On Leadership

I've been thinking about leadership a bit recently, what makes good political leaders and how bad ones can derail or undermine a group, a party or even an entire movement.  

 

All the things that affect leadership are magnified when the group or organisation is operating in a hostile environment, and as we are living in increasingly fraught times, I thought I'd write a list of what I see as some key principles of good political leadership - in no particular order of importance. 

 

1. Know the difference between autocratic action and strong leadership; the latter is good, the former is not. Autocratic leadership and an undemocratic structure can work well in organisations which, for example, are formed to respond quickly to a political issue but seldom last the course and are doomed to fail if the organisation tries to move beyond single issue campaigning into a wider political arena.

 

2. Know your people. Some people will embrace even bad leadership because they feel secure when being led; some will happily accept good leadership but resent and reject bad leaders; and some will baulk at any leadership, even if it's the best possible.

 

3. Identify your loose cannons; if they can't be well-anchored, make sure they're not loaded or their fuse can't be lit, or better still, pitch them overboard.  At the very least, have some sort of contingency plan to deal with the casualties from the recoil.

 

4. If you are dealing with drama queens, either within or outside of the organisation, do not provide them with a stage or write scripts for them. Do not make the mistake that their theatrics can be harnessed and utilised.

 

5. If you have loose cannons who are also drama queens - best to part company as quickly and amicably as possible.

 

6. Find ways to encourage and enable people to contribute. Not everyone will feel confident enough to push forward and, by mistaking this for a lack of interest, ability or commitment, you may be missing out on talents and experience that will benefit the organisation.

 

7. Ensure there is a clear distinction between governance and management ie be clear about who takes the decisions in principle and who carries them out, ie do not fall into the trap of thinking that not only are you best placed and qualified to take decisions, but you are also best placed and qualified to carry them out. That way lies burn-out for you and resentment from others.

 

8. Ensure decisions are properly recorded and the record is readily available to those who are expected to carry them out and/or are affected by them. Transparency, like sunlight, is almost always beneficial. Shade or opacity may be essential at times but too much inhibits growth.

 

9. Have clear financial rules including providing accurate information on finances to those who have a vested interest, such as donors and members;  even if you are structured in a way that does not legally require this, it is an ethical requirement and avoids misunderstandings.

 

10. Try to avoid wasting people's time by making promises that you cannot keep or have no intention of keeping, as this will breed resentment - and it is not a matter of if there will be resentment, but how much and how intractable it is.

 

11. Avoid being seen as applying double standards eg demanding unconditional support from members for a political principle, eg unfettered free speech, and then acting in ways which deny that principle within the organisation. This double standard may go unnoticed by some of those you lead, but will result in feelings of anger and resentment in others.

 

12. Have lines of communication that allow any misunderstandings or resentments that do occur to be explored and resolved - ie proceed from the understanding that closing down debate may serve to allow misunderstandings and resentments to fester and find another avenue for expression.

 

13. Behave towards others as you'd like and expect them to behave towards you, ie if you dislike your political opponents attacking you with hyperbole and emotion-laden rhetoric, don't deploy that yourself.

 

14. And finally - and platitudinally - set the leadership bar high and consistently aim to clear it.

 

Living in Deficit

This is a guest post by Roy Myers

Poverty is spoken about as if it is a one-dimensional problem - the absence of money. However, the reality is that it is a corrosive condition that affects all aspects of a person’s life.

Being poor is not just having no liquidity, most often it means being in debt - owing money - and therefore not just having no cash, but having a deficit, and a what is more, a deficit that is always compounding.

This means that the poor are always running flat out with no hope of ever catching up; they have no safety net to deal with emergencies, like new tyres for the car, new shoes for the children, dentist and medical expenses.

It means living from hand to mouth, except frequently the hand can’t reach the mouth because it is often food that is sacrificed to meet the cost of housing, power and heating.

When buying food, the poor are driven to the apparently cheapest, which may be poor quality at disadvantageous prices because, of necessity, they buy in small, uneconomic quantities. 

This scenario continues into the purchase of other items. Having little money forces one to buy the cheapest, lowest quality item with the lowest life expectancy.

The corollary of living at a subsistence level is that there is no slack for recreation, sport, hobbies and holidays  -all of which adds to the other stresses of having no money.

Whilst poverty originates in, and reveals itself at the economic level, it is a corrosive social state which creates anxiety in individuals and strains relationships. It is economic rust, eating away at the social fabric. 

The problem for the poor is that there is no easy way out. It is a state of powerlessness often exacerbated by dependency on handouts and the conditions attached to them.

Poverty has an extreme effect on children. They may be malnourished, carry some of the tensions of their home and may feel inferior to their peers who have more than them. These factors affect their ability to learn and potentially inhibits their future prospects and, in this way, poverty reproduces itself.

Poverty is not good for society as a whole as, ultimately, the problems of poverty are borne more widely, whether they are economic, social, health or education related. Very obviously poverty is also both created and exacerbated by other social ills, most notably racism.

So why is there poverty in a prosperous society? Why are some people struggling whilst others have more wealth than they know what to do with? 

Wait a minute, is there a connection here? Are the wealthy rich at the expense of the poor?

• Who pays people wages they can’t live on?
• Who charges rents that people cannot afford without making other sacrifices?
• Who sells inferior food and goods to the poor?
• Who lends money at exorbitant interest rates to the poor?

In a mechanical analysis there seems to be a symbiosis in which the rich get rich and the poor get poorer.  At the level of loan sharks and food trucks the relationship is obvious but in wider society the connections are less direct and more easily obscured.

So, what are the strategic points of intervention for a society wishing to eradicate poverty?

Firstly, working people need to be paid enough to live on. Personally, I am in favour of a universal basic wage but the onus to pay a wage that people can actually live on, must rest with employers.

The poor are also taxed disproportionately to the better off. There should be tax free allowances to account for an individual’s circumstances and there should be no GST on basic foodstuffs or on local government rates, which is a tax on a tax that is passed onto tenants in increased rents.

Secondly, housing generally is too expensive and for many people, buying is simply not an option. Much of the housing stock is of poor quality which results in adverse effects on health and well-being, higher running costs, and there is no security of tenure, which is a huge stressor.

The answer is a significant development of social housing to provide reasonably priced, comfortable accommodation, which is economic to run. This would also take pressure off the housing market.

And thirdly, primary medical care and dentistry need to be reviewed in terms of cost and accessibility. In part this requires an overhaul of the entire edifice including the over-reliance on pharmacological responses within a symptomatic paradigm. Frankly, a lot of chronic medical issues currently treated with drugs would be resolved by an improved wider quality of life. 

An open letter to all those who helped construct and erect the trans umbrella

Dear Peepx,

Some of you are remarkable people and you’ve had an astonishing journey – personally, politically, and professionally. 

I hope those of you who were an effeminate gay men or a butch lesbian before transitioning, acknowledge how much harder it would have been as an effeminate gay man or butch lesbian, to have done what you’ve done and to be recognised and rewarded by the establishment.

I can only imagine how it must feel for someone who started out as working class and lesbian, to be decked out in a grey morning suit and top hat – that male uniform required when receiving a gong from the very heart of the male dominated establishment.

And how do all those other transsexual pioneers feel now, as they see the political and theoretical umbrella they helped create to provide much needed shelter for others like themselves, and which they helped force open against a weight of considerable prejudice, being expanded to cover such a wide range of people, that folk like themselves – transsexuals – have been pushed out to the margins or forced to submit to the tyranny of an eclectic bunch of self-declared transgender activists, the interests of some of whom may well be completely antithetical to theirs? 

Some of these newcomers are very obviously highly transgressive fetishists looking to bring their kink – into the mainstream. Their motivation is to make it easier to connect with the like-minded, and – for this is the nature of many highly transgressive kinks – to make it easier to gain access to those upon whom their kink is focused and enacted.

You trans pioneers know, or should do, that those who are the focus of fetishes and upon whom fetishes are enacted, are often highly vulnerable in terms of age, sex, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, ethnicity, psychological health etc.

You do not have to be a rightwing religious fundamentalist to be concerned about parafilias, which have children and very young people as their focus, apparently attempting to claim legitimacy once again. I say apparently because who knows what is genuine and what is not in the digital era?

It is highly likely that among those who, in the 1970s, used gay liberation as a vehicle to promote the idea of ‘child love’ and who wanted to reduce the age of consent back to 13 or even as young as 4 – were malign forces that sought to strengthen homophobia, by casting the shadow of child sexual abuser over gay men.  Perhaps those malign forces are still there in the links some people are now drawing between the transgender movement and attempts to normalise and ultimately to legalise, paedophilia and hebephilia.

But you all know, or should do, that it is not just shadows created by malign external forces that want to promote homophobia and transphobia – a political shadow is also being cast by some of the people who are standing alongside you under the ever-widening trans umbrella, and whose place there you continue to support.

There are a lot of transsexuals and gay men who are worried about this, some of whom have been strong enough and brave enough to speak out in support of those who are called TERFs – amongst whom are the many radical feminists and lesbians who were the first to put their heads above the political parapet.

The links that have been made between paedophilia and male homosexuality are ideological and malign, and the same applies to transsexuals and the threat they pose to women, but the problem with the vastly increased numbers now gathered under the Trans Umbrella is that it’s much harder to know where genuine and good stops and bogus and bad begins, and we are not allowed to ask, and we can thank you for that, can’t we?

That’s the thing; you build a political movement and that movement catches a wave – sometimes a wave which is naturally formed, and sometimes artificially generated –  and it moves with a power and speed that is exhilarating and those riding it are propelled from the margins to the mainstream – politically, academically, economically.

I imagine that riding such a wave is a buzz like no other. I have to imagine it because I’ve never experienced it given every political movement I’ve been closely aligned with remains more likely to be torpedoed and sunk out at sea – ironically, by the some of the same people who now appear to support the trans movement.  So surfing the wave of mainstream populism is an unknown for me, but I imagine it’s a buzz – like any other sort of power trip.

The trouble with big waves comes when they break. The ones that are the most destructive are those which break onto steep, rocky shores – and the sex/gender shoreline is among the most treacherous and rocky of them all.

Forgive the somewhat tortuous marine analogy – but surely, you and all those other comfortably ensconced members of the coordinator class who are surfing the trans wave, must know its destructive potential. 

Some of you will survive; you’ll back off before the wave breaks and maybe even find another wave – but many of those caught by it won't survive, especially those whose genuine economic and social marginalisation the trans members of the boss and the coordinator classes have used to pull in easily persuaded allies from among liberals and the left. 

When someone tweets that TERFs will be “hushed” because there are lots of trans judges, police officers, social workers, etc etc - it sums up the dilemma between, on the one hand, claiming to have real power and significant numbers, and on the other, all those highly weaponised claims of being the locus of the most extreme marginalisation. You know, the sort of claims that lead the politically infantile to assert that  "trans rights are the pre-eminent human rights issue of our era". 

What that hushing the TERFs tweet may point to, but no one is allowed to speak about, is there may well be a large number of men in positions of power who have fetishes and kinks which make them disposed towards taking actions to try to keep the trans umbrella fully erect.

That might be a voluntary assistance, or made in anticipation of coercion, or even actively coerced. Let’s say you’re a high-ranking politician or public servant and you have a kink, which, if known, would make your role difficult or even untenable. You might well be minded to act in ways that help normalise it.

There’s a lot of stuff that's gone on: from the risible – eg. a rubber fetishist filming himself wanking in the staff loos at a children’s charity and posting it online; the sinister – eg David Challenor’s rape and torture fetish enacted upon a ten year-old girl; and the positively surreal – eg the Yaniv Affair which lurched crazily from farce to noir and back again.

This is the sort of stuff the gutter press usually feeds on and yet it's unusually quiet – contrary to the claims of trans activists who insist the media is heavy with transphobic rhetoric.

The Yaniv Affair would have remained on the social media gender debate margins if Ricky Gervais had not tweeted in classic Gervaisian fashion about the absurdity of a male-bodied menstruation fetishist suing sole operator, ethnic minority female beauticians for gender discrimination for refusing to perform a scrotum wax. 

Many of those who doggedly defended Yaniv ignored the sex, class, and race dimensions of the multiple discrimination claims, thereby granting a self identified trans woman’s rights primacy over the rights of the working-class women of colour who were being sued. 

Feminists were highlighting Yaniv’s behaviour for months and were attacked and punished for being transphobic. How was that weirdness not apparent to Yaniv’s supporters, months earlier? Why were otherwise sensible, politically astute people congratulating Yaniv on a “brave transition” at a point where there was ample on-line evidence of a menstruation fetish focused on young girls?

You do not – or at least I really hope you don’t – want to see the normalisation of the sort of extreme kinks which some transgressives want to see made legal and normalised – like sex with children, or sadistic sex where the concept of consent is reduced to a sick joke, or extreme porn, or the abuse of animals.

But this is the point isn’t it?  It’s no longer just about folk like yourself – the worthy, the well meaning, the genuine trans people  – it’s increasingly about the extreme fetishists, the vexatious and the malign who have pushed their way in under your umbrella – that umbrella you needed to expand in order to give you power and political clout – and over which you no longer seem to have control.