Today comes the news that a gang of unruly Sherpas threatened and beat three climbers on Everest.
To understand this story it is necessary to understand that Everest is big business. Lots of people are willing to pay a lot of money to climb the mountain. Nepalis can earn quite a good living - at least by local standards - helping to ferry parties up and down. In this instance a party of Sherpas appear to have been fixing ropes (a great time-saving device) when the Europeans may or may not have got in their way.
A couple of years ago I went to hear a climber give a lecture which included an account of his ascent of Everest. He described how the mountain is littered with the bodies of the 1 in 10 who failed to make it back down, frozen where they gave up. And how, whilst passing beneath the Lhotse face, a Japanese climber fell on the glacier a matter of yards away. The lecturer, a GP in civilian life, said that he had seen enough road traffic accident victims to know that the climber had broken just about every bone in his body.
None of this seemed to put him off however, and he duly got to the top.
To me the GP did not seem a proper mountaineer. Sure, he was fit and determined, but somehow he had missed the point of it. The aim of climbing is not just the summit. It is about what happens on the way. I've often thought that the effort, expense and risk of going to the Himalaya was disproportionate for a fleeting moment on top of the world; but when you must step around the dead to do it, what then?
The pioneering Scottish climber, writer and environmentalist, W H Murray, was deputy leader of the Everest reconaissance expedition of 1951, and, had things worked out slightly differently, could have been on John Hunt's successful expedition two years later. Murray must be turning in his grave. Even then he had grasped what moral and cultural effect sustained attempts on the mountain would have.
"Because it's there", replied George Mallory, when someone asked him why he wanted to climb Everest. That was a good answer at the time because Everest was unclimbed. Now hundreds of people have done it, it's a less good one.
A much better explanation of climbing had been given a generation previously by the Cambridge academic, philosopher and Alpine pioneer Sir Leslie Stephen. "We climb", he said, "to remind ourselves what it's like". And this nails it. It's about the experience while it's happening. Not the end result.
"High camps in the Himalaya and Everest itself are becoming dumps strewn with every conceivable detritus of previous expeditions", wrote Bill Murray, "from discarded oxygen cylinders to discarded bodies". That's how it is on Everest. Why remind yourself what it's like?
Tuesday 30 April 2013
Stephen Hough and road to the Good Society
"Do musicians tend to be socialists?", asked pianist Stephen Hough in the Torygraph a week or so ago.
A fair question, and one you might ask about artists more generally. Hough's answer - broadly yes, because it's only a few generations ago that musicians were treated like servants - doesn't seem to me to hold water. Few people allow their great-grandfather's vocation or politics to influence their views. Anyway, many professional musicians won't have an ancestor who trod the same path.
But if artists do tend to be left wing, why might that be? The immediately obvious answer - that they tend to depend on state subsidy and are therefore more likely to support the parties that provide most of it - strikes me as only part of the story.
Speaking as an artist who is not left wing but is nevertheless significantly to the left of Genghis Khan, I would say it is because artists are interested in the human condition; what it is like to be human; how humans interact with each other; how humans relate to the broader physical world. At the heart of that interest is compassion for humanity. It's a compassion that artists are often surprisingly bad at extending to their friends and family, but nevertheless there's a striking congruity between the focus of art and the sort of institutionalised compassion that is at the heart of left wing politics.
To reverse Hough's question, how could any artist not be left wing? My personal answer would be that parties which promise institutionalised compassion sometimes fail dismally to apply it in practice; that such compassion alters the way which whole populations behave, and not necessarily for the good; and that the version of it which the left wants to see enacted is not affordable anyway.
Amongst artists, views like these confine one to leper status, which is a shame. Artists are meant to think, and there is more than one road to the Good Society.
A fair question, and one you might ask about artists more generally. Hough's answer - broadly yes, because it's only a few generations ago that musicians were treated like servants - doesn't seem to me to hold water. Few people allow their great-grandfather's vocation or politics to influence their views. Anyway, many professional musicians won't have an ancestor who trod the same path.
But if artists do tend to be left wing, why might that be? The immediately obvious answer - that they tend to depend on state subsidy and are therefore more likely to support the parties that provide most of it - strikes me as only part of the story.
Speaking as an artist who is not left wing but is nevertheless significantly to the left of Genghis Khan, I would say it is because artists are interested in the human condition; what it is like to be human; how humans interact with each other; how humans relate to the broader physical world. At the heart of that interest is compassion for humanity. It's a compassion that artists are often surprisingly bad at extending to their friends and family, but nevertheless there's a striking congruity between the focus of art and the sort of institutionalised compassion that is at the heart of left wing politics.
To reverse Hough's question, how could any artist not be left wing? My personal answer would be that parties which promise institutionalised compassion sometimes fail dismally to apply it in practice; that such compassion alters the way which whole populations behave, and not necessarily for the good; and that the version of it which the left wants to see enacted is not affordable anyway.
Amongst artists, views like these confine one to leper status, which is a shame. Artists are meant to think, and there is more than one road to the Good Society.
Thursday 25 April 2013
Avoiding triple dip
So Britain has avoided, pro tem, triple dip recession. The economy grew marginally in the first quarter of the year, providing a bit of much needed good news for the lachrymose Chancellor, George Osborne. The figures aren't actually that comforting when looked at closely: manufacturing declined again, and the sectors spurring growth were North Sea oil and service industries. Nevertheless the economy grew, which is biggish news.
You wouldn't know it listening to The World At One. It was after twenty past when WATO got round to noticing this story, and when it did it was to wheel on an amiable old gent with a failing spectacle manufacturing business in Blackburn. Just in case anyone might have thought the figures were good. And after him, airtime for Ed Balls.
It's worth considering how this might have played if the figures had been different. Then, Britain's first recorded triple dip would have been the lead item. As it was, the lead was an extended discussion, with two studio guests, of a new Royal Charter scheme dreamed up by the newspaper industry as a rival to Parliament's own. Not that any newspapers have actually signed up to this parallel scheme, mind. But a story about the media is obviously much more important than something which might have been construed as good news for the Government.
As for Ed Balls, the bellicose shadow Chancellor was given space to say, eventually, what his alternative strategy would be. It involved a temporary tax cut and other sweeteners.
The presenter didn't ask the obvious question, which was how all this would be paid for.
And so wearingly on from the Corporation.
You wouldn't know it listening to The World At One. It was after twenty past when WATO got round to noticing this story, and when it did it was to wheel on an amiable old gent with a failing spectacle manufacturing business in Blackburn. Just in case anyone might have thought the figures were good. And after him, airtime for Ed Balls.
It's worth considering how this might have played if the figures had been different. Then, Britain's first recorded triple dip would have been the lead item. As it was, the lead was an extended discussion, with two studio guests, of a new Royal Charter scheme dreamed up by the newspaper industry as a rival to Parliament's own. Not that any newspapers have actually signed up to this parallel scheme, mind. But a story about the media is obviously much more important than something which might have been construed as good news for the Government.
As for Ed Balls, the bellicose shadow Chancellor was given space to say, eventually, what his alternative strategy would be. It involved a temporary tax cut and other sweeteners.
The presenter didn't ask the obvious question, which was how all this would be paid for.
And so wearingly on from the Corporation.
Cruising to the Edge; or possibly not
Finally, I have seen it all. Nothing can surprise me any more.
I refer to the activities of Cruise to the Edge, a tour company which offers the combination of cruising to exotic destinations whilst being entertained by your favourite prog rockers. Yes, really. Prog rockers. On a ship.
In a way it all makes sense. In the 1960s and 70s lots of people liked progressive rock. Those people are getting old. Old people like going on cruises. You have to concede there is a shrewd aspect to the plan.
But Oh Jesus. Has it really come to this? You can go aboard the Poesia and, after dining at the "wonderful sushi bar" watch members of Yes rendering extracts from Tales of Topographic Oceans, winding down afterwards by a massage at the "enchanting Balinese spa"? Not very rock and roll is it?
I'm aware that my horror at this prospect arises partly from the coupling together of two concepts I had previously thought unconnected. Old people going on a cruise surely did not have anything to do with men playing electric guitars. The answer turns out to have been that if you wait long enough, it will do. Time has undone us all.
Just as worrying is the idea that a prog rock cruise might actually turn out to be quite fun. And not just in an ironic way. I always disliked Yes, but before punk came along I knew every word and nuance of the albums Genesis made when Peter Gabriel was at the helm, and one of the acts cruising to the edge is Steve Hackett, their self-effacing guitar player during that period. My wife wouldn't come, but then again she might be glad of the chance to get rid of me for a week.
In an irony not acknowledged on the company's website, one of the acts is a band called Saga.
In the fullness of time there will I expect be a cruise ship for ageing punk rockers. I'm saving for the deposit now.
Tuesday 23 April 2013
Alex Salmond gets my Groat - again
Unsurprisingly, a Treasury report issued this morning suggests an independent Scotland will have problems with its currency. Unsurprising because the Westminster government is hostile to independence, but also because the problems are real and shouldn't be glossed over.
Scotland has four choices. Keep the pound, either in a full fledged currency union or on an informal basis (much as Panama uses the dollar); join the Euro; or float its own currency.
A currency union is possible, but would require Westminster's agreement. I shudder to think of the excoriating demands Westminster would make, but to protect sterling HMG would have to have strict control over Scotland's spending and borrowing. There would also be the small matter of the Bank of England being Scotland's lender of last resort.
Using the pound on an informal basis would give Scotland no say in Bank of England base rates, and would deprive it of a lender of last resort.
The problems of currency union being writ large in the dole queues of southern Europe, Alex Salmond has set his face against Euro membership; but it's quite possible that the EU would make adoption of the currency a prerequisite of joining the union, which the Nationalists desperately want to do.
And then there's the groat. Putting aside the expense of setting it up, a new Scottish currency would lead to higher trading costs, and the volatility of its exchange rate would lead to fluctuations in domestic wages and prices.
None of these options is easy. Opting for currency union is fine in theory, but, awkwardly for the Nationalists, leaves Westminster in a position to dictate whatever terms it likes. All these solutions, apart from the groat, would probably leave Scotland with less control over economic policy than it has at the moment. What kind of independence is that?
No, if I were Alex Salmond I'd be urgently researching the Bitcoin.
Scotland has four choices. Keep the pound, either in a full fledged currency union or on an informal basis (much as Panama uses the dollar); join the Euro; or float its own currency.
A currency union is possible, but would require Westminster's agreement. I shudder to think of the excoriating demands Westminster would make, but to protect sterling HMG would have to have strict control over Scotland's spending and borrowing. There would also be the small matter of the Bank of England being Scotland's lender of last resort.
Using the pound on an informal basis would give Scotland no say in Bank of England base rates, and would deprive it of a lender of last resort.
The problems of currency union being writ large in the dole queues of southern Europe, Alex Salmond has set his face against Euro membership; but it's quite possible that the EU would make adoption of the currency a prerequisite of joining the union, which the Nationalists desperately want to do.
And then there's the groat. Putting aside the expense of setting it up, a new Scottish currency would lead to higher trading costs, and the volatility of its exchange rate would lead to fluctuations in domestic wages and prices.
None of these options is easy. Opting for currency union is fine in theory, but, awkwardly for the Nationalists, leaves Westminster in a position to dictate whatever terms it likes. All these solutions, apart from the groat, would probably leave Scotland with less control over economic policy than it has at the moment. What kind of independence is that?
No, if I were Alex Salmond I'd be urgently researching the Bitcoin.
Monday 22 April 2013
David Graeber - misunderstanding Rogoff and Rheinhart
George Osborne had a bad week last week - tears at Mrs Thatcher's funeral, chided by the IMF and then the discrediting of a key paper by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Rheinhart which he and others had used to justify austerity policies. Essentially Rogoff and Rheinhart's paper concludes that once a country's debt to GDP ratio gets above 90%, it's very hard to get economic growth. However an American student noticed recently that the Harvard ecnomomists' data set had missed out some countries near the top of the alphabet - a presumably accidental spreadsheet error.
As so often, what's really interesting is not so much the mistake itself - Rogoff and Rheinhart say it doesn't affect their overall conclusion - but the response to it. Anyone would think a coach and horses had been driven through Hayekian economics, and that George Osborne should be sitting inconsolable in a puddle of tears. Here is one David Graeber, for example, writing in the Guardian today - "The intellectual justification for austerity lies in ruins . . . There is now no definite proof that high levels of debt necessarily lead to recession . . . Reinhart and Rogoff's study was wrong".
This is pretty typical. But even if you put aside the hyperbole, Graeber is assuming that the argument against high debt to GDP ratios rests on Reinhart and Rogoff alone. It doesn't. It's not hard to see that the higher your borrowing, the greater percentage of your national wealth goes to servicing debt, the higher the taxes you need to finance the interest payments, and the less you have to spend on growth-generating investment. Whether a ratio of above 90% is the exact point at which it becomes impossible for growth doesn't much matter; the point is, the more debt you have, the harder growth becomes.
And then there's the risk that you might go bust. Graeber is sanguine about this. Why, he wants to know, is a country like Japan, with one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios in the world, able to borrow at 1% on 10 year bonds? Because "everyone knows that in an emergency, the Japanese government could simply print the money", Graeber writes.
There are two things to say about this.
One is that Japan is a classic example of an economy with cripplingly high debts which isn't growing. Hasn't Graeber heard of the term "Lost Decade"? It was coined for Japan. The incoming Prime Minister, Mr Abe, has proposed a new massive programme of QE precisely to try and fix this problem.
Secondly, the idea that Japan (or the UK) can never go bust because it can print its own money is a fallacy, no matter how many times people repeat it. A government which tries to print its way to solvency soon discovers that investors holding foreign currency will demand ever greater interest payments to hedge against the risk that it will decline in value. Eventually the gilt markets will stop buying the currency altogether. And then what? QE in perpetuity? Printing money is not a panacea.
Countries that can do it are in a much better position than, for example, Spain or Greece, hamstrung by their Eurozone membership. But more flexibility doesn't mean they can kiss the back of their own head.
The Guardian describes Mr Graeber as "the author of The Democracy Project". His Wikipedia page is not quite so coy. He is apparently "an anthropologist and anarchist". Why the Graun thinks his views on Rogoff and Rheinhart are worth printing is beyond me. He knows even less about economics than I do.
As so often, what's really interesting is not so much the mistake itself - Rogoff and Rheinhart say it doesn't affect their overall conclusion - but the response to it. Anyone would think a coach and horses had been driven through Hayekian economics, and that George Osborne should be sitting inconsolable in a puddle of tears. Here is one David Graeber, for example, writing in the Guardian today - "The intellectual justification for austerity lies in ruins . . . There is now no definite proof that high levels of debt necessarily lead to recession . . . Reinhart and Rogoff's study was wrong".
This is pretty typical. But even if you put aside the hyperbole, Graeber is assuming that the argument against high debt to GDP ratios rests on Reinhart and Rogoff alone. It doesn't. It's not hard to see that the higher your borrowing, the greater percentage of your national wealth goes to servicing debt, the higher the taxes you need to finance the interest payments, and the less you have to spend on growth-generating investment. Whether a ratio of above 90% is the exact point at which it becomes impossible for growth doesn't much matter; the point is, the more debt you have, the harder growth becomes.
And then there's the risk that you might go bust. Graeber is sanguine about this. Why, he wants to know, is a country like Japan, with one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios in the world, able to borrow at 1% on 10 year bonds? Because "everyone knows that in an emergency, the Japanese government could simply print the money", Graeber writes.
There are two things to say about this.
One is that Japan is a classic example of an economy with cripplingly high debts which isn't growing. Hasn't Graeber heard of the term "Lost Decade"? It was coined for Japan. The incoming Prime Minister, Mr Abe, has proposed a new massive programme of QE precisely to try and fix this problem.
Secondly, the idea that Japan (or the UK) can never go bust because it can print its own money is a fallacy, no matter how many times people repeat it. A government which tries to print its way to solvency soon discovers that investors holding foreign currency will demand ever greater interest payments to hedge against the risk that it will decline in value. Eventually the gilt markets will stop buying the currency altogether. And then what? QE in perpetuity? Printing money is not a panacea.
Countries that can do it are in a much better position than, for example, Spain or Greece, hamstrung by their Eurozone membership. But more flexibility doesn't mean they can kiss the back of their own head.
The Guardian describes Mr Graeber as "the author of The Democracy Project". His Wikipedia page is not quite so coy. He is apparently "an anthropologist and anarchist". Why the Graun thinks his views on Rogoff and Rheinhart are worth printing is beyond me. He knows even less about economics than I do.
Thursday 18 April 2013
Thatcher's funeral and the right to protest
Apparently there were a small number of protestors at Mrs Thatcher's funeral. Some of them shouted slogans and waved placards, some of them just turned their backs on the procession. In Goldthorpe, South Yorkshire, however, some 2,000 people had a right knees up, culminating in the burning of a Thatcher effigy.
People have a right to protest; but I wonder in this case whether they actually were protesting; and if so to whom, and against what?
You protest to show your opposition to some proposed course of action. But that actions the protestors disliked took place 25 years ago and more. In case they hadn't noticed, the focus of their objections hasn't been in office for nearly 23 of those years. During that period she has been in no position to do anything that anyone might have usefully protested about. Even her own party, for personal reasons rather than those of policy, effectively disowned her. She was an ex-Prime Minister. She is an ex-person.
Had Thatcher been alive, this could scarcely have been called a protest; now she's dead, the only people in a position to receive and understand the demonstrators' message are her friends, colleagues and family. Thatcher herself is beyond all that.
It strikes me as pointless at best, shabby at worst, to mark their day like this. And it's not even as if the protestors have in mind some particular part of Thatcher's legacy which they want undone. Some of them are too young to remember exactly what that legacy was, or what Britain was like beforehand. Their message can be summed up like this - "We didn't like her. And we want you to know it".
Mrs Thatcher in her prime lived life as a politician; but for the last decades of her life she lived as a human being. The people who burned her effigy on the day of her funeral, in denying her that humanity, were guilty of the same inhumanity they say characterised her dealings with them. Hypocrites all.
The issue of what kind of funeral Thatcher should have had is a vexed one, and the process by which this quasi state funeral came into being is shadowy and problematic. Will we put on this show for John Major or for Gordon Brown? I doubt it. But if not, who is to decide? It might be about time to have a protocol for ex Prime Ministers. The funeral cost quite a lot of money, which might well have been better spent elsewhere, but I can't help think some of the critics wouldn't have noticed the cost if the deceased had been someone of their own political caste. Personally I think that the nation is entitled to give a decent send off to someone who, whether we liked or loathed them, has been captain of the ship we all sail in.
I have never been to Goldthorpe, a former pit village to the south east of Barnsley, but I went to school near there in the 1970s, and in the five years leading up to the miners' strike frequently made the pilgrimage to Oakwell to watch Barnsley escape first from the old Fourth Division and then from the Third. I can still remember the names of the stations we used to pass on the train from Sheffield - Attercliffe, Brightside, Chapeltown, Elsecar, Wombwell. Even then, before the year long privation of the strike and the collapse of the mining industry, South Yorkshire was a bit of dump. God knows what it was like afterwards. And yet when I see the residents of Goldthorpe on TV, their voices still crackling with anger and hatred, I want to ask them some questions.
"Did you seriously expect every other working person in Britain to keep on paying part of their taxes to prop up miners' wages in perpetuity? When miners had had a 43% pay increase in 1971 and a 35% increase in 1974? When they had effectively brought down an elected government?" Unfortunately it isn't in the nature of TV reporters to ask those kind of questions. "You say Mrs Thatcher ushered in an era of selfishness", I'd have liked to ask, "But didn't the miners try and hold the country to ransom to suit their own purposes? Wasn't that selfish too?"
It's much easier to show Goldthorpe as a benighted khazi with colourful locals than it is to ask why it ended up that way.
I didn't watch the funeral myself. I wrote a few bars of the String Quartet I'm working on at the moment. I didn't like Mrs Thatcher much either.
People have a right to protest; but I wonder in this case whether they actually were protesting; and if so to whom, and against what?
You protest to show your opposition to some proposed course of action. But that actions the protestors disliked took place 25 years ago and more. In case they hadn't noticed, the focus of their objections hasn't been in office for nearly 23 of those years. During that period she has been in no position to do anything that anyone might have usefully protested about. Even her own party, for personal reasons rather than those of policy, effectively disowned her. She was an ex-Prime Minister. She is an ex-person.
Had Thatcher been alive, this could scarcely have been called a protest; now she's dead, the only people in a position to receive and understand the demonstrators' message are her friends, colleagues and family. Thatcher herself is beyond all that.
It strikes me as pointless at best, shabby at worst, to mark their day like this. And it's not even as if the protestors have in mind some particular part of Thatcher's legacy which they want undone. Some of them are too young to remember exactly what that legacy was, or what Britain was like beforehand. Their message can be summed up like this - "We didn't like her. And we want you to know it".
Mrs Thatcher in her prime lived life as a politician; but for the last decades of her life she lived as a human being. The people who burned her effigy on the day of her funeral, in denying her that humanity, were guilty of the same inhumanity they say characterised her dealings with them. Hypocrites all.
The issue of what kind of funeral Thatcher should have had is a vexed one, and the process by which this quasi state funeral came into being is shadowy and problematic. Will we put on this show for John Major or for Gordon Brown? I doubt it. But if not, who is to decide? It might be about time to have a protocol for ex Prime Ministers. The funeral cost quite a lot of money, which might well have been better spent elsewhere, but I can't help think some of the critics wouldn't have noticed the cost if the deceased had been someone of their own political caste. Personally I think that the nation is entitled to give a decent send off to someone who, whether we liked or loathed them, has been captain of the ship we all sail in.
I have never been to Goldthorpe, a former pit village to the south east of Barnsley, but I went to school near there in the 1970s, and in the five years leading up to the miners' strike frequently made the pilgrimage to Oakwell to watch Barnsley escape first from the old Fourth Division and then from the Third. I can still remember the names of the stations we used to pass on the train from Sheffield - Attercliffe, Brightside, Chapeltown, Elsecar, Wombwell. Even then, before the year long privation of the strike and the collapse of the mining industry, South Yorkshire was a bit of dump. God knows what it was like afterwards. And yet when I see the residents of Goldthorpe on TV, their voices still crackling with anger and hatred, I want to ask them some questions.
"Did you seriously expect every other working person in Britain to keep on paying part of their taxes to prop up miners' wages in perpetuity? When miners had had a 43% pay increase in 1971 and a 35% increase in 1974? When they had effectively brought down an elected government?" Unfortunately it isn't in the nature of TV reporters to ask those kind of questions. "You say Mrs Thatcher ushered in an era of selfishness", I'd have liked to ask, "But didn't the miners try and hold the country to ransom to suit their own purposes? Wasn't that selfish too?"
It's much easier to show Goldthorpe as a benighted khazi with colourful locals than it is to ask why it ended up that way.
I didn't watch the funeral myself. I wrote a few bars of the String Quartet I'm working on at the moment. I didn't like Mrs Thatcher much either.
Monday 15 April 2013
Why I love . . . #6 Colin Davis
Sad to hear this morning of the death of Sir Colin Davis. I think it's fair to say that he was the greatest British conductor of his generation. Apart from Mackerras I can't think of anyone else who runs him close. Tod Handley? Perhaps, but Handley never really got the chance to test himself on the biggest of stages whereas Davis ruled the roost at the LSO and worked extensively abroad, particularly with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
I'm struggling to recall the occasions on which I saw Davis conduct. I know I did, because I can visualise him, dapper, economical of movement, controlled. But it was his records that made an impression on me, and particularly his records of Berlioz, and of Sibelius symphonies, many of which I had on vinyl, with their distinctive covers of Edvard Munch paintings.
Davis was a great Sibelius conductor, who not only realised what a great composer the Finn was but - and this is not by any means the same thing - knew how to perform his work, faithful to the scores without being inflexible. For me, even Karajan and Rattle didn't always understand Sibelius - I think with horror of Karajan's bruising end to the Fourth Symphony, a heavy fortissimo against Sibelius's notated mezzo-forte (all the colder for its restraint), or his excessive lingering on the C Major resolution of the the last bar of the Seventh.
Davis didn't make that kind of mistake.
Who will replace him? Rattle's is a good claim, particularly with his work in new music. But whereas I feel that Rattle is self-evidently a great rehearsal conductor, he doesn't always make reliable musical decisions in standard repertoire. Clearly he is very very good though, or he wouldn't have survived so long in Berlin.
On Saturday night we went into Manchester to watch the Halle play Haydn. Mark Elder reminds me a little of Colin Davis - the same economy, the same wonderfully appropriate gestures. Clearly he needs to do more new music (particularly more music by Nicholas Simpson), but he does the standard repertoire really well, has an open mind, and must be there or thereabouts. Rattle is languishing in Berlin. Elder is here in Manchester. RIP Sir Colin. Regis est mortuus. Vivat rex senior.
I'm struggling to recall the occasions on which I saw Davis conduct. I know I did, because I can visualise him, dapper, economical of movement, controlled. But it was his records that made an impression on me, and particularly his records of Berlioz, and of Sibelius symphonies, many of which I had on vinyl, with their distinctive covers of Edvard Munch paintings.
Davis was a great Sibelius conductor, who not only realised what a great composer the Finn was but - and this is not by any means the same thing - knew how to perform his work, faithful to the scores without being inflexible. For me, even Karajan and Rattle didn't always understand Sibelius - I think with horror of Karajan's bruising end to the Fourth Symphony, a heavy fortissimo against Sibelius's notated mezzo-forte (all the colder for its restraint), or his excessive lingering on the C Major resolution of the the last bar of the Seventh.
Davis didn't make that kind of mistake.
Who will replace him? Rattle's is a good claim, particularly with his work in new music. But whereas I feel that Rattle is self-evidently a great rehearsal conductor, he doesn't always make reliable musical decisions in standard repertoire. Clearly he is very very good though, or he wouldn't have survived so long in Berlin.
On Saturday night we went into Manchester to watch the Halle play Haydn. Mark Elder reminds me a little of Colin Davis - the same economy, the same wonderfully appropriate gestures. Clearly he needs to do more new music (particularly more music by Nicholas Simpson), but he does the standard repertoire really well, has an open mind, and must be there or thereabouts. Rattle is languishing in Berlin. Elder is here in Manchester. RIP Sir Colin. Regis est mortuus. Vivat rex senior.
Saturday 13 April 2013
Game of Thrones and John Lanchester's Capital - Fantasy Lands
There comes a point where a cultural phenomenon reaches a point of ubiquity such that the London Review of Books, the Leftie literary magazine, feels it has no choice but to look down from on high and get one of its writers to pontificate thereon. Such, recently, has been the lot of novelist John Lanchester, enthusing at some length over George RR Martin's epic fantasy series Game of Thrones, available in a WH Smiths near you and serialised on Sky for a third series.
Lanchester has done a similar job, repeatedly, for LRB readers on the subject of the financial crisis, and his novel Capital aims to put the fruits of his research into literary form.
I have read the first two Game of Thrones books; someone bought the first for my 13 year old daughter for Christmas (although given the amount of "seed spilling", as Martin often - very often - puts it, I rather wonder whether this was wise). In the fictional worlds of Westeros and Esteros various houses - the Lannisters, Starks, Tyrells and so on - compete for influence under King Robert, and then (spoiler!) compete to replace him upon his demise. Westeros is bounded to the north by a 700 foot wall of ice, keeping out the various rag-tag of wildlings and Undead who range beyond it.
If you like a sweeping narrative, full of knights, bleak landscapes, abrupt violence, serving wenches and intrigue, G of T serves a purpose. It is competently written at least (far less turgid than Tolkein), though perhaps a little purple for my taste. Martin's imaginary world is, at least at first, extremely convincing on its own terms. Moreover its people behave in ways which struck me as rather life-like (certainly in comparison with Lanchester's Capital, which I'll come to in a minute). That's to say quite often the people you are supposed to be rooting for do unpleasant things, whereas the horrible people sometimes do things that are unexpectedly nice. The baddies survive when you hope they won't, whereas Martin is utterly ruthless in killing off really good people if he feels like it.
And there's another thing. Although Game of Thrones is fantasy, Martin succeeded in persuading me at least that I was reading about real people whose behaviour faithfully reflected their culture. There's an early scene in the first book where Lord Eddard Stark, played by Sean Bean in the TV series, beheads a man for desertion. He insists on doing it personally because, he says, if you give the order you should be prepared to do it yourself, be prepared to listen to the man's last words. It's not just that Martin is happy to see his readers like Eddard Stark less (he is actually one of the most attractive characters in the first book); the scene, viewed through the eyes of his watching children, is shocking, as is the discovery that all the onlookers think better of him for his willingness to as it were put his sword where his mouth is. These are people who are like us, but whose sense of ethics and culture are utterly different.
How unlike the feted Hilary Mantel, I found myself thinking, whose characters talk and think like we do and yet behave differently in ways in which her novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies don't see fit to explain.
Martin's books are very long. The second one was over 800 pages (approximately one for each foot of the ice wall). Half way through it I thought with regret that there were only another 400 to go. By the time I reached the end, however, I was pretty sure I wouldn't read any more. There are too many characters, and despite all the room Martin allows himself, only a few of them are developed to any degree. I found it hard to work out which knight was which, and harder to care.
Secondly, the supernatural element in the books, peripheral at first, becomes all pervasive. Sorcery is a bit like CGI in the cinema: when anything is possible, part of the magic dissipates. When Game of Thrones was brutally naturalistic, it packed a punch. But when a boy becomes a wolf in his dreams, or a sorceress gives birth at will to a murderous succubus, the things which Martin made so real at first come to seem less substantial and important. Although Martin is a much better prose writer than J K Rowling, one of the great achievements of the Potter books is that magic is integrated into the stories as a problematic, tricksy and unreliable element. We know magic can't make everything right, particularly when the chief bad guy is so much better at it than almost everyone else.
The nicest thing I can say about John Lanchester's Capital is that I didn't want it to end. Sometimes in a novel you get to like the characters, or some of them, so much that it's painful to tear yourself away from them. Capital has been much touted as a State of the Nation novel, and I enjoyed it very much, but it seemed to me, although readable, engaging and intriguing, to say rather more about Lanchester (and perhaps more broadly his political and intellectual class) than about Britain.
Pepys Road in South London is one of those streets where the process of embourgeousification has left elderly Londoners living alongside nouveau bankers and Premiership footballers from Africa. Lanchester constructs a varied cast of characters and a mystery to go with them in the months leading up to the collapse of Lehmann brothers in 2008.
The really striking thing about the book is that almost all the immigrants (or descendants of immigrants) - the owners of the Asian shop on the corner, the various Polish builders, the Hungarian nanny, the African footballer and his father, the asylum-seeking traffic warden, are lovable and sympathetically treated. In a large cast of characters (thankfully smaller and better drawn than Martin's) only one foreigner (the fraudulent paymaster of the traffic warden, appearing in just a few pages) is unpleasant. OK, Iqbal the Belgian may or may not be a terrorist, but all the others are really nice.
On the other hand, almost all of the white people are shits, obsessed by money and house-prices. Of the bankers, Roger and his wife, her friend Saskia, Mark the creepy deputy, Little Tony, Jez, Eric the barbarian are horrible. Mickey the football club's fixer admittedly gets a bit nicer as the book goes on; Smitty the conceptual artist does not; Parker his assistant gets worse. Mill, the policeman, is a dreary non-entity, and the human rights solicitor is a vain publicity-seeker.
Again, all the asylum seekers are genuine asylum seekers, the arranged marriage between Ahmed and the sexy Rohinka works fine, the foreign workers aren't taking jobs away from British-born people (of whatever skin colour), and the astronomical house-prices are all to do with City bonuses and nothing to do with excessive housing demand caused by immigration.
In view of the author's convenient name, it's tempting to call this La-La Land. Capital is a book in which the dice are so heavily loaded in one direction that it's as boring dramatically as it is likeable. The only man I know personally who might be described as a banker is also intelligent and thoughtful; so such people do exist. A novel where some of the so-called bad guys were quite nice would have been much more interesting, and freed its readers to think a little more carefully about the issues. A novel where all the bankers are horrible is just as tedious as one would be if, for example, all the asylum-seekers were fake or all benefit-claimants scroungers.
One of the reviews on Capital's cover describes the book as "humane", and perhaps it is, to the characters Lanchester wants you to like. But Lanchester makes the other characters so lacking in virtue of any kind that I can't help but wonder if he isn't being patronising to his readers as well as his asylum seekers and Polish builders.
George RR Martin, aspiring only to tell a gripping story, is far less guilty of such authorial favouritism. We know of course that writers decide who lives or dies, who prospers and who flounders, but Game of Thrones has some of the arbitrariness of life. Although Lanchester writes beautifully, Martin's novels in this respect are so much truer and so much more demanding on the reader's sympathies.
The key to this is of course that Lanchester's studies in banker-land have led him to the conclusion, so beloved of the Left, that It Was All The Bankers' fault. Actually his own novel gives a clue to the lie that this is.
Roger's firm goes under, we are told in an aside, because the wholesale money markets dried up. That's to say, it caught the same disease as Northern Rock, borrowing short to lend long. Why did that happen? Because bankers had sought more and more ingenious ways of spreading the risk of loans made to people who were probably not going to be able to repay them. In other words, to satisfy our society's demands for living off debt. When those loans started to go wrong, no-one knew who was bearing the risk; banks stopped lending to each other. Firms like Northern Rock and Roger's went under. Thus the Credit Crunch.
If Lanchester had really wanted to write a novel about the attitudes which caused our current mess, Debt might have been a better title. And better protagonists than the rich banker and his spendthrift wife (who end the book still financially afloat, having sold their £1.5 million house to retreat to the country) might have been people who borrowed too much and went under. Now that would be a metaphor for the state of the nation.
Actually, like so many of the narratives beloved of the deluded, Capital reads more like a prop for Lanchester's world view, with its convenient scapegoats and multikulti feel-goodery, than it does an analysis of the real world outside his study window. I read in Larry Elliott's column in the Guardian this morning that 85% of new jobs created in London between 1997 and 2010 went to people born outside the UK. This is not new news - versions of this figure have been around for years, although I have never seen the number put so high. The British people - quite a lot of them with brown or black skins, and the rest white working class - who didn't get these jobs don't figure in Lanchester's State of the Nation novel.
Like the rest of us, immigrants are good and bad in equal measure. Like bankers, for example. But the forces which allowed them to come to Britain, the forces which allowed bankers to lend their way to riches, and the consequences for British people generally are not explored in Capital. Lanchester thinks it's enough to show bankers as greedy morons and immigrants as figures of cutesy wholesomeness, as if somehow this was a good enough way of dealing with two of the principal phenomena of Gordon Brown's boom years.
Reading Capital and Game of Thrones side by side, John Lanchester looks more like the writer living in fantasy land.
Lanchester has done a similar job, repeatedly, for LRB readers on the subject of the financial crisis, and his novel Capital aims to put the fruits of his research into literary form.
I have read the first two Game of Thrones books; someone bought the first for my 13 year old daughter for Christmas (although given the amount of "seed spilling", as Martin often - very often - puts it, I rather wonder whether this was wise). In the fictional worlds of Westeros and Esteros various houses - the Lannisters, Starks, Tyrells and so on - compete for influence under King Robert, and then (spoiler!) compete to replace him upon his demise. Westeros is bounded to the north by a 700 foot wall of ice, keeping out the various rag-tag of wildlings and Undead who range beyond it.
If you like a sweeping narrative, full of knights, bleak landscapes, abrupt violence, serving wenches and intrigue, G of T serves a purpose. It is competently written at least (far less turgid than Tolkein), though perhaps a little purple for my taste. Martin's imaginary world is, at least at first, extremely convincing on its own terms. Moreover its people behave in ways which struck me as rather life-like (certainly in comparison with Lanchester's Capital, which I'll come to in a minute). That's to say quite often the people you are supposed to be rooting for do unpleasant things, whereas the horrible people sometimes do things that are unexpectedly nice. The baddies survive when you hope they won't, whereas Martin is utterly ruthless in killing off really good people if he feels like it.
And there's another thing. Although Game of Thrones is fantasy, Martin succeeded in persuading me at least that I was reading about real people whose behaviour faithfully reflected their culture. There's an early scene in the first book where Lord Eddard Stark, played by Sean Bean in the TV series, beheads a man for desertion. He insists on doing it personally because, he says, if you give the order you should be prepared to do it yourself, be prepared to listen to the man's last words. It's not just that Martin is happy to see his readers like Eddard Stark less (he is actually one of the most attractive characters in the first book); the scene, viewed through the eyes of his watching children, is shocking, as is the discovery that all the onlookers think better of him for his willingness to as it were put his sword where his mouth is. These are people who are like us, but whose sense of ethics and culture are utterly different.
How unlike the feted Hilary Mantel, I found myself thinking, whose characters talk and think like we do and yet behave differently in ways in which her novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies don't see fit to explain.
Martin's books are very long. The second one was over 800 pages (approximately one for each foot of the ice wall). Half way through it I thought with regret that there were only another 400 to go. By the time I reached the end, however, I was pretty sure I wouldn't read any more. There are too many characters, and despite all the room Martin allows himself, only a few of them are developed to any degree. I found it hard to work out which knight was which, and harder to care.
Secondly, the supernatural element in the books, peripheral at first, becomes all pervasive. Sorcery is a bit like CGI in the cinema: when anything is possible, part of the magic dissipates. When Game of Thrones was brutally naturalistic, it packed a punch. But when a boy becomes a wolf in his dreams, or a sorceress gives birth at will to a murderous succubus, the things which Martin made so real at first come to seem less substantial and important. Although Martin is a much better prose writer than J K Rowling, one of the great achievements of the Potter books is that magic is integrated into the stories as a problematic, tricksy and unreliable element. We know magic can't make everything right, particularly when the chief bad guy is so much better at it than almost everyone else.
The nicest thing I can say about John Lanchester's Capital is that I didn't want it to end. Sometimes in a novel you get to like the characters, or some of them, so much that it's painful to tear yourself away from them. Capital has been much touted as a State of the Nation novel, and I enjoyed it very much, but it seemed to me, although readable, engaging and intriguing, to say rather more about Lanchester (and perhaps more broadly his political and intellectual class) than about Britain.
Pepys Road in South London is one of those streets where the process of embourgeousification has left elderly Londoners living alongside nouveau bankers and Premiership footballers from Africa. Lanchester constructs a varied cast of characters and a mystery to go with them in the months leading up to the collapse of Lehmann brothers in 2008.
The really striking thing about the book is that almost all the immigrants (or descendants of immigrants) - the owners of the Asian shop on the corner, the various Polish builders, the Hungarian nanny, the African footballer and his father, the asylum-seeking traffic warden, are lovable and sympathetically treated. In a large cast of characters (thankfully smaller and better drawn than Martin's) only one foreigner (the fraudulent paymaster of the traffic warden, appearing in just a few pages) is unpleasant. OK, Iqbal the Belgian may or may not be a terrorist, but all the others are really nice.
On the other hand, almost all of the white people are shits, obsessed by money and house-prices. Of the bankers, Roger and his wife, her friend Saskia, Mark the creepy deputy, Little Tony, Jez, Eric the barbarian are horrible. Mickey the football club's fixer admittedly gets a bit nicer as the book goes on; Smitty the conceptual artist does not; Parker his assistant gets worse. Mill, the policeman, is a dreary non-entity, and the human rights solicitor is a vain publicity-seeker.
Again, all the asylum seekers are genuine asylum seekers, the arranged marriage between Ahmed and the sexy Rohinka works fine, the foreign workers aren't taking jobs away from British-born people (of whatever skin colour), and the astronomical house-prices are all to do with City bonuses and nothing to do with excessive housing demand caused by immigration.
In view of the author's convenient name, it's tempting to call this La-La Land. Capital is a book in which the dice are so heavily loaded in one direction that it's as boring dramatically as it is likeable. The only man I know personally who might be described as a banker is also intelligent and thoughtful; so such people do exist. A novel where some of the so-called bad guys were quite nice would have been much more interesting, and freed its readers to think a little more carefully about the issues. A novel where all the bankers are horrible is just as tedious as one would be if, for example, all the asylum-seekers were fake or all benefit-claimants scroungers.
One of the reviews on Capital's cover describes the book as "humane", and perhaps it is, to the characters Lanchester wants you to like. But Lanchester makes the other characters so lacking in virtue of any kind that I can't help but wonder if he isn't being patronising to his readers as well as his asylum seekers and Polish builders.
George RR Martin, aspiring only to tell a gripping story, is far less guilty of such authorial favouritism. We know of course that writers decide who lives or dies, who prospers and who flounders, but Game of Thrones has some of the arbitrariness of life. Although Lanchester writes beautifully, Martin's novels in this respect are so much truer and so much more demanding on the reader's sympathies.
The key to this is of course that Lanchester's studies in banker-land have led him to the conclusion, so beloved of the Left, that It Was All The Bankers' fault. Actually his own novel gives a clue to the lie that this is.
Roger's firm goes under, we are told in an aside, because the wholesale money markets dried up. That's to say, it caught the same disease as Northern Rock, borrowing short to lend long. Why did that happen? Because bankers had sought more and more ingenious ways of spreading the risk of loans made to people who were probably not going to be able to repay them. In other words, to satisfy our society's demands for living off debt. When those loans started to go wrong, no-one knew who was bearing the risk; banks stopped lending to each other. Firms like Northern Rock and Roger's went under. Thus the Credit Crunch.
If Lanchester had really wanted to write a novel about the attitudes which caused our current mess, Debt might have been a better title. And better protagonists than the rich banker and his spendthrift wife (who end the book still financially afloat, having sold their £1.5 million house to retreat to the country) might have been people who borrowed too much and went under. Now that would be a metaphor for the state of the nation.
Actually, like so many of the narratives beloved of the deluded, Capital reads more like a prop for Lanchester's world view, with its convenient scapegoats and multikulti feel-goodery, than it does an analysis of the real world outside his study window. I read in Larry Elliott's column in the Guardian this morning that 85% of new jobs created in London between 1997 and 2010 went to people born outside the UK. This is not new news - versions of this figure have been around for years, although I have never seen the number put so high. The British people - quite a lot of them with brown or black skins, and the rest white working class - who didn't get these jobs don't figure in Lanchester's State of the Nation novel.
Like the rest of us, immigrants are good and bad in equal measure. Like bankers, for example. But the forces which allowed them to come to Britain, the forces which allowed bankers to lend their way to riches, and the consequences for British people generally are not explored in Capital. Lanchester thinks it's enough to show bankers as greedy morons and immigrants as figures of cutesy wholesomeness, as if somehow this was a good enough way of dealing with two of the principal phenomena of Gordon Brown's boom years.
Reading Capital and Game of Thrones side by side, John Lanchester looks more like the writer living in fantasy land.
Friday 12 April 2013
Nigel Farage right about something shock
Unlikely support for the proposition that the BBC's chart show should play "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead" if it gets to Number 1 on Sunday arrives today from Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP. Farage is right of course. If you believe in freedom of speech you have to accept things you find offensive. Although I think it's tasteless to mock a person's death (and cruel when they have children who can't be held responsible for the parent's shortcomings), stopping the BBC from playing the record is far worse.
It's worth reminding ourselves that the BBC wouldn't play the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen during the Silver Jubilee of 1977. That was craven. Also that Mrs Thatcher herself censored the words of Irish Republicans at the height of the Troubles. That was just stupid as well as wrong, because broadcasters merely got actors to read out their words. I hope common sense prevails on Sunday. We should be free to assess what people do and say.
The nouveau Judy Garland fans are celebrating prematurely anyway. The Witch may well be dead, but her ideas are still stalking the land.
Incidentally, fact fans might like to look at a very informative piece by Jeremy Warner in the Torygraph here listing ten myths about Thatcher, which will interest enthusiasts and detractors alike.
P.S. Predictably, in its efforts to avoid offending anyone, the BBC ended up making a right Horlicks of "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead". On its chart show the song featured only as a ten second clip in a news item; whereas the Thatcher lovers' riposte - The Notsensible's I'm In Love With Margaret Thatcher - was played nearly in full. I find it very hard to understand how the Corporation's management can make such a bollocks of this. They merely had to say, "The chart show reflects what records people are buying. That's all", and wait for the Tory attacks to go away. As it is they have made themselves look partial as well as censorious. One despairs.
It's worth reminding ourselves that the BBC wouldn't play the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen during the Silver Jubilee of 1977. That was craven. Also that Mrs Thatcher herself censored the words of Irish Republicans at the height of the Troubles. That was just stupid as well as wrong, because broadcasters merely got actors to read out their words. I hope common sense prevails on Sunday. We should be free to assess what people do and say.
The nouveau Judy Garland fans are celebrating prematurely anyway. The Witch may well be dead, but her ideas are still stalking the land.
Incidentally, fact fans might like to look at a very informative piece by Jeremy Warner in the Torygraph here listing ten myths about Thatcher, which will interest enthusiasts and detractors alike.
P.S. Predictably, in its efforts to avoid offending anyone, the BBC ended up making a right Horlicks of "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead". On its chart show the song featured only as a ten second clip in a news item; whereas the Thatcher lovers' riposte - The Notsensible's I'm In Love With Margaret Thatcher - was played nearly in full. I find it very hard to understand how the Corporation's management can make such a bollocks of this. They merely had to say, "The chart show reflects what records people are buying. That's all", and wait for the Tory attacks to go away. As it is they have made themselves look partial as well as censorious. One despairs.
Wednesday 10 April 2013
Trusting the John Muir Trust - again
Almost exactly two years ago I posted the following -
"I told you so" are said to be the most unattractive four words in the English language. You might want to bear them in mind however when you read the following.
The John Muir Trust is an environmental charity whose name honours the pioneer emigre Scot instrumental in persuading the US government to found the Yosemite National Park, and whose writings found the intellectual cornerstone of the wilderness movement. I am not one of the original few - the JMT was founded in 1983 - but since I joined membership has more than doubled, and I've seen the Trust develop from humble beginnings into a slick and professional charity. The JMT has bought up a number of estates in Scotland (Knoydart, Sandwood Bay, bits of Skye and Ben Nevis) and works to restore woodland to what is, for all its bareness, a landscape thoroughly ravaged by man.
A few years ago the JMT sent out a glossy circular appealing for money to - ostensibly - buy the Glencanisp Estate in Sutherland, then being sold by its owners, the wealthy Vestey family, beef barons and vendors of the infamous Vesta dried dinners so familiar from youthful camping trips. I have known the area for more than forty years and the idea of the JMT getting its hands on the Estate had a powerful appeal. However when you read the leaflet carefully, two things became apparent. Firstly, that the Trust had already parted with the money and was looking to refill its coffers, and secondly, that the Trust was not going to be the owner after all. The Estate had been bought by a local community foundation, and all the JMT would be getting was a seat on the foundation board.
I wrote to the Trust's then director, Nigel Hawkins, pointing out that since the JMT's relationship with its members was based on trust, it might have been better to be more open about why it was asking for money; that the JMT had taken a decision to put a lot of money into the Assynt Foundation without asking its own members; and that the JMT was making an assumption about the future conduct of the Foundation which might well turn out to be wrong. That is to say, the Vestey family, whilst not doing anything noticeable to restore the land to pristine condition, had at least not done anything to make it worse, whereas the Foundation was set up to act in the interests of local people, and their interests - jobs, amenities - might well turn out to conflict with those of this magnificent hundred thousand acre wilderness. A seat on the board could only offer advice and influence - things which could be ignored and overruled. A new private owner might well serve the interests of the landscape - which is irreplaceable - better.
To his credit, Mr Hawkins wrote back. His letter was emollient and reassuring, but ultimately unpersuasive. I still disagreed with the way the Trust had behaved, but there wasn't actually much else I could do. I can't say for sure when this correspondence took place, and I regret now that I don't have either my email or Hawkins's reply. Hawkins has now stepped down as director.
Every now and then JMT sends out copies of its Journal. In the most recent, something caught my eye.
"As (JMT and the Assynt Foundation) admit, it is a partnership that has not always run entirely smoothly, with differences of opinion on some of the Foundation's more commercially-minded plans for economic development. This led to the John Muir Trust stepping away from its seat on the Board of Directors."
Well who would have thought that might happen?
See first para for details.
__________________________________
Now almost exactly two years later p.15 of the JMT's Spring 2013 Journal includes the following paragraph: "An unhappy consequence of imbalance between conservation bodies and communities has been occasional conflicts, and occasions (sic) when with hindsight one might say that land has ended up with the wrong ownership".
I can't argue with this; except to say that in the Assynt case no hindsight was necessary.
__________________________________
Now almost exactly two years later p.15 of the JMT's Spring 2013 Journal includes the following paragraph: "An unhappy consequence of imbalance between conservation bodies and communities has been occasional conflicts, and occasions (sic) when with hindsight one might say that land has ended up with the wrong ownership".
I can't argue with this; except to say that in the Assynt case no hindsight was necessary.
Thatcher and the Miners' Strike
As so often with a political event - and Margaret Thatcher's death is nothing if not political - it's not so much the event itself that fascinates as the reaction to it amongst friends and in the media.
Of course there is a good deal of hagiography in the Torygraph (I came away from its coverage with the impression that their heroine had discovered penicillin and been the first man - sorry, woman - on the moon), but elsewhere a lot of visceral hatred. The Guardian celebrated the event by a prominent piece from its former leader writer Hugo Young, a strange thing to do when Young has been dead ten years and, whatever else you can say, events have rather tended to confirm the endurance of Thatcher's Weltanschauung rather than the reverse. Certainly Young's prediction following the 1997 election that the Tories would never govern again looks beyond daft.
As I've written elsewhere, both these reactions seem overdone. Nothing is ever as good or bad as it appears at first sight.
I've also been thinking in the days since Thatcher's death about the Miners' Strike. To repeat, I supported it financially in a modest way without ever actually thinking it was a good idea. Many people apparently regard the defeat of the Strike, even more than the Poll Tax, as either Thatcher's finest hour or the apotheosis of evil. I have come to a surprising conclusion about the Strike, which I'll come to in a moment.
It's surprisingly hard to find information about pit closures on the internet. The BBC website has a list of pits from 1984 onwards, but nothing about pre-1984 closures. This is a shame because it is widely suggested that in fact more pits closed under Harold Wilson's governments than in the Thatcher years. The BBC suggests that during the Maggie era the number was in the mid-80s; another internet source suggests that under Wilson it was 93, although that same source puts the Thatcher number at 22.
The right wing blog The Commentator should be taken with a pinch of salt, but this summary of the industry's decline sounds pretty authoratative to me and clearly shows both that the process began long before Thatcher, and that successive governments struggled to reverse it -
"264 pits closed between 1957 and 1963. 346,000 miners left the industry between 1963 and 1968. In 1967 alone there were 12,900 forced redundancies. Under Harold Wilson one pit closed every week. 1969 was the last year when coal accounted for more than half of Britain’s energy consumption. By 1970, when the Conservatives were elected, there were just 300 pits left – a fall of two thirds in 25 years.
By 1974 coal accounted for less than one third of energy consumption in Britain. Wilson’s incoming Labour government published a new Plan for Coal which predicted an increase in production from 110 million tonnes to 135 million tonnes a year by 1985. This was never achieved. Margaret Thatcher’s government inherited a coal industry which had seen productivity collapse by 6 percent in five years. Nevertheless, it made attempts to rescue it.
In 1981 a subsidy of £50million was given to industries which switched from cheap oil to expensive British coal. So decrepit had the industry become that taxpayers were paying people to buy British coal. The Thatcher government injected a further £200million into the industry. Companies who had gone abroad to buy coal, such as the Central Electricity Generating Board, were banned from bringing it in and 3 million tonnes of coal piled up at Rotterdam at a cost to the British taxpayer of £30 million per year. By now the industry was losing £1.2 million per day. Its interest payments amounted to £467 million for the year and the National Coal Board needed a grant of £875 million from the taxpayer. The Monopolies and Mergers Commission found that 75 percent of British pits were losing money.
The reason was obvious. By 1984 it cost £44 to mine a metric ton of British coal. America, Australia, and South Africa were selling it on the world market for £32 a metric ton. Productivity increases had come in at 20 percent below the level set in the 1974 Plan for Coal. Taxpayers were subsidising the mining industry to the tune of £1.3 billion annually. This figure doesn’t include the vast cost to taxpayer-funded industries such as steel and electricity which were obliged to buy British coal. But when Arthur Scargill appeared before a Parliamentary committee and was asked at what level of loss it was acceptable to close a pit he answered “As far as I can see, the loss is without limits.”
I think it's probably fair to say that the British coal industry was massively loss making; indeed even Thatcher's opponents seem to accept this. Their argument runs firstly, that pit closures wrecked entire communities, and this is undoubtedly true. It is a world portrayed surprisingly well in Brassed Off. Secondly, the social cost of propping up those communities was so enormous that it outstripped the cost of coal subsidies. I have never seen any figure put on this, but it seems at least possible; certainly it was an argument I heard put persuasively by a South Wales GP on the radio yesterday.
The Commentator's statement of the plight of the coal industry doesn't touch on the Miners' Strikes of 1972 and 1974. The first of these strikes occurred when the NCB rejected a demand for a pay increase of 43% (yes, that's 43%). The second strike brought down the Heath government, and after Labour was elected instead, Harold Wilson settled the dispute with a pay offer of 35% (yes, that's 35%). These figures do not lie. Another Welshman on the radio yesterday bemoaning the waste that The Valleys have become said, "And these were top dollar jobs which went". Indeed they were. And that's why the industry was uneconomic.
Which brings me to my surprising conclusion. The Miners' Strike would never have happened today. Why not? The 1970s and 80s were the high water mark of the assumption that the government was made of money. If you worked in an industry of national importance you could twist the government's arm and it would cough up. In their hearts I don't really believe the miners thought they could lose; not in the beginning anyway.
If you told miners today they were going to lose their jobs because their pits were uneconomic, they would fall over themselves to agree productivity changes; even a pay cut. Anything to keep their jobs.
That's the measure of Thatcher's victory. She didn't just beat the miners. For good or ill she made everyone see the world differently. This is why the revellers celebrating her demise misunderstand its significance. Thatcher is dead; Thatcherism lives robustly on.
Of course there is a good deal of hagiography in the Torygraph (I came away from its coverage with the impression that their heroine had discovered penicillin and been the first man - sorry, woman - on the moon), but elsewhere a lot of visceral hatred. The Guardian celebrated the event by a prominent piece from its former leader writer Hugo Young, a strange thing to do when Young has been dead ten years and, whatever else you can say, events have rather tended to confirm the endurance of Thatcher's Weltanschauung rather than the reverse. Certainly Young's prediction following the 1997 election that the Tories would never govern again looks beyond daft.
As I've written elsewhere, both these reactions seem overdone. Nothing is ever as good or bad as it appears at first sight.
I've also been thinking in the days since Thatcher's death about the Miners' Strike. To repeat, I supported it financially in a modest way without ever actually thinking it was a good idea. Many people apparently regard the defeat of the Strike, even more than the Poll Tax, as either Thatcher's finest hour or the apotheosis of evil. I have come to a surprising conclusion about the Strike, which I'll come to in a moment.
It's surprisingly hard to find information about pit closures on the internet. The BBC website has a list of pits from 1984 onwards, but nothing about pre-1984 closures. This is a shame because it is widely suggested that in fact more pits closed under Harold Wilson's governments than in the Thatcher years. The BBC suggests that during the Maggie era the number was in the mid-80s; another internet source suggests that under Wilson it was 93, although that same source puts the Thatcher number at 22.
The right wing blog The Commentator should be taken with a pinch of salt, but this summary of the industry's decline sounds pretty authoratative to me and clearly shows both that the process began long before Thatcher, and that successive governments struggled to reverse it -
"264 pits closed between 1957 and 1963. 346,000 miners left the industry between 1963 and 1968. In 1967 alone there were 12,900 forced redundancies. Under Harold Wilson one pit closed every week. 1969 was the last year when coal accounted for more than half of Britain’s energy consumption. By 1970, when the Conservatives were elected, there were just 300 pits left – a fall of two thirds in 25 years.
By 1974 coal accounted for less than one third of energy consumption in Britain. Wilson’s incoming Labour government published a new Plan for Coal which predicted an increase in production from 110 million tonnes to 135 million tonnes a year by 1985. This was never achieved. Margaret Thatcher’s government inherited a coal industry which had seen productivity collapse by 6 percent in five years. Nevertheless, it made attempts to rescue it.
In 1981 a subsidy of £50million was given to industries which switched from cheap oil to expensive British coal. So decrepit had the industry become that taxpayers were paying people to buy British coal. The Thatcher government injected a further £200million into the industry. Companies who had gone abroad to buy coal, such as the Central Electricity Generating Board, were banned from bringing it in and 3 million tonnes of coal piled up at Rotterdam at a cost to the British taxpayer of £30 million per year. By now the industry was losing £1.2 million per day. Its interest payments amounted to £467 million for the year and the National Coal Board needed a grant of £875 million from the taxpayer. The Monopolies and Mergers Commission found that 75 percent of British pits were losing money.
The reason was obvious. By 1984 it cost £44 to mine a metric ton of British coal. America, Australia, and South Africa were selling it on the world market for £32 a metric ton. Productivity increases had come in at 20 percent below the level set in the 1974 Plan for Coal. Taxpayers were subsidising the mining industry to the tune of £1.3 billion annually. This figure doesn’t include the vast cost to taxpayer-funded industries such as steel and electricity which were obliged to buy British coal. But when Arthur Scargill appeared before a Parliamentary committee and was asked at what level of loss it was acceptable to close a pit he answered “As far as I can see, the loss is without limits.”
I think it's probably fair to say that the British coal industry was massively loss making; indeed even Thatcher's opponents seem to accept this. Their argument runs firstly, that pit closures wrecked entire communities, and this is undoubtedly true. It is a world portrayed surprisingly well in Brassed Off. Secondly, the social cost of propping up those communities was so enormous that it outstripped the cost of coal subsidies. I have never seen any figure put on this, but it seems at least possible; certainly it was an argument I heard put persuasively by a South Wales GP on the radio yesterday.
The Commentator's statement of the plight of the coal industry doesn't touch on the Miners' Strikes of 1972 and 1974. The first of these strikes occurred when the NCB rejected a demand for a pay increase of 43% (yes, that's 43%). The second strike brought down the Heath government, and after Labour was elected instead, Harold Wilson settled the dispute with a pay offer of 35% (yes, that's 35%). These figures do not lie. Another Welshman on the radio yesterday bemoaning the waste that The Valleys have become said, "And these were top dollar jobs which went". Indeed they were. And that's why the industry was uneconomic.
Which brings me to my surprising conclusion. The Miners' Strike would never have happened today. Why not? The 1970s and 80s were the high water mark of the assumption that the government was made of money. If you worked in an industry of national importance you could twist the government's arm and it would cough up. In their hearts I don't really believe the miners thought they could lose; not in the beginning anyway.
If you told miners today they were going to lose their jobs because their pits were uneconomic, they would fall over themselves to agree productivity changes; even a pay cut. Anything to keep their jobs.
That's the measure of Thatcher's victory. She didn't just beat the miners. For good or ill she made everyone see the world differently. This is why the revellers celebrating her demise misunderstand its significance. Thatcher is dead; Thatcherism lives robustly on.
Monday 8 April 2013
RIP Margaret Thatcher
In keeping with this blog's tradition of being bang up to date with cultural events, I have finally got round to seeing The Iron Lady, two years after its release. And I began writing this blog having no idea that its subject had died the same day.
Watched with my wife and daughters, The Iron Lady provided a prime opportunity for a family row, thankfully averted by all parties' disinclination to have one - we were on holiday and, after all, a debate about whether Mrs Thatcher cut spending or raised it is hardly incendiary when compared to arguments about putting the loo seat down or leaving off the top of the toothbrush.
(Mrs Thatcher in fact raised public spending by about 1.4% p.a. per year in real terms, although in some years there were cuts, and some of the rise was attributable to the recessions at the beginning and end of her term.)
The Iron Lady occupied two hours pleasantly enough, without providing much political insight. It focused instead on Thatcher's increasing dementia and her conviction that her deceased husband Denis was in fact still in the land of the living. This was poignant, but of course speculative. I doubt very much whether the director, Phyllida Lloyd, knew much more about Thatcher's mental health than you or I, but even if she knew a lot more, it was bound to be wrong in parts. Moreover, Mrs Thatcher was still alive when the film was made, as were her children, one of whom, Carol, features heavily in it.
It strikes me a being intrusive and distasteful to show on screen someone living suffering from a mental illness, all the more so since her kids were still having to deal with its consequences. It's a small point perhaps - the Thatcher children don't have to watch it, and the subject may well have been insufficiently compos mentis - but I thought the skill with which the film was made (Meryl Streep fantastic, and Olivia Coleman as Carol very nearly as good) couldn't disguise its essential tawdriness.
What about Thatcher herself? I hated her while she was in office, like almost everyone of my class and politics did. I suppose my feelings have softened somewhat since. Mrs Thatcher demonstrated that the Government runs the country, rather than the Trades Unions, which strikes me as an unequivocally good thing. The Unions have their members' interests at heart, which is fair enough, but those don't coincide with the interests of the country as a whole.
Thatcher did her best to demonstrate that the UK needed to pay its own way by encouraging business (a message just as relevant today), but faced with competition from the Far East there was precious little she could do about it. The high interest rates she used to strangle inflation pushed up the value of the pound and wrecked British exports. I think the worst thing she did was run a government which presided over two severe recessions. The poll tax was unfair and a political disaster, but it wasn't exactly the slaughtering of the first-born.
The tragedy of the miners strike was that although other taxpayers couldn't realistically be expected to subsidise coal production indefinitely, the closure of the pits had the effect of wrecking whole communities. Brassed Off doesn't lie. These were terribly hard choices, but much easier to make when they weren't your communities or your voters. I regularly gave money to the miners, but felt the strike was probably wrong. Ultimately no country can afford to keep uncompetitive industries going forever.
So farewell Maggie T. Like her or loathe her, she was a conviction politician who had a shrewd grasp of the direction industrial decline was leading the country; and moreover had a far better understanding of the lives of ordinary people than today's brillcreemed PR puppets.
Watched with my wife and daughters, The Iron Lady provided a prime opportunity for a family row, thankfully averted by all parties' disinclination to have one - we were on holiday and, after all, a debate about whether Mrs Thatcher cut spending or raised it is hardly incendiary when compared to arguments about putting the loo seat down or leaving off the top of the toothbrush.
(Mrs Thatcher in fact raised public spending by about 1.4% p.a. per year in real terms, although in some years there were cuts, and some of the rise was attributable to the recessions at the beginning and end of her term.)
The Iron Lady occupied two hours pleasantly enough, without providing much political insight. It focused instead on Thatcher's increasing dementia and her conviction that her deceased husband Denis was in fact still in the land of the living. This was poignant, but of course speculative. I doubt very much whether the director, Phyllida Lloyd, knew much more about Thatcher's mental health than you or I, but even if she knew a lot more, it was bound to be wrong in parts. Moreover, Mrs Thatcher was still alive when the film was made, as were her children, one of whom, Carol, features heavily in it.
It strikes me a being intrusive and distasteful to show on screen someone living suffering from a mental illness, all the more so since her kids were still having to deal with its consequences. It's a small point perhaps - the Thatcher children don't have to watch it, and the subject may well have been insufficiently compos mentis - but I thought the skill with which the film was made (Meryl Streep fantastic, and Olivia Coleman as Carol very nearly as good) couldn't disguise its essential tawdriness.
What about Thatcher herself? I hated her while she was in office, like almost everyone of my class and politics did. I suppose my feelings have softened somewhat since. Mrs Thatcher demonstrated that the Government runs the country, rather than the Trades Unions, which strikes me as an unequivocally good thing. The Unions have their members' interests at heart, which is fair enough, but those don't coincide with the interests of the country as a whole.
Thatcher did her best to demonstrate that the UK needed to pay its own way by encouraging business (a message just as relevant today), but faced with competition from the Far East there was precious little she could do about it. The high interest rates she used to strangle inflation pushed up the value of the pound and wrecked British exports. I think the worst thing she did was run a government which presided over two severe recessions. The poll tax was unfair and a political disaster, but it wasn't exactly the slaughtering of the first-born.
The tragedy of the miners strike was that although other taxpayers couldn't realistically be expected to subsidise coal production indefinitely, the closure of the pits had the effect of wrecking whole communities. Brassed Off doesn't lie. These were terribly hard choices, but much easier to make when they weren't your communities or your voters. I regularly gave money to the miners, but felt the strike was probably wrong. Ultimately no country can afford to keep uncompetitive industries going forever.
So farewell Maggie T. Like her or loathe her, she was a conviction politician who had a shrewd grasp of the direction industrial decline was leading the country; and moreover had a far better understanding of the lives of ordinary people than today's brillcreemed PR puppets.
Sunday 7 April 2013
Hugh Grant and Hacked Off
Next time you watch Notting Hill, enjoy the ironies of the scene where Hugh Grant masquerades as a reporter from Horse and Hound to gain access to Julia Roberts's Hollywood star.
Grant, like Steve Coogan and other Hacked Off celebrities, is trying to shackle the mass-circulation press at the same time as enjoy the benefits it brings him. I doubt he has ever signed a contract for a movie which didn't require him to undergo a tedious pre-release publicity tour of precisely the sort lampooned in Notting Hill. He wants to have it both ways. He wants the lucrative and glamorous film work while wanting rid of the attentions of the mass-circulation press which helps plug the produce and fill the multiplexes.
Moreover, both Coogan and Grant have taken the Murdoch (and therefore the News International) shilling. There is a limit to the number of hours in the day, but a very brief excursion to the University of Google reveals that Grant worked on Nine Months, a Twentieth Century Fox film, and much more recently Coogan has appeared in Fox's Night at the Museum films. Grant says he regrets it now. Easy to say once you've pocketed the money.
There is something deeply unattractive about this, but none of it would matter if these self-regarding people had not succeeded in persuading the leaders of all three major parties into doing their bidding on the press regulation front.
Clegg, Cameron and Miliband must be living in cloud cuckoo land. The case for the new regulator rests on the proposition that the new regulator will succeed where the combination of the PCC and the criminal law previously failed. But if the prospect of going to prison did not deter the phone hackers, nothing will. Actually the hackers behaved as they did because it never occurred to them in a million years that people like them might end up in jail.
You can see something of their incredulity - what? us? - in the outraged reaction of Rebekah Brooks to the notion that she might face criminal charges. There is a pleasing symmetry with Chris Huhne's attempt to get his prosecution struck out - how dare they prosecute a cabinet minister! Don't they know who I am? These prosecutions will do ten times the good the new regulator will.
If the hacking saga reveals anything, it is that the press will always ignore any regulator when it suits them, and that the most serious failings lie with the police, who were disinclined to investigate journalists for reasons which might well not be above suspicion. As so often in public life, applying existing laws effectively, rather than dreaming up new ones, might be the way forward.
And the new regulator might do some harm. Having a Royal Charter is better than primary legislation; but requiring a two thirds majority in parliament doesn't mean parliament can't interfere. Recall that leaders of all three parties have connived to put us in this position - there's nothing to stop future parliamentarians tinkering about with it; in fact I hope the new body will be tinkered with if it doesn't work - but by then the question of regulation will be firmly in the domain of politicians. Once there it will be impossible to remove.
And what of the papers that say they won't join in? The Spectator has refused, and I would be quite surprised if Private Eye didn't follow suit. It appears they will face exemplary damages if they lose libel actions. That means facing closure. Can anyone truly say, faced with exemplary damages which it will fall to the machinery of the state to enforce, that politicians haven't got their grubby fingers in this issue?
This is a fine example of Simpson's Law, which states that anything celebrities campaign for will almost certainly be A Bad Idea. Horse and Hound probably won't suffer, but just about everybody else will.
Grant, like Steve Coogan and other Hacked Off celebrities, is trying to shackle the mass-circulation press at the same time as enjoy the benefits it brings him. I doubt he has ever signed a contract for a movie which didn't require him to undergo a tedious pre-release publicity tour of precisely the sort lampooned in Notting Hill. He wants to have it both ways. He wants the lucrative and glamorous film work while wanting rid of the attentions of the mass-circulation press which helps plug the produce and fill the multiplexes.
Moreover, both Coogan and Grant have taken the Murdoch (and therefore the News International) shilling. There is a limit to the number of hours in the day, but a very brief excursion to the University of Google reveals that Grant worked on Nine Months, a Twentieth Century Fox film, and much more recently Coogan has appeared in Fox's Night at the Museum films. Grant says he regrets it now. Easy to say once you've pocketed the money.
There is something deeply unattractive about this, but none of it would matter if these self-regarding people had not succeeded in persuading the leaders of all three major parties into doing their bidding on the press regulation front.
Clegg, Cameron and Miliband must be living in cloud cuckoo land. The case for the new regulator rests on the proposition that the new regulator will succeed where the combination of the PCC and the criminal law previously failed. But if the prospect of going to prison did not deter the phone hackers, nothing will. Actually the hackers behaved as they did because it never occurred to them in a million years that people like them might end up in jail.
You can see something of their incredulity - what? us? - in the outraged reaction of Rebekah Brooks to the notion that she might face criminal charges. There is a pleasing symmetry with Chris Huhne's attempt to get his prosecution struck out - how dare they prosecute a cabinet minister! Don't they know who I am? These prosecutions will do ten times the good the new regulator will.
If the hacking saga reveals anything, it is that the press will always ignore any regulator when it suits them, and that the most serious failings lie with the police, who were disinclined to investigate journalists for reasons which might well not be above suspicion. As so often in public life, applying existing laws effectively, rather than dreaming up new ones, might be the way forward.
And the new regulator might do some harm. Having a Royal Charter is better than primary legislation; but requiring a two thirds majority in parliament doesn't mean parliament can't interfere. Recall that leaders of all three parties have connived to put us in this position - there's nothing to stop future parliamentarians tinkering about with it; in fact I hope the new body will be tinkered with if it doesn't work - but by then the question of regulation will be firmly in the domain of politicians. Once there it will be impossible to remove.
And what of the papers that say they won't join in? The Spectator has refused, and I would be quite surprised if Private Eye didn't follow suit. It appears they will face exemplary damages if they lose libel actions. That means facing closure. Can anyone truly say, faced with exemplary damages which it will fall to the machinery of the state to enforce, that politicians haven't got their grubby fingers in this issue?
This is a fine example of Simpson's Law, which states that anything celebrities campaign for will almost certainly be A Bad Idea. Horse and Hound probably won't suffer, but just about everybody else will.
Friday 5 April 2013
The BBC's class calculator
It's official. According to the BBC's Great British Class Calculator, I am one of Britain's elite.
I have filled in the online questionnaire (the Corporation has apparently "teamed up" with "sociologists from leading universities") and it turns out that I am one of the 6% that has some savings, listens to classical music and so on.
These surveys are easy to disparage, so here goes.
Firstly, if you want to tell the nation that the old three-class system is redundant, all you apparently have to do is think of some categories - fewer than three is difficult, obviously, so better plump for more - decide what people have to do to fit in them, and hey presto you have redrawn the class map of Britain. The BBC is willing to "team up" with you, securing publicity and no doubt future funding for your "leading university". So far so predictable.
What about the quiz itself? There are only five questions, and it asks you things about money and leisure. The question about money is ludicrously simplistic. It asks if you are a property owner, but not how big your mortgage is. You could live in a small house with no mortgage or a bloody great mansion mortgaged up to the hilt. A question about pension savings ignores the fact the average person, perhaps on a modest salary after a lifetime working in the public sector, is nevertheless sitting on a notional pension pot of about £500,000, way beyond the dreams even of most of the so-called "elite".
Other questions ask "Do you know any accountants?" and "Do you listen to hip-hop?" Assuming for the moment that knowing accountants is socially desirable, and that hip-hop is less classy than classical music (it's different, but not necessarily worse), the survey nevertheless utterly misses the nuance which is at the heart of the British class system. At its heart class isn't all, or even mostly, about money.
My wife, on whose coat tails I have slalomed into Britain's top 6%, drives a nine year old Vauxhall Zafira which requires the hands of an artist (me) to get going on a cold morning; our children go to a comprehensive school; she would rather cut her own leg off than vote Tory; she is an unreconstructed fan of brass band music; she tends the shared allotment of a weekend; and yet I would blush to list the legal honours which she now holds. She is irredeemably middle-class, and yet lives a life style which in some respects is congruent with a much less affluent person.
It's that phrase "in some respects" which is the tell-tale. The point about class is that the bare facts are complex and in any event only tell you so much. Yes, it's partly about money; partly about lifestyle and interests; but it's also partly about attitudes, language and education (all ignored altogether in the survey). It tells you something about how difficult class is to pin down when the poshest person I know, by a distance, has a black skin and was born on a Caribbean island. But the compilers of surveys aren't interested in nuance - they want to put people in pigeon holes.
Quite a few of my friends are in the top 6%. They are almost without exception ordinary people, some middle-class, some not, who happen to have good jobs.
A footling survey like this one might not even be worth the half an hour required to post about it, were it not for the fact that it gets column inches in the press and reportage in the broadcast media. Politicians and the bien-pensant fulminate about Britain's inequality gap, as if they didn't help to create it. The idea of a tiny minority creaming in the money at the expense of everyone else settles in the public imagination, like grounds at the bottom of a coffee cup.
It's an absurd over-simplification; and one I'll remember next time I can't get the car started.
I have filled in the online questionnaire (the Corporation has apparently "teamed up" with "sociologists from leading universities") and it turns out that I am one of the 6% that has some savings, listens to classical music and so on.
These surveys are easy to disparage, so here goes.
Firstly, if you want to tell the nation that the old three-class system is redundant, all you apparently have to do is think of some categories - fewer than three is difficult, obviously, so better plump for more - decide what people have to do to fit in them, and hey presto you have redrawn the class map of Britain. The BBC is willing to "team up" with you, securing publicity and no doubt future funding for your "leading university". So far so predictable.
What about the quiz itself? There are only five questions, and it asks you things about money and leisure. The question about money is ludicrously simplistic. It asks if you are a property owner, but not how big your mortgage is. You could live in a small house with no mortgage or a bloody great mansion mortgaged up to the hilt. A question about pension savings ignores the fact the average person, perhaps on a modest salary after a lifetime working in the public sector, is nevertheless sitting on a notional pension pot of about £500,000, way beyond the dreams even of most of the so-called "elite".
Other questions ask "Do you know any accountants?" and "Do you listen to hip-hop?" Assuming for the moment that knowing accountants is socially desirable, and that hip-hop is less classy than classical music (it's different, but not necessarily worse), the survey nevertheless utterly misses the nuance which is at the heart of the British class system. At its heart class isn't all, or even mostly, about money.
My wife, on whose coat tails I have slalomed into Britain's top 6%, drives a nine year old Vauxhall Zafira which requires the hands of an artist (me) to get going on a cold morning; our children go to a comprehensive school; she would rather cut her own leg off than vote Tory; she is an unreconstructed fan of brass band music; she tends the shared allotment of a weekend; and yet I would blush to list the legal honours which she now holds. She is irredeemably middle-class, and yet lives a life style which in some respects is congruent with a much less affluent person.
It's that phrase "in some respects" which is the tell-tale. The point about class is that the bare facts are complex and in any event only tell you so much. Yes, it's partly about money; partly about lifestyle and interests; but it's also partly about attitudes, language and education (all ignored altogether in the survey). It tells you something about how difficult class is to pin down when the poshest person I know, by a distance, has a black skin and was born on a Caribbean island. But the compilers of surveys aren't interested in nuance - they want to put people in pigeon holes.
Quite a few of my friends are in the top 6%. They are almost without exception ordinary people, some middle-class, some not, who happen to have good jobs.
A footling survey like this one might not even be worth the half an hour required to post about it, were it not for the fact that it gets column inches in the press and reportage in the broadcast media. Politicians and the bien-pensant fulminate about Britain's inequality gap, as if they didn't help to create it. The idea of a tiny minority creaming in the money at the expense of everyone else settles in the public imagination, like grounds at the bottom of a coffee cup.
It's an absurd over-simplification; and one I'll remember next time I can't get the car started.
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