Banker bonuses and prescription drugs

When I first looked at the news this morning I was tempted to write something about continuing speculation over inflated bonuses in the city. Apparently this is on the agenda for the Labour party conference and therefore to all intents and purposes continues to be a pressing issue.

There were, however, two reasons for not commenting on how much bankers are paid: firstly, the likelihood that I could actually offer original or insightful comment on this issue (they're paid too much, the tax payer, since bailing out the banks doesn't like it etc. etc.); secondly, there was another more interesting story about Gordon Brown and prescription drugs.

For anyone that didn't see it, in an interview on BBC1's Andrew Marr programme, Gordon Brown was grilled about a possible use of prescription drugs to get him through the general election. The feeling at the Labour party conference was that such a line of questioning was inappropriate for a programme that is upheld as one for serious political debate.

Much as I believe in honesty and integrity when it comes to politics and in fact all areas of life, there is something a little cheap about such intrusive interview tactics. If there were serious causes for concern about drugs interfering with his capabilities as PM then I could see why a question about his personal life would be justified. However, seeing as this was just blind curiosity, based upon a supposition that other politicians may dabble in the odd bit of paracetamol, it does strike me as a little unfair.

Perhaps part of the reason for asking about Brown's use of painkillers is due to a general dumbing down of politics to appeal to a wider and more scandal-hungry audience. We've seen it for years now, most evident in our unhealthy fascination for affairs and the like. Regardless of the fact that adultery (to coin an old fashioned term) is neither illegal nor proven to have any direct impact upon a person's ability to be a an effective politicial animal, it seems to be the one thing that we can use to drag a senior figure down.

Why should we reduce politics to such an inane level, other than to serve mindless gossip and ultimately make political issues palatable in the most destructive way possible? Yes, politics are relevant to and should concern all of us, but the process by which we should achieve that is through educating people about the real issues at stake, rather than by reducing our leaders to little more than celebrities. You'll be pleased to know that I won't get started on the 'sleb world today...

Similarly, there should be greater recognition of the damage that gossip has in the workplace. To give HR due credit, there has been much better recognition of office bullying and certainly in larger organisations, it is now commonplace to implement policies that handle such intimidating behaviour. Yet those ever prevalent office whispers do continue to circulate.

Perhaps one trick here, without patronising our colleagues, is to increase awareness of the effect that certain types of behaviours can have. For example, among younger members of staff, are they aware of the boundaries when it comes to sharing personal information? With the advent of such gossip powerhouses as facebook, people can often find that their colleagues are privy to all sorts of information that can be used against them. It's this sort of boundary blurring that often leads to lower morale, as colleagues struggle to overcome any rumours that are used against them.

You can't control everything and nor would you want to; people can and will talk. But a greater respect for the privacy we should accord our personal lives and those of others, could go a long way to focusing on the real issues at hand, be that the hard world of business or the even harder world of politics.