into account that the culture transmits more powerfully that compliance is trumped by indulging talent and testing standards in pursuit of audience share.

The cost and power of on-air talent – particularly big name celebrities like Jonathan Ross – is intimidating to inexperienced producers, who can’t be sure that their managers will support them if they cross the stars.  As the presenter Paul Gambaccini has revealed, Lesley Douglas, the ex-Radio 2 controller, had a reputation for letting Russell Brand do anything.  So who on her team would have been able to manage him?  Certainly not a 25-year-old producer who worked for his company.

What seems to be happening at the BBC is that the leadership is allowing a culture to flourish which is misaligned with the official values.  The massive training programmes fail to address this.  They simply restate official values, which everybody knows already, but don’t get to grips with the real tensions between following procedures and gaining audience share.  What is lacking is a leadership which cascades the values in a meaningful sense in the day-to-day realities of making programmes.

A third and final point relates to the fig leaf of “edgy” comedy.  This, in some ways, relates to engaging younger audiences but goes far beyond that.  Ross and Brand on Radio 2 were addressing the middle-aged and are part of a more general drive to keep the output fresh, in line with modern sensibilities.  BBC executives, commentators and entertainers have been queueing up to express concern that creative production should not be allowed to lose its capacity to take risks.  But the reaction to Ross and Brand suggests that modern sensibilities are not as coarse as media executives have been imagining.  Last week’s surge of participation in the sport of complaining to Ofcom points to significant pent-up dislike of the Ross brand of entertainment (and possibly resentment at its high cost to the licence payer).

The broader point is that the halo of creative risk really doesn’t apply to this case.  There is a world of difference between gratuitous bullying of an old man and the carefully calibrated wit of, say, The Thick of It.  Everyone – producers, compliance officers and the audience – understands the difference.  There’s no reason why this episode should stifle genuine creativity elsewhere.  But it might be no bad thing if last week’s tumult caused the BBC to tread with more care and creative diversity – a point noted by Ian Jack (who saw in Russell Brand an exemplar of the Hobbesian view of humour as only ever boosting self-esteem at the expense of the less fortunate):

Mark Thompson and other BBC voices this week talked as though comedy had always depended on its “edginess” for its creativity; the days of Chaplin, the Marx Brothers and Dad’s Army might never have been. That view is as narrow as Hobbes’s. Worse, at least for the future of the world’s greatest public-funded broadcaster, is that edginess depends on the continual finding of new edges, breaking taboos and conventions that comprise ethical standards, which, however much they vary between generations, most of us hope will always be there.

While the events of Sachsgate may not in themselves precipitate a chill in the creative climate, it is possible that they are symptomatic of a significant change in the zeitgeist which may already be under way.  One in which the public, as ever, are ahead of the media.  Perhaps people are weary of excess and self-indulgence – in culture as much as in the economy.  On the day that America has elected Barack Obama as its president, the laddish mean-spiritedness which is the stock in trade of the likes of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand seems oddly out of place with the waves of dignity, optimism and change that are sweeping across the Atlantic.

Moral purpose is back in fashion and audiences want the media to fall into line.  Reith would approve.

West End Lane, NW6 - home to a dozen cafes and a library

Camden Council in north London, where I live, is considering changing the ethos of its libraries – to allow people to bring in food and drink and use their mobile phones.  The intention is to make libraries more appealing to young people.

As both a library user and the parent of a young person, this strikes me as an unfortunate and misguided idea.  Libraries are one of the few public spaces in the inner city to which people can turn for quiet.  Swiss Cottage, in the borough, hosts one of the best public libraries in the capital.  Young people constitute a significant proportion of the users.  They go there to find space where they can give unashamed attention to learning.  It’s a place of thought, study and contemplation.  It is wholly unsuited to be a stage for mobile phone conversations or snacking.  Urban life provides an abundance of venues for these activities.  The library offers an alternative realm.

Camden’s proposal loses sight of local councils’mission in providing public libraries.  Their role is as custodian of a value: of access to knowledge, embodied not just in the provision of books and reference facilities but in the creation of an atmosphere conducive to engaging intelligently with them.  If councils are concerned about falling attendances, they might consider a remedy which is aligned with the public value of libraries rather than capitulation to the coffee shop.  This would entail improving the intrinsic appeal of library collections and promoting respect for them.

Victoria Coren – a columnist at The Observer – is a  fellow Camden resident who is also alarmed by the council’s proposal.  She links it to a more general shift in policy in Whitehall.  Only two years ago, the Culture Minister, David Lammy, was telling us “Books are fundamentally important to what libraries are about.”  Now the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, insists that libraries must “look beyond the bookcase”.  Coren believes the contrary:

Burnham says that more library funding would ‘not be realistic in the current climate’. Cobblers. In ‘the current climate’, people need, more than ever, to know about the world. To think laterally and have ideas. To develop an internal life, as an alternative to clubbing and jet-setting. To study history and learn how we’ve got out of trouble before.

The man who thinks that books are a luxury to be cut back in times of recession is a man who doesn’t understand that knowledge is the key to everything and must be at the centre of everything.

Burnham’s approach is in line with a prevailing view that libraries are no longer relevant to the era of Amazon and Google – a view well-expressed by Jemima Lewis in The Telegraph:

People no longer want, or need, to borrow books. Public libraries were invented for the benefit of an aspirational working class – for autodidacts who could not afford the books they craved, at a time when books were really the only source of information.

Many is the clever child who clambered his way out of poverty with the help of a library card. But these days, as the Kaiser Chiefs sing, “it’s cool to know nothing”. Brave indeed is the child at a sink estate school who follows his inner swot. And if the urge to learn proves irresistible, he is probably better off on the internet, where nobody need know that he isn’t surfing porn.

This strikes me as a view which is wholly rooted in a culture – of affluent and ignorant consumerism – which is disintegrating more rapidly than we can comprehend.  As we’re all forced to review our spending, many will be delighted to find that libraries are more than equipped to meet the same need as impulse orders on Amazon address – but at a fraction of the cost.

Victoria Coren is surely right to suggest that libraries could find a new relevance in the impending period of austerity.  Could it be that preserving a space which exemplifies the ethos of concentration might serve young people better than pandering to an assumption that everything must defer to a culture of instant gratification?