Julian Barnes and the Diminishing of the English Novel

Engaged in a session of Dad's-taxiing the other night, I nearly heard Julian Barnes in the radio talking about the Booker prize. Actually I did hear a little of it; Barnes spoke of his anticipation with a childishness eagerness at odds with his reputation as a serious writer. I couldn't help but think that he'd have sounded rather different if he'd lost. Perhaps that's a given. Then my journey came to an end and I missed whatever momentous stuff followed.

In keeping with my new found status as person up-to-speed with modern literature (see posts passim) I have read The Sense of an Ending, Barnes' winning novel. Tony, a man of middle years, divorced, seeing old age approaching, recounts his friendship as a young adult with Adrian, and with Veronica, his first serious girlfriend (NB Spoilers coming). He and Veronica split, and Adrian writes to ask Tony if he'd mind if the two of them got together. Tony remembers replying facetiously; but it then turns out, many years later, that Tony wrote a rather different letter, and we are invited to believe that this led to a series of awful consequences for which the elderly Veronica cannot forgive him.

I found myself uttering a series of increasingly exasperated Paxman-like "Oh for God's sakes!" as the faintly melodramatic denouement of Barnes' book unfolded. For it to be effective - and for the novel to work - we have to accept that Tony's letter led to those awful consequences, whereas in fact a moment's reflection would convince us that they would probably have happened anyway; we would have to accept that Veronica, a clever woman, was incapable of perceiving this; and we would have to accept that Tony, himself a clever person, rather than meekly accepting his guilt, would not have the wit to utter a rather tart "Get over yourself" to Veronica and get on with his retirement. Moreover since what Hitchcock used to call the McGuffin of the story is that we all create our own histories, blurring the past, it seems strange that this should happen to everyone in the story apart from Veronica, for whom the reverses of the 1970s appear to be as painful as when they were fresh. If we as readers find any one of these things implausible (and I found all three so) the novel collapses.

Once more I found myself saying exasperatedly to my friends in the Males from Hale, a book group, "But people just don't behave like that!" I find myself increasingly hamstrung by the divergence of some art from observed behaviour. We watched Atonement the other day at home, and I was reminded anew of my exasperation with Ian McEwan's novel. You have to believe that the Keira Knightley character, caught in flagranto with the gardener's son by her sister, would have said nothing when the sister denounces him to the police, another guest having been sexually assaulted in the grounds. Yes, McEwan really thinks we will meekly accept that the Knightley character would rather have watched her lover go to prison than stand up for him. Oh, and that the victim of the assault in the grounds will one day marry her attacker. Folks is strange, but not that strange. "It's only a film", says my wife. "It's just not a very good film", I reply. Or novel, for that matter. Both Barnes and McEwan write beautifully; but no amount of beautiful writing can camouflage an unbelievable plot.

One advantage of magical realism is that it matters slightly less whether authors get this kind of thing right. When normal rules of physics and taxonomy cease to apply, one is inclined to be a bit more forgiving of aberrations of human psychology. I have also been reading Ali Smith's The Accidental, in which Amber, a woman, unbelievable in naturalistic terms, intervenes in the lives of a seriously dysfunctional family, with dramatic effect. We accept that it's not naturalistic and accept what Smith tells us. Smith makes Barnes' book feel plodding, and McEwan look like a navel gazing coin polisher. She has more talent in her little finger than either of them.

Of course the disadvantage of magical realism is that it makes us all the more aware that we are being manipulated by the author, and that it's the author's decision to make the characters move in a particular way. Good novels make it seem inevitable that, say, Sidney Carton should give up his life for his double, and it's only if we stand back and think about it that we realise Dickens could have done it differently. When Alan Breck gambles away his money in Kidnapped we are blissfully unaware that it is Stevenson who is making it happen. It seems to happen because that's what Alan Breck is like. It's the fact that we don't think about the alternatives when we're reading that gives a good naturalistic novel its peculiar force. It seems to me as a non-novelist that that's too important a quality to throw away.

Although Smith's book was wonderful, I found myself thinking afterwards about its ethos. Thanks to the wonderful Amber's intervention in The Accidental, the four members of the family are liberated from their various unhappinesses; or rather all are bar the truly unpleasant father, Michael. In particular the mother, Eve, embarks on a liberating journey in America while the others remain at home.

I would be willing to bet that Smith, Scottish and a lesbian, is of the bien-pensant Left. In case we had failed to work out how horrid Michael is, we are told quite early on that he supported the Iraq war. How ghastly! And yet the tone of the book is one in which the pursuit of personal freedom leads to fulfilment. I find this a surprisingly right-wing, even libertarian, outlook. One of the reasons so many of us lead lives which, from the outside, appear no doubt stultifying and conventional is that association with others (spouses and children in particular, but other people too) brings with it responsibilities which require that one's own personal freedom is constrained. In The Accidental Eve's Thelma and Louise-like Odyssey is described in some detail; the effect on her children, abandoned in London with their asshole father, is glossed over. Everything we know about these dysfunctional kids tells us that they will be lost without their mother. But Smith more or less ignores that. After all, gritting your teeth and getting on with family life doesn't make much of a story, does it?

It turns out that I'm not the only one who didn't think the Booker winning novel was up to much. Geoff Dyer has written a withering review of it in the New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/books/review/julian-barnes-and-the-diminishing-of-the-english-novel.html). Dyer's objection was that it was kind of OK, but no more. I think that the English novel is big enough to withstand being diminished by Barnes, and by McEwan and Smith. But I do wish they'd write with a bit less polish and a bit more plausibility.

"Pourquoi nous?", demandent les Francaises.

Apologies for prolixity this morning, and for the clumsy French, but Euro news is coming thick and fast.

Here's the head of the Bank of France and European Central Bank policymaker Christian Noyer, bleating about the rumoured imminent ratings downgrade for France: "The downgrade does not appear to me to be justified when considering economic fundamentals. Otherwise, they should start by downgrading Britain which has more deficits, as much debt, more inflation, less growth than us and where credit is slumping."

These people just don't get it. M. Noyer, even a layman like me can see that you have ignored the most fundamental of economic fundamentals.

Britain's economy may have the defects you describe; but its government has shown a willingness to get its spending under control. Has France? No. It has merely put up a couple of taxes.

Britain has its own central bank, its own currency, and can set its own interest rate. Rates here have been at 0.5% for years. ECB rates are way above this, and the Bank (for which you work M Noyer) actually put rates up after the crisis broke.

Because Britain has its own central bank, it can print money when it likes. Can France? No. France is stuffed because it signed up to monetary union.

France would love to have Britain's control over its own currency and start the printing presses rolling; in fact its President has been trying unsuccessfully to bring that about for months. It can't because its larger, more powerful and harder working neighbour, Germany, won't allow it to.

Now do you understand why Britain is borrowing at just over 2% and France is threatened with losing its AAA rating?

Someone once complained that this blog seemed quite angry quite a lot of the time. If that's so, it's a deplorable fault. But no apologies for the above.

Borg triumphs for Sweden again

Apologies to tennis fans, but Sweden's Anders Borg has been named EU Finance Minister of the year. I learned this piece of earth shattering news last night on the way home from an orchestral meeting. Mr Borg was interviewed on The World Tonight on the day Britain's unemployment figures reached their worst level for Lord knows how many years.

What, Robin Lustig, asked him, was Sweden's secret? How come Sweden's unemployment levels were so benign in comparison with Britain's? Ah, said Mr Borg, that's because we were more careful with our spending. We ran a surplus in 2006 and 2007, so that when the crisis came we could put that money into our economy.

Somewhere, I fancy, the corpse of JM Keynes gave a twitch, and in his long sleep the great man dreamed that someone in the world of the living had finally listened to him.

Lustig persisted. Did Mr Borg think that Britain was right to be cutting its deficit? Yes, said Borg. When the deficit is so bad you have no alternative. But what, Lustig went on, his desperation now becoming palpable, was Sweden's experience when it tackled its spending? Was Britain right to be cutting so fast? Yes, said Borg. We found in Sweden that it was helpful to front-load the spending cuts.

So there you have it. Someone who thinks George Osborne has got it about right.

Oh, and it turns out that Sweden isn't going to sign last weekend's Euro treaty either. Not without some changes. We are not alone!

Alex Salmond, Euroland and the Groat.

I watched Newsnight last night, mindful of wails from the Torygraph about the BBC's pro-EU bias. From the point of view of someone essentially well disposed to the EU but sceptical about the single currency, I found it pretty disappointing.

As usual with these matters, it's very hard to put your finger on bias, because the presenters never come out and say, "Well I think . . . .". Bias is something you have to infer from the questions that are asked, from those that aren't asked, from the tone of the interviewer (in this case Emily Maitlis), and from the attitudes and assumptions that underly the programme. It was this last which I found striking. Maitlis's questions, presumably scripted by her and her producer, seemed to assume that David Cameron had lost something fundamental by not signing up to a really important treaty which has a good chance of saving the Euro.

But a 6th Form economics student could tell you that the Treaty has no chance whatever of doing that. It contains fiscal rules which will not be obeyed, attempts to impose austerity measures which will make even less likely that countries will be able to grow their way out of trouble (and which there are now some signs that electorates of individual countries won't accept), makes no provision for transfers between rich and poor regions of the EU and does nothing to make the ECB a lender of last resort.

The failure to grasp this context coloured Maitlis's questions, both to the solitary Tory MP and the European politicians on the programme. She didn't ask the Eurocrats any questions about utility of the treaty, and when they accused Britain of acting selfishly she didn't point out that Britain is not in the Euro, or that in any event the Germans are effectively holding the whole continent to ransom by refusing to allow the ECB to print money. Now there's self-interest for you. Where was the question to the Dutch MEP about the transfer of Holland's surpluses to the struggling south? The EU apparently always makes good, gradualist decisions, whereas Maitlis's questions to the hapless Tory were tinged with what sounded like real anger at Cameron's impulsive mistake.

As a BBC lover I found it made uncomfortable viewing. You don't need to be a genius to see that, whatever Cameron may have got wrong, the Eurozone leaders are in a different class of incompetence altogether.

In the Autumn the EU tried to impose a haircut on Greek bond investors. "No", cried economics geeks (including me): "If you do that to Greece, that'll just push bond yields up for bigger countries like Italy". And thus it came to pass. So what does the Group of 26 promise now? That in future there will be no more haircuts for bond investors. The words "stable door" and "horse" spring to mind. But the idea that the gilt markets will believe a promise, enshrined in an EU treaty or not, that there is no chance of them losing any of their money in a future default, is laughable.

We are dealing with a group of people, mostly unelected, incapable of understanding that if you impose losses on the bond markets it might make them wary of investing in other insolvent countries, but, that having come comprehensively to pass, capable of believing that a promise that it'll never happen again will make bond investors come running back waving their hands in the air like guests at a Happy Clappy wedding.

What does any of this have to do with Alex Salmond? Well, for a long time the SNP's policy was to join the Eurozone. That's a policy which has looked more and more difficult to justify as the imbalances thrown up by the one-size fits all interest policy have brought first Ireland, then Greece and now Italy and Spain into the maelstrom. And so it comes as no surprise to find Salmond saying, on the Today programme this morning, that post-independence the SNP will "keep the pound" until conditions are right for Euro membership. "Keep the pound"? That's big of him.

I have always thought the currency issue might be the Nats' achilles heel, and strains in the Eurozone have now brought the problem to the surface. If the Scots become independent, that means independence from the Bank of England. No doubt some accommodation could be reached about ownership of the actual notes and coins in circulation. But the Bank of England sets interest rates for all the UK. Post independence it will not be setting rates for Scotland. Or rather, it will not be taking into account the Scots economy when it sets rates. I'd be willing to bet that won't happen because some English Tory MPs will make sure it doesn't. If Scotland uses the pound for any length of time (and there will be a strong feeling in England that it shouldn't), it will be on England's terms. And that will mean interest rates suitable for England and the rest of the UK, not Scotland. In practical terms that probably means a rate that is too high for Scotland, and which will quickly strangle the Scottish economy.

Salmond had better hope that the Euro is still surviving in workable form when independence day dawns. Because Scotland could fairly quickly be setting up its own currency. How about the Groat?

PS - A couple of headlines, one on Radio 5 and one on Radio 4, two days apart, both pretty much identical - "David Cameron has vetoed a treaty to stabilise the Euro" was the gist - and both thoroughly misleading. Cameron has not prevented a treaty taking place. He has used his veto to prevent Britain having to sign it. The treaty is set to be signed next March by 26 other countries. Secondly the treaty has as much chance of stabilising the Euro as I have of conducting the Berlin Phil. Hours before the time of the second headline - last night - Italian 10 year bonds had reached record levels. Some stabilisation.

Eurogeddon in slow motion

So David Cameron has wielded the handbag and, according to whom you believe, given Merkozy a biff on the nose, or missed by a mile and ended up striking himself on the ear.

This blog is faintly sympathetic to Cameron. As per previous posts, the Euro crisis can, I think, only be averted, even in the medium term, by a combination of fiscal union and a massive injection of funds, this money to come from either the Germans coughing up themselves or permitting the ECB to act as a lender of last resort. Obviously the Germans don't want to do this, but I have had a bet with a friend that they will crack in the end. I think it will happen because the markets will get more and more nervous of lending to countries and Berlin will be faced with the choice of seeing its beloved Eurozone break up or agreeing to set the printing presses rolling.

In this context the weekend's summit seems like an increasingly desperate attempt to reach a solution which defers that German decision. The idea that there will be strict rules in place - rules which will be actually enforced - to make countries restrict their borrowing strikes me as preposterous. I remember the Stability and Growth Pact, which was broken with impunity by France and Germany among others. You can hardly see fines being imposed under a regime of Qualified Majority Voting. Countries will let each other off. I doubt very much that the markets will take this seriously for long.

I am also staggered that European leaders are apparently so eager to subscribe to a system which subjects their budgets to EU scrutiny and approval. What makes them think that their electorates will put up with that? And do they not think it might be an idea to ask them first? When this kind of thing goes through on the nod you know that politicians have lost the plot.

But should we have signed up to it anyway? Clarion voices are telling us that we should. We need to have a voice at the discussions, they say. But getting our views heard is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end. The end is getting policies which are good for us. Cameron found himself in the unenviable position of having to decide whether to avail himself of the means (being able to take part in the decision making process) even though it meant swallowing policies which he believed were bad. His decision not to do so doesn't seem on the face of it unreasonable. His critics have mistaken having a voice as an end in itself. It isn't. The true goal lies elsewhere.

Another friend has sent me an email reading, "Rejoice! Rejoice! We're on our way out of Europe!" I think she's being a bit premature. Some of the Euro leaders hate us because we said the single currency wouldn't work, and we were right. Some of them are jumping up and down because Cameron refused to go along with their hollow and temporizing attempt to paper over the cracks in their grand project. But that'll pass. I'd be willing to have another bet: that in chancellories across Europe apparatchiks will soon be saying to one another, "Actually, it's a shame that we couldn't keep the Brits onside". I don't believe Merkozy or their associates ever actually believed that we would refuse to sign up; and they were unprepared when Cameron did just that.

Watching Eurogeddon unfold is like I imagine watching a train crash in slow motion. It is terrible, terrifying and fascinating in turn.

PS - As of 16th Dec it turns out that Hungary and the Czech Republic are having doubts about signing up too: annoyingly for Merkozy they are dubious about giving up autonomy over tax. And the Irish think they may have to have a referendum. Moreover, British officials are apparently to be invited to further discussions on the treaty early next year. So maybe we are not so alone after all.

Oh no not more Jeremy Clarkson

Once more into the breach, dear friends, and let's appal the bien-pensant with our funny remarks about homosexuals, foreigners and trades-unionists. Yes, it's Jeremy Clarkson, doing what he does best (his talent in other directions, to be clear, being modest).

Actually I have some sympathy with Clarkson. He was clearly trying, not very successfully, to be funny; in fact, as I've written here before, that is Clarkson's biggest problem. As his defenders have pointed out, there has been over the years a good deal more left-wing near-the-knuckle humour on TV than the reverse. It's actually quite hard to think of a right-wing comic who has got anywhere near TV recently. Bernard Manning? Jim Davidson? But just because the likes of Ben Elton were funnier (oh go on, a bit funnier) doesn't mean that Clarkson was wrong to make his attempted joke. As I weary of saying, it's much better that people are able to say appalling things than not. If you doubt this, just Google the responses of the po-faced anti-free speech Trades Unionists condemning him. Watch them and ask, who do you prefer, the rumbustious scatter-gun Poujadism of the former motoring correspondent enfant-terrible or the tight-arsed dreariness of the union apparatchiks? If the latter, I fear for you.

Anyway, about the strikes. Good or bad? As someone who quite likes the markets (with some reservations) I applaud - as surely Clarkson would - that people have the right to withdraw their labour if they like. I do slightly wonder though whether they are wise. How many people in the private sector have lost their jobs in the last five years? How many people in the public sector have lost theirs? I'd be willing to bet that private sector casualties outnumber public by ten to one, minimum. Free movement of labour means that public sector workers are free to try and get a private sector job if they like. I don't think many of them are risking it. If I was a public sector worker I'd be hunkering down and watching the cold winds blowing outside my windows with a certain amount of relief.

This sense of the wider economic context isn't one I saw widely replicated amongst the strikers. A wonder if any of them will have changed their minds after watching Robert Peston's How the West was Broke last night. My wife, for whom matters economical matter rather less than they do for me, asked afterwards, "How did this happen without anyone noticing it?" Modesty prevented me from drawing her attention to the following, written in February 2007, eighteen months before the Credit Crunch struck: "We have enjoyed a decade of economic good times built on both government and citizens spending money they did not have. . . We may well find that the trad Keynesian way out of recession is unavailable because the Government borrowed too much during the good times." Or this, from April 2006: ". . .the spending there's been in the last decade has partly been of borrowed money, by consumer and government alike. So for things to carry on it looks as if we'll have to keep on borrowing. How long can that carry on? IMO not much longer. . . it looks as if further spending growth might be difficult. That's why the end of the decade looks dodgy to me. . . Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the Keynesian idea was that you borrowed during the downswing of the business cycle and paid it back during the upswing. Seems to me that we (meaning HMG and consumers) have borrowed during the upswing (HMG to put money into public services, consumers to buy Chinese imports), and I wonder where growth will come from now it looks as if the pendulum might be going back the other way."

Some of the most telling footage in Peston's programme was the grainy newsreel stuff of Mrs Thatcher, and the mass walkouts at UK car plants like Longbridge. I remember my Dad saying at the time, "They're pricing themselves out of jobs". How right he was. But it seems to me futile to blame either management or unions. Both sides were swimming against a tide which would have washed British manufacturing industry away in the end no matter what we did.

Peston did a pretty good job of explaining how the East lent money to the West to enable it to carry on buying its products. I thought a couple of things were missing. The first was that if Gordon Brown hadn't run a deficit from 2001 onwards (when Britain was 8 years into the longest period of economic growth in its history), we would have been at least a couple of hundred billion better off when recession came, and better able to fight off the downturn without recourse to the markets. But maybe that was too party political. The truth sometimes is. The second was that all the bankers catastrophic risk-taking did was to postpone the point at which the party came to an end. It would have finished anyway at some point, with the consequences for our living standards which we're all going to have to deal with for the forseeable future.

I have strayed some distance from Jeremy Clarkson. Perhaps that's the best place to be.

How I wrote Playing Bogart

A friend emails with a link to this blog - http://louderthanwar.com/blogs/top-12-underground-records-i-wish-i-had-released. The writer, record producer Dave Parsons, has named Playing Bogart by 23 Jewels as no.9 on his list of top 12 underground records. Reader, I wrote that song and released that record. Over thirty years ago. Only a thousand copies were ever made, and they regularly appear on Ebay now, going for £50 plus (I don't have one personally).

How did this happen? And why?

I left school in 1977, just as punk was kicking off, and in my gap year, whilst other people were doing useful and interesting things, got a job in WH Smith's storeroom and joined a band, Idiot Rouge (Yes, I know; terrible name). In the course of that year we must have done 50 gigs round the North West - Liverpool, Manchester of course, Sheffield, Stoke. Through them I met Clive Gregson, singer of the pub rock band Any Trouble, and my memories of that year are of endless journeys with The Trubs, as we called them, in unreliable vans to far flung venues where we or they, or both, would play to three men and a dog for thirty quid; that and laughing quite a lot.

I also wrote a song called Playing Bogart. I was living with my parents; I was due to start a law degree at the end of 1978; I didn't want to be a lawyer; I wanted to be a pop star (more accurately a famous guitarist/songwriter of the brooding Tom Verlaine type); I didn't have a girlfriend; I was probably quite lonely. I remembered going into Manchester for the WH Smith works do around Christmas 1977, and looking at all the traffic, and the people going out, feeling like an outsider, contemplating the area where romance meets disillusionment from the windows of the 101 bus. I was a bit young to feel like this, but I'd been feeling like it for years and I suppose part of me still does.

Playing Bogart was one of the more popular items in Idiot Rouge's set, and when I left for University and our drummer, John Doyle, quit to join Magazine, the rump of the band, now called the Cheaters, carried on playing it for a while. At Nottingham I met some other musicians, Geoff Powers, Mark Buckle and Simon Harris, and we had a band called Sneak and the Previews (yes, I know; terrible name). It didn't take me long to get fed up of Simon, no doubt more my problem than his, but without him there was only the rump of a band and Mark Buckle, unhappy with my hissy fit, declined further involvement for a while. Meanwhile all around Britain bands were making their own records on a shoestring and I was desperate to be involved in this resurgence. I therefore hatched the plan of recording Playing Bogart and another song, You Don't Know Me, and releasing the resulting single myself.

There had to be other musicians involved, so I got together with Sneak and the Previews drummer Geoff Powers, Paddy Russell, a bass playing friend from school, and a guitarist I knew from Manchester, Neil Roberts, who was now at Nottingham too. We all met up in Manchester at my parents' house. The band photo was taken on the staircase as my Mum called us down for tea. I had positioned my Grandfather's Zeiss Ikon bellows camera on the stairs so that I was in full view, trying to look as much like Tom Verlaine as possible, and the others could be seen by means of carefully positioned mirrors. I taught Paddy the songs the night before the session. He had never heard them before, and in fact never played with the band again. I had decided we would be called 23 Jewels (yes, I know; terrible name). It was something written on the face of my watch.

The recording was chaotic. Nowadays the average PC has far more sophisticated recording equipment in it than did Pennine Studios, Oldham in 1978, and underground records are no longer made in the same tearing hurry. But we had paid for the studio time between us, and the first rule of recording on a budget was Be Prepared. Or to be more accurate, Be Well Rehearsed. We weren't. Notwithstanding that, the only real hitch came when we were trying to record Neil's guitar breaks at the end of Bogart. Neil was a great player, someone who came at the instrument from the angle of his heroes, guitarists like Jan Akkerman and Larry Carlton, rather than the basic thrashing fashionable at the time. As Clive Gregson, who produced the record, said, Neil always played as if he was just about to do something amazing; and sometimes he did. But he had not worked out what he was going to do, and faced with having to do something now, he was badly affected by nerves. In the end I played the first break, and for the fade out we actually put two of his solos together, one on top of the other, and it worked fine.

About the process of getting the records mastered and pressed I remember almost nothing. I do remember that Geoff, the drummer, and I hired a car and drove to London to collect them. At one point we found ourselves driving down Regent St. It was the first time I'd been to London, and finding myself somewhere familiar from all sorts of fiction was a thrill; within five years I was living there. Afterwards we took a box to Rough Trade records on Portobello road. Geoff Travis, the proprietor, listened to the record gravely and bought a hundred from us on the spot. We couldn't believe our luck. Later I sent the record to John Peel and to the NME. God love us, Peel actually played it, not once but several times; and Tom Robinson made it single of the week in the paper.

Clearly, we felt, it was only a matter of time before the record companies came knocking. We would obviously show our disdain for the majors before perhaps signing for one of the trendier minor labels. But in fact that didn't happen. A journalist interviewed us for the NME, but the story was spiked.  23 Jewels, now with Mark Buckle back on bass, did the rounds in Nottingham and further afield through 1979 and for a couple of years afterwards, but the big time never came. Astonishingly, we were a cult band, although at the time it felt as if we were just not very popular. On the Youtube Playing Bogart page someone has kindly written "The finest, most unique sounding band to come out of Nottingham". Unfortunately not many people said that kind of thing at the time, and anyway we never did really emerge from Nottingham. Things might have been different if we'd been from Manchester or Sheffield.

After a while Playing Bogart was quietly dropped from the band's set list: I didn't like playing it because it was too poppy. Our friends Any Trouble recorded it on their first album. At the end of 1982 I moved to London in pursuit of a girl, and fame and fortune. My own interests were shifting slowly but irreversibly towards classical music, and by the end of '84 I was at Music College doing a composition diploma.

So how does it feel to see this record, made on a whim by a bunch of 20 year olds in the sketchiest of circumstances, praised to the skies? Do I mind that other stuff I've done subsequently has made only a fraction of the impression? Well, no, not really. I think it is a good song, and the recording, no matter how crude, captures a performance that, as Tom Robinson said at the time, has an enthusiasm and passion that cannot be faked.

Do I mind that I didn't become a famous guitarist/songwriter in the Tom Verlaine mould as per my aspirations then? No, not much. I am happy to be doing what I'm doing now, and aware of how lucky I am in so nearly all aspects of my life that it would seem churlish to complain about any of them. We are in any event the sum of our experiences. Who is to say that if that had been different, the other things would have been just as good? Still, it's quietly pleasing to see the song remembered in Dave Roberts' top 12 (even if it is only at number 9).

To finish, I recommend that you listen to the Trubs's own version of the tune here and watch the hilarious video which goes with it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95KYEoheL1E.  Alternatively, you can have a look at this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxM0tn7R_JM - from their November 2013 reunion gig. Who is that mystery guest guitarist?

Messing with the German Requiem

A marathon day on Sunday, conducting the Athenean Ensemble in the morning in Didsbury and then off in the afternoon to help out with the Manchester Bach Choir's German Requiem. I was forcibly reminded of the joy of live music, both because of the packed house for the morning concert, an event put on and enjoyed by people who care passionately about classical music, and because of the things that went wrong over the course of the day.

Even the greatest musicians make mistakes. That is part of the pressure of having to get it right now. The pianist John Lill, a man who is said to have memorised Beethoven's piano sonatas by the age of 12, once went off into the wrong key in the Emperor Concerto. A friend recalls playing 2nd Bass Clarinet in the Rite with the BBC Phil and being horrified when the 1st player began a complex duet passage a bar early - should he follow suit and spare his colleague the humiliation, or join in and risk chaos elsewhere in the orchestra? Players are quite good at covering up these things: another friend was playing in a scratch professional orchestra at a concert featuring the tenor Alfie Boe. Mr Boe came in not one but four bars early. His accompanists seamlessly and undetectably advanced four bars to cover him.

I personally never mind too much when new things go wrong in concerts - it's the old mistakes that piss me off. So when on Saturday one section of the Athenean unaccountably missed a cue at the beginning of the Clementi symphony, that seemed just part of the unpredictable thrill of the event. You can bet no-one in the audience noticed.

I said I had gone to "help out" with the Brahms German Requiem, but I'm not sure how much help I really was. "We're short of tenors, can you come and help?" is an appeal to charity which might well have been met with, "Unfortunately I am not a tenor". But this would be to ape the scene in the Clouseau film where Peter Sellers goes into a bar and is growled at by the dog in the corner. "Does your duurg bite?", enquires Sellers of the landlord. "No", replies the landlord. The dog duly comes over and bites Sellers on the ankle. "I thought you said your duurg did not bite", complains Sellers. "That's not my dog", the landlord replies.

So although I am not a tenor, I went anyway. Now there are tenor parts and there are tenor parts. Some lie mostly in the middle of the stave with the occasional foray into the upper regions. These I can manage, because during an average day I can sing several top Gs, and once, recording a jingle for a radio advert (for a housebuilding company, since you ask), managed a top A. But the Brahms Requiem is unforgivingly high, with top As aplenty, and at least once, a top B flat; I seemed to spend three hours of the afternoon and two hours of the evening shouting, increasingly hoarsely.

However bad this was, the nadir of my contribution was reached in the second fugue, where a storm of confusing information comes your way: the pitches, awkward and non-intuitive, the rhythms, irregular and non-intuitive, the register, generally out of my reach, and lastly, the language, German. I had managed this alright in the afternoon, but now, head buried in part, resolved to go for it fearlessly, bellowing my way through for two minutes, aware that it wasn't quite going as well as previously but determined to see things through to the end like a musical George Osborne. When finally the smoke cleared and the last entry had been dealt with, I looked up. The conductor was regarding his charges with an attitude of mild rebuke. I had been a crotchet out with him throughout. No wonder it didn't sound quite right.

My wife says I have been slow to admit responsibility for this. I think that's unfair. The problem is that in music no-one quite knows what's happened. The process is mysterious, and that is part of the attraction. Some performances, note perfect, are wooden. Some have flaws but come to life in a way you cannot predict. That is why the Athenean's leader told me that she found herself on the verge of tears during Siegfried Idyll on Saturday morning; and telling me about it three days later she had to wipe her eyes again. As for things going wrong, you could call in the crash investigators like they do for a motorway pile up, and still be unsure of the cause of the musical accident.

So it might have been just me that was out.

On the other hand, I could have been note perfect. Perhaps everyone else got it wrong.

Valuing Aditya Chakrabortty

"Last week", writes Aditya Chakrabortty in the Grauniad, "you, me and every other taxpayer in Britain each handed £13 to the billionaire Richard Branson". Funnily enough I heard one of Chakrabortty's colleagues, John Harris, say exactly the same thing on Any Questions last Saturday. Now I am no fan of Branson, who is just a capitalist like any other, but this is wrong. Actually it's more than wrong, it's revealingly wrong.

Chakrabortty gets his figure by taking the amount of money the Government put into Northern Rock, subtracting the amount by the figure Branson paid for it and dividing the result by the number of taxpayers. Now he clearly isn't saying that we really paid £13 each to Virgin. What he's saying is that we've given something to Virgin which is worth £13 more per taxpayer than Branson has actually paid.

Chakrabortty's mistake lies in the assumption that Northern Rock is worth now what the UK government paid for it in 2008, and that mistake in turn lies in a misunderstanding of what value is.

When my mother in law watches the Antiques Roadshow and some becoiffed smoothie tells a gasping matron that her 18th century heirloom might be worth £20,000, what he means is that somebody would probably be prepared to pay that sum at auction. That's the best way of attributing value: the figure someone else is prepared to pay for a thing. In fact it's the only way of attributing value.

Now turn to Northern Rock. The Government has been trying to sell it for some time, but no one else was willing to pay more than Virgin. The sum beardie paid represents its value now. Moreover the value the Government paid for Northern Rock did not just represent its status as a bank in trouble. Its value was increased drastically because if the Government hadn't bought it the knock-on effects in the UK's banking system would have been profound and severe. So Chakrabortty is attributing a false value to Northern Rock, not only because in the real world no-one was prepared to pay any more than Branson; but also because what the Government was paying for was the continued survival of the UK's banking system. And before you say, well we'd be better off without that, ask yourself how much rice and pasta you have stored in your cellar. Because if the cashpoints run out, you won't be buying any for a while.

Chakrabortty could have argued that George Osborne should have waited longer; that in a few years we'd have got more for it; that Osborne should have sought to remutualise the bank. But no. He chose instead to say that the taxpayer has given money to Richard Branson. Which is not true.

Who is Aditya Chakrabortty? He is chief economics leader writer for the Guardian. But he doesn't know what value is. Go figure.

PS A few days ago (in mid-May 2012) the National Audit Office completed its investigation into the sale of Northern Rock to Virgin.  Although concluding that the Government lost money on the sale, it said that this loss "should, however, be seen as part of the overall cost of securing the benefits of financial stability during the financial crisis".  BBC Business Editor Robert Peston commented, "For the NAO, that notional £2bn loss is probably a price worth paying: it prevented a banking collapse that could have been contagious and could have led to the demise of other banks".  I am still waiting for Aditya Chakrabortty to acknowledge this in his Guardian column.

Occupy should stay

Saw a debate on Newsnight last night between a flame-haired activist type (whose name now escapes me), and a former Goldman Sachs banker (ditto). This was in the wake of the Occupy Wall St protests being removed in New York.

The course of this debate, mediated by Emily Maitlis, was predictable enough; the Activist articulately incandescent, the Banker moderate and a bit apologetic despite the activist's attempts to interrupt. Where it got really interesting however was the point at which the Banker said, the real reason for the crisis is Socialism (gasps from Maitlis and the Activist), which is to say that governments all around the world - Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Greece - had spent too much money, not daring to tell their electorates that this spending was unaffordable.

Now personally I don't remember George W Bush's government being terribly socialist - and Dubya was an intemperate spender - but nevertheless the broader point is probably true. Governments did live on borrowed money, and they did lack the political courage to balance their budgets - after all, things were going so well, weren't they?

This infuriated the Activist, by now almost beside herself. How dare a rich banker blame the governments that had tried to protect the interests of ordinary working people? I can see that, from her shoes, hearing this kind of stuff from a besuited fat cat must have been annoying. In times of austerity, it's galling to see some people utterly unaffected. But the facts rather bear the Banker out.

In Britain, a Labour government (which I voted for) consistently ran a deficit from about 2001 onwards. Labour supporters loved the Government's economic success. We enjoyed the tax take coming from the City of London's profits, deregulated by Gordon Brown. We were not only running the economy better than the Tories, but we were rebuilding Britain's social infrastructure. And yet when recession came the cupboard was bare, and, as I have noted many times here, the Government had no choice but to go to the markets to keep the economy afloat. That we are now so dependent on the gilt markets is not their fault, but ours.

The problem for the activist and other people like her is that no amount of taxing the rich or well-paid will fill the holes in Western budgets. There just aren't enough rich people. There are many, many more middle-income earners. So while basic considerations of fairness might indicate higher taxes for the affluent, in fact doing so is gesture politics. The reality is that we were all deluded into believing that the consumer paradise would last forever, and in future we are all going to have lower standards of living.

And what alternative plans do the Activist and others like her in the Occupy movement have? What do they want?, Emily Maitlis asked. For the first time the Activist looked flustered. If I could have worked out what her answer meant I would record it here. But the best paraphrase I can supply is, None.

I have some sympathy with the Occupy movements. It was never fair in the good times for CEOs to get billions while their immigrant cleaners got peanuts (and paid tax at a higher rate), and it's even less so now. CEOs are too close to the people who decide what their remuneration should be, and shareholders have too little influence over the process. I have a few shares here and there, and a couple of times a year I get a letter telling me I've earned a £17.50 dividend. No one has ever told me, "And by the way, if we hadn't been paying the CEO 9 million, you'd have had £175.00 instead". What's needed to curb the City's excesses is greater transparency over the pay process and better regulation than the botch job put in place by Gordon Brown.

But there is a broader point. I also have grave doubts about the eternal-growth project upon which our prosperity is said to depend. Growth will come in future in the markets with growing populations, perhaps India in particular. But if the population is going to carry on growing and we are all going to get more affluent, more and more resources will be used up and more and more of the planet will be despoiled. My principal objection to Wall St and The City is not that its occupants are greedy or unprincipled, but that they are part of a system to which we are all bound and which is probably not sustainable.

So actually the Occupy movement needs to do some hard thinking. What does it want, and what would a future without growth look like? How could it be made to work fairly? The authorities in New York and London should not be kicking the protestors out. It should be making them stay there until they can think of some coherent solutions.

M Barnier and the ratings agencies

At the end of October I wrote about a report that one Michel Barnier, EU internal market commissioner, had proposed - idiotically in my view - that "Credit rating agencies could be banned from downgrading countries in the eurozone's bailout scheme ..." The Grauniad's piece continued, "Presenting his proposals to reform trading in financial derivatives on Thursday, Barnier suggested the ban could be extended to downgrades of countries negotiating to join the bailout."

So far, so financially illiterate. The ratings agencies are merely the messengers. It isn't their fault that so many countries have borrowed too much money.

Now what's this in the Torygraph this morning? " ....the outspoken commissioner [Barnier] was forced to concede on his controversial proposals to introduce a temporary ban on sovereign debt ratings under bailout circumstances. Until the last moment, Mr Barnier had insisted the new proposals would include some form of a ban. But after meeting fellow commissioners, Mr Barnier acknowledged no final agreement had been reached, adding a proposal could be reintroduced later."

Commonsense breaks out in EU. I need to sit down and rest a while.

Muslims against Crusades - a liberal speaks

Why oh why did the Government feel it had to ban Muslims against Crusades last week?

Leaving aside the ease with which the ban can be circumvented (change of name being an inconvenience for the Islamists perhaps only to the extent that it necessitates fresh website design), banning an organisation because of what its members think is inherently bad.

Banning Muslims against Crusades will not alter the way its members feel. What kind of democracy is it where the majority can make illegal being a member of any group it feels is beyond the pale? It may seem OK if you don't like the people on the receiving end (and I revile the poppy-burners as much as anyone), but what if it's your group that's getting the ban?

The intellectual stimulus behind this anti-democratic move seems to me to date from Mrs Thatcher's decision to ban the broadcast of IRA leaders' voices. We were reminded of how ridiculous this was every time the actors reading transcripts of their words appeared on News at Ten. Muslims against Crusades are entitled to their views. I find them offensive, but that's the price I pay for my right to be offensive too. Prosecute them for what they do, not what they say or what organisation they belong to.

Gosh. I have come over all liberal. And about Islamists to boot.

Dr Doom redux.

Lo and behold the very next day Italian debt goes above 7%. What I'd like to know is, when does Italy next have to go to the markets? To be clear, the 7% is the figure at which existing debt is changing hands, and whilst that doesn't affect Italy directly, it does give an indication of the price the country will have to stump up next time it wants to roll over some of its old stock. In Britain these things are handled by the Debt Management Office; whatever its Italian equivalent, I wouldn't mind having a look in their diary. That will be an interesting day.

Megan Greene, colleague of Dr Doom, Nouriel Roubini, was kind enough to email a response to yesterday's post. Basically we agree. She thinks that either the ECB will have to step in, or alternatively create fiscal union, double quick. But that's if the object is to save the Euro; she writes, "I don't think that should be the end goal". I don't think that can be the end goal.

In reply to Ms Greene I offered to give Dr Doom a few tips, just in case he feels his sooth-saying has lost its edge.

PS According to the Torygraph the next Italian bond auction is tomorrow. Oh dear.

Dr Doom and William Hill

Italy is in trouble. Just how much trouble may be inferred from the fact that the interest it must pay on bonds is nudging 7%, and this when it is running into a two-year period during which it must roll over about a quarter of its vast debts. 7% was the magic figure which tipped Greece, Ireland and Portugal into bail-out territory. But these were relatively small economies whereas Italy's is much much bigger, far to big to rescue with the Eurozone's pifflingly small 400 billion euro bail out fund. Attempts to leverage the fund with input from the BRICS countries have come to nothing; somewhere in a departure lounge or munching airline food, Christine Lagarde is roaming the world trying to find countries whose citizens don't have a state pension at all willing to pay into a fund to help those whose populations can retire at 55. Good luck with that, Christine.

Now here's Megan Greene, a colleague of Dr. Doom, Nouriel Roubini, on the Today programme telling it like it is. "I think there are only two possible ends to this crisis. One is the ECB stepping in, providing massive amounts of credit easing. The other is fiscal union. It would be illegal for the ECB to become the lender of last resort. If it were to happen, someone would take it to court and win that case. Germany just wouldn't allow the ECB to start printing money."

Ms Greene undoubtedly knows a great deal more about economics than I do, but I think she is wrong about this. There are three possible ends, not two.

The ECB could step in, start printing money and use it to buy Italian bonds, but as she says that's unlikely for political and legal reasons; it's also true that fiscal union (of which an interventionist ECB would be a fundamental part) would be necessary to make monetary union work, and might actually do so. But fiscal union would be a seismic shift in the way the Eurozone operates; it would need negotiation, consensus and ratification by national parliaments. Even if these things were forthcoming, and even if the leadership so far glaringly absent from this debacle were miraculously to appear, they would take time to arrange. But the bond markets won't wait.

That's where my third possibility comes in. A third way it could end would be by the Euro collapsing. At this stage that seems to me to be most likely. William Hills are apparently offering 2/1, or thereabouts, that Greece will have left the Euro by the end of 2012. These would have struck me as generous odds even if the bet had specified the end of 2011. I can't see any way in which Greece will still be in the Euro by the end of 2012. This has got to be worth £50 of anyone's money.

Birtwhistle, Beethoven and John Adams

I found myself thinking about Harrison Birtwhistle last night. I'll explain why in a minute. I had gone to the Bridgewater to hear the Halle play John Adams' Harmonium, a piece I'd never heard before, although it's over thirty years old now. Harmonium is a long three-movement setting of John Donne and Emily Dickinson for choir and large orchestra, and opens the way it means to go on with the voices ululating gently and the instruments pulsing in and out. I liked it, although not as much as my wife and another (female) friend did. One of them enquired of Adams, "Is he still alive?", as if she intended to fly straight out to California and offer to have the composer's babies.

Even in the States, where there's more of a tradition of user friendly classical music, writing such a defiantly tonal piece in 1980 required some courage; in Britain it would have been an act of profound radicalism; at that time only John Tavener, with whom I was shortly to begin studying, was doing anything remotely similar. I wished I had heard it as a student: my own path back to tonality would have been so much easier to tread.

Someone involved with writing music inevitably finds responding to an unfamiliar work more problematic than a lay listener: you always bring a critical ear. Like many pieces written for a big orchestra, Harmonium does not (for me) let enough silence in; silence is like the white paper a watercolourist leaves blank to let the light shine through. Composers with a lot of instruments on the page are very reluctant to have them doing nothing. You generally couldn't hear the words; and although that might have been the Halle choir's fault, I think it was probably Adams'. The piece was perhaps a bit more boring than it needed to be. I went to sleep twice in it, woken each time by the music - which tended to linger on a pedal point for long periods - shifting to a new plane.

The other piece in the concert was the Eroica. I found it striking that Beethoven's harmonic language - an almost childishly simple conflation of triads and diminished sevenths - nevertheless enabled him to create a structure that was not only engaging, dramatic and touching (all things true of Adams's piece too) but also of granitic strength and cohesiveness. The ideas were worked through; when they were exhausted the piece finished and it felt right that it was doing so. The movements of Harmonium, by contrast, rather petered out. Like a badly performed Bruckner symphony, you didn't feel it ended because it had to; the movements could have been shorter or longer without the listener feeling particularly surprised. Whatever else he had done - and how the original audience must have been relieved to find a piece of contemporary music so ravishingly beautiful - Adams certainly hadn't found a way of making his tonal language an instrument of structure. Does it matter? Maybe not. My tastes lie in that direction though, and I think it can be done, even on the langourously slow-developing harmonic steppes of American minimalism.

But back to Harrison Birtwhistle. I thought of him because it struck me that our most celebrated composer is one whose music is broadly disliked by the public, to the exent that venues secretly give tickets away to make attendance figures look better, whereas the American way (without public subsidy) has produced a composer like Adams, who fills concert halls and whose music is broadly loved. What an indictment of the British way of art.

Iraq and the Arab Spring

Libya finally announces it is free from the dread hand of Colonel Gaddafi. Tunisia holds its first elections. President Obama announces the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. It's a momentous morning.

I have been wondering what would happen in the commentariat when events of the Arab Spring began to be digested. Someone would look back at the Iraq invasion and try to fit it in to subsequent events. Assiduous readers of this blog will know that I supported the invasion (I believe that it was my support which finally persuaded Blair and Bush to go ahead; Dick Cheney had been particularly hesitant until he found out I was onside), not because I thought it was a good thing - it was self-evidently bad - but because I thought it might be marginally less bad than leaving Saddam Hussein in place.

Anyway, here's Jonathan Steele in this morning's Graun (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/23/us-withdrawal-iraq-defeat-bush-neocons?commentpage=last#end-of-comments) with his take on events. As you'll see, Steele complains that, far from Iraq's fledgling democracy inspiring other North African states, it might actually have put them off. "The instability and bloodshed which the US unleashed in Iraq were the example that Arabs sought to avoid, not emulate", he writes.

Yes, I too had noticed that Libya's awakening was achieved without any bloodshed whatsoever. And things are going well in Syria, where, in the absence of an armed insurrection, President Assad remains in power.

Steele's other complaint is that Iraq's transition to a democracy has given Iran more influence than it had when Saddam was in charge.

I wish he would step off the fence and be a bit less coy. Are we to infer that because Iran now has more influence, things were better during Saddam's era? And if so, better for whom?

We can abuse Blair, Bush, Cheney and Halliburton all we like, but surely the six million dollar question for Iraqis is, Did the invasion make things better for them in the medium and long term?

A clue to the answer lies in Steele's own article. He writes, ". . . when the Arab spring dawned, the Iraqi government found itself on the defensive as demonstrators took to the streets of Baghdad and Basra to protest against Maliki's authoritarianism and his government's US-supported clampdown on trade union activity".

Does anyone remember how street protests or trades unions fared under Saddam? My recollection is that there wasn't much of either. People were too terrified. Does anyone remember Saddam's government being "on the defensive" against its own people? My recollection is that there wasn't a government as such (the word implying something a bit more that a collection of stooges or family members dripping with medals). And for a government to be on the defensive, it must be capable of being attacked. But when Saddam was in power the "government" couldn't be "attacked" because there was no process by which to attack it. There were no elections, and to take part in a public demonstration was to invite one's own death.

To state these things explicitly in reverse, in Iraq there is a government, and an elected government at that. It is imperfect (so is ours), but the government can be "attacked" by public demonstrations or by the electoral process. Are these not gains worthy of some comment by Steele?

Apparently not. Steele has nothing to say about the way in which these things have only become possible because of the 2003 invasion; he only speaks of their current imperfections. If Bush and Blair had done what Steele and his fellow-travellers wanted, Saddam would still have been in power in Iraq. No doubt it possible to construct an argument that things were better then. I would like to see it attempted. But Steele does not even try. Funny that.

Get Gaddafi off the front page

Amidst all the hoo-ha about Colonel Gaddafi's death, the papers are missing today's big story. It is that M. Sarkozy and Frau Merkel are so far apart on a package to rescue the Euro that the announcement of decisions taken at the weekend's big German-French summit has had to be postponed to next Wednesday. Basically, the Germans don't want the EFSF to be leveraged in the way the French would like.

What the Germans are playing at I have no idea. Mrs Merkel must know that the EFSF, at 424 billion (I don't have a Euro sign on my QWERTY), is nowhere near big enough, and that some way must be found to increase it. Whether the ways proposed will work (making the EFSF guarantor of the first 20% of losses is unlikely to satisfy bond purchasers numerate enough to wonder what might happen to the remaining 80% of their money) is another matter.

As if to confirm the tenuous grasp on reality held by European leaders, the Grauniad this morning reports one Michel Barnier, EU internal market commissioner, as saying "Credit rating agencies could be banned from downgrading countries in the eurozone's bailout scheme . . . " The report goes on, "Presenting his proposals to reform trading in financial derivatives on Thursday, Barnier suggested the ban could be extended to downgrades of countries negotiating to join the bailout."

Now no-one much likes the credit ratings agencies (although I don't remember people complaining about them when they were giving the go ahead for the West's enormous borrowing spree), but this is shooting the messenger. All the ratings agencies do is provide the financial markets with information. They are agents of transparency. What would M. Barnier prefer? That bond investors make decisions on rumour or innuendo instead? Does he really think that in a climate where the default position of investors is that a country might not be able to pay its bills, reducing the amount of information available will help to lower bond yields and make it easier for cash-strapped governments? I find it hard to believe, but apparently he does.

This is pretty symptomatic of the way the EU has handled this crisis. The facts are inconvenient? Ignore them. Actually no. Better still. Stop their publication.

Dale Farm and the rule of law

Ugly scenes this morning as the bailiffs and police break down barricades at Dale Farm. I have some sympathy with the occupants, particularly the children: whoever's fault this is, it's not theirs.

And yet the thing which keeps nagging me is the occupants' attitude to the law. They have used the courts to prevaricate and delay the inevitable for years. Each time the courts have ruled in their favour, the residents have expected Basildon Council to respect the judgment, and Basildon have complied, jumping through the legal hoops set for them at vast expense to Council Tax payers.

But when the courts have ruled for Basildon do the occupants comply? No. They barricade themselves in and threaten violence, making necessary this morning's militaristic-looking adventure. The residents can't have their cake and eat it. If Basildon Council had regarded the law in the same way as the residents, the bulldozers would have been into Dale Farm years ago.

The SNP, the NHS and the elderly

I've written before about the NHS's shameful treatment of the elderly (http://nicksimpsonmusic.blogspot.com/2011/05/coming-soon-serbia.html), and it came as a depressing no-surprise to find the Care Quality Commission reporting yesterday that of 100 hospitals it inspected recently, only 45% were providing proper service to elderly patients, and 20% were so bad that they were actually breaking the law.

I'm not going to waste time thinking of terms adequate to excoriate those responsible for this situation. Obviously individual callousness and inhumanity plays a part, but so also do overtraining (nurses with degrees, so the theory goes, are not overly keen to wipe up excrement), overwork and lack of money.

There is a connection between this story and another in the papers today. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, has appalled campaigners concerned about British obesity levels by urging people to eat less and by trying to persuade manufacturers to cut calorie levels in food. Why is this so bad? Because, as Jamie Oliver says, manufacturers won't do it, and everyone already knows we should eat more healthily and exercise more.

About 60% of British adults and 30% of children are obese or overweight. Obese people get ill more and are more likely to end up in hospital. More pressure on hospitals means more work for nurses and more money spent treating people who, frankly, don't have to be there. All of which means worse treatment for other patients; including the elderly.

The Tories, sadly, seem reluctant to do anything which might offend their friends in big business. Lansley has fallen into the error of thinking that a laudable Tory idea ("people should take responsibility for their own actions") can be taken in isolation; whereas in this instance people failing to take responsibility means a drain on NHS resources, with consequences which are only too obvious.

Alcohol abuse probably costs the state even more than obesity, which is why the Scots have proposed a minimum price on drink.

When you find yourself yearning to be governed by the SNP, something somewhere has gone badly wrong.

One long right wing rant

The other day a young acquaintance, messing around with friends, said, "Of course, Hitler didn't really go far enough".

My wife and I were appalled. This person is not the first 16 year old to say something stupid to shock an audience, and won't be the last; he is in truth impeccably liberal in all his views. But I told him that he could get into serious trouble at school if he were overheard coming out with that sort of thing; and as I was speaking I found myself realising that this was actually true. Is that a good thing?

Of course, as well as getting into trouble he ran the risk of offending other people; but I find I mind this less. There isn't any right not to be offended: in a free society people should be able to say that Hitler didn't go far enough without official sanction. The proper sanction is that right-thinking people shun and avoid someone with such poisonous views.

When this exchange was over, my wife told me that a colleague of hers had looked at this blog and said it was "one long right-wing rant"; I could, she said, suffer professionally by expressing opinions openly in a field which is on the whole left rather than right of centre. This may well be true. Whilst conservatives (and I can't really as a Frank Field fan be called a Conservative) regard Lefties as nice but ultimately deluded, the Left sees the Tories as the Nasty Party. It's a shame. Most people interested in politics want the best for society. There aren't many Pol Pots or Stalins. Or Hitlers for that matter.

Recognising that someday I may miss out on a gig because someone doesn't like my politics, it would be tempting to say Adieu to blogging and get on with some work. But I find I can't. And for a reason that is uncharacteristically pretentious.

I am an artist. And artists do not trim.

Ed Balls - cake eater

Hearing the dismal jobless figures on the news yesterday, I was struck by a fresh irony about Labour's calls for a growth policy.

Labour only discovered Keynes when it was too late to do the hard part, when it was too late to put money aside against a rainy day. Labour's policy was, essentially, borrow during the good times, and when the bad times come, borrow even more. In case you doubt me, Labour ran a deficit from about 2001 to 2010, and continues to advocate more borrowing now. Whatever else that is, it's not Keynesian. My admiration for Frank Field - my Favourite Living Politician: charisma-free but scrupulous, far-sighted, and with an intellectual fearlessness Orwell would have admired - went up a further notch yesterday when I heard him say that Labour got the economy wrong, and should apologise, unreservedly, for its misdoings in office.

What's this got to with Labour's growth policy? Well, the Government says, not unreasonably, that it can't pump prime the economy with a Keynesian stimulus because that could only be done by more borrowing; and it would be dangerous to increase borrowing in the febrile atmosphere where countries have been driven by this very course to the brink of default. Only this morning the Torygraph reports James Carrick, economist at Legal & General Investment Management, as saying stimulus spending of the type Balls and Miliband are calling for would help lift growth but hasten a downgrade of Britain's credit rating.

The irony is that if Labour had been reading Keynes in the 2000s, if they had improved Britain's fiscal position, the Government could have done what Ed Miliband is demanding now. In fact it would have been irresponsible for the Government not to do what Labour wants.

It is Labour's failure to act like proper Keynesians when in office which has made it so difficult for the Government to act like Keynesians now. If I were George Osbourne I'd be pretty p'd off at being lectured by Ed Balls, former Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Ed Balls is urging Osborne to eat the cake which he and his former mentor consumed long, long ago.

Steve Jobs - a Luddite speaks

I am writing this as the proud owner of a new phone. For too long, to the genuine embarrassment of my family, I have carted about the five-year old cast-off my daughter had for her 11th birthday. How could anything so relatively new look so old already? Attempting to get it to charge, or looking bemusedly at incoming texts apparently sent three days ago, always reminded me of the moment in Star Wars when Han Solo, unable to get his space ship to start, thumps vigorously on the dash board - cue the lights coming on and the engines firing up.

My wondrous new gadget, an iPhone knock-off with its GPS, email, camera and no doubt all manner of other devices calculated to make the jaw drop, would not have happened, or at least not so soon, without Steve Jobs, finally overcome by cancer yesterday after a long struggle.

Would we have been worse off without stuff like the iPhone? Without the computers which I'm using to write this and you to read it? There's an easy way to tell. Just think back to what it was like beforehand. I don't remember the pre-digital age being so bad. We got by with books, maps and landlines. We certainly weren't tempted to waste time blogging when there was ironing to be done and music to write.

Jobs' iPhone and iPad are things of beauty and ingenuity, but perhaps we didn't really need them. If Apple and Pixar aren't enough to satisfy you as to Jobs' worth, hunt out his Commencement Address to Stanford Students. I heard parts of it on the radio and it makes moving listening. There's a transcription here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/09/steve-jobs-stanford-commencement-address. This speech alone makes Jobs quite a man.

The Nasty Party and the Euro

One consequence of my lurch towards the clutches of The Nasty Party has been the process of getting to know the columnists of the Torygraph as well as I do those of the Grauniad. For while the Graun has those hand-wringing numpties Freedland, Toynbee and Kettle, a dismal roster redeemed only partly by the brilliance and common sense of Deborah Orr, the Telegraph has its own parade of usual suspects, foam-flecked and angry where their Left of centre counterparts are anguished.

You wouldn't expect them to be angry, not when their party is in power; but they are. Partly of course this is because the Tories, constrained by the Lib Dems and by Cameron's desire to appeal to the centre ground, are nothing like Tory enough for them. But I have detected a new note of anger and impatience in recent days, about the EU.

To the extent that the debacle over the Euro has vindicated the Eurosceptic right, and revealed the architects of the single currency (and their cheerleaders in Britain) as arrogant and foolish, some of this anger is justified. But The Tory Pundits aren't satisfied with being right. They know they have been vindicated, and so, I think, would any impartial and fair minded person; they said monetary union wouldn't work without fiscal union, and by golly it hasn't. But why, they want to know, isn't there any blood on the carpet? Why hasn't Greece defaulted yet? Why hasn't the Eurozone gone up in flames? Why isn't there any concrete proof of failure?

Because, it seems to me, it never pays to underestimate the capacity of European leaders, both at domestic and EU level, to do things their electorates don't want.

Very few people get to the top in European politics by being Eurosceptic. Even domestic leaders like Merkel and Sarkozy have got there by subscribing to the consensus rather than opposing it. These people are not going to give up on the Euro, or on Greece's membership of it, without a heroic struggle. If that has to involve signing away billions of taxpayers' money, so be it. The German parliament's ratification of the July 20 plan to pump money into the EFSF was hailed as a triumph, even though it was opposed by the majority of Germans and, by common consent, won't be enough. Now the Eurocrats are reported to be looking for ways to leverage the fund (by which they mean use the fund as security to borrow yet more money), again in the face of the opposition by their electorates. Belatedly, EU leaders are looking for ways to foster greater fiscal union. Their electorates probably don't want it, and it certainly isn't provided for in EU treaties. But their leaders will do it if they can.

Will any of this keep Greece in the Euro? Probably not. Monetary union without fiscal union was bound to lead to fatal imbalances; the EU set it up anyway. Greece didn't meet the criteria for entry into the Euro; she was allowed in nonetheless. The Greeks haven't met the conditions required to get the next tranche of their bail-out money; but you can bet that the EU will give it to them anyway.

This willingness to trim and shuffle to evade the demands of the moment tells you all you need to know about the way the Eurozone was set up and why it is in its present crisis. It is also why The Tory Pundits may have to wait a bit longer for their pound of flesh.

Lies, Damned Lies and Ed Balls

Gordon Brown is the most dishonest politician I can remember.

I am not going to defend this controversial view here - Jeffrey Archer? Jonathan Aitken anyone? - merely show that Brown's Mini-Me, Ed Balls is running his mentor very close.

In his Labour party conference speech yesterday Balls made some very public confessions. Labour had made mistakes - the 75p pension rise; immigration (hallelujah); failure of bank regulation (another No Shit Sherlock moment). But we should always be wary of politicians who apologise. Their commonest deception exploits the public's inability to distinguish "sorry that" from "sorry for". Saying "I am sorry that your economy is wrecked" is not quite the same thing as saying "I am sorry for wrecking your economy".

A more subtle ploy is to make a list of errors in the hope that the public will think that it is complete, tactfully forgetting other matters in the hope that we do too. To be fair to Balls, he has a novel variation on this one. His list of errors is followed by a ringing declaration of something he is not going to apologise for: "Don't let anyone tell you", he blustered, "that a Labour government was profligate with public money, when we went into the crisis with lower national debt than we inherited in 1997". So even though we got these things wrong, here is one thing we definitely got right, and don't you dare tell us otherwise!

But Balls is not comparing like with like. When Labour came into office in 1997, Britain was only five years out of the 1990-1992 recession. You would expect the public finances to be in bad shape. By 2008 we hadn't had a recession for sixteen years. In fact, as I weary of writing, the period 1993 - 2008 was the longest consistent period of economic growth in British history. You would expect the government to be sitting on a pile of cash. It wasn't. Gordon Brown had spent it all, and was running a substantial deficit.

Does Balls know this? Of course he does. And like his mentor, his pants are well and truly on fire.

Pierre Boulez, great Wagner conductor

Listening to Start the Week this morning I was reminded what a great Wagner conductor Pierre Boulez was.

One of Andrew Marr's guests on the programme had written a book on Wagner and Verdi, and another was long-time Boulez associate the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, so the subject naturally came up in conversation. Aimard was there to plug his forthcoming festival, Liszt and Boulez - Composers of the Future, taking place on the South Bank in the next few days.

What depths of irony lie in that title. Liszt was without doubt a great musician, and a great pianist. But he was not a great composer, and neatly exemplifies my long held view that talent will only get you so far in composition. Liszt is famous not because the public likes his music, but because he was a vastly talented pianist who wrote music which pianists enjoy playing. That is not the same thing.

My favourite Liszt story concerns the visit paid to him by Edvard Grieg. At the time Liszt was one of the most famous musicians in the world, and Grieg very much the young supplicant. As they played through the last movement of the Norwegian's Piano Concerto, reaching the grand tutti where the spacious A major theme is heard for the final time, subtly altered from its first appearance, Liszt cried out approvingly, "Of course! The G sharp this time!", thereby conferring the magisterial weight of his approval on Grieg's effort.

And yet Grieg's Concerto, although far from being his best work, is worth all of Liszt's compositions put together. Grieg was no intellectual, but he was a real composer, as distinct from someone who knew how to compose but not why. His music has artless tenderness and grace, with a melodic gift Liszt could only have dreamed of. It will live as long as there are people to listen. Yet whilst it is impossible to imagine the South Bank having a Grieg festival - the opportunity was passed up in 2007 on the centenary of his death - Liszt is, apparently, a Composer of the Future.

This seems unlikely in both major senses. Firstly Liszt was not a terribly influential composer. Secondly if Liszt had been going to take a grip on the public imagination you might have thought that would have happened by now. But it hasn't, and I wouldn't waste a tenner betting that it will in the next fifty years.

What then about Boulez? Another of Andrew Marr's guests was Simon Jenkins, who bravely voiced the opinion that he didn't much take to the Frenchman's music - it reminded him, he said, of the brutalist architecture of the 1960s. Interestingly Jenkins, not a man given to displays of public humility, made this confession in apologetic terms. But why? I don't like Liszt, or Saint-Saens, or for that matter Phil Collins, Kasabian, Dido and a hundred other mediocrities. It's nothing to apologise for.

When Aimard was asked to describe Boulez, I knew, in the pause which followed, what he was going to say. An intellectual, replied Aimard. But if Boulez is an intellectual, I'm a banana. An intellectual is someone brainier than the rest of us who thinks rarified thoughts and reaches the right conclusion. But Boulez reached the wrong conclusion. He thought that the rigorous systems of total serialism would make "better" music (whatever that means); moreover he poured buckets of personal vitriol over those who disagreed with him, and used his own personal power to dominate the institutions of French music - and the aesthetics of modern music generally - for half a century. That a man as forthright as Jenkins should feel obliged to apologise for disliking Boulez's music is a measure of the extraordinary cultural cringe that he and his disciples have succeeded in imposing on intelligent people who like music. Hilariously, Alex Ross (in The Rest is Noise) has Boulez responding to a question about why so few major works of the fifties and sixties had become repertory pieces by saying, "Well, perhaps we did not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener". No shit, Sherlock. I'm not even sure that Ross understands how funny this remark is.

Boulez might be better described as a Composer of the Present, in the sense that he has made a pretty good career out of ruthlessly aggressive obscurantism, exploiting the gullibility and pretentiousness of the French political classes to fund and promulgate his own work, and his view of what other people's work should be like. This view, based on the modern age's desire to incorporate the technical language of science into something - composition - which is palpably unscientific (there is after all no scientific explanation why Grieg has the x factor and Liszt does not), has caused immense damage to the cause of classical music and kept bums off seats in concert halls across the western world.

Boulez will be lucky if his music lasts as long as Liszt's. Certainly only a statistically insignificant proportion of people like it now. If he is a composer of the future, classical music is in big trouble. His tragedy, if such a successful and lucrative career can be thus described, is that he had the talent to do great things.

Perhaps he should have stuck to conducting Wagner.

Richard Murphy and the 50p tax rate

So it turns out, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, that the 50p tax rate is costing the Treasury money. "Up to £500 million a year", according to an article on the Torygraph website this morning.

Given that we all know the IFS is as infallible as the Pope, it'll be interesting whether this revives last week's debate on the subject, and what the Martin Luther of the bash-the-rich campaign, Richard Murphy, has to say on the subject. Actually, beyond the headlines, Paul Johnson,director of the IFS sounds a bit less certain. He's quoted as saying, “It looks like the 50p rate may be too high and that it is possible it will reduce tax revenues." Hmmn. "Up to £500 million", "looks like", "possible it will reduce". We're not quite there yet.

I have followed this subject with interest ever since I discovered that a close family member pays a small amount of tax at the 50p rate. It's a salutary experience, discovering that the Government is taking half your marginal income. For some reason, whenever the BBC wants to get two people to go head to head, it wheels out Richard Murphy, director of Tax Research LLP, an articulate, passionate and well-informed maker of the case for higher taxation, and some Chicago-school back woodsman like Patrick Minford, from whose gabble it swiftly appears he made up his mind that lower taxes were a good thing back in 1946 and hasn't thought about it for longer than two minutes since.

That may be just a coincidence. In these debates the presenters always talk about "taxing the rich", as if the term were not itself loaded. Although I know quite a lot of people who undoubtedly pay tax at the highest rate, I wouldn't describe them as "rich". For me, the rich are people born with a silver spoon in their mouths sitting on their backsides in a country retreat, whose children are rah-rahing all the way to Klosters. The people I know merely have good jobs. That's not the same thing. The true rich tend not to have jobs at all. Moreover, none of the those people got where they are because of daddy's largesse. They got it by working really hard for the last thirty years. So when I hear people talk about "taxing the rich more", I have to give myself a nudge: they're really talking about taxing more the hardest-working. It doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Of course, when a country is broke, as we are, the Government needs every penny it can get. You can hardly blame it for taxing people who, if not actually "rich", at least have a fair bit of wine in the cellar. So does the 50% rate bring in more tax or doesn't it? Obviously I personally have no idea. I know of course about the Laffer curve, which postulates that there must come a point at which raising taxes brings in less revenue not more. But leaving aside the view of the IFS, reputed to be a thoroughly scrupulous organisation, I have sometimes thought that the way that Richard Murphy conducts himself in argument suggests that he might secretly hold the opposite to his publicly stated view.

Murphy always dismisses the idea that people might leave the country because of tax rises. His position is that quite a lot of people say they will leave, but he hasn't been able to find any evidence that any of them do. Now this begs the question, how hard have you looked? Which invites the possibility that some people may be leaving but Murphy doesn't know about them. Certainly when the Thatcher government cut marginal rates from close to 90%, a number of high earners returned to the UK, Michael Caine and Phil Collins among them (was this a good thing: discuss).

But more interesting is the stuff Murphy doesn't mention. One is that the truly rich, reluctant to up sticks themselves, might nevertheless move their assets somewhere else. That does not require removal men. It takes a couple of phone calls. Another is that a marginal tax rate hike from 40 to 50% provides people with a massive incentive to people who have never bothered with tax avoidance measures to start bothering now. Furthermore avoidance measures which didn't make economic sense two years ago can suddenly become viable when tax on marginal income has effectively increased by 25%.

I have never heard Richard Murphy acknowledge these factors.

A close family member reports in the following terms. "A couple of months ago we went on a routine visit to the accountant. He told us that as a result of the tax rise it now made economic sense to formalise the ad hoc work I did to support my partner's business. I would have to pay tax myself, of course, but at a much lower rate. The result of this was that the Revenue would now get about £3000 less tax from us than when the marginal rate was 40%. As far as we were concerned, the tax rise had cost the Revenue money".

This is tax avoidance, and perfectly legal. It turns out that Mr Murphy has been doing some avoidance of his own. Blogger Tim Worstall appears to be suggesting here - http://timworstall.com/2010/08/24/in-which-we-are-challenged-by-richard-murphy/ - that Murphy has gone further, in particular that he set up a company and paid himself and his wife equal dividends, even though his wife did little work. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but the blog is well worth a read and includes Murphy's response.

Stop press: Although I don't do Twitter, I understand Murphy's tweeted response to the IFS report is that the 50% tax rate must be working, or else no one would want to get rid of it. A superficially impressive point. If, thinking back to the Laffer curve, the marginal rate were 99% and people wanted to get rid of it, would Murphy still be saying that the rate must be working? No. That people want to get rid of a tax is no guide either way to its effectiveness.

Proust and the rioters

During the extensive period in which I attempted to cut an intellectual figure by reading books none of my friends had, I spent the best part of two years labouring away at the literary marathon that is Proust's A La Recherche. For those who've never bothered, there are occasional flashes of brilliance, but many, many tedious pages describing what this or that member of an imaginary Parisian aristocracy might have meant when they glanced across the Duchess de Guermantes' drawing room. Yadda yadda yadda.

For those seeking the long roman a fleuve, Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence is shorter, funnier and equips those temperamentally suited to its stoic outlook with a mental armoury for dealing with the more unpleasant characteristics exhibited by people in pursuit of power. It's also British.

However Proust is so exhaustive in his examination of, well, just about everything, that for a long time afterwards all other writers seemed pretty superficial. And the enforced abstinence from reading anything else had the effect of cutting me off from new novels, an intermission from which I have never really caught up.

I mention this because the post-Proust out-of-touch feeling is tenuously analogous to the one experienced when you go on holiday and come back to find that in your absence the world has changed. In August quite a lot of people came out onto the streets and rioted; or rather rioted, looted and burned. Viewed on TV from the remote north of Scotland it looked rather weird and threatening ("Look", we cried, baffled, "there's the Arndale Centre. And it's on fire!"). The political and social environment doesn't seem quite the same as it did when we went away at the end of July, and it's irrationally annoying that its changed without our consent. Irrationally because if we'd been here it would have happened anyway.

What to make of the rioters' behaviour? Obviously looters are primarily a law and order problem rather than a political one, but it doesn't seem a complete waste of time to try and work out why they looted, if only to formulate ways of minimising the possibility of it happening again and to see what it might say about British society.

Are these people bad? Perhaps some of them; if they all are, we certainly have a lot of bad people in this country. But when I was a criminal lawyer I only came across one or two truly wicked people; the rest were stupid, feckless, greedy, desperate for drugs or drunk; or indeed any combination of the preceding. Given that even those of us that don't riot probably answer some of those descriptions some of the time, having those qualities clearly isn't enough to make you smash a window and nick trainers from JD Sports.

Much has been made of the revelation that four fifths of those arrested were known to the police in one way or other, and that most of them came from poor areas. I don't think this signifies. We shouldn't be surprised that most people committing criminal offences exhibit a habit of criminal behaviour; nor does the fact that most of them don't seem to have had much money mean that they stole and burned because they were poor. The riots were apparently organised by people who owned Blackberrys, which are expensive, and perhaps that's a clue. Perhaps they should have spent their Blackberry money on more useful things. But when you haven't got much money, spending a lot of it on something high-status but unnecessary might be a classic sign that you are going to do plenty of other stupid things as well. It's possible that the rioters who were out of work ended up out of work for the same reasons they ended up in trouble with the police, namely that they were stupid, feckless or drunk, as per the previous paragraph; in other words, their low socio-economic status and their criminality might both be effects of another cause.

If it's hard working out what makes people behave like this, what could we do that might minimise the risk of them doing it again?

I heard several rioters, or people sympathetic to them, complaining that "the Poles had taken all the jobs". Some of the complainants would evidently have had difficulty holding down a job till lunchtime on day one, since by then they would either have nicked something or told the boss to Eff Off. But they surely have a point. Surely some of the rioters would have stayed at home if they'd had jobs to go to, or prospects of a job. Unfortunately in 2004, when eight new countries joined the EU, the then Labour government allowed free entry of their citizens into the UK. By 2006 a BBC news report I found in a ten-second search said that the best part of 600,000 Eastern Europeans had come to Britain.

At that time the intellectually fearless Labour MP Frank Field, reported as saying that the number of migrants was "unmanageable and made it increasingly difficult for local people to get jobs", was a lone voice of dissent. Happily there is now much wider agreement that this open door policy kept wages down at the bottom end and made it much harder for British people (whether white, black, brown or any variant on the same) to get off the sofa and into work. In an economic boom, the last government missed a golden opportunity to shift a whole section of society into jobs, importing instead a labour force from overseas. As I weary of telling people, the Government's own figures tell us that over 50% of new jobs created in the period 1997 to 2008 went to people born abroad.

Saying that we shouldn't have started from here doesn't help solve our present problems, but you would hope that next time we get some economic growth (assuming we ever do), the Government of the day might try a little harder to make sure jobs go to the British.

All this assumes that jobs and the economic growth which creates them are a good thing; but surely another reason for looting is that our society is predicated on the seductiveness of shopping; people who can't shop, or can't shop much, feel entitled to loot. Blessed with more money than most people (although less desire to buy things than most), I am ill-placed to lecture others about the fatuity of this fetish. But buying things, and having things, is essentially shallow. It's doing things which is interesting. In this, if nothing else, I have some sympathy with the looters. Shorn of the ability to do something which society tells them is both their entitlement and the ultimate good, they have nothing to fall back on.

Of course, shopping and eternal growth are not just shallow. They're unsustainable. They can only be created by increased use of resources. And we are using far too much already. The world needs fewer people, and so does Britain. Ultimately we are going to have to work out how to set up a just society with fewer people and less growth.

We could start doing this by stopping paying people to have large families. As recent economic events have demonstrated with ruthless starkness, we cannot afford our current public spending. My favourite measure to reverse this trend is to restrict future child benefit payments to the first two children. Lots of people who don't work and have never worked, who aren't in a stable relationship and haven't ever seriously tried to maintain one, are being paid by the state to have children. Their children are disproportionately unlikely to work, disproportionately unlikely to form stable relationships, and, yes, disproportionately likely to take part in riots. Why subsidise them?

The liberal answer to this is to say, "Because they will have more than two children anyway, and those children will be brought up in even greater poverty". To which I would say, "Some of them will have more than two children, but not all, and perhaps quite a lot fewer. Moreover the parents who do have large families without being able to afford them might start to take greater responsibility for their decisions." Incidentally, no-one with enough to eat, a roof over their heads and access to free health care and education can truly be described as living in"poverty", and anyone who suggests otherwise is jumping up and down on language with heavy boots, as well as insulting the huge numbers of people around the world who will never own a Blackberry.

Thus the liberal's dilemma in a nutshell. You make a provision to help people who get into trouble; but as decades pass getting into trouble becomes more acceptable and more people do it. The liberal then asks for more and more provision to help them. The conservative says, No, you must allow people to take more responsibility for their actions, because then they will behave better. The liberal cries, But the children will suffer. So be it, says the conservative. It's an unattractive position, but not necessarily wrong.

Which brings me finally to absent fathers. It doesn't do young men any good to be brought up in families without a father. This isn't to say that it isn't possible. Just that young boys are surrounded by role models - footballers, pop stars, video games - which give them no clues whatsoever in how an ordinary adult man might live with dignity and self-worth. My Dad was a paragon - didn't get drunk, didn't womanise, didn't hit my Mum, held down a job he didn't like much - but even with his example I still find those things hard to do. Men who disappear as soon as there's a nappy to be changed aren't subject to any effective social censure. We wring our hands and say what a shame it is.

The solution to this problem is beyond one blog, beyond one person, and possibly beyond the reach of us all.

A postscript. This morning I read in the paper that, amongst others I have never heard of, a novel by one Patrick de Witt has made the Booker shortlist. Amazingly, I have read it already. My wife bought it for me when we were going on holiday. It's an engaging dead-pan Western called The Sisters Brothers. It has taken me twenty years, but once more I am, if not ahead of the race, at least running on the same lap as the leaders.

Or rather my wife is.