Where there is division, let's ramp it up
On social media, when you reach a fork in the road, take it so you have something to stab your enemies with
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On her victorious arrival on the steps of 10 Downing Street in May 1979, Britain’s first female Prime Minister chose to recite the words of St Francis of Assisi (starting at about 0:30):
“Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” (It seems this isn’t quite a faithful translation of St Francis’s words, which only goes to show that even apparently semi-spontaneous moments were in fact being carefully planned all those years ago.)
If you listen to the video, you can hear a fair amount of discord in the background, and the close presence of the police also suggests that things are a bit more shambolic than they might have hoped. This was before Downing St’s present huge iron gates were erected (in 1989).
But it’s the sentiment that counts, isn’t it? Turning discord to harmony, right? Unfortunately things didn’t quite work out that way, and by the time she left in November 1990, the only harmony to be found was that both the Tory party and the rest of the country agreed she’d overstayed her welcome. (Plus ça change.)
Still, in an age of social networks, groups of people with access to all the world’s information should be able to come together on an agreed version of the truth, right? Especially if it involves a judgment read out in court by a non-political judge considering a series of facts?
I know, you’ve probably guessed: no.
And yet the process of people diverging over a common set of facts is fascinating to watch. I’m grateful to James O’Malley1 for a couple of tweets which summed up what’s going on:
Subjectively objective
At this point we need some background on what this is all about. What follows is a précis, though the entire employment tribunal judgment is online, and like all judgments, is clearly written. Allison Bailey is a lesbian barrister who sued both the pressure group Stonewall and Garden Court Chambers (GCC), where she worked. GCC had become a “Stonewall Diversity Champion” in December 2018, and she’d complained about this to colleagues: Bailey believes (as the Equality Act says one can in work or elsewhere) that a woman is defined by her objective sex, not subjective gender. She was involved in setting up the Lesbian Gay Alliance in October 2019, to (quoting from the judgment) “resist transwomen [sic] self-identifying as women”. She tweeted to this effect, which led to outside complaints to GCC, which said it would investigate. Stonewall also complained to GCC. Subsequently, GCC tweeted that it was investigating Bailey’s tweets.
The aftermath, Bailey claimed, was that she lost income. (Para 86 of the judgment shows it growing steadily from 2015, reaching over £160k in 2018, then collapsing to just under £40k in 2019.) Suspicion was cast on the clerks, who direct phone calls from solicitors with cases needing a barrister, to available barristers. Might some of them have been antipathetic towards Bailey, and diverted business away from her, to other barristers more sympathetic with the Diversity Champion agenda? She also complained about Stonewall, saying that the group “induced, instructed or caused some of Garden Court’s actions, or that they attempted to induce or cause those actions”. Big claims. Everything was on the table.
The tribunal hearing was accessible online. The incredible attention that this topic gets is borne out by the observation in the judgment that
Unusually for an employment tribunal, members of the public and journalists observed the remote hearing in large numbers. At times there were up to 250. Many helpfully cooperated with each other, by repasting links to hearing materials for latecomers, and advising each other on technical difficulties, such as opening the online bundles. (para 13)
They even had to police the observers:
There was trouble with a few observer screen names: the tribunal did not allow names that were (In particular context) obvious harassment of a witness or counsel. Offenders were invited to log back in with a neutral name and then disconnected. The tribunal did permit screen names that indicated affiliation to one side or other in the sex/gender debate, despite several observer complaints about this, as they were deemed cultural markers (such as a lapel badge or item of clothing) which would be unobjectionable in a tribunal room or public gallery. The tribunal overlooked frivolous names if, as far as we could see, they did not harass any individual. (para 14)
But it didn’t stop there. Oh no. If you were in any doubt about how aggressive people can get:
“The order in which witnesses were called was not announced until the day before, for fear of witness intimidation. An incident on 3 May (the subject of a short case management hearing that afternoon) showed that the fear was not groundless. There was an attempt to intimidate one of the non-legal panel members of the tribunal, via a social media approach to their partner on a hearing day. A warning was given in the next hearing session that threats, however veiled, were contempt; there was no further approach. We reminded ourselves of the duty to hear the case without fear or favour.” (para 28)
Note that we don’t know who was being targeted, from which side. (Don’t make assumptions.)
Win, lose, draw?
Anyway, others will pore over every part of the judgment. The question that naturally arose: who won? When the decision was handed down on Wednesday, Bailey quickly claimed victory. Of course the place to do that was the place where this had all been triggered in the first place: Twitter.
Her chosen hashtag, #AllisonBaileyWins, began trending.
But wait. The case was against GCC and Stonewall: as Bailey’s crowdfunding page said in its title, “I am suing Stonewall”. So what happened there? You’d have to go to the fifth tweet in Bailey’s thread:
Ah. So the complaint against Stonewall failed. (Precisely why is set out in paragraphs 358-390 of the judgment, and boils down to “Stonewall didn’t tell GCC to do anything, specifically or vaguely, about Allison Bailey’s tweets, or her presence in the chambers”. Sending a protest letter, which it did, and encouraging inclusion, which it did, isn’t the same as telling GCC to fire or to downgrade her or deny her work.)
And so on social media, the opposite view—Stonewall won—gained momentum. #Stonewallwins became the battle cry of those opposed to Bailey and her views. Stonewall itself was more restrained; the tweet acknowledging the result, and the statement it linked to, did not sound like a victory lap.
No quarter
However, on social media there’s absolutely no meeting point between the two sides. If you took part, you were either Team #AllisonBaileyWins or Team #StonewallWins, and you tweeted each other TO DEATH. Or as Harry Hill would put it, FIIIIGHT! Twitter folks leapt to the barricades, while news publications struggled to describe the outcome correctly. (The Telegraph managed initially to get it wrong by suggesting the ruling had gone against Stonewall, providing yet more fuel for the fire of people to complain about the media.)
Once the simple tweeting about the result had been done, and hashtag war (#war?) joined, the next stage in the conflict was to spin the part of the judgment that one’s own side won as being indicative of what will follow. For the Bailey side, the decision against GCC means HR departments will treat Stonewall’s programs such as the “Diversity Champion” scheme as potentially toxic, because you might get sued if you follow them.
Then again, if you read the judgment, you’d wonder quite what anyone got out of the Diversity Champion scheme. Paragraph 76 of the judgment suggests that pretty much the only thing GCC did was to put the Stonewall logo on its website. No training. No work directed to the Chambers. Stonewall got some money. The value exchange is difficult to discern.
For those backing Stonewall, the outcome meant that Bailey’s original aim, as described on the website, had failed, and that now.. well, Bailey had spent about £500k raised from crowdfunding achieving nothing. (I don’t think any announcement has been made about costs.) This meant that Stonewall’s schemes had been vindicated, and future attempts to knock them back would also founder expensively.
Going back to O’Malley’s tweets above, and the question of whether it’s a loss or a win: it’s both. It’s a score-draw. Reading the judgment, one gets the impression that GCC made life a bit uncomfortable for Bailey when she objected to the Stonewall scheme (there’s some excerpts from emails which imply some impatient eyerolling), and Stonewall representatives didn’t cover themselves with glory, such as the one in October 2019 who referred to Bailey as “the terfy barrister” in an email to a sympathetic GCC member.
Equally, quite a few of Bailey’s claims fell apart. The loss of earnings doesn’t seem to be due to evil clerks diverting calls away from her; the judgment notes drily that “the clerks themselves seem to have had little knowledge of or interest in the gender critical/gender self-id debate; most conversation was about football.” (Para 101.) Instead, it was common to a number of barristers in the chambers, because the police were charging fewer people. The tribunal seems to have decided that she didn’t lose out financially due to her treatment by GCC, which is why a barrister with 20 years’ experience who claims that she was frozen out of lucrative work by her chambers over her “gender-critical” views was awarded £20,000—for “injury to feelings” over its tweet saying she was being investigated for her earlier tweets.
Everyone’s looking for the guy who did this
Tweets, tweets, tweets.. it’s so hard to identify what it is that made all this episode spiral out of control, isn’t it? That’s social warming in action: someone complains about something on social media, and then their workplace gets involved, and then everyone involved feels obliged to make their position public, which attracts more attention, and you soon have the most amazing recipe for toxic stew.
Any idea that this case was going to bring the two sides together was misplaced, of course. We’ve reached a point where very little room for compromise is available between the points of view. (I think there’s some, but that’s a topic for other people, not me.)
And social media is exacerbating the problem. Consider: if there were no Twitter, Bailey’s complaints about the Stonewall scheme would have been limited to the internal email system and some of her friends. Stonewall wouldn’t have complained. GCC wouldn’t have lost a tribunal case for publicly saying it was investigating her. People wouldn’t have taken sides over quite who “won” a subtle case. Sides wouldn’t have diverged.
But, you say reasonably, we do have Twitter. It does useful things, such as giving us almost instant updates from places where news is happening. Including the outcomes of employment tribunals.
On which you’re absolutely right. My point is: given the structure of social networks now, the anger and division that we see here is inevitable. Not likely; inevitable.
Which means that you could get the ghost of Margaret Thatcher to recite her poem about discord giving way to harmony, error giving way to truth every morning over Twitter, and it wouldn’t make a difference. This stuff is baked into the system. All the anger and division is only going to get worse. Still, we’ll be able to watch it all unfold on Twitter. Isn’t that a boon?
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