A life changed forever: Nat West Markets January - August 1994

After leaving Midland in the spring of 1993, I turned freelance as a business systems consultant. I trained as an IT auditor during my notice period, and then had a couple of early successes - an IT strategy for Woolwich Equitable Building Society, and a quality assurance report for Girobank. But something else reared its head. I had a meeting with a recruitment consultant I had talked to previously when I was considering leaving Midland after the GALM 1 disaster. He dug out his notes from our previous meeting and read them to me: "Needs to decide whether she wants to be in banking and IT or whether she really wants to be a singer".

It brought me up short. My first love had always been music, and in particular singing: I had fallen into banking because of the ruin I had made of my voice due to stress and poor technique, but that was some years ago and I knew I could now sing again. My husband was working as an executive officer in the Civil Service, we had no children, and although we had a house we had no other ties. I discussed it with him and we agreed that I would try to return to the Royal College of Music to study opera.

In November 1993, I got in touch with the Royal College and arranged an audition for February 1994. I knew this was my last chance to go into the opera school: I was already older than most other students, and if I left it any longer they would not even consider me because of my age. But there were other things in the back of my mind too.....I had made a life plan towards the end of my time at OSS, in which I said I would like to have one child within 5 years. I didn't realise it, but that was the real plan.

In December 1993 my former boss from GALM rang me. He was now at Nat West Finance. Nat West Markets had got itself into a bit of a mess with over-the-counter currency options, losing a fair amount of money and sparking complaints to senior management that compliance and risk management were not all they should be. He wanted me to come in to design a financial control system for currency options that would track the underlying FX positions, enabling traders to price the options better and reducing the incidence of in-the-money option exercise at poor strike prices. And just to make it more complicated, he wanted the system designed in such a way that it could be used for other OTC derivative products. The system was to be PC-based, small and very flexible - clearly he had in mind something like the GALM PC system I had designed at Midland.

I duly turned up at Nat West Markets, worked out a high-level design, then in partnership with a Visual Basic contractor, designed and developed what we unimaginatively called the Currency Options Accounting System (COAS). Early on in my time at Nat West Markets I discovered I was pregnant, which effectively killed any ideas of being employed permanently by Nat West. I remained a contractor, with a firm departure date of the end of July. My pregnancy also forced me to cancel my Royal College of Music audition. I had not only wrecked my only chance of studying opera, I had also - though I didn't realise it then - ended whatever hope there had ever been of a professional singing career.

I'm not going to talk much about my time at Nat West, except to say that I enjoyed it. It was hard work, and towards the end I became very tired - especially as I actually left two weeks later than planned, leaving me only two weeks of rest before my due date. But we delivered a working prototype of the system, designed a second phase for interest rate options, and finally handed the system over to IT for porting to their preferred technology. COAS ran successfully for the next 8 years and was finally decommissioned by RBS as part of the systems migration after the takeover of Nat West.

But my life was never the same again.

The lost heart: Midland GALM 3

A short while after the "leaks" incident in Midland GALM 2, I sat in a meeting between my boss and an Andersen partner, watching the Andersen partner twist my boss round his little finger.  I see deviousness and manipulation very clearly when I am not the target.....if only I could learn to see it so clearly when I AM the target!

The Andersen partner wanted to get going with a pilot study for Phase 3 of GALM, which would bring in data from overseas entities and add additional reporting. He proposed to send in some of his minions, who were at a loose end, to visit the various user departments and produce a high-level scope and initial requirements document. The consultants would be supplied at a very large discount, since they were currently not gainfully employed. I listened in disbelief as my boss agreed to this Machiavellian scheme.

Afterwards I said to him, "You do realise that Andersen's real objective is to wind up the users into expecting a Phase 3 even though we haven't finished Phases 1 and 2 yet? He knows we don't have the resources to do phase 3. Before you know it the place will be crawling with Andersen consultants expensively doing Phase 3 at user behest."

"No, no," he replied. "He's got a problem - he has some staff he doesn't have work for at the moment. We're helping him out, that's all. There won't be a project from this".

Such naivety. I was right, of course. He did apologise, later.....after a very difficult meeting with Andersen Consulting at which he explained why they would not be running Phase 3 despite their reasonable expectations that they would be doing so. Followed by an even more difficult series of meetings with user management, as a result of which he was forced to create a Phase 3 project even though we had not finished Phase 1, Phase 2 hadn't started and there were no free resources for Phase 3.

I saw my chance. Overseas systems I knew about, better than almost anyone. And I had long thought that the GALM 1 massive database containing detailed data, while useful for investment banking and markets, would not be appropriate for the smaller and simpler - and largely autonomous - overseas units. So I wrote a formal letter bidding for the Phase 3 project on the basis of a stripped-down PC-based system producing a range of reports using summary data feeds from overseas systems and GALM1. It would be far smaller than the previous phases, far quicker and easier to implement, require a much smaller team and cost far less. It would need to be accompanied by a much larger programme of data enhancement in overseas systems themselves, but that could be rolled out over a period of time, with manual data submission to fill gaps until automated feeds could be provided. I didn't know it then, obviously, but this proposal was to become the blueprint for my later work with Nat West and RBS.

My proposal was accepted and I became Phase 3 project manager. I recruited a small team - helped by the sudden availability of people from other departments who would otherwise face redundancy under Midland's "Profits Improvement Programme". Work got under way on design and development of the PC system itself. Around this time, Phase 2 of GALM (which was supposed to incorporate UK retail banking data into the GALM 1 database) was cancelled due to cost constraints, so we bid for that one too on the grounds that extending the PC system to accommodate high-level data from the retail bank was no big deal and we happened to have a team member who had come from retail banking, knew lots about the systems and the data and - even more importantly - had good established user contacts in retail banking. We won that one too, and the project officially became GALM phases 2 and 3. Suddenly I was a success, doing the sort of project work I love - small quick win developments that deliver real business benefit at low cost.

I knew that to do the overseas systems part of the project, we would need to work closely with OSS. I didn't see this as a problem: after all, I had come from OSS. So I met with a senior manager in OSS, who was very interested in what we were doing. He offered to head up the overseas data feed part of the project, staffing it with OSS people. He was more senior than me, which was a trifle awkward, but it seemed an eminently sensible suggestion, so we agreed to it. His name was written into the project structure reporting to me. But in reality he had other ideas.

By this time GALM 3 was a hot topic. It was being discussed at very senior levels in the bank. So the head of OSS saw an opportunity to get approval for his own pet project - standardisation of all the overseas systems. This would of course supersede the overseas feeds part of GALM 3, since the feed requirements would be incorporated into the standardisation programme.  He won his bid... but not for his department. A new Midland Finance-sponsored project was created, headed up by the manager who should have been leading the overseas feeds part of GALM 3. The heart had been ripped out of my project. And there was nothing at all that I could do about it.

I should have known, I suppose. After all, why would someone volunteer to report to someone more junior, even on a project basis? Why not bid to run the project themselves? He knew he couldn't dislodge me as project manager of the system itself - but he didn't want to. The job he wanted was the much larger overseas systems enhancement programme. He agreed to my proposal, then went behind my back to get what he really wanted.

Despite the loss of the overseas data feeds part of the project, we still continued with the rest. We delivered the basic PC system with manual data submission for UK retail banking (GALM 2) and the larger overseas units (GALM 3).  There was more work still to do - more reports to be written and more data to collect - but my development team leader was well capable of running the remaining developments. So when Midland was taken over by HSBC and the rest of the GALM project was cancelled, along with the overseas standardisation programme, I engineered my own redundancy. I felt it would be wrong of me to hang on to a job that could be done by my team leader: I knew that he had a young family, so job security was important to him, whereas I had no children and at that time no plans to have any, and had now completed my MBA, so the sponsorship was no longer an issue.

By this time my original boss had been moved sideways and I had a different manager. Ian was one of the best "people" managers I have ever encountered, and I liked and respected him a lot. It is thanks to him that I am a qualified project manager: he sent me on the pilot run of Midland's in-house project management course which led to a formal qualification. And I felt for him, as a "people" person, being tasked with probably the most horrible job any manager can be expected to do: the silent dismantling of an entire department. SMI was being eliminated, not by making people redundant - that would cost too much - but by making life so uncomfortable for the staff that they left of their own volition. They hated him, of course, even more than his predecessor. But they did what he wanted. One after another, they found new jobs and left. How he coped with that personally I will never know. I know he hated doing it: I think I was one of the very few people he trusted enough to show a little of what he really felt about it all.

But he didn't do that to me. He simply asked me to produce my plans for next year. The plans I produced didn't include me. My redundancy came two weeks later. My former boss was made redundant a day or two before, and I knew mine would follow. I remember being very agitated for those two days, waiting for the phone call....."come on, get on with it!" I thought. Eventually the call came, and I went down to the basement room where my manager was waiting.

"You know why you're here", he said.

"What took you so long?" I replied.

I don't think he wanted to do it. But I had left him with no choice. Looking back now, I regret my decision to leave HSBC/Midland, although I don't see that there was any alternative. Ian was someone with whom I could have enjoyed working, and there were others too that I liked and respected. I remained in touch with ex-Midland people at HSBC for some time afterwards.

Things are not always what they seem: Midland GALM 2

After my time in limbo following the Midland GALM disaster, eventually my line manager found me a job.....working directly for him as his assistant. This sounds like a good thing: as he put it, it was a more "protected" position, and it gave me the opportunity to learn far more about what was really going on. But it was not really appropriate: personal assistant to a top manager is a good job for a graduate trainee, but he was not a top manager and I was more senior than a graduate trainee. It was widely regarded as a considerable demotion. I had no choice but to accept the job, but I became a laughing stock. But not to Andersens. They started to take me seriously. "Personal assistant" to them meant "useful".

One of the things that I had to do, as his assistant, was try to introduce good project management practice into SMI, a department that he had taken over. The trouble was that SMI hated him, and did everything in their power to undermine him. They also hated me, as his representative. This was not obvious, and it was not universal. The head of that department had a small circle of close associates. And those associates did everything in their power to discredit me. The methods they used ranged from outright obstruction to lies and deception. Obstruction I could handle: it made my job difficult, but not impossible. But lies and deception were a different matter.

Just as with GALM 1 I had no idea what was really going on, so in this case too I was completely blind. I don't "read" people very easily and I find it difficult to judge when someone is lying. And because I am straightforward to the point of bluntness myself - which is partly the cause of my interpersonal difficulties - I assume everyone else is playing with a straight bat too.  That's why it is laughable when people accuse me of being "manipulative" or "twisting things". If they only knew.....I'm more devious than I used to be, but even now it doesn't come naturally and I can easily be wrongfooted by a more gifted player. Colin Duthie, one of my managers at OSS, commented once that I "don't play the game". He was only partly right. I didn't play the game, not because I chose not to but because I didn't even realise there was a game. These days I understand the game, though even now I don't always see it when I am part of it. Just as in a poker game, if you can't see the sucker, it's you, so in office politics: if you don't see the game, you are the one who is going to be stabbed in the back. And stabbed in the back is exactly what it feels like when you realise that someone is systematically spreading lies about you in order to discredit you - someone that you thought was friendly......

The first I knew of this was when my manager called me in and said that he had been told I had made some remarks that were extremely critical of a particular individual in SMI. I had indeed made some incautious remarks over drinks with a few members of SMI : not all of them were hostile, and at that time I didn't realise how much bad feeling there was anyway, so going for drinks with them didn't seem unreasonable.  But what was being said was a huge distortion of my remarks. I defended myself, of course: I admitted to the remarks but said that they were quoted out of context and distorted. He warned me to be careful what I said in future. There we left it....

But then there was a disaster. A few days later, I was accused of leaking details of a senior recruitment, including grade and salary. Apparently it was all round the office. He said it could only have come from me.

I was appalled. Given my disgraceful exit from the GALM project not long before, I could not afford another disaster. And even though it was seen as a demotion, the role of PA requires absolute discretion. If I couldn't be trusted, then I was dishonourably out of a job.....again. I had to defend myself.

I knew I had not leaked that information. I had told a couple of people from SMI that someone they knew from Andersen Consulting was joining Midland, but certainly hadn't given details of grade and salary. But my manager believed it came from me. I had to establish who else might have known about it. It transpired that my manager had disclosed the same information to everyone who reported directly to him - me, and two department heads. One was the head of the finance team with whom I had previously worked: the other was the head of the department that my line manager had taken over. Either might have had reason to try to discredit me. But the leak was in the department that had been taken over. I pointed out that it was possible that the head of the department had leaked it himself. My manager agreed that was possible, but then questioned why he would do that. I did not have an answer.....

But he turned out to be the source, although indirectly. By this time I had realised that the information leaks attributed to me were malicious. And although I had not given details of grade or salary, I had told a couple of people about the recruitment. One of them I was pretty sure would not have said anything. But the other.....I was not so sure. So I decided to test her.

The following day, I engaged her in conversation, and in the course of the conversation dropped a piece of confidential information. I had thought carefully about what I was going to drop - it had to be something that didn't really matter if it got out, but significant enough to make her want to leak it if she was the source of the leaks, as I suspected.

Sure enough, by the end of the day it was all round the office. And the following day it reached my manager. I explained to him what I had done, and why. I think that was the first time that he had realised just how much some people in SMI hated him.

It was still a bit of a mystery as to why this particular individual was so intent on destroying me. It was my boss she hated, not me. But there was a good reason. She was having an affair with the head of SMI: the information on the senior recruitment had come from him as "pillow talk". She assumed that the relationship between my boss and me was the same as hers with her boss, and therefore she could hurt him both professionally and personally by forcing him to dismiss me. It was thoroughly nasty.

And it brought home to me just how vulnerable I was to devious and manipulative people. I was far more guarded after that, being careful what I said and to whom I said it. It was a painful learning experience. But it was not enough. Far worse was to come.

Stormy waters: the Midland GALM disaster

I started at Midland Bank in 1986, working for their Overseas Systems Support (OSS) department, originally as an analyst/programmer then later as a project manager. I remember OSS as a protective environment: although I was criticised - after all, who isn't? it was always done in a supportive way. Looking back on it now, OSS seems like a haven. But then in many ways it was a department of "misfits". The senior management team had a policy of recruiting people who in one way or another were perceived as "difficult", because it kept staff costs down. But they also invested heavily in training and development, including personal skills training, precisely because of the management challenge that their recruitment policy created. Of course I didn't know all of this at the time: I know now because although OSS has long since disappeared  - along with Midland Bank - my boss there has remained a personal friend, and over the years we have talked about all of this.

The particular problem that I created stems from a very difficult childhood and adolescence, some of which I have written about elsewhere. I don't propose to go into that here. Suffice it to say that OSS took on someone who, in the words of my younger brother, "didn't know how to behave". Perhaps I am being hard on myself: but I really did have problems with interpersonal relationships. I could be very hard on people, critical of those who didn't think as fast or as clearly as I did and intolerant of people who didn't work as hard as me. And I was insensitive towards people's emotional state and unaware of their personal concerns. I know now that my own emotional "noise" was getting in the way and preventing me from hearing others....but it has taken me a a very long time to learn that.

OSS management sent me on assertiveness training, and provided supportive management. And I gradually became better at dealing with people, though it didn't come naturally. By the time OSS was restructured in 1990, I was a successful project manager with full lifecycle experience. So when I was invited to join a huge Group Asset & Liability Management (GALM) project in Midland's Finance Systems department, it seemed like a wonderful opportunity.

It turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. The project was a joint venture between Midland Finance and Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). I was to manage part of the project, reporting to a programme manager from Andersen who reported to a programme director from Midland (who was my line manager), with a team made up of a mixture of Midland Finance staff and Andersen consultants, none of whom actually reported to me or even worked anywhere near me. It was an unbelievably complex matrix management structure, and the team was dispersed - team members were all based in different areas, many in their own departments. To get any of them to do anything, I had to go through their respective line managers. And it soon became apparent that there was a history of bad relationships between some of the Andersen consultants and the Finance staff. I had no idea how to manage this cats-cradle of apparent and hidden relationships, and I made some bad mistakes, especially in my handling of Andersen staff. I am by no means proud of my dictatorial style of management at that time, but I had no idea how severe the retribution for my mistakes would be.

Early on, I was censured for publicly criticising a member of my team - an Andersen consultant - for ignoring the objectives that I had set him. That consultant was removed from the project and replaced, and the replacement's line manager - who was the Andersen programme manager - supervised her closely. This caused increasing friction: I felt I was being undermined as a project manager, while the Andersen programme manager complained that by trying to direct my Andersen staff as I saw fit I was interfering with the line relationship. It was an impossible situation. Something had to give.

One day my line manager called me in for a meeting, and informed me that I was being removed from the project. Apparently both the Andersen programme manager and the line manager of the Finance staff had complained about my treatment of their staff. He accepted their complaints at face value, and executed me.

I was devastated. And I was unemployed. Or rather, I was still employed, but I had nothing to do. For several weeks I forced myself to come into the office every day, knowing there was nothing to do when I got there. And every night I cried myself to sleep, unable to bring myself to talk to my husband about what I was going through. We had only been married a few months.....

Had my line manager investigated, he would have found that the truth was rather different from what had been presented to him. But I suppose because of the mistakes I had made in my dealings with the Andersen consultants who supposedly reported to me, he had already been primed to expect trouble. And in the end, the project was more important than me. I have no idea whether he ever found out about the distress his decision caused: although he was my line manager, I was physically located in a completely different department several floors below. The manager of that department knew about the situation and was concerned: I was doing an MBA at the time, so she gave me permission to study openly in the office....but I knew everyone around me resented the fact that I was reading books while they were working.

I was dreadfully unhappy. I considered looking for a job, but I lacked the confidence to blag my way into another job, especially as I now believed I was a failed project manager. Anyway, it was the 1990 recession and the jobs market was terrible. And Midland were part-sponsoring my MBA: I couldn't leave without forfeiting the sponsorship. I felt I was trapped.

What hurt most of all was being told that the finance team manager had complained that I had upset his staff. It was far too close to comfort to being punished for "upsetting people", without further explanation, as had happened all too often in my childhood. And I was pretty sure it was untrue. A short while before my removal from the project, in a one-to-one meeting, one of the young accountants in my team had become very upset. I don't handle tears very well, but I did my best. I asked her outright what the problems were that were causing her so much distress, and whether it was something I had done. She said it wasn't me: the Andersen team leader who was directing their work was being persistently rude and unpleasant to her and to the other young accountant involved, setting them impossible deadlines then criticising them when they didn't achieve them, refusing to answer their questions, hanging up the phone on them. That Andersen team leader supposedly reported to me, so after the meeting I asked her about it. "Oh, they're useless", she said. "They are completely unfocused". I said that her personal opinion of them didn't justify being unpleasant to them, and asked her to treat them with more respect. Unknown to me, she told her line manager about our conversation. Her line manager was the Andersen programme manager..... My dismissal from the project followed a few days later.

I did not discover for quite some time that the complaint about me came entirely from Andersen Consulting, who had claimed the support of the finance team manager for their complaint when he had not given it. It transpired that they had never wanted me, or any other Midland staff, on that project, so were systematically setting us up to fail. The emotional abuse of the young finance staff by the Andersen team leader was deliberately done to engineer their removal from the project. I suppose I was a bit more difficult to shift, being a direct report of the Midland programme director. But my Achilles heel was my interpersonal skills, so that's what they attacked. Their aim was to secure 100% Andersen staffing for the project, and they didn't care who got hurt in the process.

This was the first time I discovered just how vicious office politics can be. But it was certainly not the last, nor even the worst. To this day I remember that time at Midland, bad though it was, as less painful than either SBC Warburg or Charities Aid Foundation (CAF). I think SBC Warburg was probably the worst place I have ever worked, but CAF runs it close - which may be surprising to people who believe that big banks are bad, small banks good and charities wonderful. Give me a big retail bank any day. As employers they are far better than either investment banks or pretentious charities.

Mothers and work

This was my response to a Newsnight debate in which Laura Perrins, representing Mothers At Home Matter, claimed that for a mother to stay at home with her child is "not a luxury" and that therefore stay-at-home mothers should all be subsidised even if their husbands earn megabucks.

Sorry, Laura Perrin, but a stay-at-home mum IS a luxury. Most families can't afford it. #Newsnight
— Frances Coppola (@Frances_Coppola) October 1, 2013

The ensuing twitterstorm lasted for a day and a half and was extremely bruising. Insults and misunderstandings were rife. I was accused of feeling "guilty" about my "decision to work", and told I should "change my lifestyle" - move house, take up knitting and grow my own, apparently - in order to stay at home with my children. I ended up blocking someone who has been a follower for over two years. And I feel really sad about that - but I couldn't take all the "mumguilt" she was throwing at me. Not that she was the only one by any means.

Many people took particular exception to my use of the term "luxury". The Free Dictionary defines a "luxury" thus:

1. Something inessential but conducive to pleasure and comfort.
2. Something expensive or hard to obtain.
3. Sumptuous living or surroundings: lives in luxury.

To me, a free decision by a well-off mother to stay at home with her children is consistent with the first two of these definitions. A parent staying at home with children full-time is not generally considered to be essential to their wellbeing or development, though it may enhance family life and it certainly fits better with the archaic way in which schools operate. And the financial and personal sacrifices that stay-at-home parents make can indeed be considerable.

But many people ignored the first two definitions of "luxury" and focused on the third, throwing sob stories at me about families "scrimping and saving" so mum could stay at home. Because these people were much poorer than they would be if both parents worked, apparently that meant their decision that one of them would be a full-time unpaid child carer was "not a luxury". Indeed this was Laura Perrins' argument. But it's nonsensical. They chose to invest in an expensive luxury, namely full-time child care: clearly their household income took a beating as a consequence, so they are not "living in luxury", but that doesn't mean the childcare itself isn't a luxury. Nor does the fact that looking after children full-time is a difficult job make it any less a luxury.

I should emphasise that my comments about full-time child caring being a "luxury" apply only to those families where a parent can freely choose whether or not to work. Most families have no such choice. In many families, two incomes are necessary to pay very high housing costs. And conversely, in other families, the cost of child care makes it uneconomic for both parents to work. The CHOICE for a mother (or father) to stay at home with children is only available to well-off couples like the Perrinses. Everyone else's decisions - including mine - are dictated by economic circumstances.

It seems to me that whether women (or men) who have freely chosen to stay at home with children deserve state support, as Perrins suggests, depends on whether having a parent at home full time is essential for children's well-being and development. That is exactly the argument put forward by the organisation that Perrins represents, Mothers At Home Matter - and it is potentially dynamite. A whole generation of women has grown up expecting to work while their children are young, because of the damage done not only to their household incomes but - more importantly - to their career prospects if they stop work to look after children. But if having a parent at home full time is essential to a child's well-being and development, then working mothers are seriously neglecting their children. In which case, the clock urgently needs to be turned back to a more "traditional" model in which mothers of young children do not work outside the home, and families with children must receive state support so that they do not end up living in poverty when mothers who currently work give it up.

Personally I don't buy this argument. And fortunately, research is on my side. There is zero evidence that children are damaged by being looked after by professional carers so both parents can work. On the contrary, there is some evidence that the diversity of care is good for them, improving their confidence and broadening their experience - and that is certainly consistent with my own experience. I was a child of a traditional family with a stay-at-home mother: but my children are far more self-assured, confident, responsible and resilient than I was at their ages. I believe that it was the diversity of the care they received throughout their childhood that has made them so.

Admittedly, my childcare arrangements did get very tenuous, and eventually I changed my job and adjusted my working patterns so they fitted better with the needs of my children. I didn't want to be the sort of parent who relies entirely on professional carers and rarely sees their children. There was enough of the "traditional " in me for me to want to have the time to do "mumsy" things such as picking them up from school, baking birthday cakes for them, taking them to after-school activities and playing games with them. But I'm not convinced that my children needed this as much as I did. Both of them wanted me to spend more time with them, of course, but I don't think they suffered because my time with them was limited.

Having said that, there is no doubt that a parent working long hours amounts to absence as far as the children are concerned. Actually "traditional" families are the worst for this: the flip side to the stay-at-home mum is the dad who is only at home at the weekend, if he isn't on a business trip or playing golf. I would oppose any support for single-income families that encouraged such polarisation in family life. If families freely choose to organise their lives in such a way, let them: but don't support it through the tax system.

Turning back the clock to a more traditional model is simply not going to happen in most families, for which I am exceedingly thankful: no doubt there will be some families for whom it is a model that works, but far more families welcome the fact that these days women with children are able to remain in the workforce. And the economy needs mothers to remain in the workforce, too. The loss of skilled women from the workforce in their childbearing years is a serious problem, given the extent of skills shortages that employers say they face. Laura Perrins complains that single-income families are being discriminated against because the economy needs women in the workforce. Good. Let the discrimination continue.

However, most working parents experience high levels of stress, especially if they are working very long hours. This applies irrespective of the family model: high stress levels are as characteristic of single-income families as they are of dual-income. Too many relationships don't survive the combination of financial pressure, the demands of work and the needs of children. So in my view, working patterns for both women AND MEN need to adjust so that children have more contact with their working parents and parents have more time together. Somehow, we have to find a model of work that supports family life and relationships without forcing women (and some men) either to take jobs that don't fully use their skills or leave the workforce completely. And I think this means that it is traditional MALE working patterns that need to change. Is it impossible to foresee a future in which it is normal for both women and men to work part-time while their children are young, sharing the care of their children and making appropriate but not extensive use of professional child carers? For me, this is a model that is far more deserving of state support than a traditional model with one parent not working and the other one working far too much. Children need time with BOTH their parents.

Related reading:
Working mothers "do no harm to children's behaviour" - BBC
At-home mothers should stay out of childcare debate - The Observer
At last, working mothers can ditch the guilt - Polly Toynbee, The Guardian
The betrayal of single-income families - Laura Perrins, Conservative Home
Where were you on 9/11? - Coppola Comment

The broken contract

So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock
    and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
    and you will eat dust
    all the days of your life.
And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
    and you will strike his heel.”

To the woman he said,

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
    with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
    and he will rule over you.”

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
 By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”

This is from the story of the Fall in Genesis chapter 3, and it has fascinated me for a long time - and particularly now. For I believe we are at the end of this story. We stand, as never before, at the point where this broken contract can be made new and its terrible consequences consigned to the dust of history.

The Fall essentially is the story of the change from predominantly hunter-gatherer societies to farming communities. The "garden" is the abundant landscape that our hunter-gatherer forbears inhabited: the fruits of the earth were there to be picked, without effort and without pain. It is a beautiful picture expressing the nostalgia of the people who had abandoned that lifestyle in favour of one which gave them more control of production - enabling them to plan, and perhaps to save, for the future. And even more importantly, gave them the ability to expand the population far more than could be supported by a hunter-gatherer lifestyle: indeed, the need for workers to cultivate crops made population expansion essential. The writers of this story look back at the hunter-gatherer period as a golden age: they do not choose to remember the frequent episodes of starvation, or the need to move around constantly as sources of food were depleted - as is still the case in nomadic communities today. 

This is what the Fall tells us. For the first time there would be a hard division of responsibilities between men and women. Men were to till the ground and make it produce food for the growing population: the work would be physically demanding and painful, and nature would fight back against the rape of its resources. And the principal food that would be available at this time would be "the plants of the field" - i.e. crops. Not fruits, as had been the case before the Fall. The poignancy of Jesus' prayer to "give us this day our daily bread" should be set against the backdrop of the Fall: no more would food be simply there for the taking. It had to be earned through hard work. There is evidence that the diet of early agricultural communities was less varied and less nutritious than the diet of their hunter-gatherer predecessors. Food could be produced in greater quantities, but it was not necessarily of better quality.

The consequences for women were far-reaching. Far from being the equals of men, they were to be in a subservient role. And their principal job would be to produce children - the future workers needed to till the ground and cultivate crops. This work would cost them similar - or greater - pain and effort to that experienced by men in providing food. 

So the Fall outlines the new contract between men and women, and between human beings and nature. Men were to produce the food in the present, providing for women and children. Women were to produce the workers who would produce food in the future. And nature would fight back against the efforts of both men and women. Conflict, inequality and suffering would be the hallmarks of the fallen world. 

Since woman's primary job was to produce children, barrenness was a terrible thing. In many societies, barrenness was (and is) grounds for divorce. After all, why should a man provide food for a woman who is not keeping her side of the bargain? If a woman could not produce children - ideally sons, who would produce food in the future - she was worthless. And equally, a man who was disabled or sick was worthless, since he was unable to produce food for his family. 

This division of responsibilities has shaped human society in much of the world: most religions have something akin to the Judaeo-Christian legend of the Fall. The imperative to "multiply and fill the earth" has driven men to limit women's access to jobs, education and healthcare in case they choose to do something other than having children. And with good reason. The evidence is that when women have access to education, when they are able to work to support themselves rather than being dependent on men, and when healthcare is available for themselves and their children, they have fewer children. Considerably fewer, actually - to the point where birth rates barely achieve replacement level.

The drive to "multiply and fill the earth" has caused the human race to expand to a point where it dominates nature. Human activity destroys ecosystems around the world. Human use of fossil fuels contributes to climate change. In short, human behaviour now threatens nature. 

To me it is no accident that this point has been reached at the same time as women around the world are starting to choose other paths. For the human race actually has no further imperative to expand. It has reached its natural limits and now needs to contract down to a more sustainable level. And it is women - in choosing not to have children - who are driving this change. But in making that choice they are breaking the contract between men and women that was established at the Fall. For according to that contract, a woman choosing not to have children is equivalent to a man choosing not to work. It is a fundamental breach. No wonder powerful religious and social institutions - all male-dominated - are fighting back, trying to prevent women gaining access to the education, the jobs and the healthcare that enable them to make that choice. It is all about preserving that contract: the dominance of men, the subservience of women....the responsibility of men to provide food in the present (and women to be dependent on men).....the responsibility of women to provide workers for the future (hence prohibition of contraception and abortion). And by extension, of course, about preserving the damaged and antagonistic relationship between humans of both sexes and the natural world. 

On the other side of the fence, men too have the opportunity - as never before - of choosing whether or not to work. We have abundance in goods: we no longer need men to struggle "by the sweat of their brow" to provide food for their families. Food can be produced at little or no cost. Yet we are still obsessed with the idea that people must work in order to eat: we make a virtue out of unnecessary and unproductive work, we force people to do degrading and menial work in order to qualify for food stamps and we castigate those who choose not to work. But work itself is increasingly in short supply, because we no longer need the jobs that men in particular have traditionally been paid to do. It is no accident that the biggest rises in unemployment have been among men, particularly the young unskilled and older production-line workers. 

So women are choosing to break the contract - and men are being forced to do so. A man who can't find work isn't able to support his family. Many men find this degrading, because for so long we have valued men by their ability to work to support their families.  

The contract of the Fall has been with us for so long that we have come to see its provisions as virtues. So when those provisions seem to be breaking down, we see it as a moral failure. The gradual disappearance of traditional marriage; the emergence of new, more fluid forms of human intimate relationship; the severing of the relationship between marriage and procreation, and between sexual activity and procreation; the inability and/or refusal of some people to do degrading and menial work; all of these are seen as evidence that the moral foundations of society are breaking down. But if what is breaking down is the old contract established as a consequence of the first moral failure, why should we resist that change? After all, if conflict, inequality and suffering are the hallmarks of that contract, why would we wish to keep it? It surely isn't good enough to justify keeping a contract born of pain and maintained through suffering purely on the grounds that the alternative might be worse. It is up to us to work out what a better contract might look like - one more appropriate for a world in which women can choose whether or not to have children, and men can choose whether or not to work.

The values we attach to men and women are changing. We no longer value women by their ability to produce children, and in particular sons - at least in developed countries we don't, though in poorer areas of some developing countries this view of women may still be current. And we need to stop valuing men by their ability to work and produce - in particular, by their ability to "make stuff". Making "stuff" increasingly isn't done by the hard work of men. It's done by robots. The traditional role of man as "provider" is becoming obsolete. Both men and women now are becoming primarily nurturers, of each other and of nature, and creators of clever and beautiful things.

This is tough for many people, both men who feel emasculated by taking on nurturing roles that have traditionally been done by women, and women who feel threatened by men taking over some of their caring responsibilities. In some ways the attitude of women is even worse than that of men: women who regard men who work in nurturing roles as "not real men" can do immense damage to the self-esteem and capability of those men. But to some extent the fears of both sexes are understandable. If they are both now to be nurturers and creators, how will they divide responsibilities between them? There are no clear guidelines any more. The social roles of men and women are no longer clearly delineated. They must negotiate with each other - and that requires them to communicate openly and honestly as never before. The story of the Fall is one of lies and betrayal: Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent, God - exasperated by their refusal to accept responsibility - threw them out of Eden and locked them into a contract in which all three paid for their crime. So the new contract must be founded on honesty, openness and willingness to accept responsibility.

Much of the female suffering caused by the Fall has already been alleviated in developed countries, although there is still a long way to go in developing countries. Due to medical advances, pregnancy and childbirth are no longer the painful and dangerous experiences that they used to be, and due to improvements in sanitation and nutrition and the introduction of universal healthcare, infant mortality is very low. Women no longer need to have lots of children to compensate for those that will die: they no longer spend most of their childbearing years either pregnant or lactating, and although in many families women remain principally responsible for childcare (reinforced by government policies emphasising the importance of mothers and downgrading the significance of fathers), this too is changing. For some time now, government statistics have shown a decrease in women who claim to be "economically inactive" because of caring responsibilities, and a corresponding increase in men. We are gradually moving towards a more equitable share of domestic and childcare responsibilities between men and women. And we are also becoming more aware of male bad behaviour: domestic abuse remains a considerable problem, but at least it is now recognised as a crime and there is some help available for women experiencing domestic abuse. As a society, we are becoming less tolerant of male domination and female subservience, especially when enforced by brutality. This is progress.

In developed countries, the sort of male suffering envisaged in the Fall no longer really exists. We simply don't plough fields or harvest crops by hand any more. Farming is high-tech and intensive, and increasingly dehumanised. And other jobs that involved suffering and danger for men, such as mining and fishing, are also becoming high-tech and dehumanised. Men now need to use their brains, rather than their brawn, in their productive work. And because women's brains are as good as men's, and women no longer need to spend all their time caring for children and doing housework, women and men can now share productive work as never before.

But there is still a long way to go, even in developed nations. The Fall created institutional inequality. Women became dependent on men: men controlled financial and physical resources and held the reins of power. Even now, powerful social positions are far more frequently occupied by men than women. This is beginning to change, but nowhere near fast enough. If true equality based on mutual respect is to be achieved, there must be greater representation of women in powerful positions, and the world of work - currently organised to suit white Western males - needs to be fundamentally reformed.

And we have not yet really addressed the desperate need for humans to develop a more harmonious relationship with nature. Perhaps this is not really possible while the relationships between humans remain disrupted. A new model of human relations founded on equality and collaboration, rather than inequality and competition, must come first, and a new model of shared productive work: then, when humans are healed of the disruption caused by the Fall, men and women can together exercise their God-given responsibility to be stewards of the natural world, conserving and protecting it and using its resources wisely.

Related reading:

The changing nature of work - Coppola Comment
A woman of our time - Still Life With Paradox
Accepting inequality - Stumbling & Mumbling
We need quotas for women at the top - Richard Portes (Pieria)

Genesis 3, NIV - Bible Gateway

The problem of debt

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008, debt has been seen as a problem. Not just public debt—about which we are constantly hearing - but private debt too. Governments, people, businesses and banks are over-indebted and struggling to survive. Banks have failed and been bailed out by governments: people have lost their homes and their jobs: businesses have failed, particularly in the construction industry: governments have enacted painful spending cuts and tax rises to get public debt under control: some governments have defaulted on their debts.

In its simplest form, debt simply means an obligation. When someone has done something for us, freely and without payment, we say “I am in your debt”, and we intend to “return the favour” at some time. That is a debt—but it is a debt voluntarily entered into between two people who basically like each other. The “debt” is no debt if it the service from which it arises is done out of love.

Debt becomes a problem when there is no love between the participants—when it is either a business deal or exploitation. In its worst form, debt can be a form of bondage: human trafficking often involves loading those trafficked with debt that they can never repay, which prevents them escaping from their life of servitude. But debt freely entered into can also become a problem, if the debts become unpayable, for example if the debtor’s income falls. That has become the situation for far too many people in the last few years. Real incomes have fallen by 10% since the financial crisis, which doesn’t sound too bad until you realise that the top 1% have seen their incomes rise in the last three years…..many people’s incomes have fallen by far more than 10%. For people who perhaps took on too much debt in the years before the financial crisis, an income fall of that magnitude is crippling. Many people who could comfortably manage their debts prior to the crisis are now struggling to make ends meet. All around us there is evidence of distress: increased referrals to foodbanks, increasing use of payday lenders, increasing rent and mortgage arrears, people struggling to pay energy bills, children arriving at school hungry.

Debt, sin and forgiveness

Our attitude to debt is deeply coloured by our moral values. I am constantly struck by the criticism implied in the word “debtor”, particularly by those who have no debt themselves—even though they may have had debt in the past. Debtors are routinely described as “profligate” if they are unable to pay their debts, even if at the time that they entered into those debt agreements their income was easily sufficient to service them. It seems that morally, we are not far removed from the time when debtors were consigned to prisons such as the Marshalsea until they could pay their debts. Imprisoning debtors is mentioned by Jesus in the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18:21-35, who was forgiven by his master for gross debts but then demanded payment in full from everyone who owed him money, however small the amounts. His master found out about it and cast him into prison “until he had paid everything he owed”. But Jesus’ point is not that unpayable debts deserve imprisonment. Far from it. His point is that debts can, and should, be forgiven. In our criticism of those who, for whatever reason (including mismanagement of their finances and outright overspending) have amassed unpayable debts, we seem to have forgotten Jesus’ criticism of the man who showed no mercy to his debtors. In Jesus’ eyes, it is those who will not forgive debts who should be imprisoned. After all, God has forgiven us far, far more.

Some of you may think I am misusing this parable. After all, it is really about forgiveness of sins, not debts. But debt and sin are closely related—so closely that in the Bible the two words are used interchangeably. And in German, the word for “debt” and the word for “sin” are the same: “Schuld”. If you think about it, “forgiveness” is always about wiping out an obligation that cannot be met—and if ever there were an obligation that cannot be met, it is our obligation to the God who created us and from whom we have turned away. We are deeply, deeply indebted to Jesus, who took upon himself the burden of our debt to God. But remember that an obligation founded on love is no obligation. Jesus took the burden of our debt upon himself out of love, and in so doing freed us from any obligation except to love him in return. That is how the slavery of sin becomes the freedom of love. 

We could choose to forgive financial debts. But as a society, we have forgotten how to do this. Instead, we force people—and, in Europe, whole countries— to maintain debt service even at the expense of essential living costs or at the price of going even deeper into debt. Borrowing at ever higher interest rates to service existing loans inevitably leads to default, but loan sharks make a lot of money from people in this death spiral….and loan sharking, it seems, is becoming respectable. 

Judith Armitt, Lay Reader at All Saints Church, Frindsbury, recently gave a sermon in which she criticised lenders who exploit the vulnerable. She cited St. Paul’s list of morally unacceptable practices in Colossians 3:1-11:

“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your heart on things above…..not on earthly things…..Put to death….whatever is in your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, greed, anger, rage, malice, slander, filthy language. Do not lie to each other.”

Highlighting greed and lying, she castigated Wonga and other high-interest payday lenders:

“Don’t pretend then it’s all right to lend to people who have very little, at huge rates of interest they shouldn’t have to pay”.

She is in good company. The Archbishop of Canterbury recently criticised payday lenders for their astronomical rates of interest, and committed the Church to supporting and if necessary creating credit unions as direct competitors to payday lenders, offering short-term loans to those who need them at much lower rates of interest. It remains to be seen how well his initiative succeeds: the Church is already creating a staff credit union, and the Government is supporting the Archbishop’s scheme.

However, not everyone is convinced this is such a good idea: after all, if someone is so deeply in debt that they cannot afford basic essentials, it is debt relief and/or higher income they need, not more debt even at lower rates. We perhaps need to think about how the Christian concept of forgiveness can be brought into the way we deal with people who have got into financial difficulty.

The other side of debt

But what about the other side of debt? What about the people with plenty of money?

Jesus’ parable about the rich fool (Luke 12:13-21) describes someone with more wealth than they know what to do with:

“The ground of a certain rich man yielded a good harvest. He thought….what shall I do? I have no place to store my crops. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus”.

Judith comments that if we replace “crops” with “money”, maybe the modern equivalent is opening a new bank account because the first one is full to the limit, or buying shares or bonds on top of the money stored for a rainy day. Jesus is not necessarily saying “don’t save”: the story of Joseph (Genesis 41), for example, reminds us that we need to put some by in the years of feast, to be ready for the time of famine—if we’re made redundant, for example, or to provide for ourselves when we are too old to work. But the story of the rich fool tells us there is no point in storing up more than we need for that rainy day. For God says to him,

“You fool! This very night your soul will be demanded of you, and who will have then what you have prepared for yourself?”

You can’t take it with you. Better to spend it on something productive, perhaps by supporting local businesses or funding projects that benefit people in developing countries.

But far worse than sitting on barns full of unproductive riches is lending them out at high interest rates to people who are desperate. And far too many of us want to do exactly that. We have come to expect to live on the interest from our savings, rather than on those savings themselves, so we want to receive a good rate of return on our savings and investments. That works in the good times, if the money is lent to enterprises that use it to create economic growth. But in the bad times, when the economy is not growing, living on the interest from savings can only be done by extracting money from other people, many of whom are too poor to save, through cutting their wages, reducing their benefits, raising their taxes, eliminating their jobs. How is this compatible with Jesus’ teachings? Savings are designed to be used productively. If they can’t be used productively by others—which is what very low interest rates indicate—use them productively yourself. Spend them, or give them away.

A tough challenge

The Archbishop of Canterbury urges us to act as Christ would do. But do we know what Christ would do, faced with a society weighed down with unprecedented amounts of debt? After all, in Jesus’s society, debts were wiped out every fifty years. Perhaps we, too, need debts to be wiped out. But of course that means that those who lent that money will lose it. And we really do like to hang on to our wealth.

Yet Christ had nothing (Luke 9:58), and he sent his followers out with nothing (Matthew 10). If we are to act as he did, we perhaps need to “sell all we have and give to the poor, and come, follow Him” (Mark 10:17-23).