According to the Today Programme, there is a new post in the British army called SO1 Unacceptable Behaviours. SO1 being the name for a Colonel level staff job, and ‘unacceptable behaviours’ being exactly that.
The SO1, who sounded delightful, comes armed (though not literally) with a team of 6 behind him, and expressed on air the hope that he would soon have even more. I think that they go from barrack to barrack to sniff out racism, sexism and homophobia wherever it lurks, which is good, because we want our armed forces to operate under the same values as the rest of us. And that they educate service people in the matter of which terms and behaviours are acceptable, and which aren’t, which is even better.
Those of us who have served, particularly four decades ago or more, are painfully aware that things occasionally went too far, and that good people were hurt for no good reason. I like to think things are a bit better now.
I know no more than you do, and a lot less than a couple of signed up readers I’m aware of, but I’m prepared to take a bet that the army created this department with fractionally less enthusiasm than they might, say, take out a gun emplacement of Taliban insurgents. I’d go further. I’m prepared to speculate that it came under the category of ‘what do we have to do to get these people off our backs?’ I suspect that the celebrations of the midwives who attended the birth of this particular child were a little muted after the event.
In fact, it is just conceivable that this is all a symptom of a society that has been a bit brow-beaten into confusing its ‘isms’. Racism, for example, (which is vile, in every instance), with tribalism (which is a bit boorish) and with robust banter (which is what workplaces have been full of for ever). The ugly truth is that sometimes things are said and done that are ill-judged and even unkind, but fall well short of illegality. Just occasionally, outrage can be confected, and all of us presumably have a duty to be robust up to a certain level. And no, I am explicitly not including real prejudice of any kind in this.
I once took my mother to a surgeon at Basingstoke who was about to remove two thirds of her liver in what would be a life-saving operation.
‘Bit pleased with himself?’ I asked gently, as we headed home from the consultation.
‘Very,’ agreed my mother. ‘But we’re not paying him for his cuddliness; we’re paying him to be a good surgeon.’ On that basis, she said, she was more than delighted to entrust her wellbeing to him, and I remember being rather impressed.
Slightly the same thing applies to the army. When I was training soldiers, I remember a common inverse connection between the quality of a recruit’s upbringing and his eventual excellence as a soldier. Meaning that very often, the one who had done a stint in borstal, whose father had been knifed and whose mother had been on the game, was the one that we would all give our eye teeth to be right alongside us in the thick of the fight.
‘We’re not paying him to be paragon of virtue,’ my mother might say. ‘We’re paying him to get stuck into those trenches.’ And, again, she would be sort of right.
All of which is a very long way round of saying that I think the government’s limited time and money might be equally well spent considering reclaiming the CBE it gave to Denise Coates (intriguingly for ‘services to the community’), and going after a big share of the modest £343 million pay package she awarded herself this year in respect of her work as the co-founder of Bet365. After all, with 29000 problem gamblers in Britain, and between 250-600 of them taking their own lives each year directly because of their addiction, one could argue that the fruits of her work, and of others like her, are not entirely beneficial to the community.
And, yes, I know all about moral equivalence, thank you, but I would rather live in a country that regards Ms Coates as a clear and present danger to its moral fabric than a squaddie who forgets his manners for a minute or two.
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