Some time last week, the BBC radio presenter Nicky Campbell was in a meeting with his production team. The atmosphere, by all accounts, was relaxed and informal. Jokes and stories were being told.
Campbell, who has been a mainstay on the BBC’s schedule for years, recounted an anecdote from a friend, apparently verbatim. That anecdote contained the word “poofter” – a slightly anachronistic slang term for a homosexual man. By all accounts, the word was not Campbell’s own, merely one that he repeated while telling his story. There was no immediate reaction.
Until, at least, Campbell left the room.
The Mandatory Apology and Training
When he did, one of his producers apologized to the rest of the team for Campbell’s use of the word. The matter was reported internally. Campbell was forced to apologize to his team and to attend a meeting where he was rebuked for his insensitivity and unacceptable use of language.
The matter has earned him copious negative publicity in the British press.
Notably, most of the media outlets considered the word “poofter” so offensive that they would not even deign to spell it out, preferring the asterisk-abridged “p**fter”, which has the effect of making the word perfectly clear while also informing readers that it belongs in the same category as much uglier and more vicious terms.
Missing from almost all the coverage, however, is the elementary distinction between using a word as an insult and mentioning it while recounting what somebody else has said. There is no suggestion here that Campbell used the word abusively or intended to. There is no suggestion that he directed it at any individual person or group of people with malice or ill intent. There is no suggestion that it is a word he uses, or has ever used, in private everyday speech.
Indeed, it can reasonably be surmised from the fact that the use of the word was second-hand, deployed in the act of recounting a joke told by another, that it was intended to be humorous.
Context does not automatically excuse every use of language. But it is indispensable to judging it.
How HR Undermines Trust
This is one of those examples where the policing of language and thought is designed to promote workplace safety and harmony, but instead creates an atmosphere of mistrust, fear and self-censorship which infects workplace relationships and undermines any sense of unity.
Consider, for example, the effect that the trouble into which Campbell has fallen will have on others at the BBC: a relaxed workplace setting with co-workers; a joke or humorous story recounted; and a rapid trip to human resources, complete with attendant negative publicity.
There is another, perhaps more important, point here, and it relates to the construction of trust between human beings and colleagues.
Trust is established, broadly, by the sharing of confidences and the creation of a sense of security with another. Informal workplace relationships are built partly through small acts of conversational trust: jokes, indiscretions, personal stories and occasional misjudgments which colleagues understand in context rather than immediately converting into disciplinary matters.
Even if the jocular use of a word like “poofter” is officially frowned upon, it is precisely the kind of minor and largely harmless infraction which can become part of that shared sense of ease. The sharing of such workplace humor sends a message: you are my colleagues, and I trust you enough to be my full self around you.
The Toxicity of Workplace Censorship
That has value – in many cases, a much greater value than obsessive human-resources policing.
Accumulate enough HR interventions over incidents like this, and the result is an environment in which people who do not wish to share Campbell’s public humiliation will be less trusting of their colleagues, less relaxed in their company and less likely to be themselves.
It is a recipe for an atmosphere in which people are slower to trust those around them and more likely to present a carefully sanitized version of themselves to colleagues.
Or, to put it plainly: it is a recipe for stress.
Good management begins with a simple assumption: that most people are acting in good faith. A healthy workplace distinguishes between malice and clumsiness, between genuine harassment and an awkward – or, in this case, harmless – attempt at humor.
Once those distinctions disappear, employees cease to see one another as colleagues and begin to see one another as potential complainants.
It is true that there must be some rules: against bullying, harassment, gross misconduct and so on. But when those rules begin to punish senior employees whose only crime is an attempt to create a warm and relaxed atmosphere in the workplace, they have gone badly wrong.
A BBC Disconnected from Its Audience
Finally, for the BBC, there are wider consequences.
The already under-pressure corporation has struggled in recent years to convince ordinary Britons – many of them of the Brexit-voting, immigration-skeptical variety – that it truly represents them or that it shares their culture in any meaningful way.
When the national broadcaster publicly humiliates – or at least permits the public humiliation of – one of its longest-serving stars for using in private a word which, despite official efforts, remains familiar to anybody who has spent time in a British pub, it signals that the corporation remains trapped inside its own cultural bubble.
It suggests that it operates according to a moral code fundamentally different from that of millions of the people required to fund it.
This is the real cost of what used to be called political correctness. When it is enforced ruthlessly like this, it is the enforcer who increasingly seems alien, humorless and strange to the majority of the citizenry who understand that humor itself occasionally derives from saying the officially unsayable.
It is not difficult to imagine that a great many British people will take Campbell’s side in this row. They will conclude not that Campbell is a bigot, but that the institution disciplining him has lost its sense of proportion.
For a BBC already struggling to convince millions of people that it understands their lives, that may be the most damaging message of all.