nourishing obscurity

What can be done about this sort of mentality?

A Cambridge shopping arcade has apologised to an 84-year-old woman told to lower the hood of her anorak because it breached a “no hood policy”. Managers at Grand Arcade said sorry for “any stress” Peggy Harden, who walks with a stick, may have suffered when chastised by a security guard.

The shopping centre said it operated a “no hood policy” to “ensure a safe and enjoyable shopping experience. We are reviewing our policy to ensure the safety and well being of all our customers.”

The policy first of all – OK, fine, one can see the connection between hoods and ASBOs and it’s the same argument as that of banning the burqua. Given that terrorists in Britain tend to come, on the whole, from either that ethnic group or from the Irish, except for 7/7 which had collusion from the authorities, given that the violence and theft tends to come from male ASBOs, aided and abetted by whatever the female of the species is called, then there is a case, in a shopping centre, for being suspicious of identity hidden people.

Before you jump onto this, it’s not unlike three hooded people walking into a bank. A certain consternation is going to ensue. So, in a rational, round table discussion on the issue, this would be the management’s position. It’s nothing to do with “ensuring a safer shopping experience”, of course – it’s to protect the vendors and has sfa to do with the wellbeing of you or me.

However, let’s let this pass. The problem, essentially, is one of no discretion. This guard, in his mindless zealousness, could not distinguish between an 84 year old woman and a young ASBO. He couldn’t discern that from her gait, her walking stick, the pace at which she was moving, her husband beside her with his aged head – he couldn’t use any discretion because:

1. He’s as thick as pigs— and/or

2. He is allowed no discretion by management who adore making blanket rules with no exceptions, such blanket laws being knee-jerk reactions against horses which have already bolted, e.g. the CRB checks following the Soham murders, checks which do zero to stop paedophilic killers and/or

3. It’s Them again. It’s the whole culture of one size fits all and “best not take the chance”, the Elfansafetee madness gripping the country.

A security guard with a job is better, in his eyes, than a secuytity guard no longer with a job and so the manic application of laws proceeds apace. Management says jump and the security guard asks, “How high?”

But it’s more than that – it’s that management employed such a person with no discretion in the first place. It’s the desire for management up and down Britain to actually have automaton cogs in a smoothly working machine which will earn them Brownie points when it comes to the chief exec moving on to a similar position later elsewhere.

It has zero to do with a “safer and more enjoyable shopping experience”. What should happen and won’t is for the names of the managers who implemented this to be published and for this decision to hassle the 84 year old woman to go on their records for future employment.

What should happen is that the voices of the managers themselves should be heard as to who was pressurizing them to make these rules. Did it come from the local council? Who in the local council and of which party? Who told those people that there needed to be this sort of application of the rules?

Then we need to go back even further to who in the party was issuing these directives in the first place and then to compare the original directive to the practical result of it, i.e. the harassment of the OAP. Then a systemic analysis needs to be carried out and instead of a 500 page report at taxpayer’s expense, the reforms can be passed along the line, the madness excised from customer interface and an enjoyable shopping experience can be assured by managers and employees keeping the F out of customers’ time in the building.

It is also a good chance to finger the people in this society who have allowed this PC, one-size-fits-all mentality to proliferate, to find who has readily acquiesced to it and who has been pushing it for two decades.

Just how we, the ordinary section of the people, can achieve this is a moot point. I would have said elect the Tories but Cameron is the problem there – he is no more than a Blair clone and has aligned the Tories with pro-EU mindlessness, rather than establishing clear water and making the party electable.

Socialism

Socialism is three different things at three different levels.

1.  At the most corrosive level, it is Them, the global socialists like the Morgans and the communists who are, in fact, oligarchic in nature and see themselves, naturally, at the top of the heap, the elite, followed by the wannabee hangers-on and aspirants, followed by us, the plebs, increasingly filled by the former middle-class who have been fleeced of their wealth and turned into paupers.

2.  At the mid-management level, up and down the country, it is PC feminists and Marxists in the teaching profession through to Common Purpose graduates [and did you see the Common Purpose website shut down by these faceless people yesterday?] and people with similar hive mentality and Groupthink in key roles, at mid to low level, in government and semi-governmental instrumentalities, along with the grant and tax break seeking, free from investigation, compliant private sector.

3.  At the most worrying level, it is a generation of new graduates, people occupying the jobs in the nation who see this sort of thing as normal – the hive mentality, very top-down, in sharp contrast to its stated egalitarian, inclusive, tolerant and feelgood stated non-hierarchy.  It’s totalitarian indifference coated in a pill of niceness to everyone – a sort of Stepford Wives “How may I help you?”  Unthinking, unquestioning.

Its told from on top that any signs of freethinking, any signs of disagreement with, any signs of people escaping from this imprisoning “niceness” is the work of dissenters, of people rocking the boat and bureaucratic administrators abhor nothing more than people not going along with their unsustainable constructs.

In the socialist panacea, everyone is to be happily feeding off the teats of the nanny state and no one, no one, is to rock the boat.  I went for a job and one of the questions was about someone who wished an exception to be made to the rules.  Blind Freddy could have seen which answer was going to get me the job:

1.  Contact your supervising officer to see if an exception can be made in this case;

2.  Use your own judgment on a case by case basis;

3.  No exceptions are to be made but a note is to be logged as to the nature of the request and the customers’ details entered.

I’ll leave you to guess which variant I chose.

Filed under: Society & human issues