Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  “For too long the NHS has seen itself essentially as the National Hospital Service,” he told the Today programme. He reckons that’s wrong because only “a fifth of the determinants of the length of your healthy lifespan are caused by what goes on in hospitals”. A fifth! And yet the hospitals cost so much! The majority of the country’s health budget is being lavished on institutions that affect a mere fifth of the … you know … the determinants of the healthy thing. That’s ridiculous! Why spend a fortune on hospitals for people to die in when they could just as easily get run over by buses? Why waste money on intensive care units when, for the same money, you could print a seemingly infinite number of leaflets warning about salt?

  Not leaflets, though! I’m such a Luddite! Hancock is talking about “predictive prevention”, which, according to the departmental document, “will transform public health by harnessing digital technology and personal data”. Just as people get targeted marketing from Amazon or Facebook, this will be “targeted health advice – specifically designed for their demographic and their location”.

  This is such a Tory idea. Let’s learn from the private sector! We can replace those pricey hospitals with algorithms! That way a computer can precisely instruct people on how not to get ill – and the fact that there’ll hardly be any hospitals will be an added incentive!

  By all means let’s encourage healthy lifestyles. It also makes sense (a better idea in the document) to offer genetic analysis so patients can be warned about health risks specific to their DNA. But the commercial technique of exploiting personal data to target advertising is a trick, and a government department shouldn’t aspire to trick people, even if it thinks it’s for their own good.

  The health education the state provides should be the objective scientific truth about the causes of illness. It should be widely accessible, but not marketed, nor expressed differently according to what type of citizen a computer reckons will read it. That approach would be as contemptuous of the public as a corporation is of its customers, and another way by which inconvenient truths are transformed in people’s minds into fake news.

  * * *

  In January 2017, a woman claiming to be Charlotte Higman telephoned the Royal Bank of Scotland and asked for a security reset on Charlotte Higman’s account. She probably referred to it as “my account” if she was canny. She was canny: when the bank rang back on Charlotte Higman’s home phone number (in an attempt to make sure they were genuinely talking to Charlotte Higman), it had already been fraudulently diverted to a mobile phone in the possession of the Charlotte Higman impersonator.

  We don’t know who this woman was but, for clarity, I’m going to refer to her as Nadine Dorries MP. There is no suggestion, incidentally, that this scam was perpetrated by the MP Nadine Dorries. That’s why I’ve given the fraudster a slightly different name: her surname is actually MP and Dorries is a middle name. Still, that would cause some confusion if she ever became an MP! She’d be Nadine Dorries MP MP! And there’s already a Nadine Dorries MP! That would certainly be an amusing outcome.

  But Nadine Dorries MP isn’t the sort of person likely to become a respected parliamentarian. And this scammer sounds like a bit of a shit as well. Having reset the account, Nadine Dorries MP (not the MP) then transferred £4,318 (nice and specific) into another account. Later on in her 23-minute phone call with the bank (I don’t know what they were talking about in the meantime), Ms MP requested a second transfer, as a result of which she was asked some security questions about Charlotte Higman, at least one of which she got wrong. So this second transfer was refused. But the initial one wasn’t recalled – or reversed or stopped or bounced or whatever they’d do. They just let it go through.

  The world being awful, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that RBS’s initial response when Charlotte Higman complained that her account appeared somewhat depleted was not to acknowledge culpability, restore the money and take urgent steps to track down Nadine Dorries MP. No, its view was that all this was Charlotte Higman’s problem. And, when Charlotte Higman made a complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service, that was also the Financial Ombudsman Service’s view.

  One of the cleverest things the banking sector has done since the advent of the internet is to establish the notion of “identity theft”. Robert Webb and I once wrote a sketch about it, in which a hapless account holder tries in vain to argue that it was the bank, rather than him, that had had something stolen: “I still seem to have my identity – whereas you seem to have lost several thousands of pounds.”

  A lot of what is called identity theft is, in truth, bank robbery. Someone has approached a bank and absconded with money that doesn’t belong to them. Instead of a gun, they used a disguise. People have always tried to rob banks and, traditionally, stopping that happening was down to the bank. That was their pitch: give us your money, and we’ll keep it safe. We might lend it out while you don’t need it, and you might get a bit of the proceeds of that, but then we’ll give it back to you. You can trust us not to give your money away to someone random. It’s our job to not do that.

  With the concept of “identity theft”, however, banks try to absolve themselves of that fundamental responsibility. So now, if someone steals from them in disguise, they claim that’s an issue between the thief and the person the thief is disguised as. If a gang of armed bank robbers were wearing Tony Blair masks, would the bank now debit all the stolen cash from the former prime minister’s account? That’s a nice idea for a sympathetic heist movie.

  RBS finally restored Charlotte Higman’s account balance nearly two years later, but only after a BBC Watchdog Live investigation. “On review of Mrs Higman’s case,” said an RBS spokesperson, “and in light of new information provided to us, we have refunded Mrs Higman in full for her loss.” But it wasn’t her loss, it was the bank’s. Someone stole some money from the bank and the bank decided not to make a fuss, but to charge the loss to a customer.

  It’s bizarre behaviour, because there was definitely a theft. That was clear from the start. Charlotte Higman maintained it was the mysterious caller (Nadine Dorries MP) who’d taken the money, but RBS implied for a long time that Mrs Higman herself must have done it. It claimed that, since it had called Charlotte’s home number and got through, she must have known about the transactions. If that were true, it would mean she had transferred money out of her account and then denied it. That too would have been theft.

  So why did the bank take no action against a customer it thought was attempting to defraud it? Either it didn’t really think that or it is extraordinarily relaxed about losing four-figure sums – rather a high-handed way to behave for an institution that owes its continued existence to the generosity of the taxpayer.

  I do realise that, if we’re going to have online banking, customers have to take some responsibility for keeping their money secure. If you start putting your passwords on Facebook so friends can help you remember them, banks are put in an impossible position. Then again, if you find the online world impersonal and bewildering, there is no longer a realistic option of banking in the old-fashioned way – of having personal contact with a bank employee, in a branch you can walk to, to whom you can hand your money and who will hand it back only to you.

  We’re all forced to engage with internet and telephone banking, with all their possibilities for fraud, primarily because it’s a cost-efficient way for banks to do business. All those high street premises, all the cash and cash machines and UK-based staff created huge overheads. But it doesn’t seem right that the banks benefit from all the cost savings made by going online, while customers take the hit for the consequent ease with which money can be stolen.

  * * *

  Live by the sword, die by the sword. That’s what Vogue.com’s senior editors should be thinking at the moment. Ruefully, if they can do that without exacerbating wrinkles. They were simply going about their business disparaging and belittling people – just a normal day at the office for those who professionally s
it in judgment on what others are wearing – when they got a nasty shock.

  Let me explain. Apparently, it’s just been Milan Fashion Week. I was surprised to hear that because it seems to me it’s always London Fashion Week. Not literally always, but very nearly literally always. It genuinely feels like it’s absolutely always London Fashion Week this week, last week or next week. Is that the system? That it’s once every three weeks? If so, I suppose that leaves two-thirds of the time for it to be Paris Fashion Week, New York Fashion Week, Bristol Fashion Week (for tidy sailors) or Milan Fashion Week, which is the one it was last week.

  At the end of Milan Fashion Week, the staff of Vogue.com wrote an article on the internet – a blog, I suppose you’d call it – discussing what the week had been like, what everyone had learned and why it absolutely hadn’t been a vacuous jamboree consecrated to the monetisation of narcissism. But the main issues the Vogue.com team had wanted to raise – the future of trousers, perhaps; how a raspberry sock makes a stylish and practical epaulette warmer; the advent of the thigh-gap storage sporran, a great place for the malnourished to keep cocaine and diet pills – got rather lost because of the digs they all made at bloggers.

  Other bloggers, that is, not each other. Not people who get paid to write a blog by a magazine that also has a printed-out version for the dentist’s, but a group who seem to be known variously as bloggers, influencers and street-style stars. The ladies at Vogue.com absolutely hate this group and really let rip at them in a tone of weirdly feverish condescension. Vogue’s creative digital director, Sally Singer, started it, writing in brackets to emphasise her contempt: “Note to bloggers who change head-to-toe, paid-to-wear outfits every hour: Please stop. Find another business. You are heralding the death of style.”

  Her use of the word “style” is illuminating because it reveals weakness. She put “style” rather than “fashion”. It suits her haughty tone, of course. While affecting to give those not actually under her control an offhand instruction (which they will defy), she also seems to be alluding to something more significant, more permanent than the merely trendy. But she isn’t. The sense of something being stylish is subjective and, as such, will never die unless we create a world that contains nothing at all to which anyone at all has a positive aesthetic response. Talk of “the death of style” is empty rhetoric.

  “Fashion”, on the other hand, means something solid. It refers to objects, usually clothes, manufactured to new, cutting-edge and/or popular designs. I never know what’s fashionable, but plenty of people always do and, at any given time, some things are and some things aren’t. Sometimes flares or ripped jeans or kipper ties or powdered wigs are in, and sometimes they’re out. It’s a matter of fact. The discussion and prediction of such facts is what fashion journalism and Vogue are for.

  But Sally Singer couldn’t refer to “the death of fashion” because that sounds wrong: something will always be in fashion. Saying “the death of fashion” is like saying “the death of recently”, “the end of the latest thing”. And the latest thing at the moment is the phenomenon of bloggers, influencers and street-style stars. These people, such as Chiara Ferragni, Susie Lau and Shea Marie, whose names mean nothing to me, have huge online followings, can create and redirect trends, and make a lot of money doing so. Essentially, they have the same business model as Vogue.

  These bloggers are, by definition, fashionable, even if Sally Singer and her colleagues don’t consider them stylish. So, note to Vogue.com: never mind style – that’s not what you’re paid to care about. If what you find stylish is not fashionable, then neither are you.

  Personally, I would say that being fashionable doesn’t matter. But the staff of Vogue.com can’t say that. The whole point of their institution has always been to elevate and celebrate the value of being in touch with, and responding to, the latest trends. They can’t suddenly go off all that when it gets a bit youthful and digital and scary. That’s the top of a slippery slope that leads down to comfortable shoes.

  Of course they weren’t trying to say that fashion doesn’t matter; they were trying to be the arbiters of fashion, which I suppose has historically been the Vogue journalist’s role. It was an attempt to assert authority. Sarah Mower, Vogue.com’s chief critic, called the bloggers “pathetic” and “desperate”; Alessandra Codinha, its fashion news editor, said they were “pretty embarrassing” and that going to bloggers for style was “like going to a strip club looking for romance”; and Nicole Phelps, the director of the Vogue Runway app, called them “sad” and said, “It’s distressing, as well, to watch so many brands participate.”

  That last remark is a bit of a giveaway. That does sound pretty distressing. If you’re looking to sell advertising spots in Vogue, I imagine it has a positively tragic quality. Phelps’s implication that these brands had somehow let themselves down by associating with bloggers is a hopeless attempt to assert her dated view of the dignity of haute couture above the dictates of commerce.

  Essentially, the Voguesters’ bid to make the new girls feel small didn’t work. It didn’t make the bloggers seem gauche; it made the old-school journalists seem out of touch – not something the fashion world readily forgives. As “fashion influencer” Shea Marie put it: “You are exactly the type of people that have given the fashion world the cold, unwelcoming and ruthless reputation it has had in the past.” And the really hurtful word there is “past”. It falls to others, bloggers probably, to give it the cold, unwelcoming and ruthless reputation I expect it will continue to have in the future.

  Old bullies make way for new. But ageing and mortality must hurt all the more if you’ve made a profession out of praising novelty. When Sally Singer lashed out at the bloggers, talking desperately about “the death of style”, she must have been terrified. Because, ultimately, that’s not the death they herald.

  4

  Destroyer.org of Worlds.co.uk

  A wry glimpse of the social impact of the internet.

  Did you hear about the rich American who’s cut himself off from all news since Donald Trump was elected? There’s no reason why you should’ve done. He wouldn’t if it hadn’t actually been him. His name’s Erik Hagerman and he used to be a Nike executive, but now lives on a pig farm and doesn’t even farm pigs. He just works on his art and goes for coffee and plays guitar and gives interviews to the New York Times. Which presumably he then doesn’t read, so the interviewer could have indulged in a rare consequence-free, easy-to-write hatchet job, but didn’t.

  I don’t mean to be snide – things I say neutrally just come out like that. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of people whose faces’ resting expressions look deeply sad or intensely cross, so they have to smile to seem normal (which must cumulatively be depressing or irritating, thus retrospectively giving them temperaments to match their looks). Because, as it happens, I support Erik Hagerman’s life choice.

  Then again, I’ve got a few nits to pick. For a start, the whole art thing’s a bit lame. You can see his stuff online. He just does sort of scrunched things and patterns, and well, fine, but if there’s enough rolling news in the world, there’s more than enough crap art. Plus, his non-consumption of news media seems to involve a lot of slightly precious “business”. It smacks of the self-involvement of those who believe their allergies make them interesting.

  For example, in order to avoid accidentally hearing any careless talk at the coffee shop he goes to every morning he wears headphones playing white noise. He says music won’t do because “stray conversation can creep in between songs”. He still watches basketball on TV, but on mute so that no contemporary reference sneaks through. And he’s given his lifestyle a name, which is annoying even before you hear the name, at which point it gets more annoying.

  He’s called it “the Blockade”. That’s all wrong, and I don’t think it’s deliberate. A blockade is a siege: ingress to, or egress from, an entity is prevented by outsiders. What Hagerman’s doing – the entity in the middle trying to prevent ingres
s from the outside world – isn’t a blockade, it’s Trump’s immigration policy. What’s more, Hagerman certainly doesn’t oppose informational egress from the central entity in his blockade (which is him) because, as I mentioned, he gave an interview to the New York Times. It seems like he wants other people’s attention, while simultaneously withholding his own. “Watch me ignore stuff!” is the pitch.

  However, leaving aside my cynicism about how Hagerman advocates his approach, the approach itself is tremendously attractive. The New York Times interviewer touched upon criticism it had received in a way that, to me, merely encapsulated its appeal: “To avoid current affairs is in some ways a luxury that many people … cannot afford.” I mean, why not just liken it to a holiday in the Maldives? A lobster dinner? A dishwasher? Yes, not everybody can afford it: for many, ignoring the news is impossible because it affects them directly – just as, for many, buying a dishwasher is impossible. But does that mean if you can, you shouldn’t?

  Probably. In an ideal world. But you’d need to have ignored the news for a very long time to be willing to believe that’s what Earth is. Capitalism is pretty horrible, but the various attempts at improving on it have either led to totalitarianism or gradually eroded back into capitalism. Or, in the case of modern China, both.

  Obviously, people are much more likely to get slagged off for ignoring current affairs than for buying dishwashers. And that’s appropriately capitalistic: keeping up with the news, like buying a dishwasher, involves purchasing stuff. Or, when it doesn’t, it involves being sold: allowing the fact that you’ve looked at something to be marketed to advertisers or worse. Either way, it’s economic activity. However, ignoring the news doesn’t add to the GDP, and so, unlike other luxuries that do more tangible harm (eg air travel or golf), it can be widely condemned without commercial risk.