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Assembly Insights: What Does Fanta Zero Have to Do with Yom Kippur?

Assembly Extract from Mrs Katie Shapiro, Senior Deputy Head at Bancroft’s
Presented on Monday 14 October 2024
The last time I did a whole school assembly I said in passing how much I loved Fanta Zero. Following the assembly, there wasn’t much comment on anything I’d said in the assembly – no one mentioned the points I’d carefully crafted about community and creating a sense of belonging at Bancroft’s. But people who spoke to me afterwards were very keen to chat about my Fanta Zero consumption.

So I thought today, that since that passing reference was clearly the most interesting thing I said, I’d start with it. Don’t worry, I haven’t totally lost the plot. There is a link to what’s coming. An update – I still love Fanta Zero and get through about six cans a day – although I have now branched out to Tango Apple Zero

And here I come to the point of my assembly. Last Saturday was a difficult day for me. It was a no Fanta Zero day. Saturday was Yom Kippur in the Jewish calendar – the day when Jewish people don’t eat or drink anything at all for 25 hours. For those who take it really seriously – and I’m not one of them in this regard – you are not even supposed to brush your teeth.  The aim of the day is to repent, to think about everything you have done wrong in the previous year and to say sorry for it.

So this weekend, whilst craving my Fanta Zero, I’ve been thinking about the whole idea of saying sorry and what it means not just for me, but more widely in today’s culture and society and I wanted to share some thoughts with you.

The currency of saying sorry has changed. Everyone is apologising these days. There has actually been an observed trend of celebrities saying sorry on social media in order to attract attention. Apparently saying sorry gets clicks. And more than that – celebrities know that saying sorry means that their followers feel connected with them and part of their life.

Companies are also saying sorry a lot. I received an email a couple of weeks ago from a shop with the title ‘I’m sorry’. Usually I would have deleted spam emails like this one but I clicked on the email because I wanted to know what the shop was sorry for. The apology was for their website which had been not working properly. What a brilliant marketing tactic. The shop had succeeded in reminding me of their existence.

Meanwhile there is also a trend of public figures saying sorry for things which aren’t actually directly their fault. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing – it was clearly a good thing that Tony Blair apologised in 2007 for Britain’s role in slavery. Equally, we could all applaud Rishi Sunak last year when he apologised for the fact that the British government banned gay people from the army up until the year 2000. But these apologies are easy to do – it’s very easy to say sorry for something which you know that everyone else knows isn’t actually your fault personally. Tony Blair clearly wasn’t alive when Britain was involved in the slave trade and Rishi Sunak wasn’t Prime Minister when gay people were banned from the army. It’s much harder to say sorry when you have actually done something wrong – when you have personally messed up and need to apologise.

And here we have an issue. Because whilst everyone might be apologising when it’s easy, they aren’t always apologising when it’s hard – when they are culpable and personally to blame. Our politicians are a good example here. And there are so many examples to choose from.

Liz Truss – remember her? Our PM of only 49 days refused to apologise for her financial policies which led to some homeowners facing much higher mortgage rates. This all sounds quite technical but essentially her policies ended up directly raising the monthly payment which some people had to pay on their mortgages leaving them struggling to pay everyday bills.

Then there was Boris Johnson. He ignored the Covid rules which he himself had put in place, attending parties at Number 10. He did apologise eventually but added as part of his apology that he believed the party was a work event, and therefore allowed under the Covid rules at the time. He later said in a book published just a couple of weeks ago: “I saw no cake. I ate no blooming cake. If this was a party, it was the feeblest event in the history of human festivity.” His earlier apology – if really it could be considered to be one – therefore rang very hollow.

Not wishing to look like I have it in for Conservative politicians in this country, let me balance these examples with some from the Labour Party. You might have read over the past few weeks that Keir Starmer was found to have accepted donations for clothes and gifts such as tickets to see Arsenal in the hospitality box and a two and a half thousand pound donation for his glasses. That is a lot of money on glasses. He hasn’t apologised.

And then on the other side of the Atlantic, we have Trump. Despite all the controversies he has been embroiled in and arguably could have said sorry for, he has refused to apologise for a single one. He said: “Apologizing is a great thing but you have to be wrong. I will apologize sometime in the hopefully distant future if I’m ever wrong.”

It’s not just politicians who struggle to say sorry when it matters. Businesses do their best to avoid proper apologies when they have made serious mistakes. They worry about how an apology would make them look. And they worry even more about the compensation which they may have to pay their customers. So even when a company does make an apology, it can lack authenticity and sound rather pathetic and half hearted. The apology is often in the passive voice: ‘Mistakes were made’, rather than ‘We made mistakes’ and the apologies are limited ‘We are sorry if you felt inconvenienced’. This reluctance led the previous government under Rishi Sunak to try to pass a law to make it easier for companies to apologise. They wanted the law to say that if a company said sorry this did not mean that the company would be more likely to have to pay compensation.

So what can we take from this: saying sorry when we have actually done something wrong is hard. The first stage of admitting to oneself that we’ve done something wrong is often the most difficult. It  requires empathy and I know Mr Dickinson talked about the importance of empathy with the Thirds earlier this academic year. Empathy allows us to see situations from other points of view, rather than reaffirming our own narrative to the point that we can convince ourselves of a version of events which simply isn’t correct. Admitting that we have wronged someone also takes courage – one of our school values. It requires us to swallow our pride. It requires us to be a bit vulnerable. But actually the reluctance we may feel to apologise can be misplaced. We tend to overestimate how humiliating and stressful an apology will feel once we just get on with it. In the end, it is more likely that our apology will make us feel better about ourselves.

So my day of no Fanta Zero and thinking about being sorry is done. But I hope that this assembly has maybe made you think a little bit about the value of genuine remorse and apology. I hope that we can be even more of an empathetic community. I hope that we can admit when we are wrong and think how we can make things better to repair any damage.

We all make mistakes in life. We are all human but it’s the way we deal with those mistakes which counts.

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