My worst career nightmare? In 2012 at a health inequality forum of medical experts that I was leading and had designed, a famous professor stood up and said.
“This is rubbish. You are wasting our time”.
Except it wasn’t a nightmare. It was real. About eighty people, including a BBC recording crew who were covering the event, all leant forward to see how a totally humiliated man would die on stage. I had spent four years researching and designing the event and in the process completely reversed my world view on the merits of meritocracy and whether the poor are poor because the rich are rich. I now believed that is exactly why they are poor and I knew that social mobility in the UK had ground to a halt and that trickle down economics was a myth (it floods up) and inequality would bring the country down (as it might be doing with Brexit).
I had been through a transformational change, a complete 180 on who I am. I had previously given all the credit to myself for my career achievements. I had worked hard and taken risks. I deserved my superior rewards and status. I viewed people behind (beneath?) me as less talented and choosing not to try hard enough. I dismissed the diseases of low income as being self inflicted by “lifestyle” choices: smoking, alcohol, substance abuse, eating too much fat and sugar, not being active. This is the philosophy of meritocracy. But over time the evidence from scientific research stacked against me. I came to realise I should be thanking a lot of other people and luck for the part they played in helping me to my good fortune. I might have started from the back of the queue but I was Iucky to be born to a loving, working class family. Fate (luck) gave me the intelligence to pass an exam at age 11, which channelled me to a good school with great teachers who tolerated my shallow interest in studying, and got me the grades to sneak into university by the back door that opened up a well paid white collar career. By another stroke of good fortune I graduated into a recession and spent two years building my character working in the docks and a car factory. The evidence was clear. I could not resist the logic that told me I had been lucky. I wasn’t born into wealth and power, I had worked hard and taken risks but I was still lucky. It took me until my my fifties to see that the rules behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance that dished out my prizes, had been kind to me.
In the course of our research I read hundreds of health studies and journal articles and met the top medical experts, but the two most significant turning points in my conversion to a more enlightened self were 1) reading Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and Road to Wigan Pier and 2) visiting Washington DC in 2009 and seeing with my own eyes that the American Dream, that I had always admired, was dead. I had been “on the hill” when they cleared Congress for Obama to make his historic speech on health care. My daughter and I watched it in the backroom of a sports bar with the servers (who would benefit from it), while well paid young professionals who already had health insurance, watched the game in the main bar. Then on the Saturday we were witness to the Tea Party protest, when one million middle and working class Americans took the authorities by surprise in their march against “socialist” health care. We spoke to marchers. They weren’t right wing fascists. They came across as polite hard working, disillusioned Americans, like Richie Cunningham’s Mom and Pop, who had suffered a decade of losing jobs and incomes to offshoring, call centres and automation. They did not want their health insurance to go up to pay for migrants who were taking their jobs and undermining pay rates. It was a shock to hear their views, and a bigger shock to realise how the lucky winners of meritocracy, including people like myself, had neglected our duties, taken our winnings and not cared for the losers. They were not to blame for their circumstances or their frustration. We were. I was. I still am. This is a difficult thing to admit.
[Tea Party protestor who needs health care carries sign protesting against health care, Washington 2009)
The health inequality conference had all this baked into it. It was a role playing “wargame” with real policymakers and the public playing versions of themselves. The objective was to identify policies to close the eleven year gap in life expectancy between the poorest and richest income deciles. And now a professor, who I knew and liked and counted as a friend and colleague, was belittling me in the harsh glare of the conference and BBC. During the five year period when I ran strategic wargames my biggest nightmare was exactly this: an expert would stop the game and accuse me of running a con. For years, when I woke up from these nightmares I assured myself it would never happen. Our work was too good. But here I was frozen in horror, like the emperor who realised he has no clothes and I wasn’t waking up.
Although I can remember it as clearly as the moment it happened, my temporary meltdown was also captured in broadcast quality video. Everything was recorded on tv. I am one of a very small group who can watch a snuff movie of himself. The trouble when I watch the video is that it is not how I remember it. In my memory I calmly bide my time, letting him finish, collecting my thoughts and then pounce and silence him with a brilliant riposte, inserting my verbal stiletto straight in his argument to win an instant apology and the admiration of the audience. But on tape, I see a rabbit stuck in the headlights who slowly formulates a stumbling response, which gathers momentum and ends by politely asking for more time to allow less academic members of the conference to finish being briefed so they can make a contribution.
[Note: I had insisted citizens from the lowest income decile were there to make policy alongside the experts. My converted new self was asking: Why shouldn’t ordinary people have an opinion on policies to save their own lives? But that isn’t how it normally works. I had spent weeks coaching people who were not used to meetings in how to participate. In the first session we had to get them up to speed on the data for the scenario and this expert clearly felt it was going too slowly and we were teaching him to suck eggs].
Having heard my plea, he grudgingly conceded and at the end of the second day he apologised fully and properly and congratulated us in front of the same audience for joining the people who had been neglected with the experts to design practical health policies to help close the gap. He was man enough to admit that having real poor people in the room when policy was formulated had added something special. For a start it completely humanised it. Not only did they contribute knowledge of their lives that could only be known through experience, the experts changed the terms that they used to describe people and their environment. They used their names. You can’t call someone socioeconomic group E if they are sitting next to you. They even developed friendships over the two days, with people they would otherwise never socialise with or discuss matters with as equals.
But in that instant when he called it rubbish the video proves I was clinically, mentally dead. Frozen by doubt and humiliation. I was 56, and for a couple of minutes all my lifetime fears about being chucked out of the graduate middle class intelligentsia and being exposed as a fraud had materialised.
Of course it was an irrational fear. After the event a different even more famous professor, Tom Kirkwood, a BBC Reith lecturer, asked me to write a report for him take to a meeting with the health minister the next day. I stayed up all night to finish it. It was a success. Not bad for a bloke with no GCSEs in Maths or Sciences, but the thing I still remember, that I still have nightmares about, is standing alone on stage being told my work was crap. Do I subconsciously wish I had punched his lights out? No. I liked him. We had got on really well until that moment. He was just being a normal academic at a conference. That is how they behave.
I accept the risk as anyone does who puts themselves on a stage (pedestal). If you want to enjoy the applause you must accept the risk. My biggest fear was not confrontation, I can handle that, but being called a thick and stupid working class idiot (which is how it felt). It’s that English class thing. At the grand old age of 56 I had finally faced it in public. I won, but it still haunts me. I am an FRSA, a fellow of two Russell group universities, an Oxford postgrad, a moderately successful business person, but I know I will never get that monkey off my back and, I don’t want to. I don’t want to be like them. When the skiers, yachters, BMW drivers and wine drinkers lost Brexit I was glad. Payback. I don’t want to be a smug, rich, self entitled, middle class meritocrat. Along with millions of working class voters I voted Brexit to send a distress signal to this class. What a complicated mindset I have. I am pleased my children are not burdened like this. In fact when I get obvious pleasure from putting down a pompous, well spoken middle class person, they remind me that they can’t know what it’s like to be working class. They sometimes feel I am fighting against people like them and their friends. Ugh! I really can’t win.
Anyway, that was my worst nightmare. I have never listened to the BBC coverage of that event. I have tried but as soon as I hear my voice I turn it off. Here it is. I am told it’s not too bad. They kindly did not include my “emperor’s new clothes” trauma.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03k2k7y
