Shouting and throwing things isn’t bullying, it’s just bad manners

Wednesday, 24th February 2010

Of course it’s bad to persecute people, says Rod Liddle. But bullying has now become the latest politically correct public sector growth industry

But it is almost impossible to stop these ‘antis’ from expanding, from almost unlimited aggrandisement. Public sector industries are set up to fight iniquities and become iniquities in themselves, having captured the zeitgeist and, more often than not, the legislature too. They spread their wings, they claim more and more territory until we all accept that one in three of us are disabled, when we’re clearly not, one in three of us are gay, when we’re clearly not; bullying ceases to be this awful thing which spoils the lives of vulnerable and blameless individuals and becomes instead this business which happens to everyone, when clearly it does not. And as these public sector industries expand, sucking in ever larger sums of charitable donations and taxpayer’s money, they simply cannot be gainsaid, in public; because we are all against bullying, racism, sexism and discrimination against the disabled. Even when the definitions of each ‘ism’ have long since mutated beyond recognition from what was originally intended and have become an end in themselves.

What constitutes bullying in the workplace now, according to both the charity ‘National Bullying Helpline’ and the deathless associations of human resources managers, is simply bosses getting cross and displaying that annoyance directly to their employees. This certainly seems to be the case with Gordon Brown, who is accused of occasionally throwing a mobile phone across a desk. This isn’t bullying — it is frustration, exasperation, impatience. It might be bad manners and, according to the rapidly growing sector of our economy which deals with human resources (another sector of the economy which has grown disproportionately), it might be ‘unprofessional’, as they put it. But it is not remotely bullying. It is, perhaps, a good thing to show an employee that his or her incompetence had a certain definite effect which was undesirable and that, as a consequence, it would be far better not to do it again.

If what Gordon brown has been accused of constitutes bullying, then I have been bullied intermittently throughout my professional life and so probably have you. Bosses shouting at you in front of other people because you messed something up, rather than doing as the human resources people would prefer and saying almost nothing, just writing something surreptitiously on your file and, a few months later, sacking you after a disciplinary hearing. As an employee, I know which approach I prefer — the human and humane, even if it might sting for a while. Rather a Nokia to the skull than some corporate monkey telling me, bloodlessly, that I was for the chop. Long live a certain kind of bullying, then, even if it is not bullying as you or I might recognise the term.