Symbolic Forest

Serious posts are hard to write, aren’t they. This article has been sitting in my drafting pile for a couple of months, and has been sitting around taking up space in my head for most of the past year. It’s about an important topic, though, one that is close to me and one that I think it’s important to discuss. This post is about diversity and inclusion initiatives, in the workplace in general, and specifically in the sort of workplaces I’ve experienced myself, so it will tend to concentrate on offices in general and tech jobs in particular. If you work in a warehouse or factory, your challenges are different and I suspect in many ways a lot harder to deal with, but it is not something I am myself in a position to speak on.

It’s fair to say, to start off with, firstly that my career has progressed a lot since I first started this website; and also that attitudes to diversity and inclusion have changed a lot over that time too. I’ve gone from working in businesses where you would have been laughed at for suggesting it at all mattered or should even be considered, to businesses that care deeply about diversity and inclusion because they see that it is important to them for a number of reasons. What I still see a lot, though, are businesses that start with the thought diversity is important, so how do we improve it, and I think that, frankly, they have things entirely the wrong way round. If instead they begin from a starting point of inclusivity is important, so how do we improve it diversity will naturally follow. If you try to make your workplace an inclusive workplace from top to bottom, in across-the-board ways, then you will create a safe place for your colleagues to work in. If your colleagues feel psychologically safe when they are at work, they’ll be more productive, you’ll have better staff retention rates, and people will actively want to work for you.

The Plain People Of The Internet: But I’ve always felt happy at my desk, chair reclined, just being me, anyway. It’s not something we have trouble with!

But this is where the inclusivity part really comes in to it. There are always going to be some people who feel at home wherever they are. They’re usually the people who are happy in their own identity, which is very nice for them. They’re also the people who expect everyone else to go along with what they want, which is less nice. The people who say “well I have to put up with things in my life, so I don’t see why we should make life easier for everyone else,” and “they’re just trying to be different because they want the attention.” These are the people who are going to have to have their views challenged, in order to make the office round them a truly inclusive place for everybody. At the same time, though, you can’t ignore these people, because inclusivity has by definition to include everybody. You have to try to educate them, which is inevitably going to be a harder job.

For that matter, you always have to remember that you don’t truly know your colleagues, however well you think you do—possibly barring a few exceptions such as married couples who work together, but even then, this isn’t necessarily an exception. You don’t know who in your office might have a latent mental health issue. You don’t know who might have a random phobia or random trauma which doesn’t manifest until it is triggered. Whatever people say about gaydar, you don’t know the sexuality of your colleagues for certain—they might have feelings they daren’t even admit to themselves, and the same goes for gender identity and no doubt a whole host of other things. You can never truly know your colleagues and what matters to them, or who they really are inside their heads.

The Plain People Of The Internet: So now you’ve gone and made this whole thing impossible then!

No, not at all; it’s just setting some basic ground rules. In particular, a lot of companies love “initiatives” on this sort of thing, but they tend to be very centralised, top-down affairs: “we’ll put a rainbow on our logo and organise a staff party”. Those aren’t necessarily bad things to do in themselves, but I strongly believe that to be truly successful, inclusivity has to come from the ground upwards. The best thing you can have is staff throughout the organisation who care about this sort of thing, if they can be given the opportunity to gather people around them, educate them about the importance of the whole thing, and push for change from the bottom upwards.

The Plain People Of The Internet: Aha, I get you now! Get all the minorities together, shut the boring white guys out of the room, and get the minorities to tell us how to sort it out!

No! Firstly, the people who you need to get to seed things off are the people who are passionate about it, moreover, people who are optimistic that their passion is going to have an affect. That applies whoever they are, too. If you want to be inclusive, you must never shut out anyone who is passionate about the topic—with certain exceptions that we’ll come to—because, firstly, inclusivity is for everyone, and everyone has a part to play in it. Secondly, as I said above, you don’t know your colleagues: you don’t know why any particular colleague is passionate about it.

Deliberately making inclusivity and diversity the responsbility of the minorities on your staff is, I’d go far to say, nearly always a counter-productive option. For one thing, you want to find passionate people to drive this forward: you shouldn’t automatically assume that everyone who doesn’t fall into a particular “minority” bucket in some way will be passionate about diversity and inclusion, or even that such a bucket exists. Equally, you need to be very wary of some people who will ride the concept as their own personal hobby-horse, and insist that they, personally, should be the arbiter of what diversity means. There are people out there who will insist that because they are disadvantaged in one way or another, they have the right to determine the meaning of diversity and inclusion in any organisations they are part of. These are the sort of people who conflate inclusivity across the whole office with advantage for themselves personally; they will insist that inclusivity and diversity efforts be focused solely on aspects that benefit them, and will attempt first to narrow the scope of diversity and then to gatekeep what is allowed inside. If you’ve followed my logic about diversity flowing from inclusivity and not vice-versa, you’ll immediately see that this is a nonsense. The reason the type of person I’m talking about doesn’t see it as such, is that they see it, even if they don’t realise it, as being something solely for their own benefit in one way or another.

The Plain People Of The Internet: Now you’re not making sense again! Find people that are passionate but not too passionate? You’re just looking for a team of nice milky liberals who won’t really do anything!

It’s difficult, really, to talk about hypotheticals in this sort of area, partly because every organisation and every situation genuine is very different to another. I’m confident, though, that when you do start getting involved in this sort of area it’s straightforward to see the difference in the two different kinds of passion I’m talking about: passion to improve everybody’s lives, or passion to get more for themself. Sadly, the latter are often much louder, but it’s often very clear: they will be the people saying that they know Diversity and can precisely define it, because they are themselves more Diverse than anybody else so know exactly what needs to be done. The people who say “I’m not really sure what diversity is, but I know we need to get everyone’s input on it” are the people that you want on your team.

The Plain People Of The Internet: So what was the point of all this again? Just what are our team trying to do here?

Make your workplace a more inclusive place, whatever that takes. Make sure that nobody feels excluded from social events. Try to make everyone feel that they are on the same broad top-level team. Make sure that “soft” discriminatory behaviour is discouraged,^* and that people are educated away from it: for example, teach people to use non-discriminatory language. Make sure your interview and hiring processes are accessible and non-biased—this is particularly important at the moment when doing remote interviewing, because requiring the candidate to pass a certain technical bar is inevitably going to exclude people. But, most importantly, when your passionately inclusive pathfinders of inclusivity come up with ideas and want to get them adopted, make sure they have the support and resources to actually get that done.

The Plain People Of The Internet: And then you’ll magically be Diverse with a capital D?

There’s a lot more to it than that, of course. People have written whole books on this stuff; I can hardly squeeze it all into a single blog post. But if you can find people to transform your office into a more inclusive space—a space where everyone can feel safe and at home—then you are one step along the road. Actually generating that atmosphere: another step. After that, your office will become somewhere that a diverse range of people feel comfortable working in, because it is a fully inclusive space and because everyone across that range can feel at home working there. And then your management can start being proud of being a diverse organisation, rather than deciding that you are going to be Diverse but not knowing how to get there on more than a superficial level.

The Plain People Of The Internet: Feel at home at the office? Pshaw! Terrible idea!

I agree with you completely that the office shouldn’t be your home, “working from home” notwithstanding. It’s still important to separate the two and not hand over your entire soul to the capitalist monster. Nevertheless, much as you might hate working for a living, if you do have to work for a living, it’s important for you to try to be as happy as you can be within that context. Finding a workplace that can be a safe place for you to exist in, whilst not being your home, is one way to go about that. It’s not really what this post is supposed to be about, but it’s a digression it might be a good idea to explore at some point.

This post is getting a bit long now, judging by the way my scrollbar is stretching down the screen. It’s a personal view. I don’t pretend to know all the answers, and it’s not a field I claim to be an expert in, but it’s a field that is important to me personally and it’s a suggestion towards a sensible approach to take. Diversity is important to all of us, because we are all diverse: none of us is any more diverse than the other, and none of us has the right to judge another’s lifestyle as long as it causes others no harm.^** The key thing, to my mind, is accepting that genuine diversity does require acceptance and appreciation of this; and that if you want to become diverse, becoming inclusive first is by far the easiest approach.

The dichotomy really, I suppose, is between organic growth and forced construction. Consider, if you’ll forgive me another painful analogy, your workforce as the shifting sands of a beach. If you build a Tower of Diversity and Inclusion on top of those shifting sands, it will fall, or get swallowed up by the dunes. If you let a Forest of Inclusion and Diversity grow up through the sand, it will hold it together and make it more cohesive. I know it’s a bit of a daft analogy really, but hopefully it helps you see what I’m trying to painfully and slowly explain. If you try to be inclusive, and if you turn your workplace into a safe space for everyone to be themselves, the latter is hopefully what you will be able to grow.

* I’m working on the basis here that “hard” discriminatory or offensive language or behaviour is immediately called out and shut down, which I know isn’t always the case in all workplaced.

** I have cut a whole section out of a previous draft of this post, discussing how to spot people who use diversity as a shield to do horrible things. Hopefully, in most situations, it’s not something people have to worry about, but it does happen. It’s a shame that we do have to worry about these situations, but they do happen. Going round again, though, if an inclusive workplace is one where people feel safe to be themselves, it’s also one where hopefully people feel safe to report any transgressions and make sure they are dealt with. I have, sadly, heard of people who use diversity-styled language to try to defend themselves against accusations of abuse or of sexually predatory behaviour, and I’m not surprised there are some who think that diversity is some sort of loophole in that regard, because some people will always take whatever advantage they can.

Keyword noise: diversity, inclusion, the workplace, The Plain People Of The Internet.

Today was the first morning of this autumn with signs of frost on the ground. I sat down at my desk and saw the roofs across the street fringed with white at the edges of the tiles, as the sun rose in a clear blue sky. Winter is coming, and our Hallowe’en pumpkins are in a dark corner of the garden for the local slugs and snails to eat. A robin fluttered around the garden, getting ready for all the Christmas posing; I doubt they go for pumpkin. In the summer the garden was full with house sparrows, as nearly every house in this street has a few sparrow nests under the eaves; but now they are quiet and are staying inside.

A month or so ago, I talked about how awful the world of politics is, too awful to want to write about. This morning, with the results of yesterday’s American presidential election still entirely up in the air, that seemed still very true. This evening, the results of yesterday’s American presidential election are still somewhat up in the air, but not quite as awful. We can but hope.

Since the clocks changed it’s dark now before I leave my desk in the evening, and on nights with clear skies, at the moment, I can see Mars rising, the first “star” visible above the roofline on the other side of the road. It rises above them just as dusk falls, visible already as a dim orange pinprick whilst the sky around it is still blue. Over the course of this year I’ve come to know the roofline opposite my window intimately. I feel like I know all the cracked tiles and broken patches like the back of my hand; I’ve watched the missing tiles on a house down the street get worse as the year has gone on and wonder how the residents cope in rainstorms, and I’ve watched a house a similar distance up the street slowly have its roof replaced, its chimney repointed, everything tidied and neatened and primped. Winter is coming, we are a third of the way through the final quarter of the year. After that, though, things will be brighter again.

Keyword noise: seasons, autumn, winter, frost, astronomy, Mars, Donald Trump.

Very long-term readers, or people who have gone delving around in the archives, might be aware that back when this site started, I used to talk about politics on a reasonably regular basis. Indeed, if you look in the menus (either down below or over on the right), you can see there’s a whole category for it. Since the restart, though, there really hasn’t been anything political that I have wanted to write about, or thought it worth writing about at all.

Fifteen years ago, British politics was in a pretty moribund state. The passion that led from getting a Labour government into power on a landslide win had faded. The Tories flailed aimlessly for a few years before settling on a leader with a shiny, plastic PR-friendly exterior and barely anything on the inside beyond a passionate over-confidence in his own ability. Labour were just…tired, fading away into a party mostly consisting of bland interchangeable technocrats. The feeling I had was: it didn’t matter back then what you thought about politics. Everything was just a bland porridge of centrist-looking parties not wanting to rock the boat, not doing anything too controversial or too likely to upset the press barons, mostly interested in finding some sort of grey consensus. There was a vague sense of religious morality underlying everything, a vague tinge of disapproval of anything sexual that wasn’t straight, cis and vanilla; but otherwise nobody seemed to have any passion or aims beyond their own careers.

I somehow predicted the planned outcome of the 2010 General Election five years ahead of time, and could see that the Tories were slowly and painfully pulling themselves apart as a party, but almost everything else I tried to predict about what might happen to the world, politically, turned out to be wrong. I suppose that’s still a better success rate than most political journalists who actually get paid to ramble, but nevertheless, I still feel as if maybe fifteen years ago I should have realised the extent of the precipice we were on, and just how far we were going to fall, when people realised just how to take advantage of the online world, and of the bland vacuity that was 2000s politics. I didn’t realise the Tories would keep themselves alive by trying to absorb every opinion to the right of them. Eight or nine years or so later, their ploys all played off, and we have been in the nightmare timeline ever since. We should have seen in coming.

So now, why would I want to write about politics, when it is worse, darker, more divisive, than anything I would have ever imagined? Fifteen years ago, you often would hear people saying they didn’t trust politicians, that they never told the truth, that no politician was ever honourable. People have taken advantage of that: if nobody ever trusted politicians, why should they even try to tell the truth? Why should they even try to behave with honour? In Britain the government has made it clear that laws are for others to obey and them to ignore, whether at the level of international relations or at the level of individuals. It seems pointless sometimes to point out just how poisonous this is. All we can do is try to still behave honourably ourselves. In this morning’s news, the American president has apparently come down with the ongoing pandemic disease, one that—given his age and ill health—has a high chance of either killing him outright or leaving him even more mentally impaired than he already is. Given he has recently claimed the disease is a hoax, given that by both accident and design he tells multiple lies every single day, it seems impossible, a few hours later, to tell whether he actually has it or not.

Hopefully, one day, there will be light on the horizon and politics will be boring again. Hopefully one day all the politicians will be interchangeably bland. Looking back, we didn’t realise just how lucky that was. Maybe my ambition for the first year of this blog’s relaunch should be to end up with more posts in the “Trains” category than the “Political” one, because those posts will be much more fun and healthier to both read and write.

Keyword noise: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, David Cameron, pandemic, apathy, authoritarianism, bad news, Tories, Conservatives, Prime Minister, prophecy, xenophobia.

Well, hello there. Happy new year and all that.

I’ve broken the silence because, in the post below this one, you might notice that I said the one-off Dirk Gently adaptation broadcast on BBC4 last Christmas “very much had the smell of a pilot about it”. Funnily enough, the BBC agreed with me, so much so that it will be getting a short series in 2012. Whether the series will also be filmed in Easton, Montpelier and St Werburghs remains to be seen. Nostradamus himself would be jealous of my keen-eyed prediction skills.

In other futurology updates: a year ago, I predicted that the new government would last about fifteen months, collapsing over electoral reform. I now have three months left on that one, and the electoral reform has gone the way I always thought it would.* We will see. Nostradamus may not be quite so impressed. In slightly better news, though, we do now have the tea towel that we wanted this time last year. The downside to this: I now have to catch up on all the washing-up that’s been waiting since then.

* Despite being a Yes voter myself. No, not that Yes.

Keyword noise: BBC, Bristol, coalition, Dirk Gently, Easton, electoral reform, Flight Of The Conchords, prediction, referendum, tea towel, television, voting reform, washing up.

Having just moved house, we’re very aware right now that in the south-west, affordable housing is hard to find. It might be getting harder, too. Yesterday’s news included an announcement that local councils will be able to block developments on garden land.

Note that the article there is rather optimistic as to whether that type of development will be stopped. It won’t be; the decision on whether to allow it will be devolved to local government, which is in democratic terms a Good Thing that’s hard to argue against. In practical terms, though, it means that developments will be stopped in areas where residents have the means and inclination to be influential and to lean on their councillors; and will be concentrated in areas where nobody’s going to complain. In other words, another polarisation policy, to increase the economic differentiation of our towns and suburbs.

At first sight, I thought, it sounds like it might be a good idea. After all, I grew up in a leafy suburb, built in a time and place when housing plots included reasonable gardens, and so I quite enjoy tree-lined avenues and verdant cul-de-sacs that help you forget you’re in a city. But, thinking about it, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea. Verdant cul-de-sacs are nice, but affordable housing is better. A blanket ban on building over gardens isn’t what’s needed; what would be more useful is a more general control on maximum density of housing. If the planning regulations included a rule that every X square metres of new housing must include Y square metres of private or public garden space, then developers would be as free as they liked to demolish old houses and replace them with flats; the open space and the greenery would be preserved, just in a slightly different form.

It doesn’t take much, after all, to give an area the greenery it needs. Symbolic Towers, from the front, has no green space at all, one house in a line of terrace with virtually every front yard concreted, tiled or gravelled over.^* At the back, we only have a small square of garden, too. But despite its small size, the garden and the gardens alongside are a quiet, peaceful, green space, sheltered from the inner city with trees and bushes.

It’s easy to forget, when a development is fresh and harsh, how time mellows a landscape. As I said, I grew up in a tree-lined surburban estate, and that’s how it is in my memory. When I look back at photos from my childhood, though, I’m shocked by how bare it looks. There’s hardly any greenery to be seen: it’s a stark landscape of red-brick houses, bare, plain lawns and sticky saplings staked into the ground here and there. In my memory it’s always as it is now, those saplings all fleshed out into fully-grown trees, and gardens grown up to fill in the spaces.^** We forget that gardens take time to grow and mature; we forget, indeed, that Britain has no such thing as natural countryside at all, even our “ancient woodlands” being to some extent man-made.^*** Developing on garden space isn’t necessarily a bad thing, so long as some green space remains; and it’s easy for “we don’t want to lose the green space next door” to be a cover for “we don’t want flats that just anyone can afford next door!” If we have rules that ensure that some green space will remain, we can redevelop our cities in a sensible and healthy way. And in thirty years time, those new flats will be surrounded by greenery, and people will wonder that their street was ever any different.

* Do not ask about the gravel. Unless, that is, you would like some free gravel.

** Memo to my parents, 30 years ago: think twice about moving into a house with a horse chestnut sapling planted at the end of the driveway, because before it’s a third fully-grown it will already have buggered up the drains.

*** They are still ancient, of course. But pollen analysis shows firstly that their mixture of trees is rather different to the genuine primaeval forest that grew up between the end of the recent ice age and the start of farming; and, secondly, that we probably have rather more woodland today than we did 2,000 years or so ago.

Keyword noise: brownfield, development, garden, garden grabbing, green space, housing, planning, redevelopment, Symbolic Towers.

Following on from yesterday’s post about government spending cuts: there is, of course, one thing that would save quite a bit more money than freeing up some unused phone numbers. Regular readers of this blog will – especially if they were regular readers about a year ago – be very bored of me droning on about the West Of England Partnership‘s^* ongoing guided busway scheme, which consists essentially of turning former and current railway alignments such as the Bristol-Bath Railway Path or the Bristol Harbour Railway into private roads for the exclusive use of First Group, at public cost. Rather high public cost, at that, as for any road scheme; and the first phase of the project would have no purpose other than to replace the current Ashton park-and-ride services with new, less useful, park-and-ride services from the same car park. Follow this link to read more.

Well, the local press has suddenly noticed that cancelling this scheme might be a nice easy way to cut the Department for Transport’s budget down a bit; and other local bloggers have had similar news on another poorly-thought-out local transport scheme. That big hole in the government budget, it appears, is suddenly going to mean no money for new roads, whether that be a replacement for Hartcliffe Way, or paving over the Harbour Railway so that bus routes 903 and 352 can avoid Hotwells Road.^**

You might also notice a quote from Councillor Hopkins in that article. “An alternative might be a much cheaper ultra-light rail system, which was tried out on a short stretch of Bristol’s dockside several years ago.” He’s referring to a machine called the Parry People Mover, a small lightweight railcar powered by a flywheel that gets charged up at stops. I don’t see it happening, either. Parry People Movers have been tried at various sites, including the Bristol Harbour railway, but they’ve never seemed to last very long except for one location, Stourbridge (West Mids), a very short line with no intermediate stops. They need a railway line to run on, and reinstating the railway to Ashton Gate then extending it to Ashton Vale would be as expensive, probably, as building a road. Similarly, you couldn’t extend a Parry People Mover line into the city: you’d have to lay tramlines, for one thing, and if you were doing that, you may as well go with a real tram that doesn’t have to wait for a 5- or 10-minute recharge at each stop.

So: a short-for-cash government means no new buses and no new roads. In the long run, no new public transport is a Bad Thing; but new roads, public or private, always mean more traffic, higher emissions, and more oil used up. Hopefully, an enforced pause will mean we can wait for a while, until we can design a transport scheme that’s actually useful, not just one that’s easy.

* I do wonder sometimes what other local councils, like, say, Somerset, Devon, Dorset or Cornwall think of the CUBA local authorities claiming the name “West of England” for themselves and themselves alone.

** Because that, essentially, is all that first phase of the “Bus Rapid Transit” scheme, for all the work it needs, amounts to.

Keyword noise: Bedminster, Bristol, Bristol Post, Bristol Harbour Railway, buses, Gary Hopkins, government, guided bus, light rail, North Somerset, Parry People Movers, spending cuts, West of England Partnership.

Today’s big news story: the government has started on its grand crusade to save money and thereby rescue the nation. Whether it will work remains to be seen, of course. I was intrigued, though, by one assertion which I heard on the news this morning: the government will save money by cutting back on call centres and helplines, because there are, apparently, many many government helplines which have barely even received a single call.^*

Which sounds, on the face of it, shocking. Hundreds of phone lines that have never taken a call? Surely there must be warehouses full of call-centre staff sitting waiting for the phone to ring, sitting with their feet up reading magazines and flicking balls of paper at each other, because they have hundreds of phone lines but no calls to take?

Er, no. Despite the image put across there, it is completely false. I know this because: well, I have worked for such phone lines. Yes, there are indeed hundreds of government-funded phone numbers that have never, ever taken a call. That’s because that’s how marketing people like it. The total extra cost of it, per phone line, is peanuts – maybe it gets into whole tens of pounds if you add up absolutely all the figures, but that’s about it.

This is how it works. When the government’s marketing people^** think they might want to run a new advertising campaign, they buy up a block of phone numbers, 0800, 0845, or whatever. Then, they produce their TV adverts, print adverts, leaflets, whatever: and each one gets a different phone number on it. All of these numbers will point to the same team – who will usually be already handling a similar type of helpline – and, it’s true, someone does have to go through a spreadsheet of phone numbers and route them to the right call centre. It’s not tricky work. When a call comes in, the hard-worked call-centre staff look at their screen, and make a note of which line it came in on. That information all gets collated, filed, and sent back to the government marketeers, who will graph it all carefully and say “ooh, Leaflet 72B didn’t work very well, it only got half the calls-per-leaflet of Leaflet 72C.”

The reason they do it this way is: it gives them reliable data, not data that relies on the caller’s memory. If you actually ask the caller where they saw the advert, then a) it annoys them, and b) they can’t remember. Even if they think they can remember, they can’t remember. If you say “can you remember what you were watching when you saw it,” you’d be amazed how many people will tell you, in all sincerity, that they saw your advert in the middle of Eastenders. But, on the other hand, it does mean that there are lots and lots of phone numbers that have been bought up in readiness, but which don’t get used; they’re there, just in case more numbers are needed. Having them sitting and programmed-in to the phone network, though, doesn’t really hurt. It certainly wouldn’t save the government money if they weren’t there. Indeed, I’m sure that a marketing expert would argue that it wastes money. An advert that doesn’t get a response, after all, is an advert wasted; and if you’re going to pay for a prime-time ad slot, or to print x million leaflets of your latest advertising wonder, you will want to know what sort of response rate it’s getting. The less accurate the data you’re getting back is, the bigger the risk that you’re pouring your ad budget down the drain.

In the long term, a hurried cut in the wrong place could cost you millions further down the line. So: sometimes, something that looks like a simple saving isn’t one. Especially when it’s something that’s hardly a big saving at all. There are indeed many government-owned phone numbers that have never, once, been called. That doesn’t mean they’re costing us anything to have, though; and it doesn’t mean that somehow the government is doing something wrong, that it’s set all these call centres up then forgotten to tell anyone; or that it’s set up lines that nobody wants to call. Those people, waiting for you to ring, are already busy enough.

* This would have been on Today at some point, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I can’t really find any news stories online that refer to this particular claim, apart from this one in the Shropshire Star; The Guardian refers to it more obliquely.

** The Central Office of Information, who sound slightly Soviet but are really the government’s advertising and marketing arm. They are the people who sit between the media, the advertising agencies and the call centre companies on the one hand, and the government departments who want to put their message across on the other; whether it be an NHS public health campaign like “don’t get swine flu”, HMRC trying to get you to send your tax return in on time, or the MoD trying to get people to join up.

Keyword noise: advertising, call centre, Conservatives, George Osborne, government, helplines, marketing, spending cuts.

When I was growing up, back in the heyday of capitalism, “caring for the environment” was seen as a bit of a fringe activity. In school, we were all taught how important it was; but in the real world, nobody really paid much attention.

Fast forward to today: companies are falling over themselves to be Environmental, and to show that they Care with big green hugs, pretty flowers and all that. But in many cases this is pure greenwash: an attempt to look caring because they know that caring sells, because ticking the “environmental!” box makes their company look good. Look at the details, and there’s often no real benefit.

One advert that’s been out recently has been particularly annoying us. Kenco, who make reasonably tasty coffee, but whose advertising campaign is annoying, silly, and patronising. “We tried using 100% less packaging,” they lie, “but it didn’t work. So we’re using 97% less packaging instead.”

All well and good: less packaging equals less materials used equals less weight equals less fuel used in distribution. Sounds nice, on the surface. If you look at it with a longer-term eye, though, things aren’t quite so clear-cut. The traditional packaging, as you probably know,^* was: glass jars. One of the oldest packaging forms there is, and one of the greenest. It’s so easy to recycle that we’ve been recycling it ever since it was first invented; all you do is clean it and melt it. OK, there was a period of 200 years or so when we didn’t bother; but glass recycling was one of the first forms of recycling to be widespread in this country in the modern period. Even back in the days when, as I said, I was growing up and nobody really worried too much about the environment, we would still take a trip to the village “bottle bank” once a week. I loved to take each jar from the bag, and jump up to get it in the hole, trying to get as loud a smash as I could.^**

What have Kenco replaced their glass jars with? Plastic packets. What’s the recyclability of plastic packets in this country? Virtually nil. Can you reuse them for anything? Virtually nothing. So, we go from glass jars which can be easily reused or recycled, to plastic packets which are useless after you get them home, and have to go for landfill. Change in packaging weight: a 97% drop. Change in waste produced: an increase of enormous proportions. Not quite such a good-looking result. Moreover, glass is made from sand, of which there’s no great shortage; plastic is made from oil, which is getting harder and harder to find. Oh dear.

The big disadvantages of glass packaging, of course, are weight and bulk. Less packaging weight means lower transport costs, and less fuel used. Yes, true, this is a good thing for the environment. It’s even better for Kenco, though. I suspect there’s one single big purpose behind this change: cutting Kenco’s transport costs. Their purpose in the world, after all, isn’t to heal the environment, and it isn’t even to make reasonable-tasting coffee. It’s to make money for their owners, by a) selling more coffee and b) lowering the cost of producing that coffee. Trying to persuade us that their cost-cutting is good for the environment will, I assume, help them sell more coffee to some people. In the long run, though, it’s a much less sustainable way to package. It’s not really as good for the environment, as they’d like us to think.

* And still being produced of course

** And that’s not counting glass milk bottles and fizzy drink bottles, sold on deposit and reused many times over by the manufacturers since, ooh, the railways first came along and made large-scale distribution practical.

Keyword noise: advertising, coffee, environment, glass, greenwash, Kenco, packaging, plastic, recycling, sustainability.

There’s been lots in the news lately about Britain’s 2018 World Cup bid getting into an embarrassing sticky patch, the FA chairman resigning after some unflattering private conversations were published, and of course there’s speculation that the bid may be over before it’s barely begun. Well, hurrah for that, I have to say.

I’m guessing that England’s bid has some rather flaky patches hidden underneath the glitz, anyway. This is because part of it involves Bristol, and the flakiness of Bristol’s part of the bid has already been well-publicised locally. To summarise for non-Bristolian readers: the bid depends on a new football stadium being built on a greenfield site. Part of it still doesn’t have planning permission, and campaigners are still trying to block the rest. The football club have previously claimed that they could only afford to build the thing by also building a housing estate – permission refused – and by selling their old stadium site to Tesco, which generated a rather big local anti-Tesco campaign. Tesco, presumably not wanting to be seen on the losing side of an argument, pulled out of the deal just before their planning application was due to be heard. Their place has been replaced by Sainsburys, who have a shiny website but not much else likely to swing opinion in their favour.

I’ll nail my colours to the mast straight away and say that I’m not in favour of the World Cup coming to England. I’m not in favour of it existing at all, in fact; but if it has to exist, I definitely don’t want it getting in the way of real life. Particularly, though, I’m not in favour of having to pay for it, which undoubtedly all of us will, especially if we live in a Host City. I’m also not really looking forward to having my home city turned into a corporate-sponsored advertising opportunity for a couple of months; because, let’s face it, if you follow the money-trail then the World Cup is nothing to do with football and everything to do with advertising the highest-bidding corporations; part of that involves turning the host cities into corporate monocultures where anything referring to those corporations’ competitors is strictly forbidden.

The local press sneaked a darkly threatening line into one of their recent World Cup stories: the bid is legally binding on the city council. In other words, if England is unlucky enough to make a successful bid, that’s it. It goes ahead, and the city council is bound to deliver what they’ve promised. If Bristol City FC are telling the truth, if they really can’t afford to build a stadium without a supermarket, and the supermarket plans get thrown out, then presumably the city will somehow have to find a way to build it. The council could be in a nasty trap, either to approve an unpopular and unwanted supermarket or to fund a stadium they’re obliged to ensure exists. Of course, there may be a way for them to get out of it; I really do hope there is.

That’s one of the problems, I suppose, in making a bid for something on the grounds that you have a nice stadium which doesn’t exist yet and doesn’t have funding in place. Presumably the people at FIFA who are going through all the bids with a fine-tooth comb will spot that England’s bid depends on at least one stadium which consists solely of pretty pictures and promises so far; and will want to know what’s going to happen should the money to build it not turn up as expected. Fingers crossed. Even so, I feel like patting Lord Triesman on the back; when it comes to England losing the bid, everything will help.

Keyword noise: Ashton Gate, Bristol, Bristol City, football, Football Association, Lord Triesman, Sainsburys, Tesco, World Cup.

Since the election, I’ve felt a bit sorry for Gordon Brown, what with all the people who have rushed to gloat and put the boot in since his progressive downfall started. Last week’s Have I Got News For You featured a montage of his strained-looking toothy smile, his clunky body-language, as if the ability to smile and shake hands smoothly was indeed what really mattered in a leader. I can sympathise partly because my own smiles are often as bad as his, especially if I’m trying to pose. When I’m smiling for the camera, everyone else shuffles their feet and small children run away crying; so when people make fun of Gordon Brown for suffering the same problem, he definitely gets my sympathies.

People’s reaction to his clunkiness, though, just goes to show how much people are concerned today with style and slickness over intellect; and Gordon Brown’s defeat, which people are already treating as much less narrow than it actually was, is only going to reinforce that. When we see David Cameron and Nick Clegg standing together, I get an uneasy squirming horror-film feeling that something is not quite right: that we’re not watching real people, but some sort of shiny artificial human-mimicking lifeform whose twin bodies are slowly converging onto one set of features. By the end of this parliament, we’ll be ruled by Cameregg, one creature with two identical bodies, identical faces with features so blandly generic you could barely pick them out from a crowd. Ed Balls, and the Miliband brothers, might well be part of the same species: some sort of bizarre alien trying to put on a human face but turning into an inhuman everyman. It might just be the effect of modern spin-driven media-friendly politics – or maybe the Autons are real after all.

Keyword noise: Auton, David Cameron, Doctor Who, elections, General Election, Gordon Brown, horror, Nick Clegg, plastic.