Marks and Spencer - not exactly kosher

My astonishment at yesterday's news that Marks and Spencer was allowing Muslim till staff to direct customers with alcohol or pork to other tills was swiftly followed by the conclusion that this was a policy which wasn't going to last.

Never mind the fury which erupted on Facebook, imagine the anger amidst the mayhem of Christmas shopping when the person queuing for ten minutes with a groaning trolley is told she must go elsewhere. Imagine too being the poor cashier who has to tell the customer.  Clearly this one wasn't going to survive 24 hours.

And so it has proved.  M&S now apparently say Muslim staff will be allowed to work in other areas of their stores (no doubt not shifting crates of champagne around in the back office).  With any luck the tide of ill-will which has flowed their way won't dent their Christmas figures too much.

Personally I have no objection whatsoever with someone not wanting to sell alcohol or pork.  The best way for an individual to avoid this is probably not to apply for a job with one of the UK's biggest food retailers. Marks and Spencer selling wine and sausages?  Who would have guessed?

A pluralist society requires all sorts of tolerances.  Perhaps surprisingly for someone who regards Islam's treatment of women with a certain amount of dismay, I think France's ban on the burqa is wrong.  I don't like the headscarf very much, but I wouldn't patronise those who wear it by assuming that all of them are coerced or brainwashed.  But selling pork and alcohol is not the same thing as eating them yourself (if it were so, tens of thousands of Pakistani corner shops would have gone out of business years ago); and declining to serve those who do sends out a signal to wider society about Islam which is totally counterproductive.

What were Marks and Spencer thinking of?  Michael Marks, a Belorussian Jew who founded the company with Thomas Spencer in 1894, must be turning in his grave.  

Clare Balding, UCL and a British version of Islam

A couple of weeks ago on a long motorway drive I found myself listening to Clare Balding's Desert Island Discs.  Why, Kirsty Young wanted to know, did Ms Balding decline to take part in coverage of the Open Golf championship at Muirfield, a club which refuses entry to women, whereas she was willing to go to the Winter Olympics in Russia, a country whose government is notoriously homophobic?

Balding's answer, that in the UK her stance had some resonance whereas in Russia no-one knew or cared who she was, seemed reasonable enough, and I forgot about it until the hoo-hah last week over the debate at University College London.  You may remember that UCL is in trouble for hosting a Muslim-organised debate where audience members were offered mixed or segregated seating.

Like most small "l" liberals I incline to the view that people should be able to do more or less what they like where possible, and as someone with religious sympathies if not actual religious beliefs that view extends to the practice of religion.  However where religious rights and other rights clash there's an ambigous middle ground that I suspect we will see increasingly fought over.

If you are inclined towards an absolutist take on religious freedom, consider the practice of compulsory female circumcision, a manifestation of religious belief in action.  Still think people should always be able to do what they like?  No, nor me.

In reality our willingness to tolerate other people's religious practices is not absolute, but depends on the extent to which those practices differ from our own.  Someone who thinks segregating a meeting is OK might not mind too much compulsory clitoridectomy; someone who finds segregation an affront to feminism is going to be horrified by it.

UCL seem to have followed the policy arrived at by Universities UK - namely that segregation is OK if it's voluntary and if there's a third area of mixed seating.  Subsequently UUK now seem to have withdrawn this policy in the face of criticism from David Cameron and Michael Gove. Lord knows what they are going to replace it with.

Areas where potential rights conflict, in this case female equality versus religious freedom, are probably not subject to being forensically unpicked: at root politics is about power, and about imposing your vision of society on others.  We haven't tried to accommodate those North African Muslims who practice female circumcision: we think it's wrong, so they can't do it legally. The UK government has essentially imposed its views on them.

Unlike Clare Balding, I personally don't think there's much wrong with Muirfield golf club having a men-only membership.  It's a private organisation; other golf clubs are available.  I as a man am free to take my maximum-handicap hacking elsewhere if I choose.  Nor would I mind a private Mosque having segregated prayers, if that's what its members want.

(Don't ask me why a men-only golf club is just about OK, but a whites-only one wouldn't be; let's stick to the topic)

A university on the other hand is, whatever the niceties of ownership, essentially a public institution.  If it wants to ban segregated meetings it should be able to do so.  Muslims are free to campaign against it and it's up to them to see if they can prevail.

As for Ms Balding, three quarters of an hour in her radio company was quite enough.  I couldn't quite put my finger on what I disliked about her.  And no, it wasn't that she was a lesbian.  I realised afterwards it was that she was a female version of a male type I have always envied and disliked - the Jock.  Cheerful, unreflective, competitive and enthusiastic, she played a series of quite dreadful records.

Lastly, a mention for the Inclusive Mosque Initiative, an organisation which is trying, in the face of some resistance, to promote what are effectively unisex mosques.  I have always thought that for the UK to come to an unacknowledged truce with Muslims a British version of Islam would have to emerge, and this is an enormously encouraging sign.

Radio Mandela makes the news

To get one thing clear at the outset, I admired Nelson Mandela.

I am also astonished and bored by the outpouring of flannel and hagiographies at his death. A serviceable but dull BBC4 programme about Byzantium on Friday night was interrupted by a banner advertising "Breaking news on BBC1". Was nuclear armageddon upon us? Was a tsunami roaring up the Mersey estuary? No. Mandela had died.

I can't think of any reason why I should have needed to know sooner rather than later. After all, the coverage was still going on on Monday morning, when Radio 5 was inviting listeners to share their "memories of Mandela". There was no chance of any of us missing the news. You might have thought the station had been renamed Radio Mandela; apparently the BBC has received over 1000 complaints about excessive coverage. I'm surprised it's so few.

Against my better judgment I watched News at 10 that night. Too many of the contributors struck the kind of solipsistic tone which Private Eye would satirise as "The day Nelson Mandela met me". Among them was John Simpson, who is experienced enough to know the pitfalls of personalisation but let his vanity get the better of him. In the Guardian of course it was even worse, although the paper redeemed itself by printing a magisterial obituary by David Beresford which you can read here, and which I urge anyone who thinks I'm unduly cynical to look at before giving up on this post.

As Beresford makes clear, Mandela was a complex man, absent from the world during much of his adult life, emerging from prison an ingenue, and finding himself the poster boy for liberal opinion the world over. This was a position he subsequently struggled to justify, with one striking exception, an exception so startling that it goes a long way to explaining the reverence felt for Mandela around the world.

It was that he forgave his captors, and by doing so made possible the peaceful transition to majority rule in South Africa. No small thing.

But news organisations are not meant to be cheerleaders. When a great public figure like Mandela passes on, their job isn't to exalt.  I don't imagine though that Pravda's tributes to Josef Stalin were any more lavish than those the liberal media bestowed on Madiba.

Nowhere in the coverage I saw was there any mention of his penchant for hobnobbing with celebrities, his attempts to milk the rich for unspecific "good causes" (some of which appeared to have close connections to his own family), his cosying up to foreign governments like Indonesia, Taiwan and Nigeria in exchange for donations to the ANC or his reluctance to speak out about AIDS. Neither was there any mention of Mandela's endorsement, while still in prison, of Winnie Mandela's notorious necklacing speech - Beresford's obit alleges that proof of this endorsement was removed from journalist Anthony Sampson's official biography when Mandela threatened to withdraw co-operation from the project.

None of these things make Mandela more of a bad man than a good one. Neither does the corruption of his successors in the ANC make his legacy toxic. But their absence from the news coverage shames journalists' professionalism.

How could this have happened?

Most of us on who grew up politically in the 70s and 80s worshipped Mandela.  He appeared to stand for something decent and true, yet was unjustly imprisoned for fighting against something hateful and false. For we white liberals, he was a black man who was palpably westernised (a lawyer). His words at the Rivonia trial had the authoritative ring of Shakespeare and the King James Bible (not surprisingly since Mandela was assisted in his speech by the novelist Nadime Gordimer and by Anthony Sampson).

Growing up in a society which was learning to cope with black immigration, we young white people could admire Mandela from afar. He gave us the luxury of demonstrating our own Anti-Racism, whilst not actually having to have anything to do with him personally. Moreover because he was imprisoned, we had no opportunity to find out whether our idol had feet of clay or not.

My generation is now in charge in the media. When someone who was totemic for our far off youth dies, we are going to go for it in a big way. Does anyone remember the fanfares which accompanied Lou Reed's passing a few weeks ago?

The coverage of Mandela's death reveals as clearly as any story in recent years that what appears in the news media, both in quality and quantity, is a reflection of the personal history and opinions of the journalists and editors involved. Most of the time it's easy to forget this, but the coverage of Mandela's death reminds us that it's true, and it's true all of the time.

P.S.  The sight of the bogus sign-language expert gesticulating next to that old fraud Jacob Zuma at Mandela's funeral said a great deal about the quality of the people who have risen to the top in the new South Africa.  In a sentence, I'd say that a wicked regime has been replaced by one which is incompetent and corrupt.

Married with benefits

Is marriage a good thing or not? Sir Paul Coleridge, described by the Torygraph as "a senior High Court Judge", apparently thinks so, for he has waded into the debate with some pithy remarks after his Think Tank, the Marriage Foundation, published a report showing that children of unmarried parents were twice as likely to suffer family break up as those whose parents were married.

I didn't know judges were allowed to have Think Tanks, which just goes to show you learn something new every day, even if it isn't anything terribly interesting.

I'm sympathetically inclined to Mr Justice Coleridge's view, but the trouble with "research" like this is that it fails to take into account that people who get married are self-selecting: that's to say, the kind of people who make such a public commitment are precisely the kind of people who are likely to stick with it when the gloss wears off. Of course their children are less likely to suffer family break up.

Sir Paul is clearly aware of the controversy his remarks might stir up, for he insisted that he was not intending to "preach morality". 

"If your relationship is not stable enough to cope with children", he wrote, "you should not have them".  Well maybe, but the trouble is people's relationships tend to come under most strain after the children have come along.  If the state really wanted to minimise family break up it would discourage couples unlikely to stick together from having children in the first place.

How could it do this? By restricting child-related benefits to married couples. Young men are pretty stupid and irresponsible, but young women aren't. "I'm not having your baby", would be the cry, "until you marry me". Watch the birth rate plummet.

But of course this won't happen.  For one, the piteous plight of single unmarried mothers would soon be winging its way to a TV screen near you. Cathy Come Home Redux. In the face of such emotionalism the right of young men to father a child and then slope off without a backward glance or social censure will always be placed ahead of the desirability that children should have both parents in attendance. When some children suffer conspicuous poverty, a policy which nevertheless beggars many more emotionally will always be preferred.

"You have no right to have children", said Mr Justice Coleridge, "you only have responsibilities if you have them".

Not a widespread view in Britain now.

George Osborne's Autumn statement - squaring the fiscal circle

Amidst the kerfuffle surrounding the Chancellor's Autumn statement, it might be a good moment to take the political temperature.

George Osborne has been attacked by Labour for the last three and half years on the basis that his economic recipe wouldn't work.  It now looks as if they were wrong.  Plan A has got Britain back into growth.  Of course Ed Balls would say that it would have happened quicker if we'd done what Labour wanted, but that would have involved higher borrowing and higher interest rates.  The deficit, which has stalled at about £120 billion, might well have increased, sending out a disastrous signal to the debt markets, from whom we must borrow about £2.5 billion every week.

In middle-age my political sympathies tend to lie with the parties that have had the most credible economic plan, because it's only when you have an economy which works that you can afford the kind of public services most people would like to see.  In all my adult life I can't remember a single Labour policy devoted to balancing the books, and, looking back, I'm amazed to find that I voted for them so many times.

In the months leading up to the 97 election Labour promised to stick to Tory spending plans for a couple of years in order to head off a repeat of the "Labour's tax bombshell" headlines said to have done for John Smith in 92, but since it was explicitly a Tory policy that was being copied, I don't think this counts.  Actually it's adoption led to a brief period - the last such - when Britain ran a surplus.

I think Osborne, like him or loathe him, has followed the least bad course of action open to him - none of them were good - and stuck to his guns despite overwhelming public, political and media hostility.  He deserves his political reward. We don't hear too much about Plan B nowadays. Of course we are having the wrong kind of recovery, whipped up out of QE and the housing market, but it is better than none, and when you consider that the EU, one of our principal export markets, is flat on its back, we should be grateful for what we've got.

But about Osborne's political reward. There isn't much of it. Ed Balls has given up telling the Chancellor he was doing the wrong thing and avoided the temptation to claim that growth would have happened sooner on his watch, seeing more fertile ground in the protest that, for most people, living standards are falling, growth notwithstanding. Labour's lead in the polls is modest but shows no sign of going away.

On several grounds this is an infantile objection. In the first place, an economy only a few months out of recession is not going to be uprooting many trees. In the second, wages have been stagnant at best (adjusted for inflation) for some years, and it didn't just start when the Coalition got into office. Thirdly, there are assumptions in Balls' criticism which are totally unwarranted, namely that we are entitled to eternally rising living standards - we aren't - and that there is some magic button Osborne could press if he chose which could restore them - there isn't.

As I've argued on here before, in the last half century we exported our manufacturing capacity and tried to fill the income gap with borrowing (that's what the bankers were doing before it all went wrong - finding more and more ingenious ways of lending us money).  The only way of returning to widespread employment is by restoring some lost competitiveness.  Lower wages is one way of achieving that.  Labour is so far from understanding this that it recently suggested that companies with "market power" should charge consumers more in order to raise wages for their staff.

Companies like, er, the big six energy companies?  They certainly have plenty of market power.

One of George Osborne's announcements today was of future increases in the pension age. This is one way of lowering the benefit cost of an ageing population. It sounds and is harsh, but bear in mind that at the time the welfare state was set up, life expectancy for working men was about 48.

Another way of making sure the UK will be able to pay its pensioners in future is by a dramatic increase in immigration. But the UK is already one of the most crowded countries in the world (the South East of England would I think be third, behind Hong Kong and Bangladesh), housing is increasingly unaffordable, building land scarce and expensive, and immigration very unpopular with most people.  Moreover immigrants themselves become old in time, and a future plan which proposes more of them to solve our budgetary problems looks increasingly like a demographic Ponzi scheme.

All of this - a senescent population, an overspending government, falling wages and a housing shortage looks to me like one of those situations which can't go on forever and which must therefore stop. Judging by Labour's lead in the opinion polls an awful lot of people don't see it this way.

There seems to me a divide between those who view this particular circle as one that can't be squared, and those who think an incoming Labour government can restore the natural pre-2008 order of things. But an incoming Labour government will, in 2015, face exactly the same problems the Coalition currently faces, and will I think swiftly discover that taxing the rich a bit more won't darn the hole in the fiscal sock.

The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that the post-war welfarist society those of us of a certain age have grown up with cannot go on as it is. Pension age is merely a harbinger. From welfare benefits and care for the elderly to taxation and retirement, things are going to change whether we like it or not. I don't personally think it will be pretty.

Boris Johnson, IQ and meritocracy

Admirers of the floppy-haired neo-Wodehousian Mayor of London like to point beyond his foibles (the womanising and the gaffes) and cry, "But Boris is really intelligent!".  Personally I rather doubt this.  I once bought a book of his journalism at an airport bookstall, and over the following couple of hours it prompted many a Paxmanian "Oh come on!"  Ignoring the possibility that it's me that's not very intelligent, Boris is in hot-water again because of a speech he gave last week, and it's time to spring to his defence.

A report in the Guardian today describes Johnson as suggesting that "some people cannot do well in life because of their low IQ".  Is that what he said?  Here's the relevant passage.

"No one can ignore the harshness of that (free market) competition, or the inequality that it inevitably accentuates; and I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth.

Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2% have an IQ above 130.  The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.

And for one reason or another - boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and god-given talent of boardroom inhabitants - the income gap between the top cornflakes and the bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever.  I stress: I don't believe that economic equality is possible; indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.  But we cannot ignore this change in relative economic standing, and the resentment it sometimes brings . . . "

It's worth noting that Johnson describes free market competition as "harsh", that it inevitably "accentuates" inequality, and that IQ tests might be of dubious value.  He also suggests IQ score does not equate to "spiritual worth".  None of these nuances are present in the reporting of his speech, which has been of the "Boris causes controversy by saying that thick people have no chance in life" variety.

(Actually what this means in practice is that journalists read his speech, tried to think of someone who might be offended, rang them up, read the passage over the phone and wrote down their response. Hey presto a controversy is born.)

Let's start with the facts.  Some people have high IQs.  Some people don't.  IQ (Intelligence Quotient) tests are meant to measure intelligence, although it has often been pointed out that by the time children are old enough to take them, the overlay of family background and conditioning distorts the results.  IQ tests moreover only measure a certain kind of intelligence (essentially ratiocination) whereas other kinds abound. These points and others are made in a kind of Festschrift on the Guardian letters page this morning, where a lot of people who probably haven't read Boris's speech express how outrageous they found it.

No matter how many kinds of intelligence there are, home environment must have some part to play in their development; but so also must genetics. Let's not argue about the proportions please. Let's just agree that genetics has a significant part to play.  Let us also assume that while there are other forms of intelligence (emotional, hand/eye, fine motor for example) the one Boris was talking about is the one which can recognise patterns, think abstractly and process information.  Does possession of these abilities make it more or less likely for someone to prosper by comparison with a person who lacks them? I think the only answer one can give to this is yes.

So is Boris right when he says IQ is "relevant to a conversation about equality"?  Again, I think the answer's yes; but it's where the argument goes next that's really interesting.

Social reformers have tended to argue in favour of a meritocracy, which is to say that people should be allowed to rise up according to their abilities irrespective of their social class.  Now consider where this leads when you hitch the idea to the genetic wagon.

Able people tend to marry other able people, and have children who are, because of the inheritability of characteristics, rather like them.  Even if the parents were working class to start with, their children tend not to be. In time these children will grow up and will tend to marry other able middle class people.  According to this model, if you have something resembling a meritocracy for a century or so, the middle classes will tend to be more intelligent than the working classes.

I realise this will be a horrifying idea for many of the bien-pensants, who thought Boris was bad enough. But how could it be otherwise? If ratiocinating intelligence leads to social advancement, and if it is to a significant extent heritable, in time meritocracy is bound to lead to a stratified society with an underclass in which low intelligence is significantly over-represented.

Meritocracy, which looks such a good idea in principle, turns out in practice to lead to something out of a sci-fi novel.

The alternative, of course, is a society is rigidly stratified by social class, in which intelligent people are kept firmly in their place. This looks just as unattractive.

I don't of course have any answers to this. Like Boris, I think a society with total equality is impossible and undesirable. The centrifuge of capitalism, for all its faults, has made people materially better off to an extent that the Communists of the 1930s would have found it impossible to imagine. Even the most down-trodden of peasants in rural China prefer to work in the Apple factory than break their backs tilling the paddy fields. And capitalism has also proved to be an economic principle surprisingly consistent with the idea of self-determination and freedom, at least compared with the alternatives. But it's not pretty, it fetishes consumption and some people do much better out of it than others.

Interestingly, although Boris acknowledges the inequality that the economic centrifuge imposes, the last time I saw a survey on this it suggested that inequality was decreasing under the Tories - this is because the asinine way sociologists use to measure it depends on the median income, and if the median income falls so does inequality.  I have railed about this fruitlessly several times on this site.

I find critics of Johnson's speech both baffling and, yes, contemptible.  A great deal that's wrong about Britain today stems from our reluctance to face facts.  Everybody in the reality-based community knows that some people are brighter than others, and the bright people tend to do better in life.  Johnson's critics are in denial. Why?  Partly because they think it diminishes the less able to point out that such people exist (actually Johnson went out of his way to stress their "spiritual worth"), partly because they hate the idea of pre-determination which genetic inheritance rather ominously suggests, and partly because they belong to a political credo which still thinks that everyone must get a prize.

They are missing a trick.  If the kind of inherited inequality Johnson is talking about means anything, it is that some people are never going to be doctors, bankers or lawyers no matter hard they try.  As Johnson wrote, "we cannot ignore this change in relative economic standing, and the resentment it sometimes brings . . . "  That looks to me like an argument for a more compassionate society rather than the reverse.

PS The day after I posted this, Nicholas Watt, the Guardian's political correspondent, wrote of Johnson that "the London Mayor mocked people with low IQs".  This is so far from the truth that I am tempted to give up reading the paper altogether.

Alex Salmond and the Groat redux

I have to confess that I haven't read the SNP's blueprint for an independent Scotland released today, but I have followed its press coverage (which puts me in the same position of most of the media, who haven't read it either but who have read what their colleagues have had to say about it).

There are two things which are immediately striking.  The first is that the attractive, solvent and fair country which Alex Salmond promises is not his to grant.  Which is to say, an independent Scotland will presumably have elections with changes of government from time to time, and the Labour party north of the border will have an agenda different from his.

The second is that Salmond is no nearer fixing the currency problem than he was five years ago.  Reading the Torygraph's online discussion boards (neither more nor less barking than the Graun's, which alas no longer allows me to post), I was astonished to find that almost none of the Nationalist posters understood the difficulties adoption of sterling posed for Scotland.  These are, in no particular order, that Scotland would have no central bank and no lender of last resort, that the Scottish economy would not be taken to account by the Bank of England in setting rates, and that its ability to borrow on the money markets (like rUK Scotland will not be breaking even any time soon) would be constrained, possibly by Westminster (which might make borrowing controls contingent on using sterling).

The question I could not get any Nationalist to answer this morning was, "Why would Scotland be better off swapping a system in which it has a modicum of influence over monetary decisions in favour of one in which it has none whatsoever?"

Here's another one: Why has Alex Salmond abandoned the Euro as currency of choice, presumably on the basis that a currency union without political integration eats its weaker members alive (see Spain, Ireland and Portugal for details), in favour of another currency union without politcal integration?

The situation would actually be worse for Scotland than it is for the PIIGS - at least the ECB is supposed to take into account what it is happening in the peripheral Eurozone countries, which is more than the BoE would be doing post-Independence.  You can see how this would play out immediately - a recovering rUK would probably need a higher base rate than Scotland, and if so Scotland would immediately have interest rates that were too high, and which had the effect of strangling its economy.

The only Yes-voting poster I could find who understood these problems favoured a short period of sterling usage followed by the setting up of Scotland's own currency.  There are obvious difficulties with this, but at least it has the merit of allowing monetary decisions to be made in Scotland rather than in Threadneedle Street in the City of London.

That most posters didn't understand the problem is rather depressing, and raises the unattractive prospect that the Yes vote could win without its supporters really understanding what they were getting into.

Electorate has no grasp of economics.  Who knew?

Petroc Trelawney and the Bridcut amnesia

A strange case of amnesia seems to attend people reading John Bridcut's book Britten's Children.   Petroc Trelawney is one of several who don't seem to have been paying attention.  Otherwise he wouldn't have written the following in the Torygraph: "Yes, Britten found working with young people exciting and inspiring – but that was as far as it went. In current times, it’s reassuring that we can listen to Britten comfortable in the knowledge that he is unlikely to be the subject of a posthumous tabloid exposé".

Actually Bridcut's book sets out in some detail the curious case of the chorister Harry Morris. In 1937 Britten, then 24, took Morris, aged 13, on holiday to Crantock in Cornwall with his family. Britten had bought Morris new pyjamas. Whilst there 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".

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. 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 - that he was blameless - is somewhat undermined.

Britten's admirers are prone, like Trelawney , to drawing a veil over the less pleasant side of his personality. Extraordinarily, Bridcut himself is just as guilty as Trelawney. A couple of years ago he wrote to the Guardian defending Britten on the paedophilia charge. "There was no suggestion of impropriety", he wrote. Had he forgotten about Harry Morris? Had he not read his own book?

Actually there is a clue to Bridcut's approach in its title - Britten's Children. It should have been called Britten's Boys. There are no girls in it.

As a fellow toiler in the field I admire Britten's talent. He could do anything he chose and do it brilliantly. But like all composers he was limited by the constraints of his personality and preoccupations, which in Britten's case were focused on the corruption of innocence (my suspicion is that Britten knew about this corruption from both sides - corrupter and corrupted). But this is a narrow theme and Britten mined it to the point of tedium.

In any case musical history is littered with examples of the prodigiously talented who are now forgotten. Talent is not everything. Hector Berlioz, a far far greater composer than Britten, has been described as a "genius without talent". If this is slightly unfair to Berlioz on the talent front, it well makes the point that genius and talent are separable.

(It's also worth pointing out that for all his genius, Berlioz never succeeded in co-opting the French musical establishment - when he finally got a job at the Paris Conservatoire it was as assistant librarian - whereas Britten was a master at rising up the greasy pole and discarding those who were no longer any use to him.  I genuinely think this does account for at least some of his pre-eminence today. There is a deeply unpleasant vignette in Britten's letters where he and Lennox Berkeley are recorded as spending an evening sniggering over Vaughan Williams' scores, laughing at the "mistakes" in the orchestration; this the same RVW who interceded on Britten's behalf when the LSO were ridiculing Our Hunting Fathers, the composer's first major orchestral work.)

Ultimately what makes music last is the quality of the invention, and it is on this front that Britten, for me, falls down. I have seen most of his operas and conducted some of his music but I can't remember a note of any of them. Perhaps a few bits of the Four Sea Interludes. People will be whistling and playing John Williams in a hundred years; I'm not sure about Britten.

And I have to correct Petroc Trelawney about the popularity of his work. I went to see Midsummer Night's Dream recently - it left me cold, although that's not the point: the point is that the theatre was half empty. Doesn't Trelawney know that these shows are put on not because the public wants them, but because the world of state-subsidised arts administration has decided the public should have them?  It'll be interesting to see how that pans out.

Lastly, Britten is often accused of scuttling off to America in 1939. To be fair, the evidence suggests that he and Pears didn't go because of impending war (although of course everyone knew it was coming). But I have always thought the War Requiem (one of his best works) both telling and evasive in its choice of poetry: much easier, after all, to make the pacifist case in the context of the 1914-18 war than the one which had just finished.  If I could have asked Britten one question today it would have been this: "If more people had been pacifists and we had lost the war, how long do you think it would have been before the fascist regime had allowed gay marriage?" I hope the irony that this reform was enacted by the kind of conservatives that Britten savaged in Peter Grimes would not have been lost on him. 

Yesterday I had the good fortune to conduct the D Minor Piano Concerto by Brahms in a stunning performance by the Indian pianist Julian Clef, aka Julian Pulimagath.  Now Britten despised Brahms, saying that he played some through once a year to remind himself how bad it was.  And yet the Brahms D Minor has a degree of pathos, dignity, tenderness, determination and finally warmth which I find conspicuously lacking in Britten's music.  The sad thing is not that Britten couldn't have done all that if he'd wanted to.  It's that he didn't want to.

Ken Livingstone and the tax gap

These are strange days indeed.  Before the weekend the Torygraph reported Ken Livingstone as criticising Gordon Brown for "borrowing £20 billion a year at the height of the boom in the first decade of this century in order to avoid having to increase taxes, because he wanted to increase public spending".  Speaking at a "Labour Assembly Against Austerity" Mr Livingstone described this as "an act of cowardice".

Before one raises a hallelujah for the sinner that repenteth and so on, it's worth pointing out a) that Livingstone blames the Tories too for excessive borrowing, b) that he would like Labour to put up taxes to fill the gap and c) his figures are wrong - actually during the height of the boom Brown borrowed about £40 billion (plus or minus a few billion) for five successive years.

I realise that this is a old tune now, but it's one I never mind playing: the new Keynesians who wanted Osborne to reflate the economy by increasing borrowing (before Osborne proved them wrong) are merely Keynesians-lite - they were silent when Brown passed up the opportunity to swallow the hard part of the great man's prescription - run a surplus during the good times. I don't remember Owen Jones and his ilk shouting for higher taxes or lower public spending then.

When the Blair government briefly balanced the books at the beginning of the first term it was because Labour had pledged to stick to Tory spending plans in an effort to avoid a repeat of the "Labour's tax bombshell" headlines said to have done for John Smith in 1992.  Otherwise Brown defiantly ran a counter-cyclical deficit, promising that he had done away with Tory boom and bust.

Nevertheless I think Livingstone's outburst is good news, because it may be a sign of increasing focus on the issue that matters, namely, what sort of public services can we afford with the tax take which the public is willing to bear?  He is also correct that borrowing to consume is inherently dubious because it is living today off our children's future income.

There is a delusion on the Left to the effect that Britain's fiscal gap can be closed solely by taxing the rich more.  They're wrong.  Firstly, there aren't enough rich people.  Secondly, when you put marginal tax rates up the rich call their accountants, arrange their affairs differently or go elsewhere.  As it happens the richest 1% in the UK currently pay nearly 30% of all income tax; in the late 70's when marginal rates were nearer 90% the figure was about 11%.

Livingstone is right that we can have whatever public services we want, but the reality is that it isn't just the rich who will have to pay more tax, but the rest of us as well.

RIP John Tavener

Desperately sad to hear last night of the death of John Tavener.  It must be awful for his wife and family.  He was only 69.

I wrote a few months ago about my four years of lessons with John, and you can read the post here if you're interested.  He was a nice man and a thoroughly distinctive and utterly fearless composer working in a time of conformism masquerading as radicalism.

So now the tributes will come flooding in.  I heard one of them last night, an interview with ex-Radio 3 controller Nicholas Kenyon on Front Row.  Kenyon said that in the 1980s Tavener had been an unfashionable composer, and that it was heartening to see his reputation growing again.  When I heard Kenyon say this I did wonder, Unfashionable with whom?

Tavener's relationship with the BBC was an uneasy one.  I remember seeing him literally shaking with anger at a rebuff that one of his favourite sopranos had received.  He had overcome the Corporation's reservations about this girl, and persuaded them to allow her to broadcast one of his pieces, but afterwards a producer had written to her to point out that this occasion was a one-off, and that as far as he was concerned she still had not passed her BBC audition.

Tavener was white with anger.  I can't remember exactly what he said, but it contained words like "petty", "mean" and "vindictive".  And then he said - and I do remember this clearly - "They hate me.  They hate me because I'm popular".  This while pacing up and down his living room in Wembley Park.  "But because I'm popular, they can't ignore me".

The question of what music was for was one we discussed many many times.  It was easy for composers like Bach or Haydn who worked for patrons, the church and the aristocracy respectively, but afterwards more difficult.  He was sure though that music had to communicate with an audience, and that if it didn't there was probably something wrong with it.  At the time - the mid 1980s - this was not a widely held view in the British musical establishment, and it's probably fair to say that an artificial reverence for the recondite and intimidating still lurks in mouldy corners.

Personally I am not a great fan of Tavener's music.  As I've written here many times before, it's about the invention, stupid - you either like it or you don't.  And I don't, or not that much.  I like his attitude to the world and his humility (although like a lot of humble people, John defended his humility with a certain amount of ferocity) more than I like the music which those attitudes inspired.  But undoubtedly he was a wildly, extravagantly ambitious composer who wrote music a lot of people loved.  That is a very rare thing now, and I'm not sure there's another living British composer who inspires such affection.

The last time I saw Tavener was from row J at the Bridgewater Hall last July.  My wife told me to go and say hello, and I wish now I had overcome my scruples.  I know he would have been absolutely charming and it would have been good to have said - however unwittingly - goodbye.

Ha-Joon Chang, Ed Miliband and the energy companies

Ha-Joon Chang will be familiar to some readers as author of 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism.  Today he is on the Graun's op-ed pages supporting Ed Miliband's idea of getting companies to pay their staff more.  Chang's thesis is that companies could afford to pay their staff higher wages, but choose not to.  "Many companies do in fact have significant influence over what they charge . . . it may be (they have market power) because they face little competition, like the railway companies . . . So at least companies with market power are perfectly capable of paying their workers more by charging customers more, if they so wanted - except that they don't".

Let's examine what might happen if a company facing "little competition" decided to put its prices up to pay its workers more.  I happen to know a bit about this because I am trying to get a new landline put in at the moment, and there is only one provider of landlines, BT (anti-plug for BT - they have been totally rubbish).

If BT put its prices up the cost will, as Chang says, be passed on to consumers.  So ordinary people who have a landline will be made poorer merely to pay BT staff more. Moreover, some people who don't like BT's price increase might decide to get rid of a landline altogether and rely on a cable connection or mobile phone instead.  BT's market share would decline, as would its profits. As its business shrank it would lay off workers.

As I wrote yesterday this looks suspiciously like a Tory policy, taking money from the many to give to the few. Yet it was Ed Miliband's idea, and Mr Chang, who teaches economics at Cambridge, supports it.  The expression "ivory tower" springs to mind.

In the face of such madness it is reassuring to turn to the Torygraph, which has enough fruitcakes of its own, but also the reassuringly sensible Jeremy Warner, who writes today that our problems are "not going to be solved by Labour's economically illiterate mix of price controls on energy and tax incentives to create higher wages.  This will only succeed in raising unemployment . . . In truth there are no easy fixes for falling real incomes, since the underlying cause is endemically poor productivity . . . You cannot spend what you don't earn unless you borrow the difference".

Amen.

One last point about Ha-Joon Chang. I can think of a number of companies which face "little competition" and which could pay their workers more by raising prices. The big six energy companies for example. I wonder what Ed Miliband would think of that?

Suzanne Moore, Russell Brand - high expectations

A spirited defence of Russell Brand comes from Suzanne Moore, deploring "the ranks of the professionally sensible" who have attacked him.  It's a novelty to find oneself bracketed, however unwittingly, as professionally sensible, but there we are.

Writing in the Graun, Moore thinks that Brand "nicely highlights the narrowness of our present political discourse . . . that discourse needs busting open . . . all the retorts amount to a defence of parliamentary democracy, a political process that many are clearly alienated from (sic) . . . those who accuse Brand of naivety are themselves naive about what voting achieves . . . Brand hits home because politics as it is enacted is dull and conformist . . . This system is so dead and closed that there feels little choice . . . In reality people are falling away from political parties. Brand's idealism is in part a response to this. . . He is right on many counts and while we are far from revolution we have a younger generation with high expectations and no means to meet them.  

Some points in no particular order:

Parliamentary democracy has got flaws, but, as Churchill said, the alternatives are worse. Brand, as he readily admits, doesn't have a programme; but if he did, how would he go about implementing it?

Since parliamentary democracy is apparently deplored, I could only imagine this would be by violence.

Actually such an attempt would fail, partly because the machinery of the state would be exercised to suppress it, and partly because it wouldn't command majority support; but I hope it's enough for me destroy Brand's credibility to point out that violence would be the only plausible means. After all, he doesn't intend to do it via the ballot box.

Surely Suzanne Moore, writing for the benevolent falafel-chewing gluten-free Guardian, couldn't be endorsing violence, could she?

Secondly, the Anonymous protestors, with their sweat-shop made face masks, may be right about some things, but they don't represent anyone but themselves. Brand and his new friends may rail against Parliament, but the truth is that even tired old Parliament has more democratic legitimacy than they do.

Thirdly, if there feels little choice in our parliamentary democracy it's because, essentially, the big intellectual arguments have long ago been won and lost.  There is a general consensus in Britain that people want a sort of social democratic capitalism, in which the market's dynamism is harnessed and tamed to provide economic freedom but also an adequate safety net for the poor.

This sort of model has been discredited by events of the last five years, partly because the capitalism which made a few people rich by providing debt to the rest of us collapsed in a heap; and partly because its collapse revealed that the welfare system paid for with the fruits of that debt wasn't affordable. But most people believe and hope it can still be made to work, and this is where British politics is now - arguing about the details. It might change, but the views of Brand and Moore are still in a tiny minority.

Lastly, the "younger generation with high expectations and no means to meet them" is almost worth a blog in itself, but I think Moore's analysis is partly right. It's quite possible that the rising generation might be the first in a long time to end up being poorer than their parents.  I say might because when I look back at my own childhood I remember wooden toys, an orange in your stocking at Christmas, holidays in rainy Scotland, and not daring to ask if I could share a room when my girlfriend came to stay; whereas even the least fortunate of my children's contemporaries have had computer games and phones that would have made us gasp, cheap holidays in the sun, endless restaurant meals and no-questions-asked room-sharing when significant others come round. Living standards have gone up dramatically in the last forty years.

Ah, say Moore and her ilk, but what about jobs? What about getting on the housing ladder?

Boring I know, but unemployment was much higher during the Thatcher years, and as for the housing ladder, most people didn't ever think they would ever own their own property anyway; ironically it was Mrs Thatcher who put the notion into the public's mind. I didn't own a house until I was thirty six.  It was the first time since leaving home that I had gone upstairs to bed, because I hadn't lived anywhere with two floors.

Actually, although loan-to-value levels are high, the proportion of mortgage payments to average earnings is very low by historical standards because interest rates are so low.  People can't get on the housing ladder not because prices are too high but because, post-credit crunch, mortgage companies are demanding a sizeable deposit which they don't have. None of us is used to saving, and that's because we got used to a period in the nineties and twenty-hundreds when credit was easy to get: if you wanted something, you just went to the bank and the money was handed over.

This is where I agree with Moore.  The younger generation has high expectations and no means to meet them.  If they had a little more curiosity about the last hundred years of British history (and there are after all quite a lot of people available to ask about it) they would see that they are in fact incredibly fortunate - they have grown up in a time of enormous personal liberty, freedom from strife, unparalelled life expectancy and material affluence.  It's a crisis of expectation.  But not any other kind of crisis.

Reflections on Russell Brand

As befits a comedian, Russell Brand has always seemed to me essentially a joke figure.  Surprisingly, other people seem to be taking his ideas seriously.  He's been on Question Time, been interviewed by Paxo on Newsnight, guest-edited an edition of the New Statesman and now has been given a full page article in the Grauniad.

Essentially Brand's argument is that the main political parties don't represent the views of ordinary people. They are in hock to the City and in any event are run by the pusillanimous and the corrupt.  Democracy isn't working. We need to send a signal to politicians, and we can start by refusing to vote.

So far so sixth-form.  But is he right about any of it?

First of all Brand is wrong to say that parties don't represent ordinary people.  Actually a whole industry has grown up to inform politicians what ordinary people are thinking.  Polling gurus read the runes and tell the parties what the man in the street is concerned about.  The parties may be slow to react, but react they do.

For example, the number one issue which concerns the British - rightly or wrongly - is immigration.  Poll after poll shows this to be true. For years both parties - but particularly Labour - ignored the issue, hence the apparently irresistible rise of the EDL and UKIP. The main parties have now responded; there isn't much they can do about the issue (our right to control our own borders has been largely ceded to the EU) but their policies have changed in so far as it is within their power to do so.

That's the way that two-party politics works. Labour and Conservative may be superficially the same old parties, but they do alter over time.  The Labour party of Michael Foot was a different beast from the same party under Kinnock; it changed again under Tony Blair, and it's changing again under man-of-principle Ed Miliband. The same is true for the Tories.

So Brand's contention that the parties don't represent ordinary people seems unlikely to be true, because if there was something British voter were desperately concerned about the focus groups would be telling the pollsters, and the pollsters would be telling their political paymasters.

I think what Russell Brand means is that the parties don't represent him.  That seems inevitable given that he has been given space in the press precisely because his views aren't mainstream.

Democracy's flaw is that to work well electorates should be intelligent and well informed. Ours isn't, and no-one exemplifies this better than Brand himself.  I'm willing to believe he's an intelligent guy - he writes beautifully - but like many people who have other things to preoccupy them than the tedious detail of politics and economics, he doesn't actually know very much. Judging from his article in the Guardian today, his knowledge of what caused the financial crash and continues to impede economic growth is absolutely minimal.

I wonder whether, if you asked him, he would be able to tell you, without looking it up, what our debt to GDP ratio was currently, what Britain's current deficit was, how many years out of the last 50 we have run a surplus, when that was and why it happened, what activity the bankers were engaged in which enabled them to make so much money, how many jobs the City of London supports, how much tax revenue and foreign investment it brings in, why Alastair Darling had no choice but to bail out the banks, what the Glass Steagall Act was and why it was repealed, or what was distinctive about the period 1993 to 2008.

My guess would be that Brand would know no more than one or two of these things at most. And yet he thinks he knows better than everyone else what's wrong with our economy. That's democracy in a nutshell. It gives people who know next to nothing the same electoral influence as those who take an obsessive interest in politics. And that's as it should be. You can't have enfranchisement tests.

Ah, Brand might say, but hardly anyone else knows these things either; and he'd be right. And that's why we are wrong to complain about our politicians - they are the product of our own apathy and ignorance.

As for not voting, Brand is welcome to it. The fewer people vote, the more my vote counts for. His brand of Trustafarianism sounds to the outsider like the whining of a disappointed narcissist. I was going to suggest that he take a good look at himself in the mirror. But he's probably doing that anyway.

P.S. It occurred to me after writing this that the most plausible argument that our society needs sweeping away and starting anew is that so many people in it think Brand's arguments warrant attention.  I guess I'm as guilty as anyone.

Brimming with political ideas - Ed Miliband and the living wage

Ed Miliband has demonstrated again his ruthless mastery of politics. I am not being ironic. The BBC reports today that he has "unveiled plans to deliver a living wage of at least £7.45 per hour for millions of people if Labour wins the next election".

Let's examine what the consequences of this would be. In the public sector, it would mean that there was less money to go round other areas of public spending. In the private sector it would make companies forced to go along with the proposal less competitive at a stroke.

In both cases it would mean a little more pay for some, but fewer jobs for others. You could caricature this as being more like a Tory than a Labour policy, concentrating wealth in the hands of the employed rather than those looking for work (who would now of course be less likely to find it).

I am absolutely sure that Miliband, who once taught economics at Harvard, knows full well what the consequences of this policy would be. And yet he promises it nonetheless. This is why I call him ruthless. Just as with his energy price cap, he knows that there are plenty of people in Britain ill-informed and desperate enough to vote for him on this prospectus.

I think we're going to see a great deal more of this before the next election.  There's a distinction between policy and politics.  Sadly, Miliband looks to me brimming over with political ideas but woefully short of plausible policy.

Ultimately there's only one way to widespread prosperity, which is for this country to pay its own way in the world by providing products and services that people in other countries want to buy. If living standards are falling, it's because we aren't doing that well enough. It's depressing to sound like an unattractive character in a Northern mill drama (or, for that matter, like Alderman Roberts of Grantham), but sometimes the truth is hard to swallow.

Chris Huhne and the Leveson proposals

For some inexplicable reason the Guardian, only a few months after his release from prison for getting his wife to take his speeding points, has taken to printing columns by the former energy secretary Chris Huhne. You may say that Huhne has paid his debt to society and well done Alan Rusbridger for sending some work in the direction of his former colleague (Huhne did a stint on the Graun's European desk many many years ago).  I'm not so sure. The Huhne-Pryce saga revealed Huhne to be a man of insatiable ambition, a bully, a liar, and someone who thought the law of the land did not apply to him. I think his presence diminishes the paper. Other columnists are available after all. But what do I know?  I'm only one of the small and dwindling band of people who still pay to read the Guardian.

Today's Huhne column is particularly hard to stomach, since it's on the subject of the new press regulator. (That the Guardian expects its readership to fork out to read his comments on this change in the law is particularly galling, since Huhne, when in office, showed absolute contempt for it. But that's the Guardian these days.  Its sense of righteousness only extends so far.)

The article is trailed by the headline, "Self-regulation failed for bankers. Why should it work for journalists?" Well of course it won't. Even the threat of criminal prosecution didn't deter them from phone-hacking (although more of that in a minute). But why then does Huhne think a new state-sponsored regulator will? Huhne's article finishes with the prediction, "The system will bed down.  Everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about."

It's curious how the high-profile people gunning for the press have an interest in seeing it muzzled.  MPs are unhappy at their hounding over expense claim abuses, Hugh Grant didn't like their reporting his use of prostitutes or revelation of his fathering a child from a brief fling, and Steve Coogan was unhappy with the Mail for its own prostitutes plus cocaine stories.

My sympathies for celebrities are limited. Both Coogan and Grant have made films for the Murdoch empire (did they not read the name on the cheques?), and both have made lavish use of publicity interview tours to promote their work. The words "heat" and "kitchen" spring to mind.

The people who do need protecting from the press are the innocents like the parents of Milly Dowler; and yet the people who hacked into her phone are either in prison or currently facing a gruelling and humiliating trial at the Old Bailey. The criminal law did not deter their persecutors, but it will deter anyone with any brains who sees what has happened to them. As usual, we are changing the laws in a panic when it would have been better to make sure the - perfectly adequate - existing ones were enforced.

It'll be interesting to see which papers sign up to the new regulator.  The Spectator and Private Eye have said they won't, undeterred by the threat of punitive libel costs. My guess would be that the publishers of the Guardian will. That's because Rusbridger and his colleagues are pusillanimous hand-wringers, lacking the cojones to defy the government and damn the consequences.

It's worth dwelling for a moment on what those consequences are. A non-Leveson compliant publication which is sued for libel but wins will nevertheless be liable for its own costs and for the costs of its unsuccessful opponent. I've italicised this because costs are a crucial issue in litigation. Just imagine if you are a trigger-happy litigant nursing some semi-imaginary grudge. Even if you lose your action against a non-compliant publication you have nothing to lose overall because they'll have to pay your costs anyway. The libel courts will be flooded by the over-sensitive. Non-Leveson publications might as well give up now.

If you take on a non-compliant publication and win, the newspaper will have to pay you extra punitive damages.

These costs orders will be enforced by the State.

And yet advocates of the Leveson approach deny that it involves any element of political control of the press.

None of the above will apply to publication on the internet.  Leveson's report has only a couple of pages on it.

As I've sometimes observed here, you can tell an awful lot about an idea by the people who support it. This one is advocated by Chris Huhne, which seems about right. It's a right Chris Huhne of a proposal.

Lou Reed, post modernism and the avant-garde

Suzanne Moore writes an interesting piece in the Graun today about The Velvet Underground, the death of Lou Reed, which she feels deeply, and how, as the headline puts it, post-modernism has killed the avant-garde.

All the great Velvets' songs (Sweet Jane, Waiting For My Man, Venus in Furs) were essentially three (or sometimes two, or even one) chord pop songs.  The band flattered their fans into thinking they were listening to something radical, whereas essentially they merely took a lot of drugs, played badly, were recorded badly, and wore sunglasses.

All over the anglophone world young people from the suburbs of provincial towns (Moore was born in Ipswich) illuminated their lives by imagining themselves as outsiders, glamorous acolytes of Andy Warhol. The fans weren't so keen on the Velvets' forays into sonic experimentation.  As Moore herself says, Reed's most successful solo album, Transformer, pushed boundaries only in its suggestions of transexuality (a trope perhaps borrowed from David Bowie and Mick Ronson, who produced it, and who had been exploiting the sexual ambiguity thing for several years); otherwise Transformer was unashamedly commercial.  It's no accident either that Reed's follow up, Metal Machine Music, was returned to record shops in droves as "edgy" fans baulked at its wall of noise.

In a way Reed's career demonstrates only too well what the avant-garde should be, and what pop actually is. The Velvets experimented.  People didn't like it. They recorded simple pop songs about the joys of drug taking and S&M, and people who would never indulge in either bought the records in their thousands.

You have to applaud the willingness of artists to experiment and fail (particularly when they don't ask the general public to pay for their efforts); and yet the cult of experimentation has probably got too deep under our cultural skin, so the young and aspiring have for decades now made originality their mantra.  Originality is all very well, but Transformer was a much better album than Metal Machine Music even though it was so derivative.

(I have personally always quite liked Nicholas Maw's notion of having inherited a tradition and not wanting to deviate too far from it.)

Moreover the entrenchment of avant-gardism as an artistic practice has been self-consuming.  As experiencers of art, we have become unshockable.  Our exposure to so much that seeks to startle has made us alive to the likelihood that any new piece of art will attempt to do just that, and accordingly we are inured to its impact.  Not so much The Shock of the New as The Predictability of the New.

So I don't agree with Moore that post-modernism has killed the avant-garde.  The avant-garde has eaten itself, and I actually don't think post-modernism has killed anything.  If there is any kind of argument for this proposition it is that by showing their technical contrivances and by juxtaposing conflicting artistic languages, artists have undermined the persuasiveness of meaning: that we can no longer take seriously an artistic language because we have become too aware of the processes which underpin it and of the possibly of a different language existing alongside.

But here in the world of classical music we have been dealing with this for well over a hundred years.  As soon as composers began making specific reference to music of an earlier period the authority of a contemporary style began to be undermined.  If post-modernism has killed musical language it's strange that people still play and enjoy the Holberg Suite, or Dumbarton Oaks; or that people can enjoy a piece from 1830, say, when they have just finished listening to one from 1930.

The reality is that in any sphere, not just music, a language which is persuasive will draw in those experiencing it, and persuade them, if only for the duration of that experience, that it represents a convincing view of the world.  If a language fails to do that it will atrophy.

You don't seem many attempts today to go beyond (or even as far as) Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.  Today's avant-garde usually becomes tomorrow's blind alley.

Mark Elder and Nigel Kennedy lock horns

In August the Graun ran an interview with Nigel Kennedy, in which the "bad boy" violinist apparently said, "I think conductors are completely over-rated . . .  because if you love music, why not play it?  Why wave around and get off on some ego shit?  I don't think the audience give a shit about the conductor . . . no one normal understands what the conductor does.  No one knows what they do!  They just wave their arms out of time."

Fast forward to October, when the paper printed a short Q & A with Sir Mark Elder, in which the Halle's MD was quoted as saying, "(Kennedy) and I have given wonderful performances together, and yet there he was saying we're all a load of wankers, and that nobody knows what we're there for".

The notion that no-one knows what the conductor does is widespread. Conductors don't after all make any sound during performances (apart from a little grunting from time to time), and it must seem to the general public like a rather inexplicable profession. But conductors do do something. Several things. Here are some of them.

In an orchestra someone needs to take a broad view of the tempo and shape of a work, and in rehearsal it's useful to have someone involved but not playing to identify problems that need to be fixed. Conductors control the speed of the music (otherwise which of the players would decide?), and with their hands help provide information about dynamics, articulation, balance and phrasing. Anyone who thinks that what conductors do with their hands makes no difference has not tried it. Von Karajan used to say that by varying his upbeat he could make the strings, or woodwind, or brass, play early in a tutti chord, and although I probably couldn't do that I have enough experience to be pretty sure that it's true. The players often say they don't watch (and certainly listening is just as important), but it's funny how you can get them to play the same passage differently by beating in a different way.  

So conductors are useful in performances and vital in rehearsal. But are they "a load of wankers" just the same? Well quite possibly. This is where I disagree with Elder.  It's quite possible to conduct great performances and be a plonker at the same time. It's not only possible, but likely that plonkers are going to be over-represented in the stick-waving business, given that it tends to attract people who like standing on a box, talking down to others, making their own separate entrance and getting an extra round of applause from the audience. I should know.

Next, Kennedy will be telling us that policemen are more than averagely likely to enjoy hitting people with sticks, or that footballers quite like playing football. Who knew?

I actually think that orchestral players expect the conductor to be a bit of a divvy. Inevitably some of them are. It's tempting to play up to this expectation actually, because often one's own real personality is just not adequate to the task of rehearsing an orchestra for three hours at a stretch. One becomes larger than life. I once had a piece performed by a conductor who wore an embroidered waistcoat. In the rehearsals. I actually didn't think he was a plonker. He was just doing what the players expected him to do.

But Kennedy is also wrong if he imagines that only conductors can be idiots, and in this regard he betrays a lack of self-awareness which is fatal to his argument. It's quite possible for a soloist to be a plonker as well.

You may well think that only someone with a very narrow set of interests could possibly be sufficiently driven to acquire the technical skill to make an international career as, for example, a violin soloist. You might find a person like that adopting a succession of eccentric hair styles and outfits in an attempt to make themselves seem more interesting. Such a person might be tempted to adopt a "mockney" accent to disguise their middle-class background, and try a foray into other musical styles for which they had only a modest aptitude; jazz for example.

I leave it to you to decide whether this photograph depicts such a person.

National security - back to the steam age

I can't have been the only person to notice that if you hack into the private communications of the government, you face jail; whereas if the government hacks into your private communications that's perfectly OK.

I don't generally have much time for attention seekers like Bradley Manning, but it does seem curious that getting unauthorised access to, for example, the US National Security Agency's records, is punishable with a long prison sentence (or in Edward Snowden's case, years of exile; or in the case of one British hacker a long struggle against extradition); whereas if the US National Security Agency hacks into your emails or phone calls, be you a private individual or a friendly foreign leader like Angela Merkel, that's just the kind of routine stuff the state does every day.

There are arguments which go some way to explain this strange disparity of outcome, but nevertheless it's striking that the state can do whatever it likes, whereas we can't.

Orwell's vision of a telescreen in every room, watching us while we watch it, is becoming truer by the day.

If I were a terrorist of any kind, I'd be doing my plotting by Royal Mail.  It's easy and cheap to set up computer systems which monitor email and search for keywords - "terrorist" and "plotter" for example (and it's a big hi to all the good people at GCHQ!) - but it's time consuming and expensive to steam open envelopes in a back room of a sorting office.

Bullies - Grant Shapps and the BBC

The Tory party chairman Grant Shapps is in the news again, this time for an interview in the Sunday Telegraph in which he says, in terms, that if the BBC wants the licence fee renewing it had better get its act together.  The BBC, says Shapps, suffers from a culture of secrecy, doesn't look after our pennies well enough, and has a left-of-centre bias.

It is no longer controversial to say that the BBC was biased.  Successive internal reports, by John Bridcut amongst others, suggest the Corporation has had an institutionally liberal outlook on matters such as immigration, although the reports are always careful to stress that this is how things used to be.

The reports also use the word "liberal", not "left wing".  I think this is because to admit it had ever been left-of-centre would be an utter disaster for the BBC; anyway, "liberal" has a nice cuddly feel, doesn't it?  Who could feel threatened by liberalism?

Actually if you consider what the obverse of a "liberal" bias would be, the answer is, as I've observed here before, a "conservative" one.  As so often with officialdom, words are chosen to obscure meaning rather than to communicate it.

The thought that the BBC might have had a bias that was the opposite of "conservative" is not quite so comforting for people that value its place in British society.

Not surprisingly the Guardian wades into the debate this morning, accusing Shapps of being a bully and comparing him unfavourably with Norman Tebbit.  Coming from the Graun that's abuse indeed.  And you can see their point.  The idea of a political party trying to get the state broadcaster to run a more sympathetic agenda sounds uncomfortably like Eastern Europe pre-1990.  The paper's leader finishes, " . . a fair and informed national broadcaster matters far more to Britain than a here-today, gone tomorrow partisan politician".

A fine declaration, but one which does rather beg the question, is the BBC's coverage actually fair?  I'm not going to address this now because I don't think it sheds much light on the Shapps controversy. You might find it striking that whilst there is no shortage of ex-BBC staff willing to say that the Corporation is on the whole a left of centre organisation, there have been none, and I mean none, who have come forward with the opposite view.  You might also have noticed that it's a while since any Labour politician complained about the BBC being a Rightist organisation.  But for the moment that's all beside the point.

What might legitimise Shapps' complaint is a consideration of who decides what constitutes "fairness".  The BBC mandarins would probably say it's for them to decide, and I wish them luck with that difficult job.  But the BBC relies on public consent for its continued existence, and it matters a great deal to the Corporation if a significant proportion of the public think it is biased.

Shapps is worth taking seriously not because he is an MP or Government minister (he is neither), but because he represents a much broader constituency up and down the country which thinks that over decades the BBC has got things wrong and is still getting them wrong now.  Failure to heed this constituency undermines the case for the licence fee and jeopardises the BBC's continued existence.

Larry Elliott taxes the rich a bit more - again

The most economically literate journalist the Guardian has - and it's not saying much - is Larry Elliott.  This morning he weighs into the debate about taxing the rich.  I wrote a couple of weeks ago ("Labour's missing billions and the privileged few") about the problems inherent in this.  Elliott unwittingly confirms my conclusion - which was that increasing top rates of tax for high earners won't solve our fiscal problems.

He reports the conclusions of an IMF report which suggests that the rich, particularly in the US, might be undertaxed, quoting the following passage: "The implied revenue gain if top rates on only the top 1% were returned to their levels in the 1980s averages about 0.25% of GDP, but the gain could in some cases . . . be more significant".

"Applying the IMF's formula to Britain", writes Elliott, "would mean that the exchequer would raise an additional £4bn from taxing top earners".  If the IMF are right (although, as my "Labour's missing billions" post pointed out, an HMRC report from 2012 suggests that putting up top tax rates to 50% might actually have lost the Exchequer money rather than raised any extra), "applying the IMF's formula to Britain would mean that the exchequer would raise an additional £4bn from taxing top earners, since 1% of national output is about £15bn".

In case you think this is a large sum of money, it isn't.  Even Elliott admits "This is not exactly a fortune". What he doesn't tell Guardian readers (assuming any of them actually read the economics page) is just how small a sum it is.  The UK has to borrow £4bn on the money markets about every ten days just to keep going.

So when you've taxed the rich a bit more, then what?

The idea that the massive gap between what it takes to run Britain (as currently constituted) and the nation's income can be filled by taxing the rich more is the political equivalent of one of those 19th century quack cures like Ward's Drop.  People want to believe it will work, but they don't want to know too much detail in case the detail reveals that it won't.  That's why Elliott left "This is not exactly a fortune" to his last para and didn't enlarge on the consequences.  He could for example have pointed out that even raising an extra £4bn still left a further £116bn unfunded at current deficit levels.

The maths imply only four choices for us.  One, tax everyone a lot more, and not just the rich.  Two, cut spending.  Three, a combination of one and two.  Or four, go bust.

Wilshere for England

The other day I watched from the Old Trafford stands as, late in a game against Liverpool, David Moyes brought on a late substitute, the young Belgian winger Adnan Janujaz.  A slight stick-like figure, uncannily similar in shape to the young Ryan Giggs, Janujaz received the ball wide on the right, faced the defenders in front of him with a wiggle of the hands as if to say, "Come and get it if you can", shaped left and right, then with a shift of his hips left them all standing.  He might be a wunderkind - it's too early to say - but he looks at the very least a good prospect.

And he might just play for England.

How can this be? Janujaz was born in Belgium, but could also play for Albania via his parents or Kosovo (if they had a senior team: they don't).  He turned Belgium down when offered, and has said he would prefer to play for Albania.  But Roy Hodgson has said the FA are monitoring Janujaz with a view to calling him up to play for England in due course, taking advantage of a 5 year residency rule - news which caused the Arsenal and England midfielder Jack Wilshere to comment a few days ago, "The only people who should play for England are English people . . . If you live in England for five years it doesn't make you English. . . If I went to Spain and lived there for five years I'm not going to play for Spain".

Wilshere is largely right (though I suspect that the unlikelihood of his playing for Spain rests less on personal preference and more on not being good enough to attract a Spanish domestic club in the first place).  But of course the key is, who exactly are English people?  Janujaz, who has been at Man U for two years, hardly qualifies.  But what about other British sporting greats?

Mo Farah came to England when he was 8.  That seems fair enough. Kevin Pietersen didn't come to Britain till he was 19, and opted to play for England to avoid the racial quota system in his own country. He's South African.  So are Jonathan Trott, who came here aged 20, and Craig Kieswetter.  Chris Froome has raced under a British licence on the basis of his father's nationality but otherwise has almost no personal links with the UK.  Bradley Wiggins on the other hand, though born in Belgium, went to school in North London.

Why is any of this important?  Because international sportsmen represent their country.  When England run out onto the pitch we want to know that however rubbish they may be they are nevertheless a product of the same climate, language, diet, geography and culture as we are.  Otherwise we can't identify with them. Simple as that.  Even though Monty Panesar wears a turban and has a brown skin, he's very obviously much more English (ie, bad at fielding) than KP, who frankly I wouldn't have in my house.

In an attempt to refute Jack Wilshere the journalist Paul Hayward, writing in the Torygraph this morning, cites the examples of Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis, who, startlingly, is apparently "mixed race".  Who knew?  But as we've seen Farah came here when he was 8, and as for Ennis, she was born in Sheffield and no-one gives a bugger about race any more (at least not in sport, a results based business): truly I have never, not once in many years spent haunting football terraces, ever heard anyone say, "So and so shouldn't play for England because he's black".  Never.  So in a way it is heartening to see that Wilshere has reservations about Janujaz, who looks white to me, because he is not English.  

You don't have to be born in England to be English.  But having grown up here certainly helps.

Lady Chatterley, the Y-word and creeping censorship

I don't remember much of the 1960s (because I was too young, not because I was off my face all the time), but I know that until 1968 theatre productions in the UK were regulated by the Lord Chamberlain's office. That's to say, if you wanted to put on a play, you had to get a licence.  This seems extraordinary now, but it's all of a piece when you consider that Penguin books were prosecuted for publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover as recently as 1960.

How freedom of speech has come on! Now you can say - or show - pretty much anything you like.  Hard core pornography is available at the touch of a button, and Channel 4 puts on a show called Sex Box which, apparently, features couples having it off and then talking candidly about it on screen.

Oh that D H Lawrence should have lived to see this hour!  Oh Mariella Frostrup that your career should come to this!

Well not so fast.  I wonder whether in fact we have not reached the high watermark of liberty, and whether the tide is now ebbing.  It was depressing to read that at the weekend a Spurs fan was arrested for being one of thousands of Spurs fans shouting the word "yid" at White Hart Lane.  As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the Y-word is not a racist slur, and in the football context it is not even anti-Semitic. Now a yobbo from Kent gets prosecuted for posting on Facebook a picture of a burning poppy captioned with the words, "Take that you squadey (sic) c---ts".  Now UKIP's crappy Godfrey Bloom gets booted out of the party because the media wilfully misunderstands his use of the word "slut" and Nigel Farage won't stand up for him.

We live increasingly in a world where you cannot say what you like, or at least not if you say something the chattering classes (people like me, in other words) find unacceptable.  The sad irony is that advances in freedom of speech were driven by the Liberal Left - the Conservatives lost that argument comprehensively around the time prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffiths-Jones asked the Chatterley jury, "Is this a book you would want your children or servants to read?" - but it is the Liberal Left which is leading the charge back to censorship. It sometimes seems to me that there is a range of opinions which it is legitimate to hold, and within that range you can say what you like.  But should you stray outside, woe betide you.

Too many people in Britain fail to understand that there is no right not to be offended.  And that true freedom of speech involves other people being able to say things you really don't like.  That's a freedom worth having because it gives you the right to say things they don't like either.  That the decline from this ideal should be driven by the same political group that was instrumental in giving it to us in the first place I find desperately sad.

P.S. A couple of days ago at the LSE freshers week two students from the University's Atheist Secularist and Humanist Society were told to cover up "Jesus and Mo" T-shirts (you can read the satirical online cartoon here), on the basis that they were "offensive" and might be considered "harassment".  Yes, that's right.  The LSE founded by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, forefront of 60s student radicalism, telling a pair of students what they can and can't wear. The wearing down of freedom of expression goes on and on.

Life cycles

A couple of weeks ago some toerag broke into our garage and stole the family bike.  Eventually its loss began to be felt and I was sent to Halfords to buy another one.

Having dashed his hopes of selling me a £1,000 model, the young sales assistant and I fell to discussing the cheapest and second cheapest instead.  Pressed about the difference, he said, "Well this one's got 21 gears, whereas that one's only got 18".  I had to laugh.  "When I was your age", I said, "we had Sturmey and Archer three-speed and thought we were lucky", shocked to find myself sounding, and not for the first time, exactly like one of the Four Yorkshiremen.

The shop assistant wouldn't have been thinking this, because he was far too young to know who the Four Yorkshiremen were.

The other day my son went away to University.  I don't remember much about my first experience of going away to school, aged 11, except there were many moments when having to hold it together was almost overwhelming; and some when it actually was.  But I do remember going away to University, less traumatic for the experience of boarding school, and I am therefore all the more bemused to be in the same situation thirty five years later, except this time playing the role of Father instead of Son.

Truly I have become my Dad.

What to make of this?  Life is not exactly a circle.  If it were, I'd be the Son still.  Perhaps more like a shallow spiral, where, having come all the way round, you find yourself tantalisingly close, unreachably close, to where you were decades previously.

No doubt these thoughts, perhaps true, are cliches.  But being cliches none the less true.

George Osborne and balancing the books

One striking thing about George Osborne's Tory conference speech yesterday was his pledge to run a budget surplus in the next Parliament.  You would imagine no Chancellor would have to say such a thing.  It would be the obvious aim of anyone in control of the purse strings, just as it would be the obvious aim of any footballer to try and win a game.  And yet years when budget surpluses actually happen are as rare as hen's teeth.  Since 1963 British governments have only managed it seven times.  It's a measure of how used we have become to living on debt that Osborne can make this announcement and people act surprised.

I hope Osborne can make it happen, amongst other reasons because it will flush the Keynesians-lite out of the woodwork. Since the financial crash it's surprising how many people who remained silent on economics during the Brown boom have been telling us that they were Keynesians all along, and that the solution to our problem is Keynesian deficit spending.  They forget that there are two parts to Keynes, the easy and the hard part.  The easy part is the spending bit.  The hard part is saving money during the good times so that when recession comes the Government can pump-prime the economy.  Where was Ed Balls during the Brown boom?  At Gordon Brown's right hand, is where.  Running a deficit, year after year.  How dare he urge deficit spending now.

It was an aide of Ronald Reagan who delivered the surprising apercu that what cannot go on forever must stop.  Deficits can go on for a long time, but unless the economy is growing dramatically the aggregate of debt to GDP balloons as well.  When Labour came to power in 1997 the ratio was 40%, widely regarded as manageable.  But because of the credit crunch and Labour's spending it has risen to about 90%, considered by economists to be not far below the level from which it becomes impossible for a state to recover, as rising interest payments increasingly dominate a government's spending.  Don't forget that QE money has been poured into buying up UK gilts, keeping the prices down.

Osborne was right to warn yesterday of the risk of another recession - considerable, if the wheels come off the Euro wagon - and the consequences this would have for the UK's debt stock.  In a recession we would be running a deficit again, like it or not, with an effect on debt-to-GDP which can only be imagined.  As I've said repeatedly, I think Labour will win in 2015.  I don't expect Chancellor Balls will be aiming for a budget surplus.  The rest of us had better hope we don't have another recession.

Ed Miliband - a rising tide of folly?

"Now the rising tide just seems to lift the yachts", said Ed Miliband in his conference speech.  It marks another step in the progress of Labour's criticism of Coalition economic policy.  First austerity would kill growth; then when growth returned it was the wrong sort of growth; now it is growth which is making the rich richer but not the rest of us.  Living standards are not rising, goes the complaint, gilded with a little class war to get the faithful's juices flowing.

There are several things to say about this.  Firstly, the economy has only been growing modestly.  Secondly, it's only been growing for about six months or so.  Thirdly, real living standards haven't been growing for some time, and in fact for young workers started to fall about ten years ago, when Labour was in power.

But it's the fourth point that's the most important.  Why does Miliband (and everyone else) assume that living standards must rise inexorably?

If we have learned anything from the credit crunch it is surely that the West has used debt to plug the gap left by reduced national income. In Britain, manufacturing industry went overseas - more than a million jobs in manufacturing lost during the Blair years - to people that were willing to work for a dollar a day.  These people had far, far lower living standards than we did (although, interestingly, they still thought it better to live in poor conditions and work in a sweat-shop than labour in the paddy fields all day - Apple's critics please note).

Here, our living standards carried on rising, defying gravity, but only because government, house buyers and consumers took on eye-watering quantities of debt.  In Britain the level of personal debt when Labour came to power was about £500 billion.  In the following fifteen years it trebled to £1.5 trillion.  That's £1,500,000,000,000.  There is a limit to how much more we can take on (although surely we will try).

Actually it's possible to argue that we got into difficulties precisely because we wanted higher living standards.  In the post-war years this demand made our wage costs higher, and our industries less competitive. The newly rich economies of the Far East, looking for somewhere to park their money, were happy to lend it back to us so we could carry on buying their goods.

So I don't expect to see living standards rising much any time soon.  And I wonder whether they would be a good thing anyway. Consumerism is shallow, and its devotees boring.  I used to think that prosperity would make people cultured and civilised, but it actually just makes them go out and buy the stupid tat they fetishised before they had money.  Perhaps that's capitalism's fault.

Moreover, the higher wages are in Britain, the more difficult it will be for us to keep the manufacturing jobs we have and perhaps even make new ones.  I would much rather see living standards stagnate but more people have jobs, and I sometimes think the best hope for us is that people in the Far East have living standards which gently rise while ours gently fall to meet somewhere in the middle.  It might mean that people would turn their faces away from consumption a little.

But falling living standards is the cri du jour.  Expect to see many more cries for higher wages from the economically illiterate before 2015.