MY NAME IS Mick, and I am an office bully. Before you start booing, I am a victim of office bullies too. Indeed, many people I have worked with could also qualify as both bullies and bullied. And so, quite possibly, could you — at least according to the ever-widening definition of workplace harassment today.

In a survey, 81 per cent of employees claim to have been bullied at work. Surely there are not enough hours in the working day to pick on all of them? In another survey, self-styled victims of workplace bullying describe their common ordeals of being ridiculed, excessively monitored and excluded from meetings or social events, alongside a few instances of physical abuse.

Most of this amounts to what used to be called office politics. It can be unpleasant, but it is only part of most people’s working lives at some point. Yet to judge by last week’s landmark bullying case, office politics is now equated with the crime of stalking.

Helen Green won £800,000 in damages from Deutsche Bank, after a High Court judge ruled that her former employer had not protected her from bullying colleagues. Criticism of the case has focused on the big payout, but the principles it established are far more worrying.

The case was heard under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 — a law that was supposed to protect individuals from personal stalking. Ms Green claimed that she had been driven to a nervous breakdown by four female colleagues whose bullying included making derogatory remarks, refusing to talk to her and blowing raspberries. Once, The Times reported, a colleague “apparently crossed her arms in a very dramatic way and stared at Miss Green”. The court was told that the office environment was one of “extreme bitchiness”.

No doubt. But that is hardly new or shocking, particularly in the high-pressure City, and as Ms Green was having an affair with her boss and had been promoted several times. Yet it is treated as if the bullies had boiled her bunny.

Companies may have little defence against future cases, since the House of Lords judgment ruled that employers have “vicarious responsibility” for the behaviour of staff. Far be it from this old libertarian Marxist to stand up for poor little billionaire banks, but it does seem to raise the question why a firm would want to employ anybody in Britain. Indian call centres, here we come (at least until the sub-continent catches up with UK harassment law).

I see no evidence that workplace bullying is getting worse — rather we are more willing to see ordinary office politics as bullying. This is not simply about a few individuals going soft or gold-digging. It is about the broader rise of mistrust and the feeling that hell really is other people.

The intrusion of harassment law into office politics can only make matters worse by poisoning relationships. Already there have been calls for yet more zero-tolerance anti-harassment codes, more policing of e-mails, more awareness training. At this rate, we might all soon be scared to talk to workmates, unless reading from a script approved by company lawyers.

Schools were the first to expand the definition of bullying to include such everyday playground issues as being shouted at or “excluded”. Now it is being imported into the adult worlds of the City — and even the Armed Forces.

It was reported this week that a regimental sergeant-major at Sandhurst had been suspended for allegedly bullying cadets, apparently by shouting obscenities (RSM swears at recruits — the horror!), and stamping on the less-than-shiny boots of one. (The MoD explained that the cadet was not wearing his boots at the time.) Whether the RSM also folded his arms and stared is not reported.

Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com

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