You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (18 page)

There are several forms of suppression available. The use of expensive lawyers to punish critics in libel courts, most notably in Britain, but in France, Brazil and Singapore as well, is an under-explored form of censorship that allows the wealthiest people on the planet to intimidate their opponents. The control by the wealthy of parts of the media is a kind of censorship, if not in the age of the Internet a censorship that is as effective as it once was. The most obvious restriction on freedom of speech, and the one which can cause the most damage to the common good, is so ubiquitous and accepted we do not even call it censorship, or think of tearing off the gag that silences us.

The Censor in a Suit

Every time you go into your workplace, you leave a democracy and enter a dictatorship. Nowhere else is freedom of speech for the citizens of free societies so curtailed. They can abuse their political leaders in print or on radio, television and the Web as outrageously as they wish, and the secret service will never come for them. They can say that their country’s leader is a lunatic, their police force is composed of sadists and their judiciary is corrupt. Nothing happens, even on those occasions when their allegations are gibberish. The leniency of free societies is only proper. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to spout clap-trap, as regular surfers of the Web know. If employees criticise their employers in public, however, they will face a punishment as hard as a prison sentence, maybe harder: the loss of their career, their pension, and perhaps their means of making a livelihood.

Britain has a formal legal protection for whistleblowers, but as so often with laws about free speech, the theory is one thing and the practice another. Workers are allowed to make ‘qualifying disclosures’ and warn of criminal offences, failure by their firms to comply with legal obligations, miscarriages of justice, threats to an individual’s health and safety, and threats to the environment. The list sounds impressive, but the law says that an employee must first take his or her concerns to their employer. Only then can they raise the alarm and claim compensation if the boss fires them.

‘It’s like telling a mouse to go see the cat,’ one of London’s best employment lawyers told me. If the employer thinks for a moment that the employee may go to the press or a Member of Parliament, he will suspend him or her and deny them access to the computer system. In theory again, the law is aware of the problem, and allows an exception to the rule. If employees reasonably believe that they will suffer a ‘detriment’, or the employer will destroy evidence, they can go public without notifying their bosses. In practice, any worker who took the law at its word because he ‘reasonably believed’ his employer would destroy evidence or silence him would find himself in a catch-22. When his compensation case came to court, he would have to say, ‘I went to the press without consulting my employers because I thought my employers would fire me.’ To which the employer would respond, ‘No we wouldn’t, and because you didn’t come to us first, you have no evidence that will stand up in this court that we would have.’

As soon as a whistleblower brings unwelcome news to his or her superiors, the human-resources department of any major public or private bureaucracy knows what it must do next. It will instruct its lawyers to secure a gagging injunction from the courts. All employment contracts include confidentiality clauses stating that the employee cannot release information about the organisation and its clients under any circumstances. Many now contain an additional catch-all clause stating that the employee must take no action that could bring the organisation into disrepute. Britain is a country where a council can sack a dinner lady for bringing her ‘school into disrepute’ by telling parents that their daughter was being bullied in the playground. Workers here do not speak their minds if they suspect their employers may find out. Even medics, who have a professional duty to protect the interest of patients, are exposed. The Nursing and Midwifery Council struck off a nurse who revealed the neglect of elderly patients by taking a camera crew into her hospital. The
British Medical Journal
said that when a doctor raised concerns about unsafe heart surgery in his hospital, ‘his career stalled’ and he moved to Australia to find work. Medical whistleblowers, whose concerns touch on vital questions of who lives and who dies, ‘find themselves the subject of retaliatory complaints and disciplinary action’. In one case of alleged research fraud, whistleblowers were advised to ‘keep quiet or their careers would suffer’. When they did not, the regulatory authorities investigated them first, rather than the abuses they had uncovered.

In theory again, the courts will not issue a gagging order if the defendant can prove that he was seeking to release information that the public ought to know about. In practice, judges rarely refuse to gag, because the odds are stacked against the employee. Imagine a woman who has gone to her boss, maybe nervously, maybe filled with trust in her superiors’ good faith. Instead of listening to her concerns, the employer tells security to escort her from the building. Her swipe card no longer works. She has no access to the computer system. Her belongings are in bin bags in reception, and she cannot afford expensive legal representation. Her case is lost before it has begun.

Lawyers know of just a handful of instances where employees have received compensation because they followed the correct procedure: first raising their concerns with their managers, and going public only when the company failed to address them. By one of those serendipities that can make the most atheist of authors believe that a supernatural power orders the universe, among the few was Gita Sahgal, who organised the Asian feminists who protested in defence of Salman Rushdie in Parliament Square in 1989. After her employer, the human-rights group Amnesty International, required her to leave for complaining to the press about its alliances with Islamists, her lawyers secured compensation for her.

Few have chosen to follow her path, because the driving desire in the minds of the overwhelming majority of employees is not the intricacies of the legislation or the possibility of compensation, but keeping their jobs and avoiding the need to go to law that speaking their minds would bring. Every whistleblower I have known has ended up on the dole. Their colleagues know without needing anyone to spell it out for them that self-censorship is necessary if they are to enjoy future wealth and security. Speaking out in the public interest guarantees financial loss and unemployment. The primary concern of employees, public and private, is to avoid a confrontation. They work in hierarchies organised like armies. The managing director or CEO is the general, and a princely salary bolsters his or her status and pride. Beneath him or her are the staff officers, whose first duty is to show mindless obedience; and beneath them are the grunts, who are expected to take orders without question and not to answer back. The radical British economist Chris Dillow describes the strangeness of today’s hierarchical organisations well. As the collapse of communism approached in 1989, conservative and soft-left commentators ‘told us, rightly, that no one had enough knowledge and rationality to manage an economy. But they also told us that managers had enough knowhow to manage a firm.’ While they condemned the hierarchical centrally planned economy, they praised the hierarchical centrally planned corporation or state bureaucracy.

If we take one lesson from the economic crisis, it should be that excessive wealth rendered the managers of banks unfit to run complex organisations. They had the most persuasive of economic incentives not to investigate the dangers of collapse thoroughly, because prudent banking would have cut the size of their extraordinary bonuses.

We should not be surprised that the managerial system that was so successful in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries experienced such a breakdown. Modern economies do not depend on producing goods on assembly lines, but on creative thinking, and you cannot command and control creativity, or order it to appear on time like a replacement machine tool. In the most advanced areas of the economy, most notably computing and biotechnology, small, light firms overtake established corporations because they know that information is scattered across organisations, not confined in the offices of executives. They tap it by encouraging cooperation, not subservience. As the costs of storing and retrieving information have collapsed, sharing expertise ought to be easy. But the cooperative approach based on openness and trust undermines the status of managers, whose wealth depends on the ability to create the impression that they have knowledge that their subordinates cannot be trusted to share.

All of the above are strong arguments against the managerialism that blights free countries. But the strongest stares us in the face. If managers looked to the inspiration for the technologies they deploy, they would find it comes from a scientific method that has no connection to the cramped, fearful ideologies of the managerial economy. The scientific method insists that researchers must go where the evidence leads, whatever the consequences. Status, salary and position should offer no protection from criticism, because no idea or person is sacred. Richard Feynman said that the differences between true sciences and the pseudo-sciences – a category that includes the management-speak of the business schools – was that the former try to be honest, while the latter do not.

Richard Dawkins illustrated the scientific ideal of egalitarian openness with the affecting story of a young zoologist challenging an old professor in Dawkins’ zoology department. The professor believed that the Golgi apparatus (a microscopic feature on the interior of cells) was an illusion. ‘Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely compelling evidence that the Golgi apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said – with passion – “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would. But all scientists pay lip-service to the ideal, [and] the memory of the incident still brings a lump to my throat.’

The scientific method is opposed to secrecy, and has no respect for status. It says that all relevant information must be open to scrutiny. The ideal it preaches – not always successfully, I grant you – is that men and women must put their pride to one side and admit mistakes. It is the opposite of the hierarchical cultures of business and the state, where status determines access to information, and criticism is met with punishment.

Nearly all of us work in hierarchies. Nearly all of us bite our tongues when we should speak freely. Yet few of the classic or modern texts on freedom of speech discuss freedom of speech at work, even though, as the crash of 2008 showed, self-censorship in the workplace can be as great a threat to national security as foreign enemies are.

On the Psychology of Financial Incompetence

‘The bullying is all I remember about him,’ said a former executive as he recalled how dictatorial folly had brought down the Royal Bank of Scotland, and helped to almost bring down the British economy with it. ‘He was just another angry guy.’

I could add that he was also a deluded, petty and ruthless man who terrified his subordinates, but the dismissive tone of ‘just another angry guy’ is better than a sackful of adjectives. When tyrants fall, and the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland was a tyrant of the workplace, people shake themselves as if snapping out of a dream, and wonder why they ever feared the reduced and ridiculous figure before them.

‘Fred the Shred’, or to give him his full title, Sir Frederick Anderson Goodwin, was born in 1958. His father was an electrician in Paisley, a suburb of Glasgow, who sent him to the local grammar school. Young Fred went on to Glasgow University, the first Goodwin from the family to receive higher education. He graduated, and began to work his way up the corporate ladder. He was not a fool. In 1991, as a young accountant, he helped wind up the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which had financed Saddam Hussein, the Medellín drug cartel and many another gangster and terrorist. He impressed his superiors by recovering money they thought had disappeared into crime families’ safe-deposit boxes for good.

Goodwin earned his nickname by shredding jobs after he moved from accounting to become a manager at the Clydesdale Bank. His determination to cut costs may not have impressed his junior colleagues, but it won him many admiring glances from institutional shareholders and directors. RBS made him its deputy CEO in 1998, and he took overall control shortly after it purchased the National Westminster Bank in 2000.

The takeover was a triumph for RBS, and you can understand why success inflated Goodwin’s pride. Despite the glories of Scottish culture, there is a strong sense of inferiority among the Scottish elite. However well careerists do in Edinburgh, they cannot escape the feeling that the prizes worth having in politics, business, the arts and the media are won on the big stage down south; that if they do not make it in London, their achievements will feel trifling. The battle for NatWest overturned English superiority. Edinburgh beat London. The men from the New Town outsmarted the men from Chelsea. NatWest managers had precedent and money on their side, and few gave the Scots a chance. RBS was one third of the size of its English rival. The deal RBS was offering was seven times the size of the previous biggest hostile takeover in the UK, and no hostile takeover of a major European bank had been successful before. City analysts assumed it would fail, but their scepticism could not stop RBS, whose dynamism and aggression saw it through.

Goodwin’s triumph was twofold. He believed that ‘naysayers’ ran the NatWest, cautious and to his mind lazy bankers, who turned down good lending opportunities and missed the seductive prospect of speculating in the derivatives market. Once in charge, he tore into the bank’s costs, slashing staff and merging departments, and ordered its remaining bankers to go out and find business. Profits ballooned, and Goodwin could say to himself that not only had he fought the City in a takeover battle and won, he had also gone on to show that the supposed super-stars of London finance had missed an opportunity for profit that had been staring them in the face.