James Purnell - liberal Humanities graduate

The appointment of former Labour minister James Purnell to a top BBC job - one of those titles like Head of Vision or Strategy or something - is old news now, but computer problems have silenced this blog as effectively as the Stasi for a week or so, and Purnell has been on my mind.

The hoo-ha about his appointment is overdone.  For one thing, try finding a person fit to be Head of Strategic Vision, say, who doesn't have political views of one sort or another.  Impossible.  For another, the head of the BBC Trust is Chris Patten, a former Tory minister, and I don't remember anyone being up in arms much about that.

But if the BBC really wanted to appoint Left wingers to senior posts, it wouldn't have to go to former politicians like Purnell.  It would just carry on with the same recruitment policies it's had for years. 

If an organisation recruits from a fairly narrow - in educational and class terms - band of people, it will tend to get people with a fairly similar outlook.  To be specific, the BBC tends to recruit intelligent, well-educated middle-class people with a Humanities degree from a good University.  Who could possibly have thought that they would tend to be Left of centre?

Despite the moanings of various disgruntled BBC luminaries like Antony Jay and Michael Buerk, I very much doubt that there is anything resembling overt political bias at the Corporation.  But the BBC, the window through which British people tend to view the world, is a product of the attitudes of its staff, which in turn are a product of their background and education.  Andrew Marr hit the nail on the head when he remarked that if your staff tend to live in a fairly small area of West London, and eat, drink and in some cases sleep together (he should know), "a certain group-think emerges".

And boy does it.  The experience of moving to the provincial suburbs after 16 years of London (Balham, Notting Hill and finally Stoke Newington) has persuaded me that the majority of people in Britain march to a different drum-beat, and their views - conservative with a small c - are very different from the metropolitan elite.  I don't always agree with them, but it's clear to me that the BBC doesn't represent them. 

You notice it in the programmes that don't get made, the people who don't get interviewed, the questions that don't get asked and the assumptions that are made about where the centre ground in politics lies.  The BBC retains a surprising deference about the Royal Family, but on the whole it sees the world through the eyes of liberal Humanities graduates.  There are worse ways of seeing the world, but nevertheless the appointment of James Purnell is a red herring.  It's the big picture that's a bit fishy.

Quentin Tarantino, Hilary Mantel and Edward Elgar - all in one post

I wrote last summer about seeing Elgar's Coronation Ode performed at the Proms; to recap, it is a piece of jingoistic pomposity written for the coronation of Edward VIIth.  The music isn't the Worcester Wizard's finest, but the really startling thing about it was the libretto, served up by A.C. Benson.  Since Benson wrote the words to Land of Hope and Glory no-one should be surprised to find the Coronation Ode offered a disconcerting glimpse into the Edwardian mind, a place as remote from our sensibilities as the ice planet Hoth.

At the time I contrasted this almost incomprehensible difference with Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies, a historical novel which none of its admirers seems to have noticed superimposes a modern consciousness on Henry VIII and his hangers-on.  Whatever else it is, BUTB (and its predecessor, Wolf Hall) is not a portrait of 16th century Britain.

If Elgar and Benson are utterly foreign to us only a hundred years on, Henry and his chums can only be recreated by a supreme act of imagination, which Mantel does not even attempt.  I have always wondered what is the point of the historical novel, but one which doesn't even have a go at showing what might have motivated a people and informed their culture is more baffling than most.

I didn't expect to find Quentin Tarantino's new film, Django Unchained, doing this at all, let alone doing it a lot better, but it really does.

I'm not a Tarantino fan, finding the violence just a bit too pointless, but I like the bits of his films where the characters just talk to each other, and sure enough there is a quite wonderful encounter between Django, a runaway slave, Dr. Schutz, his mentor, and a slave owner, Calvin Candie, which forms the climax of the film (or should have - in a rare failure of pacing there's a further half hour tacked on in which Tarantino himself makes an ill-advised appearance).  Candie, very well played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a monster, and through him Tarantino has a very decent stab at doing something Mantel cannot.  That is, showing someone thoroughly inhabiting a set of attitudes utterly alien to our own and yet functioning recognisably as a human being.  Despite all the gore - the hallway of Candie's mansion appears at the end to have been showered in blood - I thought it was, as my children might say, proper good art.

I have recently found myself wondering what the composer of the Coronation Ode would have made of Britain today.  Empire gone, locked in an uneasy embrace with the EU, gripped by austerity, in and out of recession.  "Mightier still and mightier / Shall thy bounds be set"?  Hardly.  So I have written a five-minute orchestral piece, Blighty, which imagines a Pomp and Circumstance march for the new century.  It is of course unperformable, a piece of post-modernism in which the language of Eric Coates rubs shoulders with hip-hop and ends with a whimper of defeat.  But some pieces just have to be written.

As for Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies has just won another award. Funny old world.

Despising Chris Huhne

So now we know it was true all along.  Chris Huhne really did put pressure on his wife to take speeding points for him.

The scale of the former Guardian journalist's dishonesty is extensive.  Obviously he lied at the time of the initial charge.  He lied in his public statements.  Then he must have lied to his legal team (who could otherwise not have represented him).  He made strenuous and unsuccessful efforts to have the prosecution struck out (at considerable expense to you and me, the poor old taxpayers).  Only when the reality of the trial hit him did he finally listen to his legal advisors' warnings about the likelihood of a conviction.

Huhne has pleaded guilty in order to get some discount on his sentence.

Amidst the many unattractive features of his behaviour is the depth of ambition it reveals.  Here is someone who has clawed his way up the greasy pole only to find the depths beneath yawning.  Realising that ruin beckons, he scrabbles all the more desperately to stay aloft.

Here too is the arrogance of power.  Motoring convictions are for the little people.  People like me don't take a prosecution lying down - we try to get them struck out and issue public protestations of our innocence, deploring that the state should have been so misguided.  We call a press conference!

Shades of Rebekah Brooks.

And yet amidst the loss of his career (although I wouldn't bet against a comeback) there is worse.  The papers reveal a vituperative exchange of texts between Huhne and his son, a relationship apparently sundered when it became apparent that the ex-minister was leaving his wife for another woman.  Of all the woes of his current situation this must be the most painful.

As time goes by the opportunities for philandering become mercifully fewer.  So, less mercifully, does the inclination.  Flowing blond locks (I have the photos to prove it, honest) fell out long ago, washed down the plughole of life.  The clean cut jawline sags like an underdone doughnut.  Infidelity, which might once have been attributed to an unscrupulous admirer or a moment of weakness, could now be achieved only by a determined campaign.

Thank God.  Because nothing, nothing, would be worth the torment of my children's contempt.

Prison is the least of Chris Huhne's problems.

Dr. Tim Morgan and The Perfect Storm

At the end of last year a ComRes poll revealed that only 6% of respondents understood that the national debt was rising rather than falling.  That's because most people don't understand the difference between the deficit (our annual overspend) and the debt (the aggregation of all our past annual overspends).

I'm explaining it in case you are one of the 94%.  If you're not, apologies.

In the face of such ignorance, it's hard to see how we're going to come to terms with the economic problems facing the country. Which are legion.

I was reflecting on this after reading the latest of Dr Tim Morgan's magisterial series of reports into the state of the British economy.  Dr Morgan is Head of Global Research at brokers Tullett Prebon, and over the last year or so he has published three or four of these blockbusters.  They are easy to find on the net.  Just Google Dr Tim Morgan Armageddon.  Yes that's right.  Armageddon.

Broadly speaking Dr Morgan's thesis is that most of the growth we enjoyed during the Brown boom was due to borrowing.  If you assume that this borrowing - government, consumer, housing-related - is at or near its peak, there is little likelihoood of a similar stimulus to the economy in future.  So no wonder the economy is not growing.  It's not going to.  This is sobering, but for most people outside the Keynesian-lite cadre of Ed Balls and his fellow-travellers, not terribly surprising.

How did we get into this situation?  Now Dr Morgan has released a new report, entitled "Perfect storm: energy, finance and the end of growth", which addresses the issue.

"Fundamentally, what had happened here was that skilled, well-paid jobs had been exported, consumption had increased, and ever-greater quantities of debt had been used to fill the gap. This was, by any definition, unsustainable . . . anyone who believed that a globalisation model (in which the West unloaded production but expected to consume as much, or even more, than ever) was sustainable was surely guilty of wilful blindness. Such a state of affairs was only ever viable on the insane assumption that debt could go on increasing indefinitely . . . the process of globalisation has distorted the normal relationships between production, consumption and debt beyond the point of sustainability. The West is in deep (and perhaps irreversible) trouble because it has consumed more, just as it has produced less."

I'm aware of course that I enjoy reading Dr Morgan's work partly because I like a frisson of horror every now and again; but also partly because I agree with most of his conclusions.  There's nothing like a bit of external self-validation.

"The real causes of the economic crash are the cultural norms of a society that has come to believe that immediate material gratification, fuelled if necessary by debt, can ever be a sustainable way of life . . . "  Amen to that.

And confirming my suspicion that all the financial services industry did was enable us to keep on borrowing, "There has been widespread public vilification of bankers, the vast majority of whom were . . . only acting within the parameters of the ‘debtfuelled, immediate gratification’ ethos established across Western societies as a whole . . . Bankers, trying to establish an even larger borrowing market . . . created the ultimately disastrous phenomenon known as subprime, in which mortgage funds were advanced to borrowers who were not remotely capable of keeping up 

repayments".

Dr. Morgan is right about almost everything.  No, really.   

"Alongside wasteful investment allocation and disastrous labour market policies, the West has allowed the rise of two extremely damaging cultural norms. The first of these is the unchecked rise of consumerism, fostered by an advertising industry which spends close to $470bn annually (and about $143bn in the United States alone)."

"The second is a sense of entitlement, both at the individual and at the national level. Welfare systems, originally intended as safety nets, have been allowed to price Western workers out of international markets. Benefits systems, even if they are not (as is often claimed) “lifestyle choices” for the recipients of benefits, certainly have been exactly that for the armies of administrators that flourish in almost all such systems. The rise of welfarism has imposed huge social costs and taxes on businesses, placing them at an ever greater competitive disadvantage which has been exacerbated by well-meaning labour legislation in which considerations of profitability and efficiency are also-rans when measured against supposedly ‘progressive’ social objectives.  Worst of all, Western countries and their citizens have behaved as though their affluent lifestyles are some kind of divine entitlement rather than the reward of productiveness."

But admirers of Dr. Morgan will find new shocks in his paper.  The first is that he thinks that the markets will "in the very near future" realise that central banks can never reverse their massive Quantative Easing.  "If – or rather, when – the credibility of eventual reversal is lost, a dire chapter of recklessness is likely to end in money-printing, hyperinflation and collapse."  

But there's worse.  The long  period of economic growth across western economies has coincided with and depended on the availability of cheap energy.  But energy is now going to get even more expensive, partly because of rising living standards and rising demand in India and China, and partly because of the increased cost of extracting oil from the ground.  

Put simply, the more it costs to extract energy the greater the percentage of a country's national income which has to be devoted to pay for that extraction.  Initial oil deposits - the low hanging fruit if you like - were cheap and easy to extract.  Now it's getting much much more expensive, and paying for that extraction will cripple economies, particularly those that don't have big reserves themselves.

Our way of life will be over, within a decade!

If I believed everything Dr. Morgan wrote I'd be stocking up on rice and pasta.  I don't, or at least, not completely.  For one, he seems to be enjoying his doomsaying slightly too much.  And we shouldn't assume that because his analysis of how we got to where we are looks unnervingly accurate his prognostications will come true.  After all, twenty years ago, when Britain was emerging from Black Wednesday and the longest period of economic growth in our history was just beginning, you could have stuck a hundred clever and well informed economists in a room and not one of them would have come up with the current scenario.  The chances of Dr. Morgan being right in every particular are very small.  Harold Macmillan's "events, dear boy" have a way of making idiots of us all.  

Secondly, I think Dr. Morgan underplays the ability of technology to transform the way energy is consumed and supplied.  Oil won't run out - it'll just become too expensive and we'll have to use something else.  The something else could itself provide an opportunity for growth (the question of whether growth is of itself a good thing is for another day.  Or days).

Lastly, although humans are very bad at preparing for change they are very good at adapting to it when it arrives.  The world will look different, but we will probably cope with it.

The 94% who didn't know the difference between the debt and the deficit worry me much more than Dr. Morgan.  Because it's in the dawning realisation for them that there may be no return to the old days of reckless plenty, and in the painful adjustment which must follow, that the true danger to civility lies.