Bullied at work? Grow up

No one wants to be called a bully. One thinks of Flashman roasting poor Tom Brown over an open fire, something I saw in a television drama as a child and can recall the details of until this day. Of course, I didn’t need fiction to convince me of its existence. At my comprehensive school the tough kids would routinely give a casual shove to the weaker ones. At public schools it’s reputedly far worse, even to this day. With the advent of the internet, schoolchildren can now harass each other 24/7, though I’m one of these old-fashioned people who believes that one can actually switch communication devices off if they’re bringing one sorrow. (I know I’m outrageous.)

Until recently, though, adults didn’t go around claiming to be ‘bullied’. I find it literally impossible to think of my mum or dad doing so. Then came the rise of the human-resources department and workplace grievances could no longer be sorted out by a screaming row over the bacon slicer and a post-work sweet sherry at the pub across the road (my mum’s preferred way of sorting out squabbles with her shopgirl colleagues). Instead, they had to be treated as something serious.

Alas, the professional meddlers appear to have failed somewhat as only last year a study published in the Journal of Business Ethics found that not one respondent had anything good to report about how their company’s HR department tackled alleged bullying problems. They reported being either ignored or further victimised, claiming that HR routinely sided with ‘management bullies’. ‘Workers describe bullying as pervasive, harassing, tormenting, manipulative, undermining, devastating, stressful, toxic, nightmarish, hellish and unconscionable’, noted Anglia Ruskin University in its press release on the study. ‘In contrast, they see human-resources departments as weak, complacent, cowardly, exploitative, complicit, corrupt, self-serving, ineffective and colluding.’

A new book by Darren McGarvey called Trauma Industrial Complex: How Oversharing Became a Product in a Digital World explores how appealing the siren-song of victimhood can be. ‘Today, trauma permeates media, from music and television to films and books – my own included. While the increasing openness is welcome’, he writes, ‘I’ve observed that this rise has been accompanied by a parallel explosion of disinformation and sometimes harmful guidance about how to deal with personal trauma’. He asks if the stories we’re telling ourselves are ‘liberating us or keeping us trapped’.

It’s our old pal the Victimhood Olympics again. Though no one wants to return to the days when Flashman was allowed to cook fags to his heart’s content, it’s hard to believe that everyone who claims they’re being bullied really is. Like having a mental-health condition, no one would have time to do anything else. The National Bullying Helpline contains a section called ‘Am I a bully?’, which I’m afraid I found rather amusing:

‘What makes you think you are a bully? Have you been accused of being a bully? Do you believe you reacted recklessly or unnecessarily aggressive, so feel remorseful? Well, we are all human! The fact that you are examining your actions and / or feelings is extremely commendable and you will, very likely, recover from this phase or situation you are going through. We are pleased that you are seeking to challenge and “better” yourself as a person. This trait is not typical of a bully! You may have acted out of character in a difficult situation but that is likely to be something that will be remedied over time.’

I wonder if we had this taste for drama before the rise of the soap operas – specifically, the ones driven by interpersonal problems. It’s no coincidence that many of today’s soaps are followed by the weary message to call a specific helpline if you have experienced anything like the histrionics displayed by their characters. Indeed, what has rendered a soap like Coronation Street so dull and unpopular is mostly the ceaseless lecturing and hectoring about different kinds of bullying. I keep thinking of the old phrase ‘piling on the agony’. Perhaps once a populace’s emotional thermostat has been turned up it’s impossible to turn down again. Hence the disappearance of the mustn’t-grumble stiff upper lip.

Like ‘racist’ or ‘far right’, ‘bully’ is often a way that weak people who are themselves would-be bullies shut down fights they couldn’t resist picking but then quickly realised they couldn’t win. Transvestite men, annoyed that women won’t just hold still and let themselves be bullied out of everything from prizes to toilets, are particularly big on it, to the point that dirty great hulking blokes now see themselves as ‘dolls’ to be ‘protected’ from all of us bullying TERFs.

There’s just been a big brouhaha over the Polari Prize – founded by the great gay male working-class writer, Paul Burston – because a bunch of blue-haired bourgeois activists believed that only their kind should be allowed in. When they objected to the brilliant gay male writer John Boyne being long-listed because he had playfully described himself as a TERF, the whole prize was called off. But you can bet your sweet bimby that they consider themselves the bullied, not the bullies, as the #BeKind mob invariably do. I created a great word for them way back in 2015 – the cry-bully: ‘A hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper.’

Claims of bullying when people can’t get their own way have unfortunately spread way beyond the arts and showbiz and gone directly to the heart of government. Think of all those poor ickle civil servants ‘bullied’ by the likes of Priti Patel, who made a nuisance of herself by attempting to do what she’d been elected to do. The very vulgarity of it! As Dominic Raab – another alleged bullier of the Blob – put it in 2023: ‘If someone had hurt feelings, because of something I did, of course I don’t want to upset anyone and I made clear that I’m sorry for that. But that’s not bullying, and we can’t deliver for the British people if the bar is that low.’

Politics being showbiz for ugly people, the two professions have a lot in common on the bullying issue. One of the ‘bullying’ allegations against BBC Breakfast star Naga Munchetty is that in 2022, supposedly she referred to a sex act and asked a colleague if they had done it. A source told the Sun that it was ‘crass, inappropriate and wildly unprofessional. The person felt embarrassed.’ Munchetty has also been accused of being a diva over her breakfast requirements. Her toast ‘needed to be a little bit burnt but not too much’, one former staff member told the Telegraph. ‘And if you didn’t get it right she would never shout at you but she would act as if it was a really stupid mistake to make.’ Never shout at you.. So basically, she’d give you A Look.

The word ‘snowflake’ inevitably comes to mind, as it does when one reads in the Daily Mail that ‘a series of complaints had already been made to the BBC’s management and HR department about an “intimidating and bullying” culture on Breakfast, which had led to long-term members of staff leaving their jobs’. ‘There is a normalisation of people crying at work and on their journeys home’, one employee said.

I don’t know what young people who go to work in the media imagine it will be like. Personally, when I became a journalist at the age of 17, I hoped that it would be full of harsh, impatient people telling me what to do – and hopefully, swearing. I was tired of my calm, polite childhood and desperate for some hustle and bustle. Perhaps these days the wrong sort of youngsters are going into this notoriously harsh profession, ones who’ve never been told they’re lacking in any department by their proud parents? Maybe recruit a few more working-class kiddies who’ve grown up expecting life not to be a bed of roses?

In the almost half a century I’ve now been a hack, I’ve had rape threats, death threats; I’ve been slandered and libelled. But I’ve never once gone to a lawyer or the police (though the police once came to me, sent by my then-employers, the Guardian, who were concerned about my safety when a particularly insistent nutter tried to waylay me there). When I was fat, a magazine put my name under a photo of Jabba the Hutt. When I criticised Meghan Markle, her fans came at me in a concerted campaign of taunts about the suicide of my son. But I would never, ever claim that someone had bullied me. I’d see it as an insult to my own sense of self-respect.

Of course, if someone is physically attacking someone and / or sexually bothering someone, that’s already covered by the criminal law and needs to be countered with extreme measures. But for the rest, as Eleanor Roosevelt put it: ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.’

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, Notes from the Naughty Step, here.