From Amber Rudd to TSB, ‘sorry’ seems too easy to say – they need to back it up with meaningful action
From the bosses of big companies to secretaries of state running big government departments, they seem to be falling over each other to say it
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Your support makes all the difference.“Sorry seems to be the hardest word.” That’s how the song goes, but I think Bernie Taupin might want to rethink his famous lyric in the light of recent events.
From the bosses of big companies to secretaries of state running big government departments, they seem to be falling over each other to say it.
This week we had Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer apologising if journalists at The Guardian felt the social network was trying to prevent the truth coming out – with the help of the legal letters it has got fond of sending.
MPs were also told that Facebook accepted it had missed opportunities and got things wrong as users’ data went here, there and everywhere. “It hurts,” he said of the flak his employer has been taking. Poor lamb.
Then there was Paul Pester, the chief executive of TSB. There was no messing around from him. He said he was “really sorry” in a tweet after his bank’s customers found themselves locked out of their accounts when they tried to access them online in the wake of an IT “upgrade”, for which the word disastrous feels like an understatement. It took him 48 hours to surface, but hey, better late than never.
Home secretary Amber Rudd seems to have been expressing some form of contrition for more than a week in the wake of the Windrush scandal, which has seen her department trying to throw out British citizens who came here on the ship bearing the same name.
It started with a sorry for “any confusion or anxiety felt” – that, by the way, is classified as a non-apology – but as time went it became “deep regret” with her voice cracking, and the tears of a crocodile apparently on the way.
Even the prime minister, she who decided to create a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, which has caught growing numbers of her fellow citizens in its poisonous web, got in on the act with an apology to the leaders of Caribbean nations from which the Windrush generation were invited to come.
Is it just me, or did Amazon’s Jeff Bezos use some of his drones to fly this country’s business and political elite copies of a certain Hasbro board game named “Sorry!” that was popular when I was young?
Either that, or they’ve all accepted places at one of those universities offering PR courses and got started early on Unit 101: Apologising. “Students will learn the value of a carefully worded apology for the purposes of disarming critics and making difficult issues go away.” Cabinet ministers and corporate executives can at least afford the inflated fees.
But all these disparate situations have in common, is how empty the words have felt when they’ve come from the mouths of the people I’ve mentioned.
Let’s start with Facebook, which has talked about “empowering users”. This translates as making them do all the work to protect their information, while it continues to throw off more money than God.
No one employed there has lost their job over its data scandal, because founder Mark Zuckerberg has said the buck stops with him. Except that beyond appearing before the US Congress, he’s been sending lieutenants like Schroepfer out to cop all the flak. That’s a strange sort of buck.
As for Mr Pester, he says he has agreed with the chairman of TSB’s owner Sabadell that he’ll take responsibility for putting things right. He’s drafted in IBM, while his exhausted staff have been working around the clock in branches to deal with frazzled customers who’ve been taking out their frustrations on them.
Resign? Pfah. I suppose he could be made the fall guy at a later date, but if it happens he’ll get a nice payoff and another fancy job before long.
Meanwhile, for all Rudd and May’s apologies, they still haven’t put things right. Fresh evidence of the Home Office’s callous ineptitude seems to emerge by the day, the latest being the fact that doctors from India who the NHS had offered jobs to – and who it desperately needs – can’t get in.
Incredibly, this was said to be “in the national interest”. You read that right. Having sick people go untreated through a lack of doctors is “in the national interest”.
The thing with apologies is that they are meaningless if unaccompanied by genuine contribution and meaningful change.
Far from being the hardest word, sorry seems to be just too easy to say. Bernie had best get started on a new song.
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