Buerocracy

u u u u u u u u

AND MORE.....

BORN INTO BUREAUCRACY

TAX COLLECTORS

GOGOLS BUREAUCRATIC NIGHTMARE

CENTRAL PROCUREMENT DIRECTORATE

THE CENSUS

MERDE LEVEL EDUCATION

BUREAUCRACY IS GOOD

BUREAUCRATIC LANGUAGE

INSIDE

Bureaucracy

the vacuum

the vacuum

BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

DOES NORTHERN IRELAND HAVE THE WORLD'S MOST BLOATED CIVIL SERVICE? by colin graham The Northern Ireland Civil Service is an anomaly. Established with Partition it continues to exist as an entirely separate entity from the United Kingdom Civil Service, though its procedures and structures shadow the UK Civil Service.

Like the UK Civil Service, the NICS has come in for criticism for its size and sleepiness. Historically it has been a horror to free-marketers and rollers-back of the state that such a small population can be so economically dependent on an unwieldy state-employed workforce – though during the Troubles keeping people in state employment may have been thought to be better than having them on the dole. It’s only two sides of one desk, after all. Even so, it is still an occasional abhorrence to the British establishment that Northern Ireland supports what Lord Smith of Clifton (formerly Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ulster) called a Civil Service that is ‘bloated, unwieldly and not fit for purpose’, and ‘more collectivist than Stalinist Russia, more corporatist than Mussolini’s Italy and more quangoised than the Britain of two Harolds’ – making it historically quite important.

Given that George Bain, formerly Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s, was charged with looking at the relocation of civil servants away from Belfast to create a ‘better economic balance’ in Northern Ireland, it would seem that these distinguished former public servants (of a type) weren’t impressed with what they saw in Northern Ireland during their time in charge of the two universities.

So, to temporarily adopt the weird anti-obesity language of reform, is the Civil Service in Northern Ireland ‘bloated’? That depends a bit on what you think the Civil Service is. If we stick strictly to those working in the NICS then about 34,000 people are employed, out of a population of 1.7 million. That’s one in fifty. In Scotland there are 50,000 civil servants for a population of 5 million. So, one in one hundred in Scotland. Which would suggest that Northern Ireland is either twice or half as well administered as Scotland. But add in local government and quangos and both Northern Ireland and Scotland have about 12% of the population in public employment – or in the case of Northern Ireland, 32% of the workforce. The Republic of Ireland has around 21% of its workforce employed in some form by the state.

Northern Ireland has a large public sector, and within that a large Civil Service. But they do a good job. Or, at least, they serve an important function, which isn’t necessarily the day-to-day work. The real reason to treasure the Civil Service in Northern Ireland is that the Civil Service administers Northern Ireland slowly, at a speed understood by Northern Ireland. Since the first version of devolution there has been much kerfuffle about reform of the NICS. This ‘Reform of Public Administration’ has been based on an anti-bloating principle – proposals include reducing the number of councils from 26 to 11 and halving the number of quangos. Goldblatt-McGuigan carried out research for the Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister in 2006 and suggested that, in order to get Reform the phrase ‘no pain, no gain’ had to be put prominently in every office used by a civil servant – not quite true, but they did use the phrase in

their report. The solution to hideous, disfiguring bloatedness is to be a public sector fitness regime, in which strategic managers fantasise about themselves as Hollywood personal trainers.

The Civil Service is not for rolling over though. But neither is it for fighting openly with its new masters. The strategy is much more subtle – take this new, goal-achieving, client-centered language and use it to your advantage. When the DUP went into powersharing with Sinn Féin in 2007 the poor Civil Service had to gird its loins, having had a reprieve on reform while the previous administration thrashed around. But this time it was ready. Arlene Foster went to the Assembly with a statement about the Reform programme which ended, quite seriously, by quoting Winston Churchill (‘… the end of the beginning’). One might be tempted to think that was Ms Foster’s bit of the speech and she must have been a bit anxious about if she was comparing taking on the Civil Service with the Second World War. The earlier parts of her speech had the ring of the civil-servantdrafter, and therein lay the genius. The language of GoldblattMcGuigan was turned against itself in a dizzying concoction of meaningless management Powerpoint-ese: … our vision is of a strong, dynamic local government that creates vibrant, healthy, prosperous, safe and sustainable communities that have the needs of all citizens at their core. Central to that vision is the provision of high-quality, efficient services that respond to people’s needs and continuously improve over time.

Wrap this up with the assertion that ‘successful local councils must be effective local champions that respond to the aspirations and concerns of their communities and guide — in partnership with others — the future development of their area’, throw in a reference to ‘stakeholders’ (that wonderfully inclusive buzzword which suggests that everybody is involved but nobody is responsible), and as if by magic Civil Service ‘bloatedness’ has been saved. Here is a civil servant thinking ‘I can write meaningless language in the style of a reformer and do it better than a reformer. So well that it will be rendered meaninglessly empty – bloated, one might say’.

So the Reform agenda in the Northern Irish Public Service can sound tough, but it may not be tough enough for the wiles of the

civil servant, long experienced in dealing with such nonsense. As far back as 1991 Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, who had just retired from his role as Head of the Civil Service in Northern Ireland, was taking advantage of his new-found, post-retirement leisure to ruminate, in Fortnight, and in Burkean terms, on the constitutional niceties of Northern Ireland. In doing so he refuted as ‘utter nonsense’ the idea that civil servants might seek to influence the political process they served. He then went on to suggest that the only question the political establishments in Britain and Ireland should have been asking themselves in 1991 was ‘Is the Provisional IRA being defeated?’ Given that he had presumably not sought to influence the political shape of the province throughout his entire career, he must have been bursting to write that question down and get it published.

Bloomfield tried to reform the Civil Service, but not on the scale currently imagined. Lord Smith of Clifton, that former UU ViceChancellor, thinks we have the Civil Service we deserve, but not for long if he can help it. He is thankful for the energy and ‘bouyancy’ of the private sector, post-Agreement, but this is being held back by a collective inertia stemming from Northern Ireland’s recent past.

Speaking in the House of Lords in 2004, Lord Smith tarred a whole culture with a confident brush: ‘Under direct rule, Northern Ireland politicians of all shades, both here in Westminster and locally, are just part of the claimant culture to which, in its turn, the Civil Service and its mode of operation respond. It is an unhealthy situation, with totally inadequate political scrutiny and public accountability. Let us restore the devolved institutions and slim the budget and the bureaucracy.’

It is reassuring in a way that our ‘bloated’ Civil Service and its general lethargy are not just the results of bureaucratic incompetence.

They are much more than that, according to Lord Smith, in his capacity as intrepid adventurer who has returned to the metropolis with tales of the useless natives. The slothfulness and inefficiency, the dole mentality, is actually a real and true reflection of Northern Irish identity. Being ‘bloated’ may be the only common collective identity there is in Northern Ireland. It is thus outrageous that Lord Smith should imagine putting the Northern Irish Civil Service on an institutional Weightwatchers plan. That’s an attempt to change the entire core political identity of Northern Ireland. It’s our bureaucracy and we must insist on keeping it, because not only does it belong to us, it is the perfect embodiment (according to Lord Smith) of what Northern Ireland really is. But Arlene Foster must have known, as she waded through the verbiage of a speech meant to signal the end of the Civil Service as we know it, that we can trust in the Civil Service, as our authentic public servants, to find a way to lose, duplicate, dally over, complicate and then consult on any proposals for slimming.

BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

Microsoft Word 2007 doesn’t underline ‘bureaucratese’ with a red squiggle: the term has definitely entered the language. Makes sense; we never really shut up about bureaucracy or its sister words, most of them not great in connotation – official-speak, doublespeak, jargon, euphemism, gobbledygook, and ‘Ohmigod,itwastotallyannoyingandt ookforfreakingeverand-Ihadtofilloutlikesixforms.Christonabike!’

But where did this bureau-lingo come from? And who perpetuates it?

‘Bureaucracy’ arrived in English in 1818 via the Old French bureaucratie, and with it (so said 19th-century European reformers) came rationality. Catherine the Great and some of her precursors got the bureaucratic ball rolling first. To reform the Russian courts and local governments, Catherine established a civil bureaucracy in 1775; it only included the nobility, but it was a start.

Divine Right was on the way out, but governments were still clunky, unfair, mired in nepotism and insider politics. As more people were moved to cities, their needs became more interconnected and government had to keep up. Bureaucracy was brought closer to the people, and it was supposed to be the Red Bull-cum-diet pill to focus lawmakers and leaders on the real issues and cut out the fatty favouritism. According to the U.S. History Encyclopaedia, bureaucracies would “consist, particularly at their highest levels, of highly educated and trained people organized rationally, not of people who were selected on the basis of whom they knew or had supported in the previous election.”

Wow. That worked.

And while it was busy erasing nepotism, neutral, efficient bureaucracy created ‘bureaucratese’ – a classy, transparent vocabulary to make sure that 1. everyone in every situation gets treated equally and fairly, and 2. the workings of bureaucracy are regulated and clear. Bureaucratese is truly dispassionate communication. Genius. We’ll use it for everything. Terms and conditions. Parking violations. Managing companies. Insurance policies. Breaking up via text message. Et cetera.

Bureaucratic language is a revolving door – an in and an out. It’s an IN for the disadvantaged: Laws and policies are enforced across the board. The mighty can be brought low or the meek be exalted on technicalities. But the OUT clause is pretty mighty. All people are equal in bureaucratese, and so is every detail – even the tiniest. This inflexibility and detachment is the perfect out for anyone who doesn’t want to think too much: Just enforcing policy. Nothing personal, you’re just not my type. I don’t make the rules around here. (None of us do, do we?) Just what this world needs: less critical thinking and empathy.

Bureaucratese seems smart. You can’t talk back to someone who’s got Functional Reciprocal Mobility, or works with Systematised Third-Generational Hardware on a Responsive Management TimePhase. You can’t talk back to it because, literally speaking, it makes no sense.

Behold, the Baffle-Gab Guide:

A B

Management 1 Integrated Total Organizational 2 Monitored 3 Systematized Reciprocal 4 Parallel Digital 5 Functional Logistical 6 Responsive Transitional 7 Optional 8 Synchronized Incremental 9 Compatible Third-Generation Policy 0 Balanced

C Options Flexibility Capability Mobility Programming Concept Time-Phase Projection Hardware Contingency

Philip Broughton worked for the U.S. Public Health Service in Washington, D.C., and passed the Baffle-Gab Guide around as a joke (see Time magazine, 13th September 1968, p. 20). Pick any number between 100 and 999 and there’s the bureaucratic phrase you’ve been searching for, full of bullshit mystique: 956 = Compatible Digital Concept (handy for Mac-heads) 111 = Integrated Management Options (an across-the-board favourite) Funny phrases, but dangerously easy to misconstrue in reality.

Dictionary definitions are nothing once the context is twisted.

The Holocaust is bureaucratic language’s most twisted association.

The Nazi party discussed its ‘Final Solution’ via a network of insidious phrases: ‘Incurables’ were designated for ‘special treatment’ (‘Sonderbehandlung’, or just S.B). The doctors who administrated the ‘solution’ were collectively called the ‘Public Ambulance Service, Ltd.’ The motorised death-squads first seen in Poland in 1939 were ‘task forces’, and crimes against humanity such as the massacre at Babi Yar ravine (where almost 34,000 Jews were killed after the capture of Kiev) were ‘major operations’.

These few examples are cited from the Jewish Virtual Library, but there are many more. The Third Reich’s use of bureaucratic language was, in some cases, an out for Nazi-party middle management – and, notoriously, an in for Holocaust deniers to advance their theories.

I clocked some other potentially slippery terms above, too – ‘motorised death-squads’, ‘crimes against humanity’. We make automatic assumptions about phrases like that based on our knowledge of history. They’re forms of shorthand, but ones we all know the horrific, never-to-be-repeated origins of. But the physical reality isn’t there in literal terms. The actual emotional impact is inferred, but it isn’t there in the words themselves.

So bureaucratese allows equality and neutrality but also serious misinterpretation – it levels the playing field as fast as it disguises atrocity. So are we paying enough attention to decipher bureaucratese, to navigate it? Or are we floating down Gobbledygook River on a lilo, downing Coors Light?

The tough part is that plenty of situations demand bureaucratic shorthand methods and language. Take the UK Border Agency, which handles hundreds of thousands of visa applications every year – legit and bogus claims from students, asylum seekers, refugees, migrant workers, ‘non-EEA or non-Swiss national family members of an EEA or Swiss national exercising European treaty rights in the UK’.

That’d be me. Form EEA2. Proving you’re in a ‘durable partnership’ with an EEA national exercising EU treaty rights in the UK. Right so: Send Form EEA2, along with both of your passports and all other relevant proof of partnership. (We did. Letters from parents and friends, pictures, etc.) A letter acknowledging they had everything: I became ‘the applicant’. My passport became ‘the document’. Next you’ll receive an application reference number (we didn’t), call us on the number listed above (no number given) if you have any questions, and you’ll hear back from us within six months (we didn’t).

Six months, seven, eight ... We guessed at our chances. We’re not married, don’t own a house, no joint bank account – they’re gonna say we don’t have enough proof. More proof? If UKBA wants more proof, we’ll send a used condom. Fuck their tiny, bureaucratic minds.

(There was a heavy phase of The Thick of It-watching, possibly related.)

When the verdict arrived, after ten months, I had to read it twice to figure out whether to break out the champagne or dig through the

bedroom wastebasket: “I am returning your document which features an endorsement confirming your status. At present your only claim to remain in the United Kingdom is as the family member of a European Economic Area (EAA) national who is exercising Treaty rights here. If your family member decides to leave the United Kingdom, or ceases to exercise Treaty rights, or if you cease to be a family member, you would have to qualify to remain in the United Kingdom in your own right. This Directorate should be notified immediately if your family member decides to leave the United Kingdom, or ceases to exercise a Treaty right here, or if you cease to be a family member.”

My visa process was a breeze, compared to some people’s – filing claims, waiting way more than a year. (For more on the Border Agency’s antics, check out the Operation Gull briefing on NILawCentre.org). But I still felt a certain let-down. A lack of welcoming celebration. A definite lack of pineapple.

In 1493 Christopher Columbus discovered that a pineapple set by the entrance to a Carib village meant that visitors were welcome. Pineapples weren’t even native to the Caribbean – they arrived through migration as well. Columbus and others brought the pineapple back to Europe, and it survived as a symbol of welcome there and in the New World. Sea-faring merchants would impale a pineapple on a stick outside their homes to announce that they’d returned from a voyage and wanted to see friends. Pineapples show up on carved bedposts in guest rooms of stately homes, and on motel signs in the Deep U.S. South. They’re an edible oddity roaming the globe, a way to say, ‘Hey, pull up a chair and enjoy this thing that looks like a cockatoo had sex with a honeycomb.’

Bureaucratese couldn’t deal with pineapples. They’re too prickly and tasty.

What strikes me about the letter from UKBA is its lack of tasty, prickly emotion. I was ready for Malcolm Tucker, and they sent C3PO. Official-speak is defined by an absence of human empathy. It doesn’t care how long you’ve been waiting, what the implications of its verdict are. It won’t even give you a harsh, raw no. The emotional detachment of bureaucratic language applies whether the effect is horrifying or just a bit frustrating.

But we’re the ones who write and read bureaucratese. We humans can move bureaucratic language closer to embracing the pineapple.

Make it squirm. Get under its skin.

Slap your bureaucratic language on the arse. Take it skinny-dipping.

Teach it some Malcolm Tucker: Bureaucratic language, ‘you’re as useless as a marzipan dildo. Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off.

Yeah, okay, fuckity-bye.’

BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

By Quentin Heiss

Ask most university lecturers why they do the job they do and they will give you basically two reasons for becoming an academic: either it is because of a love of teaching and/or a compulsion to do research.

I’ve yet to meet an academic who confesses to doing it for the admin.

That’s not to say those people mightn’t exist: somehow such nutters may have blagged their way through an interview, guffing on about their stellar teaching experience and the quality of their dismal and surely unread research just in the hope that they could realise the dysfunctional dream of lumbering themselves with interminable paper trails, never-ending rounds of committee meetings, and wholly indifferent catering.

When we’re not teaching or trying to do some bloody research – the things we thought we were employed to do – academics are usually involved in one of the following, mostly pointless but overwhelmingly tedious, bureaucratic systems: a)

b)

c)

d)

e)

the University appraisal system which, in this corporatelyminded age requires individual members of staff to align their own work to agreed (not by academic staff mind you; no, that would be too easy) strategic targets set by, more often than not, non-academic business-middlemanager types who live with their heads shoved sideways up their typically well-upholstered arses; the tenuous possiblity of promotion to another academic scale; the move into seniority is not so much vertical as horizontal though; as a relatively senior person in the midst of it all, promotion only means more meetings with the sad entrails of human effluent that pass for University administration, and consequently more paperwork created by these no-marks, so is of sod all use to anyone who ever held ambitions to replace Tom Paulin on Late Review; moreover, the paper exercise involved in applying for promotion and the ever-moving goalposts one is required to aim for actively discourage the whole fucking idea anyway; Departmental or School Board meetings at which the latest tranche of unrealistic corporate targets and unworkable policies is revealed to general guffaws, quickly followed by a dawning silence that instantly understands that these are not actually a joke and will be used as measures to most likely remove you from your job somewhere not so far down the line; providing feedback to the ‘end-users’, formerly known as students, on over-elaborate forms and via at-times labyrinthine mechanisms that help prove to the National Student Survey (another rod with which to beat academics’ backs) that when we say your essay is a mediocre stab in the dark that you’ve clearly mostly lifted from Wikipedia you twat then it is a mediocre stab in the dark that you’ve clearly mostly lifted from Wikipedia and why the hell did you bother doing that ’cos we told you not to a million times in the first place you complete and utter waste of your own and everybody else’s time; looking for a job elsewhere on account of any combination of the above.

One thing you can rely on in a university is that there is a form for everything. There’s even a form for the form, a duplicate and a triplicate in case the original gets lost, which it invariably does, once it passes out of the hands of an academic (who typically is quite well qualified in matters of filling in the form in the first place and then

filing it) and into the numpty paws of adminstrative support staff who believe that their pointless half-finished wank of a job is the central pivot that makes that university work and that without them the whole thing would come crashing down. These people exist for the bureacracy and the bureacracy exists to give them a clerical minion position which appears to carry this sole specification: making the lives of lecturers a total and perpetual misery.

Every university has them: a bank of fuckbag drones, locked away in ‘central administration’, 100% of whose time is taken up with pen pushing, issuing email directives, and completely missing the point that Universities are supposed to exist to educate the coming generations and produce up-to-the-minute research on the world in which we live, the societies we’ve created, the books we write and read, the bodies we inhabit, the minds we use, and the associated other foibles of human existence. All the twenty-first century has done to universities is to frontload the role of an academic with bureacratic gobbledegook that shunts real academic endeavour down the list of priorities.

To give one example of the kind of horseshit we have to contend with. Every department or school within a university in the UK undergoes teaching audits every four or five years or so to ensure the quality of teaching provision. In theory, not a bad idea. In practice, a thankless exercise of incrementally more bureaucratic circuitousness. To satisfy this ciruclar end, we are marshalled into creating committees and subgroups to oversee the finding, or sometimes the last-minute invention, of hard copy evidence that says

a department does what it says it does; the production of lengthy documents that attest to our capability to teach as defined by national documents on that very matter that few decent academics ever have the time or inclination to read; the rewriting of course information so that it adheres to current subject benchmark statements, learning outcomes and assessment criteria; and the presentation of the whole caboodle to a panel that sits for at least two days and whose primary reason for existence is to be versed in the current jargon of the day created to give this very exercise some semblance of governmentsupported credibility. Indeed, so versed in the admin speak of the exercise was one such panel member during an audit at my previous institution that, when I attempted to answer a point in what otherwise might be construed as layman’s terms he interjected with the following request: “We’d like you to give us back a response in the language of the subject benchmark statement as well adhering to the published guidelines for compiling your department’s teaching audit information with which you were supplied rather than plain English, if you would be so kind.”

Complete and utter cock (panel member and audit exercise combined) were my dovetailed thoughts. Circles within circles, wheels within wheels, none of which turn with any great speed or, it would seem, aspire to do so. And it’s not just academics who suffer this nonsense. Students – sorry I should really be saying consumers here, or stakeholders shouldn’t I? – frequently find themselves enrolled on the wrong degree programmes, arguing the point with registry staff that they can’t be taking modules in Russian as they’ve applied to do Chemistry, or querying why their university takes over a year to realise that as a part-time student they shouldn’t have been paying full-time fees in the first place and can they have their money back, please? This last is not such a hard one to figure out: universities are about doing the maths these days and a temporary delay in returning mistakenly requested fees that accrue some bank interest in the meantime is not such a biggie really, is it? A temporary oversight; an honest misunderstanding; your money was just lying in our cosy offshore account awaiting your clarification of your own status. Whatever you do, just don’t dare blame it on an administrative cock-up. That would never do.

By Quentin Heiss

BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

By Nancy Argento.

Civilisation: an advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development in human society, marked by progress in the arts and sciences, the extensive use of record-keeping, including writing, and the appearance of complex political and social institutions.

And lo, bureaucracy is born…

Former Trade Minister Lord Digby Jones, in giving evidence to a public administration committee hearing on good government in January 2009, proclaimed that Whitehall could be run with “half as many” civil servants, and described being a junior minister as “one of the most dehumanising and depersonalising experiences” anyone could have. I’m sure the inmates of Guantanemo Bay would agree.

“The whole system is designed to take the personality, the drive and the initiative out of a junior minister,” he said. “So many people in the civil service are far more interested in process than they are in outcome. They pay lip service to outcome because they have targets to meet, boxes to tick.”

This is a common complaint of politicians, who like to have a wacky idea in the bath on Friday, and task the civil service with implementing it on Monday. Something Must Be Done, and must be done Quickly, so that the politician can demonstrate how dynamic and effective he or she is. Any objections raised by civil servants to the desired action are seen as obfuscatory, evidence of bumbling bureaucrats obstructing the will of the Elected. Democracy can be dangerous, with the status of having been Elected used as a justification for all sorts of actions, in the way that the divine right of kings was invoked in the past. I Am The Chosen One and Thou Must obey, runs the logic. Except we all know that most governments are elected on the basis of less than 50% of the actual votes cast, thanks to the first past the post system, and many policies developed on the hoof have never been put before the electorate, whose views on the new initiative can therefore only be guessed at.

The task of the civil service is good administration, which you would think should also be supported by politicians and the government. But unfortunately good administration takes time, and involves setting aside purely political desires. Good administration requires consultation of those affected by policy proposals (the stated government commitment is to consult for a minimum of 12 weeks). And if you consult, it’s only polite to take time to consider the responses you receive, which also takes time. The law requires that administrative decisions are rational and reasonable, and that includes complying with European law and human rights. Time must be taken to assess the effects of a policy, and to assess its compatibility with the law. This is why civil servants are obsessed with process – it’s through careful compliance with due process that you end up with well-considered, robust policies and legislation.

Quick Fixes usually end up being anything but.

Ministers don’t tend to see why they cannot have a free hand to implement the policies of their choice, because they have been Elected, Selected, Chosen. The most extreme example of this attitude was demonstrated by the then Home Secretary David Blunkett, in response to repeated government defeats in the courts on the grounds of non-compliance with human rights. Mr Blunkett warned that the power of the courts to overturn government policy could be a threat to democracy. No, you dolt, ‘democracy’ does not mean that the elected can do whatever they choose simply because they have been elected. Our democratic system has developed over hundreds of years, and the British constitution contains checks and balances, with power being delicately balanced between the legislature (Parliament), the executive (the government) and the judiciary (the courts). This ensures against tyranny by any one of these arms of government. The rule of law, which politicians like to make much of when it comes to denouncing terrorists, means that everyone is subject to the law, including government ministers. If a government minister doesn’t understand this basic premise, heaven help democracy.

It is important however to make a distinction between bad bureaucracy and good bureaucracy. Good administration necessarily involves a certain amount of bureaucracy, and in this context I mean record-keeping, recognised lines of command and hierarchy, and accountability for decision-making. Record keeping enables consistent decision-making, and combats capriciousness. I’m not defending red tape bureaucracy, or complexity for its own sake, but real life is complicated.

There is a balance to be struck when making rules, between simplicity and brevity versus more detail and proscription. Simple rules seem attractive superficially, but they are often so vague as to leave doubt as to what was actually intended. Next stop, court proceedings to determine what the boundaries of the rules are.

Broad rules can also allow a large amount of discretion on the part of a decision-maker – not always a good thing. It depends of course on whether the discretion is exercised in your favour or not as to whether you will approve of large amounts of discretion. More detailed, proscriptive rules can seem bureaucratic, but they define the landscape and the boundaries more clearly, and tend to reduce disputes, and therefore are often preferable as a matter of good administration.

The European Union is often held up as an example of nightmarish bureaucracy. But think of it in another way – it is decision-making by committee. Recall if you can the last time you had to make a decision about something as simple as choosing a restaurant, or a film to watch, when in a large group of people. Trying to achieve consensus was probably quite difficult. Now imagine repeating that exercise,

with a group size of 27, and trying to reach a decision about a subject in which the parties have competing economic interests and there are complicated points of detail to be hammered out. Also, you are negotiating not with your nearest and dearest, who may be prepared to compromise simply because they are fond of you, but with your neighbours, some of whom you might not particularly like. No wonder negotiations and the resulting legislation can be torturous and seem Kafkaesque to the outside world.

One of the main aims of the founders of the European Community (as it then was) was to prevent war in Europe by means of closer economic ties between countries. Measured against this aim, the EC/EU project has been spectacularly successful, with no war ever breaking out between member states. Trapping the players in neverending Byzantine procedures which require constantly shifting alliances with different partners in order to achieve acceptable outcomes in areas as diverse as the environment, consumer protection or economic development, means that everyone is too preoccupied to think about war. You cannot adopt a ‘slash and burn’ tactic with Country A in the negotiations concerning waste electrical goods, because you need to keep them onside for the negotiations about the rights of employees. And the same for Country B, and Country C, including these days, all the way past County Z. People often complain about the cost of the European project, but it is far cheaper than war. Now there’s a good argument for bureaucracy.

BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

The Central Procurement Directorate

By Burgess Shale

O

ne night a man had a dream. He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord. Across the sky flashed scenes from his life. For each scene he noticed two sets of footprints in the sand, one belonging to him and the other to the Lord. When the last scene of his life flashed before him, he looked back at the footprints in the sand. He noticed that many times along the path of his life there was only one set of footprints. He also noticed that it happened at the very lowest and saddest times of his life. This really bothered him and he questioned the Lord about it: “Lord, you said that once I decided to follow you, you’d walk with me all the way. But I have noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life there is only one set of footprints. I don’t understand why, when I needed you most, you would leave me.”

The Lord replied, “My precious, precious child, I love you and I would never leave you! During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I was procuring.”

“Procuring, Lord?” asked the man.

The Lord beamed a smile of wondrous beneficence and compassion.

“That’s right my son. Here, this is where I purchased 340 litres of bull semen. And this is where I tendered for 28 tonnes of mixed aggregate. And way over there,” the Lord pointed far into the distance, back along the beach, “I think that was 27,000 small pink PostIt® index notes.”

The man considered this for a long time and looked back at the beach. He stopped walking and thought for a while. As he looked, he could see that the Lord’s footprints had stayed with him during all the most recent time of their walk together.

“Why, Lord, did you not procure more recently?”

The Lord looked the man in the eye, with great love. With one hand He flicked His Hair from His Eye, scratching His Nose absentmindedly.

“My child, I do not need to procure any longer. Not since I established the Central Procurement Directorate.”

The man looked at the Lord and felt an enormous tenderness rush up his central nervous system and bounce off the inside of one of his eyes. He began to weep.

“Lord, I implore you, tell me more about the Central Procurement Directorate.”

“Of course, my child, only, call it the CPD, it’s more convenient in colloquial speech.” The Lord cleared His Throat. “CPD - with its expertise in the field of procurement and construction - helps Departments to achieve real savings in procurement budgets which can free up resources to be used on service delivery and improving Northern Ireland’s physical infrastructure.”

“Savings, Lord?”

“Yes. CPD’s role is to support the Procurement Board in developing and reviewing procurement policy and to carry out an executive function in relation to the procurement of supplies, services and works for the public sector.”

The Lord turned to look at the setting sun, and kneeling in the sand, made a crab.

“CPD is responsible for disseminating policies approved by the Board and for monitoring their implementation, as well as developing and promoting best practice in procurement within the Northern Ireland Public Sector. We aim to do this in the context of fair and open competition for Government business.”

Golden light streaked the beach where the two walkers talked.

Dolphins played far out in the ocean.

“Our success as a Directorate depends on providing our public sector customers with a service which delivers best value for money in the procurement of supplies, services and works as well as high standards in the provision of a professional design, maintenance, and advisory service. We aim to do this through working with suppliers and potential suppliers, helping to develop the supply base in order that it can successfully meet the needs of the public sector market.”

The man swayed as a torrent of understanding and humility momentarily impaired his balance. He steadied himself on a large rock, on which a multitude of many-coloured insects gazed in speechless devotion at the Lord.

“Lord,” said the man, “What about the effects on the CPD’s capabilities of the current economic climate? What about the Public Sector’s general viability and sustainability in a time when public budgets are under great pressure, and there is unprecedented demand on taxation income?”

The Lord nodded. He looked again at the man, His Head slightly to one Side.

“Yes, my child, this is the most difficult of times for the Public Sector. At times such as these it is necessary to cut the lean meat from the bone and leave the fat wriggling on the floor. You see, son,” the Lord smoothed His outer tunic, and vanquished a defective frond of seaweed from the surface of the earth, “The Public Sector, which My Father gave to you, has been allowed to grow like a cancerous virus, spreading a dark, wobbling shadow over small and medium business growth in every quarter in which Records have been kept. You, my child – now you must join with Me, and help Me to spread a new message. That procurement must become more competitive, embracing change and making itself fit for service in a changed era. That the Public Sector can no longer seek to procure and provide everything that My People need. That in a time ahead, it will be profitability and good business sense which will drive Public Provision, not cant, or the paternal state’s inability to cut its ties with its whelps. Cut, my son. Cut, cut, cut. Keep cutting, keep cutting, don’t worry that’s just blood!”

The Lord’s Zeal overwhelmed the man and he lay on the sand, unable to move, for some moments. Streaks of red and purple flashed across the sky, as the sun’s last rays coated the sea and the land with molten gold.

The Lord turned around to the man and looked at him, as he lay on the sand. “Have I told you the one about the Eleven Monkeys of Fiscal Rectitude?” he asked.

“No Lord,” said the man, infinite gratitude making it difficult for him to avoid choking. And so the Lord began.

BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

The Census

by ERIC TATE

T

he phrase “sectarian headcount” is often bandied about in publications in this part of the world, regurgitated by amateur psephologists and sore politicians alike in disparagement of our election results. Tom Hadden, founding editor of Fortnight magazine, put the phrase to use as an ironic double-entendre in his analysis of the 1981 census figures , for the decennial census is quite literally a sectarian headcount: an enumeration of religious sects in the administrative division of the United Kingdom known as Northern Ireland. The administration of this administration is carried out by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA), which is part of the Department of Finance and Personnel, whose minister is bean (and head) counter supreme Sammy Wilson. If you fancy having a look at where all the counting was outsourced from, the NISRA Census Office is on Castle Street in McAuley House, opposite the side entrance to Primark.

The NIRSA website (aside from its relatively shiny front end) is a quaint retrograde assemblage, full of dead links, missing images, fuzzy GIFs and period fonts – it’s like travelling back in time to 1996. The ‘Census History’ link continues to charm, taking you to pages resembling a GeoCities fan site crafted by an aspergic ten year old. If the aesthetics don’t leave you reeling, the language definitely will – it’s surprising to find some decidedly non-secular language on the website of a government agency. Surely the vignette describing the biblical account of the birth of Jesus falls short of the Civil Service standards of impartiality and accuracy, since it has long been disproved as historically impossible, internally incoherent and merely a prophesy-fulfilling plot device? Further on, we have an account of King David’s census from a millennium before the birth of Mr. Christ - I may be mistaken, but aren’t phrases like “Israelites”, “plague” and “wrath of God” no longer part of the bureaucratic lexicon? And since when has a bronze age religious text been considered a reliable source?

Regardless of the Agency’s spiritual peccadilloes, it shouldn’t impinge on the empirical task at hand. The Registrar General’s 112page report on the 2001 census gives an indication of the logistical complexities of carrying out such a survey, even in a country as small as Northern Ireland (population 1,685,268 at the last count). The position of Registrar General is currently held by Dr Norman Caven, who is granted power to take a census by the Census Act (Northern Ireland) 1969. Censuses have been held in Britain and Ireland every 10 years since 1821 up to partition and, due to the twin kerfuffels of setting up a mini-parliament and World War II, have only been held in Northern Ireland every 10 years since 1951. Planning for the 2001 census began in 1993, opening with interminable consultations with various (to use the vernacular of modern management parlance) “stakeholders”. Essentially, this meant the census questionnaire used in England and Wales was Northern-Irelandicized by the NI Census Advisory Group, all eleven governmental departments and all the non-departmental public bodies with whom they worked.

Considering that the date of the census is fixed legislatively, it’s remarkable that the census was prepared to schedule, but no doubt the wheels (and several palms) of administration were greased by the liberal application of consultants. Initially, Vogue Consultants advised which consultants should be consulted and Bird & Bird kept everyone on the right side of the law. Contracts were subsequently advertised in the Official Journal of the European Communities, which is a bit like Gumtree for European governments. Chessington Computer Services Ltd were paid to make sure staff got paid, and KPMG (a Factotum Choir favourite) pointed out the mistakes that would mean some folk didn’t get paid.

Lockheed Martin were awarded the contract to do the donkey work of data capture and collation (which they subcontracted to Polestar and another Factotum Choir favourite, Fujitsu). Some of Lockheed’s flying killer robots were reprogrammed to read the retuned census documents, pool the data and pass illegible forms to their human slaves to decipher. Unfortunately for the robots, they weren’t programmed to remove the mote from their own eyes: dust 1

2

Hollerith 1890 Census Tabulator

settled on the scanners, producing marks that made empty boxes on the form to appear filled in. Over one thousand organic employees in Widnes, Cheshire had to (aside from polishing robot eyeballs) riffle through census forms to extract those with false responses, causing a three month delay in the production of the results. NISRA concluded that the contracting out of this work was cheaper “in relative terms” than conducting the work in-house. They make no comment on the merits of employing 1000 woollybacks over 1000 natives.

So what were the results? The census is a useful tool for identifying pockets of deprivation and aiding allocation of public resources and blahdey blahdey blah... look, it’s a sectarian headcount, and what we want to know is how many prods and catholics there are in the country, since this acts as a reductive and lazy barometer for predicting national self-determination. Question 8a of the census allowed the respondent to identify whatever cult they belonged to at the time. Subtracting the total number of Protestants reckoned in the seventy-nine post-reformation denominations plus the total number of RCs from the total population.

However, this being Northern Ireland, a straightforward tally of what the people chose to identify as is not good enough. Implementation of Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998, which places a statutory obligation on public authorities to promote religious equality, was somehow fulfilled by a question that asks what religion do other people think you are. Question 8b asks “what religion, religious denomination or body were you brought up in?”, a question that mistakes religion for an inherited disorder and disingenuously labels it “community background”. Not that it makes a great deal of difference, serving only to make the ‘everyone else’ slice of pie a little more meagre.

Even if one ignores that Orthodox Christians are classified as Protestant and that there’s no accounting for those who change faiths, it’s difficult to see how this data is useful. The question is asking what religion your parents were when you were a child and, as Richard Dawkins argues, makes as much sense as classifying your political persuasion by how your parents vote. Interestingly, European Union legislation on censuses, which is yet to be promulgated into UK law, has no requirement to count the religious make-up of the population, demonstrating a mature secular distance

from state intrusion into citizen’s religious freedoms.

Speaking of religious freedoms, what about the 2001 Jedi phenomenon? By way of an email-orchestrated prank of dubious hilarity, 390,127 people in England and Wales and 14,052 people in Scotland recorded their religion as “Jedi” or “Jedi Knight”.

Alas, NISRA does not hold such data, instead squirreling the total number of Northern Irish Jedi pricks within the “other religious and philosophical groups”. At least we know there are fewer than 125 of them. These pranksters avoided prosecution not just because there’s an amendment to the Census Act removing liability from questions relating to religion, but because the prosecutor would have to prove that the respondent did not believe what they had written. I suppose it’s just as difficult to disprove belief in an all-pervasive galactic force manipulated by midi-chlorians and invented by an overwieght nerd as it is to prove the existence of a beardy invisible sky man who fathered a Jewish zombie peacenic.

Two unfortunate souls, however, did not evade the long arm of the Statistics and Research Agency, causing offence by failing to make a census return and were subsequently prosecuted. So put away any reservations you may have about participating in next year’s sectarian headcount – the threat of a fine of up to £500 plus costs should focus minds. Stand up (and err... sit down again, get comfy, find a biro, fill in some boxes) and be counted!

Fortnight, No. 195, June 1983, p.9 “The Census: Not Just Sectarian Headcount”.

Northern Ireland Census 2001 General Report http:// tinyurlcom/2001NIcensus (Please take a look, if only to admire the post-ironic-hipster reindeer jumper modelled on the front cover)

BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

Drawing by Miguel Martin

immigration and bureaucracy

By Bernard Keenan It’s difficult to approach the subject of bureaucracy in immigration in any concise way. An immigration system is essentially nothing other than bureaucracy; it is perhaps the quintessential bureaucracy.

Unlike healthcare, policing, education, or other aspects of a modern biopolitical state, there is no positive content to immigration, no function or service being performed, other than to ask “are your papers in order?” Thus there is always a whiff of something incredulous and cruel in the very function of immigration officials.

Immigration is an interesting lens for viewing the relationship between sovereignty and population. While most of us take it for granted that our liberties to work, move freely, and seek social support if we need it are essentially natural and unlimited save where we have broken the law, from the perspective of the immigration system they are better seen as positive entitlements deriving from holding citizenship or some leave to remain. For those on the outside, life is a lot more difficult.

As a caseworker in an immigration law firm, I occasionally work at various Immigration Removal Centres around the London area.

A day at the removal centre starts early. Legal aid covers transport costs, provided they’re reasonable, but reasonable means you can forget about taking the comfortable Heathrow Express. So it’s best to leave yourself at least two hours getting from King’s Cross underground into the security hut at IRC Harmondsworth, on the West Drayton bypass. The Piccadilly line runs through the heart of central London, into the heart of West End and Soho, across Knightsbridge and South Kensington depositing the upper middle classes and the staff who serve them, across Hammersmith, then stretches out over land across the western suburbs to the concrete city of Heathrow.

Immigration Removal Centres have expanded exponentially and continue to expand as the government increasingly prioritises forced removals of people in the UK without valid leave to remain.

Removal usually requires detention, so goes the rationale. The two male-only centres near Heathrow are called Harmondsworth and Colnbrook. Both are essentially prisons, however Colnbrook somewhat more so, as it seems to be generally used to house foreign national prisoners immediately before deportation (deportation differs from administrative removal – it entails a specific order preventing return, whereas ‘removal’ theoretically hold’s no legal consequence in and of itself).

Recently the contract for running Harmondsworth passed from Kalyx to GEO. They sort of rearranged some of the procedures, like which bulletproof window you have to go to first on the way in, but essentially there’s not much difference except the logos on the gate.

This is how government works these days of course. Serco, Kalyx, Group4, GEO – faceless and anonymous conglomerates profiting massively by depressing costs and delivering more for less etc etc.

Passing through the sliding screen doors, an electronic screen cycles around the different corporate logos. A chart in the waiting area shows the lines of command in the centre. In the midst of the security

guards, the diversity manager, and the telephonist is the portrait of the chaplain, a fat white man in a dog collar smiling uncomfortably.

I’m always struck by the painting on the wall just there. It’s a rudimentary effort, pastels on recycled paper. They’ve had it framed and placed a plaque underneath to tell the world that this was done

by Jonas – ‘one of the students in our art class’. I suppose it’s possible that Jonas, whoever he is or was, may have held a student visa at some point, but he certainly didn’t come to Harmondsworth to learn anything.

Nominally detention is necessary to enable removal from the UK, there is often little logic or reason discernible behind the detention regime: I have arranged appointments to see people in one place only to arrive and be informed that they were moved that morning to a different centre 200 miles away, or that they have actually just been released after weeks held inside. While detention is supposed to be subject to legal oversight in the form of bail rights, the UK Border Agency regularly ignores the decisions of the courts in respect of releasing immigration detainees. I recently arrived at an appointment in a removal centre beside the runway at Gatwick, only to be told that I should reconsider my visit to the client who was, at that particular moment, spitting, urinating in his room, smashing up crockery, and being manhandled by staff who were going in four at a time behind a riot shield. Upon pointing out to the staff at the Home Office responsible for his case that a schizophrenic man with the mental age of a child is not a good candidate for prolonged detention (six months by that stage), he was transferred to the Victorian era prison at Holloway, which boasts a secure hospital wing.

There are normally three reasons that I may find myself in IRC Harmondsworth on the West Drayton bypass of a day. Occasionally I’ll be visiting a client there. On other days it’s in order to run the free legal advice clinic provided to detainees, which sadly involves quite a lot of ‘not-much-we-can-do-sorry’. Usually, it’s to provide representation for asylum claimants in the Detained Fast Track asylum procedure.

There are three centres in which Fast Track is utilised. Oakington is the original one. Then there’s Harmondsworth for men, and Yarl’s Wood near Bedfordshire, which houses houses women and, notoriously, families. Yarl’s Wood is where most of the traumatised children subjected to dawn raids by teams of immigration officers and police end up. Incidentally, there is no dedicated Immigration Removal Centre in Northern Ireland. People arrested by the police or immigration services there are quickly spirited across the channel to Dungavel in Scotland, placing them in a different jurisdiction and making visits by friends or family almost impossible.

Detained Fast Track is the process for dealing with an asylum application in as little time as legally possible. When someone first claims asylum, the interviewing officer may decide that their claim appears to be one that is ‘suitable for the detained Fast Track process’. This is a euphemistic way of prejudicing the claim. Rather than applying the ‘anxious scrutiny’ that the House of Lords says

every claim requires, it more or less means that they are definitely going to refuse this one. Admittedly many of the claimants in the Fast Track process are people who have claimed asylum only as a last act of desperation when facing removal. Yet many are people with a genuinely well founded fear of persecution in their home country. The accelerated speed of the process – interview one day, refusal the next, a deadline of two days in which to lodge an appeal, two or three more to then prepare for the appeal hearing, and all conducted while the applicant remains in detention – means that it is almost impossible to prepare an adequate case. As a comparison, it generally takes six to eight weeks for a normal, non-detained asylum case to go from refusal to appeal. This time is necessary. It allows an advocate enough time to instruct independent experts on the country of origin, or to obtain scarring reports, or psychiatric assessments, translations of arrest warrants, or whatever else a particular case may need. Every case is different. ‘Anxious scrutiny’ requires process and care. DFT provides none.

After a few minutes waiting, I’m led up from the waiting area to the legal visits room by a guard wearing rubber soles and a lot of heavy keys. Some of the guards are pleasant, others look at you like you’re an idiot for even talking to the detainees. In the visits area, guys mill around waiting to be interviewed, handed their refusal letters or removal directions, or to meet their lawyers. They mostly wear tracksuits and sandals, they crack jokes in Arabic, Pushtu, Urdu, Farsi. It’s a strangely relaxed atmosphere among the detainees, although every now and again there are reports of riots in the centre, riots which the hardline prison service ‘Tornado Team’ may be required to put down.

On Fast Track cases, if you’re lucky you’ll get to spend at least an hour or two taking some instructions from the client prior to the interview. This isn’t a lot of time and often you have to negotiate for more with the young Home Office civil servants running the show. They walk around with large files and magnetic ID cards, all professionally amiable, all apparently clothed in the smart-casual section of Next. Once the interpreter has arrived the interview begins.

A Home Office asylum interview is an aggressively inquisitorial affair. The theory seems to be that everyone is lying to you, the trick is that you just have to ask enough questions to reveal their inevitable contradictions. Round and round it goes. Everything is written down by hand. Every few hours there’s a break while the bureaucrat goes off to review everything that’s been said, identify possible weaknesses, and figure out an appropriate line of attack. Then we resume. Questions are repeated, because it’s thought that liars find it hard to invent details the same way twice. This is an old ritual, its traces lie in the stranger in the medieval citadel, forced to confess themselves before the priests, those honourable guardians of Truth.

An inevitable refusal of asylum is always accompanied by a Reasons for Refusal letter. This is written by the Secretary of State’s disembodied voice, speaking through the dedicated young civil servant who carried out the interrogation. The reasons for refusal

BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

range from simple disbelief – your story is implausible, or as a dishonest illegal immigrant, you cannot possibly be considered credible – to bold statements about the ‘true’ situation in an applicant’s home country, which is always perfectly fine despite the occasional human rights abuse. These assessments are based on the Objective Evidence which the Home Office itself commissions and publishes. Contradictory sources are ignored.

By way of example, Afghanistan is considered by the Home Office to be perfectly safe. Even if a person has been persecuted in their home region, so it goes, they can simply go to live elsewhere.

Strangely, the Foreign Office and the MOD seem to have a slightly different view of the situation in Afghanistan at the moment, judging from their advice to tourists. But that’s the great thing about separating out the bureaucratic instruments of state: your left hand is not bound by the actions of your right hand, in fact, it has no obligation to even acknowledge that your right hand exists.

This led to the interesting situation last year where Home Office Presenting Officers were going to the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal to argue that Tamil asylum seekers could be safely removed to Sri Lanka. This took place while the Home Office itself had in fact suspended removal flights to the Sri Lanka on account of the military were doing to the Tamils in the north. David Miliband expressed the Foreign Office’s horror at what the government were doing, yet the Home Office continued to tell judges that the situation was fine.

At best this was due to a failure to communicate the situation to the Presenting Officers. At worst, it reveals a deliberate policy of lying to the courts to strengthen cases against refugees when it is politically expedient to do so.

A normal day at the advice surgery usually involves giving a lot of bad news. Some detainees are simply awaiting removal, having been refused asylum and exhausted their appeal rights. There usually isn’t anything that can be done at that point, in the absence of some new development or piece of evidence. Yet some people spend months trapped in immigration detention as administrative problems with their home state prevent them being sent back, but their lack of status in the UK means they cannot remain. The Home Office constantly oppose granting bail to such individuals, and the Immigration Judges at the AIT generally agree with the line that removal is ‘imminent’ when appeal rights are exhausted. This bureaucratic limbo effectively creates a form of indefinite detention. The mental strain of not knowing if you’ll ever be released or returned home is extremely traumatic. One begins to understand why the chaplain looks so worried in his mugshot downstairs. It is difficult for such individuals to access the courts to claim for unlawful detention, and impossible for them to voluntarily return unless accepted by their home state.

They languish.

In Yarl’s Wood, an isolated site located on a remote hilltop outside Bedford, everything is more or less different but more or less the same. The private security corporation is different, and more thorough in their searches of visitors. In Yarl’s Wood the detainees are all women or families with children, no single men are held there.

But the same traces of prison architecture remain. The same on-site AIT is in place to ensure quickly determined (and usually quickly dismissed) appeals. And the procedures and assessments are basically the same. Individual and organised hunger strikes take place without effect. There is violence, attempted suicides. There is desperation.

Leaving an Immigration Removal Centre always brings a guilty feeling of relief. At the security lockers I retrieve my belongings, my book, my ipod, my passport. I put it in my front pocket. This proof of belonging, this lucky accident of birth, it always feels ten times more valuable on the way out of an IRC, ten times more blessed.

The Border Agency boasts that it is increasing removals of undocumented foreign nationals from the UK. I won’t quote their statistics, they mean nothing to me. But they show that the idea of an integrated European immigration system is becoming a reality.

We live in a globalised economy with clearly defined strata of class and belonging. The reduction of individuals to case numbers, the anonymous, standardised reasons for refusal of international protection to those in need, the use of detention even where removal is not imminent all serve to dehumanize the people whose lives are precarious. We learn in immigration just how our society views the margins of itself. The value of a person is now directly proportionate to the economic value they represent. The obverse of this; the economic conditions that drive people to seek a better life in the developed world, that fuel the wars they are fleeing, is excluded from consideration. We prefer to keep it locked away until we are sure it is out of sight.

By Neil Jarman In late 1996 I was having a drink with a colleague discussing ideas for the next stage of a broad research programme associated with a prominent political issue connected to the still fragile, emergent and uncertain peace process. In particular we toyed around with the idea of the value of travelling to a number of other countries to see how they had responded to similar problems. We noticed a senior figure from a prominent local funding agency, who was across the other side of the bar, and with the casual bravado that comes from a couple of pints, approached him and floated the idea we had been discussing.

His response was encouraging and over the next couple of days I sketched out the idea in a little more detail, did a very general guesstimate for costs (which were not extensive) and submitted the proposal. A short time later our proposal was approved. Although in the end we made numerous changes to our project, to the locations we visited and the ways in which we spent the allocated funding, we delivered the project on time and in budget, and produced a report that, I think contributed to the broad debate.

Fast forward to 2009 and I was involved in the submission of another proposal, this time in response to a call for ideas for projects funded through EU peace money. The submission deadline was the beginning of February and according to the timetable, set by the local organisation responsible for managing the funding, all stages of the decision making process would be completed to allow the project to begin in late May, thus allowing 20 months to do the work. In June we were asked to submit a more detailed proposal, for consideration by the end of August. In the end the decision on funding the project was not made until the November, nearly ten months after the initial submission. We were not successful and, due to the delays, the successful proposal now had just 12 months to complete the work instead of 20.

Gil Scott-Heron may have insisted that the revolution would not be televised, but the process of social transformation, from war to peace, in Northern Ireland has certainly been bureaucratised. The two examples above may well be at the extreme ends of flexibility and bureaucracy, but over the past decade, most people involved in delivering peace projects would be able to recount similar examples of how the accountants seem to have gained the upper hand. In the late 1990s there was definitely a sense that the important thing was to get the money distributed in order to support work, generate ideas and help consolidate the peace, but a decade later the focus is more clearly on a more formalised process of control and accountability for public funds.

Private or independent funders still provide opportunities for undertaking innovative projects, and for working in situations where outcomes or even the final form of the project cannot be guaranteed, but public funding is more readily distributed with a greater degree of control and restraint, or with the objectives being more closely set from above. And while it is entirely understandable and necessary for there to be a process of accountability for the use of public money, thresholds can too readily be crossed, whereby the bureaucracy becomes a factor inhibiting applications for funding. Contrast one major independent sector funder with a requirement for applications to exceed no more than four pages, with the European programmes, where application forms run to 20 or 30 pages of questions, many of which are formulaic, and which in turn generate formulaic answers from experienced application writers who know what is expected, what key words and phrases to include. Although an open application process is designed to ensure equality of opportunity to a wide range of groups and organisations, it actually scarcely disguises the fact

that experienced writers of funding applications quickly learn what is required to tick the boxes.

Another factor contributing to a sense of bureaucratic stultification and inertia has been the frequent changes to the organisations that are responsible for delivering money, for designing calls for applications for funds, assessing bids and managing the projects they agree to fund. Currently much of the latest (and probably last) round of EU peace funds are being delivered through local councils, which often have limited experience and understanding of the procedures. This has led to applicants for funds having to second guess what the tenders actually call for and having to include caveats in completed forms to allow for clarification of expectations. However, to be fair, the SEUPB (who have overall responsibility for EU funding) do appear to have changed (or ‘clarified’) the rules on occasion and thus caused delays to decision - making or required changes to procedure for projects that have been approved. In one case they simply suspended the process of approving funding for one category of work, after a call for tenders had been advertised and a number of organisations worked up and submitted proposals. There is then a sense of hierarchical structures tinkering with procedures, and one layer of bureaucracy having to respond to new rules imposed from above, with the perception that the process of delivering funding becoming the dominant focus, not the delivery of work on the ground.

Peace building work is not alone in struggling with the top down requirements of a system that has limited or no connection with what is happening (or needs to happen) on the ground, and with a hyperfocus on risk aversion rather than innovation, which in turn is based on suspicion and mistrust of the new or the different. Anyone who travels through British airports regularly has to be prepared to adapt to new security procedures (for our own good of course) imposed from above in response to the possibility of a remote or unlikely threat. The growing bureaucracy in the process of supporting the Northern Irish peace industry is unlikely to stop anyone from trying to continue their work or to develop new projects or activities, but it has become an encumbrance, and at times a disincentive.

It is easy to look back with a nostalgic eye and romanticise how it was ‘back then’ and it is easy to view bureaucracy as simply an unnecessary impediment to ‘real work’ that will make a difference. But while some degree of administrative procedures and accountability is necessary, effective bureaucracy should enable, facilitate, smooth a path and not draw attention to itself. When the process of administration and accountability becomes the story, it is clear that priorities are out of balance.

BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

, Gogol s Bureaucratic Nightmare

Drawing by Miguel Martin

by Peter Mulree Jordan

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-52) was the first Russian writer to examine the realities of bureaucracy in literature. His play The Government Inspector (1835), his novel Dead Souls (1842) and his short stories The Nose (1835) and The Overcoat (1836) exposed the officialdom of provincial Russia to hilarious satire. There was also a great philosophical depth to his work that remains timeless. He managed to capture universal themes of man’s inner struggles, desires, and life ironies. His stories, with their biting realism and moral criticism, remain some of the most important works of world literature.

The Government Inspector is a satire of the extensive bureaucracy of nineteenth-century Russian government. In Gogol’s play the young man, Khlestakov, mistaken for the government inspector belongs to the lowest of fourteen possible levels within the Russian civil service. The tangled mess of the Office of the Governor establishes the image of small town Russian bureaucracy as ludicrously inefficient and incompetent. Nothing of any value gets accomplished amidst the masses of paperwork by the numerous characters holding official government titles. His play had its premiere in St. Petersburg attended by the Tzar Nickolai I. But it also made him many powerful enemies who hated his satire on Russian bureaucracy, leading to his exile.

Later that same year Gogol wrote his short story The Nose. Ivan Yakovlevich, a barber, finds a nose in his bread during breakfast. With horror he recognises this nose as that of one of his regular customers: Major Kovalyov. He tries to get rid of it by throwing it in the Neva River, but he is caught by a police officer.

Meanwhile Kovalyov wakes and finds his nose missing. The nose, by now, is pretending to be a human. Kovalyov confronts it in the Kazan Cathedral, but from its clothing it is apparent that the nose has acquired a higher rank than him and refuses to return to his face.

Kovalyov returns to his flat, where the police officer who caught Ivan finds him and returns the nose. But Kovalyov’s joy is cut short when he finds that he is unable to re-attach the nose.

Finally, Kovalyov wakes up with his nose reattached. He is carefully shaved by the barber and happily strolls about the city to show off his nose.

A year later Gogol wrote his short story masterpiece: The Overcoat. The story centres on the life and death of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin a government clerk in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg. His threadbare overcoat is often the butt of office jokes. Akaky forces himself to live within a strict budget to save enough money to buy a new overcoat.

The new coat is the talk of Akaky’s office on the day he arrives wearing it. His boss decides to host a party honouring the new coat.

Akaky leaves the party later than he normally would and is mugged on his walk home. He wakes in the snow minus his beautiful coat.

On the advice of another clerk in his department, he asks for

help from a distinguished General. After keeping Akaky waiting an unnecessarily long time, the General demands of him exactly why he has brought so trivial a matter to him, personally, and not presented it to his secretary.

Akaky makes an unflattering remark concerning departmental secretaries, provoking so powerful a scolding from the General that Akaky nearly faints. Soon afterwards, Akaky falls ill with fever. In his last hours, he is delirious, imagining himself again sitting before the General, who is again scolding him.

Soon, Akaky’s ghost is haunting areas of St. Petersburg, taking overcoats from people. Finally, Akaky’s ghost catches up with the General, and takes his overcoat. The narrator ends with the account of another ghost seen in another part of the city, but that one was taller and had a moustache, bearing a resemblance to the criminals who had robbed Akaky earlier.

Vladimir Nabokov gave the following appraisal of Gogol and his most famous story: “Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift. But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treat rational ideas in a

logical way, he lost all trace of talent. When, as in the immortal The Overcoat, he really let himself go and pottered on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.”

There are echoes of Gogol’s story in Chekhov’s The Death of a Government Clerk (1883). The short story deals with a civil servant named Chervyakov who accidentally sneezes on a General and is mortified because he is unable to obtain the General’s pardon.

After repeated rebukes, he resigns himself to defeat, lies down, and simply dies. His sense of self-worth is so intricately bound up in his subservient role that, unpardoned, he has no reason to continue living. Gogol is also referenced in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. The character Trigorin is afraid that friends and family are “going to seize me like the wretched clerk in that story of Gogol’s” It was his friend Pushkin who suggested the main idea for The Dead Souls. The novel revolves around the exploits of Chichikov, a civil servant on the lower rungs of Russian society. Driven by a desire to enhance his social standing, Chichikov develops an ingenious scheme.

Landowners paid taxes based on how many serfs or “souls” they owned. The number of “souls” they owned was a measure of their economic and social status. The government kept count of owned

BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

“souls” and this count was based on government census numbers.

Grasping an opportune moment between two censuses, Chichikov buys records of these dead souls from landowners eager to lighten their tax burdens. Papers certifying Chichikov’s ownership of four hundred “souls” rapidly elevates Chichikov’s status: landed gentry open their homes to him, try to give away their daughters in marriage, and celebrate him at civic functions.

Gogol’s writing contains condemnations of the dehumanising effects of bureaucracy reflected in later work by Dostoevsky and Kafka. Dostoevsky admired Gogol, and considered him one of his literary teachers. Dostoyevsky’s story The Crocodile (1865), in which a civil servant, although swallowed by a crocodile, continues from within the monster’s belly to develop principles of economy is typically Gogolian.

Kafka’s novel The Trial (1925) begins with the famous words: “Someone must have traduced Joseph K. for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” On his thirtieth birthday, a senior bank clerk, Josef K., is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents for an unspecified crime. The agents do not name the authority for which they are acting. He is not taken away, however, but left at home to await instructions from the Committee of Affairs.

Over the course of the year, the stress of the case weighs heavily on K. On the last day of K’s thirtieth year, two men arrive to execute him. By now he is a broken man, offering little resistance. They lead him to a quarry where he is expected to kill himself, but he cannot.

The two men then execute him. His last words allude to his own subservience to this bureaucratic nightmare: “Like a dog!”

George Orwell’s 1984, published thirty-five years later, is one of the world’s most widely read and quoted novels into the twenty-first century and has a Gogolian and Kafkaesque quality to it. Inspired

by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Orwell worked intensely, often writing ten hours a day even when bedridden with tuberculosis.

From his essay Why I Write, he said: “The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

It was Joseph Heller’s experience of warfare, and of military bureaucracy, that gave him the inspiration for Catch-22. The central character Yossarian is trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare. In a bureaucracy individuality does not matter. Soldiers are not even people, but simply property that can be listed on an inventory.

Kurt Vonnegut’s writing was also tempered by his experiences in the Second World War. Common themes in Vonnegut’s work include the dehumanisation wrought by bureaucracy. His characters care about involvement. Yet they are helpless. Vonnegut acknowledged having read Dostoevsky and Gogol at a critical time in his life. He refers to Dostoevsky in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and quotes from him in Breakfast of Champions (1973) and Slapstick (1976).

Gogol’s stories have inspired generations of writers. In satirizing the corruption within the Russian bureaucracy, he addressed more universal themes of human corruption. He saw human beings as entangled in a web of confusion and deception, misled not only by appearances but also by their own inner thoughts; their own delusions and lies. Gogol’s work is thus as relevant to the world of the twenty-first century as it was to its own time.

Published by Factotum Downsizing the doggy biscuit allocation in the second quarter.

It’s all so wonderful ...

Bureaucracy: Don’t you just love it? Even the word ‘bureaucracy’hard to pronounce properly, difficult to spell, too many syllables and yet it now surrounds the public sector like a comforting cushion, reliably there to fall back on, never far away, a cornerstone to lean on as we go through our daily grind. A definition of bureaucracy, for those of an alien persuasion, is: taking a simple transaction between two people and turning it into a convoluted mess, involving as many people as possible.

So how does this work on a day to day basis? How does the Modernising Government agenda work in practise? Let me give you one small example of ‘centralisation’ designed to streamline processes, thus saving money and push us further along the road towards the paperless office: Asking for a day off.

Then (before computerised centralisation) Go to Line Manager(LM) and ask for day off.

LM casts a quick glance at the staff rota handily pinned on the board behind, and says Aye or Nay. Mission accomplished.

Now (after computerised centralisation) Log on to computer - Log on to HR Connect - Get refusal message - Repeat until temper flares -Phone HR Connect Help Line - Listen to recorded message - Wait for person to come on line - Be patronised by person on line - Log onto HR Connect - Find sub-menu- Click through various options - Get confused -Phone ‘Super User’ colleague for help Read instructions sent - Follow instructions - Consult ‘Super User’ again - Fill in full details with help of ‘Super User’ - Send to LM Phone LM to let them know a request is pending LM then; Logs on to computer - Logs on to HR Connect - Gets refusal message - Repeats until temper flares -Phones HR Connect Help Line - Listens to recorded message - Waits for person to come on line - Is patronised by person on line (they go on a special training course) -Logs onto HR Connect -Finds sub-menu - Clicks through various options -Finds my request -Checks staff rota handily pinned on board behind them -Chooses ‘Approve’ or ‘Not Approved’ optionPhones me to let me know if I can have leave.There now, isn’t that much better? We’ve both managed to waste a couple of hours and involve other people (admittedly, not that many; must try harder.)

After all that, I would take a nice relaxing cup of tea but unfortunately, that’s not possible: under Health and Safety rules, we’re not allowed to use a kettle.

By Mary McGlynn

Factotum 11 Lombard Street Belfast BT1 1RB [e] info@factotum.org.uk www.factotum.org.uk Editors & Design Stephen Hackett Richard West Cover illustration Duncan Ross Masthead illustration David Haughey Reviews Editor Fionola Merideth Web editor Stephen Hull Distribution Manager Jason Mills Advertising Richard West To advertise in the Vacuum or receive information about our advertising rates call 028 90330893 or email info@ factotum.org.uk Print run: 15,000 Distribution: Northern Ireland and Dublin The Vacuum welcomes and encourages correspondence.

Write to the above address or email letters@factotum.org.uk All copyright remains with the authors.

BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

I was not consulted on the matter and nor do I recall the exact details, but apparently sometime not long after discharging me into the world my mother proceeded to the local Registrar’s office to create an official identity for me. The piece of paper she came away with linked the wriggling, screaming infant in the pram with a new bureaucratic entity about whom certain facts (name, sex, date and place of birth, parent’s names, father’s occupation) could be established by anyone who cared to look it up. The game was up - I had been numbered, dehumanised and filed away in a civil service cabinet in order that I may pass unabated through the structures of the state; attend school, access healthcare, vote, obtain a passport and a driving licence, and so on.

Birth declaration and registration was first introduced in Ancient Rome during the reign of Emperor Augustus (27 BC – 14 AD) and developed by his successors. It provided a way of supplementing documentary evidence about the population gathered in censuses, especially to see when they were eligible to pay tax or serve in the military. Although it was supposed to be mandatory, there was no punishment for non-registration so it seems likely that large numbers of people didn’t manage to drag themselves away from larking about at the public baths or enjoying the new pastime of watching lions eat Christians. The first instances of registration in Britain and Ireland came in 1538 under Henry VIII, who took time out from marrying then beheading his cousins to get his Chancellor to introduce a system. Churches then began to keep registers of all baptisms, weddings and deaths but the process was far from comprehensive.

It took until 1836 for a proper civil registration system to come into effect in England and Wales and a further ten years for it to be extended to Ireland. Pressure for its application here had come from a number of sources; wealthy Presbyterians who were finding it difficult to claim inheritance rights, factory inspectors on the mainland who were concerned about the number of underage Irish emigrants presenting themselves for work with fake birth certificates, and Irish Poor Law Commissioners who were attempting to impose compulsory vaccination for smallpox. Within the first decade of the new legislation many births still went unregistered, especially in rural areas, and it wasn’t until the 1880s that time limits and penalties were introduced, shifting the onus onto the parents.

Partition meant that Northern Ireland got its own independent registration system as of 1st January 1922 and the administration of this is currently carried out under the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1976. The General Register Office in Belfast keeps the records for all births, deaths and marriages in the country. Maternity units of local hospitals send out lists of all births to the Office and these must then be registered within 42 days otherwise, in the words of the 1976 Act, the parents ‘shall be guilty of an offence and liable to a fine not exceeding £10’. Not exactly the full wrath of the state but, as the Assistant Registrar, Alistair Butler, explains; ‘It’s not something you have to be heavy-handed with because people want to register the birth due to the problems it creates if they don’t.

You can’t get child benefits, healthcare or anything else these days.

I’ve worked here for four years and I’m only aware of one case where we’ve had to chase someone up after the 42 day limit.’

Does anything unusual ever happen?

‘Mostly it’s fairly straightforward but you do get the odd thing… bigamy, disputed fatherhood and things. One man called up to get his birth certificate and we did a trace and found that there was someone with the same surname born on the date he had given us but not a matching first name. Basically the guy had been using what he thought was his name for his entire life but it turned out that he was

actually called something else. Maybe the parents had changed their minds between the time of registering the birth and getting the child christened. In situations like that we also have a facility for people to change their certified name as long as they can prove that they’ve been using their current one for a period of two years – we do about 200 name changes a year.’

Whereas birth registration is almost ubiquitous today this was not always the case. During the 1930s and ‘40s it was not such a common practice as incentives such as welfare benefits had not yet been introduced. For unregistered people born during this period who suddenly find that they need a birth certificate, perhaps because they want to travel abroad for the first time, the General Register Office has a procedure for the late registration of births. It carried out 24 of these in 2009 and 30 in 2008.

Despite the modern day pressures to register a birth there is a subculture of people who refer to themselves as ‘Freemen’ who aim to live independently of government systems and legislation.

They can often be found congregating in corners of the internet like David Icke’s messageboard, discussing the New World Order and linking each other to Youtube excerpts from Zeitgeist. The birth certificate conspiracy theory goes like this; although most people don’t realise it, we are all only subject to a few basic Common Laws (such as infringement on the life, liberty and property of others) and everything else is merely a Statute Law which requires our consent before it can be applied to us. Upon registration of your birth a legal entity is created in your name which becomes the property of the government and is therefore subject to these Statute Laws. The government attaches a financial bond to your birth certificate which represents your potential value to society in the form of taxes and fines throughout your life. It uses this to obtain loans from creditors on the stock market and create revenue for itself. However, if you are not registered you remain independent of your legal entity. You

By Jason Mills are therefore exempt from this government slavery and are free to smoke crack, run red lights and make a mockery of the Artificial Insemination of Cattle Regulations (Northern Ireland) 1997.

My exploration of this madness culminated in trawling through a 13 page thread on an internet forum called Freeman-On-The-Land where a user called ‘Free’ from Leicestershire detailed his ongoing battle with the registration authorities regarding his refusal to register his newborn son. By the final page seven months had passed since his first post (it felt like that in real life too for time had slowed to a trickle), his relationship with the child’s mother had ended and the matter had been passed on to the Registrar General for England and Wales. At this point my eyes and brain were hurting so much that I suffered an aneurysm and passed out on my keyboard, whereupon I had phantasmagoric visions of giant shape-shifting lizards branding babies with barcodes. When I regained consciousness I lifted my head and looked at the computer screen only to find that I had typed the words ‘NEW AGE CONSPIRACY BOLLOCKS’ into Microsoft Word with my face.

While the non-registration of children in the UK remains rare (66 cases throughout England and Wales during 2008 where a child had still not been registered after 365 days), across Africa, Latin America and Asia it is a different story. An estimated 51 million children are born across the world each year without any official documentation, a figure that children’s charities such as Unicef and Plan work to reduce. This can be due to inadequate registration systems, fears of persecution through identification or the cost and difficulties of getting to registration centres. The charities argue that this strips the children of legal rights, making them a more attractive commodity for child labour, trafficking, soldiering, prostitution and forced marriage. Furthermore, it is extremely difficult for them to be identified and returned to their families if rescued. Which makes it seem ironic that a few privileged people with broadband connections and access to state benefits go to such great lengths to avoid the process.

BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

“Zacchaus was a greedy little man, He cheated all the people in the land, If their rent they couldn’t pay, He would take their homes away, Or their furniture, Or everything they had.... Zacchaus, Zacchaus..”

(Primary School Song) Poor sods, no wonder they’re hated. If the earliest reference to your job is in the Bible and it’s gets a bad rap, it’s going be very hard to ever change that perception, right? What are your first thoughts at the mention of the word Taxman? Resentment? Annoyance? Fear?

You’re not alone.

My first thought was actually Zacchaus. (see above) This children’s song was apparently also used to differentiate Catholic and Protestants, according to the melody. (Little did Zacchaus know he’d be a contender in Northern Ireland’s playgrounds.) Apart from the Biblical taxman (remember Matthew?) The only other one I knew was the one in the Beatles song, stealing all George Harrison’s hardearned money. In the world of computer games we have “Taxman Gordon” (a game that has Pacman replaced by a mini Gordon Brown.

It’s a game you can’t win. Obviously.) It’s no wonder we see The Taxman as an Agent Smith- style character. In American Television they fare no better. Whereas we have HM Customs they have the IRS (everything’s scarier when it’s been abbreviated) It’s slightly worrying that we hope that a murderer such as Tony Soprano escapes from their clutches without ‘paying’.

In Art & Literature we see the same trend: In Lewis Carroll’s

10

th

Hunting of the Snark, an illustration shows the tax collector as a fat little man, scratching his head and surrounded by vile, scary-looking creatures. He has resorted to working under what looks like a dank, rotting, tree. A view verified by Richard Yancy (an ex IRS employee) who describes his admission of his job like this: “I work for the IRS,” at which point the conversation suffers a distinct deflation, an awkward pause. Something changes in the other’s eyes, in the body language. A distance, sometimes a literal distance as the person takes a step backwards, is created. There is now something between you, a shadow, a stench of something rotten, shameful, an admission of something unseemly, a confession without the benefit of sacrament. “ I have a friend whose father has just retired from Tax-Collecting.

Upon reading that excerpt to him he said, ‘Yeah, Dad pretty much describes it like just like that.”

Yancy also describes an incident in which a new IRS employee, whom upon telling her stylist of her job, is physically thrown out of the hairdressers, mid-cut and told not to come back. Phew! What other job would engender such hatred?.....” I’m a farmer.” “WHAT?!

AGGGGGGH, No! Stay away from me! (actually, that’s the reaction of a lot of girls in Armagh on nights out).

Similarly, the character of the taxman in Chekov’s short story, The Husband, is described as “a narrow, spiteful soul, given to drink, with a big, closely cropped head, and thick, protruding lips. He had had a university education; there had been a time when he used to read progressive literature and sing students’ songs, but now, as he said of himself, he was a tax-collector and nothing more.” Not someone you want to run into in a dark alley then, never mind marry.

In the 1543 painting The Tax Collector, by Paul Vos, the collector

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pores over sheets of paper, hand hovering over a little pile of coins on the desk, while a man waits, hat in hand, and a fearful look on his face; beside his wife and son (she is holding a pig). A barbed comment, perhaps?

Another example of the ’vilification’ of the taxman can be seen in Mike Rotunda’s character, Irwin R. Schyster (his initials are IRS) a wrestler who fought in a shirt and tie as a heel “taxman” gimmick who harassed fans, urging them to pay their taxes.

Personally, I have vague memories of sitting in my parents restaurant, and hearing whispers of “the taxman’s coming”. I remember the sudden hush that would fall over the kitchen, the subdued atmosphere, till he’d been and gone. This man must be scary, I remember thinking. He’s not nice. We kids were sent to play quietly in the disused, mote filled, rooms upstairs, till he had slithered out the front door. We’d come down for tea and an air of relief would have replaced the unease. Later I heard stories of my mum engaging in verbal battles with the VAT man before they settled into a relationship of mutual respect. But that’s neither here nor there.

My conclusion? The tax collector then, seems to me to be the grownup’s Bogeyman, a shadowy* character with mythical power, giving us sleepless nights ...worrying that that noise we hear in the middle of the night is a man tapping away furiously on a calculator under the bed.

*And there’s further cause to worry. Taxmen are now apparently trolling Facebook for tax-evadees. Careful what you boast now!

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BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

Obscure Object of Desire

By Darran McCann

We had guests in our house recently. Two old friends and their eldest, a lad of twelve or thirteen. Bright lad. We were sitting in the living room when the telephone in the hall rang, brrrriinnnnng brrrriinnnnng. Can’t remember who it was; probably one of those annoying pre-recorded voicemails beginning: “Wish you could consolidate all your debts in one easy-to-use blah blah blah…?”

Hang up. Or perhaps it was some hapless call-centre stooge, just as unhappy to be bothering me with questions about whether I’m happy with my bank as I was to receive the call, getting only indignation and a wage-slave pay packet for his trouble. As I returned to the living room our guest, bright lad that he is, said: “So that’s why you say you’re ringing someone.” Bleeping, buzzing, the opening chords of ‘Sex on Fire’, Michael Palin screaming that no-one expects the Spanish Inquisition – all these things he had heard announcing an incoming call to telephones, but ringing? As in, an actual bell making an actual ringing sound? This was a first. It turned out my

The Vacuum is preparing a special issue made up of dreams from people in Northern Ireland. We are looking for people to record their dreams when they wake up and are still fresh in their minds, either by writing them down (preferably in less than a page) or by describing them onto tape. We would like to receive as many dreams from as wide a range of people as possible.

• All the dreams will be published anonymously • Dreamers are asked to identify themselves by occupation and age (eg.

beautiful avocado-green Bakelite telephone was the basis for quite an etymological tutorial. (Hang your heads, those who laughed at the presence of the words “beautiful” and “avocado” in the same sentence. I can guess with confidence the vintage of my phone – 1969 at the earliest, 1981 at the latest, precisely because of its colour.

If it were white, what would that tell me? Its very avocado-ness tells a story – a story of ‘Seventies garishness, perhaps, but better that than blameless, neutral nothingness.)

Our guest was fascinated to learn why we say we dial a number, and seemed to enjoy using the dial, making the circular motions with his finger for each digit. He had seen dial telephones before (in movies) but hadn’t made the connection. You wouldn’t, would you?

Why do we ring someone? Why do we hang up? Why are movies called film? Why is TV the box? Why are newspapers collectively known as the press?

“But why do you have an old phone?” he asked.

“You mean, why have a landline?” I replied, a little confused. It’s true, landlines are no longer essential. You still need them at work, sure, since it’s easier for the boss to police landlines than mobiles, and that’s fair enough since the boss is paying for them; but in the home, if it wasn’t part of the cable/broadband package, fewer and fewer people would bother with a landline. I mean, how often do you call people on their landline? Only if you can’t get them on the mobile, right? But no: our young wanted to know why we have such an antiquated model? One without even something as rudimentary (twenty years ago) as an answering machine? A good question, for which I had no good answer. Our telephone is clunky, loud, unpersonalised, it only makes and receives calls, you have to plug it into the wall. Conversely, the tiny Nokia thingy in my pocket is more advanced than what they used for the moon landings. It’s a phone, telephone directory, computer, radio, camera, filofax, calendar, diary, calculator, photo album, camcorder, computer game, rudimentary recording studio, record player – hell, a record collection…

(How archaic these words now read! Camcorder. Telephone directory. Record. As I type filofax, Microsoft Word alerts me to possible error with a red line beneath it – a sure sign of a once wellknown word now in the lexicographical departures lounge along with wireless, phonograph, haberdasher, daguerreotype, lithographer....

Cameras, photo albums, radios and the rest used to be distinct products; to people under 20, they are iPhone apps. Imagine, teens marvel, that these items once had to be accumulated separately, in all their space-hogging expensiveness!)

Yet I love my clunky old telephone dearly. When my mobile

student, aged 20; baker, aged 40) • If people or places are mentioned in the dreams it may be helpful to contextualise them, (ie. my friend John; St. Joseph’s, where I went to school) • The idea is to record the dreams just as they happened, but we may have to edit them.

To send us your dreams either email them to us at info@factotum.org.uk or write to us at: The Vacuum, 9-11 Lombard Street.

Belfast, BT11RB The deadline is 20th March 2010.

phone rings – actually it doesn’t ring, it vibrates and plays the kazoo intro from ‘Highway 61’ – my blood pressure rises. It doesn’t matter who’s on the other end of the line, it’s always the 21st century calling.

And usually it has demands. But when my telephone rings, the effect is different. It’s gentler. I pick up the receiver (which is what they called a handset in the olden days) and it takes me back to my youth, reminding me of the ritual of nervously calling a girl, praying it’d be her and not her Da that answered. I balance the receiver between chin and shoulder and sit myself on the third-from-bottom stair. I don’t worry about my minutes, or whether my battery is getting low.

Everything slows down. It takes a certain amount of time to manually dial a number and there’s no short cut, no speed dial. You just have to dial each digit and wait for the dial to roll back round. Marx believed that industrialisation had “alienated” the worker from the product of his labour; admittedly it’s a trivial comparison, but if you manually dial a number (or another favourite ludditism: put a needle on an LP) you’re engaging with the phone (or the record player) in a way that the touch of a button can’t match. That engagement, small though it surely is, is like balm. It has the most unexpectedly soothing effect, and that’s very welcome in this most harassed of ages. It’s reconnecting with a past (perhaps a fictive one) where communication was more tactile, more hands-on, required more effort and therefore tended to be more rewarding. When we had half a dozen real friends and a slightly larger coterie of acquaintances, if we were lucky, instead of 246 clicks on Facebook, 246 illusions of friendship. Before our relationships were deadened by the soma we call convenience.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that the past was a better place than the present. Medicine, health choices, attitudes to race and sexuality, carpet and wallpaper – just a few areas off the top of my head in which the past sucked. But the past is so undeniably inaccessible, each of our parts in it so irrevocable, that we can make it the place where everything wrong with now was somehow right. In the present, communication is so ubiquitous that we spend more of the day surfing, emailing, texting, Facebooking and Twittering than we do with speech. But the past wasn’t hectic. In the past, you didn’t have to communicate with people you didn’t want to communicate with. The people you did want to communicate with, you saw faceto-face.

Except on the occasions when you gave them a ring. On those occasions, in a concession to technology, you would sit on your third-from-bottom stair, clamp the receiver under your chin and dial the number.

And of course we were all happier then. Weren’t we?

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Centrifugal: Sequence VI Some Actions Around The Centrifugal Book of Europe The members of Centrifugal are artists, educators, architects and theorists who have come together to investigate the spatial, political and economic forces producing contemporary ideas of Europe. Centrifugal arises from the peripheries, from sites that have often been formed through their colonial relations with the ‘old Europe’, and which are now structured through complex webs of desire, resistance and adaptation. The project is concerned with finding resonances and affinities across the diverse spaces, histories and political imaginaries inhabiting these edges of Europe.

Thursday 18th March

Friday 19th March

Saturday 20th March

Sunday 21st March

Ongoing Screenings in PS2 Window:

6 pm: The Centrifugal Book of Europe - Launch Venue: Conor Lecture Theatre, Art College.

11 am: Taru Elfving and Susan Kelly Seminar: ‘Role of Networked Curation& Criticism’ Venue: Brown&Bri, 11 Lombard Street, Belfast ------------------------------------2 pm: Kalle Hamm Tour: ‘International Window Shopping Tour’ Venue: Belfast Exposed Gallery

12 noon & 2 pm Susan Kelly Performance: ‘Silences’ Venue: Belfast Exposed & City Hall

2 pm: Aisling O’Beirn Aisling O’Beirn’s Belfast Landmark Hunt Venue: Depart from Belfast Exposed and pick up a free ‘Map’. Part of Exchange Mechanism.

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Daniel Jewesbury – Gilligan (2009) Nicole Hewitt – Zagreb Films -------------------------------------

The Centrifugal Book of Europe is a ‘map’ of the social, cultural and political space of contemporary Europe, and of the phantasmic Europes that may yet be called into being. Join us to launch the book and for a weekend of events in Belfast.

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Shopping tour where people try to find products from different countries, photograph them to make a slide show to be shown towards end of Centrifugal in PS2. Part of Exchange Mechansim ------------------------------------3.30 pm: Platforma 9,81 Workshop: ‘Invisible Cities’ Venue: Belfast Exposed Gallery Open workshop swapping case studies and methodologies with Forum for Alternative Belfast (FAB). Part of Exchange Mechanism ------------------------------------6 pm: Daniel Jewesbury and Robert Porter Lecture & screening: ‘On Broadway’ Venue: Conor Lecture Theatre, Art College Jewesbury and Porter have been investigating the ‘space’ of post-conflict Belfast for several years. In this lecture they will describe the successive regenerations that have taken place at Broadway. From this basis they will introduce a new approach to theories of the ‘event’, and to critical public art practice, in the perpetuallyregenerating city.

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In collaboration with Paul King / BBeyond as part of Exchange Mechanism. www.bbeyondperformance.org ------------------------------------12 pm: Nicole Hewitt Performance: ‘Belfast Rubbish’ Collaborative Venue: Belfast Exposed Gallery Performance in response to collected items of Belfast rubbish - an ongoing preparation and rehearsals as part of Exchange Mechanism Platform.

------------------------------------6 pm: Sezgin Boynik Talk, screening and DJ set: The Politics of Punk in Peripheral Countries Venue: Black Box Café, 18 – 22 Hill St Sezgin Boynik, co-author of ‘An Interrupted History of Turkish Punk’,will present his analysis of what Punk meant in the peripheries, including Turkey and former Yugoslavia.

Followed by archive screenings and a special Turkish-Irish DJ set.t.

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‘Some Actions Around the Centrifugal Book of Europe’ was kindly sponsored by the University of Ulster Cultural Development Fund.

Monday 22nd March 11 am: Minna L Henriksson Workshop: ‘Making a Network Map’ Venue: Flaxart Studios, Top floor, United Optical Building, 44 – 46 Corporation St Belfast.

All day workshop - To book a place on the workshop please email Erika at flaxartstudios@googlemail.com -------------------------------------

Tuesday 23rd March 2 pm: Kalle Hamm Screening: ‘International Window Shopping Tour’ Venue: PS2, Donegall Street, Belfast Screening of slide show from Kalle’s ‘International Window Shopping Tour’.

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BROWN&BRÍ

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BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

Bureaucracy: How it really works Do you think civil servants do little more than sit around drinking tea all day? Are you convinced that the private sector could do it better?

Are you angry, REALLY ANGRY, about “red tape”, “pen pushers” and grey-suited mandarin bean-counters taking your hard earned taxes and wasting them on bureaucracy?

Well, your hour is coming: the long-term plan of free-reigned capitalism is coming into its final phase. As the global meltdown cuts away at the civil service budgets, resulting in lay-offs, redundancies and early retirements - collectively known as ‘natural wastage’ - then there will be no choice, none whatsoever, but to privatise it all, just like the 1980s - and what a success that was.

So how will this all come to pass? Three words: “Value for Money”.

Naturally all sensible thinking people realise that public money must be publicly accounted for; new policies must be for the benefit for all; and all government departments must be efficient and effective.

And, most importantly of all, it must be seen to show that public money is accounted for, that all new policies are for the benefit for all; and that all government departments are efficient and effective.

After all, this is YOUR bureaucracy in YOUR democracy.

So if your Government wants a new Policy, or a Strategy perhaps, maybe a Corporate Plan, probably as a result of some lobbyist focus group, then it must make sure that it is consulted on, Equality Impact assessed, reviewed, SWOT analysed, maybe do a PEST analysis, definitely look at TSN areas, aspire to Best Practice, and don’t forget your business plan. Are you thinking in terms of Joined Up Government with Key Stakeholders and Gatekeepers? Have you

available through hard copy, websites, blogs, Twitter posts and social networking? Is your feedback indicative of wide-scale buy-in?

If you have done all this, then all your weeks of bureaucratic hard work will prove that you have achieved value for money.

How could any private sector company ever compete to provide such a service? What’s that you say? The private sector aren’t obliged to have such an immense bureaucracy of reports, rules and balanced scorecards and weighted scoring to get things done? Hmm that’s true. Still, with the success of transformational Government, evidence-based feedback loops and endless tick-boxes, assessments and reports now prove that the Civil Service is indeed fit for purpose. and that purpose is to tie it up so completely in its own bureaucratic mess of red tape that there really is only one solution - to bring in the Private Sector And we have the stats to prove it.

By Dr Donkere van Burmah

quality staff implementing all this bureaucracy – are they Charter Marked, IIP accredited, or on the path to Steps to Excellence with the EFQM excellence model? Are you Transforming Government and updating your communications channels by making all this

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BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

REVIEWS Belfast Burgers Various locations I am a burger connoisseur. I’m not especially proud of that fact.

There is something crude about them, I know. Burgers are tainted with the garish, strip-lit patina of the fast food joint, the greasy, cheesy lure of McDonalds. And then there’s the fact that lusting after burgers seems somehow unfeminine. I’m not saying women should all be delicately nibbling rocket leaves and sipping pomegranate juice. But snarfing a burger (the correct technical term) feels so filthy, so greedy. And so very, very right.

I should make it clear that I don’t long for cheap, skimpy, pallid meat patties. I want the full-blooded variety: made from excellent well-hung steak, with a chargrilled, crisp exterior and a pink, tender inside. That is what I long for.

If I see a burger on a restaurant menu, I cannot resist. Will I have the pork belly with cannellini beans? The spatchcocked poussin? Or will i have the big dirty burger, an ignorant wodge of meat in a bap?

It’s the burger every time.

I think my burger love may have started as a child, when I discovered Ken’s burger restaurant in Bangor. Ken’s was the kind of place that served tomato ketchup in squeezy red fake tomatoes, before the practice became knowing and ironic. The burgers came nestled in soft green and silver foil, reeking of onions and tucked in

a floury white bap. Probably the melted cheese was of the plasticky But it had more heft than you might expect. True, it was made square sort, but memory transposes it into the most flavoursome from lamb, which was a bit of a jolt. Lamb often tastes unpleasantly ooze. You stuffed the burger in your mouth with a handful of chips goaty to me, yet the ovine flavour wasn’t too pronounced this time. and felt content.

The burger seemed to be subtly scented with cumin and ginger, a So where are the best burgers to be found today? The Gourmet cheffy touch which was more of a distraction than an enhancement.

Burger Bank on the Belmont Road ain’t bad. And recently I enjoyed Burgers should be basic, elemental food. Meat. Bread. Bap. Tomato a really tasty one in Made in Belfast, down the side of the Northern sauce. Cheese (maybe). Don’t screw about with them and dress them Bank in Donegall Square West. You have to be in the right frame up. It’s just wrong. of mind to go to MiB. A determined inner serenity is necessary to The other difficulty was that I had to eat the lamb burger while a counteract the effects of all the self-consciously kitschy stuff on the group of ladies-who-lunch shrieked and brayed over their micro-leaf wall, and the fact that you will probably have to sit on a cardboard salads. One woman had a laugh like a banshee - a wailing, agonised stool with a cod-philosophical saying scribbled on it. A couple of moan. It didn’t make you want to linger. But the burger itself was hours of yoga should do the trick. hot, filling, meaty. A qualified success.

Anyway, this burger was a big bastard. I cut him in half for These Belfast burgers were decent nosh. But for the definitive decency’s sake, before I attempted to pick him up. (I never use article, you have to travel further afield. The burgers at Balloo a knife and fork to eat a burger. I’m after an unmediated, tactile House in Killinchy, Co Down, are crispy cow heaven. Even the experience.) He came in a Belfast bap, the sort with the slightly overaccompanying salads are ballsy there. And the ones in the Elephant baked top, and with a cheesy Welsh rarebit topping. On the side was and Castle in Dublin are truly superlative. Here they ask you how a small enamel cup of tomato relish, as well as the obligatory chips. you want your burger cooked, in the same manner as a steak. Have Oddly, the whole thing was presented on a rustic wooden chopping the mozzarella-topped one, medium rare, and weep with joy. board.

One more thing. There’s no point taking anyone with you when I had to practically unhinge my jaw to get a full bite, but that only you’re sating your burger hunger. You don’t want your friends to see added to the sense of glorious plenty. The meat was Dexter beef, you like this. Eat rudely, fast and alone. It’s the only way. that small, obligingly tasty variety. The flavour kapowed through my mouth, and the relish ran down my chin. Bloody good.

Reviewed by Bitsy Sonomabiche The only trouble with the burger in the Avoca Cafe in Arthur Street was that, to get there, I had to go through the nightmare of pink gingham, pink fake cherry blossom branches and pink wellingtons that is the Avoca shop. For this reason, I didn’t hold out much hope for the Avoca burger. I thought that it, too, would be twee and ladylike and lacking in cojones.   

Talks at Belfast Exposed Demands and Denials of Freedom 12 March & 23 March 2010 Demands and Denials of Freedom: Day 1 Friday 12 March 2010

Demands and Denials of Freedom: Day 2 Friday 23 March 2010

-------------------------------------------Time: 12:00 - 15:00 Pirates of the Internet Copyleft and The Commons Is copying the same as stealing? Are you a pirate? The entertainment industry are lobbying governments Europe-wide to introduce legislation that will undermine personal privacy and civil liberties in the interest of protecting innovation and artists rights. Kevin Flanagan leads a discussion and presentations on Copyleft, The Commons and the Free Culture Forum Charter.

-------------------------------------------Time: 16:00 - 18:00 Censorship, Self Censorship and artistic expression An open conversation with artists about constraints on freedom of expression and how it impacts on their practice. Lead by Julia Farrington, Index on Censorship.

---------------------------Time: 11:00 - 14:00 Censorship, Self Censorship and artistic expression An open conversation with curators and publishers about constraints on freedom of expression and how it impacts on their practice. Lead by Stacey Patton Anderson, Index on Censorship Index on Censorship are research partners for Exchange Mechanism -------------------------------------------Time: 16:00pm - 17:00pm Campaign for Artists Freedom Manick Govinda challenges new Home Office regulations - which will curb invitations to non-EU artists and academics to visit the UK for talks, artist residencies, conferences and temporary exhibitions.

Index on Censorship are research partners for Exchange Mechanism -------------------------------------------19.:30pm - 21.00pm Privacy, Human Rights & The Law Current policy and practice concerning the national DNA database have thrown the relationship between the individual and the state into sharp relief. How important is privacy in our lives today, and does the ‘surveillance state’ pose a threat to it?

Head of Artist Advisory Services and Artists' Producer at Arts Admin, Manick is also a member of the London Cultural Strategy Group at London City Hall.

-------------------------------------------Time: 19:00pm - 21:00 Policing the Public Gaze: Assault on Citizen Photography The Manifesto Club debates the growing restriction of citizen photography - by community safety wardens, private security guards and self-appointed ‘jobsworths’.

The Manifesto Club campaigns for freedom in everyday life.

John Fitzpatrick, professor of law and director of the Kent Law Clinic, University of Kent at Canterbury assesses the recent contribution made by the law, and human rights law in particular, to these issues. for more information see:

Speakers: Pauline Hadaway is the Director of Belfast Exposed and author, 'Policing the Public Gaze

www.manifestoclub.com www.photographernotaterrorist.org www.reportdigital.co.uk www.photo-forum.org

Jonathan Warren is a freelance photographer, based in London working for daily newspapers, magazines and news websites. He is one of the founders of the ‘I'm a Photographer, Not a Terrorist’ campaign.

Jess Hurd is a freelance photographer and contributor to Report Digital.

Josie Appleton is the Director of the Manifesto Club.

-------------------------------------------Belfast Exposed 23 Donegall Street | Belfast BT1 2FF Northern Ireland www.belfastexposed.org

BUREAUCRACY. THE VACUUM NO.45

The Out to Lunch Festival

Brain Box

MAGNERS LIGHT STYLE AWARDS

6th to the 31st January 2010

UTV

Café Vaudeville, Belfast

The Out to Lunch Festival returned this year for its fifth incarnation.

I’ve always looked upon it as The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival’s humble little sister - kind of tagging along, tugging meekly on her skirt, wanting one day to grow up like her oh-so-popular sibling.

However, after a three week run with over forty five shows, astonishingly held in just one small venue there seems to be little that is modest or humble about her.

It shouldn’t really work. It really shouldn’t, not in January, not just after Christmas, not when it’s cold outside and when we’re all suddenly broke and we’re all a little fatter and a little more depressed. Not when we could be sitting at home in front of the fire half way through the first season of The Wire box-set we got from Santa. But it does. The shows are cheap, a fiver each and with a hearty lunch thrown in for afternoon performances it sure beats sitting in Clements eating expensive yellow soup and eavesdropping on hipsters as a means of in-meal entertainment.

The opening few days saw a host of comedic acts take to the stag - Karl Spain, Andrew Maxwell and Kevin McAleer - which was a good programming idea seeing as most us were probably still hung-over or hadn’t gotten home yet from New Year’s Eve and were in need of a little endorphin seepage to soothe away the demons.

Andrew Maxwell was a particular highlight, seemingly improvising the majority of his act and catering it for his Belfast audience whereas Kevin McAleer treated us to two helpings of his classic comedy show Turn it On. Enter stage left then a variety of theatrical and literary events.

Brian Keenan read from his memoir I’ll Tell Me Ma and former Labour MP Chris Mullen took to the stage in a revealing discussion about his 20 years in British politics. Grace Maxwell, partner of indie music godfather Edwyn Collins, read from her novel Laughing and Falling , about the long and arduous journey of therapy her husband took while attempting to re-inhabit his body following two devastating brain hemorrhages. It tied in nicely with a performance from Collins himself only a few days later. The week then coming to a close with an irreverent, bizarre yet brutally funny performance by Paul Currie in his one man show Sticky Bivouac.

Then, for over two weeks there was … well, look, there was a hell of a lot of music. A nonsense amount of music, with nearly thirty gigs in fourteen days. To be completely honest I’m not even going to try to dissect it all. It would be like trying to review your mate’s ipod. Your mate, who has a ridiculously eclectic taste, who actually means it when you ask him what sort of music he like and he says ‘I like everything.’ The sort of guy you’d as likely see clicking his fingers and looking as though he ‘gets it’ at a Paris jazz bar as you would see chewing on his own head, standing directly in front of the P.A in a Berlin dungeon nightclub as a quarter of a million beats per second pound through his face… that sort of mate… you know the type. Malcolm Middleton, Sam Baker and a Bonobo DJ set all shared the stage with an array of musicians from every musical genre imaginable. It was… relentless.

Every festival has a dud, every single one, a show where nobody shows up and the performer (usually the actor of a one man self penned simply dreadful biopic about growing up in blah blah blah struggling with such and such an affliction) stands on stage overacting while the driven-to-drink festival director looks on in mild resentment at the grubby stain skid-marking his festival. ‘Out to Lunch’ didn’t have one. The Festival sold out practically two shows a day for the entire festival’s duration. That’s no small feat. It speaks volumes about the programming team and the astute marketing strategy of the festival heads but mostly about the quality and diversity of the acts that appeared. Take a look on the website (www. cqaf.com) and ensure you catch as much as you can next year.

The licence under which UTV operates states that the broadcaster has a duty ‘to provide a range of high quality and diverse programming’.

At the risk of sounding like ‘Angry from Tunbridge Wells’, that’s a duty which, in my opinion, it fails to fulfil five nights a week, by spewing out its tv-for-profit programme Brain Box. Brain Box was created by Ostrich Media, a group last seen peddling Quiz Call to insomniacs, drunks and graveyard-shift security guards as part of Channel Five’s late night schedule.

Like its predecessor, Brain Box is ostensibly a game show. Each night a caffeine-addled presenter stalks a glitter-soaked set tempting viewers to ring up and have a go at solving a puzzle or answering a question. If they get it right, viewers win cash, if they get wrong they hear canned groans and the presenter begins her glamour model temptress routine all over again.

As a concept the show is unashamedly cynical. Viewers are not seen as viewers; they are individual streams of income, so bewitched by the promise of a quick win and a bit of low rent razzle-dazzle that they are all too willing to fill the pockets of the broadcaster and the producers.

And those pockets are certainly bulging. Each call costs £1; a single two-minute game can have anything up to two hundred callers, of which only one will be successful. Given that the show is aired for around 12 hours each week the take home profit must be considerable – it is the only show on the UTV roster not to feature advertisement breaks.

In its defence, it has had over 1,000 winners since the programme it was first aired in August 2009, with prizes ranging from £50 to £500. And you couldn’t accuse Brain Box of not having the viewer’s best interest at heart. ‘Set yourself a limit and stick to it’ they are warned, advice so sage-like in its nature it could become a mantra for modern life.

The programme is vaguely hypnotic and perfectly suited to the late night/early morning slot. It is easy to zone out to and one would assume an effective visual sedative.

The presenters are a unique breed and may well warrant further study should an anthropological school ever have a few spare grants knocking about. The show’s format requires the presenter to drum up interest in the games while talking to viewers in friendly, almost amorous tones, about nothing in particular. The result is stream-ofconsciousness presenting, which veers from nonsensical babbling to weird self-revelation.

Puzzles are either impossibly easy or simply impossible. During a word search game viewers are asked to find the names of fruits and vegetables amongst the jumbled up letters. Simple enough, until those everyday staples kale (‘a variety of cabbage of course’), guar and okra are revealed amongst the answers.

Brain Box is undoubtedly exploitative and questionable in its morality. It is a disheartening reflection of contemporary commercial television and a natural spin-off of the pay-to-vote programming which dominates TV schedules. The producers have identified a market and cobbled together a format which allows them to tap into it with maximum profit. The thing is, you can’t really hold it against them. From alchemy to snake-oil, so long as people are willing to buy crap there will be people queuing up to sell it. Luckily there’s usually an old movie on the other side.

Reviewed by Marlowe Canning

Reviewed by Aidan Stennett

“Do you think her boobs are real?” asks a girl in an orangey dress, the tone of her voice deadly serious. She motions with her glass towards a local TV personality who is holding court at the far end of the room from us.

It’s not the usual line of questioning you get from a stranger at a bar in Belfast, but then again, the Magners Light Style Awards is not your usual night out. Well, not according to its sponsors anyway. The official website tells us that the event is “the highpoint in the social calendar amongst the glamorous set, allowing those who set trends and turn heads to strut their stuff!”

The aforementioned glamorous set has gathered in Café Vaudeville. Normally the venue of choice for check-shirted divorcees on the pull, tonight the bar is awash with girls in designer dresses, boys in pointy shoes and more girls (and boys) in fake tan. Before the show begins, we make our way to the upstairs bar for some lowcalorie pear-flavoured drinks, courtesy of the sponsors. It’s a tight squeeze and in order to reach the free cider, we have to file past a long line of excited guests, most of whom appear very much at home at these kinds of events. Ex-reality TV contestants, former Miss Northern Irelands, promotions girls, bar owners and hairdressers are all present, each one vying for a coveted Style Award. I get strangely excited when I spot the guy from The Apprentice.

But the natural high of celeb-spotting soon turns to sweaty-palmed fear, as my outfit (navy jacket from second-hand shop, blue shirt and spotty bow tie) is systematically dissected by a long line of unforgiving eyes, belonging to people with trendier clothes and much nicer hair. At the end of this gauntlet of beauty, smiling girls dressed in elaborate togas are handing out the long-awaited free booze. But just as we reach for our first glass, we realise we’ve made a big Style Awards faux-pas. Orlaith from Big Brother and pals are waiting to get their picture taken, and we’re blocking the view. A cross word and a nudge in the back from the photographer sends us on our way.

Only a selected few, it seems, are plucked from the crowd for official photographs and, despite some conspicuous hovering on our part, noone asks us. Slightly miffed, we head downstairs for the main awards show, availing of more cider on the way.

Our hosts for the evening, an ex-Miss Great Britain and a local radio DJ, are taking their jobs very seriously. So too are the nominees. The announcement of the ‘Most Stylish Restaurant’ winner (the Fitzwilliam Hotel) is greeted with much fist-pumping and screaming by a big group of supporters beside us. “How would you describe your personal style?” asks host Gemma Garrett, as each of the evening’s winners collect their trophies on stage. Always be true to yourself, never be afraid to experiment with colour and wear clothes that reflect your personality, we’re told. After more nuggets of style advice (all delivered with straight faces and followed by polite applause) and a final appearance on stage by the girls in the togas, the night’s entertainment is over.

For a small city, Belfast has an inordinate amount of these identikit award ceremonies (‘The Ulster Tatler’, ‘IN!’ ‘GO!’ and ‘Fate’ magazines all run their own events each year). Their marketing blurbs talk of celebrating the best of the ‘new Northern Ireland’, which generally translates as shops in Victoria Square and a handful of bars in the Cathedral Quarter. These events keep plenty of people in business (what would our local marketing managers, modelling agencies and PR firms do without them?) but the whole thing feels reductive, repetitive and rather incestuous. Once you’ve listened to ten local ‘celebs’ revealing their personal style mantras, you start wishing the event was sponsored by a much, much stronger drink.

Maybe I’m just jealous I didn’t get my photo taken.

Reviewed by Des O’Hare