Name: A culture of fear is undermining leadership at every level of society
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A culture of fear is undermining leadership at every level of society

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Thirty years ago today, Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street for the last time as prime minister. On the doorstep, she said she was “very happy that we leave the United Kingdom in a very, very much better state than when we came here 11 and a half years ago”.It seems a good moment to reflect on how the practice of leadership has changed since then.Mrs Thatcher had come to power in 1979 partly because people felt the country lacked leadership. The famous question the Conservatives, under Ted Heath, had put to voters in the general election of February 1974 was: “Who governs Britain?” The fact they had to ask showed the problem – and contributed to the Tories’ defeat.In those days, the problem centred around industry, especially nationalised industry. Trade union militants had great power, backed by legal privileges, to wreck the economy. Management and ministers were frightened of them. The gradual trade union reforms of the Thatcher era moved power both upwards – to management – and downwards – to ordinary members.They worked. The number of working days lost to strikes dropped from over 29 million in 1979 to fewer than two million in 1990. Business confidence returned. So did confidence in the power of elected governments to govern. Even today, no one – except, of course, the unchanging, ever-Red Jeremy Corbyn and friends – wants a return to the industrial relations of the Seventies.Yet leadership today – political, industrial/financial, civil service, educational, sporting, media, cultural, charitable, Church and state, private and public, police, even military – has that may be even worse than that of the Seventies.In the course of my work, I meet leaders in the above areas – Cabinet ministers, chief executives, bankers, judges, vice-chancellors, chief constables, bishops, generals, museum directors, etc. Many of them are people of high ability, but all of them nowadays, I sense, are subject to an emotion which corrodes their ability to act: fear. They are not wrong to be fearful. Something in the culture wants them to be afraid. What is it? How did we get here?As is often the case with things that go wrong, the road has been paved with good intentions. Tony Blair’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), for example, was designed to empower the citizen against the excessive secrecy of bureaucracy. Yet it has also undermined the proper, iterative, well-recorded process by which leaders should reach policy decisions.If officials and ministers know that release under FOIA could at any point expose a document they have written to public gaze, they will be too frightened to write what they really think in the first place. This, plus the traps of social media and the deification of “whistle-blowers”, means that “sofa government” becomes the norm. Nothing important is written down; nothing is fully prepared. Things are run by a court, not a Cabinet.Again, it is a truism that governments should act under law, but is it to the public good that lawyers should usurp the prerogative of ministers and military to use violence in extreme situations? In Mrs Thatcher’s time, the SAS was allowed to rescue hostages in the Princes Gate siege by killing their captors and to shoot IRA terrorists before they could blow up British soldiers in Gibraltar. No modern prime minister would dare approve such operations, yet the current terrorist threats to our citizens are even more severe.In the workplace generally, many reforms have improved the powers of employees against bad employers. It has rightly become against women, older people, or ethnic minorities or to sexually harass the people who work for you. To take an extreme example, it was said of an owner of The Spectator magazine 50 years ago that his policy was to ask the secretaries to sleep with him. If they refused, he sacked them. If they agreed, he sacked them. He would not stand much chance today.Yet the assertion of rights has now gone so far that leaders have less and less time to pay attention to the actual job they are supposed to do because they are ensnared in lawsuits and employment disputes. Worse still, the growing power of an unsupported accusation means that the career of everyone in a position of responsibility hangs by a thread. He – it is more likely a man than a woman – will be suspended if accused, with the burden of proof reversed: he will have to prove his innocence.The Macpherson report into the killing of Stephen Lawrence famously defined a racist incident as “any incident which is perceived to be racist, either by the victim or by any other person”. This definition is patently unjust to the accused, yet it has become normative. People use it all the time, and because they know its power, some abuse it. Leaders, of course, are not so often directly accused, but that is no escape. The accusation of cover-up, or just of not handling such a situation very well, is enough to ruin a leader’s reputation. So they are scared. The fact they are scared only adds to the incentive to accuse them. They become in thrall to their HR departments.The most recent frightening development is the . This reached its apogee in the assault on our institutions by supporters of Black Lives Matter after the killing of George Floyd in May. Suddenly, government departments, museums, galleries, universities and businesses which had absolutely nothing to do with policing in Minneapolis, and most of which are specifically not supposed to engage in political activity, came under social-media orders to “take the knee”, and express BLM views. Hartwig Fischer, the director of the British Museum officially declared the museum “aligned with the spirit and soul of Black Lives Matter everywhere”. As an art expert, he knows how vital it is to establish the true provenance of an object before accepting it. Yet he appears to have done no due diligence on the extremist provenance of BLM.Frightened of what? Better to ask, I think, frightened of whom? It is fascinating that so many of our cultural, university, sometimes even school leaders explain their BLM response almost wholly in terms of their staff, particularly younger staff, or their students. Museums, for instance, or the National Trust, come under pressure from the more radicalised among the younger generation of their curators, and simply give in, as if they careers depended on it.The institutions show an almost militant lack of interest in the views of the millions who actually visit their galleries, libraries or houses, let alone those of the Government which hands them huge amounts of taxpayers’ money. The BBC is similarly scared of its activist staff and uninterested in its licence-fee payers.A shift of power is taking place. The people who are paid to lead in many areas of British life increasingly lack the power to do so. As industry in the Seventies ceded power to hard-Left union shop stewards, so today large swathes of Whitehall, local government, culture and education cede it to their woke employees and the Twitter mob that backs them up. This disempowers voters and the Government they duly elected. Once again, the question becomes: “Who governs Britain?”Related TopicsThe Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our.You need to be a subscriber to join the conversation. 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Thirty years ago today, Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street for the last time as prime minister. On the doorstep, she said she was “very happy that we leave the United Kingdom in a very, very much better state than when we came here 11 and a half years ago”.It seems a good moment to reflect on how the practice of leadership has changed since then.Mrs Thatcher had come to power in 1979 partly because people felt the country lacked leadership. The famous question the Conservatives, under Ted Heath, had put to voters in the general election of February 1974 was: “Who governs Britain?” The...

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Charles Moore

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A culture of fear is undermining leadership at every level of society

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