Poor Digby Jones
Pity poor Digby Jones, former head honcho at the CBI and now former junior government minister. He whined when he took the job, he whined when he had the job and he’s whining now he’s out of the job:
The former Trade Minister Lord Jones told the Commons Public Administration Committee that the job of junior minister was “one of the most dehumanising and depersonalising experiences a human being can have”.
Some us, when hearing his ugly pronouncement on things like the minimum wage, wondered if he was human in the first place. Still, poor Digby. Fancy having a job even more dehumanising and depersonalising than in an Asian sweat shop or a UK call centre or whatever drone tasks him and his corpulent chums want to herd us into. Yes, pity poor Digby.
Posted on January 16th, 2009 at 9:08am under Miscellaneous misanthropy, UK politics
Clearly it wasn’t the worst job in the world – you are distorting what he said.
His job was dehumanising because he had no responsibility, no control and no levers to change anything. Anyone can find themselves in this position but for someone brought into the government to put his vast experience to good use, only to find himself wasting away in the corner, just goes to show how little Brown gave a toss about his opinions.
It also makes a mockery of Brown pretending to create a government of all talents, as he clearly wasn’t interested in Digby’s talent at all. As I suspected at the time, it was just political showboating by the government to try and put one over the Conservatives.
During his 15 months in Ministerial office he made 45 overseas visits, travelling to 31 different countries and meeting with the worlds top business leaders and politicians.
‘Oh, the inhumanity of it all!‘, he must have cried to himself as the drinks trolley came round again. So uninterested in his talents were New Labour, Digby’s got a carbon footprint the size of Wales.
Clearly it wasn’t the worst job in the world – you are distorting what he said.
He said it was “one of the most dehumanising and depersonalising experiences a human being can have”. That’s the actual quote. I venture to suggest that the list of more “dehumanising and depersonalising experiences” available is practically endless. Try spending 12 hour night-shifts hosing slime off the factory walls, and then tell me that being in a cushy junior minister’s position with “no responsibility, no control and no levers to change anything” is “one of the most dehumanising and depersonalising experiences a human being can have”. If nothing else, it betrays a certain lack of perspective.
And what is “Digby’s talent”?
To paraphrase Bart Simpson, he can hear pudding.
“His job was dehumanising because he had no responsibility, no control and no levers to change anything.”
As you say, anyone can find themselves in this situation. The point that Digby consistently missed is that the vast majority of people DO find themselves in this situation, and that he is a champion of a system which produces this misery – which is why no Labour government should ever have employed him.
ejh asks ‘what is Digby’s talent?’ When I read the story I thought, ‘dehumanising? Where was Digby’s humanity in the first place. Isn’t he a Slitheen?’
I know people who know people, me. Apparently, Digby-Jones was ‘an arse’ who didn’t understand quite basic things about being a Minister and threw a strop when he was told he couldn’t do things like use his Ministerial car for non-Ministerial business. Maybe that’s what he thought was dehumanising. He wasn’t well liked, anyway.
But that’s just hearsay.
The hearsay makes anecdotal sense, in the context of Comrade Digby thinking you can sack half the Civil Service and have it run twice as efficiently: that’s pretty much British Management 101 as far as the CBI are concerned. Like Blair, he thinks that the ‘proper channels and procedures’ are for little people.
This is a long time ago and I can’t remember exactly what it concerned – but can anybody else recall Pigby appearing on Newsnight about something important and his only concern was to insist everybody acknowledged that he’d not been found at fault? Sorry, that’s not much to go on but if anybody else can recall the incident I’d be obliged. Anyway, it was vintage Pigby, all mouth and ego and not the slightest concern for anybody else.
In 2004, when I still wrote stuff on my blog, this was one of my posts:
“In Sam Wood’s 1941 film ‘The Devil and Miss Jones’, J.P. Merrick, the villainous department store owner, dismisses the complaints and demands of union organisers by saying, “why don’t they make themselves so indispensable that they can’t be fired”.
In Digby Jones’ (no relation) 2004 speech, he says, “the only protection people need in a tight labour market with skills shortages is to be so adaptable, trained and valuable that no employer would dare let them go or treat them badly”. He continues, demonstrating some nerve, to say that the unions “just don’t get it! They are doing no more than marching valiantly towards 1970”.
Well, that’s thirty years progress, comparatively speaking.”
Surely, when you sound almost exactly like the villain in film you ought not be employed as a government minister, should you?
Police today raided several addresses in London where they discovered junior ministers manacled to the walls of cellars in ‘appalling conditions’.
A notorious trade in the trafficking of junior ministers has developed over the last few years. The victims are lured into taking up these jobs with promises of lavish expenses, luxurious living accommodation, fame and influence. Once in the country they discover that they will instead find themselves forced to service the ego’s of more senior colleagues on a daily basis and to engage in the most sordid acts – the advocacy and defense of government policy – before crowds of jeering, braying and drunken journalists.