Tag: storytelling

2021xi4, Thursday: Once upon a time…

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Let me tell you a story. I think it’s about corruption. But do decide for yourself.

Once upon a time, there was a man in Harare. His name was Edwin. He was a ZANU-PF member of Zimbabwe’s Senate.

Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash

Edwin had a friend who ran a business in his constituency. The business sold cars. Edwin’s friend was bidding for a contract to sell cars to the government. Edwin’s friend’s business paid Edwin a consultancy fee. Edwin talked to his colleagues in government, encouraging them to contract with his friend’s business. He didn’t say anything about his relationship with his friend, or that the business in question was owned by his friend, or about the money the friend’s business had given him.

Was Edwin acting corruptly?

I agree.

Oops. I’m sorry. I’ve got the story wrong. Try this one instead.

Edwin wasn’t in Harare at all. He was in Stoke-on-Trent. He was a Labour councillor. (And this is back in the days when 95% of Stoke’s council was Labour – when, as the sneering cynics might have unfairly said, you could get a monkey elected in Stoke if you strategically shaved them, stuck them in a suit and pinned on a red rosette.) Edwin’s friend owned a garage. Edwin’s friend paid Edwin some money to “advise” him on business. The friend wanted to pull down the garage and build flats. That would make him a killing. The friend’s planning application was becalmed in the planning committee. Without telling anyone about his relationship with his friend, or about the money, or about any connection he had with the planning application, Edwin spoke up in favour of the application.

Was Edwin acting corruptly?

I agree.

Damn. I’m really messing this up. Because both stories are true. And in both cases, Edwin got found out.

An independent arbiter, appointed by the assembly each Edwin was part of, and sticking to the rules that the assembly had agreed, investigated Edwin’s conduct. In the time after the conduct in question, each Edwin had lost his wife in tragic circumstances, so the arbiter in each case gave their Edwin every chance to defend himself, extending deadlines and giving him more leeway than would be normal. Each arbiter found their respective Edwin’s defence to be baseless – “stretching credulity”, it said about one of his arguments – and his conduct to have breached the rules of the assembly. In each case a cross-party committee of Edwin’s fellow representatives agreed with the arbiter’s findings, and censured Edwin, suspending him from the assembly.

Hold on a minute, said each Edwin’s party – ZANU-PF in the one case, Labour in the other. This isn’t right. Edwin hasn’t had a fair say. Let’s press pause on this while we reconsider the rules we’d previously agreed were fine. Each of the two parties whipped Edwins’ colleagues to suspend punishment while – for however long it takes – a committee on which that party holds a majority thought again.

Each Edwin, of course, is still sitting. Still unpunished.

In each case, is Edwin’s party acting corruptly?

Hmmm.

I recognise I’m not being terribly subtle here.

Obviously I’m not talking about Edwin. And I’m not talking about ZANU-PF or Labour. Although if either of them did this, they’d be just as much in the wrong.

This isn’t about parties. This is about probity. About ethics. About the wholesale abuse of power for private advantage.

About, in other words, corruption.

Owen Patterson’s party (because of course that’s what this is about) whines about a lack of due process from the Standards Commissioner (whose report is here). From a party whose Lord Chancellor and Attorney-General want to make it so ministers found to have acted unlawfully can simply, administratively, change the law to suit their purposes, this is cant. Base hypocrisy.

For shame.

I also recognise that these are strong words. Stronger, I think, than I’d usually use.

A few days ago my old friend Max left a comment on a previous post on LinkedIn. He referred – approvingly, I should note – to my “blogrants”. For a moment I was taken aback. Do I really rant? I hope not.

Notwithstanding that, I realise I may have done so here.

But I haven’t spent most of my working life working against corruption elsewhere to nod and wink when I see it at home.

There’s a point to the story-telling method I’ve adopted above – and not only, as I’ve discussed before, because we humans respond to stories, not to bare recitations of fact.

It’s instructive, particularly in this country where we like to believe we’re cleaner than most, to swap out places like “London” or “the UK” and tell the same story as if it were in Harare. Or Abuja. Or San Salvador. Or Kabul. Or Moscow. Or Beijing. Or Beirut. Or any of the other places that we think we’re better than. It’s also important, if one is to have a shred of decency, to imagine how one would feel if it was – in political terms – the other lot. It’s like steel-manning the issue.

If it’d be corruption elsewhere, it’s corruption here. Not sleaze. Corruption. Names are important.

Call this what it is.

1140: a quick update, having finally got round to reading this morning’s Politico playbook from which the below info was taken. For the record, the following Conservative MPs voted against the party whip. They should be applauded. Some would say: well, they’re only doing what they should; where’s the credit in that? But this is like whistleblowing. They’ve put their careers in jeopardy. This is brave, and right.

Aaron Bell. Jackie Doyle-Price. Richard Fuller. Kate Griffiths. Mark Harper. Simon Hoare. Kevin Hollinrake. Nigel Mills. Jill Mortimer. Holly Mumby-Croft. Matthew Offord. John Stevenson. William Wragg.

19 Tory MPs voted in favour despite having in the past had complaints upheld. Not strictly speaking a conflict, but still fairly grubby. I won’t name them, since I guess they’ve a right to their opinion, however shameless it is.

Not so for the three Tory MPs whose alleged misconduct is still under investigation:

James Cleverly. Daniel Kawczynski. David Warburton.

I can’t put it better than Politico does:

If they can’t see why it’s inappropriate to be voting to effectively get rid of the current standards process then Playbook can’t help them.

Quite. Again: for shame. If only they had any.

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2021v28, Friday: Not oil.

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Getting the analogy wrong can ruin policy, as our approach to data has shown. And turning to real fossil fuels: two big, big events involving an oil company and a coal mine.

Short thought: Taking a short break from thingification, this week marks three years since the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR as most of us know it, came into force.

Many hate it. It’s caused a huge amount of work for organisations of all kinds. It’s clunky, imprecise, open to vast interpretation as to how its extensive obligations should be implemented, and therefore tends towards lengthy tickbox exercises rather than the “privacy by design and default” which is, to me, the heart of the whole exercise.

And, of course, it leads to all those dialogs every time you log into a website. And more recently, also the pointless and aggravating requests that you acknowledge the site’s legitimate interest in using your data any way they want. 

(Pointless because if push came to legal shove, I can’t believe a court would waste more than a few seconds on any such factor. Your legitimate interests aren’t something you can just sign away. Particularly not without genuine consideration. Yet another piece of annoying figleaf. Aggravating for the same reason.)

But I still think the anniversary is worth celebrating. Because GDPR did something really important. It enshrined, far more strongly than its predecessor legislation the core principle that your data is yours. It’s not some public resource that organisations can use however they want; some commons they can enclose at will. 

Analogies are important here – and yes, I realise we’re back on stories again, because when the story’s wrong, our responses to it are wrong too. Here, the problem is the dominant analogy: “data is the new oil” is a phrase often bandied around, but as Matt Locke notes here, this is entirely the wrong categorisation:

The discussions around data policy still feel like they are framing data as oil – as a vast, passive resource that either needs to be exploited or protected. But this data isn’t dead fish from millions of years ago – it’s the thoughts, emotions and behaviours of over a third of the world’s population, the largest record of human thought and activity ever collected. It’s not oil, it’s history. It’s people. It’s us.

To indulge in a bit of shameless exaggeration, treating data as a common untapped resource from which anyone can make a buck is akin – in direction if not in scale – to treating Swift’s Modest Proposal as a sensible contribution to the argument on population control.

Think of data as a part of ourselves, and suddenly the priorities change. Stories like the UK government’s attempt – again! – to give relatively unfettered commercial access to health data become as vile as they seem. (On that, instructions to opt out are here – the deadline’s 23 June.)

It’s not oil. It’s us.

Ultra-short before-thoughts: While we’re on the subject of oil, a couple of interesting items which I haven’t had time properly to process yet:

  • A small investment outfit has managed to force directors onto the board of Exxon who actually care about climate change. My recent reading of The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson, has been scaring me witless, and bringing me to the belated realisation of just how much harm climate change naysayers have done to my daughter’s future. About damn time.
  • This one I really want to read and consider: an Australian federal court has denied an application by several children for an injunction to stop a vast open-cast coal mine. But in doing so, it’s found something legally fascinating and with huge potential implications: that there is a duty of care on a government minister to consider what such a project will do to those children’s futures. To anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the common law jurisprudence of negligence, this is immense: new duties of care rarely emerge, with courts (at least in England and Wales) highly reluctant to go beyond existing categories of duty; and only then incrementally and with small steps, based on analogy with existing duties. (For a really good explanation of how this works, see the case of Robinson in the UK Supreme Court.) I really, really need to see how the judge in Australia reached this conclusion (which is at [490-491] of the judgment). I’m on vacation next week, so I might have time to take it in. 

Because I’m on vacation, no promises about posts next week. I’’ll try to take thingification a bit further forward, and there’s so much to do on privacy. We’ll see where we get to.

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2021v10, Monday: Put yourself in the picture.

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No-one gets elected unless they can tell a story enough people want to be part of. Will Labour ever learn that lesson again?

Short thought: Those bored to tears with me banging on about stories should look away now. Because in the wake of last week’s local elections in the UK, here we go again.

I don’t know what a Labour-run country would look like. They haven’t told me. Or if they have, I’ve missed it. And I’m really not oblivious enough to news to have overlooked it.

I know what the Tories want me to think a Tory-run country (which is what we currently have) looks like. I don’t believe they’re either willing or (more importantly) capable of producing the levelled-up, non-London-centric future they’re describing. I think an administration based on flagrant lying, gaslighting and corruption will probably get found out one day.*

But I at least see the picture they’re painting. And I can understand, particularly in areas which have been so much at the back of the queue for decades that the front is only visible with a telescope (and having grown up partly in Stoke-on-Trent, this isn’t just theoretical to me), how it seems far better than any alternative.

That’s the thing. Yes, there’s the vaccine bounce. Yes, there’s the relief of re-opening – and incumbents (let’s not forget that many Labour and other incumbent administrations actually did quite well) almost always benefit when there’s an economic or social upswing.

But political parties are social engines. They’re powered by human attention and (to some extent) trust. And trust and attention are – yes, here we go again – narrative-driven.

Put simply: you vote for someone when they tell a story that enough people feel they either want, or need, to be a part of. And to do that, you need to act, not just react; and you need to find ways of telling your own story, on your own turf; not the turf the other parties define.

Labour has forgotten this. It forgot in 2010-2015, when it allowed the “Labour spent all the money, so austerity is inevitable” lie to take root. It forgot between 2015 and 2019, when Corbynmania had a story of sorts – but one which seemed explicitly to discard or disdain large numbers of people whose votes, to be frank, Labour needed if it was to win power.

And national Labour, at least, seems to have forgotten it now. It focuses on the stories it tells itself (bring back Corbynism! No, Blairism for the win!) instead of the stories it needs to tell the rest of us. And that’s disastrous.

I want to know how we free up the country outside London. I want to know how a post-pandemic UK could find ways of making sure a kid growing up in Southend, or Wigan, or Warwick, or their Scots or Welsh equivalents, doesn’t have to move to London to have the life they deserve, keeping their cash local and their community thriving. I want to know how workers can be protected and their employers encouraged and incentivised to avoid zero-sum games. I want to know how we can integrate facing down the climate threat into this new model. I want to know how despite all this London can remain the thriving, bubbling, economic and social wonder that it is – but not at the cost of elsewhere. (Other countries manage to be truly multi-centred nations; why not us?) I want to know how we can see the rest of the world and its peoples as opportunities, not threats, and love difference as the vital ingredient of life that it is, without using it as a weapon. How we can stop using the EU as a bogeyman, stop pretending that other trade arrangements will wholly replace the ones we’ve shut the door on, and start making Britain after Brexit work without constantly lying about it.

(For the climate in particular: I warmly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, a new book telling – as if in retrospect – one story of how the world dealt with impending climate catastrophe. It’s fiction, sure; but it’s an example of how to paint a word picture that one wants to climb into. As Todd Tucker puts it: it should be “required reading for anyone that writes white papers for a living”.)

All this can fit into a grand narrative. One which is doable, so long as you’re in power. And almost none of this is going to come from this government, which prefers pork-barrel to policy.

Here’s a picture I want to paint myself into. A story I want to be a character in. A future I’d like to believe in.

But I’m not hearing it. Not from anyone. And that makes me cry.

*Although I always bear in mind the investing dictum that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. The same can apply to the electability of incompetent narcissist populists, I fear.

Someone is right on the internet: I’ve been sleeping appallingly recently. Insomnia’s been a plague for years, but the past few months? Worse than I can remember. It’s left me often incapable of functioning after about 4pm. And then I wake up before 4 the following morning… and the cycle continues.

There are things I can and should do. Meditate more. Eat better. Talk things through. Exercise. Read rather than rely on devices. I’ll be working on them all.

And on the subject of reading, having something thought-provoking about sleep may not help, but it sure feels as though it might. So this, from Wired on how octopuses seem to dream, is perfect.

The answer appears to be: they have REM sleep, but only for a fraction of the period that we do. Could it be because, as they seem to dream, it affects their skin colouration – normally an expression of mood and a defensive tool for camouflage? Is the evolutionary risk of a long REM period just too high?

No idea. But it’s great to think about. And in any case: sleep study and cephalopods, all in one. Two absorbing interests covered at the same time. What’s not to like?

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2021v5, Wednesday: Stories.

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On learning advocacy from story-telling, across genres and styles. With a plug for Carly Simon, John le Carré, and a recent opponent of mine.

Short thought: I can bore for Britain on the subject of story-telling. Indeed, I already have, several times.

But this is because it’s important. For us all as human beings, for whom stories help us understand who we are and – as critically – who others are. (And sometimes, more malignantly, paint others in ways which traduce them.)

And particularly for us advocates. As I’ve said before, a big part of advocacy is in crafting the narrative that makes the facts sing, which simply makes more sense than the other side. It’s not the only thing. But it’s a big thing.

Most of us advocates, unsurprisingly, therefore love language. And we owe it to ourselves to learn from its usage, not only in our own world, but in others.

Songs, for instance. Sure, a good lyric is a million miles away from what you can put before the High Court. But the greatest song-writing is often a peerless exercise in narrative concision. A few verses to relate a whole tale.

A fabulous, fabulous example of this is an old favourite of mine: You’re So Vain, by Carly Simon. Putting aside the frankly tedious argument about whether it was Warren Beatty or someone else who inspired it, it’s essentially a story told – stripping out repetitions of the chorus – in fewer than 200 words.

And what words! I could choose any line, but this one stands out for packing the maximum meaning into only five words:

“And your horse naturally won.”

That adverb does so much work. In context, it’s practically a story all of its own.

Seriously. Listen to it. See how the story builds. See how every word works. And learn.

Fiction, of course, is the same. This is one reason I love audiobooks. When read by a good narrator, in circumstances where you can pay just enough attention, the words of great writers sing out to you and leave you breathless.

Again, an old favourite. While running recently, I’ve been re-listening to an unabridged reading of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré’s peerless classic of loss, regret and espionage – although frankly the espionage, as with much of le Carré’s work, was the canvas rather than the paint. The first few chapters kept hitting me with phrase after phrase, each more perfectly formed than the last, each with every word working.

Will I use it directly? Of course not. But will I reflect on the usage, the choices underlying it, and seek to learn? Without a doubt.

The lesson here for me: narrative is everywhere. Much of it is dross. Some of it is breathtaking. The latter is a masterclass for those, like me, who tell stories for a living. And we ignore it at our, and our clients’, peril.

(As a sidenote here: I heard a wonderful piece of narrative advocacy yesterday, from my opponent in an employment tribunal hearing. I’ll say nothing about the content of the hearing, on which judgment has been reserved. But that doesn’t have to stop me from saying that Rad Kohanzad, of 42 Bedford Row, told his client’s story beautifully, simply and effectively, weaving his submissions naturally into the tale as he spun it. Not too effectively, I hope; obviously, I want to win! And, albeit in a different metre, I think my story-telling was pretty sound too. But credit where it’s due.)

(If you’d like to read more like this, and would prefer it simply landing in your inbox three or so times a week, please go ahead and subscribe at https://remoteaccessbar.substack.com/.)