Julia Gillard, the Australian PM, has been supplanted by arch rival Kevin Rudd, after months of disparagement of her gender, her failure to produce children, her sexual orientation and choice of paramour.
Amazingly, it turns out that Australia is a misogynistic society unprepared for the idea of women taking a prominent role in political life. Who knew?
Thursday 27 June 2013
George Osborne the mad axeman
Mixed reviews in the press this morning for George Osborne's spending review. The Chancellor is attacked from the right by the Torygraph, which points out that a £11.5 billion cut is only 1.5% of a £750 billion spend, that public spending has continued to rise on his watch and that it remains marooned at on or about 44% of GDP. On the other hand the Guardian is against it too. "Osborne takes the axe to public sector jobs", and "Osborne the axeman" run the headlines.
Delve deeper and some interesting faultlines appear. Dan Hodges, the Torygraph's resident Blairite columnist, thinks Osborne has nailed Ed Balls. "The key part of the debate came in the instant just before George Osborne rose to deliver his reply. . . He couldn't wait to spring back to his feet. . . Despite all the attacks on him and the Prime Minister, why was Ed Balls not prepared to say what he wanted to say, namely that despite borrowing spiralling out of control, Labour wanted to borrow more?"
Hodges thinks that Osborne has manoevered Balls into a corner, where Balls has to choose between accepting Tory spending plans or admit that Labour will spend more and borrow more.
This echoes something I've thought for a year or so now - that it's reasonable to criticise Osborne for lack of growth in the economy, or for borrowing too much, but not both. After all, if Osborne had borrowed less there would have been even less growth.
"Labour's "the government is borrowing too much, we'd borrow more" line means the deficit denial tag is now hung round their neck for good", writes Hodges. "The Chancellor believes the political and economic cycles are slowly moving into alignment. And he also believes there isn't anything Ed Balls or Ed Miliband can do about it".
Boy must he loathe the Brownites.
Amidst the acres of critical coverage in the Graun, the leader column has this gem tucked in right at the end. "The picture that emerged from yesterday's spending review was of a Britain in 2016 that resembles a joyless version of Britain in 2006". Well yes. But Britain in 2006 was a woozy paradise fuelled by economic narcotics. What do they expect it to look like when someone attempts to take the debt syringe away?
Martin Kettle's column is all about the politics. As ever with Kettle - who does at least seem to me to have grasped the seriousness of Britain's economic situation - the real fun is to be had with the comments below. "I've said many times before", writes one cheerful poster with only tenuous links to the reality-based community, "just f--- off to the Daily Mail with your Tory cheerleading".
Osborne's "punitive action will have next to no impact on the deficit", writes Jonathan Freedland. "It's all about the politics". What would he prefer? That Osborne put in place some real cuts which would have an impact?
Over in the Torygraph Peter Oborne is in no doubt about the Chancellor's faults. Doing anything about the national economic emergency "means making the kind of difficult decisions that would throw the Coalition into disarray. . . Everybody knows what needs to be done. But nobody dares to do it. . . if growth does not return, we will soon need a chancellor with the will and the guts to make the big cuts in the major spending departments".
A friend reports a visit to the Courts the other day. Tea could not be provided for the jury after 3 p.m. because of budget cuts. A new Sheriff was being sworn in and everything stopped for the occasion. But although the various dignitaries got coffee, there were no biscuits. Budget cuts. The Department of Justice is going to have a budget cut of 10% in 2015-16 (a bigger cut than the Department of Culture, Media and Sport). It won't be long surely before there is no tea or coffee either.
Meanwhile foreign aid continues to countries like Pakistan, which has a top rate of tax lower than the UK's. And a nuclear weapons programme.
Delve deeper and some interesting faultlines appear. Dan Hodges, the Torygraph's resident Blairite columnist, thinks Osborne has nailed Ed Balls. "The key part of the debate came in the instant just before George Osborne rose to deliver his reply. . . He couldn't wait to spring back to his feet. . . Despite all the attacks on him and the Prime Minister, why was Ed Balls not prepared to say what he wanted to say, namely that despite borrowing spiralling out of control, Labour wanted to borrow more?"
Hodges thinks that Osborne has manoevered Balls into a corner, where Balls has to choose between accepting Tory spending plans or admit that Labour will spend more and borrow more.
This echoes something I've thought for a year or so now - that it's reasonable to criticise Osborne for lack of growth in the economy, or for borrowing too much, but not both. After all, if Osborne had borrowed less there would have been even less growth.
"Labour's "the government is borrowing too much, we'd borrow more" line means the deficit denial tag is now hung round their neck for good", writes Hodges. "The Chancellor believes the political and economic cycles are slowly moving into alignment. And he also believes there isn't anything Ed Balls or Ed Miliband can do about it".
Boy must he loathe the Brownites.
Amidst the acres of critical coverage in the Graun, the leader column has this gem tucked in right at the end. "The picture that emerged from yesterday's spending review was of a Britain in 2016 that resembles a joyless version of Britain in 2006". Well yes. But Britain in 2006 was a woozy paradise fuelled by economic narcotics. What do they expect it to look like when someone attempts to take the debt syringe away?
Martin Kettle's column is all about the politics. As ever with Kettle - who does at least seem to me to have grasped the seriousness of Britain's economic situation - the real fun is to be had with the comments below. "I've said many times before", writes one cheerful poster with only tenuous links to the reality-based community, "just f--- off to the Daily Mail with your Tory cheerleading".
Osborne's "punitive action will have next to no impact on the deficit", writes Jonathan Freedland. "It's all about the politics". What would he prefer? That Osborne put in place some real cuts which would have an impact?
Over in the Torygraph Peter Oborne is in no doubt about the Chancellor's faults. Doing anything about the national economic emergency "means making the kind of difficult decisions that would throw the Coalition into disarray. . . Everybody knows what needs to be done. But nobody dares to do it. . . if growth does not return, we will soon need a chancellor with the will and the guts to make the big cuts in the major spending departments".
A friend reports a visit to the Courts the other day. Tea could not be provided for the jury after 3 p.m. because of budget cuts. A new Sheriff was being sworn in and everything stopped for the occasion. But although the various dignitaries got coffee, there were no biscuits. Budget cuts. The Department of Justice is going to have a budget cut of 10% in 2015-16 (a bigger cut than the Department of Culture, Media and Sport). It won't be long surely before there is no tea or coffee either.
Meanwhile foreign aid continues to countries like Pakistan, which has a top rate of tax lower than the UK's. And a nuclear weapons programme.
Tuesday 25 June 2013
The OECD's hard working migrants
The OECD reported last week that that after the financial crisis a greater percentage of immigrants were in work than native Britons. This is not terribly surprising, because the Government's own figures show that most new jobs created in the Blair / Brown years went to people born overseas. In London the figure is about 80%.
It's easy to work out the economic impact of immigration in broad terms. Immigrants increase the pool of available labour and therefore bear down on its cost (that's why the CBI is so keen on it). Lower labour costs mean lower inflation, which equals lower interest rates.
But lower interest rates mean cheaper debt, which means more debt and higher house prices. A population that's growing faster than new houses are being built means higher house prices and more debt. Higher house prices mean less money available for discretionary spending. A huge amount of Britain's personal wealth is tied up in housing, a misallocation of resources which reduces disposable income and lowers the amount of money available for investment.
Britain is drowning under a tsunami of personal debt and has a chronic housing shortage. Ironically, immigration contributed to that. We would have had a financial crisis anyway, but it wouldn't have been so bad.
But lower interest rates mean cheaper debt, which means more debt and higher house prices. A population that's growing faster than new houses are being built means higher house prices and more debt. Higher house prices mean less money available for discretionary spending. A huge amount of Britain's personal wealth is tied up in housing, a misallocation of resources which reduces disposable income and lowers the amount of money available for investment.
Britain is drowning under a tsunami of personal debt and has a chronic housing shortage. Ironically, immigration contributed to that. We would have had a financial crisis anyway, but it wouldn't have been so bad.
The OECD report has been spun in some parts of the media as showing what a great success the mass immigration of the last fifteen years has been. After all, more immigrants are in work than Britons. But stating the point in those terms rather begs the question, how do we calculate the full cost of working immigrants? The OECD haven't taken into account the British people who would have got jobs if migrants hadn't got them instead.
Of course migrants will marginally increase the amount of economic activity, even if they don't bring any money with them. More people tends to mean higher GDP. But for every migrant that is working, you have to add in not just the extra cost of the services provided to them and their families, but the services and benefits provided to the British person who the migrant kept out of a job.
It's worth remembering that a disproportionately high percentage of the British unemployed will be black or Asian Britons, the children of earlier generations of immigrants. They will in many cases have been displaced by white people from Eastern Europe.
It's worth remembering that a disproportionately high percentage of the British unemployed will be black or Asian Britons, the children of earlier generations of immigrants. They will in many cases have been displaced by white people from Eastern Europe.
For every additional working migrant to be a net economic benefit to Britain you have to show either that they didn't displace a British person, or that even if they did, the net value of their tax receipts is greater than the cost of their consumption of services plus the welfare costs of the British person they kept out of a job.
Those are pretty hard to do. As always with these things, the answer you get depends on the question you ask.
Jeremy Forrest and the age of consent
Someone called Bernadette Rooney writes well in the Guardian today about the Jeremy Forrest case, and her own relationship, aged 16, with her English teacher, aged 27.
Rooney writes, "There is a massive difference between accepting that Forrest should be barred from his chosen career for life and accepting the kind of narrative being drawn around this story. He is being widely talked about as a "paedophile" or "pervert" who "abducted" a 15-year old girl . . . child protection experts are vying with each other to find ever stronger language to condemn him. He had "groomed" his pupil, exploited his position of power, and committed "abuse" . . . while the teacher is being presented as a monstrous sexual predator, so the pupil is painted as a vulnerable victim who will suffer long-term "damage" . . . The experts' concern for the girl, however, does not extend to listening to her side of the story or respecting her repeated claims that the relationship was loving and consensual . . . (they) state that her positive view of the relationship is "an illusion".
About her own relationship, Rooney says, "I was not damaged by the experience, and have thrilling memories of the excitement of a relationship with an older intelligent man who inspired my love of literature . . . But such is the hysterical framing of this case that none of us are even allowed to say that . . . I was not a child who was damaged by an abusive relationship with a paedophile. I was an intelligent young adult with the power of reason who knew what I was doing and I don't regret a thing".
On the whole I'm on Rooney's side. Forrest did of course deserve to be sacked, and while he may not have harmed his pupil, there will be other pupils who could be harmed and who deserve to be protected. But Rooney is bang on the money when she says, "The experts' concern for the girl . . . does not extend to listening to her side of the story or respecting her repeated claims that the relationship was loving and consensual".
In this respect the law is on the experts' side; but the law strikes an inevitably arbitrary distinction between 15 and 16 - it assumes no 15 years olds can give mature consent but all 16 year olds can. The reality is more complex - some 15 year olds are mature enough and some 16 year olds aren't.
Sentencing guidelines which took into account what Jeremy Forrest's lover had to say about their relationship might have resulted in his getting a more realistic sentence than five and a half years in prison. Stuart Hall, remember, recently got 15 months for offences including a sexual assault on a nine year old girl.
I'm increasingly coming to the view that we are suffering from a Janus-faced attitude to sex. We are so concerned about protecting minors that Forrest gets five years plus. Yet pornography is widely available for free at the click of a mouse for the delectation, if that's the word, of young children, giving them a view of relations between adults which is misleading if not outright dangerous.
I would like to think that the experts who condemned Forrest and his lover are at the forefront of a campaign to do something about that, but I am not holding my breath.
As for Ms Rooney, it turns out that in her Guardian article she used a pseudonym to protect her husband. He is a teacher.
Rooney writes, "There is a massive difference between accepting that Forrest should be barred from his chosen career for life and accepting the kind of narrative being drawn around this story. He is being widely talked about as a "paedophile" or "pervert" who "abducted" a 15-year old girl . . . child protection experts are vying with each other to find ever stronger language to condemn him. He had "groomed" his pupil, exploited his position of power, and committed "abuse" . . . while the teacher is being presented as a monstrous sexual predator, so the pupil is painted as a vulnerable victim who will suffer long-term "damage" . . . The experts' concern for the girl, however, does not extend to listening to her side of the story or respecting her repeated claims that the relationship was loving and consensual . . . (they) state that her positive view of the relationship is "an illusion".
About her own relationship, Rooney says, "I was not damaged by the experience, and have thrilling memories of the excitement of a relationship with an older intelligent man who inspired my love of literature . . . But such is the hysterical framing of this case that none of us are even allowed to say that . . . I was not a child who was damaged by an abusive relationship with a paedophile. I was an intelligent young adult with the power of reason who knew what I was doing and I don't regret a thing".
On the whole I'm on Rooney's side. Forrest did of course deserve to be sacked, and while he may not have harmed his pupil, there will be other pupils who could be harmed and who deserve to be protected. But Rooney is bang on the money when she says, "The experts' concern for the girl . . . does not extend to listening to her side of the story or respecting her repeated claims that the relationship was loving and consensual".
In this respect the law is on the experts' side; but the law strikes an inevitably arbitrary distinction between 15 and 16 - it assumes no 15 years olds can give mature consent but all 16 year olds can. The reality is more complex - some 15 year olds are mature enough and some 16 year olds aren't.
Sentencing guidelines which took into account what Jeremy Forrest's lover had to say about their relationship might have resulted in his getting a more realistic sentence than five and a half years in prison. Stuart Hall, remember, recently got 15 months for offences including a sexual assault on a nine year old girl.
I'm increasingly coming to the view that we are suffering from a Janus-faced attitude to sex. We are so concerned about protecting minors that Forrest gets five years plus. Yet pornography is widely available for free at the click of a mouse for the delectation, if that's the word, of young children, giving them a view of relations between adults which is misleading if not outright dangerous.
I would like to think that the experts who condemned Forrest and his lover are at the forefront of a campaign to do something about that, but I am not holding my breath.
As for Ms Rooney, it turns out that in her Guardian article she used a pseudonym to protect her husband. He is a teacher.
Wednesday 19 June 2013
Nearing Compleation on An Teallach
Towards the end of last year I was surprised to find that I only had 14 Munros left to do. Clearly this discovery meant that I would have to have a bit of a get-together with friends and accomplices for the last one, and so I've hired a house in Scotland for next Easter, by which time I hope I only have one left.
I started nearly forty five years ago with my Dad on Bidein a'Ghlas Thuill, one of An Teallach's two tops, so it seemed fitting when I was planning all this to finish with the other one, Sgurr Fiona. This is quite a daunting mountain to climb in what may well be winter conditions, It's quite high, climbed from sea level, and, if done properly, involves some heady scrambling over the pinnacles and up to Lord Berkeley's seat. My wife wants to stay behind and make a good dinner for us all. I am trying to insist that she come with us. The children may be even less biddable.
Almost all of the Munros can be climbed without use of the hands, so it is not on the whole a technical challenge. You can of course make it harder by opting to do some of the great mountaineering routes along the way - I've been lucky enough to do Tower Ridge on the Ben, Agag's Groove on the Buchaille and the remote Mitre Ridge on Beinn a'Bhuird amongst others - and by doing a fair proportion of them in winter. I have often had to crawl on the exposed summits when the westerly gales made standing up impossible, most memorably one November day on Schiehallion, when my eyelashes were blown back into my eyes.
The Munros in winter are never easy and sometimes downright dangerous, particularly if you go on your own. But the main challenge is that there are so many of them - 277 when I started, a figure which rose to 284 and then fell again marginally last year to 283 when Beinn a'Chlaideimh was remeasured and found to be below the 3000 foot mark. Beinn a'Chlaideimh is the easiest one I've ever ticked off, because I hadn't yet climbed it, and its demotion by the Scottish Mountaineering Club brought my outstanding number down to 13. I now have 10 left.
As well as being numerous, a lot of Munros are an awful long way away from London (where I was living from number 2 - the Carn Dearg near Corrour railway station - onwards) and Manchester (where I've lived since climbing Stuchd an Lochan, no. 149). That helps explain why all but two of my remaining Munros are north of the Great Glen. But even if you live in Glasgow, say, some of them take some getting to, and when you get there are a long, long way from the road. I have met people in the Fisherfield Forest who had walked in for the day to climb A'Mhaigdean, and they looked dead on their feet with 15 miles still to go. Doing the Munros is hard, but not quite hard enough to prevent about 5,000 people from having done it. The task requires a quality which just so happens to be one of the only ones I possess in world-beating quantities, namely persistence, and that explains why I have nearly finished them.
It is of course possible to criticise the undertaking as a mere box-ticking exercise, and certainly I've met some people who gave every appearance of regarding it in that way. But its great merit is that the pursuit takes you to places you would never otherwise have gone, often in weather that the less obsessive would regard as more suitable for experiencing from within licensed premises.
And it repays. I saw the afterglow from the top of Beinn a'Ghlo one winter dusk, and came down the mountain in darkness; I climbed Tower Ridge on a perfect day overlooking a temperature inversion, all the peaks standing out like islands; I have stood on Sgurr Mhic Coinnich looking westwards over a shining sea, and in the silence of the Cuillin heard the blood roaring in my ears. I've seen eagles galore, foxes, badgers, otters, once a wild cat (perhaps), and had as much fun with friends as in any other part of my life. It has been well worth it.
Moreover, I have kept a diary of all my ascents since the very early years, and I now have a series of snapshots of my life going back to the late 1980s, in which I quickly found that the interesting things to record were the most apparently trivial. So I can tell you what two girls did when I was approaching the summit of Carn a'Chlamain, or what I overheard a passerby say as we were unroping on top of the Ben.*
I'm quite glad I've nearly finished though. Not because I desperately want to complete (or compleat, as Munroists apparently spell it); the nearer I've got to the end the less I mind whether I finish or not. It was the doing that was the pleasure, and as Sir Leslie Stephen, philosopher and Alpine pioneer, once wrote, "We go climbing to remind ourselves what it's like". But I have climbed an awful lot of Scottish mountains now, and I know pretty well what they are like. It would be quite nice not to have to do it any more. Moreover, although I'm not physically decrepit I am starting to see what decrepitude will be like. I am fending it off by spending time at the gym, but it would be mildly annoying to find that it had overtaken me on the last lap.
What will I do if and when I have compleated? Please don't say climb them all again. It makes me tired just thinking about it.
*The girls were looking at my legs; at the time I thought their glances were admiring, but I now realise it was just my unfashionable tweed breeches that caught their eye. The passer-by on the Ben said, "I goes, 'What did you call me?', and he goes 'I called you a c*** Dad. Get over it'". I thought that could not possibly happen with my kids. Little did I know.
I started nearly forty five years ago with my Dad on Bidein a'Ghlas Thuill, one of An Teallach's two tops, so it seemed fitting when I was planning all this to finish with the other one, Sgurr Fiona. This is quite a daunting mountain to climb in what may well be winter conditions, It's quite high, climbed from sea level, and, if done properly, involves some heady scrambling over the pinnacles and up to Lord Berkeley's seat. My wife wants to stay behind and make a good dinner for us all. I am trying to insist that she come with us. The children may be even less biddable.
Almost all of the Munros can be climbed without use of the hands, so it is not on the whole a technical challenge. You can of course make it harder by opting to do some of the great mountaineering routes along the way - I've been lucky enough to do Tower Ridge on the Ben, Agag's Groove on the Buchaille and the remote Mitre Ridge on Beinn a'Bhuird amongst others - and by doing a fair proportion of them in winter. I have often had to crawl on the exposed summits when the westerly gales made standing up impossible, most memorably one November day on Schiehallion, when my eyelashes were blown back into my eyes.
The Munros in winter are never easy and sometimes downright dangerous, particularly if you go on your own. But the main challenge is that there are so many of them - 277 when I started, a figure which rose to 284 and then fell again marginally last year to 283 when Beinn a'Chlaideimh was remeasured and found to be below the 3000 foot mark. Beinn a'Chlaideimh is the easiest one I've ever ticked off, because I hadn't yet climbed it, and its demotion by the Scottish Mountaineering Club brought my outstanding number down to 13. I now have 10 left.
As well as being numerous, a lot of Munros are an awful long way away from London (where I was living from number 2 - the Carn Dearg near Corrour railway station - onwards) and Manchester (where I've lived since climbing Stuchd an Lochan, no. 149). That helps explain why all but two of my remaining Munros are north of the Great Glen. But even if you live in Glasgow, say, some of them take some getting to, and when you get there are a long, long way from the road. I have met people in the Fisherfield Forest who had walked in for the day to climb A'Mhaigdean, and they looked dead on their feet with 15 miles still to go. Doing the Munros is hard, but not quite hard enough to prevent about 5,000 people from having done it. The task requires a quality which just so happens to be one of the only ones I possess in world-beating quantities, namely persistence, and that explains why I have nearly finished them.
It is of course possible to criticise the undertaking as a mere box-ticking exercise, and certainly I've met some people who gave every appearance of regarding it in that way. But its great merit is that the pursuit takes you to places you would never otherwise have gone, often in weather that the less obsessive would regard as more suitable for experiencing from within licensed premises.
And it repays. I saw the afterglow from the top of Beinn a'Ghlo one winter dusk, and came down the mountain in darkness; I climbed Tower Ridge on a perfect day overlooking a temperature inversion, all the peaks standing out like islands; I have stood on Sgurr Mhic Coinnich looking westwards over a shining sea, and in the silence of the Cuillin heard the blood roaring in my ears. I've seen eagles galore, foxes, badgers, otters, once a wild cat (perhaps), and had as much fun with friends as in any other part of my life. It has been well worth it.
Moreover, I have kept a diary of all my ascents since the very early years, and I now have a series of snapshots of my life going back to the late 1980s, in which I quickly found that the interesting things to record were the most apparently trivial. So I can tell you what two girls did when I was approaching the summit of Carn a'Chlamain, or what I overheard a passerby say as we were unroping on top of the Ben.*
I'm quite glad I've nearly finished though. Not because I desperately want to complete (or compleat, as Munroists apparently spell it); the nearer I've got to the end the less I mind whether I finish or not. It was the doing that was the pleasure, and as Sir Leslie Stephen, philosopher and Alpine pioneer, once wrote, "We go climbing to remind ourselves what it's like". But I have climbed an awful lot of Scottish mountains now, and I know pretty well what they are like. It would be quite nice not to have to do it any more. Moreover, although I'm not physically decrepit I am starting to see what decrepitude will be like. I am fending it off by spending time at the gym, but it would be mildly annoying to find that it had overtaken me on the last lap.
What will I do if and when I have compleated? Please don't say climb them all again. It makes me tired just thinking about it.
*The girls were looking at my legs; at the time I thought their glances were admiring, but I now realise it was just my unfashionable tweed breeches that caught their eye. The passer-by on the Ben said, "I goes, 'What did you call me?', and he goes 'I called you a c*** Dad. Get over it'". I thought that could not possibly happen with my kids. Little did I know.
Monday 17 June 2013
Why I love . . . #8 Jean Sibelius
On Thursday I went with my wife and a friend to hear the last of the BBC Phil's Sibelius concerts, with John Storsgard conducting Nos. 3, 6 and 7. Storsgard doesn't seem to be one of the glib grandstanding conductors; in fact he turned shyly to face the audience at the end, with all the diffidence of a Swedish yeoman farmer asking the local squire for his daughter's hand. There were some mannerisms in the 3rd Symphony, but the rest of it was solid and well done. It must be a knackering evening's work, getting through all that knotty music.
Afterwards my wife was underwhelmed. She likes some bits of Sibelius, particularly Night Ride and Sunrise, but she doesn't know the less popular symphonies. "There was just so much waiting around for something to happen", she said of the Sixth. "I mean, I liked the purple passages, obviously, but the hanging around inbetween was unbearable".
It's always hard to explain why you like something, all the more so when you've liked it for years and years and it's part of your having become who you are. When I was a kid my Dad used to take us to Wythenshawe library, and we were allowed to borrow one record per week. After a few months of Bach and Haydn, I thought, "Well perhaps I'd better try some of this modern stuff". I was only about ten, and as it happened Sibelius was only about ten years dead. The LP of Sibelius 2 had a nice landscape on it, so I took it home. I can truthfully say that within ten seconds of the music starting I knew two things; one, that this person was writing for me, and two, that I wanted to be a composer.
I'd like to think too that I immediately recognised that behind the wash of D Major strings there was an understated subtlety and complexity at work - were the rising string crotchets a tune or an accompaniment? Was it an accident that the chattering woodwind figures which follow are a severely compressed inversion of the rising pattern? This may be wishful thinking; but I know loved the invention straight away.
Brought up in post-industrial Manchester, surrounded by the bare Pennine moors, and spending parts of the year in the wilds of Scotland, Sibelius had written music for all my landscapes, internal and external. As a teenager I absorbed his music so thoroughly that today I almost never listen to it. I can imagine it whenever I like. Going to hear it is an occasional diversion, not an inner need.
If Sibelius had just carried on doing the kind of thing he did in the first two symphonies I would still have loved him; but something happened to him, as I found myself telling my wife on the way home, between about the Violin Concerto and the Third Symphony. In the Third we enter a new world, in which although much is superficially the same the outcome is profoundly different; and different in a way which I think has implications for Sibelius's successors.
In writing about the Third most commentators focus on the last of the three movements, in which Sibelius seems to construct the piece from a series of fragments as it goes along. It is rather like a flat-pack symphonic movement, except that unlike an IKEA wardrobe, it functions perfectly well as it's being assembled. But although this is a piece of technical wizardry unparallelled in the repertoire (can anyone imagine Mahler or Shostakovitch being able to accomplish the same thing? Britten could have done it perhaps, but few others) I think the true significance of the Third lies elsewhere. In particular it lies in the occlusion of the symphonic narrative idea which stems from Beethoven and, perhaps, reaches its apotheothis in Mahler.
I have been fortunate enough to conduct quite a lot of the great Germanic repertoire, from Haydn onwards. At the end of the 18th century music tends to be formalistic; it is in a major or minor key, and there is a ritualistic quality to its premises, processes and conclusion. But as the 19th century goes on, harmonic resources become more complex and expressive - you can see it starting to happen in late Mozart - and by the time we get to the Eroica and the 5th symphony, Beethoven is starting to construct narratives of great psychological depth and power.
The finale of Beethoven's 5th is seen (and felt) as a convincing riposte to the drama of the opening, the pathos of the slow movement and the uncertainties of the scherzo. This cumulative narrative power proved inspiring to generations of composers, who struggled to repeat and explore it with varying degrees of success. My own feeling is that Tchaikovsky managed it in the Pathetique but not elsewhere, and Rachmaninov only, courtesy of his great melodic gifts, by the skin of his teeth in the 2nd. But the point is that even in the hands of a great master like Brahms, there is a certain predictability of outcome. Of course, all is going to end well (or tragically as the case may be).
But triumph and tragedy are not the only outcomes in life, and in any event both rather depend on a solipsistic view of the world in which Romantic individualism is applied to the consciousness of the Enlightenment. And as Kipling said, triumph and disaster are imposters both. By the early 20th century the time was surely ripe for music with a different affect.
We all know that the serialists solved this problem in a way which became the dominant trope in the following hundred years. But, starting with the Third Symphony, Sibelius had his own ideas. The point of the Third, it seems to me, is not its technical brilliance, but the composer's refusal to adopt the narratives of Romanticism whilst nevertheless retaining much of its musical style. (You might argue that the serialists did the reverse; that they continued and heightened those narratives - Expressionism? - whilst junking much of the style. Much good it did them)
So the convenient and satisfying (if somewhat pat) conclusions of Sibelius's first two symphonies are gone, and in their place he leaves something altogether more disjointed and ambiguous. I don't have time, space or energy to demonstrate how he does this (and it is not all in the structure), but the Third has a terseness, a concision where ideas of great emotional potency (first movement second subject for example) are ruthlessly constrained (which can be annoying in Brahms but seems to work here); the music is always finding quiet corners to go into, disrupting its flow (Storgards and the BBC Phil did these really well); at what should be the emotional high points (end of the first movement) Sibelius clothes his ideas impersonally in woodwind and horns rather than the full tutti, saved for the last two dignified chords.
And this was just the start for Sibelius. The Fourth symphony, my favourite, takes understatement to new heights. If you want objective evidence, it is the only piece I can think of in the repertoire which ends mezzo-forte. That one dynamic speaks volumes (actually many conductors on record, including Von Karajan, cannot bear to follow the composer's instructions: they don't understand what he is trying to do). Sibelius experiments here with minimalism - the ostinati of the last movement of the 2nd were the means to create a great cumulative climax, whereas in the Fourth Sibelius is stopping the music almost for its own sake; surely John Adams had been listening to the Fourth when he wrote Shaker Loops. The Fifth is more conventional in affect, although its structure is one of great originality and looks forward to the Seventh. In the Sixth we are back in the territory of the Fourth, with its stop-go sense of motion and simple poignant endings, sometimes abrupt and unexpected.
Yes, said my wife, but it's all so disjointed! Well, to a degree, it may be. But the point about all these pieces, from the Third onwards, is that when you know them well you realise what a great sense of interconnectedness and unity they all have. And it is this unity that Sibelius is working towards with the one-movement Seventh symphony. The people who described the Third symphony as Neo-Classical meant it in the musical sense, but I think this is a truer term when one considers Sibelius's later works in the light of the Classical Greek ideas of beauty and unity. If he accomplishes these ideals anywhere it is in the Seventh. In a miraculous piece of skill rivalling the finale of the Third, this is music with many speeds yet only one. Don't ask me how he does it.
In 1994 my wife and I bought a small house in North London. She was six months pregnant. To have somewhere which was in some respects mine and which would do for the start of family life, after ten years precarious peregrination (Balham, Shepherd's Bush, Notting Hill, Holloway), was quite overwhelming. On the first evening I unpacked the stereo and played Sibelius 2. She found me sitting on the sofa in tears. In November I'll be conducting it again in Halifax.
As a mature composer Sibelius set his face against Romanticism, but the subtlety of this personal transformation and the means by which it is accomplished continue to fascinate and inspire.
PS Almost uniquely amongst major composers, some of Sibelius's best pieces are amongst his least well-known. Try Tapiola. And although the Violin Concerto is one of the greatest written for the instrument, the Six Humoreskes are better still - short pieces of immense pathos and charm, without a trace of sentimentality. Lastly, a plea for the Three Piano Sonatines Op.67, minatures by a twentieth century giant who still had time for small things.
PPS Sibelius is credited with the following quotes, all three amongst my favourites. "Ignore the critics. No statue was ever erected to a critic". "While the others serve cocktails of various hues, I have nothing to offer but pure spring water" (a bit pious that one, but you get the drift). And lastly, "All the doctors who told me to stop drinking are dead". Amen to that.
Afterwards my wife was underwhelmed. She likes some bits of Sibelius, particularly Night Ride and Sunrise, but she doesn't know the less popular symphonies. "There was just so much waiting around for something to happen", she said of the Sixth. "I mean, I liked the purple passages, obviously, but the hanging around inbetween was unbearable".
It's always hard to explain why you like something, all the more so when you've liked it for years and years and it's part of your having become who you are. When I was a kid my Dad used to take us to Wythenshawe library, and we were allowed to borrow one record per week. After a few months of Bach and Haydn, I thought, "Well perhaps I'd better try some of this modern stuff". I was only about ten, and as it happened Sibelius was only about ten years dead. The LP of Sibelius 2 had a nice landscape on it, so I took it home. I can truthfully say that within ten seconds of the music starting I knew two things; one, that this person was writing for me, and two, that I wanted to be a composer.
I'd like to think too that I immediately recognised that behind the wash of D Major strings there was an understated subtlety and complexity at work - were the rising string crotchets a tune or an accompaniment? Was it an accident that the chattering woodwind figures which follow are a severely compressed inversion of the rising pattern? This may be wishful thinking; but I know loved the invention straight away.
Brought up in post-industrial Manchester, surrounded by the bare Pennine moors, and spending parts of the year in the wilds of Scotland, Sibelius had written music for all my landscapes, internal and external. As a teenager I absorbed his music so thoroughly that today I almost never listen to it. I can imagine it whenever I like. Going to hear it is an occasional diversion, not an inner need.
If Sibelius had just carried on doing the kind of thing he did in the first two symphonies I would still have loved him; but something happened to him, as I found myself telling my wife on the way home, between about the Violin Concerto and the Third Symphony. In the Third we enter a new world, in which although much is superficially the same the outcome is profoundly different; and different in a way which I think has implications for Sibelius's successors.
In writing about the Third most commentators focus on the last of the three movements, in which Sibelius seems to construct the piece from a series of fragments as it goes along. It is rather like a flat-pack symphonic movement, except that unlike an IKEA wardrobe, it functions perfectly well as it's being assembled. But although this is a piece of technical wizardry unparallelled in the repertoire (can anyone imagine Mahler or Shostakovitch being able to accomplish the same thing? Britten could have done it perhaps, but few others) I think the true significance of the Third lies elsewhere. In particular it lies in the occlusion of the symphonic narrative idea which stems from Beethoven and, perhaps, reaches its apotheothis in Mahler.
I have been fortunate enough to conduct quite a lot of the great Germanic repertoire, from Haydn onwards. At the end of the 18th century music tends to be formalistic; it is in a major or minor key, and there is a ritualistic quality to its premises, processes and conclusion. But as the 19th century goes on, harmonic resources become more complex and expressive - you can see it starting to happen in late Mozart - and by the time we get to the Eroica and the 5th symphony, Beethoven is starting to construct narratives of great psychological depth and power.
The finale of Beethoven's 5th is seen (and felt) as a convincing riposte to the drama of the opening, the pathos of the slow movement and the uncertainties of the scherzo. This cumulative narrative power proved inspiring to generations of composers, who struggled to repeat and explore it with varying degrees of success. My own feeling is that Tchaikovsky managed it in the Pathetique but not elsewhere, and Rachmaninov only, courtesy of his great melodic gifts, by the skin of his teeth in the 2nd. But the point is that even in the hands of a great master like Brahms, there is a certain predictability of outcome. Of course, all is going to end well (or tragically as the case may be).
But triumph and tragedy are not the only outcomes in life, and in any event both rather depend on a solipsistic view of the world in which Romantic individualism is applied to the consciousness of the Enlightenment. And as Kipling said, triumph and disaster are imposters both. By the early 20th century the time was surely ripe for music with a different affect.
We all know that the serialists solved this problem in a way which became the dominant trope in the following hundred years. But, starting with the Third Symphony, Sibelius had his own ideas. The point of the Third, it seems to me, is not its technical brilliance, but the composer's refusal to adopt the narratives of Romanticism whilst nevertheless retaining much of its musical style. (You might argue that the serialists did the reverse; that they continued and heightened those narratives - Expressionism? - whilst junking much of the style. Much good it did them)
So the convenient and satisfying (if somewhat pat) conclusions of Sibelius's first two symphonies are gone, and in their place he leaves something altogether more disjointed and ambiguous. I don't have time, space or energy to demonstrate how he does this (and it is not all in the structure), but the Third has a terseness, a concision where ideas of great emotional potency (first movement second subject for example) are ruthlessly constrained (which can be annoying in Brahms but seems to work here); the music is always finding quiet corners to go into, disrupting its flow (Storgards and the BBC Phil did these really well); at what should be the emotional high points (end of the first movement) Sibelius clothes his ideas impersonally in woodwind and horns rather than the full tutti, saved for the last two dignified chords.
And this was just the start for Sibelius. The Fourth symphony, my favourite, takes understatement to new heights. If you want objective evidence, it is the only piece I can think of in the repertoire which ends mezzo-forte. That one dynamic speaks volumes (actually many conductors on record, including Von Karajan, cannot bear to follow the composer's instructions: they don't understand what he is trying to do). Sibelius experiments here with minimalism - the ostinati of the last movement of the 2nd were the means to create a great cumulative climax, whereas in the Fourth Sibelius is stopping the music almost for its own sake; surely John Adams had been listening to the Fourth when he wrote Shaker Loops. The Fifth is more conventional in affect, although its structure is one of great originality and looks forward to the Seventh. In the Sixth we are back in the territory of the Fourth, with its stop-go sense of motion and simple poignant endings, sometimes abrupt and unexpected.
Yes, said my wife, but it's all so disjointed! Well, to a degree, it may be. But the point about all these pieces, from the Third onwards, is that when you know them well you realise what a great sense of interconnectedness and unity they all have. And it is this unity that Sibelius is working towards with the one-movement Seventh symphony. The people who described the Third symphony as Neo-Classical meant it in the musical sense, but I think this is a truer term when one considers Sibelius's later works in the light of the Classical Greek ideas of beauty and unity. If he accomplishes these ideals anywhere it is in the Seventh. In a miraculous piece of skill rivalling the finale of the Third, this is music with many speeds yet only one. Don't ask me how he does it.
In 1994 my wife and I bought a small house in North London. She was six months pregnant. To have somewhere which was in some respects mine and which would do for the start of family life, after ten years precarious peregrination (Balham, Shepherd's Bush, Notting Hill, Holloway), was quite overwhelming. On the first evening I unpacked the stereo and played Sibelius 2. She found me sitting on the sofa in tears. In November I'll be conducting it again in Halifax.
As a mature composer Sibelius set his face against Romanticism, but the subtlety of this personal transformation and the means by which it is accomplished continue to fascinate and inspire.
PS Almost uniquely amongst major composers, some of Sibelius's best pieces are amongst his least well-known. Try Tapiola. And although the Violin Concerto is one of the greatest written for the instrument, the Six Humoreskes are better still - short pieces of immense pathos and charm, without a trace of sentimentality. Lastly, a plea for the Three Piano Sonatines Op.67, minatures by a twentieth century giant who still had time for small things.
PPS Sibelius is credited with the following quotes, all three amongst my favourites. "Ignore the critics. No statue was ever erected to a critic". "While the others serve cocktails of various hues, I have nothing to offer but pure spring water" (a bit pious that one, but you get the drift). And lastly, "All the doctors who told me to stop drinking are dead". Amen to that.
Thursday 13 June 2013
Measuring out my life in replacement dishwasher baskets
The great literature of the 20th century is full of disenchantment with the human condition. From Kafka to Koestler, from Camus to Canetti, from Heller to Houllebeq, its heroes - no, its everymen - rail and chafe against the impersonality and alienation of modern life.
But though I scanned their pages full of sympathy and fellow-feeling, usually from within the seams of a charity shop overcoat, nothing has ever filled me with greater boredom and horror than the experience of ordering a new dishwasher cutlery basket from E-spares.
I've nothing against E-spares, a domestic part replacement website which seems to do a terrific job. But oh Jesus. There is a video ("Hi. I'm Matt from E-spares") with bouncy theme music. In it the chap tells you to order the one that's exactly right for your dishwasher if you can, before considering the universal dishwasher basket. I watched all 42 bland seconds of it with my mouth wide open.
That was bad enough. But what's this? When I go to the universal dishwasher basket page I see that a staggering 672 people have written and posted comments about it. Why? On the first page one reads "better then the one i had and better for big familys". I am tempted to scream, to read them all and jump out of the window in equal measure.
Never in all my life have I felt the sheer pointlessness of human existence so keenly. That it should come to this. "Measuring out my life in coffee spoons"? Eliot didn't know the half of it.
But though I scanned their pages full of sympathy and fellow-feeling, usually from within the seams of a charity shop overcoat, nothing has ever filled me with greater boredom and horror than the experience of ordering a new dishwasher cutlery basket from E-spares.
I've nothing against E-spares, a domestic part replacement website which seems to do a terrific job. But oh Jesus. There is a video ("Hi. I'm Matt from E-spares") with bouncy theme music. In it the chap tells you to order the one that's exactly right for your dishwasher if you can, before considering the universal dishwasher basket. I watched all 42 bland seconds of it with my mouth wide open.
That was bad enough. But what's this? When I go to the universal dishwasher basket page I see that a staggering 672 people have written and posted comments about it. Why? On the first page one reads "better then the one i had and better for big familys". I am tempted to scream, to read them all and jump out of the window in equal measure.
Never in all my life have I felt the sheer pointlessness of human existence so keenly. That it should come to this. "Measuring out my life in coffee spoons"? Eliot didn't know the half of it.
Wednesday 12 June 2013
So farewell then GCSE coursework
As I have often said here, the plural of anecdote is not data. But (as I have often gone on to say) -
A few years ago a friend's daughter came round to my house to do some coursework on my computer. She was doing the composition module of her GCSE music. At some point in the day she played it to me. "It's bloody awful", she said. Privately agreeing, but searching for something good to say about it, I said, "I quite like the middle section". "Oh, Mr Beech wrote that bit", she replied. Mr Beech was the head of department.
A relative of mine was doing GCSE art. She had got stuck with a big painting and brought it home. Her Mum is quite a good artist and spent an hour or so working on it. The daughter got an A, and for a year or so the painting figured prominently on the school's promotional literature.
A teenager was telling me recently about her French GCSE aural. Apparently the kids have to write and then memorise the answers to some questions (actually where the parents are literate in French, the parents tend to do it for them). In the aural itself the examiner, who is their teacher, asks the questions and marks the kids on their ability to recite the answers. The exchange is recorded on tape, but, this teenager told me, that doesn't stop the teachers giving visual clues when candidates have a memory lapse, or even writing words down on paper and holding them up for the candidates to see.
I have a lot of sympathy for teachers faced with yet another shake-up of the exam system. But coursework has got to go. There is overwhelming temptation for parents and staff to cheat.
A few years ago a friend's daughter came round to my house to do some coursework on my computer. She was doing the composition module of her GCSE music. At some point in the day she played it to me. "It's bloody awful", she said. Privately agreeing, but searching for something good to say about it, I said, "I quite like the middle section". "Oh, Mr Beech wrote that bit", she replied. Mr Beech was the head of department.
A relative of mine was doing GCSE art. She had got stuck with a big painting and brought it home. Her Mum is quite a good artist and spent an hour or so working on it. The daughter got an A, and for a year or so the painting figured prominently on the school's promotional literature.
A teenager was telling me recently about her French GCSE aural. Apparently the kids have to write and then memorise the answers to some questions (actually where the parents are literate in French, the parents tend to do it for them). In the aural itself the examiner, who is their teacher, asks the questions and marks the kids on their ability to recite the answers. The exchange is recorded on tape, but, this teenager told me, that doesn't stop the teachers giving visual clues when candidates have a memory lapse, or even writing words down on paper and holding them up for the candidates to see.
I have a lot of sympathy for teachers faced with yet another shake-up of the exam system. But coursework has got to go. There is overwhelming temptation for parents and staff to cheat.
Tuesday 11 June 2013
Obama is watching you, apparently
I am greeting the news that Obama is watching me with a shrug.
No doubt what the US is doing is terribly wrong and infringes our right to privacy. No doubt in the hands of an even less benevolent state than the US the information might be put to bad use.
Nevertheless I don't think Edward Snowden has told us anything very earth shattering.
The obvious reason is that I don't have anything to hide (although in the world of the security services that's probably a matter of opinion; and mine may not count).
Secondly, it's one thing for the CIA to be monitoring and storing my emails (and my posts on this blog), but I don't flatter myself that anyone is actually reading them (if you are, greetings all, and long live the special relationship).
Thirdly, did we seriously expect that we could have devices in our homes receiving and sending information all the time and that no-one would watch what we were doing? We might just as well be surprised that Tesco Value Burgers should contain horsemeat.
I have long resigned myself to the idea that Orwell's Telescreen in every home, watching citizens as they watched it, has come to us a mere ten years after 1984 (actually the Telescreen is even more ubiquitous than Orwell imagined, since in his novel the proles are considered too unimportant to have them). If English Country Cottages can get adverts to scroll down the sidebar of my browser, did anyone really imagine that the Government couldn't get into our PCs as well?
When you go online, you lay yourself open to the world.
No doubt what the US is doing is terribly wrong and infringes our right to privacy. No doubt in the hands of an even less benevolent state than the US the information might be put to bad use.
Nevertheless I don't think Edward Snowden has told us anything very earth shattering.
The obvious reason is that I don't have anything to hide (although in the world of the security services that's probably a matter of opinion; and mine may not count).
Secondly, it's one thing for the CIA to be monitoring and storing my emails (and my posts on this blog), but I don't flatter myself that anyone is actually reading them (if you are, greetings all, and long live the special relationship).
Thirdly, did we seriously expect that we could have devices in our homes receiving and sending information all the time and that no-one would watch what we were doing? We might just as well be surprised that Tesco Value Burgers should contain horsemeat.
I have long resigned myself to the idea that Orwell's Telescreen in every home, watching citizens as they watched it, has come to us a mere ten years after 1984 (actually the Telescreen is even more ubiquitous than Orwell imagined, since in his novel the proles are considered too unimportant to have them). If English Country Cottages can get adverts to scroll down the sidebar of my browser, did anyone really imagine that the Government couldn't get into our PCs as well?
When you go online, you lay yourself open to the world.
Sarah Tisdall - The Guardian's missing whistleblower
In the wake of the furore about President Obama's data gathering exercise, the Guardian prints this morning a piece in G2 consisting of interviews with whistleblowers from various fields, detailing their tribulations - loss of job, loss of home, loss of health, relationships etc. As I read this piece I couldn't help noticing that one of the most famous whistleblowers of recent years was missing.
This was Sarah Tisdall, a civil servant who in 1983 leaked details about the arrival of US cruise missiles in Britain to a newspaper. The paper complied with a court order that it reveal the identity of its source, and Tisdall as a result was sent to prison for four months.
The newspaper in question? The Guardian of course.
This was Sarah Tisdall, a civil servant who in 1983 leaked details about the arrival of US cruise missiles in Britain to a newspaper. The paper complied with a court order that it reveal the identity of its source, and Tisdall as a result was sent to prison for four months.
The newspaper in question? The Guardian of course.
The end of the Eurozone. Or not.
Today in the German Constitutional Court at Karlsruhe a case begins which could signal the end of the Eurozone. Or not.
The head of the Bundesbank, Jens Weidmann, is asking the Court for a declaration that the European Central Bank exceeded its mandate when it said last year that it would be prepared to buy up the sovereign debt of troubled southern peripheral member countries. ECB head Mario Draghi's Outright Monetary Transaction mechanism is widely credited with putting a cap on bond yields in Spain and Italy, thereby preventing default and Eurozone break up.
Now the Court has no jurisdiction over the ECB, but it does over the Bundesbank, and it could in theory declare that Germany's central bank could not lawfully take part in Draghi's scheme. OTR has cast such a formidable spell on the bond markets that no country has yet had to use it, and what would happen to bond yields if the Court ruled OTR unconstitutional is anyone's guess.
But while we're in the business of guessing, my money is on the Court finding in favour of the ECB.
Why?
Because the great and the good in continental Europe have been brought up on Every Closer Union with their mother's milk. If I had to bet the mortgage, I'd wager that the eight judges of the Bundesverfassungsgericht won't upset the apple cart.
The head of the Bundesbank, Jens Weidmann, is asking the Court for a declaration that the European Central Bank exceeded its mandate when it said last year that it would be prepared to buy up the sovereign debt of troubled southern peripheral member countries. ECB head Mario Draghi's Outright Monetary Transaction mechanism is widely credited with putting a cap on bond yields in Spain and Italy, thereby preventing default and Eurozone break up.
Now the Court has no jurisdiction over the ECB, but it does over the Bundesbank, and it could in theory declare that Germany's central bank could not lawfully take part in Draghi's scheme. OTR has cast such a formidable spell on the bond markets that no country has yet had to use it, and what would happen to bond yields if the Court ruled OTR unconstitutional is anyone's guess.
But while we're in the business of guessing, my money is on the Court finding in favour of the ECB.
Why?
Because the great and the good in continental Europe have been brought up on Every Closer Union with their mother's milk. If I had to bet the mortgage, I'd wager that the eight judges of the Bundesverfassungsgericht won't upset the apple cart.
Tuesday 4 June 2013
Ed Balls smells the coffee
I've been pointing out for five years that the credit crunch is a much more serious problem for the Left than the Right, and there are a couple of signs today that late risers are at last beginning to smell the coffee.
Firstly, the Grauniad reports today Ed Balls's speech to the effect that under the next Labour government the most affluent pensioners won't get the winter fuel payments any more. This reform is long overdue, and it shows a dawning acknowledgment that future governments really are going to have to cut spending.
Secondly, the paper has a wonderful quote from the Institute of Public Policy Research, the Left-leaning think-tank, whose director Nick Pearce writes, "The challenge for Labour is to assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs".
It's been obvious since about 2009 that the boom in UK government spending had been largely built on the state taking on more debt, and on the tax revenues generated by consumer debt. All the credit crunch did was demonstrate the truth of the maxim that What Can't Go On Forever Must Stop.
The consequences for social democracy, as the IPPR seem at last to be recognising, are devastating. Social democracy's big idea is that the state will spend the large sums of money required to support people who need supporting. What's immediately obvious from the 1997/2010 record however is that the UK government could not afford its public spending commitments even though its course almost exactly coincided with the longest period of economic growth in British history (1993-2008).
If public spending was unaffordable during the very best of economic good times, my reasoning goes, it isn't going to be affordable in the more straitened times to come. That's why I've been boring friends and family for years with the proposition that social democracy as we have known and sometimes loved it is in very deep trouble.
So when an IPPR director says Labour must "assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs" it is a cherishable "no really" moment for those of us in the reality-based community.
You have to hand it to Ed Balls. No one else in British politics could possibly utter his line about "iron financial discipline" - this from Gordon Brown's chief lieutenant - and maintain a straight face.
His winter fuel payment cut will save about £100 million, it is calculated. The UK's projected deficit for 2013-14 is close to £120 billion.
Deckchairs. Titanic.
Firstly, the Grauniad reports today Ed Balls's speech to the effect that under the next Labour government the most affluent pensioners won't get the winter fuel payments any more. This reform is long overdue, and it shows a dawning acknowledgment that future governments really are going to have to cut spending.
Secondly, the paper has a wonderful quote from the Institute of Public Policy Research, the Left-leaning think-tank, whose director Nick Pearce writes, "The challenge for Labour is to assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs".
It's been obvious since about 2009 that the boom in UK government spending had been largely built on the state taking on more debt, and on the tax revenues generated by consumer debt. All the credit crunch did was demonstrate the truth of the maxim that What Can't Go On Forever Must Stop.
The consequences for social democracy, as the IPPR seem at last to be recognising, are devastating. Social democracy's big idea is that the state will spend the large sums of money required to support people who need supporting. What's immediately obvious from the 1997/2010 record however is that the UK government could not afford its public spending commitments even though its course almost exactly coincided with the longest period of economic growth in British history (1993-2008).
If public spending was unaffordable during the very best of economic good times, my reasoning goes, it isn't going to be affordable in the more straitened times to come. That's why I've been boring friends and family for years with the proposition that social democracy as we have known and sometimes loved it is in very deep trouble.
So when an IPPR director says Labour must "assemble an alternative social democratic strategy that better controls costs" it is a cherishable "no really" moment for those of us in the reality-based community.
You have to hand it to Ed Balls. No one else in British politics could possibly utter his line about "iron financial discipline" - this from Gordon Brown's chief lieutenant - and maintain a straight face.
His winter fuel payment cut will save about £100 million, it is calculated. The UK's projected deficit for 2013-14 is close to £120 billion.
Deckchairs. Titanic.
Monday 3 June 2013
The Sutton Trust - don't make me laugh
The Sutton Trust, an educational charity, has come up with a corking demonstration of the woeful blindness that blights UK educational policy.
It reports today that top state schools "are significantly more socially selective than the average state school nationally and other schools in their own localities", with a much lower proportion of kids on free school meals. Affluent middle class people are crowding round the best schools. The Trust thinks that "schools, particularly in urban areas, should use a system of ballots - where a proportion of places is allocated randomly - or banding across the range of abilities to achieve a genuinely balanced intake".
But the Trust is mistaking correlation for causation. It hasn't asked two fundamental questions, the first being "what is a good school?", the second "how does a school become good?"
The Trust defines good schools by results, referring to them as "the highest performing comprehensive schools". Good results = good schools. Let's assume that's right (although I personally think "good" is better defined in terms of value added). Now how did those schools become good? Obviously a lot of different things go into the mix - quality of leadership, quality of teaching, quality of facilities; but surely the one which trumps them all is quality of intake (I know the plural of anecdote does not equal data, but my own kids have done very well in a comprehensive in which some of the teaching was terrible and the buildings so depressing and squalid that they would have been a disgrace in 1970s Albania). If a school has an intake in which bright industrious kids well supported at home are over-represented, it will tend to do better than one in which they're under-represented.
So in which section of society are bright industrious kids well supported at home most likely to come from? Why, the middle class of course.
Keep with me here - I'm not suggesting that all working class kids are thick and have feckless parents, or that all middle class kids are all paragons; I'm just suggesting that bright industrious people tend to marry people like themselves, and either become or remain middle class. Not surprisingly, given a triple whammy of genetics, culture and affluence, they tend to raise children who take on their parents' characteristics.
It may not be an especially appealing thought, but we should not be surprised to find that the bright and industrious are over-represented in the middle class compared to the working class. This can only be not true if a) intelligence and industry are not heritable qualities, or b) we live in society that does not reward brains and effort. They are; we do.
So actually the Sutton Trust has got it risibly the wrong way round. There is a link between the middle class and the best performing state schools, but it doesn't work the way the Trust imagines.
The Trust thinks the middle class cluster round the best schools. Actually the best schools are best because the middle class cluster round them.
We will never get educational policy right in Britain while we suffer from this delusion - and Michael Gove suffers from it as well - that all wrongs can be righted if only we can make all schools "good" schools. The Sutton Trusts goals are actually more limited, in the sense that it is only trying to equalise access to "good" schools. But it too is chasing a shadow. If you equalise access the only result will be that "good" schools will start to get slightly worse results and "bad" schools slightly better.
The Trust says, comically, that "lower income students do better when there is a mix of students of all backgrounds in a school". I'm sure they do. The corollary must also be true - that higher income students do worse; and moreover as you reduce the number of higher income students in a school, the lower income students, previously doing better because of them, start to do worse as well. The Sutton Trust are strangely silent about this.
No amount of tinkering will fix the basic problem, which is that a lot of kids aren't very bright, and in any event come from households with a range of dreadful social problems, not the least of which is that the parents didn't get anything in particular out of the education system themselves. The kids are fly enough to know that they aren't going to be lawyers or doctors, but not quite clever enough to be realise that education is not just about money.
What might just make a difference, because of the very large numbers of children involved, would be the abolition of private education. A tsunami of Tarquins and Tamsins would descend reluctantly on the Gasworks Comp. Then you would see some equalisation.
But which government is going to risk that one?
P.S. A very good letter in the Graun the following day from a fellow sceptic wondered whether affluent middle class people enjoy better health because they are treated by "top doctors", or whether leafy suburbs enjoy lower crime rates because they are watched over by "top police officers".
Very pithily nailed. Bah. Humbug.
It reports today that top state schools "are significantly more socially selective than the average state school nationally and other schools in their own localities", with a much lower proportion of kids on free school meals. Affluent middle class people are crowding round the best schools. The Trust thinks that "schools, particularly in urban areas, should use a system of ballots - where a proportion of places is allocated randomly - or banding across the range of abilities to achieve a genuinely balanced intake".
But the Trust is mistaking correlation for causation. It hasn't asked two fundamental questions, the first being "what is a good school?", the second "how does a school become good?"
The Trust defines good schools by results, referring to them as "the highest performing comprehensive schools". Good results = good schools. Let's assume that's right (although I personally think "good" is better defined in terms of value added). Now how did those schools become good? Obviously a lot of different things go into the mix - quality of leadership, quality of teaching, quality of facilities; but surely the one which trumps them all is quality of intake (I know the plural of anecdote does not equal data, but my own kids have done very well in a comprehensive in which some of the teaching was terrible and the buildings so depressing and squalid that they would have been a disgrace in 1970s Albania). If a school has an intake in which bright industrious kids well supported at home are over-represented, it will tend to do better than one in which they're under-represented.
So in which section of society are bright industrious kids well supported at home most likely to come from? Why, the middle class of course.
Keep with me here - I'm not suggesting that all working class kids are thick and have feckless parents, or that all middle class kids are all paragons; I'm just suggesting that bright industrious people tend to marry people like themselves, and either become or remain middle class. Not surprisingly, given a triple whammy of genetics, culture and affluence, they tend to raise children who take on their parents' characteristics.
It may not be an especially appealing thought, but we should not be surprised to find that the bright and industrious are over-represented in the middle class compared to the working class. This can only be not true if a) intelligence and industry are not heritable qualities, or b) we live in society that does not reward brains and effort. They are; we do.
So actually the Sutton Trust has got it risibly the wrong way round. There is a link between the middle class and the best performing state schools, but it doesn't work the way the Trust imagines.
The Trust thinks the middle class cluster round the best schools. Actually the best schools are best because the middle class cluster round them.
We will never get educational policy right in Britain while we suffer from this delusion - and Michael Gove suffers from it as well - that all wrongs can be righted if only we can make all schools "good" schools. The Sutton Trusts goals are actually more limited, in the sense that it is only trying to equalise access to "good" schools. But it too is chasing a shadow. If you equalise access the only result will be that "good" schools will start to get slightly worse results and "bad" schools slightly better.
The Trust says, comically, that "lower income students do better when there is a mix of students of all backgrounds in a school". I'm sure they do. The corollary must also be true - that higher income students do worse; and moreover as you reduce the number of higher income students in a school, the lower income students, previously doing better because of them, start to do worse as well. The Sutton Trust are strangely silent about this.
No amount of tinkering will fix the basic problem, which is that a lot of kids aren't very bright, and in any event come from households with a range of dreadful social problems, not the least of which is that the parents didn't get anything in particular out of the education system themselves. The kids are fly enough to know that they aren't going to be lawyers or doctors, but not quite clever enough to be realise that education is not just about money.
What might just make a difference, because of the very large numbers of children involved, would be the abolition of private education. A tsunami of Tarquins and Tamsins would descend reluctantly on the Gasworks Comp. Then you would see some equalisation.
But which government is going to risk that one?
P.S. A very good letter in the Graun the following day from a fellow sceptic wondered whether affluent middle class people enjoy better health because they are treated by "top doctors", or whether leafy suburbs enjoy lower crime rates because they are watched over by "top police officers".
Very pithily nailed. Bah. Humbug.
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