Institutionally rubbish?

A lot of hot air in the paper yesterday marking the 10th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence's death at the hands of racist thugs.  Was the Met Police force still "institutionally racist", as the Macpherson report had it?  

In a former life I used to be a solicitor in East London, working with largely black clients, in and out of its police stations in the early hours of the morning, dealing with mostly white police officers.  Yes, many of them were racist; but that was not because the institution was racist - in fact it had tried strenously at management level to do the right thing - it was because Met police officers tended to come from lower middle or working class backgrounds, often outside London, and thus tended to be from the social class most likely to be overtly racist and to have least personal experience of living and working alongside black people.  Moreover, because the areas in which they worked were largely black, most of the criminals were black too. So it's not hard to see how the black = criminal equation grew up in the minds of these officers.  Not that that's any excuse, mind.

I thought of this today because an independent report has looked into the death of Stuart Lubbock in Michael Barrymore's swimming pool.  And guess what?  It says that the police failed to secure the site and failed to secure crucial items which might have been used to assault Lubbock and which later "disappeared".  In all, six complaints by Lubbock's father were upheld.  

For anyone used to seeing the way the police work from the inside, the real lesson of both these cases is that the police are very often mediocre at what they do.  The Met were probably never institutionally racist, but they were certainly institutionally rubbish.

The arctic south

I spent Friday and Saturday with a friend climbing some hills either side of the A9 in the Central Highlands, an area that lacks almost all of the drama of Glencoe and the west but has something of what I imagine to be the grand scale of the Arctic tundra or the Russian steppes.  There had been heavy snowfall which was now melting, but although we waded exhaustingly through acres of slush, the ground underneath was still frozen solid.  The benevolent looking weather belies the strength of the wind - you could hardly stand upright in it. It's worth clicking on the picture to see the wonderful striations of snow, and to get the sense of the high plateau, one of the most southerly Arctic environments in the world, apparently going on forwever.

Freedom of certain kinds of speech?

Two pieces of bad news for lovers of free speech last week.  First, the turning away at Heathrow of the right-wing Dutch MP Geert Wilders and then the hoo-ha over Richard Bean's play England People Very Nice at the National Theatre.  To be clear, I haven't seen either the play, or the film that Mr Wilders proposed to show at Westminster.  But if "free-speech" means anything beyond an inaccurate platitude, it means allowing people to express opinions you don't like.  

Justifying Wilders' ban on the grounds that letting him in might cause a riot, it must have embarrassed David Miliband to discover that Wilders had been over a month previously without any such thing happening.  You should be able to describe the Koran as "fascist", however wrong that might be, without attracting the attention of either the law or the Muslim great and good.  

As for Mr Bean, it disappointed me that so few of the usual suspects lined up against him seemed to realise that the fact that they didn't like his play was absolutely irrelevant in the context of freedom of speech.  I personally believe that racism is stupid as well as wrong, but that's only a matter of opinion, and the fact that it's the PC brigade which is edging towards a state where some opinions are officially OK and some not gives me concern.  Think how easily the jack-boot might be transferred to the other foot.

The fact is that immigration makes a lot of people in Britain extremely uneasy, and the more their voices are marginalised and brushed under the carpet the more likely it is that in the medium-term support for extremists will grow.

Bankers in the dock?

The Grauniad has its knickers in a twist again over the credit crunch, the inquisition of banking CEOs by the Treasury select committee apparently meriting a double-page spread.  Methinks a bit of deflection at work here - so capitalists take enormous risks and put immediate personal gain ahead of long-term sustainability!  What next?  Bears crapping in the woods?

No, if Governments let them, bankers run riot.  And who set up the UK's banking regulatory system?  One Gordon Brown.  No sign of him in the dock though.

According to a bold splash in the Graun, their MP inquisitors thought it worth while asking the erstwhile Masters of the Universe whether they had any formal banking qualifications.  I didn't bother reading the answers.  A few miles from where I'm writing this, Alex Ferguson is going off to work.  Without any formal football qualifications.

So farewell then Scolari!

It's hard to feel much sympathy for Chelsea fans after their club sacked their fourth manager in five years: I've tried, and failed.  They've had the good news with Mr Abramovich - his shed loads of money bought them a great manager and some instant trophies - but now here comes the bad news.  

It's hard to believe, I know, but here's an owner who thinks he knows more about football than the people he pays to run the team, who wanted success now, who didn't understand that sometimes things get worse before they get better, and who has become reluctant to throw good money after bad.  It's downhill all the way from here.

Directing bruckner

Went to see Bruckner 8 played by the BBC Phil at the Bridgewater on Saturday.  Gunter Herbig was conducting.  Unlike many, he conducts only fractionally ahead of the beat, so that there does appear to be some relationship between what he does and what the orchestra does.  There was no single point where I thought, "He got that wrong", but sometimes did feel a lack of direction in the music, a common fault in Bruckner performances, and it's interesting to think why this might be.  

Bruckner tends to write in self-contained paragraphs.  One ends and another begins.  Over time you get previous paragraphs repeated, sometimes nearly verbatim, sometimes very much altered.  Because of the huge stretches of music involved, repetition of these long paragraphs can make you feel as if you're going round in a circle.  Hearing the music after a long and busy day, there were times when I imagined myself in a dream-state; my fourteen year old son fell comprehensively asleep and his heavy breathing punctuated the silences between the movements.  

When the final chord began at (what turned out to be) the end of the last movement I found myself thinking, "This could be the end.  On the other hand he could just contrive a diminuendo and get it going again with something else".  There was no sense that this had to be the conclusion; it was almost as if Bruckner had merely had enough and thought, "Right, let's bung a bit of C major in - that'll round things off nicely".  That could be the conductor's fault, of course, but it's a feeling you rarely experience in Sibelius or Nielsen: their grip of musical argument is so masterly that you are never in any doubt that the music has got to where it's been going all along.

At the moment I'm rehearsing the Gorton Phil for a performance of Symphonie Fantastique at the end of February, and my other gripe concerned Bruckner's orchestration.  If only he had had a fraction of Berlioz's imagination!  With Bruckner it is sumptuous strings or heaven-storming brass; or both.  But his woodwind writing is pedestrian - they are reduced to the occasional cursory solo.  No wonder wind players don't tend to rate Bruckner much.  Of course one reason Mahler's symphonies are on the whole better regarded is that his writing for the orchestra is a hundred times more varied and idiomatic than Bruckner.  But then, like Berlioz, he was a conductor, and conductors understand the way an orchestra works in the way few composers can.