Star Trek and the wrong sort of growth

I've been reflecting on how the news that the British economy grew by 0.3% in the first quarter of the year will be received.

Here's a prediction.  The people who criticised George Osborne for failing to get any growth won't shut up.  Neither will the people who said there would never be any growth with his policies.  They will just start saying something else.

Yes, the Chancellor will have succeeded in stimulating growth, but of the wrong sort.  To misquote the Starship Enterprise's surgeon, Bones McCoy, "it's growth Jim, but not as we know it".

Mohsin Hamid and the enthusiastic fundamentalists

The author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid, wrote a good piece in the Guardian the other day about Western perceptions of Islam.  He wrote, "There are more than a billion variations of lived belief among people who define themselves as Muslim - one for each human being, just as there are among those who describe themselves as Christian, or Buddhist, or Hindu.  Islamophobia represents a refusal to acknowledge these variations, to acknowledge individual humanities, a desire to paint members of a perceived group with the same brush.  In that sense, it is indeed like racism.  It simultaneously credits Muslims with too much and too little agency: too much agency in choosing their religion, and too little in choosing what to make of it". You can read the full piece here.

I thought Hamid's article well-argued, though I didn't quite agree with his conclusion, and it reads even more oddly in the light of yesterday afternoon's truly awful murder of a soldier in Woolwich.

It appears that the perpetrators thought of themselves as Muslims.  Hacking the soldier to death was part of their "choosing what to make of" Islam, as Hamid would put it.  I don't think you can really argue that people should continue to think well of a religion if some its adherents' "lived belief" (Hamid's words again) involves murdering someone who, whatever your views about British foreign policy, cannot truly be said to be personally to blame.  A religion has all shades of believers, as Hamid says, but in the UK, curiously, a disproportionately high number of Muslims think it is OK to go around killing other British people (not to mention doing dreadful things to Muslim women).  Are we to make nothing of this?

The Spectator rather nobly posted some tweets this morning from Muslims deploring the murder.  Again and again I was struck by their tone, which slipped seamlessly from "Isn't this terrible" to "How dare you blame this on Islam!"

In the same way I was struck yesterday by the heroism and nobility of the people who shielded the dying man on the ground, and the woman who got off a coach to engage the murderers in conversation.  I have no idea whether these people were Christians or not; it doesn't matter much.  Most British people have at the very least a set of ideas about how to behave which they have inherited by a combination of Christianity mediated by the conscience of the Enlightenment.

The police didn't even shoot the murderers stone dead.  They shot them in the legs.  The shootings have triggered an automatic investigation by the Police Complaints people.  The murderers are being treated in hospital by the very best medical care the NHS can provide.  If they survive, they will stand trial by what is still on the whole a pretty good criminal justice system, represented by really clever and scrupulous people who will try to get them off.  All these things will be paid for by a system of government - itself a fructification of post-Christian ideals - the murderers (and many like them) utterly despise.

By their fruits shall ye know them, I believe it says somewhere in the Bible (not that I have ever read it); and this is true of all religions and all people, all the time, all over the world.  It seems to me Mr Hamid has some more thinking to do.

David Cameron, Bruce the Shark and the Stupid Party

What on earth are the Tories doing? Have they taken leave of their senses?

Firstly, they're in a coalition government.  Of course David Cameron can't do everything he wants.  Get over it.  And as things stand it's perfectly conceivable that with a slowly improving economy, a Labour party with no convincing economic policy and a Lib Dem vote that will surely collapse in a heap, they could win outright in 2015.  Would they prefer Cameron to throw the dice in the air and call a snap election now?

The Tory backwoodsmen rather remind me of Bruce the Shark in Finding Nemo.  "Fish are friends, not food", Bruce mutters to himself repeatedly.  And it works until he smells blood.  Thus the Tories over Europe.  Scenting the possibility of an In-Out referendum, the red mist has descended and common sense thrown to the wind.  Not for nothing are they known as The Stupid Party.

Enjoying Luhrmann's Gatsby

Much against my better judgment, I allowed myself to be dragged out to see Baz Luhrmann's version of The Great Gatsby on Friday night.  I'm not really a Gatsby fan - Fitzgerald is a great stylist and the book is beautifully written, but I find it a little slight; and I suspect there probably are second acts in American lives, no matter what its author claimed. 

Off-puttingly, Luhrmann's version has been widely panned by the critics; and I don't think he has made a really good film since Strictly Ballroom (no shame there - it's a hard act to follow), and what he might do to Fitzgerald's novella seemed in prospect analagous to Meatloaf being let loose on Dove Sono.  

But funnily enough art does retain the occasional power to surprise, and I enjoyed The Great Gatsby very much.  

Firstly, it doesn't pretend to be a faithful adaptation; rather a new version conceived in filmic terms.  

Secondly, the acting is fantastic throughout - Carey Mulligan as Daisy bewitching and capricious; some bloke whose name escapes me playing her husband with just the right mix of nastiness, sexual potency and charm; Tobey Maguire is jejeune as Nick; and Leonardo DiCaprio brings just the right suggestion of fraudulence to his Gatsby .  

Thirdly, it looks great, with the party scenes imagined and realised with tremendously exaggerated pizzaz.

Lastly, Gatsby does something so difficult to accomplish, either in literature or film - it shows us a relationship breaking down.  Like most relationships, there isn't just one thing that kills Daisy and Gatsby's affair, but a succession of small circumstances.  I found it utterly plausible.

There are as many potential versions of Fitzgerald's novella as there are readers.  Get over it, critics.  For all but the box tickers amongst you, Luhrmann's film is a thoroughly satisfying night out.

Osborne goes for Plan B

This morning comes the news that France has slid into recession.  Schadenfreude is not a French word, but when the principal architect of the Eurozone finds its economy at last being ravaged by the consequences of its own policy, onlookers are entitled to smile somewhat.  And all the more so since the Torygraph reports that in the face of a slew of encouraging economic data from the UK, the Bank of England is likely to upgrade its domestic growth forecasts.

I'm pleased our economy seems to be doing a bit better at last, not the least because it's funny to see the George Osborne's critics gasping and flapping at the news that there hasn't been a triple-dip recession and there probably wasn't a double-dip either.  And yet I have some sympathy with Allister Heath, who, in a sceptical piece in the Torygraph today, writes that "Directing subsidised credit towards the housing market, as the Help to Buy and Funding for Lending Schemes are doing, is an absurd, reckless policy which suggests Osborne has learnt nothing from the sub-prime crash . . . it is a gamble that will end in tears".

I don't think that all the marginal uptick in growth we now seem to be seeing can be entirely due to Osborne's schemes.  Some of it will be the natural recovery in animal spirits that happens when people just get tired of feeling down.  But Osborne's efforts will have had something to do with it, and I think Heath is right.

In the years before 2008 there was a massive misallocation of funds into property, leaving housebuyers overextended and banks sitting on zombie assets.  Given that the ideal solution - allowing the banks to fail - is impossible because of their structural importance, the second best would have been to allow time and a little gentle wage-inflation to do their subtle work.

Yet instead of waiting while air gently leaks out of the balloon, Osborne has chosen to pump it up still further.  Has he never heard of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?  These were state mortgage guarantee schemes which had to be bailed out when US banks, divested of the consequences of irresponsible lending, lent irresponsibly.

Perhaps after all this is Plan B - do more of what got us into trouble in the first place.

Race, culture and the Oxford sex gang

A year or so ago a friend involved professionally in the Rochdale sex case, where a gang of Asian men traded white girls for sex, told me, "Of course there's a lot more of this stuff out there, you know".  So it has proved, with cases in Derby and Telford topped yesterday by the conviction of a gaggle of unsavoury looking blokes from Oxford.

Some BBC news bulletins mentioned the Defendants were Asian; some didn't.  A very difficult call to get right.  What bearing, if any, does race have on this?

Well firstly, the gang didn't rape the women for being white.  They did it mainly because they were women.  But did they rape them because they were white?  To put it another way, would they have raped them if they had been Asian?

We'll never know; but I would guess not.  For one, it's much easier to regard someone without empathy (as legions of white racists have shown), if they have a different-coloured skin.  But secondly Asian families, with their powerful and rigid structures, would probably never have allowed their daughters to wander the streets in search of drugs, fags and take-aways, as did the victims in the Oxford case.

Parental indifference and chaotic family structures are much more likely to be characteristics of the white underclass, and it's surely these qualities that left the girls vulnerable to the depredations of the gang.  And for men brought up in the Islamic tradition, the easier morals and laissez-faire individualism of white post-Christian society must seem as alluring as they do utterly contemptible.

In other words, it's a cultural thing rather than a racial one.

For the Guardian, of course, the dramatic over-representation of Asian men in this type of case (which the newspaper admits) is nothing to do with either race or culture.  It is because girls playing truant or running away from home are much more likely to be out and about in the evenings, where Asians, active in the night-time economy of the taxi and the corner shop, are free to befriend them.  I am not making this up.

Amidst this sorry story of wickedness, social services stupidity and police incompetence, a sad vignette.  "Social services let me down", the Guardian reports one of the girls as saying.  That's certainly true.  It's probably true of the police as well, and perhaps of her parents.  I wonder whether she feels she might have made some bad decisions herself along the way.

PS  Writing in the Torygraph one Sean Thomas, a novelist, suggests that it might all be the BNP's fault.  If only the Fascists hadn't come out years ago and said there was an Asian sex gang in Oxford (their leader being interviewed by the police on suspicion of inciting racial hatred as a result), the prosecutions would have taken place much earlier.  You see, because the BNP were saying it, everyone thought it couldn't possibly be true.  If this is right, it's an object lesson in the nostrum that even sometimes people you don't like are worth listening to.  But it probably isn't.  You might just as well argue that because the BNP were against immigration, successive governments decided to do nothing about it.

The Guardian and tax - mind the hypocrisy gap

The Guardian has written extensively over the years about tax avoidance.  Not surprisingly, the newspaper is against it.  No doubt a few of its staff have ISAs, which are also a form of tax avoidance, but that's by the by.  The newspaper is at it again this morning.  "UK's top companies condemned for prolific use of tax havens", reads the headline.

This is all very well, but as I never tire of repeating, the Guardian's owners, Guardian Media Group, themselves used offshore companies to buy Emap.  In 2008 GMG made profits of over £300 million but paid no tax whatsoever; actually it received a tax rebate of £800,000.  You can read more about its activities here.

How does the Guardian justify this self-contradictory stance?  In a blog a couple of years ago Editor Alan Rusbridger argued, essentially, that the newspaper - which generally makes a loss - needed the profits from GMG in order to keep going.  He said this arrangement allowed "the Guardian's writers the freedom to write what they want. . .  Individual columnists - and even leader writers - may well disagree with some aspects of how the parent company has run itself over the years.  Commercial colleagues may likewise fundamentally disagree with the views of the paper and its writers.  The point of the trust is to allow each to operate independently.  It seems an odd argument that individual Guardian journalists, who have no part in business decisions, should refrain from covering tax avoidance, or should feel inhibited in expressing their views".

This just won't do.  Firstly it's not true to say that Guardian journalists "have no part in business decisions".  Actually their very jobs depend on the business decisions made by GMG, including its decisions to avoid tax.  They may not have any influence on those decisions, but without them the newspaper would go bust.

Secondly its curious that although the Guardian's writers are said by Rusbridger to have "the freedom to write what they want", to "disagree with some aspects of how the parent company has run itself over the years", little of this disagreement actually makes its way into the pages of the paper.  Where was the Guardian coverage when GMG bought Emap via offshore companies?  Or when it paid zero tax on £308 million profit?  Rusbridger and his colleagues seem to have felt strangely "inhibited in expressing their views" on those occasions.

It seems to me that Guardian journalists are happy for their own jobs and pensions to be propped up by tax avoidance; but when - say - Barclays uses similar means to prop up the jobs and pensions of its own staff (not to mention the dividends of its shareholders, many of whom will be pensioners or pension funds), Guardian journalists start jumping up and down.

What hypocrites.  The truth about tax avoidance is that you cannot stamp it out altogether.  It's in the nature of a system where x attracts tax and y doesn't, people will do their best to try to shunt as much of their income as possible into y.  New rules only lead to new methods of avoidance.

If the Guardian really wants a worthwhile target, it might like to consider the - largely third world - countries whose economies depend on low tax rates which attract the avoidance industry.  Perhaps Mr Rusbridger could send a gunboat.

The Eurozone - the unacceptable face of capitalism

Despite the occasionally splenetic nature of this blog, it's actually quite rare that I feel like shouting at the radio or hurling a shoe at the TV.  Such a moment did however occur on Newsnight a couple of days ago, when Kirsty Wark was interviewing a German financier.

What advice, Ms Wark wanted to know, would the financier give to the 68% - pause and gasp - of young Greek people currently without work.  "Well obviously", replied the financier, in a nostrum worthy of Ayn Rand, "they should go to countries like Germany to look for work".

Pause and gasp.

This is the remorseless logic of the Eurozone in a nutshell.  It is a single market, a single currency, moving towards a single economic policy.  In that singularity labour, like capital, is a commodity to be shunted around, from areas where there are no jobs to areas - often hundreds or thousands of miles away - where work is to be had.  It is Norman Tebbit's "On your bike" writ large.  "On your plane", perhaps, or more likely, the hapless protagonists being so strapped for cash, "On your overnight bus".

But that's not what citizens want, I felt like shouting.  Young Greeks don't want to go to Germany to find work!  They want to find work in a country where they can speak their own language, eat their own food, socialise with their own friends, enjoy their own culture and stay in touch with their own families!  But this is a luxury which the Eurozone thinks they should give up.

Fundamentally, in its disdain for the nation state, the Eurozone treats individuals as pawns who must be willing to up sticks as economic circumstances dictate and roam Europe looking for countries where the vagaries of the markets have determined that times are less mean.

Far from being the apotheosis of citizen-centred government, the single currency area has ensured that in future many people will be treated as mere units of production, rootless and voiceless.  It's hard to think of a more naked expression of capitalism's unacceptable face.

This is what we are learning about the EU in general, and the Eurozone in particular.  As nation states give more and more power to the centre, they find themselves - how did we miss this? - increasingly powerless over areas of their politics that truly matter.  In the UK our biggest bugbear is perhaps immigration, which we no longer control; but other countries have also given away economic policy, which they find is now being dictated to them by Brussels.  Thus is power centralised and thus are national electorates disenfranchised.

The banker was absolutely right.  Young Greeks should go to Germany.  That is what life in the Eurozone entails.

Barbara Hewson, Stuart Hall and the age of consent

In the wake of Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall, Freddie Starr, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, barrister Barbara Hewson has stuck her foot in it just somewhat with a piece in Spiked magazine.  According to the BBC, she called for the age of consent to be lowered to 13.  About the prosecutions she wrote, "What we have here is the manipulation of the British criminal justice system to produce scapegoats on demand.  It's a grotesque spectacle . . . It's time to end this prurient charade, which has nothing to do with justice or the public interest."  You can read the story here.

Now I'm not about to defend Hewson's view of the age of consent, nor to waste much time attacking her Chambers, which described itself as "shocked by the views she expressed" (personally I find their failure to defend her freedom of speech distinctly more shocking).  It seems to me that while the law banning sex under 16 is an arbitrary figure intended to protect the vulnerable (and some 16 year olds will be vulnerable, some 15 year olds not), there's little to be gained from exposing an even larger tranche of young people to the attention of those who want to groom them for their own gratification.

But I do have just the faintest sympathy for Hewson's sense of outrage.  Here it is.

I'm old enough to remember the 70s, and what it was like to be attracted to women then.  For those born in a more enlightened age, it was very different.  That's not to say that groping a 9 year old, one of the accusations levelled at Stuart Hall, was widely regarded as alright.  It wasn't (although I'll come back to that).  It's more that the occasional remark about the size of a girl's breasts, a bottom pinch here, a wolf-whistle there, was considered (at least by men) as part of the rough and tumble of everyday interaction.  I'm not defending it.  But that's how things were.

That impinges on the current slew of celebrities and teachers undergoing trial by ordeal in this way: behaviour like fondling your students while they're playing the violin, getting them drunk on an awayday and having sex with them in your car, taking advantage of teenage (and perhaps underage) fans in your dressing room while your BBC minders look the other way, this all now seems a long way from today's mores.  Thirty or forty years ago it was a lot closer to what most people took for granted as part of everyday life.

What seems like extraordinary behaviour now, was then not so far removed from everyday conduct.  Remember, the pill had burst upon society, skirts were short, and the expression "free love" had not attracted overtones of naivety and cynicism, .  For men (and particularly for men with authority or power) it was open season.  That's why when one of the girls at the Menhuin School complained about a staff member, she was was told to make sure she wasn't alone with him; that's why girls in St James's Leeds were told by a nurse to feign sleep when Jimmy Savile did his loathsome ward rounds.  The people who let the vulnerable down were not necessarily bad people, but they were certainly people from a society which had different attitudes.

I find the almost puritanical absence of sexual reference in the world of work or education now slightly strange, when our society fetishises, trivialises and monetises sex at every opportunity, when - apparently - young people copulate, usually while drunk, at the drop of a hat and pornography is freely available to every teenager.  And pre-teenager.  I wonder whether we are not the new Victorians, clamping down on sexualised behaviour in some contexts, while waving our knickers in the air in others.

And I guess this is my point.  I wouldn't go back to the way things were, but I'm not totally sure our society is much better.  Who can honestly say that in forty years we won't be horrified by some current celebrity's squalid and opportunistic behaviour?  My money says we will.

And there's another thing.  We make judgments about what people did thirty or forty years ago, smug in the assumption that the next generation will share the same values and congratulate us for our outrage.  But they might not.  Society's sense of what's right and wrong is constantly shifting, and our condemnation of Savile and Hall could just as well look smug and self-satisfied.

why I love . . . #7 Sir Alex Ferguson

"Stop the clocks", wrote Auden, "Cut off the telephone".  OK, it's not as bad as that.  Sir Alex Ferguson hasn't died.  Only announced his retirement.

It feels like a little death just the same.

My route to Manchester United has been long, circuitous and ambiguous.  My Dad took my brother and I to watch City a couple of times when I was a kid.  Briefly, I was a City fan.  Sometimes I went to watch United with a neighbour.  Then, when I went away to school and was old enough to leave the premises on my own, I started going to the nearest town, Barnsley, to watch the Tykes prise their way out of the old Fourth Division and into the Second.  Years later I was jumping up and down when Ashley Ward, our lumpen striker, prodded the ball through Bruce Grobelaar's legs at Anfield for an improbable 1-0 victory during Barnsley's only season in the Premiership.

Around that time, 1992 or 3, there were stirrings from Manchester.  I was living in London, a disaffected Northener.  Alex Ferguson, hanging onto the job by his fingernails, some said, had signed a charismatic but eccentric French midfielder from the previous season's champions, Leeds.  With Lee Sharpe flying down one wing and a willowy young man called Ryan Giggs on the other, United were playing the kind of football that prompted Nick Hornby to write a piece in the Guardian entitled "Manchester United's moral right to win the Premiership".  The combination of my exile, United's exhilarating football, Eric Cantona's Gallic panache and the comically gruff Glaswegian standing on the touchline orchestrating everything made the lure of Old Trafford irresistible.  Then there was the small matter of the Champions League Final in 1999.

When I moved back to Manchester at the end of the decade I might have told you I was a United fan; but it's really more complex than that.  In February 1998 Barnsley played United in the FA Cup, and, watching the game on TV in a North London pub, I found myself wanting Barnsley to win, which they did 3.2.   And the last game of the 2012/13 season was an odd one, with City needing to win to take the title for the first time in decades; unable to watch it on TV I went to the allotment with my wife, and stood by the car in the closing moments of the game as the clock ran out on City's chances.  When Aguero scored the winning goal with seconds remaining I was interested to find that I was gutted; but at the same time thinking "Well we've won it loads, so maybe it's their turn".  So perhaps the years have made me into a United fan after all, but not so much of one that I couldn't feel that losing was good for Manchester.

Some words to describe the manager - Gruff.  Irascible.  Twinkling.  Manipulative.  Shrewd.  Determined.  But above all successful.  Thank you, Sir Alex, for all the pleasure you've given me.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.

PS I think the board will go for Mourhino.  But I hope they don't.  Mourinho will stay for a couple of years, dazzle, infuriate, fall out with someone and leave an unhappier club behind.  Give it to David Moyes.

Ed Miliband - peeing in his own shoe

"Whereof one cannot speak", goes Wittgenstein's well-known phrase or saying, "thereof one must remain silent".

This gnomic utterance has been taken to heart by Ed Miliband, who refused repeatedly on The World At One to confirm that his party's proposed VAT cut would lead to increased borrowing.  Hats off to Martha Kearney for persisting.  Eight times, apparently, she asked.

How Labour must wish it had got the other Miliband instead.  In a close race Ed was installed ahead of David by virtue of Trade Union block votes.  (I am reading Tony Blair's biography at the moment, and in it he states that the Unions were the only party donors he came across whilst in office who explicitly demanded policy changes in exchange for their money).

Ed Miliband has admitted he made a mistake.  Not that the policy was a mistake, you understand, just the refusal to answer the question.  According to the Guardian, he said he had declined to admit to the borrowing because "I suppose I felt it was rather a commonplace".  His aides said he had just been through an "emotionally charged" question and answer session on Newcastle under Lyme high street.

I had not previously thought to see the words "emotionally charged" in the same sentence as that particular Midlands town.

But how about the policy?  Yes, a temporary VAT cut would do something to stimulate economic growth, but at a cost of about £12 billion a year, money that would not just cost extra in interest rates but also push up the interest rates on the rest of the new borrowing Britain would have to do.  And when the year was over, would the fundamentals have changed?  Not one jot.

Moreover it's worth considering that the Bank of England has indirectly injected nearly £400 billion into the UK economy by way of QE.  Did that kick-start the economy into urgent life again?  Not as far as you'd notice.  The effect of Miliband's £12 bn tax cut would be tiny.

The British economy will struggle to grow just as long as the Eurozone limps onwards.  Even now there are signs that recession is creeping from the periphery to the core.  Temporary VAT cuts won't alter that.

Here's another well-known phrase or saying for Ed Miliband to ponder.  Well-known in Iceland at any rate.

"Peeing in your own shoe won't keep your foot warm for long".