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Dominic Raab’s right about case against him – but not in the way he means [1]
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Date: 2023-04
On the surface, there is something ironic about Dominic Raab losing his job because of bullying allegations. After all, bullying is what this government is all about.
Take any group that has been disempowered by society, and you’ll find Rishi Sunak’s boot stamping on its face. Whether it’s refugees, trans people, Travellers, benefits claimants, homeless people – we could be here a while – the Tories and their pals in the press have spent the last 13 years mobilising both society and the state against the vulnerable in order to entrench elite rule.
But the problem Raab has come up against is the first rule of Britain’s ruling class – which is that you should always be seen to look people in the eye, smile at them and shake their hand, even if you are also kneeing them in the groin. The harder you kick people, the more you have to charm. Talk softly, but invent a special device for crushing the testicles of those who cross you.
You might think, as Raab has said, that feminists are “now among the most obnoxious bigots,” or that “the typical user of a food bank is not someone who’s languishing in poverty, it’s someone who has a cash flow problem episodically”. But you have to be civil to those people if you meet them in person.
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British culture loves a bully, but they need to be of the smarmy, David Cameron sort, or the bumbling Boris Johnson sort, not the brazen Donald Trump sort.
Dominic Raab lost his job – temporarily, I suspect – because he was seen to forget this rule. Tory voters who will cheer as government ministers threaten to drown children in the Channel can’t abide the thought of a deputy prime minister who is rude to people’s faces.
What will happen next is a reframing of the whole affair. Raab’s resignation statement is less an apology and more a declaration of culture war. This isn’t about being polite in the way that Tory voters care about, he says. After all, as he is keen to point out, the report into his conduct concluded that he didn’t shout or swear at anyone. Instead, we’ll be told, it’s about wokery.
Raab would be right about this, in a strange sense. Bullying isn’t about whether or not you say please and thank you, or use rude words. It’s about whether you abuse your power over people. Those objecting to things they perceive as “woke” are objecting to those who stand up to abuses of power.
Despite the mythology of ruling class politeness, actual interpersonal bullying – rather than what you might call failures of etiquette – has been a central feature of the behind-closed-doors workings of the British government forever. As former House of Commons Clerk Jenny McCullough writes in openDemocracy today: “The culture of many public institutions still serves to normalise unacceptable behaviour and victimise workers who object to it.”
What’s changed is that Britain’s 19th century culture of deference has broken down over the last couple of decades. Where our grandparents had ideas of rank drilled into them, both from the mass-militarism of two world wars and the empire, and from the broader class system, the generations currently taking over aren’t arriving with all those assumptions.
Now that millennials, whose parents are less likely to have fought in a war or served in the colonies, are starting to get into senior jobs – including in the civil service – they (we) are less likely to put up with being mistreated by superiors than their (our) predecessors. The Me Too generation of women is, rightly, less likely to put up with workplace misogyny. Workers are, to some extent, less likely to just smile when faced with racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dominic-raab-resignation-bullying-adam-tooley-report/
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