There are some aspects of parenthood which are a disappointment; it so happens that I married someone even worse than sport than I was, and so I have never had the pleasure of standing beside a windswept football/cricket/rugby/hockey etc pitch and shouted enthusiastically while one of my children scored a hat trick or a brisk half century before lunch. My how the tears would have flowed though.
Amidst the many other satisfying things however, my son likes Marquee Moon nearly as much as I do.
Marquee Moon is an LP released by the American band Television in the late 70s. In my view it is the greatest pop/rock record of the era. Perhaps any era. The only threat to its status is perhaps that it is neither pop or rock. Television emerged from the New York underground scene as post-Velvet Underground wannabees, and were embraced enthusiastically as New Wave kindred spirits when their debut LP reached these shores. I saw them play once, at the Manchester Apollo, in about 1977.
Television fulfilled the first and most obvious criteria for a rock band. They looked like a gang. On the front cover, nearly all black, they stand facing Robert Mapplethorpe's camera (yes, that Robert Mapplethorpe) in an uneven echelon, with leader Tom Verlaine looking out from under his centre-parted fringe, an amused Mona Lisa half smile on this face, appearing to proffer something to the viewer. On the inside sleeve they are rehearsing in what is no doubt some trendily bleak NY loft apartment, drummer Billy Ficca waiting patiently to be told what to do, bass player Fred Smith watching observantly while Verlaine chops something out on his Fender Jazzmaster and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd, hunched over a scruffy Telecaster, tries to make sense of it. The lighting is low and monochrome. They look young, but not naive; they are not jocks, but neither are they nerds; they aren't punks, but they aren't prog rockers either. They are their own genre. Weirdos perhaps. And they belong together.
So much for the cover. The record itself consists of eight songs recorded with a simplicity that belies the laborious care taken to achieve the effect. Drummer Ficca is a million miles away from the four-to-the-floor simplicity of greats like Charlie Watts or Ringo; but he does just enough to keep the music interesting without ruining it by showing off. Bassist Smith is like a great referee - you never notice him. But it is the guitarists that are riveting and make Television's distinctive and much-copied sound (vide the Arctic Monkeys).
Playing Fender guitars through Fender amps gives Verlaine and Lloyd's work a distinctive clarity. And the songs are beautifully arranged, each guitarist playing the absolute minimum, so the sound is full of holes and spaces. And what sounds they produce. In particular Verlaine's Jazzmaster has a glassy chiming ring that is utterly distinctive; no other guitar I know of can make that sound. It has something of the glass harmonica about it. As a soloist, Lloyd is a decent technician, but again Verlaine has the touch of genius. Taking his cue from the nagging lines of Neil Young, his playing, sometimes minimalist, sometimes expansive, has a percussive and modal inflexion to it. He can thrash it, and he can make it sing.
As for the songs themselves, they are not quite as simple as they sound. See No Evil hurries rhythmically along for a few minutes, but most of the tunes are slow, or nearly slow. Prove It has only three or four chords, but is a cheeky subversion of early 60s bubblegum pop with a stop-start chorus. Torn Curtain wanders into strange harmonic by-ways. Elevation is perhaps characteristic of Verlaine's approach to lyric writing - "It's just a little bit back from the main road / where the silence spreads and the men dig holes", he sings, bleating like a disappointed goat. And, "I knew it must have been some kind of set up / All the action just would not let up". In the gaps between he plays some fills that take the breath away.
Who knows what the lyrics mean? "I remember how the darkness doubled / I remember lightning struck itself / I was listening, listening to the wind / I was hearing, hearing something else". Who cares? Verlaine seems to have calculated that if no-one could work out what the words meant it didn't much matter what they meant. "Docks, clocks / A whisper woke him up / the smell of water would resume".
The climax of the record is perhaps the title track, Marquee Moon, a nagging ostinato of three elements cutting across each other, and reaching in Verlaine's solo a tremendous climax in D major (from memory) where, for one of only a very few times on the record an instrument other than guitar, bass and drums appears - some whirling piano arpeggios which clarify that we have reached somewhere. The music subsides, and then restarts, chugging into life as patiently as in the opening.
When I saw Television live, Verlaine did all the singing, and most of the playing. Only on the encore of Satisfaction did Richard Lloyd get the chance to cut loose, which he did dazzlingly. This personal dynamic might have gone some way to explain why the band split shortly after their second LP. In reality there was no need to make another one. Marquee Moon is as close to perfect as you can get. For the young man of sensitive disposition (a category into which my eldest falls squarely) its gnomic cadences are as close to a satisfactory account of the world as you could wish for. Its light still burns brightly after thirty-five years.
Sunday 30 December 2012
Wednesday 19 December 2012
Andrew Mitchell, the police and the press
The Andrew Mitchell case has now become a very sticky soup indeed, with the arrest of a serving police officer on suspicion of leaking the Downing Street incident log to the press. At the same time comes the allegation that an officer - possibly the same one - emailed his MP (a colleague of Mitchell's in the Whip's Office with whom he did not get on) posing as a member of the public. This email apparently states that passers-by and tourists were upset by Mitchell's behaviour during the confrontation.
The second allegation is much more damaging than the first, because it suggests that an officer who was not even present at the scene fabricated evidence against Mitchell.
My involvement with the criminal law did not begin until several years after the introduction of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, a piece of legislation passed in the Thatcher government's second term, but it was the cornerstone of every lawyer's practice, inside the police station and out. PACE was designed to get rid of the routine fitting-up indulged in by Police, convinced (often but not always correctly) they had the right man but lacking the evidence to get a successful conviction. After PACE, what went on in a police station and the way evidence was prepared and secured became significantly more formalised, to the frustration of the officers, who now had to go out and investigate suspects properly.
So if it turns out that a police officer tried to stitch Mitchell up by pretending to have seen something he didn't, no one with any experience of how the police operate will be a bit surprised.
Of the two pieces of CCTV footage which have been released, one shows Mitchell, presumably having been invited to use the smaller side gate, wheeling his bike from left to right across the main gate. He pauses while the officer opens the side gate, and then departs. The whole incident is over in about twenty seconds. Mitchell does not even stop walking except for a couple of seconds as the side gate is opened. The second film shows the gates from the outside. There are at the very most one or two people walking by. None of them is close to the gate, and none of them stops.
The CCTV film seems to show that, contrary to the police's suggestion, there is no stand up row, and that there were no horrified bystanders waiting outside the gates. At the very most Mitchell might have had time for the muttered imprecation, which he admits. It looks to me as if we have fallen victim once again to taking seriously, after Stephen Lawrence, after Michael Barrymore, after Hillsborough, what the police say. My professional experience of dealing with the police is that for every officer who is diligent, bright and scrupulous, there is another who is lazy, dim and dishonest where not outright corrupt. That's a ratio which isn't good enough.
But back to the press. I first became interested in the Mitchell story because it coincided with the murder of two WPCs in NE Manchester. It was particularly embarrassing for the government, the po-faced political reporters told us, that Mitchell's treatment of the Downing St police should have happened when officers all over the country were putting their lives on the line for the protection of the public. I pointed out what a selective view of police conduct this was, when there was other police conduct which could have been used for comparative purposes that didn't reflect so well on them.
Where are these po-faced political reporters now? Answer, on the news again last night telling us sanctimoniously that Andrew Mitchell might have been the victim of a gross injustice.
The second allegation is much more damaging than the first, because it suggests that an officer who was not even present at the scene fabricated evidence against Mitchell.
My involvement with the criminal law did not begin until several years after the introduction of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, a piece of legislation passed in the Thatcher government's second term, but it was the cornerstone of every lawyer's practice, inside the police station and out. PACE was designed to get rid of the routine fitting-up indulged in by Police, convinced (often but not always correctly) they had the right man but lacking the evidence to get a successful conviction. After PACE, what went on in a police station and the way evidence was prepared and secured became significantly more formalised, to the frustration of the officers, who now had to go out and investigate suspects properly.
So if it turns out that a police officer tried to stitch Mitchell up by pretending to have seen something he didn't, no one with any experience of how the police operate will be a bit surprised.
Of the two pieces of CCTV footage which have been released, one shows Mitchell, presumably having been invited to use the smaller side gate, wheeling his bike from left to right across the main gate. He pauses while the officer opens the side gate, and then departs. The whole incident is over in about twenty seconds. Mitchell does not even stop walking except for a couple of seconds as the side gate is opened. The second film shows the gates from the outside. There are at the very most one or two people walking by. None of them is close to the gate, and none of them stops.
The CCTV film seems to show that, contrary to the police's suggestion, there is no stand up row, and that there were no horrified bystanders waiting outside the gates. At the very most Mitchell might have had time for the muttered imprecation, which he admits. It looks to me as if we have fallen victim once again to taking seriously, after Stephen Lawrence, after Michael Barrymore, after Hillsborough, what the police say. My professional experience of dealing with the police is that for every officer who is diligent, bright and scrupulous, there is another who is lazy, dim and dishonest where not outright corrupt. That's a ratio which isn't good enough.
But back to the press. I first became interested in the Mitchell story because it coincided with the murder of two WPCs in NE Manchester. It was particularly embarrassing for the government, the po-faced political reporters told us, that Mitchell's treatment of the Downing St police should have happened when officers all over the country were putting their lives on the line for the protection of the public. I pointed out what a selective view of police conduct this was, when there was other police conduct which could have been used for comparative purposes that didn't reflect so well on them.
Where are these po-faced political reporters now? Answer, on the news again last night telling us sanctimoniously that Andrew Mitchell might have been the victim of a gross injustice.
Monday 17 December 2012
Ed Miliband, immigration and inequality
A day or so after I posted about Frank Field and immigration, Ed Miliband gave a speech acknowledging some of Labour's mistakes in office. "The capacity of our economy to absorb new migrants was greater than the capacity of some of our communities to adapt", he said.
Now that the leader of the Labour party is admitting unrestricted immigration might not have been such a good idea after all, perhaps the bien pensant will stop calling those of us with reservations about it racists.
Incidentally, when Miliband implies the economy has successfully absorbed migrants he's only half right - most of them got jobs, but that was at the expense of unemployed British people, a disproportionate number of whom have black or brown skins.
Actually that's one of the strangest ironies of the issue - cheerleaders for immigration have always enjoyed the see-I'm-not-a-racist glow which comes with it, deploring us provincials for their alienation from metrocentric multiculturalism. But actually most of the immigrants were white, and many of the people who suffered, either because they were shut out of the jobs market or because their pay levels languished as the liberal middle-classes forged ahead, were black. More bizarrely still, the people most enthusiastic about immigration tended to be the same people jumping up and down most frenetically about the rise in inequality under the Blair / Brown governments.
To return to Miliband, some of the "communities" (oh Lord) who couldn't "adapt" were the out-of-work community, who found themselves competing with migrants for jobs. Then there was the low-paid community, who found that an increase in the supply of labour meant that employers didn't have to compete for staff by raising wages.
Yes, immigration increases inequality and is bad for black British people. Who knew?
Thursday 13 December 2012
Why I love . . . #3 Frank Field
In the last ten years the British population has increased by 3.7 million (2011 census).
More than 500,000 Polish people now live in the UK (2011 census).
In the period of the last Labour government more than 50% of new jobs created went to people born overseas (HMG figures).
UK unemployment figures are currently about 2.5 million. Young black men are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as young white men. More than 50% of young black men are unemployed (Guardian, March 2012).
Fewer than 2 million new homes have been built in last ten years (my rough calculation from NHBC figures).
RIBA calls for an extra 300,000 homes to be built every year (Independent, 26 Oct 2012) to deal with the housing crisis.
Nick Boles, housing minister, calls for 1,500 square miles of greenfield sites to be built on (Telegraph, 27 November).
"The main threat to biodiversity, the variety of species alive on earth, is human activity . . . One of the biggest problems that human activity causes is habitat loss, the physical environment that provides a homes to populations of different species" (Merci, Environmental pressure group).
The UK population is now over 57 million. The population density of the South East is about 450 residents per square km (ONS report), third amongst major countries behind only Bangladesh (1,045 per sq km) and South Korea (498 per sq km).
Most of Britain's population growth in the last ten years has come from immigration (2011 census).
Frank Field, the former Labour minister, said (Telegraph, today 13th December) the population increase should now be treated as a "state of emergency . . . This is not so much a wake up call, it is almost time for the firing squad for politicians who have allowed this to happen". He accused his own party of lacking "humility" over its role in allowing immigration to go unchecked.
That's Frank. Fearless. Even handed. And better still, usually right.
PS A day or so after I posted this, Ed Miliband gave a speech acknowledging some of Labour's mistakes in office. "The capacity of our economy to absorb new migrants was greater than the capacity of some of our communities to adapt", he said. I suppose I should be relieved to find that I am no longer confined to the lunatic fringe. I'm going to post more fully on this in a minute.
More than 500,000 Polish people now live in the UK (2011 census).
In the period of the last Labour government more than 50% of new jobs created went to people born overseas (HMG figures).
Fewer than 2 million new homes have been built in last ten years (my rough calculation from NHBC figures).
RIBA calls for an extra 300,000 homes to be built every year (Independent, 26 Oct 2012) to deal with the housing crisis.
Nick Boles, housing minister, calls for 1,500 square miles of greenfield sites to be built on (Telegraph, 27 November).
"The main threat to biodiversity, the variety of species alive on earth, is human activity . . . One of the biggest problems that human activity causes is habitat loss, the physical environment that provides a homes to populations of different species" (Merci, Environmental pressure group).
The UK population is now over 57 million. The population density of the South East is about 450 residents per square km (ONS report), third amongst major countries behind only Bangladesh (1,045 per sq km) and South Korea (498 per sq km).
Most of Britain's population growth in the last ten years has come from immigration (2011 census).
Frank Field, the former Labour minister, said (Telegraph, today 13th December) the population increase should now be treated as a "state of emergency . . . This is not so much a wake up call, it is almost time for the firing squad for politicians who have allowed this to happen". He accused his own party of lacking "humility" over its role in allowing immigration to go unchecked.
That's Frank. Fearless. Even handed. And better still, usually right.
PS A day or so after I posted this, Ed Miliband gave a speech acknowledging some of Labour's mistakes in office. "The capacity of our economy to absorb new migrants was greater than the capacity of some of our communities to adapt", he said. I suppose I should be relieved to find that I am no longer confined to the lunatic fringe. I'm going to post more fully on this in a minute.
Tuesday 11 December 2012
Viva Berlusconi - no, really
Italian stockmarkets slumped yesterday on the news that Silvio Berlusconi's party had withdrawn its support from the country's governing coalition, prompting the resignation of stand-in PM Mario Monti and early elections next year. Berlusconi has pledged to stand for a fourth term in office.
In a small way this is a good thing.
Why? A year or so ago I wrote a post suggesting that Greece would probably be out of the Eurozone by the end of 2012. I was wrong. A large debt write down following by billions in the way of EZ hand outs has contrived to keep Greece in the game. I underestimated the ruthlessness and resourcefulness of EZ leaders. Of course this has only been possible because draconian austerity policies have been forced on ordinary Greeks (and not just the Greeks - the Portuguese and Spanish too).
Although there have been riots and protests, no EZ country has a major political party with a policy of withdrawal from the Eurozone. Even the Greek Anti-Austerity party doesn't want to withdraw. It's easy to understand why this should be. The current generation of European leaders have been brought up on the idea of European integration. It was in their mothers' milk. They're not going to turn round and admit that the Euro has been a gigantic mistake.
And so the Eurozone slips backwards towards recession, as the deficit countries (just about everyone) tighten their belts and the surplus countries (mostly Germany) look smug and refuse to spend any more.
If it's very difficult to see how this will play out, it's also very hard to see it ending anything other than badly. Growth is going to be in short supply in Europe generally; economies that aren't growing will struggle to reduce their deficits; as economies shrink the pressure applied to the populations will grow and grow. How long will people put up with it? And what will happen when they've had enough? In the mainstream parties there is a vacuum of leadership tailor-made for the extreme Right.
That's why Silvio Berlusconi's assertion that Sgr Monti's policies have dragged Italy "to the edge of the abyss" strikes a chord. It's not that Berlusconi has explicitly called for Italy's exit from the Euro. He hasn't. But any EZ leader willing to stand up and say, "Hang on, this isn't working" is swimming refreshingly against the tide. Hold your nose. Viva Berlusconi.
In a small way this is a good thing.
Why? A year or so ago I wrote a post suggesting that Greece would probably be out of the Eurozone by the end of 2012. I was wrong. A large debt write down following by billions in the way of EZ hand outs has contrived to keep Greece in the game. I underestimated the ruthlessness and resourcefulness of EZ leaders. Of course this has only been possible because draconian austerity policies have been forced on ordinary Greeks (and not just the Greeks - the Portuguese and Spanish too).
Although there have been riots and protests, no EZ country has a major political party with a policy of withdrawal from the Eurozone. Even the Greek Anti-Austerity party doesn't want to withdraw. It's easy to understand why this should be. The current generation of European leaders have been brought up on the idea of European integration. It was in their mothers' milk. They're not going to turn round and admit that the Euro has been a gigantic mistake.
And so the Eurozone slips backwards towards recession, as the deficit countries (just about everyone) tighten their belts and the surplus countries (mostly Germany) look smug and refuse to spend any more.
If it's very difficult to see how this will play out, it's also very hard to see it ending anything other than badly. Growth is going to be in short supply in Europe generally; economies that aren't growing will struggle to reduce their deficits; as economies shrink the pressure applied to the populations will grow and grow. How long will people put up with it? And what will happen when they've had enough? In the mainstream parties there is a vacuum of leadership tailor-made for the extreme Right.
That's why Silvio Berlusconi's assertion that Sgr Monti's policies have dragged Italy "to the edge of the abyss" strikes a chord. It's not that Berlusconi has explicitly called for Italy's exit from the Euro. He hasn't. But any EZ leader willing to stand up and say, "Hang on, this isn't working" is swimming refreshingly against the tide. Hold your nose. Viva Berlusconi.
Thursday 6 December 2012
Crisis at Christmas
In the Guardian and on the news the run of stories about hardship at Christmas is just beginning. Housing benefit cuts and mortgage defaults are putting people on the streets, and the Government's austerity policies are to blame.
This may be true, but the Government's opponents talk of austerity as if it were a choice. The suggestion is that there might be a painless alternative which Ed Balls is just waiting to implement, and as if there will come a point at which it is over. George Osborne's latest prognosis talks in terms of cuts lasting until 2018 or thereabouts, and after that date, we're told, everything will return to normal. If only incompetent Chancellor Osborne didn't keep putting it off!
I think that view is delusional. Austerity is not optional but inevitable. The idea that when your economy is at rock bottom and you are borrowing millions of pounds a day just to stay afloat it might be rational to carry on public spending as before is beyond ridicule. Austerity is with us for the forseeable future, and if, as I expect, Labour returns to power in 2015 we will merely have Labour's version instead.
What will it look like? You would hope they would have learned that there is only a certain mileage to be gained from taxing the wealthy. A week or so ago the Torygraph reported that the numbers of people declaring an annual income of more than £1 million fell from 16,000 to 6,000 after the introduction of the 50p tax rate; the Treasury reckon they lost £7 billion. But I wouldn't bet my mortgage on it. By 2015 the clamour from Labour's natural constituencies for a bout of rich-bashing will be more intense than it is now. It won't plug the hole in the UK's budget, and, like the 50p tax rate, it might cost the Treasury more than it gains; but it'll happen all the same. Parties pander to their supporters.
All of which brings me back to a point I've been making for three or four years, one which is worth dragging out into the light every now and again. It is that the credit crunch is not a crisis of Capitalism. Rather it is a crisis for Social Democrats. Why? Boom and bust is just what capitalism does - capital is misallocated; there is mispricing of risk; it all goes pear-shaped. This was a particularly big one, exacerbated by globalisation. In the decades ahead it will eventually work through the system, as the Far East gets richer and the West gets poorer. In the end the cycle will start again, with any luck featuring better safeguards in future (it probably won't, but one can hope).
Social Democracy, on the other hand, is dead in the water. It is predicated on an extensive system of support for people who have been unfortunate or who have made bad choices. For western countries expecting high standards of living it was unaffordable in the good times; we know Britain couldn't afford it, because overall we ran a deficit during the longest period of economic growth in British history, from Black Wednesday in 1993 to summer 2008. It will be doubly so in the bad times which now stretch away into the future. Way beyond 2018.
Personally I don't think Labour is anywhere near working out what might be a plausible substitute; not that that will spoil their chances in 2015. Most of their natural support haven't even grasped the nature of the problem - it still astonishes me how many people still think it was all the fault of the banks (or Gordon Brown for that matter), without asking themselves what it was the banks were doing. Answer - working out more and more ingenious ways of making it look OK to lend to people and governments that couldn't afford to pay it back. Trying to prop up Western living standards that couldn't be supported without that lending.
No, if I were a Social Democrat I'd be chewing my fingernails. If I were on the Hard Left, on the other hand, I'd be feeling rather chipper.
This may be true, but the Government's opponents talk of austerity as if it were a choice. The suggestion is that there might be a painless alternative which Ed Balls is just waiting to implement, and as if there will come a point at which it is over. George Osborne's latest prognosis talks in terms of cuts lasting until 2018 or thereabouts, and after that date, we're told, everything will return to normal. If only incompetent Chancellor Osborne didn't keep putting it off!
I think that view is delusional. Austerity is not optional but inevitable. The idea that when your economy is at rock bottom and you are borrowing millions of pounds a day just to stay afloat it might be rational to carry on public spending as before is beyond ridicule. Austerity is with us for the forseeable future, and if, as I expect, Labour returns to power in 2015 we will merely have Labour's version instead.
What will it look like? You would hope they would have learned that there is only a certain mileage to be gained from taxing the wealthy. A week or so ago the Torygraph reported that the numbers of people declaring an annual income of more than £1 million fell from 16,000 to 6,000 after the introduction of the 50p tax rate; the Treasury reckon they lost £7 billion. But I wouldn't bet my mortgage on it. By 2015 the clamour from Labour's natural constituencies for a bout of rich-bashing will be more intense than it is now. It won't plug the hole in the UK's budget, and, like the 50p tax rate, it might cost the Treasury more than it gains; but it'll happen all the same. Parties pander to their supporters.
All of which brings me back to a point I've been making for three or four years, one which is worth dragging out into the light every now and again. It is that the credit crunch is not a crisis of Capitalism. Rather it is a crisis for Social Democrats. Why? Boom and bust is just what capitalism does - capital is misallocated; there is mispricing of risk; it all goes pear-shaped. This was a particularly big one, exacerbated by globalisation. In the decades ahead it will eventually work through the system, as the Far East gets richer and the West gets poorer. In the end the cycle will start again, with any luck featuring better safeguards in future (it probably won't, but one can hope).
Social Democracy, on the other hand, is dead in the water. It is predicated on an extensive system of support for people who have been unfortunate or who have made bad choices. For western countries expecting high standards of living it was unaffordable in the good times; we know Britain couldn't afford it, because overall we ran a deficit during the longest period of economic growth in British history, from Black Wednesday in 1993 to summer 2008. It will be doubly so in the bad times which now stretch away into the future. Way beyond 2018.
Personally I don't think Labour is anywhere near working out what might be a plausible substitute; not that that will spoil their chances in 2015. Most of their natural support haven't even grasped the nature of the problem - it still astonishes me how many people still think it was all the fault of the banks (or Gordon Brown for that matter), without asking themselves what it was the banks were doing. Answer - working out more and more ingenious ways of making it look OK to lend to people and governments that couldn't afford to pay it back. Trying to prop up Western living standards that couldn't be supported without that lending.
No, if I were a Social Democrat I'd be chewing my fingernails. If I were on the Hard Left, on the other hand, I'd be feeling rather chipper.
Wednesday 5 December 2012
George Osborne - bash carefully
The Chancellor has been getting some stick recently, and no doubt after today's Autumn statement (delivered on December 5th? - not very Autumnal, George) he'll be in for some more.
I was watching the Ten O'clock News and Newsnight last night. Criticism seems to be two-fold. One, Osborne hasn't got the economy to grow. Two, he's borrowed too much. But considered together these criticisms collapse into a heap.
By universal consent, the economy has failed to grow because of weak demand. How could Osborne boost demand? Only by borrowing more.
You think he's borrowed too much already? Fine. Cut spending. But that would only lead to demand being still weaker.
His critics can't have it both ways. Either he's borrowed too much, or he's at fault for low growth. But not both.
Labour has been at the forefront of having its critical cake and eating it, which is a bit rich because we have ended up with borrowing levels pretty close to what they planned before the 2010 election.
Of course, it's possible that Osborne is to blame for neither. Trying to revitalise the economy when you are up to your eyes in debt, with the eurozone in crisis, America emerging from recession and growth faltering in the Far East is about as near a futile exercise as I can imagine. The truly depressing thing about recent economic news is that it is very difficult to think of anything else the Chancellor could do.
Which strikes me as the biggest and most telling charge to make against Osborne. He is two and a half years into the job, and is probably more fairly described as dogged rather than imaginative. Yes, it's hard, but he is paid to think creatively about the economy, which the rest of us aren't.
I was watching the Ten O'clock News and Newsnight last night. Criticism seems to be two-fold. One, Osborne hasn't got the economy to grow. Two, he's borrowed too much. But considered together these criticisms collapse into a heap.
By universal consent, the economy has failed to grow because of weak demand. How could Osborne boost demand? Only by borrowing more.
You think he's borrowed too much already? Fine. Cut spending. But that would only lead to demand being still weaker.
His critics can't have it both ways. Either he's borrowed too much, or he's at fault for low growth. But not both.
Labour has been at the forefront of having its critical cake and eating it, which is a bit rich because we have ended up with borrowing levels pretty close to what they planned before the 2010 election.
Of course, it's possible that Osborne is to blame for neither. Trying to revitalise the economy when you are up to your eyes in debt, with the eurozone in crisis, America emerging from recession and growth faltering in the Far East is about as near a futile exercise as I can imagine. The truly depressing thing about recent economic news is that it is very difficult to think of anything else the Chancellor could do.
Which strikes me as the biggest and most telling charge to make against Osborne. He is two and a half years into the job, and is probably more fairly described as dogged rather than imaginative. Yes, it's hard, but he is paid to think creatively about the economy, which the rest of us aren't.
My annual Rachmaninov 2
Early next year the Halifax Symphony Orchestra will be playing Rachmaninov's 2nd Symphony. We had the first rehearsal last night. When I was young I had Andre Previn's magisterial version of the piece, recorded with the LSO in the 70s, and in the years before I went to music college and became cynical, its passion and lyricism were often a mental soundtrack to my life.
To describe Rach 2 as sumptuous would be to short-change it. The symphony is nearly an hour's worth of musical velvet. I have conducted it before, an experience I remember chiefly for the long stretches of rehearsal spent cajoling the second violins to play fig. 33 correctly in the second movement; I remember too having to signal to one of the double basses who had turned up late for the concert how many beats I was going to give before the start of the last movement; that and the relief, as the music crested the last hill and began to wind itself up for the exuberant final bars, that we had got through it without disaster; Rach 2 is technically hard for the players, thickly scored and ambitious.
I also remember thinking - and this struck me last night too - "I no longer believe what Rachmaninov is telling me". It might be worth considering what exactly that is. Rachmaninov speaks of present unhappiness and of longing for something that is just out of reach, a longing expressed with almost fetishistic care and obsessive length. Only at the very end do we feel that we might have actually attained it, and it is that feeling of consummation and achievement which makes the final couple of pages so exhilarating.
How useful is that for living? In my experience not much. It may be difficult to get something you really want, and miserable when you haven't got it; but few things are as good (or bad) as they first appear, and an even bigger task is how to be happy once you have got something long desired. Rachmaninov isn't alone in focusing short-sightedly on this near term goal at the expense of what lies beyond it: many other Romantic composers strove to express loss, want and attainment. Why not? They are powerful feelings.
But for me this just makes the more emotionally mature achievements of other composers all the greater - I'm thinking particularly of Brahms, Nielsen and Sibelius. There is a quality of stoicism and resignation in Brahms' music which seems to recognise that the Romantic outlook is only a small part of human experience; as for Nielsen his two masterworks, the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, are explicit attempts to wrestle with how to live as an adult. They are not the most radical pieces of twentieth century music, but they see the world with a clarity and acuity far removed from Rachmaninov's sentimental vision. After writing the Violin Concerto, Sibelius went beyond the subjective play of human emotions into a rarefied musical sphere which reflects the relationship between man and the physical world.
Everyone should listen to Rach 2 once every year or so. It is a great piece of music, challenging and emotional, vividly orchestrated and full of memorable tunes. But it is not the whole story.
To describe Rach 2 as sumptuous would be to short-change it. The symphony is nearly an hour's worth of musical velvet. I have conducted it before, an experience I remember chiefly for the long stretches of rehearsal spent cajoling the second violins to play fig. 33 correctly in the second movement; I remember too having to signal to one of the double basses who had turned up late for the concert how many beats I was going to give before the start of the last movement; that and the relief, as the music crested the last hill and began to wind itself up for the exuberant final bars, that we had got through it without disaster; Rach 2 is technically hard for the players, thickly scored and ambitious.
I also remember thinking - and this struck me last night too - "I no longer believe what Rachmaninov is telling me". It might be worth considering what exactly that is. Rachmaninov speaks of present unhappiness and of longing for something that is just out of reach, a longing expressed with almost fetishistic care and obsessive length. Only at the very end do we feel that we might have actually attained it, and it is that feeling of consummation and achievement which makes the final couple of pages so exhilarating.
How useful is that for living? In my experience not much. It may be difficult to get something you really want, and miserable when you haven't got it; but few things are as good (or bad) as they first appear, and an even bigger task is how to be happy once you have got something long desired. Rachmaninov isn't alone in focusing short-sightedly on this near term goal at the expense of what lies beyond it: many other Romantic composers strove to express loss, want and attainment. Why not? They are powerful feelings.
But for me this just makes the more emotionally mature achievements of other composers all the greater - I'm thinking particularly of Brahms, Nielsen and Sibelius. There is a quality of stoicism and resignation in Brahms' music which seems to recognise that the Romantic outlook is only a small part of human experience; as for Nielsen his two masterworks, the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, are explicit attempts to wrestle with how to live as an adult. They are not the most radical pieces of twentieth century music, but they see the world with a clarity and acuity far removed from Rachmaninov's sentimental vision. After writing the Violin Concerto, Sibelius went beyond the subjective play of human emotions into a rarefied musical sphere which reflects the relationship between man and the physical world.
Everyone should listen to Rach 2 once every year or so. It is a great piece of music, challenging and emotional, vividly orchestrated and full of memorable tunes. But it is not the whole story.
Tuesday 4 December 2012
Boycotting Amazon
Last June I posted about the thorny issue of tax dodging (Jimmy Carr and Amazon), pointing out that "Amazon do millions, if not billions, of business in the UK. But they don't pay any tax here. Amazon have the right to arrange their tax affairs in any legal way they like. But we don't have to buy books from them. I find www.abebooks.co.uk a perfectly good substitute."
I might have added Starbucks and Google to Amazon; and now it appears that Starbucks are going to re-arrange their affairs to increase their tax exposure. Hooray. These people need our goodwill and custom.
Incidentally, if Starbucks were really making no profits from their UK business, why do they have one? Why don't they just close it down? That Starbucks think it worth operating here gives the lie to the pretence that they aren't making any money.
That still leaves Amazon (and no doubt plenty of others). Every pound we don't spend there increases the pressure on them. Come on citizens! Keep your wallets in your pockets!
I might have added Starbucks and Google to Amazon; and now it appears that Starbucks are going to re-arrange their affairs to increase their tax exposure. Hooray. These people need our goodwill and custom.
Incidentally, if Starbucks were really making no profits from their UK business, why do they have one? Why don't they just close it down? That Starbucks think it worth operating here gives the lie to the pretence that they aren't making any money.
That still leaves Amazon (and no doubt plenty of others). Every pound we don't spend there increases the pressure on them. Come on citizens! Keep your wallets in your pockets!
Thursday 29 November 2012
Ignoring the Leveson Report
Like you, I haven't read Brian Leveson's report; I doubt whether even Leveson himself has read all of it. But like you, that doesn't stop me having opinions about it, and here they are.
Leveson seems to have opted for some kind of independent Regulator, like the PCC but set up on a statutory basis to prevent the government fiddling with it.
Sounds very worthy, but here are three things that are wrong with it.
First, given that any regulator is inevitably going to proceed on the basis of rules, why are newspapers more likely to obey a Leveson-type regulator than they were the Press Complaints Commission? To put it another way, the press not only broke the PCC rules but the criminal law also. Anyone who thinks a Leveson-compliant regulator would have more of an impact on journalists than the prospect of a prison sentence is crazy.
Secondly, what if some newspaper refuses to co-operate, as the Spectator has threatened? Richard Desmond, it will be remembered, refused to allow his publications to be scrutinised by the PCC. And here's where Leveson gets nasty. He seems to be suggesting that refuseniks will be dealt with by Ofcom, a state sponsored body, instead, and face harsher costs penalties in litigation than publications that comply. But who is head of Ofcom? Why, it's none other than Ed Richards, a former apparatchik of Gordon Brown. In other words, co-operate with Leveson's Regulator or a state-sponsored body with a political appointee at its head will get you. When Leveson says there is a world of difference between his scheme and state regulation he is being disingenuous. Leveson is proposing to use state regulation to compel compliance with his scheme.
Thirdly, the remit of Leveson's Regulator won't apply to the internet. His vast four-volume report apparently devotes only one page to it in a total exceeding 2000. We could soon find ourselves in the bizarre situation that a print copy of an offending newspaper story might fall foul of the rules but an online one might not. It's hard to think of a better way of sinking print media altogether, making it irrelevant in comparison to the net's unrestricted Wild West.
On the whole we get the press we deserve. I bet even the people who have suffered most egregiously from the attentions of Fleet Street - in this case perhaps the Dowler parents and the McCanns - will have read the News of the Screws or the Sunday People in their time. I know I have. Yes, the press is unscrupulous and all the rest, but they are in business because we keep buying their papers. And sometimes they come up with some gold. The phone-hacking story, remember, was broken by a newspaper.
I don't feel terribly sorry for the celebrities like Steve Coogan and Hugh Grant who have added their bleating to Hacked Off's campaign. All of them have at some time or other used the press to further their careers - Coogan has made films for Rupert Murdoch's companies, for God's sake. All of them are free at any time to go and seek a life of suburban obscurity. It's surprisingly easy. People like the Dowlers and McCanns are blameless of course; but hard cases make bad law. Those who hacked their phones are in prison, and some of the people who put them up to it will probably be joining them pretty soon.
Surprisingly, I think David Cameron is right to resist Leveson's self-righteous allure.
Leveson seems to have opted for some kind of independent Regulator, like the PCC but set up on a statutory basis to prevent the government fiddling with it.
Sounds very worthy, but here are three things that are wrong with it.
First, given that any regulator is inevitably going to proceed on the basis of rules, why are newspapers more likely to obey a Leveson-type regulator than they were the Press Complaints Commission? To put it another way, the press not only broke the PCC rules but the criminal law also. Anyone who thinks a Leveson-compliant regulator would have more of an impact on journalists than the prospect of a prison sentence is crazy.
Secondly, what if some newspaper refuses to co-operate, as the Spectator has threatened? Richard Desmond, it will be remembered, refused to allow his publications to be scrutinised by the PCC. And here's where Leveson gets nasty. He seems to be suggesting that refuseniks will be dealt with by Ofcom, a state sponsored body, instead, and face harsher costs penalties in litigation than publications that comply. But who is head of Ofcom? Why, it's none other than Ed Richards, a former apparatchik of Gordon Brown. In other words, co-operate with Leveson's Regulator or a state-sponsored body with a political appointee at its head will get you. When Leveson says there is a world of difference between his scheme and state regulation he is being disingenuous. Leveson is proposing to use state regulation to compel compliance with his scheme.
Thirdly, the remit of Leveson's Regulator won't apply to the internet. His vast four-volume report apparently devotes only one page to it in a total exceeding 2000. We could soon find ourselves in the bizarre situation that a print copy of an offending newspaper story might fall foul of the rules but an online one might not. It's hard to think of a better way of sinking print media altogether, making it irrelevant in comparison to the net's unrestricted Wild West.
On the whole we get the press we deserve. I bet even the people who have suffered most egregiously from the attentions of Fleet Street - in this case perhaps the Dowler parents and the McCanns - will have read the News of the Screws or the Sunday People in their time. I know I have. Yes, the press is unscrupulous and all the rest, but they are in business because we keep buying their papers. And sometimes they come up with some gold. The phone-hacking story, remember, was broken by a newspaper.
I don't feel terribly sorry for the celebrities like Steve Coogan and Hugh Grant who have added their bleating to Hacked Off's campaign. All of them have at some time or other used the press to further their careers - Coogan has made films for Rupert Murdoch's companies, for God's sake. All of them are free at any time to go and seek a life of suburban obscurity. It's surprisingly easy. People like the Dowlers and McCanns are blameless of course; but hard cases make bad law. Those who hacked their phones are in prison, and some of the people who put them up to it will probably be joining them pretty soon.
Surprisingly, I think David Cameron is right to resist Leveson's self-righteous allure.
Monday 26 November 2012
Re-reading Britten's Children
I've been meaning for months to write about John Bridcut's book Britten's Children, quite one of the silliest and most misleading studies of a public figure I can remember. Prompted by a letter by the author in today's Guardian, I now discover that there's been a bit of a furore in the last few days, in so far as anything in the classical music world qualifies for the description, prompted by an article a few days earlier by Martin Kettle, the paper's chief leader-writer and self-appointed classical music expert.
2013 will be the centenary of Britten's birth, and a plethora of celebrations are planned. The composer's homosexuality was well-known during his lifetime, but less well-known, although much whispered about, was his attraction to pubescent, and perhaps pre-pubescent boys. In the aftermath of the Jimmy Savile affair, this is something that induces a queasy feeling, and Kettle goes over some of the old ground in his article. As the dominant figure in British music during the middle years of the 20th century, Britten gathered around him an army of acolytes, admirers, proteges and hangers-on, all of whom are understandably proud of their association with him and defensive about his reputation. One of them is the writer John Bridcut.
Why is Britten's Children a silly and misleading book? Well the clue is in the title. Flick through it and try and find the references to girls. Britten's Boys would have been a better title. I haven't read it for a couple of years, but when I did my overwhelming impression was of a determined attempt to exonerate Britten. Bridcut interviewed a number of people who were "taken up" by Britten, including the actor David Hemmings, and recorded that nothing untoward had taken place between them. Hemmings stated that he was well aware, as the original Miles in The Turn of the Screw, how attracted to him Britten was; it was just that Britten never did anything about it. Bridcut concludes from his failure to find any evidence against Britten that the composer never did anything wicked.
This naive conclusion must be read in the light of the Harry Morris affair. In 1937 Britten, then 24, took Morris, a chorister aged 13, on holiday to Crantock in Cornwall with his family. As a present Britten had bought Morris some new pyjamas. Whilst at Crantock an incident occurred; Morris returned to London and a stand-up row took place between Britten and his elder brother; they were estranged for a time afterwards. Bridcut writes (p.52) that later in life Morris said he had been alarmed "by what he understood as a sexual approach from Britten in his bedroom. He said he screamed and hit Britten with a chair. This brought Beth (Britten's sister) rushing into the room, who, he said, shouted at her brother. She and Ben left, and Beth locked the door. Harry got dressed, packed his bags, and sat waiting for the morning. Without speaking, Beth took him to the station, and dispatched him to London. When he reached home, he told his mother what had happened, but she told him off and refused to believe his story. He never told his father."
Morris died in 2002. Bridcut notes (p.46) that "as an old man he had revisited Crantock, and the experience had made him feel ill". Then, astonishingly, Bridcut goes on, "Benjamin evidently delighted in laying on for Harry the same sort of treats as those he had given (another young protege), and in seeing his eyes light up with fresh experiences beyond his reach at home. This was what motivated him all his life in establishing friendships with boys".
I nearly fell off my chair when I read that last sentence.
With all the participants dead, it is impossible to be specific about what happened between Britten and Morris. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that this was an incident where Britten's interest in young (and therefore vulnerable) boys crossed the line between thoughts and deeds. It may be the only time Britten did so; it may not be. In either event, Bridcut's general conclusion about Britten's conduct and proclivities is undermined. We know Britten fancied pubescent boys. We don't know whether he ever did anything about it, but Bridcut's conclusion about his motives in "establishing friendships with boys" are surely risible in the light of Morris's experience.
There are further stupidities in Britten's Children, of which perhaps the most egregious are the many pages Bridcut devotes to Britten's relationship with Wulff Scherchen, a young German. It's true the pair met in the early 30s when Scherchen was 13 and Britten 20; but their relationship did not begin until 1938 when Scherchen was at Cambridge. The relationship was between two young men, and quite why Bridcut devotes fifty pages to it in a book called Britten's Children is a mystery.
Does it matter whether Britten if was a paedophile? Well evidently yes if anyone suffered from his attentions; but even if he was it wouldn't make him a bad composer. Wagner isn't a bad composer because he disliked Jews. And to put it the other way round, twenty years of more or less blameless devotion to family life doesn't, sadly, make me a good one either.
In time, Britten's music will stand or fall on its own. Personally I admire his work more than like it - for all its brilliance, I feel it generally lacks heart. He is the Saent-Saens of the 20th century.
What of John Bridcut? His reply to Martin Kettle's article is on this morning's Guardian letters page. "There was no suggestion of impropriety", he writes. Perhaps he should re-read his own book.
2013 will be the centenary of Britten's birth, and a plethora of celebrations are planned. The composer's homosexuality was well-known during his lifetime, but less well-known, although much whispered about, was his attraction to pubescent, and perhaps pre-pubescent boys. In the aftermath of the Jimmy Savile affair, this is something that induces a queasy feeling, and Kettle goes over some of the old ground in his article. As the dominant figure in British music during the middle years of the 20th century, Britten gathered around him an army of acolytes, admirers, proteges and hangers-on, all of whom are understandably proud of their association with him and defensive about his reputation. One of them is the writer John Bridcut.
Why is Britten's Children a silly and misleading book? Well the clue is in the title. Flick through it and try and find the references to girls. Britten's Boys would have been a better title. I haven't read it for a couple of years, but when I did my overwhelming impression was of a determined attempt to exonerate Britten. Bridcut interviewed a number of people who were "taken up" by Britten, including the actor David Hemmings, and recorded that nothing untoward had taken place between them. Hemmings stated that he was well aware, as the original Miles in The Turn of the Screw, how attracted to him Britten was; it was just that Britten never did anything about it. Bridcut concludes from his failure to find any evidence against Britten that the composer never did anything wicked.
This naive conclusion must be read in the light of the Harry Morris affair. In 1937 Britten, then 24, took Morris, a chorister aged 13, on holiday to Crantock in Cornwall with his family. As a present Britten had bought Morris some new pyjamas. Whilst at Crantock an incident occurred; Morris returned to London and a stand-up row took place between Britten and his elder brother; they were estranged for a time afterwards. Bridcut writes (p.52) that later in life Morris said he had been alarmed "by what he understood as a sexual approach from Britten in his bedroom. He said he screamed and hit Britten with a chair. This brought Beth (Britten's sister) rushing into the room, who, he said, shouted at her brother. She and Ben left, and Beth locked the door. Harry got dressed, packed his bags, and sat waiting for the morning. Without speaking, Beth took him to the station, and dispatched him to London. When he reached home, he told his mother what had happened, but she told him off and refused to believe his story. He never told his father."
Morris died in 2002. Bridcut notes (p.46) that "as an old man he had revisited Crantock, and the experience had made him feel ill". Then, astonishingly, Bridcut goes on, "Benjamin evidently delighted in laying on for Harry the same sort of treats as those he had given (another young protege), and in seeing his eyes light up with fresh experiences beyond his reach at home. This was what motivated him all his life in establishing friendships with boys".
I nearly fell off my chair when I read that last sentence.
With all the participants dead, it is impossible to be specific about what happened between Britten and Morris. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that this was an incident where Britten's interest in young (and therefore vulnerable) boys crossed the line between thoughts and deeds. It may be the only time Britten did so; it may not be. In either event, Bridcut's general conclusion about Britten's conduct and proclivities is undermined. We know Britten fancied pubescent boys. We don't know whether he ever did anything about it, but Bridcut's conclusion about his motives in "establishing friendships with boys" are surely risible in the light of Morris's experience.
There are further stupidities in Britten's Children, of which perhaps the most egregious are the many pages Bridcut devotes to Britten's relationship with Wulff Scherchen, a young German. It's true the pair met in the early 30s when Scherchen was 13 and Britten 20; but their relationship did not begin until 1938 when Scherchen was at Cambridge. The relationship was between two young men, and quite why Bridcut devotes fifty pages to it in a book called Britten's Children is a mystery.
Does it matter whether Britten if was a paedophile? Well evidently yes if anyone suffered from his attentions; but even if he was it wouldn't make him a bad composer. Wagner isn't a bad composer because he disliked Jews. And to put it the other way round, twenty years of more or less blameless devotion to family life doesn't, sadly, make me a good one either.
In time, Britten's music will stand or fall on its own. Personally I admire his work more than like it - for all its brilliance, I feel it generally lacks heart. He is the Saent-Saens of the 20th century.
What of John Bridcut? His reply to Martin Kettle's article is on this morning's Guardian letters page. "There was no suggestion of impropriety", he writes. Perhaps he should re-read his own book.
Friday 23 November 2012
Why I love . . . #2 The Coen Brothers
The Guardian's film reviewer, Peter Bradshaw, today gave Gambit, written by Joel and Ethan Coen, one star. I don't care. I'm going to see it anyway. I love everything the Coens turn out. It's easy to say that Fargo is a great film, or The Big Lebowski, because you'd have to have a heart of stone and a funny-bone bypass to get nothing out of them. But I love the Coen Bros bad films as well. In fact my favourite Coen Bros film is one the press thought was terrible - Intolerable Cruelty.
Opening with a philandering swimming-pool salesman getting shot in the backside, Intolerable Cruelty involves the tribulations of a vacuous much-married socialite (Catherine Zeta Jones) and cynical divorce lawyer (George Clooney). The divorce lawyer, author of a famously impregnable Pre-Nuptial agreement (the "Massey Pre-Nup"), of course falls for the socialite and all manner of capers then ensue as legal convolutions make them rich one minute and a pauper the next, in love one day and estranged the following. Ms Jones is perfectly cast - that she is as wooden as a stake through Stanislavski's heart only makes her more believable - and each time I watch it I have forgotten the plot twists thoroughly enough to enjoy them afresh.
Intolerable Cruelty isn't a great film - the press might be right: it might even be a bad film. I fear Gambit might be a bad film too. But Joel and Ethan are nothing if not intelligent - they know a turkey when they see one - so why do they persist in these modest, popular, unambitious multiplexers when they are also capable of so much more?
It's in the answer that their appeal for me lies. The Coen Brothers just like films - good ones, bad ones, serious ones, funny ones - they don't care. They do it because they can. They are playing. And it is the artlessness of their messing around that I find so appealing.
Opening with a philandering swimming-pool salesman getting shot in the backside, Intolerable Cruelty involves the tribulations of a vacuous much-married socialite (Catherine Zeta Jones) and cynical divorce lawyer (George Clooney). The divorce lawyer, author of a famously impregnable Pre-Nuptial agreement (the "Massey Pre-Nup"), of course falls for the socialite and all manner of capers then ensue as legal convolutions make them rich one minute and a pauper the next, in love one day and estranged the following. Ms Jones is perfectly cast - that she is as wooden as a stake through Stanislavski's heart only makes her more believable - and each time I watch it I have forgotten the plot twists thoroughly enough to enjoy them afresh.
Intolerable Cruelty isn't a great film - the press might be right: it might even be a bad film. I fear Gambit might be a bad film too. But Joel and Ethan are nothing if not intelligent - they know a turkey when they see one - so why do they persist in these modest, popular, unambitious multiplexers when they are also capable of so much more?
It's in the answer that their appeal for me lies. The Coen Brothers just like films - good ones, bad ones, serious ones, funny ones - they don't care. They do it because they can. They are playing. And it is the artlessness of their messing around that I find so appealing.
Why I love . . . #1 Tim Storrie
A colleague of my wife's is married to a bloke called Tim Storrie. Tim is a medium-sized bear of a man, affable, funny and clever. We generally meet at social events organised by our wives, and at one of these a year or so ago I made an enthusiastic comment about something or other.
Tim's response was, "Christ Nick, I've never heard you say you liked anything before now".
I was mortified. There are plenty of things I dislike - eggs, ballet, Simon Cowell - but also plenty of things I do. I don't know Tim Storrie that well - although sufficiently well to know that the world does not contain nearly enough people like him - and perhaps he just needs to sit next to me at meal-times a bit more often.
But in honour of his misjudgement I thought I would begin an occasional series of enthusiasms. This is number one, in honour of its inspiration. I would have called it the Tim Storrie Memorial Column, but Tim is alive, well and practising law.
Column number two coming shortly.
Tim's response was, "Christ Nick, I've never heard you say you liked anything before now".
I was mortified. There are plenty of things I dislike - eggs, ballet, Simon Cowell - but also plenty of things I do. I don't know Tim Storrie that well - although sufficiently well to know that the world does not contain nearly enough people like him - and perhaps he just needs to sit next to me at meal-times a bit more often.
But in honour of his misjudgement I thought I would begin an occasional series of enthusiasms. This is number one, in honour of its inspiration. I would have called it the Tim Storrie Memorial Column, but Tim is alive, well and practising law.
Column number two coming shortly.
Tony Hall and the age of austerity
As George Entwistle leaves the BBC and Tony Hall returns, I have been thinking about money.
Entwistle left with a full year's salary for his pains - £450,000. He also got, according the Mirror, £10,000 for legal advice and £10,000 for "communications support" (which seems to be a euphemism for bodyguards to protect him from the media scrum outside his home).
Interestingly, the Mirror also reports that in the last two years 10 senior BBC staff got compensation packages worth £280,000 or more. One of the failed applicants for the DG job, Caroline Thompson, left recently with a pay-off in excess of £650,000. I hope this sum will come as consolation for Ms Thompson, who otherwise might have been feeling quite miffed that Entwistle's successor has been appointed without the job being advertised again and without being given the chance to re-apply.
So what of Tony Hall? Well, Mr Hall has been Chief Exec at the Royal Opera House for the last 11 years. The ROH's 2010 accounts revealed that he was paid £390,000 for a job which still left him time to chair an Olympics commitee and do his bit in the House of Lords. The ROH is, you may remember, an institution that pays its MD Antonio Pappano nearly £700,000. Some of which is public money.
An environment in which two employees can get pay-offs totalling well over £1 million, all of which is public money, sounds as if it will suit Mr Hall down to the ground.
I have just paid the lady who cleans our house. She gets £8 per hour, well above the minimum wage. But probably not enough to cover bodyguards.
Entwistle left with a full year's salary for his pains - £450,000. He also got, according the Mirror, £10,000 for legal advice and £10,000 for "communications support" (which seems to be a euphemism for bodyguards to protect him from the media scrum outside his home).
Interestingly, the Mirror also reports that in the last two years 10 senior BBC staff got compensation packages worth £280,000 or more. One of the failed applicants for the DG job, Caroline Thompson, left recently with a pay-off in excess of £650,000. I hope this sum will come as consolation for Ms Thompson, who otherwise might have been feeling quite miffed that Entwistle's successor has been appointed without the job being advertised again and without being given the chance to re-apply.
So what of Tony Hall? Well, Mr Hall has been Chief Exec at the Royal Opera House for the last 11 years. The ROH's 2010 accounts revealed that he was paid £390,000 for a job which still left him time to chair an Olympics commitee and do his bit in the House of Lords. The ROH is, you may remember, an institution that pays its MD Antonio Pappano nearly £700,000. Some of which is public money.
An environment in which two employees can get pay-offs totalling well over £1 million, all of which is public money, sounds as if it will suit Mr Hall down to the ground.
I have just paid the lady who cleans our house. She gets £8 per hour, well above the minimum wage. But probably not enough to cover bodyguards.
Thursday 15 November 2012
Martin Kettle and the definition of poverty
I have long thought that Martin Kettle was the doyen of the Grauniad's salaried columnists, the one with the best understanding of the new reality post the 2008 crash. In today's paper, under the headline "Austerity is here to stay", he writes, "We may have come out of recession again, but the idea that Britain, let alone the countries of the eurozone, can expect to see any resumption of the kind of growth rates to which we have all been accustomed since the second world war, is increasingly fanciful. We are living through not a downturn but an epochal change, and we need to make a more consistent effort to understand what this implies."
This is a long way from the Graun's usual take on things, which you might summarise as "If only the bankers hadn't been so greedy everything would have been OK". And if you read the comments on Kettle's article on the Graun's website it's clear that it's a long way from the views of the readership. But actually the bankers were only trying to find new and more imaginative ways of enabling the West to carry on borrowing. That they were lining their pockets at the same time doesn't make them any more attractive, but we shouldn't lose sight of the activity which enabled them to do so. If anything, the bankers helped the consumer party to carry on longer than it would have done, and otherwise we would have been facing these problems somewhat sooner.
I'm not sure Kettle fully understands the consequences of perpetual austerity however. "Although the 20th century social democratic project may have stalled amid economic decline", he says, "the financial crisis has undoubtedly opened up a fresh opportunity to redefine the terms on which the rich and poor can coexist in times of greater scarcity". This may be true up to a point, but what might any new definition look like? The problem with the rich is that although they are conspicuous, there aren't many of them. If you tax them till the pips squeak you still won't raise a fraction of the sums needed to carry on paying Britain's welfare bills. Austerity has not so much opened up a fresh opportunity as driven a stake through the social democratic project's heart. For the project depended on huge amounts of government spending, and as Liam Byrne famously admitted, there's no money left.
Amidst th' encircling gloom I am heartened to see in the same edition of the Graun a story to the effect that Michael Gove is going to change the current official definition of poverty. Presently this utilises the median income as a benchmark. I have been railing against it for years, because it means that in a rich country like Monaco there are people with a BMW on the drive and a yacht down at the marina who are officially poor, and people in a poor country like Bangladesh existing on a dollar a day who aren't. What kind of definition is that?
Well, one which has been revealed in all its uselessness by the fall in the median income post 2008. As the most common salary level in Britain has fallen, thousands of people have been removed from offical poverty. You couldn't make it up. Fatuous, and the sooner the definition reflects absolute poverty the better.
This is a long way from the Graun's usual take on things, which you might summarise as "If only the bankers hadn't been so greedy everything would have been OK". And if you read the comments on Kettle's article on the Graun's website it's clear that it's a long way from the views of the readership. But actually the bankers were only trying to find new and more imaginative ways of enabling the West to carry on borrowing. That they were lining their pockets at the same time doesn't make them any more attractive, but we shouldn't lose sight of the activity which enabled them to do so. If anything, the bankers helped the consumer party to carry on longer than it would have done, and otherwise we would have been facing these problems somewhat sooner.
I'm not sure Kettle fully understands the consequences of perpetual austerity however. "Although the 20th century social democratic project may have stalled amid economic decline", he says, "the financial crisis has undoubtedly opened up a fresh opportunity to redefine the terms on which the rich and poor can coexist in times of greater scarcity". This may be true up to a point, but what might any new definition look like? The problem with the rich is that although they are conspicuous, there aren't many of them. If you tax them till the pips squeak you still won't raise a fraction of the sums needed to carry on paying Britain's welfare bills. Austerity has not so much opened up a fresh opportunity as driven a stake through the social democratic project's heart. For the project depended on huge amounts of government spending, and as Liam Byrne famously admitted, there's no money left.
Amidst th' encircling gloom I am heartened to see in the same edition of the Graun a story to the effect that Michael Gove is going to change the current official definition of poverty. Presently this utilises the median income as a benchmark. I have been railing against it for years, because it means that in a rich country like Monaco there are people with a BMW on the drive and a yacht down at the marina who are officially poor, and people in a poor country like Bangladesh existing on a dollar a day who aren't. What kind of definition is that?
Well, one which has been revealed in all its uselessness by the fall in the median income post 2008. As the most common salary level in Britain has fallen, thousands of people have been removed from offical poverty. You couldn't make it up. Fatuous, and the sooner the definition reflects absolute poverty the better.
Tuesday 13 November 2012
Abu Qatada and burning the poppy
Just when you thought it was safe to go and walk the streets of Britain again, it turns out that Abu Qatada has been let out on bail - with a 16 hour curfew - by a senior immigration judge. Cue much frothing of the mouth in the Torygraph, which reports that it is going to cost the UK £5 million a year to monitor his activities.
I have no time for Mr Qatada and his ridiculous views - he reminds me of an Islamic (and more sinister) version of Sir Roderick Spode, P.G. Wodehouse's fabled leader of the Blackshorts - and clearly this country would be better off without him. The sooner he is on a plane the safer we will all be.
But there is one snag, namely the rule of law. If you believe in the rule of law, you have to accept that it protects people you don't like as well as those you do. It grates that Mr Qatada, who doesn't believe in democracy or the rights of the individual, should take advantage of liberties the kind of society he wants to construct would not extend to you and me; but that's the rule of law for you. It doesn't discriminate between one person's value and another; in fact it recognises that discriminating will always be subjective. And subjectivity reduces the law to a whim.
Actually we should be grateful for good laws which protect the likes of Qatada, because it is becoming increasingly clear that there are some very bad ones which don't. In Kent yesterday some idiot has been arrested for posting a picture of a burning poppy online, with the caption "How about that you squadey (sic) ****s". This is the latest in a long line of incidents where the police have arrested and sometimes tried individuals under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 for posting messages or images which are "grossly offensive".
The MCA started life as a worthy piece of legislation intended to deal with threatening or poison pen letters, but it was amended by Labour in 2001 to cover electronic communications, and here's where the trouble originates. I read somewhere that just about any idea worth stating will at some point have been grossly offensive to someone - it's not hard to see that if Darwin had published The Origin of Species online he could have been prosecuted under the MCA. Actually there will be people somewhere in Britain today who find Darwin's theory grossly offensive, and that is rather the point.
The MCA as amended assumes that people have a right not to be grossly offended. They don't; or at least they shouldn't have. Because if they do, it forces us to decide what is grossly offensive and what isn't. And that is a matter of opinion, of the police in the first instance and ultimately of judges and juries. As soon as you make opinion the foundation of law you have chucked away freedom. As I said, subjectivity reduces the law to a whim.
So much bad jurisprudence arises out of failure to apply existing laws sensibly. John Terry and Anton Ferdinand should both have been prosecuted under the Public Order Act. The POA, a statute that has been around in one form or another for over a century, makes it an offence to use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause violence. If the young toe-rag had burned a poppy at a Remembrance Day parade, the POA could have been used against him. Online, the State needs to grow up and amend the MCA.
I have no time for Mr Qatada and his ridiculous views - he reminds me of an Islamic (and more sinister) version of Sir Roderick Spode, P.G. Wodehouse's fabled leader of the Blackshorts - and clearly this country would be better off without him. The sooner he is on a plane the safer we will all be.
But there is one snag, namely the rule of law. If you believe in the rule of law, you have to accept that it protects people you don't like as well as those you do. It grates that Mr Qatada, who doesn't believe in democracy or the rights of the individual, should take advantage of liberties the kind of society he wants to construct would not extend to you and me; but that's the rule of law for you. It doesn't discriminate between one person's value and another; in fact it recognises that discriminating will always be subjective. And subjectivity reduces the law to a whim.
Actually we should be grateful for good laws which protect the likes of Qatada, because it is becoming increasingly clear that there are some very bad ones which don't. In Kent yesterday some idiot has been arrested for posting a picture of a burning poppy online, with the caption "How about that you squadey (sic) ****s". This is the latest in a long line of incidents where the police have arrested and sometimes tried individuals under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 for posting messages or images which are "grossly offensive".
The MCA started life as a worthy piece of legislation intended to deal with threatening or poison pen letters, but it was amended by Labour in 2001 to cover electronic communications, and here's where the trouble originates. I read somewhere that just about any idea worth stating will at some point have been grossly offensive to someone - it's not hard to see that if Darwin had published The Origin of Species online he could have been prosecuted under the MCA. Actually there will be people somewhere in Britain today who find Darwin's theory grossly offensive, and that is rather the point.
The MCA as amended assumes that people have a right not to be grossly offended. They don't; or at least they shouldn't have. Because if they do, it forces us to decide what is grossly offensive and what isn't. And that is a matter of opinion, of the police in the first instance and ultimately of judges and juries. As soon as you make opinion the foundation of law you have chucked away freedom. As I said, subjectivity reduces the law to a whim.
So much bad jurisprudence arises out of failure to apply existing laws sensibly. John Terry and Anton Ferdinand should both have been prosecuted under the Public Order Act. The POA, a statute that has been around in one form or another for over a century, makes it an offence to use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause violence. If the young toe-rag had burned a poppy at a Remembrance Day parade, the POA could have been used against him. Online, the State needs to grow up and amend the MCA.
Monday 12 November 2012
George Entwhistle's Dutch Uncle
The Dutch have a nice saying. In its slightly sanitised version, it goes, "If my Aunty had a beard, she'd be my Uncle". I have been reminded of this in the wake of the surprise resignation of BBC Director General George Entwhistle.
Amongst everyone else, his mother, and Uncle Tom Cobley, veteran presenter David Dimbleby has been putting himself about in the media on the subject of the Entwhistle resignation, appearing on the Today programme this morning and writing an article in the Torygraph. I always thought of Dimbleby as an archetypal paternalistic Corporation Man, but apparently not. "The trouble is", he writes, "that the BBC in recent years has throttled itself with its own bureaucracy . . . It is over managed and badly managed so that no one knows how or where decisions are taken . . . George was a product of that bureaucracy - had risen speaking its language - and that language was his downfall".
It's that last point which rings a bell. If you have an organisation which dedicates itself to management speak, to becoming a blue-skies-thinking producer-choice best-practice human-resources kind of organisation, inevitably the people who rise to its top are the kind of people who thrive in that environment. They must be willing not just to go along with all the balderdash - that's not enough - they must believe in it. Entwhistle evidently believed, and that's one of the reasons why he got to be D-G.
But almost by definition someone who believes can't really lead, because leadership is often the antithesis of this touchy-feely let's-have-a-brainstorming-session-in-a-country-house-hotel way of management; and that's why, at the first sign of trouble, Entwhistle has been found out.
As Dimbleby says, Entwhistle shouldn't have resigned. He should have pointed out that he didn't make the Newsnight programme, or put in place the regime under which it was made. He should have pointed out that Newsnight staff were simply guilty of bad journalism. He should have got the culprits into his office, locked the door, banged their heads together, given them the hairdryer and sent them out a quarter of an hour later mute and shattered with a boot up the backside. Told to do better or else.
Had Entwhistle been this kind of person of course, he wouldn't have got the D-G's job. "If my Aunty had a beard, she'd be my Uncle". And there's the rub. People who adhere to the Alex Ferguson school of management do not, I suspect, prosper at the BBC. And of course had he actually done what I've suggested, the programme makers would have filed a complaint against him, resigned, sued for constructive dismissal and then been compensated handsomely.
And funnily enough, that's exactly what has happened to Entwhistle. He has been given a year's salary - £450,000 - to cheer him on his way.
Just think of the programmes you could make with that.
Amongst everyone else, his mother, and Uncle Tom Cobley, veteran presenter David Dimbleby has been putting himself about in the media on the subject of the Entwhistle resignation, appearing on the Today programme this morning and writing an article in the Torygraph. I always thought of Dimbleby as an archetypal paternalistic Corporation Man, but apparently not. "The trouble is", he writes, "that the BBC in recent years has throttled itself with its own bureaucracy . . . It is over managed and badly managed so that no one knows how or where decisions are taken . . . George was a product of that bureaucracy - had risen speaking its language - and that language was his downfall".
It's that last point which rings a bell. If you have an organisation which dedicates itself to management speak, to becoming a blue-skies-thinking producer-choice best-practice human-resources kind of organisation, inevitably the people who rise to its top are the kind of people who thrive in that environment. They must be willing not just to go along with all the balderdash - that's not enough - they must believe in it. Entwhistle evidently believed, and that's one of the reasons why he got to be D-G.
But almost by definition someone who believes can't really lead, because leadership is often the antithesis of this touchy-feely let's-have-a-brainstorming-session-in-a-country-house-hotel way of management; and that's why, at the first sign of trouble, Entwhistle has been found out.
As Dimbleby says, Entwhistle shouldn't have resigned. He should have pointed out that he didn't make the Newsnight programme, or put in place the regime under which it was made. He should have pointed out that Newsnight staff were simply guilty of bad journalism. He should have got the culprits into his office, locked the door, banged their heads together, given them the hairdryer and sent them out a quarter of an hour later mute and shattered with a boot up the backside. Told to do better or else.
Had Entwhistle been this kind of person of course, he wouldn't have got the D-G's job. "If my Aunty had a beard, she'd be my Uncle". And there's the rub. People who adhere to the Alex Ferguson school of management do not, I suspect, prosper at the BBC. And of course had he actually done what I've suggested, the programme makers would have filed a complaint against him, resigned, sued for constructive dismissal and then been compensated handsomely.
And funnily enough, that's exactly what has happened to Entwhistle. He has been given a year's salary - £450,000 - to cheer him on his way.
Just think of the programmes you could make with that.
Wednesday 7 November 2012
Clive Dunn - meet Elliott Carter
Following the recent news that Elliott Carter has died aged 103, it's sad to hear Dad's Army actor Clive Dunn has today joined the composer beyond the Pearly Gates.
It won't surprise followers of this blog, if any, that I am not a fan of Carter's music. Too much of it just sounded like a big racket to me, though I once heard Nicholas Daniel playing his Oboe Concerto, a late work which I thought was just about the best that high modernism could possibly be considering that it managed without triadic harmony, regular rhythm or recognisable repetition. You couldn't hum it, but it was the best argument I've ever heard for the proposition that it was possible to write listenable squeaky gate music. It made Boulez sound like an amateur.
The Guardian's obituarist noted that in mid-career Carter "made use of a highly systematised harmonic system, involving tables of all possible permutations of a given set of intervals. Manipulating these systems involved immense labour and copious sheaves of preliminary sketches (well over a thousand pages for A Symphony of Three Orchestras)".
Reader, I must confess that I too once wasted time and trees in the same fashion.
"But from the 80s", the obit continues, "Carter increasingly composed free-style, by ear".
Hence the Oboe Concerto. For me the moment of revelation came when I actually succeeded in getting one of my laboriously composed behemoths performed by a professional orchestra. I returned from the first rehearsal devastated. The small part of me which feared the result might be unlistenable was thumpingly vindicated. Not long after when I began to write my first symphony I simply sat down at the piano and forced myself to write whatever came into my head. I have never looked back.
To turn to another popular entertainer, Clive Dunn was made famous by his role as Corporal Jones in Dad's Army. I can't think of any programme which has introduced more catch-phrases into the English language. "Stupid boy Pike" was Captain Mainwaring, of course, and "We're all doomed" Private Frazer. But "Don't panic!", "They don't like it up 'em!" and "Permission to speak" were all Corporal Jones. Just thinking about them makes me laugh.
Clive Dunn also had a sideline as a singer. If he and Elliott Carter should meet Upstairs, I like to think that Dunn will treat the composer to a rendition of his 1970 hit "Grandad". Now that would be an event almost worth dying to witness.
It won't surprise followers of this blog, if any, that I am not a fan of Carter's music. Too much of it just sounded like a big racket to me, though I once heard Nicholas Daniel playing his Oboe Concerto, a late work which I thought was just about the best that high modernism could possibly be considering that it managed without triadic harmony, regular rhythm or recognisable repetition. You couldn't hum it, but it was the best argument I've ever heard for the proposition that it was possible to write listenable squeaky gate music. It made Boulez sound like an amateur.
The Guardian's obituarist noted that in mid-career Carter "made use of a highly systematised harmonic system, involving tables of all possible permutations of a given set of intervals. Manipulating these systems involved immense labour and copious sheaves of preliminary sketches (well over a thousand pages for A Symphony of Three Orchestras)".
Reader, I must confess that I too once wasted time and trees in the same fashion.
"But from the 80s", the obit continues, "Carter increasingly composed free-style, by ear".
Hence the Oboe Concerto. For me the moment of revelation came when I actually succeeded in getting one of my laboriously composed behemoths performed by a professional orchestra. I returned from the first rehearsal devastated. The small part of me which feared the result might be unlistenable was thumpingly vindicated. Not long after when I began to write my first symphony I simply sat down at the piano and forced myself to write whatever came into my head. I have never looked back.
To turn to another popular entertainer, Clive Dunn was made famous by his role as Corporal Jones in Dad's Army. I can't think of any programme which has introduced more catch-phrases into the English language. "Stupid boy Pike" was Captain Mainwaring, of course, and "We're all doomed" Private Frazer. But "Don't panic!", "They don't like it up 'em!" and "Permission to speak" were all Corporal Jones. Just thinking about them makes me laugh.
Clive Dunn also had a sideline as a singer. If he and Elliott Carter should meet Upstairs, I like to think that Dunn will treat the composer to a rendition of his 1970 hit "Grandad". Now that would be an event almost worth dying to witness.
Monday 22 October 2012
Jimmy Savile and the BBC - believe in better
I feel slightly sorry for the BBC over all the shenanigans over Jimmy Savile. After all, plenty of other organisations - hospitals, charities - fell for the cigar-toting kiddy-fiddler and facilitated his sordid gropings on their premises; but they aren't being lacerated in the public prints in quite the same way.
Having said that there is a case to answer, and whilst it may be true that nothing was known for certain about Savile's various exploitations, there was an easy way to make sure they didn't carry on - stop employing him. It would have been good if that obvious way out had been taken, and that might end up being the BBC's biggest mistake.
It's hard to imagine any commercial organisation beating its breast via the hair shirt as the BBC is doing now. Credit to it. I suppose you could argue that the Corporation has an obligation to try and do the right thing that Sky, for example, wouldn't have, because we, the licence-fee payers, don't have any choice but to carry on funding it, paedophile employees or no, whereas if Murdoch and his men had done something similar we could always take our subs elsewhere.
Which brings me to the thing which must humiliate the BBC the most. Of all the indignities forced on staff, there can be few more galling than the appointment to the chair of one of its Savile inquiries than a former head of Sky News. It's come to something when someone who used to work for one of Rupert Murdoch's organisations is regarded as more trustworthy than one of the Corporation's own.
Believe in better? Believe in bitter.
Having said that there is a case to answer, and whilst it may be true that nothing was known for certain about Savile's various exploitations, there was an easy way to make sure they didn't carry on - stop employing him. It would have been good if that obvious way out had been taken, and that might end up being the BBC's biggest mistake.
It's hard to imagine any commercial organisation beating its breast via the hair shirt as the BBC is doing now. Credit to it. I suppose you could argue that the Corporation has an obligation to try and do the right thing that Sky, for example, wouldn't have, because we, the licence-fee payers, don't have any choice but to carry on funding it, paedophile employees or no, whereas if Murdoch and his men had done something similar we could always take our subs elsewhere.
Which brings me to the thing which must humiliate the BBC the most. Of all the indignities forced on staff, there can be few more galling than the appointment to the chair of one of its Savile inquiries than a former head of Sky News. It's come to something when someone who used to work for one of Rupert Murdoch's organisations is regarded as more trustworthy than one of the Corporation's own.
Believe in better? Believe in bitter.
Friday 19 October 2012
Andrew Mitchell cops it at last
A few weeks ago I pointed out how strange it was that the media wanted to us to judge Tory Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell's row with Downing Street Police in the light of the public service and self-sacrifice of the officers murdered in East Manchester. This at a time when news stories distinctly less flattering to the police were freely available for comparison, not the least being the revelation that the police lied repeatedly over the Hillsborough tragedy. Since then there have been others, for instance the unedifying spectacle of an officer recorded in the back of a police car telling a suspect, "You will always be a nigger".
However the press have finally got their man. On the Radio 4 news tonight - Andrew Mitchell finally resigns.
The next story? About a murder investigation abandoned because of a mistake by a police officer rendering crucial evidence inadmissable.
Yes, the police are corrupt, racist, incompetent, violent and dishonest. Except when it comes to monstering the Chief Whip. Then they are paragons of public service.
However the press have finally got their man. On the Radio 4 news tonight - Andrew Mitchell finally resigns.
The next story? About a murder investigation abandoned because of a mistake by a police officer rendering crucial evidence inadmissable.
Yes, the police are corrupt, racist, incompetent, violent and dishonest. Except when it comes to monstering the Chief Whip. Then they are paragons of public service.
Thursday 18 October 2012
The bell tolls, but not just for the Guardian
A story in the Torygraph yesterday reports that senior figures at the Guardian "are seriously discussing a move to an entirely online operation". It's well known that the Graun has been losing money hand over fist for years, and that the paper is only propped up by revenue from Auto Trader, but it was news to me that a situation which clearly couldn't go on indefinitely might be coming to an end sometime soon.
I am of course too grown up to believe everything I read in the Torygraph, and their story, which seems to have originated in a blog called More About Advertising, was swiftly rubbished by Graun media writer / stooge Roy Greenslade on the paper's website. "The truth is", he wrote, " that the Guardian isn't about to do any such thing".
When you pick at this a little, it starts to come apart. The Torygraph story said senior figures were "seriously discussing" closing the print edition, whereas Greenslade denied something rather different - he denied that the print edition was going to be closed. He didn't deny they were discussing closing it.
A lawyer's point, you may say; but one of the things a law degree taught me is to read carefully what people write. Moreover, as someone on the website commented, "the steps are like this: it is impossible for us to do this; it is possible, but we are not going to consider doing it; we have considered doing it, but that doesn't mean we will do it; we always said we were going to do this". It seems to me that at the moment the Graun is probably at the third stage.
I have been reading the Guardian for about thirty years. The era during which I saw myself as a Guardian-reader in the technical sense probably began to fade at about the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It seemed obvious to me that the choice facing the Blair government then was not between one thing which was self-evidently bad (war) and another self-evidently good (no war), but between two things self-evidently bad - war on the one hand, and more Saddam Hussein on the other. Not only was the real nature of this dilemma not reflected in the paper's comment (which was virulently against the invasion), but the self-righteous and self-congratulatory tone of its staff and readership as reflected in the paper seemed to me to show a total lack of awareness of its agonising nature. That George W Bush was the architect of the scheme seemed to them enough, whereas to me this was an object lesson in the principle that just because you don't like the person making an argument that doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong.
This opened up a chink between the Graun and me which widened over the rest of the decade as it began to occur, about 2004-5, that Gordon Brown's economic miracle was a chimera. Our prosperity was based on unsustainable debt, I thought, Brown's public spending was unaffordable, and when the era of easy credit was over, we would have to start paying it back. Blind to the mortal blow this struck at the heart of Social Democracy, the Graun was hailing Brown's skill and arguing that public spending should be higher still.
It didn't help that at this time the only columnists for whom reality seemed to have dawned were the great Frank Field and the paper's economics correspondent, Larry Elliott. However the paper kept Elliott well away from the leader page, where economic matters were dealt with by Martin Kettle and Adity Chakrabortty, the latter a thorough clown whom I have spent some time rubbishing on this blog. Elsewhere Polly Toynbee railed against privilege, despite being levered into Oxbridge with one A Level by virtue of her father's contacts, and despite being very nicely off with a holiday home in Tuscany.
The paper endorsed the Lib Dems at the last election, outraging much of its readership and staff, and then threw its hands up in horror when the party, which any fool knows has quite a significant right-of-centre element, promptly joined forces with the Tories.
The Guardian shows very few signs of joining the real world five years on from the Credit Crunch. Despite the economic virus sweeping through Europe in the form of the single currency, the double dip recession is all George Osborne's fault; whereas just a little more stimulus, borrowed from the evil money markets or taxed from the greedy fat cats, would set us back on the road to prosperity again. Tax avoiders are wicked, except when it is Guardian Media Group itself which wants to use Channel Island tax provisions to acquire Emap. Freedom of speech is an unalloyed good, just as long as you don't say anything the moderators on the paper's website don't like.
Nowhere in the Guardian's Weltanschauung is there the slightest flicker of acknowledgement that the spending supporting British living standards has to be earned, and if that spending is to continue, we have to compete on world markets. That this notion carries overtones of a grocer's daughter from Grantham causes me as much distress as it does anyone else, but once again the fact that I didn't like Maggie Thatcher (and I didn't) does not (pace George W Bush) mean that she was wrong.
Funnily enough, we still get the Guardian delivered, and still read it at a mind-crushingly early hour of the morning with a cup of tea. I could get another newspaper instead, but the Times is desperately boring, and if I suggested the Torygraph my wife would crush me like an insect. So in the broader sense I am still a Guardian reader after all. And while I can't suppress a touch of schadenfreude at the prospect of the loss of the liberal left's house magazine, part of me would die with it. And the bell would not just be tolling for the Graun, but for the print media generally. Anyone who loves newspapers, as I do, should be very wary of premature celebration.
I am of course too grown up to believe everything I read in the Torygraph, and their story, which seems to have originated in a blog called More About Advertising, was swiftly rubbished by Graun media writer / stooge Roy Greenslade on the paper's website. "The truth is", he wrote, " that the Guardian isn't about to do any such thing".
When you pick at this a little, it starts to come apart. The Torygraph story said senior figures were "seriously discussing" closing the print edition, whereas Greenslade denied something rather different - he denied that the print edition was going to be closed. He didn't deny they were discussing closing it.
A lawyer's point, you may say; but one of the things a law degree taught me is to read carefully what people write. Moreover, as someone on the website commented, "the steps are like this: it is impossible for us to do this; it is possible, but we are not going to consider doing it; we have considered doing it, but that doesn't mean we will do it; we always said we were going to do this". It seems to me that at the moment the Graun is probably at the third stage.
I have been reading the Guardian for about thirty years. The era during which I saw myself as a Guardian-reader in the technical sense probably began to fade at about the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It seemed obvious to me that the choice facing the Blair government then was not between one thing which was self-evidently bad (war) and another self-evidently good (no war), but between two things self-evidently bad - war on the one hand, and more Saddam Hussein on the other. Not only was the real nature of this dilemma not reflected in the paper's comment (which was virulently against the invasion), but the self-righteous and self-congratulatory tone of its staff and readership as reflected in the paper seemed to me to show a total lack of awareness of its agonising nature. That George W Bush was the architect of the scheme seemed to them enough, whereas to me this was an object lesson in the principle that just because you don't like the person making an argument that doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong.
This opened up a chink between the Graun and me which widened over the rest of the decade as it began to occur, about 2004-5, that Gordon Brown's economic miracle was a chimera. Our prosperity was based on unsustainable debt, I thought, Brown's public spending was unaffordable, and when the era of easy credit was over, we would have to start paying it back. Blind to the mortal blow this struck at the heart of Social Democracy, the Graun was hailing Brown's skill and arguing that public spending should be higher still.
It didn't help that at this time the only columnists for whom reality seemed to have dawned were the great Frank Field and the paper's economics correspondent, Larry Elliott. However the paper kept Elliott well away from the leader page, where economic matters were dealt with by Martin Kettle and Adity Chakrabortty, the latter a thorough clown whom I have spent some time rubbishing on this blog. Elsewhere Polly Toynbee railed against privilege, despite being levered into Oxbridge with one A Level by virtue of her father's contacts, and despite being very nicely off with a holiday home in Tuscany.
The paper endorsed the Lib Dems at the last election, outraging much of its readership and staff, and then threw its hands up in horror when the party, which any fool knows has quite a significant right-of-centre element, promptly joined forces with the Tories.
The Guardian shows very few signs of joining the real world five years on from the Credit Crunch. Despite the economic virus sweeping through Europe in the form of the single currency, the double dip recession is all George Osborne's fault; whereas just a little more stimulus, borrowed from the evil money markets or taxed from the greedy fat cats, would set us back on the road to prosperity again. Tax avoiders are wicked, except when it is Guardian Media Group itself which wants to use Channel Island tax provisions to acquire Emap. Freedom of speech is an unalloyed good, just as long as you don't say anything the moderators on the paper's website don't like.
Nowhere in the Guardian's Weltanschauung is there the slightest flicker of acknowledgement that the spending supporting British living standards has to be earned, and if that spending is to continue, we have to compete on world markets. That this notion carries overtones of a grocer's daughter from Grantham causes me as much distress as it does anyone else, but once again the fact that I didn't like Maggie Thatcher (and I didn't) does not (pace George W Bush) mean that she was wrong.
Funnily enough, we still get the Guardian delivered, and still read it at a mind-crushingly early hour of the morning with a cup of tea. I could get another newspaper instead, but the Times is desperately boring, and if I suggested the Torygraph my wife would crush me like an insect. So in the broader sense I am still a Guardian reader after all. And while I can't suppress a touch of schadenfreude at the prospect of the loss of the liberal left's house magazine, part of me would die with it. And the bell would not just be tolling for the Graun, but for the print media generally. Anyone who loves newspapers, as I do, should be very wary of premature celebration.
Wednesday 17 October 2012
Bring Up the Bodies wins the Booker
The replacement of Stella Rimington as chair of the Booker judges by Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS, has had predictable consequences. Rimington's much derided "readability" has gone, and "literariness" has come storming back. I'm glad about this, because I thought Bring Up the Bodies, which has taken this year's prize, a much better novel than Julian Barnes' 2011 winner, The Sense of An Ending. I found Barnes' book very slight, crashing to the ground, like so many contemporary English novels, over some very basic plausibility hurdles.
I've written about both these books before, but am more convinced than ever that whilst Bring Up the Bodies is a tour de force, incorporating an ambiguous meshing of first and third person narrative styles that I have never encountered before, it tells us little about Thomas Cromwell, its protagonist. Cromwell is clearly a ruthless fixer, but lacks the venality expected of ruthless fixers, and lacks any other qualities which might have explained why someone we find so sympathetic should be willing to skewer his enemies in such a cold-eyed manner. There is an extent to which everyone is hard to pin down, and elusiveness is part of the human condition; but in Mantel's book Cromwell seems to me not so much elusive as hardly there at all.
As for her grasp of the period, all the detail is there, and it is never showy. But neither does she seem to have understood that those people 500 years ago were, as well as being the same as we are, also utterly different. Mantel has got the sameness, but that's all.
I've written about both these books before, but am more convinced than ever that whilst Bring Up the Bodies is a tour de force, incorporating an ambiguous meshing of first and third person narrative styles that I have never encountered before, it tells us little about Thomas Cromwell, its protagonist. Cromwell is clearly a ruthless fixer, but lacks the venality expected of ruthless fixers, and lacks any other qualities which might have explained why someone we find so sympathetic should be willing to skewer his enemies in such a cold-eyed manner. There is an extent to which everyone is hard to pin down, and elusiveness is part of the human condition; but in Mantel's book Cromwell seems to me not so much elusive as hardly there at all.
As for her grasp of the period, all the detail is there, and it is never showy. But neither does she seem to have understood that those people 500 years ago were, as well as being the same as we are, also utterly different. Mantel has got the sameness, but that's all.
Lady Sybil and the Dead Parrot
Watching Downton Abbey on Sunday I was reminded that nothing ruins a story as much as the intrusion of the real world outside its confines. We all know there's a puppet master outside the narrative, but woe betide the artiste that allows us to notice the strings being pulled. It kills involvement at a stroke. There's a Margaret Attwood novel, Alias Grace, where the author dangles two alternative versions of a story in front of us for - what seemed to me like - the last third of the book. "For Heaven's sake", I wanted to shout at the author, "Make your flippin' mind up!"
At a rather less exalted level than the grumpy Canadian, on Downters the fragrant Jessica Brown Findlay, alias Lady Sybil, was misdiagnosed in pregnancy by snooty consultant Tim Pigott-Smith. Piggot-Smith is no more appealing now than when he was a pervy flogger in Jewel in the Crown all those years ago, and I wonder whether his life has been ruined by association with the horrible characters he has to play.
Anyway, while Brown Findlay was croaking quite movingly of child-birth complications, behind it all lay another complication - she has had offers of work in LA. I found it impossible to put this out of my mind. Nothing confirms Downters descent into a posh soap than the realisation that Lady Sybil was being written out of the story. Moreover, it wasn't even Julian Fellowes pulling the strings, but Brown Findlay's agent.
RIP Downters. RIP Lady Sybil. Not dead, just gone to Hollywood.
At a rather less exalted level than the grumpy Canadian, on Downters the fragrant Jessica Brown Findlay, alias Lady Sybil, was misdiagnosed in pregnancy by snooty consultant Tim Pigott-Smith. Piggot-Smith is no more appealing now than when he was a pervy flogger in Jewel in the Crown all those years ago, and I wonder whether his life has been ruined by association with the horrible characters he has to play.
Anyway, while Brown Findlay was croaking quite movingly of child-birth complications, behind it all lay another complication - she has had offers of work in LA. I found it impossible to put this out of my mind. Nothing confirms Downters descent into a posh soap than the realisation that Lady Sybil was being written out of the story. Moreover, it wasn't even Julian Fellowes pulling the strings, but Brown Findlay's agent.
RIP Downters. RIP Lady Sybil. Not dead, just gone to Hollywood.
Wednesday 10 October 2012
Azhar Ahmed, the Guardian and free speech
So a young British Muslim man has been given a stiff community sentence for a post on the internet to the effect that he hopes British soldiers killed in Afghanistan go to hell. And a white boy gets 12 weeks inside for publishing something horrible about someone else which now escapes me. I am surprisingly unhappy about all of this.
I can't articulate my response better than the following, posted by one BuckHucklebuck on the Guardian's Commentisfree website this morning:
"The right to offend is sacred. The right to be a vile, disgusting, subhuman ... is sacred. The right to think and say terrible things about the dead, the dying, the best and brightest is sacred. Any abridgment of it is far worse than anything I could say about a missing child. There is no combination of hateful, hurtful, disgusting, lewd or vicious things I could say that would be worse than the removal of my right to say it."
Amen to that. Thankfully the DPP, Keir Starmer, is now looking afresh at s.127 of the Communications Act 2003. This section, passed by a Labour government, makes it an offence to send "by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character". It effectively invites anyone to go to the police if they are offended by something you or I say online.
In its leader today the Graun observes that "in the end the solution will have to be rewriting or even repealing, as opposed to reinterpreting, this law". Fine words; and I'd have liked to post a grateful response to BuckHucklebuck online. However, on Commentisfree my contributions are now being pre-moderated. In practice this means if I post something, it doesn't appear.
Free speech for all then. Except on Commentisfree.
I can't articulate my response better than the following, posted by one BuckHucklebuck on the Guardian's Commentisfree website this morning:
"The right to offend is sacred. The right to be a vile, disgusting, subhuman ... is sacred. The right to think and say terrible things about the dead, the dying, the best and brightest is sacred. Any abridgment of it is far worse than anything I could say about a missing child. There is no combination of hateful, hurtful, disgusting, lewd or vicious things I could say that would be worse than the removal of my right to say it."
Amen to that. Thankfully the DPP, Keir Starmer, is now looking afresh at s.127 of the Communications Act 2003. This section, passed by a Labour government, makes it an offence to send "by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character". It effectively invites anyone to go to the police if they are offended by something you or I say online.
In its leader today the Graun observes that "in the end the solution will have to be rewriting or even repealing, as opposed to reinterpreting, this law". Fine words; and I'd have liked to post a grateful response to BuckHucklebuck online. However, on Commentisfree my contributions are now being pre-moderated. In practice this means if I post something, it doesn't appear.
Free speech for all then. Except on Commentisfree.
Friday 5 October 2012
QE Balls
The papers have become fond of aping Private Eye's Number Crunching feature, where figures are contrasted to ironic effect. Here's one of my own.
£4bn - the sale proceeds of the new 4G licences, which Ed Balls says he would use to kick-start the economy.
£400bn - the amount of QE the Bank of England has pumped into the economy in the last two years without kick-starting the economy at all.
£4bn - the sale proceeds of the new 4G licences, which Ed Balls says he would use to kick-start the economy.
£400bn - the amount of QE the Bank of England has pumped into the economy in the last two years without kick-starting the economy at all.
Thursday 4 October 2012
Jimmy Savile - Monarch of the Glen
If anything has wrecked Glencoe more comprehensively than the traffic pouring down it along the A82 and the insensitively sited car parks crawling on summer days with coach parties of Japanese tourists, it is the knowledge that this week's paedophile hate figure, Jimmy Savile, owned a house there.
A friend told me years ago, as we were off to climb some clag-shrouded hill or other. In one way it seemed almost impossible to believe. The track-suited TV personality showed in his public manifestations absolutely nothing which might have indicated a love for the outdoors. And yet it was perfectly possible that Sir James might, on some TV jaunt or other, have driven, or more likely been driven, down the Glen, seen a For Sale sign, and forked out on a whim.
If I was going to buy a house in Scotland, Savile's wouldn't have been the one. It is in one of the most spectacular places in Britain, but it's right by a very busy road, with lorries thundering by. Moreover it looks out up the glen to the little Buchaille rather than across to the Lost Valley or Stob Coire nan Lochan. For someone as famous as Savile it can't have provided much privacy, and I wonder how much time he actually spent there. Certainly on many dozens of journeys up and down Glencoe I have never seen any sign of life at the house.
Long before the allegations about Saville's sex life became public, the Glen seemed diminished by Saville's presence. To me, he represented everything that was tawdry, cheap and meretricious about the world; the Glen everything that was worth doing in it. The fact that he had raised millions for charity didn't figure; the knowledge that he had owned the house rankled then, and still does.
Nevertheless it's a shame Savile isn't around to answer the allegations against him. If true - and we'll probably never know - they feature conduct unacceptable in any era; but before the BBC gets blamed for carrying on employing him despite rumours about his taste for underage girls, its as well to remember that times have changed a lot since the 1970s. I heard the sainted John Peel make remarks about schoolgirls on his show which would have got him sacked on the spot today. I loved Peel, but, like Saville, he was lucky to be working when he did.
PS - Thank goodness the Metropolitain Police are investigating Savile's crimes. He's dead, and there's no prospect of a prosecution, but it's reassuring to know that at last Plod is on his tail.
A friend told me years ago, as we were off to climb some clag-shrouded hill or other. In one way it seemed almost impossible to believe. The track-suited TV personality showed in his public manifestations absolutely nothing which might have indicated a love for the outdoors. And yet it was perfectly possible that Sir James might, on some TV jaunt or other, have driven, or more likely been driven, down the Glen, seen a For Sale sign, and forked out on a whim.
If I was going to buy a house in Scotland, Savile's wouldn't have been the one. It is in one of the most spectacular places in Britain, but it's right by a very busy road, with lorries thundering by. Moreover it looks out up the glen to the little Buchaille rather than across to the Lost Valley or Stob Coire nan Lochan. For someone as famous as Savile it can't have provided much privacy, and I wonder how much time he actually spent there. Certainly on many dozens of journeys up and down Glencoe I have never seen any sign of life at the house.
Long before the allegations about Saville's sex life became public, the Glen seemed diminished by Saville's presence. To me, he represented everything that was tawdry, cheap and meretricious about the world; the Glen everything that was worth doing in it. The fact that he had raised millions for charity didn't figure; the knowledge that he had owned the house rankled then, and still does.
Nevertheless it's a shame Savile isn't around to answer the allegations against him. If true - and we'll probably never know - they feature conduct unacceptable in any era; but before the BBC gets blamed for carrying on employing him despite rumours about his taste for underage girls, its as well to remember that times have changed a lot since the 1970s. I heard the sainted John Peel make remarks about schoolgirls on his show which would have got him sacked on the spot today. I loved Peel, but, like Saville, he was lucky to be working when he did.
PS - Thank goodness the Metropolitain Police are investigating Savile's crimes. He's dead, and there's no prospect of a prosecution, but it's reassuring to know that at last Plod is on his tail.
Wednesday 3 October 2012
Yes Minister, Pre-Distribution and the Big Society
A Yale political scientist, one Jacob Hacker, has come up with an idea he calls "pre-distribution", focusing work done by John Rawls and others on how to make society fairer. At the moment the state tries to do this ex post facto via taxation and welfare. Hacker wants to do it much earlier on.
I heard Hacker interviewed on the radio the other day because his ideas have been taken up by Ed Miliband (the Tories have been quick to link the hapless author with Yes Minister's Jim Hacker; David Cameron delightedly pointed out at PMQs that the academic has written a book called The Road To Nowhere). Jacob Hacker seemed a thoroughly amiable chap, partly bemused and partly flattered by the attention he is getting.
Basically, he wants employees to be given more money. This is all very laudable (and if it could be achieved by making sure their Chief Executives got less, it might even work); but if you pay employees more, you immediately raise the company's cost base and make its products and services less competitive. More money for the employed means fewer jobs for others. If we did what Hacker - and now apparently Ed Miliband - want, the Germans and Chinese would be laughing their heads off. Because they are the people who would benefit.
Hacker's view is shared by by Dave Prentis, head of public sector union UNISON. Prentis has bitterly criticised the Government's public sector pay freeze. He may be justified in trying to get better pay and conditions for his members, because this is after all what unions are there to do, but he is wrong to suggest, implicitly if not explicitly, that higher wages for public sector workers are somehow good for society at large. They aren't. Every pound spent on higher public sector wages is one less that can be spent somewhere else in the economy. That's why Ed Miliband has endorsed the Tory pay freeze. Prentis needs to explain which service (or whose jobs) he would cut to pay for his members' wage increases.
For the disaffected, alternative employment and better pensions may be available in the private sector. Or not.
If the pre-distributionists really wanted wages at the bottom end to rise, they would be calling for an end to unskilled immigration. Its effect has been much studied (not the least by Prof David Blanchflower) and is well understood. The pool of available labour increases. Employers don't have to compete for staff by raising wages. Wages at the bottom end stagnate while those at the top rise.
During the last Labour government more than 50% of new jobs created went to people born outside the UK, leaving many British people (some of them, incidentally, with brown skins) languishing on their sofas. Ironically, those most in favour of unrestricted immigration are those most likely to complain about the inequality which results when you have it.
Like other big ideas, Pre-Distribution will come and go. Blue Labour. Red Tory. Ed Miliband mentioned Disraeli's One Nation during his party conference speech - that one, more than a century old, flickers briefly into life now and again. Will the Third Way still have legs in 2112? Perhaps. But I don't think we'll be hearing much about the Big Society.
I heard Hacker interviewed on the radio the other day because his ideas have been taken up by Ed Miliband (the Tories have been quick to link the hapless author with Yes Minister's Jim Hacker; David Cameron delightedly pointed out at PMQs that the academic has written a book called The Road To Nowhere). Jacob Hacker seemed a thoroughly amiable chap, partly bemused and partly flattered by the attention he is getting.
Basically, he wants employees to be given more money. This is all very laudable (and if it could be achieved by making sure their Chief Executives got less, it might even work); but if you pay employees more, you immediately raise the company's cost base and make its products and services less competitive. More money for the employed means fewer jobs for others. If we did what Hacker - and now apparently Ed Miliband - want, the Germans and Chinese would be laughing their heads off. Because they are the people who would benefit.
For the disaffected, alternative employment and better pensions may be available in the private sector. Or not.
If the pre-distributionists really wanted wages at the bottom end to rise, they would be calling for an end to unskilled immigration. Its effect has been much studied (not the least by Prof David Blanchflower) and is well understood. The pool of available labour increases. Employers don't have to compete for staff by raising wages. Wages at the bottom end stagnate while those at the top rise.
During the last Labour government more than 50% of new jobs created went to people born outside the UK, leaving many British people (some of them, incidentally, with brown skins) languishing on their sofas. Ironically, those most in favour of unrestricted immigration are those most likely to complain about the inequality which results when you have it.
Like other big ideas, Pre-Distribution will come and go. Blue Labour. Red Tory. Ed Miliband mentioned Disraeli's One Nation during his party conference speech - that one, more than a century old, flickers briefly into life now and again. Will the Third Way still have legs in 2112? Perhaps. But I don't think we'll be hearing much about the Big Society.
Friday 28 September 2012
Mario Draghi as Jan Tomaszewski - keeping the Euro in the game.
Eurozone watchers like me underestimated at first the willingness of the apparatchiks to keep the single currency going. Whilst good leadership might have been in short supply, a story has emerged in the last year of striking resourcefulness in taking steps to defer the final Euro crunch. In retrospect this should have been obvious - a generation of European leaders has grown up believing in the The Project, and they are not going to see their dreams chucked on the scrap-heap just because of a yawning currency imbalance between north and south.
No leader has emerged with greater credit (admittedly in a below-average field) than Mario Draghi, ECB chief. First of all his Long Term Financing Operation, allowing banks access to cheap three-year money, kept the banking system afloat at a time when it might well have foundered. Now, when it looks as if Spain could get sucked into the abyss of unaffordable bond yields, up pops Draghi with a promise to do "whatever it takes" to keep yields down, a promise which has taken the concrete form of Outright Monetary Transaction, a scheme by which the ECB will buy sovereign bonds on the secondary market in exchange for fiscal reforms by the sovereign in question.
Draghi reminds me of Jan Tomaczewski, the legendary Polish goalkeeper, who flung himself in the way of the missiles bombarding his goal during World Cup qualifier against England in 1973. Like Tomaczewski, Draghi seems equal to everything that is thrown at him.
But his interventions are short-term only. Draghi is a good shot-stopper, but he cannot stop the relentless attacks on his goal. The country most likely to need OMT now seems to be Spain. But Spain doesn't want to ask for the money yet, because it would be politically humiliating and in October there will be regional elections. Meanwhile the country has youth unemployment at 50%, and yesterday Madrid cut 40 billion Euros from its budget (perhaps to forestall the demands the ECB will make for triggering OMT), which will only push its economy further into recession. And this at a time when Catalonia is pressing for a secession referendum which Madrid says would be illegal. Old Spanish generals are warning about military action if Catalonia goes ahead.
Thus even the most competent Eurozone leader's measures are made at the expense of ordinary people in countries of the southern periphery. They are anti-democratic in several senses. Draghi and his like have no democratic mandate in Spain. They aren't even Spanish. Their decisions profoundly affect the Spanish electorate, but Spanish voters have no say in them. Their effect on Spain as the country struggles to do what is required of it is so grindingly awful that it jeopardises not just Spanish democracy, barely half a century old, but the existence of the country in its current form.
That all this should be happening in pursuit of a monetary union that was meant to ensure a united and peaceful Europe is a bitter irony.
A prediction then - if a country leaves the Euro it won't be because EU leaders have run out of imaginative road. On the contrary, they will keep thinking of ways to kick the can on a bit further till hell freezes over. Instead it will happen because somewhere people decide that they have had enough. At this stage Spain looks the most likely candidate.
No leader has emerged with greater credit (admittedly in a below-average field) than Mario Draghi, ECB chief. First of all his Long Term Financing Operation, allowing banks access to cheap three-year money, kept the banking system afloat at a time when it might well have foundered. Now, when it looks as if Spain could get sucked into the abyss of unaffordable bond yields, up pops Draghi with a promise to do "whatever it takes" to keep yields down, a promise which has taken the concrete form of Outright Monetary Transaction, a scheme by which the ECB will buy sovereign bonds on the secondary market in exchange for fiscal reforms by the sovereign in question.
Draghi reminds me of Jan Tomaczewski, the legendary Polish goalkeeper, who flung himself in the way of the missiles bombarding his goal during World Cup qualifier against England in 1973. Like Tomaczewski, Draghi seems equal to everything that is thrown at him.
But his interventions are short-term only. Draghi is a good shot-stopper, but he cannot stop the relentless attacks on his goal. The country most likely to need OMT now seems to be Spain. But Spain doesn't want to ask for the money yet, because it would be politically humiliating and in October there will be regional elections. Meanwhile the country has youth unemployment at 50%, and yesterday Madrid cut 40 billion Euros from its budget (perhaps to forestall the demands the ECB will make for triggering OMT), which will only push its economy further into recession. And this at a time when Catalonia is pressing for a secession referendum which Madrid says would be illegal. Old Spanish generals are warning about military action if Catalonia goes ahead.
Thus even the most competent Eurozone leader's measures are made at the expense of ordinary people in countries of the southern periphery. They are anti-democratic in several senses. Draghi and his like have no democratic mandate in Spain. They aren't even Spanish. Their decisions profoundly affect the Spanish electorate, but Spanish voters have no say in them. Their effect on Spain as the country struggles to do what is required of it is so grindingly awful that it jeopardises not just Spanish democracy, barely half a century old, but the existence of the country in its current form.
That all this should be happening in pursuit of a monetary union that was meant to ensure a united and peaceful Europe is a bitter irony.
A prediction then - if a country leaves the Euro it won't be because EU leaders have run out of imaginative road. On the contrary, they will keep thinking of ways to kick the can on a bit further till hell freezes over. Instead it will happen because somewhere people decide that they have had enough. At this stage Spain looks the most likely candidate.
Legalising drugs and two dead policewomen
I am willing to be persuaded that legalisation of drugs is a good idea, but as long as they are illegal it's wrong to take them.
There are two reasons for this, one contentious and one incontestable. The first one - because laws in a democratic society should be obeyed - is open to the observation that it leaves no room for conscientious objection. The second however bears all before it.
It is that to take drugs illegally is to facilitate a worldwide criminal monster which causes chaos and misery wherever it reaches. It wrecks whole countries (think Colombia and Mexico) and blights the lives of millions. By all means campaign to get drugs legalised, but while they're illegal it's despicable to take them. Even just a bit of spliff now and again helps to keep the monster going.
Amidst the universally outraged reaction in the media and in society at large to the killing of the Hattersley policewomen, no-one mentions drugs. But drugs are the gangs' principal business. The demand element in their business, without which it wouldn't exist, comes from society at large.
Including, and probably disproportionately, the media.
There are two reasons for this, one contentious and one incontestable. The first one - because laws in a democratic society should be obeyed - is open to the observation that it leaves no room for conscientious objection. The second however bears all before it.
It is that to take drugs illegally is to facilitate a worldwide criminal monster which causes chaos and misery wherever it reaches. It wrecks whole countries (think Colombia and Mexico) and blights the lives of millions. By all means campaign to get drugs legalised, but while they're illegal it's despicable to take them. Even just a bit of spliff now and again helps to keep the monster going.
Amidst the universally outraged reaction in the media and in society at large to the killing of the Hattersley policewomen, no-one mentions drugs. But drugs are the gangs' principal business. The demand element in their business, without which it wouldn't exist, comes from society at large.
Including, and probably disproportionately, the media.
Tuesday 25 September 2012
Andrew Mitchell and the police
So Andrew Mitchell, the Chief Whip, has a run-in with the Downing St police officers. Cue earnest correspondents on TV and in the press pointing out how bad this looks in the light of the killing in Manchester of two policewomen. The Police make sacrifices for us, they intone, and it ill behoves a Tory minister to treat them with disrespect.
I have no particular taste for Mitchell, who looks typical of his kind, but it's funny how the press has chosen the murdered WPCs as a context for his conduct. They could instead have chosen the Met officer who pushed the newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson to the ground. Or the South Yorkshire police who perjured themselves after the Hillsborough disaster.
But that would make Andrew Mitchell, pleb or no pleb, look pretty decent, wouldn't it?
I have no particular taste for Mitchell, who looks typical of his kind, but it's funny how the press has chosen the murdered WPCs as a context for his conduct. They could instead have chosen the Met officer who pushed the newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson to the ground. Or the South Yorkshire police who perjured themselves after the Hillsborough disaster.
But that would make Andrew Mitchell, pleb or no pleb, look pretty decent, wouldn't it?
Wednesday 19 September 2012
Parade's End, liberalism and the Duchess of Cambridge
My wife and I have been watching Parade's End (known in the family, in deference to E M Forster, as Howard's Parade). The BBC's adaptation of the Ford Madox Ford novel, with a script by Tom Stoppard and a stellar cast including Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall and Roger Allam amongst many others, ought to have been compulsive viewing. But we've been disappointed, finding a lot of it stodgy and garbled. Some scenes that should have been electrifying (the dinner with the mad vicar) looked like a hasty run-through, and much though I love Cumberbatch, he hasn't made the decent but stubborn Tory MP Christopher Tietjens really likeable enough for us to care what happens to him. Cumberbatch sticks his jaw out and looks stoic, trying out a new accent every week, but the script doesn't allow us to get inside the character. Rupert Everett, doing a fine unobtrusive job as Tietjens' brother, is wasted. Watching the first episode of the new Downton Abbey series on Sunday night reminded me what an effective screen-writer Julian Fellowes is: Downton is less ambitious, but Fellowes delivers in a way that Stoppard doesn't.
The Parade referred to is, presumably, the facade of Edwardian life, where the rich pretended all was well in front of the servants, women couldn't vote, and authoritarian generals looked blithely on while their men were butchered by the hundred thousand. I haven't read Madox Ford's book (though I will), but the TV series invites us to look forward by comparison to our own time of emancipation, honesty in sexual relations and a more enlightened foreign policy. This is much the same appeal Mad Men makes - we feel superior watching Don Draper and his cronies drink their sexist, racist and Republican way across New York in the same way as we pity Tietjens his loveless marriage and deplore the treatment of Suffragettes.
A couple of episodes in there was a scene in which Tietjens accidentally wandered into the bathroom while his wife was naked. There must have been a dozen ways in which this information could have been communicated without actually showing Rebecca Hall's upper half, but the director nevertheless opted for the full frontal. Now I have been a fan of Ms Hall since her fragrant turn in Woody Allen's Vicky, Christina, Barcelona, but I personally found her nakedness disconcerting to the extent that it rather overshadowed the point of the encounter (which was to underline the extent to which the couple were alienated from each other).
No matter: that is where the liberalism the series argues for has got us - whereas at the time Parade's End was written the only chance of seeing naked breasts was pretty much get married or go to Paris, by the 70s the adolescent male could enjoy a nano-second of Jenny Agutter jumping naked into a billabong (Walkabout, since you ask) and now the casual viewer can see Ms Hall's perky embonpoint adorning his living room at will.
And that is not to mention the inexhaustible reams of pornography available at the click of a mouse, now arriving chez nous without so much as a discussion in Parliament, let alone a vote by MPs.
No matter: that is where the liberalism the series argues for has got us - whereas at the time Parade's End was written the only chance of seeing naked breasts was pretty much get married or go to Paris, by the 70s the adolescent male could enjoy a nano-second of Jenny Agutter jumping naked into a billabong (Walkabout, since you ask) and now the casual viewer can see Ms Hall's perky embonpoint adorning his living room at will.
And that is not to mention the inexhaustible reams of pornography available at the click of a mouse, now arriving chez nous without so much as a discussion in Parliament, let alone a vote by MPs.
Is this liberalism an advance? I'm not sure. For every piece of art that is improved by the explicit, I suspect there are many, many others made worse. More generally, is it a freedom worth the price of its misuse? As with all such things, those who argue for emancipation assume that people will use it wisely; I think that's a mistake.
Meanwhile, in an ironic meeting between the old world and the new, a French magazine prints topless pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge. I have some sympathy for her, but I don't think she will be sunbathing topless again any time soon.
Meanwhile, in an ironic meeting between the old world and the new, a French magazine prints topless pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge. I have some sympathy for her, but I don't think she will be sunbathing topless again any time soon.
Monday 17 September 2012
Hillsborough and Islam
So some American fruitcakes make a stupid and offensive film about Islam. Across the world Muslims march. In Libya the US embassy is set on fire and people are killed. Meanwhile in the UK a new report into the Hillsborough tragedy reveals that police lied and altered witness statements.
There is a modest connection between these two events.
First, Islamic outrage. Clearly a lot of people don't understand that in the West people have considerable freedom of action, and if some idiot makes an offensive film that is not the US government's fault. "Ah", say the protestors, "but they let it happen. They didn't stop it". They don't understand that the freedom to practice a religion - Islam, say - is pretty much the same thing as the freedom to make art, however bad and tawdry. Religion is merely one way of looking at the world; other views are available. "Ah", say the protestors, "but Islam is not just a religion. It is the religion, and if you say anything against it you are insulting it". At which point the Western mind slightly loses patience, and thanks the Lord, Allah, whoever, that such folly does not take place here.
Actually, about a thousand people protested outside the American Embassy in London over the weekend.
As for Hillsborough, the subject came up at a party on Friday night. Amidst the universal condemnation of the police, my friend Ewan came up with the following.
"Of course, the thing they never mention is how the people actually died. They weren't crushed by falling masonry or anything. They were crushed by people pushing from the back. Yes, the police shouldn't have opened the exit gate, but they only did that because loads of Liverpool fans were late, and when they opened it they pushed to get in. OK, it wouldn't have happened if the gate hadn't been opened, sure, but the actually deaths were directly caused by fans pushing".
I'm paraphrasing, obviously, but Ewan was articulating a sentiment that I have heard hinted at many times, almost furtively, out of the corner of my ear in conversations about Hillsborough over the years. Ewan's contention was that so widespread was the sympathy for the victims, and so successful the Hillsborough lobby in focusing blame on the police, the stadium designers and the FA (all partly responsible for more remote causes), that the truth about the proximate cause could no longer be mentioned. Anyone who was remotely critical about the Liverpool fans on that day risked the self-righteous ire of an entire city, unable to accept that some of the blame lay with its own. It nearly did for Boris Johnson, and only last week another Chief Superintendent had to backtrack hastily over some comments that, goodness gracious, the conduct of fans at the time didn't make the police's job any easier. Ewan had himself, he said, been putting these points on the Guardian's Commentisfree website, only to find himself banned. Comment is only free within certain Guardian-approved limits, it appears.
In case you're wondering, Ewan is not me; and Ewan is not his real name either. He is a professional person with something to lose and I wouldn't identify him here.
I have no idea whether he is right about Hillsborough (although in the absence of a meteorite having fallen unnoticed on the Leppings Lane End there is certain plausibility about the explanation). Certainly football grounds were unruly places in the 70s and 80s, and attending them was to experience a visceral thrill of physical danger, and not just from the jostling hostility of rival fans: I went to an FA Quarter Final at Oakwell where supporters at the home end were so jam-packed in that getting your arm up to scratch an ear was a major undertaking. It's a miracle there weren't more disasters.
Incidentally although you would imagine, reading the Hillsborough coverage, that football crowds behaved with the same hushed decorum found at a Swiss finishing school on prize-giving day, I distinctly remember fans chanting the N-word when a black player got the ball, bananas being thrown onto the pitch in their direction, and the Barnsley fans singing "You'll never catch the Ripper" at the police. Civilised it wasn't. I don't remember anyone saying, "No, after you old chap".
But whether my friend is right or not about the proximate cause of the tragedy, it's indisputable that suggesting Liverpool supporters might have been partly to blame has become something whereof, to borrow from Wittgenstein, one cannot speak.
In the same way that in some countries you can't say, for example, that Islam is a load of tosh.
The test of ideas is their availability for public scrutiny. Freedom is only possible if individuals are willing to put up with the expression of ideas they don't like. This is worth doing because in exchange you get the opportunity to express your own. The 96 deaths at Hillsborough were a tragedy for the individuals and their families. The death of free speech is a disaster for all.
There is a modest connection between these two events.
First, Islamic outrage. Clearly a lot of people don't understand that in the West people have considerable freedom of action, and if some idiot makes an offensive film that is not the US government's fault. "Ah", say the protestors, "but they let it happen. They didn't stop it". They don't understand that the freedom to practice a religion - Islam, say - is pretty much the same thing as the freedom to make art, however bad and tawdry. Religion is merely one way of looking at the world; other views are available. "Ah", say the protestors, "but Islam is not just a religion. It is the religion, and if you say anything against it you are insulting it". At which point the Western mind slightly loses patience, and thanks the Lord, Allah, whoever, that such folly does not take place here.
Actually, about a thousand people protested outside the American Embassy in London over the weekend.
As for Hillsborough, the subject came up at a party on Friday night. Amidst the universal condemnation of the police, my friend Ewan came up with the following.
"Of course, the thing they never mention is how the people actually died. They weren't crushed by falling masonry or anything. They were crushed by people pushing from the back. Yes, the police shouldn't have opened the exit gate, but they only did that because loads of Liverpool fans were late, and when they opened it they pushed to get in. OK, it wouldn't have happened if the gate hadn't been opened, sure, but the actually deaths were directly caused by fans pushing".
I'm paraphrasing, obviously, but Ewan was articulating a sentiment that I have heard hinted at many times, almost furtively, out of the corner of my ear in conversations about Hillsborough over the years. Ewan's contention was that so widespread was the sympathy for the victims, and so successful the Hillsborough lobby in focusing blame on the police, the stadium designers and the FA (all partly responsible for more remote causes), that the truth about the proximate cause could no longer be mentioned. Anyone who was remotely critical about the Liverpool fans on that day risked the self-righteous ire of an entire city, unable to accept that some of the blame lay with its own. It nearly did for Boris Johnson, and only last week another Chief Superintendent had to backtrack hastily over some comments that, goodness gracious, the conduct of fans at the time didn't make the police's job any easier. Ewan had himself, he said, been putting these points on the Guardian's Commentisfree website, only to find himself banned. Comment is only free within certain Guardian-approved limits, it appears.
In case you're wondering, Ewan is not me; and Ewan is not his real name either. He is a professional person with something to lose and I wouldn't identify him here.
I have no idea whether he is right about Hillsborough (although in the absence of a meteorite having fallen unnoticed on the Leppings Lane End there is certain plausibility about the explanation). Certainly football grounds were unruly places in the 70s and 80s, and attending them was to experience a visceral thrill of physical danger, and not just from the jostling hostility of rival fans: I went to an FA Quarter Final at Oakwell where supporters at the home end were so jam-packed in that getting your arm up to scratch an ear was a major undertaking. It's a miracle there weren't more disasters.
Incidentally although you would imagine, reading the Hillsborough coverage, that football crowds behaved with the same hushed decorum found at a Swiss finishing school on prize-giving day, I distinctly remember fans chanting the N-word when a black player got the ball, bananas being thrown onto the pitch in their direction, and the Barnsley fans singing "You'll never catch the Ripper" at the police. Civilised it wasn't. I don't remember anyone saying, "No, after you old chap".
But whether my friend is right or not about the proximate cause of the tragedy, it's indisputable that suggesting Liverpool supporters might have been partly to blame has become something whereof, to borrow from Wittgenstein, one cannot speak.
In the same way that in some countries you can't say, for example, that Islam is a load of tosh.
The test of ideas is their availability for public scrutiny. Freedom is only possible if individuals are willing to put up with the expression of ideas they don't like. This is worth doing because in exchange you get the opportunity to express your own. The 96 deaths at Hillsborough were a tragedy for the individuals and their families. The death of free speech is a disaster for all.
Wednesday 12 September 2012
The Dawkins Delusion #2
Here's the second part of an article I wrote in 2006 about Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion.
In the first, posted a few weeks ago, I set out the problems Dawkins faced when writing it. To summarise, firstly, he didn't know enough about theology to do a decent demolition job. Secondly, for someone who sets himself up as a rationalist, Dawkins’ own reasoning was often slipshod. Thirdly, Dawkins made assumptions about the value of scientific truth which didn't seem to me to be warranted, and which he doesn't question.
In particular I tried to show how Dawkins failed to grasp the implications for religious people of the physical nature of the universe - broadly, it's a mistake to invoke the laws of physics to cast doubt on an entity that many religious people believe doesn't take physical form.
In this second part I want to look at Dawkins' treatment of the curious fact of the universe and of our presence within it.
This has been seized on by Theists keen to support the idea of a God. Isn’t it funny, the argument runs, that conditions in the universe are just right for us? How amazing that if the laws of physics were just slightly different then we wouldn't be here! This is an argument which is not perhaps as shaken as it should be by the thought that “we could only be discussing this question in the kind of universe that was capable of producing us" (The God Delusion, p.144), but nevertheless Dawkins seems uneasy here, and if there is only one universe then he evidently feels he has some refuting to do.
Dawkins suggests that the “Goldilocks” (ie just right for us) universe theory could be undermined by the suggestion that there are many universes “co-existing like bubbles of foam”, as he puts it. This is not his field of expertise, and he can do little (p.145) except outline the theories of Martin Rees, Leonard Susskind and others about these multi or mega-verses.
Obviously if there were more than one universe, Theists would no longer be able to claim that the existence of one which included us must be part of God’s master plan, to design intelligent beings capable of appreciating Him (or other pronoun of choice).
It’s worth pausing here to consider how Dawkins’s intellectual stance sits alongside his rhetorical means. Religion, The God Delusion tells us, is a lingering superstition, whereas Dawkins is a scientific rationalist, using only the tools of pure reason to demolish quasi-mediaeval faith.
But what tools is he relying on here? The “suggestion” that there are many universes. The multiverse "theory". Our universe "may" this, "may" that, "may reverse itself". "It is conceivable that" followed by "if" the other. This on p.145, whilst over on p.146 someone else “has developed a tantalizingly Darwinian variant on the multiverse theory”; but don’t worry, it’s not a religious nut, it’s a respectable theoretical physicist, one Lee Smolin.
So let’s get this straight. When Theists rely on unproven theories, they’re taking us back to the Dark Ages. But when theoretical physicists do, they’re wheeled out to provide support for Prof Dawkins’ attempt to demolish the “Goldilocks” universe argument.
There’s more of the same double standards, incidentally, elsewhere in the book - look at p.155/6.
“May” and “if”, “theory” and “suggestion”, are deluded fantasies when they are part of the belief systems of the religious, but put them in the hands of Professor Dawkins and they become glinting forensic tools.
There is a powerful whiff of hypocrisy here. The application of rigorous and fair premise-and-conclusion logic is the cornerstone of science, and something with which Dawkins explicitly associates himself. He is a scientist after all. But instead of examining the subject in a dispassionate and even-handed way, Dawkins buttresses his arguments with the same rhetorical bluster and flabby ratiocination he derides in his opponents.
The temptation to chuck the book in the bin was pretty strong, but my wife had paid fifteen quid for it, so I carried on reading.
However things got worse.
I'll post the gory details in a couple of weeks.
In the first, posted a few weeks ago, I set out the problems Dawkins faced when writing it. To summarise, firstly, he didn't know enough about theology to do a decent demolition job. Secondly, for someone who sets himself up as a rationalist, Dawkins’ own reasoning was often slipshod. Thirdly, Dawkins made assumptions about the value of scientific truth which didn't seem to me to be warranted, and which he doesn't question.
In particular I tried to show how Dawkins failed to grasp the implications for religious people of the physical nature of the universe - broadly, it's a mistake to invoke the laws of physics to cast doubt on an entity that many religious people believe doesn't take physical form.
In this second part I want to look at Dawkins' treatment of the curious fact of the universe and of our presence within it.
This has been seized on by Theists keen to support the idea of a God. Isn’t it funny, the argument runs, that conditions in the universe are just right for us? How amazing that if the laws of physics were just slightly different then we wouldn't be here! This is an argument which is not perhaps as shaken as it should be by the thought that “we could only be discussing this question in the kind of universe that was capable of producing us" (The God Delusion, p.144), but nevertheless Dawkins seems uneasy here, and if there is only one universe then he evidently feels he has some refuting to do.
Dawkins suggests that the “Goldilocks” (ie just right for us) universe theory could be undermined by the suggestion that there are many universes “co-existing like bubbles of foam”, as he puts it. This is not his field of expertise, and he can do little (p.145) except outline the theories of Martin Rees, Leonard Susskind and others about these multi or mega-verses.
Obviously if there were more than one universe, Theists would no longer be able to claim that the existence of one which included us must be part of God’s master plan, to design intelligent beings capable of appreciating Him (or other pronoun of choice).
It’s worth pausing here to consider how Dawkins’s intellectual stance sits alongside his rhetorical means. Religion, The God Delusion tells us, is a lingering superstition, whereas Dawkins is a scientific rationalist, using only the tools of pure reason to demolish quasi-mediaeval faith.
But what tools is he relying on here? The “suggestion” that there are many universes. The multiverse "theory". Our universe "may" this, "may" that, "may reverse itself". "It is conceivable that" followed by "if" the other. This on p.145, whilst over on p.146 someone else “has developed a tantalizingly Darwinian variant on the multiverse theory”; but don’t worry, it’s not a religious nut, it’s a respectable theoretical physicist, one Lee Smolin.
So let’s get this straight. When Theists rely on unproven theories, they’re taking us back to the Dark Ages. But when theoretical physicists do, they’re wheeled out to provide support for Prof Dawkins’ attempt to demolish the “Goldilocks” universe argument.
There’s more of the same double standards, incidentally, elsewhere in the book - look at p.155/6.
“May” and “if”, “theory” and “suggestion”, are deluded fantasies when they are part of the belief systems of the religious, but put them in the hands of Professor Dawkins and they become glinting forensic tools.
There is a powerful whiff of hypocrisy here. The application of rigorous and fair premise-and-conclusion logic is the cornerstone of science, and something with which Dawkins explicitly associates himself. He is a scientist after all. But instead of examining the subject in a dispassionate and even-handed way, Dawkins buttresses his arguments with the same rhetorical bluster and flabby ratiocination he derides in his opponents.
The temptation to chuck the book in the bin was pretty strong, but my wife had paid fifteen quid for it, so I carried on reading.
However things got worse.
I'll post the gory details in a couple of weeks.
Tuesday 11 September 2012
About as good as Mendelssohn
"I don't know why we have so many third rate foreign conductors", harrumphed Sir Thomas Beecham, "when we have so many second rate ones of our own".
The notion that the British prefer their glamorous Guiseppi Verdis to their prosaic home-grown Joe Greens is a persistent one amongst musicians, and although I've never knowingly experienced it, I've met a lot of musicians who swear they have. Certainly plenty of them have tried to make their names more interesting in order to make themselves seem more interesting. Albert Kettleby, himself a third rater, whose In A Monastery Garden is credited to the much more exotic sounding Albert Ketelby, also wrote under the pseudonym Anton Vodorinski.
Another favourite ploy is to utilise the middle name, which would make me Owen Nicholas Simpson (I could have been Wales's national composer, instead of merely being the best - possibly: I don't know all my neighbours - in my street). It worked for Mark Turnage. And for Richard Bennett.
As it happens, I'm not sure what Beecham has got against being second rate. It's a condition I've aspired to through most of my compositional life. That's why I was delighted by the following remarks by a horn playing colleague. "That piece of yours we played a few years back", he said, "that was excellent. Not as good as Beethoven, maybe. About as good as Mendelssohn. Not first rate, but maybe second rate".
Not as good as Beethoven. But better than Kettleby. I'll settle for that.
Meanwhile in Trinity Church Cemetery, Berlin, the composer of Midsummer Night's Dream, the Octet for Strings, Fingal's Cave and the E minor violin concerto is quietly turning in his grave.
The notion that the British prefer their glamorous Guiseppi Verdis to their prosaic home-grown Joe Greens is a persistent one amongst musicians, and although I've never knowingly experienced it, I've met a lot of musicians who swear they have. Certainly plenty of them have tried to make their names more interesting in order to make themselves seem more interesting. Albert Kettleby, himself a third rater, whose In A Monastery Garden is credited to the much more exotic sounding Albert Ketelby, also wrote under the pseudonym Anton Vodorinski.
Another favourite ploy is to utilise the middle name, which would make me Owen Nicholas Simpson (I could have been Wales's national composer, instead of merely being the best - possibly: I don't know all my neighbours - in my street). It worked for Mark Turnage. And for Richard Bennett.
As it happens, I'm not sure what Beecham has got against being second rate. It's a condition I've aspired to through most of my compositional life. That's why I was delighted by the following remarks by a horn playing colleague. "That piece of yours we played a few years back", he said, "that was excellent. Not as good as Beethoven, maybe. About as good as Mendelssohn. Not first rate, but maybe second rate".
Not as good as Beethoven. But better than Kettleby. I'll settle for that.
Meanwhile in Trinity Church Cemetery, Berlin, the composer of Midsummer Night's Dream, the Octet for Strings, Fingal's Cave and the E minor violin concerto is quietly turning in his grave.
Friday 7 September 2012
Mario Draghi and the Guardian
The Guardian had some interesting things to say the other day following the launch of Mario Draghi's Outright Monetary Transaction scheme for buying up the bonds of Southern European economies. Its admirable Economics Editor Larry Elliott summed up the drawback of the scheme in one sentence: "The rescue plan involves Governments in Rome and Madrid driving their economies deeper into depression to reduce interest rates they pay on their borrowing". Quite right.
But here is the Leader column, taking much the same tone but with some interesting details which throw light on the Left of centre take on UK economic policy.
"The debt problems for Spain and Italy have worsened partly as a result of their economies slowing down: so strong-arming them into making ever more spending cuts will just intensify the death spiral. If you want a parallel, just look at George Osborne's double-dip recession, created with a very similar mix of "fiscal conservatism and monetary activism". As the chancellor has found, even after Mervyn King has thrown the best part of £400bn at the economy, a recovery can't be rustled up to order."
Firstly, the parallels with the UK are misconceived. The UK has its own central bank which can set interest rates at a level suitable for this country. EMU countries don't. The UK's central bank can use QE to inject liquidity into the economy and keep its bond rates down. Until now, EMU countries couldn't. The UK can allow its currency to devalue to make its exports more competitive. Individual EMU countries can't.
Actually the UK's position is not that much like the EMU countries'. If we are sinking in recession it is partly because of the stasis across the Channel.
Secondly, the Graun's assertion that a recovery can't be rustled up to order, not even when its central bank has "thrown the best part of £400bn at the economy" blows a hole in its own criticism of George Osborne. I'm sorry for labouring the following point, and I only do it because I don't hear it said anywhere else.
The Left has generally criticised Osborne for cutting too far and too fast. If Osborne had cut more quickly (actually he has scarcely cut at all: public spending is still rising in nominal terms) he would have ended up borrowing more money. This is the implicit consequence of Labour's policy, even if it is very rarely stated. If Osborne cut less quickly and deeply, we are invited to believe, the economy would still be growing.
Now read the last sentence of the Leader again: "As the chancellor has found, even after Mervyn King has thrown the best part of £400bn at the economy, a recovery can't be rustled up to order." But where even throwing £400 bn at the economy won't make it grow, why does the Guardian believe that the bit of extra borrowing we might be able to do - far less than £400 bn - would get us out of recession?
After all, we can all agree that "the best part of £400bn" didn't work, can't we?
But here is the Leader column, taking much the same tone but with some interesting details which throw light on the Left of centre take on UK economic policy.
"The debt problems for Spain and Italy have worsened partly as a result of their economies slowing down: so strong-arming them into making ever more spending cuts will just intensify the death spiral. If you want a parallel, just look at George Osborne's double-dip recession, created with a very similar mix of "fiscal conservatism and monetary activism". As the chancellor has found, even after Mervyn King has thrown the best part of £400bn at the economy, a recovery can't be rustled up to order."
Firstly, the parallels with the UK are misconceived. The UK has its own central bank which can set interest rates at a level suitable for this country. EMU countries don't. The UK's central bank can use QE to inject liquidity into the economy and keep its bond rates down. Until now, EMU countries couldn't. The UK can allow its currency to devalue to make its exports more competitive. Individual EMU countries can't.
Actually the UK's position is not that much like the EMU countries'. If we are sinking in recession it is partly because of the stasis across the Channel.
Secondly, the Graun's assertion that a recovery can't be rustled up to order, not even when its central bank has "thrown the best part of £400bn at the economy" blows a hole in its own criticism of George Osborne. I'm sorry for labouring the following point, and I only do it because I don't hear it said anywhere else.
The Left has generally criticised Osborne for cutting too far and too fast. If Osborne had cut more quickly (actually he has scarcely cut at all: public spending is still rising in nominal terms) he would have ended up borrowing more money. This is the implicit consequence of Labour's policy, even if it is very rarely stated. If Osborne cut less quickly and deeply, we are invited to believe, the economy would still be growing.
Now read the last sentence of the Leader again: "As the chancellor has found, even after Mervyn King has thrown the best part of £400bn at the economy, a recovery can't be rustled up to order." But where even throwing £400 bn at the economy won't make it grow, why does the Guardian believe that the bit of extra borrowing we might be able to do - far less than £400 bn - would get us out of recession?
After all, we can all agree that "the best part of £400bn" didn't work, can't we?
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