MARKETS or MEERKATS?

I want to know what The Markets really are. I want to know because the news has been telling us how important The Markets are all week. Apparently, we need above all to entrust our livelihoods and governments to The Markets.

This raises an important question. Should humans really decide the shape and qualities of the world of the future with their brains or by responding mechanically to what The Markets tell them is required tomorrow?

In this momentous week we have seen the democratically elected leader of Greece replaced by an unelected individual of whom the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and The Markets approved. We know what the IMF and the ECB look like. But we do not have the slightest idea who or what The Markets actually are.

 We do know, however, that The Markets liked it when Lucas Papademos was sworn in as Prime Minister in Greece.  The Markets liked it when it became clear that Silvio Berlusconi  would have to resign and that he would probably be replaced by Mario Monti.

The Markets are now in power, and allowed to tell The Greeks and The Italians who should govern them. Now I don’t have a  problem with Papademos. He is clearly a sensible man as well as a banker. It is even more obvious that almost anybody would deserve greater respect as a leader than ‘Burlesquoni’. But I do not think that we have yet understood that there has been a terrifying takeover of the democratic system by a race of aliens about whom we know practically nothing.

Do Markets look, for example, a bit like Meerkats? Or are they actually Meerkats? Perhaps their name reflects a simple phonetic shift whereby ‘a’ and ‘e’ become inverted. Perhaps they are Meerkats who live in houses inside real markets with marble fish slabs and fruit baskets. Or perhaps they are new breed of Meerkats who live in stock exchanges and eat crazy graphs with squiggles on showing ten-year bond yields.

Either way, we need to know. The Meerkat/Markets clearly want to run the world, and have just picked on the two countries which gave us Classics because they have a nasty sense of humour.

Or is it that they have been listening to the Senior Management Team at Royal Holloway? 

The Markets, like Paul Layzell and his team, think that the future of universities should be dictated by supply and demand on a short-term basis. 

In Classics at Royal Holloway, we are now told that although there will be fewer redundancies and none until 2014, they might still happen if ‘The Market’ for undergraduate degrees in Classics shifts downward. We scholars can’t ever try to design long-term research or teaching policies, because The Markets might suddenly remove vital colleagues or fail to replace them altogether.

Hiring and firing academics depending solely on the current ‘Markets’ is a not a completely new idea. But it is one that has always been resisted in cultured communities. This is because it means that crucial decisions about the sort of intellectual environment people want to live in are taken not by humans but by the new race of power-crazed Markets who are trying to take over the world.

Nero in the East End

When the clocks have changed, darkness falls early, and Management still proposes to hold the threat of redundancy over the heads of four of my colleagues more or less indefinitely, it is time to go AWOL and treat myself to a little recreation. 

Last Thursday I went with an expert in French theatre to the matinee of Racine’s Britannicus at Wilton’s Music Hall in the East End of London. 

I have a rule, derived from experience, that nine out of ten visits to the theatre end in disappointment, and I am no great fan of the French Baroque Bard. But this was one of the best performances I have seen in the 21^st century. The play, in a supple and eloquent new translation by Timberlake Wertenbaker, made complete, compelling sense.

The plot of Britannicus is incredibly simple. It stages the day in 55 AD when Nero finally killed his half-brother Britannicus off so he could secure his own hold on power. 

There is a complication to do with their competition for the lovely (and more importantly, virtuous) Junia; Racine’s demonstration of the way that power turns people on libidinally is wholly uncompromising. It reminded me forcibly of the one event I have ever attended in Parliament, a reception long ago where Cabinet ministers were encircled by rival assistants of both sexes, all dressed to kill, and trying to dominate the great men’s attention. You could literally smell the testosterone. 

But that is not my main point. The play is an ensemble piece which anatomises the way that the second tier of management behaves when a leader is not immoral but amoral. His aides and confidantes fight, sometimes to the death, for control over his psyche. They compete with each other in depravity, causing extensive collateral damage.

The sociopathic, heartless young Nero was played brilliantly by Matthew Needham—an excellent young actor we are bound to hear more of—and I found myself understanding that the problem with tyranny is not actually the tyrant. It is the relationship between the tyrant and his aides. Unless the tyrant takes the pragmatic, paranoid route and regularly purges his entire staff (Stalin), there will always be individuals trying to exercise power through gaining the monopoly of control over his psyche and emotions.

In this case it is Nero’s mother Agrippina, his tutor Burrhus, and Narcissus, the sinister, suave two-faced tutor of Nero’s half-brother Britannicus. Narcissus is the ultimate opportunist, a cynical man on the make (he is a freedman) who rises to near the top of the pile not because of any inherent abilities but because of the power vacuum just beneath—or beside—a great dictator. 

This production skilfully sustained the triangular power struggle that can only be fought through psychological pressure on an out-of-control and emotionally dysfunctional youth incapable of empathy. Sian Thomas, as Nero’s staggeringly self-obsessed mother, was frighteningly believable. I will long remember her purring voice telling Nero to come and sit beside her so she could get to work on ingratiating herself back into his favour. There was plenty of very dark humour.

Britannicus is a play which shows how ancient history could make exciting theatre in 1669, a year when the French King Louis XIV limited freedom of religion and had a Protestant named Roux de Marsilly, accused of plotting an attempt at regicide, publicly tortured in Paris. 

But its exploration of the way that tyrannical power inevitably breeds a secondary class of people with ambitions to wield power themselves will always be relevant. The production is still open for another two weeks. Go see it if you can. You will never see another Nero and Agrippina like it.

Parallel Crises

I had intended to write this week’s blog on the remarkable upturn in the study of ancient Greek and Roman history in Australia’s secondary schools, where it is now more popular than Modern History, but try as I may to get away from industrial conflict, it seems to be following me around. 

On Friday night in Sydney my children and I got onto our Qantas flight to London. It turned out to be one of the very last Qantas flights to leave Australia before the entire domestic and international fleet of this old, prestigious, much-loved airline was grounded by its own Chief Executive, Alan Joyce. 

Alan Joyce

This is an extraordinary step for an airline boss to take—in Joyce’s own words, ‘an unbelievable decision’.   

The Australian prime Minister stepped in and referred the matter to an emergency session of Australia’s industrial tribunal, which has now ruled that the unions and management should  return to the negotiating table and come to an agreement within 21 days or face binding arbitration.

Joyce put at risk thousands of passengers and jobs, the future of the airline, and even the national economy of Australia. His strategy was designed to make the unions of airline workers come to heel and agree to stop all industrial action straightaway. He did not want to negotiate with them but to force them back to work on his dictatorial terms. 

The fact that he grounded the fleet just one day after raising his own salary by a massive 71 percent to five million Australian dollars p.a. shows that he is not a tactful man, but we shall have to wait and see whether this is the worst that can be said about him. It is not clear that his company can ever recover from his divisive and high-handed tactics.  He has damaged the relationships between management and workers profoundly.

While Qantas employees and all Australia wait to see whether Joyce’s company can recover from behaviour which Captain Richard Woodward, vice-president of the Australian and International Pilots Association, has described as ‘megalomaniacal,’ the situation at Royal Holloway remains critical. 

Paul Layzell

The first formal ‘consultation’ between the Classics Department staff and members of the Senior Management Team takes place tomorrow morning at Egham, inauspiciously on Halloween; there are still three weeks until the next meeting of College Council. 

But while on the other side of the world Alan Joyce refused to continue talking to his own workers, at Royal Holloway the Chair of our Union (the University and College Union) Bruce Baker, has just this morning felt forced to resign. 

Baker writes ominously to UCU members that he does not ‘believe that the Senior Management Team has now, or has ever had in the time I have been at Royal Holloway, any genuine interest in establishing constructive relations with the UCU or acknowledging that employees, including academic staff, should have a collective role in determining the conditions under which they labour.’  

The ancient Greek biographer Plutarch liked to write history in terms of parallel biographies comparing Greek and Roman individuals whose careers shared similar features. The Athenian general Nicias was compared with the Roman Crassus, for example, because the former was responsible for the Sicilian disaster and the latter for the Parthian disaster. 

Perhaps the 21^st-century equivalent would be the Parallel Disasters brought on worker-management relationships in old and prestigious British and Australian organisations.

On Missing the Point

After more than three and half months of flat-out campaigning against the proposals of the Managers of my college to decimate my department, I left Britain with a sigh of relief, assuming that I could enjoy two weeks’ of freedom from conflict between those in power and those they claim to manage.

But just outside the apartment in Melbourne where I have been staying, teams of mounted policemen used what certainly went far beyond reasonable force to evict a peaceful set of protestors from the city centre. The soundscape which I experienced began with singing of Aboriginal and protest songs but ended in sirens and screaming.



Lucidly written leaflets explained that the protest was primarily against the mining of uranium by BHP Billiton, the largest mining company in the world, in a very specific location. It is on land sacred to indigenous Australians at the Olympic Dam works North-West of Adelaide.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I watched Australian television and read Australian newspapers, to read that the trouble with the ‘Occupy Melbourne’ initiative by the protestors was that it had no specific goal, only a vaguely articulated sense that capitalism was not a good system.

That was not what I heard the protestors saying. The press missed the point they were trying to make entirely, and also seemed unwilling to entertain the possibility that the police force’s violent eviction of the demonstrators might have just a little to do with the imminent visit of Queen Elizabeth II.

Obscuring the point that people who disagree with you are making is one of the most effective weapons in the artillery cupboard of the powerful. When I embarked an Airbus for Australia a week ago, I had not yet recovered from my astonishment that the press was giving more column inches to the question of whether Liam Fox is gay, and to the alleged use of public money to subsidise his best friend’s accommodation in hotels, than to the scandalous fact that an unelected representative of wholly biased political and business interest groups was regularly allowed to interfere in British defence policy. Yet this staggering corruption was scarcely discussed the day that Dr Fox resigned.

On a miniature level, the same tactic of obscurantism has characterised the entire attempt of the Senior Management Team at Royal Holloway to discredit the teaching and research activities of its own experts in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds since the end of June this year.

Huge efforts and the assiduous work of well-paid Directors of Communication has gone into obscuring the obvious point that nobody can know whether students will want to take degrees costing nine thousand pounds in any particular academic department until there is any evidence to consider.

If this basic point is missed, then heads of universities can close or decimate any department they like on the strength of ideological grudge disguised as speculation.

BHP want to mine uranium on Aboriginal land. Adam Werritty has not been elected and doesn’t represent British citizens. Classics at Royal Holloway had record applications this year. Are these points clear enough?

On Leadership

Xenophon

On June 28^th, my colleagues in Classics & Philosophy as well as our Union representatives were abruptly told that our leaders were about to put proposals before  Council that would emasculate the teaching of ancient Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway and make half its Classicists redundant. 

This means that for the first time in my life, I now have direct personal experience of a work community suffering from the drastic loss of morale which highhanded management creates.   

Our new professional Managers had of course failed to consult with us or our representatives ‘when proposals were still at a formative stage’, to quote the ACAS guidelines relevant to this type of situation. 

But our Managers’  failure to talk to their own people at an appropriately early stage and in an appropriately respectful manner is not just a violation of modern employment protocols. It also happens to be exactly the same mistake made by every single incompetent leader in ancient Greek literature, and there are quite a few of them. 

In fact, most of the greatest Classics focus precisely on the connection between the style of an individual leader and the success or failure of the community he leads.  In the Iliad, it is Agamemnon’s demoralising insults to the most able members of his team, precipitate decisions, personal greed and intellectual shortcomings that make such a pig’s breakfast of the siege of Troy.   

In insulting the time-honoured local traditions represented by Chryses, disparaging his crack warrior Achilles, exuding negativity, taking more than his fair share of booty and privileges, and miscalculating the tenor and content of his speeches to the army, Agamemnon manages to delay the fall of Troy considerably, damage many relationships, dispel trust, and incur many more fatalities. 

In Sophocles’ Antigone, civic collapse is caused by Creon’s highhanded edicts, intimidating tactics and failure to listen to his citizens, when he has no previous experience of being the Chief Executive and has only just taken up the reins of power in Thebes.  

On the other hand, in Xenophon’s Anabasis, we are presented with an inspiring picture of the sort of leader who knows that morale is everything. The Greeks are stranded, in lethal danger, in Mesopotamia. They face material hardship, hostile tribes, and a Persian King with a deep grudge against them as well as an enormous army. 

But Xenophon, the Athenian captain freely elected by the men who do the work, is aware of the importance of group solidarity, freedom of speech, and especially of proving that he does not regard himself as any more important or deserving than the ordinary soldiers. The morale he fosters in due course enables the Greeks to escape, despite numerous obstacles and hazards, to home and safety. 

We could do with a little more Xenophon and a little less Agamemnon and Creon in Egham right now.