Untangling a knotty tie problem
Earlier this year when Graham Allen, a Labour MP, stood up to speak on behalf of the British Youth Parliament which had asked to use the Common's chamber for a debate, he was roundly chastised because he was not wearing a tie.
Quite whether his naked neck was as the result of trying to save on expenses of an attempt to look "down with the kids", in the hope of capturing the Nottingham youth vote, was unclear. Two months later I suspect that Honourable Members have more pressing issues to be getting hot under the collar about, which is a shame because we men really need to have a talk about the future of ties.
I think they should be consigned to that small room in the back of the museum of fashion reserved for men's stuff, alongside ruff collars, breeches and codpieces.
What is the point of ties?
They never had any practical purpose such as keeping the neck warm or protecting it from swords. The tie's origin lies in ancient China, Roma and Egypt where men sometimes wore bits of cloth around their necks to denote social rank. They told you who it was permissible to shove around and who to bow and scrape to. We do not really do that anymore.
The modern necktie can be traced to the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), when soldiers from Croatia, fighting for France, turned up for work wearing knotted handkerchiefs around their necks as means of identification. The French who always have more interest in clothes than in fighting liked their style and promptly left the Croats to do the dirty work and scuttled back to Paris to open tie shops, calling the item a "Cravat", which is "Croat" in a French accent. From that day to now it has been decreed that a man is not properly dressed unless he has a bit of coloured cloth around his neck.
The mercenaries had a point; a tie can serve as a low cost way of identifying people who belong to the same group. In this regard, school ties come to mind, but due to health and safety fears some schools are now banning the real thing in favour of clip-on versions. The safety nannies have declared real ties to be killers so they have been replaced by what are in effect floppy fabric badges, and what is the point of that?
Ties do have a simple decorative value, but for every firm elegant hand-finished Italian silk item you will see today, I guarantee that you will have to witness 50 limp polyester examples. Then there is the nadir of neckwear, the unfunny abomination known as the humorous tie. (The wearing of which should be a hanging offence – with an amusingly coloured noose!)
So has the tie really had its day?
Well maybe not, it still has one powerful group of supporters: politicians. Ties send psychological signals that the more able politicians are adept at manipulating. Most of the time this boils down to a red tie when you want to look like a leader and a blue tie when you want people to trust you, and a pink and yellow cartoon psychedelic job if you want to be the next Lembit Opik.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was extremely adept at the tie game. He would switch from red to blue in the few seconds it would take to move from a podium (leader giving speech to nation) to a TV camera (regular guy with your family’s best interests at heart).
Strangely Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling have taken to wearing purple ties. Did they compare fashion tips we wonder? Maybe the Laurel and Hardy of British politics thought that by choosing a colour that comes about when you mix red and blue that they would radiate leadership and trustworthiness at the same time. Sadly it does not work that way, as purple denotes haughty arrogance.
Of mice and men
First Minister Peter Robinson, a keen tie wearer, must be ruing Harold MacMillan’s axiom that it is “events” that change the course of politics in spite of the best laid plans.
Thus it was that just as the DUP leader was starting to make some of the most intelligent noises ever to be heard in the Assembly, about reducing Departments, cutting back on MLAs, slashing quangoland and getting to grips with the inept wastrels of the rights industry, that a spate of headlines regarding his own spending habits undercut the credibility of his excellent plans.
Equality cuts both ways
Last Friday hundreds of civil servants took to the streets to protest as they have not yet received the pack pay that was promised at a time when the Executive was in the business of buying votes and blissfully unaware that money does not grow on trees.
The rationale for 100 million pay out comes from equal pay claims by thousands of civil servants and although the money was promised more than a year ago it has not yet appeared. (Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if it turned out there was never even enough cash in the kitty to pay for this generous gesture?)
The disgruntled public servants were brandishing placards calling for equal pay, which, in the normal course of events, would seem fair enough. However I wonder how the public sector Trades Unions that organised the protest will react to a new research document from PricewaterhouseCoopers titled ’The Tortoise and the Hare’ which reveals that the famously generous, some might say over generous, public sector pension provisions mean that in most cases civil servants will, over the course of a working life and retirement, will be better off than their equivalents in the private sector.
How about a bit of equality for the rest of us?
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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