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.