New Year's Eve post

As the end of year approaches, I wave goodbye to my birthday (56, since you ask), then Christmas, then New Year's Eve.  Hello 2015.  The knowledge that I'm almost certainly in the last third of my life requires a certain equanimity of spirit to face down.  I think I'm up to it, but you never know.  At least you can't have a mid-life crisis whilst in the foothills of old age.  It's a conceptual impossibility.

Resolutions for the New Year - spend more time fishing ("God does not deduct from man's allotted span time spent fishing", according to Chekov) and start writing an opera; one should keep challenging oneself after all.

I have spent the last couple of days climbing in Scotland with Prof Mitchell.  Evidently I still have the legs and lungs to do the height gain in six inches of fresh powder snow, and here are a couple of pictures to prove it.

My life situation would appear to be that whilst I can still run up and down stairs, I can't always remember why I'm doing it.  Happy New Year to all.

Labour, the bankers and the Barnett Formula

There is a richly appropriateness to the mess in which Ed Miliband now finds himself.

Think of it this way.

In 2008 the Credit Crunch brought the giddy spending of the Blair / Brown years to an end.  Bankers had found increasingly exotic ways of justifying lending to people who couldn't repay their loans, telling their regulators that they were spreading the risk.  In fact they were spreading uncertainty, and when it emerged that some people really couldn't pay back, the banks drew in their horns like a snail catching the first whiff of salt.  Capital flows dried up and so did economic activity.  This problem, arising first in the US, swiftly spread over here and we saw queues outside Northern Rock.

The obvious conclusion from this - that had the bankers behaved properly the spending spree of the 2000s would have come to an end far sooner - was lost on the Left, which preferred to blame the bankers without asking what it was they had actually been doing (lending us all money).

A further conclusion - that a country which is borrowing £150 billion per year just to stay afloat needs to make some spending cuts - was also fiercely resisted.  It suited Labour to blame George Osborne for austerity (despite the fact that overall government spending was actually still going up) because to acknowledge he might have been right would have been to invite speculation about the future of social democracy itself.

After all, if your raison d'etre is to spend more money to solve society's problems, it is rather awkward if it looks as if you can't even afford the spending you're doing at the moment, let alone the spending you say you'll do once you get re-elected.  So Labour carried on banging away at Osborne, and it went quite well for them until it turned out we hadn't had a double dip recession after all, let alone a triple dip.  The fact that with the economy growing at 3% we are still running a deficit of about £2 bn every week rather bears out Osborne's view of things: even as the good times look like returning we are still running at a massive loss in the UK.

Labour's failure to explain the stark consequences of 2008 to its supporters (and even its most educated supporters can hardly bring themselves to look at the financial pages, feeling that businessmen are on the whole either City fatcats in red braces snorting cocaine, or tedious people with Birmingham accents involved in the manufacture of widgets), has nowhere been more evident than in the West of Scotland.  Finding after the first debate with Alastair Darling that Yes was still way behind in the polls, Alex Salmond tried a new tack - he linked the possibility of iScotland with the creation of a new, fairer progressive society.  This wasn't what Salmond himself wanted, and he knew full well that it wouldn't be affordable, but needs must when the devil drives and Salmond was in a fix.

To give credit to his shameless ingenuity it worked like a dream.  Labour voters in the party's post-industrial heartlands went over to Yes in droves, and the pro-Indepence faction ironically did better in Labour strongholds of the Clyde valley than it did in its own SNP heartlands (which, without exception, voted No).

But the revelation that the massed ranks of Labour supporters in Scotland's most densely populated areas were switching to Yes so panicked the No campaign that they mobilised the Great Clunking Fist of Gordon Brown, brought blinking into the light like a long-interred Golem, bearing his new promises of extra powers plus retention of the Barnett Formula.  And these promises in turn enabled David Cameron to make his own pledge of solving once and for all the West Lothian question, the issue of English votes for English laws.

Ed Miliband's opportunist criticism of George Osborne's economic policy together with his failure to educate his own supporters of the new realities of life post-2008 has in fact come round in a great arc and struck him on the head. It will now be a miracle if Labour can escape the consequences of its own short-termism.  What goes around comes around.

Scotland says Nae

I must have cared deeply about the Scottish referendum, because I dreamed about it twice last night, each time thinking the result had been No, and each time waking to the disquieting realisation that a Yes vote was still possible.

But here we are in Glad Confident Morning and the Scots really have voted No.

Some observations at random.

1. The Nationalists will never have a better chance of winning.  They only needed 51% of votes, and they were led by a man who could sell snow to the Eskimos.  If there's another referendum - and there surely will be, the Scottish psyche being as it is - the UK prime minister would be perfectly justified in demanding a two-thirds majority for a change so fundamental. The next time Alex Salmond will be an old man, if the West of Scotland diet doesn't get him first.   If Salmond had led the No campaign, Yes would have suffered a humiliating defeat rather than a decisive one.

2. Geographical distribution of the votes shows that Yes voters were disproportionately young working class, and No voters disproportionately middle-aged or elderly middle-class.  The Yes voters, more likely to be badly educated, inexperienced and badly informed, voted for a case that was emotional, nationalistic and utterly threadbare intellectually.  The Noes voted for one which made pragmatic common sense. I heard a man say, "This was a cry for help from Scotland's disadvantaged".  More accurate to call it a cry for more generous - and unfunded - welfarism.

3. The pollsters overestimated the Yes vote and underestimated the No vote.  This ties in with the many stories of intimidation by the Yes campaign.  The Noes were nervous at speaking out, even to pollsters.

4.  Simpson's law applied.  This principle, first posited in the beige heat of the AV referendum, proposes that whichever side has the most artistic Luvvies is not only wrong but will lose.  So here, when most Scottish Luvvies supported independence.

5. This is a disastrous day for Labour in England. In the wake of promises by Westminster party leaders that Scotland must have more powers, the notion that England must also have more powers has gained what seems like irresistible traction (though this may of course fade). If, as is long overdue, Scottish Westminster MPs are barred somehow from voting on English matters, that should put an end to Labour government in England for a long time.

6. I've already heard several English Labour politicians temporising hilariously on the prospects of a solution to the West Lothian question. Translated, their obfuscation means, "Please let our Scots colleagues keep on voting.  If you don't we'll never be in a majority and enjoy ministerial office again".  Self-determination is apparently only the Celtic nations, not for the English.

7. There are enormous problems inherent in working out new constitutional and tax arrangements. It's going to be hard to combine a UK-wide distribution from central funds with the idea of locally variable tax rates.  How will English politicians explain to their electorate that their taxes should be used to prop up the (over-generous) Barnett Formula to Scotland when the Scots are sucking in investment by undercutting English taxes?  But if all four countries start raising all their own tax and stop getting a central Westminster grant, those differing tax rates will lead to flows of businesses and populations as it becomes apparent that not all four countries are equally prosperous.  Is that really what we want? Ultimately there will have to be some sort of carry over from the richer countries (ie England) to the others.

8. Timing is everything.  Cameron promised the Scots it would be done quickly, and he'll have to keep to that at the same time as keeping the English onside.  There'll be a general election next year, and you'd imagine he'd be able to present a plan to the English electorate which would get a ringing endorsement. In the constitutional deliberations which will follow in the next few months I expect Labour to peel off pretty quickly, realising that English votes on English matters will assuredly mean electoral doom. Cameron had better get it right, but it isn't impossible.  (I wrote this post a few hours after the No declaration; in fact Ed Miliband by tea-time the same day was already babbling about a Constitutional Commission and English regional assemblies; translation - in which direction is the long grass?)

Still and all, although I'm not a flag-waving jingoist I think that willingness to change just enough to prevent upheaval reflects a good deal of credit on Britain.  I'm glad Britain still exists this morning and tonight I'll be cracking open a bottle of Aldi champage to celebrate.

Neither may be Great, but they're still probably better than some of the alternatives.

Things can only get better in Scotland

It has long been my contention that the Nationalists have been offering Scottish voters a false prospectus, and so on this momentous day I offer some extracts from Alex Salmond's Bumper Book of Lies - 

(1) We own the pound and currency union is inevitable.
(2) Even if there’s no currency union that doesn’t matter.
(3) We can join the EU without having our own currency or central bank.
(4) The EU will accept us with open arms without being obliged to sign away our sovereignty and adopt the Euro.
(5) Significant Scottish businesses are largely pro-separation. 
(6) Our financial services industry won’t melt away south of the border.
(7) We will keep all the oil revenues.
(8) Oil revenues are not falling and can only increase. 
(9) The NHS is at risk if we stay in the Union.
(10) Taxes will not increase in iScotland.
(11) Jobs will not be at risk in iScotland.
(12) Mortgage rates won’t increase.
(13) Interest rates on government borrowing won’t increase.
(14) rUK will accede to all of our negotiation demands.
(15) Pensions will be safe and affordable in iScotland
(16) The separation on offer is true independence.
(17) We will be immune from the budgetary pressures which force the UK to borrow about £2 bn a week just to stay afloat.
(18) We can walk away from the UK’s national debt without consequences.
(19) We can defend ourselves just as well on our own.
(20) English banks will be happy to make home loans to us in sterling even though there’s a risk that we might set up our own currency later.

And the biggest lie of all perhaps – 

(21) In iScotland “Things can only get better”! 

Some editions of Mr Salmond's book include another - 
(22) If we're wrong about the above we can always go and work in England

"Things Can Only Get Better"?  A more apposite anthem might actually be Joy Division’s “New Dawn Fades”

The decline of classical music - other people are noticing shock

An article in the Times breaks the news that, according to the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, the number of pupils learning to play the electric guitar "has overtaken those learning the violin for the first time".

In October 2009 I wrote a post entitled "Barry Manilow and the decline of classical music" which sums up my attitude to guitar lessons.  Part of it read: "hardly had I got into double figures when I realised that girls had an irrational weakness for boys who could play the electric guitar. So the violin was a chore (enjoyed playing, hated practising), whereas the guitar was a pleasure to be indulged whenever there was a free moment. The school had a visiting guitar teacher, but the kids who had lessons were universally useless at rock and roll. That's because you cannot teach someone to play it. You have to work it out for yourself. Classical music requires technique, and if you can acquire one it will take you almost to the highest level, where only the last few percentage points of musicality marks the difference between Alfred Brendel and a journeyman. But rock and roll is not like that. In a discipline which prizes above all else the ability to improvise, every player has to find their own way: after all, the great masters of the electric guitar, from Hendrix to Richard Thompson to Tom Verlaine, have styles so divergent they might be playing different instruments. Not only were lessons useless, but they were given by adults. Pop music was ours, the music of the young, and we would no more have let them teach us about it than they would have known how."

But not only are electric guitar lessons pointless.  The fact that so many kids want to have them is symptomatic of classical music's loss of prestige and relevance.  Jonathan Vaughan, director of music at the Guildhall School is quoted as saying "Classical music is being sidelined in every possible area. We are sleepwalking into a crisis and no one seems to be acknowledging it."  Vaughan has noticed a distinct falling off in the quality of home-grown students.  Actually I would argue that the crisis goes back a long way and that we are already well into it.

The rise of pop music is partly responsible.  So is the "call-me-Kevin" school of child-centred education, where anything that might be "difficult" is avoided (as if we would teach Harry Potter rather than Shakespeare . . . oh, wait).  So also is the old-school nature of acoustic instruments, particularly in times when every teenager has access to a computer on which the most amazing digital signal processing technology is readily available, often for nothing.  So also however is the determined effort by the gatekeepers of performance time to keep out new classical music which might be popular with audiences in favour of stuff which they themselves think might be edgy and impressive.

There is a very simple lesson here.  If you take an artistic medium with a sizeable audience base and by a series of choices over many years manoeuvre it away from the tastes and interests of that audience, firstly the audience will tend to dry up, and secondly the audience's children will be less likely to want to engage with that artistic medium themselves, whether as consumers or performers. Thirdly, as interest wanes the provision made for that artistic medium in schools declines.  After all, if no one cares about it, why should we teach it?

Why are we surprised that kids don't want to learn a classical instrument?

I have an interest to declare of course, in that I am myself a writer of classical music that on the whole audiences quite like.  I once had a piece performed by an ensemble with a reputation for its interest in the edgy and impressive.  Afterwards one of the administrators told me that she had never received so many expressions of interest in and admiration for a new work.

I never heard from them again.

iScotland and the impossible dream

I said I'd give up blogging, but in the face of the Scottish referendum this Thursday I can only plead St Augustine - Not Yet.

Sentimentally speaking I hope the Scots don't go.  But let's leave that on one side because I don't have a vote and anyway sentiment is hardly a basis for making a decision like this.

What would I do if I were Scots?  I'd vote No.  That's because I think Scotland would be worse off. Worse off both economically and in terms of international clout.

Why worse off?  Because iScotland won't have its own currency (something I've been pointing out on here for three years), which means it'll face higher government borrowing costs.  Its financial services industry will drift away south, and so will the many UK government jobs currently situated there (National Savings for example).  Oil revenues will decline, and anyway iScotland won't get them all - at the moment they belong to all parts of the UK and the rUK government won't have any incentive - political or economic - to give them away.  English banks will be reluctant to lend to people in another country where there are currency uncertainties, and so mortgage rates will be higher.

Scotland is disproportionately dependent on government jobs and services, so severance from the rest of the UK will leave that burden falling on Scottish taxpayers.  And the burden will increase, because Scotland will lag economically and has a population demographic which is ageing disproportionately, raising the proportion of its national income that Scots must devote to pensions.  Moreover Scotland has an unhealthier population than the rest of the UK, so the cost of running the NHS will be disproportionately greater.  At the moment all these costs are borne by all the UK.  Post Aye, Scotland will have to bear them itself.

It is a no-brainer.  Scotland's national income will go down at exactly the same time that the money it needs to sustain jobs and services will go up.  Taxes will have to rise or services be cut; or both.  The effect of this will be to drive business and investment south.

To be clear, there is one way in which Scotland might make this all work.  It is by having its own currency and central bank, running a low-tax small-government economy undercutting rUK from just over the border.  And this is actually what Alex Salmond wants - not for nothing were the SNP known at one time as the Tartan Tories - but it isn't what Scots as a whole want, and it isn't the prospectus which is being laid out.  Which brings me to the way the campaign has been run.

I don't blame the No party for being negative and lacklustre.  They were a long way ahead in the polls for a very long time and to them their case must have seemed overwhelming (as it does to me).  It's very hard to make a case which depends on the sheer stupidity of the Yes campaign to seem anything other than negative.  Against any other politician than Mr Salmond it would have been good enough, but Salmond is just as much a tactical master as he is a strategic duffer.

How has he managed to make Yes draw level in the polls?  By appealing to the very substantial element of the Scottish electorate which wants to live in the sunlit uplands of Scandinavian-style high-tax welfarist Social Democratic nirvana.  Salmond doesn't want this himself, and knows it isn't possible; the money is just not there, and things will actually get worse rather than better after Independence.

But he also knows that an awful lot of mugs with no grasp of economics don't know that, and by selling them the Impossible Dream he has hiked the Yes vote from 20 points behind to within snatching distance of victory.

I personally blame Labour for a good deal of this.  The overwhelmingly clear lesson after the Credit Crunch was that the bankers had been looking for more and more inventive ways of lending us money.  The Crunch happened because it turned out that we couldn't pay it back.  We had in fact been living beyond our means for many years.  This was obvious to everyone who had made a habit of reading the financial pages, which excluded almost everyone on the Centre Left (with the notable exception of Frank Field).

The Left blamed the bankers, failing to see that the bankers were just helping us all borrow, and that if the bankers had behaved responsibly we'd have just had to stop borrowing and face reality even sooner.  The Left railed against austerity without seeing that although services have been cut, government spending is still rising and that, awkwardly for them, the UK is still having to borrow about £2 billion every week just to break even.  And that's when the economy is growing at 3% per year.

What's this got to do with Scotland, and why is Labour partly responsible?

The leadership of the Labour party has connived in a critique of the Coalition which is misleading and does its supporters no favours.  It has maintained the illusion that there is a magic button which David Cameron could press which would restore the UK miraculously back a decade to the "good" times when Gordon Brown was Chancellor, when money flowed and there was a Diversity Co-Ordinator on every street corner.  There isn't any such panacea of course, but people who hate the Tories need no excuse to bury their heads in the sand.

If Ed Miliband were a responsible leader he would have pointed out to his supporters that there is no magic button, that we are not as rich as we thought we were and that we can in the end only have the public services we can afford.  He hasn't. So a lot of people still believe it could be glad confident morning again if only the mean old Tories could be booted out.

It just so happens that people who take this view are very thick on the ground in West Scotland's industrial heartlands, and it is this wholesale mobilisation of the Scottish working class (largely Catholic) vote which has brought the Union to the brink.

The argument favoured by the Left for solving Britain's fiscal black hole (that is, amongst those who can bring themselves to admit there is one) is to Tax the Rich.  Whatever its other weaknesses, this argument doesn't work in Scotland because most of the rich live in, er, England.  Please forgive me for finding that quite funny.

And so we find ourselves four days away from Independence.  For someone like me who loves Scotland and has had an emotional engagement with the country for fifty years that is a sad situation. But the people I feel really sorry for are those who think their problems of joblessness, deprivation and ill health will be solved by a poorly-thought through attempt to create a socialist version of Brigadoon.

Things Can Only Get Better, is the Nationalist refrain.  It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that they might get worse instead.

The last post

It having been pointed out to me that spending an hour or so each week writing this blog might not be the best use of a busy composer / conductor / househusband's time (something of which I was in any event subliminally aware), I've decided to pack in blogging.  So this will be my last entry.

I've posted here for nearly four hundred times in five and a half years, my first attempt being in February 2009, generating a readership that's grown from nothing to about 50 hits a day, a tiny figure in web terms but not bad for a small-timer.  I haven't re-read my collected blogging works in full, but looking back over the entries I see I've had certain recurring preoccupations, and it's instructive to consider to what extent events have borne out the views I had at the beginning.

Starting with the issue on which I've been most egregiously wrong, namely the Eurozone. I thought that after the financial crisis the Euro would implode under the weight of its own contradictions. In the first place I underestimated the extent to which those at the top would be willing to bend the rules to keep the party going - the famous Draghi put was almost certainly illegal under EU law, but the mere fact of Draghi's "whatever it takes" utterance was enough to quiet the panicking money markets. Secondly I had not appreciated the extent to which the free movement of labour laws would enable Mediterranean states to export their impoverished and angry unemployed youth (largely to Britain). This game is not over yet, but it's amazing that we're still playing at all.

Elsewhere I've done a bit better.

It remains true that the Left has not on the whole understood that the massive hole in Britain's budget (we're still borrowing more than £2 billion every week) cannot be filled merely by taxing the rich more. The contradictions this exposes in the Social Democratic programme (whose raison d'etre is to provide an expensive social safety net) have not even been addressed, let alone solved. This doesn't mean Labour won't win in 2015 however.

The dangers of excessive immigration, in terms of the environment, the economy, the strain on public services and on social cohesion have if anything become even more obvious, most recently with the Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham schools. Race doesn't matter much; culture assuredly does. How Britain is going to absorb an awful lot of people who regard its social mores with contempt is a problem for the future.

In an allied issue, it has become even more apparent that Britain is overpopulated. Bar Hong Kong and Bangladesh, we are one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Partly because of immigration, partly because immigrants tend to have a higher birth rate, we don't have enough houses. In the year to 2013 the population increased by 400,000. Yet paradoxically the more we try and build the more we build on farmland (that's not to say that all new housing is or must be built there). A recent Cambridge University study shows that we already have a massive food import problem; and our capacity to grow our own is diminishing all the time the demand for it is going up. Something has got to give.

My contention that the police are on the whole absolutely rubbish rather than insitutionally racist has been borne out by event after event. In fact in the last five and a half years the only story out of dozens I can think of which suggests that the police really are "institutionally racist" rather than incompetent, corrupt, lazy and sometimes racist (on an individual level) was the recent one about references to racism being removed from disciplinary reports. Everything else has been about mediocre or dishonest people doing a mediocre job.

Next, that hoary old chestnut - BBC bias. No-one of course can prove that the BBC is biased, although the Corporation has sometimes seemed to be acknowledging every other week that it is. I prefer to look at the long list of senior figures, most recently Jeremy Paxman, who agree (shame Jeremy that you couldn't bring yourself to say so while you were still in the job). You only have to ask what the opposite of a liberal bias might be to see that the BBC is effectively admitting an anti-conservative bias. I have no objection to that. I only object to having to pay for it. If the BBC wants to carry on taxing us to pay for services other people get for nothing, it needs to put its recruitment policy in order.

Tony Blair is a much reviled figure these days, and even I - a former admirer - concede that he has much to answer for, not the least the baleful consequences of allowing market forces into the university system on the coat-tails of an unjustifiably expanded student intake. But Blair was right that there was a cost in failing to intervene in Iraq which his opponents are reluctant to acknowledge, let alone discuss. We are seeing this cost now with Syria and Ukraine; indeed, I sometimes think that the greatest benefit to black Americans of President Obama's election might be the revelation that one of their chaps could become the most powerful man in the world and still be just as rubbish as Bush, Carter, Reagan and all the other duffers. "There is a red line", says Obama. If so, I haven't seen any evidence of it. A very talented public speaker who will no doubt do very well as the new Nelson Mandela after his presidency is over.

The other area in which I have consistently felt we are sleep-walking into trouble is that of freedom of speech. There is no right not to be offended, nor should there be, and nowadays people are being prosecuted (under legislation like the Telecommunications Act, intended for other purposes) merely for saying things that the CPS thinks some people won't like. Ultimately there are no objective ways of determining what is offensive and what isn't. The true civil libertarian should acknowledge this reality and come down in favour of individual freedom wherever possible. It seems to me a tragedy that the liberal Left - the sector of society which fought so hard for freedom of speech - should have instigated these sorts of restrictions and that the unreflective Right in Britain should have gone along with it.

Lastly Art. I've tried to expand on some of my enthusiasms and dislikes. I don't feel Modernism has really spoken to the human condition in a useful and articulate way. My own somewhat gentler art has been liked by audiences but not by those walk in the corridors of power.

I like the story about Berlioz. When the French musical establishment finally decided he was worth a job in the Paris Conservatoire it was as Assistant Librarian. If this is what the greatest ever French composer had to endure, who am I to complain?

If you have been, thanks for reading.

Why I love . . . #12 Richard Linklater's Boyhood

The other day I went so see Richard Linklater's new film Boyhood.  As readers of the press will know, Boyhood's McGuffin is that it was filmed, a few days at a time, over 12 years, allowing the actors to age, most notably the child leads, who start the film fresh-faced ingenues and end spotty, hairy and sexually active teenagers on the verge of adult life.

Some reviewers have found Boyhood boring, but I found its poignant ordinariness transfixing.  And walking home afterwards I was reminded of Jonathan Franzen's much lauded novel The Corrections. Franzen is a wonderful writer, but the mistakes made by the parents in his family saga were at first repeated by their children but then "corrected", and all three as I recall walked away and lived happily ever after. A let down to end on such a false note.

The greatest merit of Boyhood was that it allowed its participants no such luxury.  The feckless Dad and the Mum who kept ending up with alcoholics were allowed in middle age a degree of resolution to their problems - after all, most of us can learn to avoid repeating our more obvious mistakes given fifteen years to reflect - but there was no sense that Mason and his lovely sister were going to be free of the kind of difficulties which beset their parents.  I found watching these children age and seeing them standing uncertainly on the threshold of adult life touching and uplifting at the same time.

Tony Hall and the curse of our present system

I've written in a previous post about Tony Hall's grilling in front of a Commons committee on the subject of the BBC DG's plan to boost black, Asian and ethnic minority representation in the Corporation's output.

It will be recalled that Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, berated Hall for the BBC's "racist approach" to diversity, saying that the white working class were being ignored. Davies is wrong because although this may be a bad thing, it's not a racist bad thing: even on his own case it is discrimination on the basis of class rather than race.

Interestingly though the admirably clear-thinking Daniel Hannan has written a wonderful blog in the Torygraph today discussing the meaning of diversity which makes Davies' point much more cogently and forcefully.

I have been saying for years that the BBC's most serious weakness when it comes to bias is that it tends to admit people from a narrow societal and educational base, that's to say metrocentric young university graduates with a humanities degree.

Why, I have written so often that the words are getting worn out, are we surprised that the BBC has, by its own admission, a liberal bias given the nature of the people who work for it?

Here is Hannan, in a different context admittedly, but the read-across is nearly complete:

"How has “diversity” come to mean only headcounts of women and ethnic minorities? When voters complain that the party leaders are similar, they don’t mean that they’re all white, or that they’re all male, or even that they’re all Oxford-educated. They mean that they seem cut off from the concerns of the country at large. Nigel Farage . . . has never tried to pass himself off as anything other than a public-school-educated broker. On duty, he wears pinstripes; off duty, tweed and cords. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because it’s what Nigel is saying that attracts his voters, not where he went to school."

". . . "diversity” has taken on almost the precise opposite of its dictionary definition. [For its advocates it] doesn’t just mean having people with different skin-tones; it means having people with different skin-tones who think in similar ways. . . But being diverse is less important to the diversity-wallahs than holding approved ideas about promoting diversity. . . The last thing its exponents want is actual pluralism. They want more Muslims, but not Muslims who hold Islamic views about, say, the definition of marriage. They want more black people, but not black people who get ideas about prospering outside the EU. They want more women, but not more Margaret Thatchers. . . [True diversity would involve breaking] . . .the attitudinal monotony, what the French call the pensée unique, that is the curse of our present system."

Tiger Woods, Sergio Garcia and people of colour

I raised a weary eyebrow the other day when Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, berated various BBC bigwigs, including DG Tony Hall, in a Commons select committee hearing for the Corporation's "racist approach" to diversity.

Hall has apparently planned a boost to black, Asian and ethnic minority representation in the Corporation's output, and Davies' objection is that this is itself racist because it ignores the white working class.

Whilst Davies is clearly wrong - if it's class discrimination it can't have anything to do with race - his argument is slightly more nuanced and interesting than it first appears. "I think the true racist sees everything in terms of race or colour", he said. "Surely what we should be aiming to be is colour blind".

I thought something along these lines a couple of years ago when the Spanish golfer Sergio Garcia said that he intended to cook fried chicken for Tiger Woods. The brilliant American tweeted his displeasure about this apparent piece of racial stereotyping, and Garcia, jumped on by the media, apologised for his remarks. Then the head of the European Golf Tour George O'Grady tried - ineptly - to stand up for Garcia, saying he had "most of his friends are coloured American athletes".

Only someone well out of the metropolitan loop could have made such a schoolboy error.  O'Grady soon found himself up to the nostrils in the media thick and sloppy.

The word "coloured" is now well out of order. As far as I can remember it was replaced by "black" at least twenty years ago, although now, at least in the US, the favoured expression seems to be "people of colour". I have no idea what the correct parlance is and personally use the "black", because that was the inoffensive term amongst "black" people when I was growing up.

We have become such a rainbow nation however that "black" no longer fits the bill accurately, not when latte is a more common colour on Britain's streets. I can't bring myself to use "people of colour" (it is ploddingly over-elaborate). "African-American" and "Afro-Caribbean" are cumbersome, and "coloured" reminds me rather too much of Apartheid South Africa. "Black" people have the right to call themselves whatever they choose, but it is of course patronising in itself to imagine that "black" people are a single homogenous group; the reality is that individuals will have different ideas about how they'd like to be addressed. It can be bafflingly difficult for the average white person to avoid giving offence. Sergio Garcia may be a prick, but he probably isn't a racist prick, and as for Mr O'Grady the words "well-intentioned" and "hapless" spring to mind.

All of which brings us back to Philip Davies MP. And yes, "what we should be aiming to be is colour blind". Absolutely. Britain is not a colour blind country, but it has made such massive strides in that direction that I sometimes wonder whether hyper-sensitivity about race is counter-productive. If we're trying to get to a situation where race doesn't matter, why do people so often make such a fuss about it on such modest pretexts? Of course there are various withering put-downs possible to that question, but are we not at least approaching the point where saying "Oh well, never mind" every now and again might at least be an option worth considering?

If Tiger Woods had simply shrugged and said, "Sergio can cook me fried chicken whenever he likes", he would have emerged from the furore with his reputation (and by association that of his fellow - cringe - people of colour) very much enhanced.

Sir Harrison Birwistle at 80

 Harrison Birtwistle is 80 round about now, and an article appears on the Guardian's leader page praising the old controversialist.  Sir Harrison is a "profoundly British composer" it seems, perhaps even "a natural successor to composers such as Elgar, Holst and Delius . . .as powerfully distinctive as that of any composer alive today".

It won't surprise my friends and enemies to learn that I am not a Birtwistle fan. I tried listening to Earth Dances again this morning, and, after the marvellously effective opening low brass and percussion notes had begun to blend and criss-cross each-other I found myself thinking, "this is actually quite boring". It took about a minute and a half.  I felt as if I were being beaten over the head with a rubber truncheon.  For me, Birtwistle has never learned that it is not what you say - everyone has something interesting to say, and most of us can come up with the profound from time to time - it is how you say it. Art is a mediation of experience, and we won't persist with it if it doesn't mediate in a way which generates pleasure.

But this is of course just a personal view, even if it's one which is widely shared in Britain. The Guardian's comparison with Holst, Elgar, Butterworth, RVW is instructive.  I have been a musician for about fifty years, soberingly, and in truth I have never once heard anyone say, "Did you hear that piece of Birtwistle's on the radio last week?" or "I'm playing some Birtwistle at the moment", or "I really like that piece of Birtwistle's".  And of course I couldn't whistle anything of his, nor have I ever met anyone who could.  Neither have I ever met anyone in all this time in and around the profession who was interested in Birtwistle's music.

What's really striking about Birtwistle is that, notwithstanding that the Guardian's leader writer (probably Andrew Clements) thinks he is of a similar stature to Elgar et al, he is almost totally absent from British musical life. He is our most celebrated composer, but almost no-one involved in the business (whether as a listener, and amateur or a professional player) pays any attention to what he does. And this despite the many hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money that, over the years, has been pushed in his direction (much of it via the Royal Opera House, the biggest recipient of Arts Council money in the UK).

In the year after Elgar's First Symphony was premiered it received over one hundred performances in Britain.  That's because people like Elgar's music and were willing to pay to hear it. Other of his pieces have entered the national consciousness, so that even now most British people will recognise Nimrod or the Pomp and Circumstance marches; and those with an interest in classical music will have listened hundreds of times to or performed the symphonies, the Cello Concerto, Gerontius, the Serenade for Strings and the Introduction and Allegro (I could of course go on).

The same is not quite true of Holst and Delius, but it's much truer of them than it is of Birtwistle. The Planets is a work which every musician, like it or not, recognises as a ubiquitous part of the cultural fabric of British life. The same goes for the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending with RVW.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, Birtwistle has ever written has come remotely close to entering the consciousness of the British people. His music hasn't even entered the consciousness of those charged professionally with the task of delivering it to the public. I had dinner with a professional orchestral player last night. Had she ever played any Birtwhistle? She thought she must have; after all, she'd been in the business for twenty years. But if so she couldn't remember anything about it.

(Incidentally, it's quite funny to finding the Guardian defining something as British, since the general drift of its comment on recent utterances by David Cameron is loftily sceptical. "So Mr Rusbridger, what did the Guardian mean when it said Birtwistle was a very British composer . . . "  As someone commented on its website, the newspaper is in danger of falling through its own thin ice.)

How then have we got to the stage where, despite this strange absence from British musical life, Birtwistle can merit a leader in the Guardian on his 80th birthday?

The short answer is that the Graun is not short of the kind of people who admire people like Birtwistle; but there's more to it than that.

Birtwistle was very fortunate when, in 1959, William Glock was made controller of Radio 3 and decided that the cow-pat school of British music was outdated. What the public really needed, Glock thought, was a good dose of European total serialism. This rejection of the politer art of the old school tied in rather well with the working class revivalism which followed Look Back in Anger (1956), and it must have helped that Birtwistle was a Northener from Accrington.

At any rate Birtwistle was taken up by Glock, as was Peter Maxwell Davies, and their two careers flourished accordingly. Birtwistle in particular became a poster boy for the kind of "challenging" and "edgy" art whose advocates felt divided them from the safe and suburban Mr and Mrs Concert Goer, arriving in a coach party from Frodsham. "But it hasn't got a tune", these tedious provincials wailed, bolstering the hipsters' sense (already pretty strong) that they themselves were breathing an altogether more rareified atmosphere.

So Birtwistle over the years came to be not just a purveyor of music that almost no-one wanted to listen to, but a symbol (for both sides of the argument) of the idea that avant gardism was not so much paving the way for the masses to follow as constituting an end in itself, a kind of super-art that only a certain tiny percentage of society was intelligent enough to "get".

Of course the fact that the masses were paying for their pleasure did not trouble the elite (nor, apparently, Sir Harrison).

So actually Birtwistle is really a British composer only in the sense that the British have paid for him to become what he is. He might be more accurately described as a European composer, firstly because his music owes much more to the European influences which took root on the continent and which, pre-Glock, British composers regarded with some suspicion, and secondly because the idea that a self-appointed elite should sit at the apex of a system, political or cultural, is one which has more parallels in recent European history than in Britain, with its long democratic traditions.

Ironically then, Birtwistle's eminence speaks much more eloquently about British cultural life in the second half of the twentieth century than his music ever has to British people.  In this sense, and only this, is Birtwistle "a profoundly British composer". His fame tells us something important about British society.

This is not an argument against public subsidy in art. Still less is it an argument that what the masses like must by definition be good. It involves instead a recognition that between Birtwistle at one end of the continuum and Karl Jenkins at the other there exists a great body of composers whose music the public might have liked if it had had a chance to hear it. It says that while it may be legitimate to use public money to pay for something for a bit to see if it catches on, there comes a point when the public's distaste becomes clear.

That point was reached with Birtwistle many decades ago.  But, as so often, the people who dish our money out knew better.

The Ring of the Nibelung - could have done better?

I have had opera up to the eyeballs. Last week I went with my wife to Glyndebourne to see Rosenkavalier, and on Saturday sat through Opera North's concert performance of Gotterdammerung in Salford.

Salford / Glyndebourne. You choose.

At last I can say I have seen The Ring. The Twilight of the Gods was the last instalment of the Opera North's four-year cycle, and OK it was only semi-staged, but rarely did we think any of it could have been improved by full production.

Is The Ring any good? That's a very large question. In 1990 Radio 3 broadcast it in a sequence of one act per night, and I listened to it religiously in a remote cottage on the island of Lewis in between bouts of reading Anna Karenina and writing a very bad orchestral piece. At the time I wrote in my diary, "A stupid story, but what wonderful music".  Nearly twenty five years later I can't disagree much with that.

It was reassuring to find that enthusiastic Wagnerians like George Bernard Shaw felt Gotterdammerung was the weakest of the four operas. So did we. Oddly, Wagner wrote its libretto first, and The Ring was conceived when Wagner realised that he would have to include a lot of back story for Gotterdammerung to make sense.

If the narration was cut down, it didn't show. The opening scene with the Norns felt like padding, and, even though I love Wagner, Act I, at 2 hours 15 minutes, was interminable. Shaw thought that Gotterdammerung was a reversion to the Grand Opera Wagner had been trying to avoid in the first three parts of The Ring, and whilst this may be true he nevertheless dealt with the grand passions of the characters in a majestic fashion. Brunnhilde's refusal to part with the ring even as Siegfried is unwittingly betraying her was magnificently written.

Nonetheless I felt the overarching dramatic scheme of The Ring would have been improved by a professional dramaturg like Hugo von Hoffmansthal. Hoffmansthal's work with Strauss in Rosenkavalier (and elsewhere) has a roundedness that Wagner's libretto lacks (and probably wouldn't have aspired to). The operas would have been better, shorter and more dramatically effective. Hoffmansthal might have done more with a character like Gutrune, the woman whom Siegfriend, under the influence of a magic potion (stupid story, remember), has betrayed Brunnhilde. Gutrune is thrust in front of us after the prologue and, embroiled in the plot immediately without any opportunity to establish herself as a character, remains an unengaging cipher.

However the character most conspicuously missing from Gotterdammerung is Wotan. He has banished Brunnhilde to the high rock, but Siegfried has rescued her, redeemed her even, with human courage and love. I would have given a good deal to see Wotan walk back on stage at the end. What music Wagner could have summoned up for a confrontation with Brunnhilde! But Wotan should also surely have been present for the fall of Valhalla - in his absence the collapse of the Gods is like Hamlet without the prince. It would have been good to know a little more of why the return of the ring to the Rhinemaidens necessarily meant the end of the old world and beginning of the new. After all, the Rhinemaidens had the ring at the beginning of Rhinegold, and that seemed to work for the Gods. And why should we think that the new world would be any better? Wagner doesn't tell us.

It may seem picky to find fault with The Ring's plotting and pacing, but that is the sort of exacting engagement Wagner would have expected and wanted. It's impossible to imagine his being satisfied with an audience which walked out thinking "Well that was nice", and then went home for tea and toast. We left talking about what we'd seen, and were still talking about it an hour later.

Of course, the heavenly length of The Ring, its unwieldy structure and dramatic raggedness, are part of its peculiar charm. The fact that it could have so easily been better still merely adds to the compelling nature of Wagner's creation.

I haven't mentioned the music. The best bits are amongst the best bits of 19th century Romanticism, and therefore amongst the best in any genre anywhere. In some of it Wagner seems to be treading water slightly, but in an idiom which you have to credit him for inventing, exploiting and finally growing out of. It is an amazing achievement.

On Saturday the Opera North orchestra played mostly well in a desperately unflattering acoustic, and Richard Farnes, who has lovely hands, conducted unflappably. I could have perhaps done with a bit more flapping. It won't be to everyone's taste, but here is George Solti conducting the Vienna Phil with Birgid Nilsson in the Immolation Scene. This gives a sense of the possibility of a no-holds-barred style of Wagner conducting which sometimes The Ring cries out for.

Luis Suarez - biting by accident?

Leaving aside the football itself - and what a gripping struggle last night's Germany -v- Algeria game was - the World Cup continues to provide peerless entertainment off the field.

Trying to explain how an Italian defender ended up with teeth marks in his shoulder, Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez claimed, "After the impact . . . I lost my balance, making my body unstable and falling on top of my opponent . . . At that moment I hit my face against the player leaving a small bruise on my cheek and a strong pain in my teeth".

This reminds me rather of the captain of the cruise liner Costa Concordia who, it will be recalled, left his sinking ship by accident when he tripped and fell into the lifeboat.

So far, so implausible. But fervent were the denials from Uruguayan people and press. It was an Italian plot. It was an English plot. It was a European plot. Suarez was innocent.

Except that it now turns out that he wasn't. Writing on Twitter, Suarez said. "I have had the opportunity to regain my calm and reflect on the reality of what occurred . . . the truth is my colleague Giorgio Chiellini suffered the physical result of a bite in the collision he suffered with me. For this I deeply regret what occurred, apologise to Giorgio Chiellini and the entire football family and I vow to the public there will never be another incident like it".

So Suarez did bite Chiellini. Certainly this is what the press is now reporting, although - once a lawyer, always a lawyer - read closely the statement looks more like an acknowledgment of the bite together with the claim that it was an accident.  Chiellini did "suffer the physical result of a bite", even if Suarez didn't mean to do it.

Still, everyone seems to think it is an admission, so perhaps that's what it is.

Suarez is still appealing the four-month ban FIFA handed out. If FIFA think his original denial was a lie, might they not be tempted to increase the ban rather than reduce it?

In Brazil the entertainment goes on and on.

Rolf Harris and the effect of Operation Yewtree

Is Operation Yewtree a witch-hunt? That is apparently what Terry Gilliam and Chris Tarrant think. Gilliam described it as "like something you'd expect to find in the former Soviet Union", and Tarrant said he "found what was happening terrifying".

There isn't any suggestion that Tarrant himself has anything to fear from the investigation.

Operation Yewtree's record is mixed. Freddie Starr, Jim Davidson and Jimmy Tarbuck were all arrested (Starr four times) before being told they would face no further action. Dave Lee Travis was tried on multiple counts and acquitted on most of them, the jury being unable to reach a decision on the others. Michael Le Vell and William Roache were acquitted. On the other hand both Max Clifford and Rolf Harris have been convicted and others are pending.

Is this, as an article in the Guardian suggests today, a "vindication" of Operation Yewtree?  Well, yes and no.  But mostly no.

Firstly, Yewtree is sometimes guilty of applying today's thou-shalt-not-touch standards to the very different social mores that applied in the 60s and 70s. Rape then would be rape now, but some of the other behaviour would have been regarded as boorish rather than criminal. One of Rolf Harris's victims complained that he had "groped her bottom". I'm afraid that's just what people did. Perhaps they shouldn't have, but as one of the people who complained about Dave Lee Travis said in court, at the time she did not regard his touching her as a sexual assault. That says everything you need to know about changing standards.

Secondly, although you'd expect prosecutions to have a failure rate, Yewtree's is rather high. It has left wreckage behind. And even leaving aside the trauma of an early morning arrest, the shame of the investigation and the crippling legal fees, once you are arrested for a sexual offence you never get your reputation back. People will always wonder, "Did he really do it after all?"

Thirdly, a long trial costs the state an awful lot of money. Does such a high failure rate justify the cost?

Fourthly, for the last 18 plus months rather a lot of Metropolitan Police officers have been tied up trying to find out what ageing celebrities did the last century. To say that these officers can't be in two places at once is not to minimise the misery and suffering of people who have lived with the memory of serious sexual assault for a long time. It's merely to acknowledge that other people are suffering now and serious criminals are walking free because Met Police officers are working on Operation Yewtree instead.

(Of course the police must love it, because they get to meet TV personalities and their cases are all over the papers. Much more glamorous than bringing your run-of-the-mill scrote up before the beak.)

As it happens I know a number of lawyers who've been involved in Yewtree cases, some on the prosecution side, some on the defence. There is a clear consensus. Other important police work - particularly in relation to gangs - is being neglected. The CPS are incompetent and badly prepared. Some of the prosecutions look desperately thin (one complainant said she had been in a car with the accused and thought something must have happened, but she couldn't remember what it was). And lastly, Operation Yewtree is happening because senior officals, under pressure from the commentariat, wanted to be seen to be doing something about sex crime.

So Operation Yewtree marches on.  But potting the elderly Rolf Harris is a poor sort of vindication.

Land and freedom

Sometimes reports appear in the press which, ostensibly unrelated, set off the car alarm in one's mind.

The first, which you can see here, suggests that Britain's population has been growing twice as fast as the rest of Europe for the last decade, gaining as many people as in the entire previous generation.

The Torygraph report today says that immigration accounts for "at least 60 per cent of the growth in the last decade . . . That does not include the knock-on effect of immigration on birth rates, with around a quarter of new babies in the UK being born to foreign mothers". In the year to mid 2013 the UK's population grew by about 400,000, adding "the equivalent of the population of Bristol in a single year".

The figures are from the Office for National Statistics, by the way.

Yesterday several papers ran a story about a report on the UK's food supply produced by the University of Cambridge.  The BBC's version is here.  Britain is apparently running out of land for food, and "faces a potential shortfall of two million hectares by 2030". The UK's population is expected to exceed 70 million by 2030, but already we run a food, feed and drink trade deficit of £18.6bn.

So there we are. Not enough land. Too many people.

Since this is a drum I've been banging for some time, I should be feeling quite smug.  And I would, if I didn't have three children myself.

Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and the press

The professional Yorkshireman Godfrey Bloom, it will be remembered, lost the UKIP party whip because he was recorded telling some party workers at a meeting that they were "sluts".

I am not an admirer of UKIP (an electoral phenomenon rather than a serious political party) or of Bloom (a man who makes the robustly outspoken Sir Geoffrey Boycott look mealy-mouthed), but I couldn't help but feel the MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber was hard done by.

Mr Bloom was, according to the Torygraph, "challenged at a women's fringe event by Jane Collins, a former by-election candidate, who told him: "I have never cleaned behind my fridge". Bloom is reported to have replied, "This place is full of sluts", to general laughter.

Yet at this remark the media descended on Bloom like a pack of wolves and the whip was duly withdrawn by Nigel Farage. Actually, as Bloom tried to make clear, the word "slut" has two meanings - a promiscuous woman, or on the other hand a woman who is untidy and slovenly. It was clear from the context - the fridge, remember - that Bloom was using the word in the latter sense. And yet the press reported the story as if Bloom had uttered some dreadful insult.

I was reminded of this with reporting of the verdicts in the Rebekah Brooks / Andy Coulson trial yesterday. As I wrote at the time she was arrested, I was glad Ms Brooks had to face the law over her newspaper's phone hacking. She had overall responsibility for what happened on the paper, and there was a serious possibility that she had known about the hacking. Moreover for too long those close to the Murdoch empire had been looking over the Government's shoulder, and seemed to imagine that being wealthy and powerful they were above the law. Instilling the notion that they aren't is well worth the expense of the trial. Even, in Brooks' case, an unsuccessful one.

This morning the Guardian ran the story on the front page under the headline "Coulson: the criminal who had Cameron's confidence".  David Cameron, it will be remembered, employed Coulson as press adviser for rather under a year from May 2010. By this point Coulson hadn't been News of the World editor for three years, and anyway had always denied any personal involvement in the phone hacking saga. It must have seemed a reasonable call by Cameron at the time, but it now appears that Coulson was a liar.

Nevertheless, the Guardian's opening paragraph seems guilty of hyperbole. It reads, "Seven years of deceit by David Cameron's former director of communications were undone in the Old Bailey yesterday".

The paragraph would more accurately have read, "Seven years of deceit by Andy Coulson about his conduct before becoming David Cameron's director of communications . . ."; but when did a journalist ever make their reputation by underplaying a story?

And of course, it's not just the Graun. All the papers are at it. Even Nick Robinson at the BBC, a well-known Tory sympathiser, weighs in with his "apology . . . will not be enough to silence the questions David Cameron now faces".

What utter bollocks. The phone-hacking story is important, because it shows how a powerful media organisation abused its position (and suborned the police). But that is the real story. The David Cameron angle is just noise.

In the Godfrey Bloom affair, I couldn't understand why no journalist had the balls to write, "In shock news yesterday the nation's entire news media deliberately misunderstood the meaning of the word 'slut' in order to end a politician's career and have something to write about".

So here. Journalists pretend that something Andy Coulson did years before David Cameron employed him is a political problem for the Prime Minister. It isn't. It's a media problem. That's why Cameron has apologised.

Cameron has calculated that less damage would be sustained by saying sorry for the minor infraction of employing somebody who turned out to be a criminal, than would be the case if he pointed out that the criminality occurred some time before Coulson came to work for him.

It must be galling for him, but Cameron knows the press are shits and that he has to play the game.

So, curiously, a story which started with the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies, ends (or perhaps that should be continues) with, er, the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies.  Who would have thought?

Tony Blair and the real villains in Iraq

What to make of the extraordinary events in Iraq recently, as Al Qaida 2.0, in the form of ISIS nasties, advance with Blitzkrieg speed across the country, murdering and burning as they come?

Tony Blair's reappearance as lost prophet, advocating fresh intervention, grizzled and impassioned, has probably done his reputation no favours, and certainly for the Not In My Name brigade there's plenty of fresh ammunition.

I have an interest to declare here. I thought that, WMD or no WMD, Iraq would be better off facing an uncertain future without Saddam than a certain future with him, given that a future with the Butcher of Baghdad in charge was as near as we're going to get to the personification of Orwell's vision of a jackboot stamping on a human face, forever.

It has however been a lonely business pointing out the awkward truth about Iraq's former dictator, and it's cheering to find this article in the Torygraph by one of its foreign correspondents, Colin Freeman.

"Saddam Hussein", writes Freeman, "was just as brutal a killer as ISIS's thugs are, and had Saddam's men had i-phones around to record their atrocities, the results would have been just as horrific.  There would however have been one important difference. In Saddam's case, the footage of those toppling into mass graves wouldn't have just been a few dozen or hundred, but hundreds of thousands . . . It's estimated that Saddam killed around 300,000 people (in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991). . . one can't be certain that he would have done the same in the the event of an Arab Spring ten years later. But it does rather suggest he had it in him. . . Half a million people on either side perished in the eight year war that Saddam started with neighbouring Iran, a campaign of trench warfare far more brutal and senseless than anything in World War One. Another 100,000 were killed by the Allied armies as they repelled his equally foolhardy invasion of Kuwait in 1991. And this is before you take into account all those he tortured and killed in secret. . . if Saddam had already directed his armies to kill a million people in the course of . . . 20 years, he might well have done another few hundred thousand had he been left in power. And for that reason alone", Freeman concludes, "we should remember that it is him, not Tony Blair, that is the real villain alongside ISIS".

Amen to all that. And yet quite a lot of people genuinely think Tony Blair is a war criminal for getting rid of Saddam. Funny old world.

Thomas Piketty and the success of capitalism

The Guardian reports this morning that queues developed in London yesterday outside the lecture theatre where French economist Professor Thomas Piketty was booked to speak.  Most of them, according to vox pops the paper conducted, hadn't read Piketty's book Capital, and you can hardly blame them for preferring to get its message in an hour or so rather than wading through many hundreds of pages.

The success of Capital in capturing the imagination of the Left-leaning public probably tells us as much about the phenomenology of the media (and of collective hysteria) as it does about economics. A friend recently asked me what I thought of the book. "I haven't read it", I said. "Neither have I", he replied. "But I read a review of it".

So have I now. Several reviews. That doesn't make me an expert, but lack of expertise has never stopped a blogger from having an opinion.

Piketty's thesis is, essentially, that assets grow in value at a faster rate than economies do, so people who have assets get richer faster than people who don't. Hence ever rising inequality.

But in purporting to address the bigger picture (which is certainly what Piketty's supporters claim for him), he excludes what for the purposes of analogy you might call the picture frame. Which is to say that although we live in a world of inequality, it is actually a world in which most people are getting richer.

I like to imagine what George Orwell would have made of the affluence of our society. I think he would have been horrified at the vacuousness of consumer culture, but amazed and impressed at capitalism's capacity to create wealth. For capitalism does indeed make people richer. It just doesn't make them richer at the same rate.

What would Orwell have made of mobile phones? Here is a gadget that would have been utterly beyond his imaginings. Even Ian Fleming, writing in the technologically obsessed 1960s, never dared to get Q to present James Bond with anything so outrageous.  "Now look James, you can get the cricket score on it, and the weather forecast for Kuala Lumpur, and the chemical formula of cordite, and the latin name of the Ring Tailed Lemur. Clever eh?" "You're pulling my leg, Q". And yet fifty years later most people reading this will have one, all at the expense of a tenner or so a week.

The point of the mobile phone for Piketty's thesis lies in the whereabouts of its manufacture. These things are not made in Walsall or Frankfurt or Detroit. They're made in Thailand, or Taiwan or China.

Why are people willing to work in factories assembling chipsets instead of labouring in the paddy fields or herding the family's cows? It's because working in factories gives them a higher standard of living. The conditions may be rubbish and the pay exploitative by our standards, but it's still better than the alternative.

Of course the downside is that as jobs have leaked from the affluent West to the impoverished East, wages in Europe and America stagnated and even fell. That's capitalism in action too. But we are still living in societies in which the overwhelming majority of people have enough eat, get a free education and have a roof over their heads; whereas they are not.

Professor Piketty's fans are so concerned that they aren't getting rich as fast as the Duke of Westminster that they haven't noticed that in other parts of the world capitalism is slowly making genuinely poor people better off.

The Trojan Horse letter - British values and the limits of tolerance

In the wake of the Trojan Horse saga alleging a plot by fanatical Muslims to make state schools teach, er, according to Muslim principles, the government has decreed that teaching British values should be part of the curriculum.

This edict has been widely and understandably criticised by cultural relativists and wiseacres alike.  No-one knows what British values are so it is impossible to teach them, goes the argument.  And who is to say British values are better than Muslim ones, ask the relativists?

I am a passionate enemy of cultural relativism, but I think the Government's critics are half right. British culture and values are the complex sum total of our food, climate, literature, music, architecture, sport and landscape, to name but seven items of what surely is a much longer list of component parts. You can't do more than scratch the surface of that at school.

And that's the trouble. Young Muslims brought up in Muslim families in largely Muslim areas of Birmingham are always going to lead a somewhat schizophrenic existence. They watch British TV, walk around Britain's streets and go to Britain's schools, but even if there were no Islamification in the classroom, they would still spend an awful lot of time at home and in the mosque. Theirs is always going to be a double life.

A friend from Hackney, a woman of Afro-Caribbean extraction, told me that her split existence even extends to speaking a different version of English to family and West Indian friends. But for her no cultural barrier existed remotely as high or difficult as the one which separates devout Muslims from their post-Christian white and black contemporaries.

The subtext of the Government's critics is the demeaning if generally unstated one that there is no such thing as British culture.  This must be wrong, because if it were true we'd be just the same as other countries. And we're not.

Nevertheless hearing David Cameron struggling to define some of those British values, I was struck by his use of the word "tolerance". We're a tolerant people, he said. Well yes, in some respects we are. I would prefer to say that we're slow to get angry and willing to put up with a good deal.

But if we're so tolerant, why are we getting so cross about Islamification of British schools? Surely if we were really tolerant we'd just say, OK, you want to drop teaching of evolution and call white girls prostitutes?  Fine. We're tolerant. We don't care. Just get on with it.

The reality is that Islamic immigration has exposed the limits of our famous tolerance. We weren't asked if we wanted it; if we had been asked, we'd probably have uttered a polite "no thanks". But now it's here and we have to work out a way of living with it, we must stop pretending what a tolerant lot we are.

If Britain's going to carry on working reasonably well as a nation, we have to get Muslims to assimilate. And if that's going to happen the rest of us have to say, you can do this, and this, and this, but you can't do that. No to Islamification of the classroom. No to forced marriage. No to honour killings. No to FGM. We may be tolerant, but we're not that tolerant.

Roy Hodgson and the quarter finals

Having got the statutory whinge about the World Cup out of the way a few days ago (The World Cup is for the mentally negligible), it's time to pontificate about England's opening performance against Italy last night.

What is the aim of England football managers?  Answer, to get out of the group stage and on to the quarter finals. Why? Because they know that if we get to the quarters they'll keep their job. That results in the kind of pragmatic football which makes fans curse at the TV in frustration. Because of course eventually we come up against a better team. Time after time we have subordinated our natural head-banging desire to attack to dreary conservatism. We should long ago have learned that we'll never win a competition playing this way, and never have any fun in the process either. Because fun should be the object. We know we aren't the best team in the world, and what we really want is to see England playing the kind of football we can be proud of.

I realise this makes me look an idiot for taking football seriously, but there we are.

If I had to point to the acme of stupidity in this respect it would be Sven Goran Eriksson's selection of midfielder Trevor Sinclair to go to the World Cup in Japan in 2002. Sinclair was a decent club pro, not good enough to hold down a regular place in the first team, and he took the place of the maverick genius Steve McManaman. I remember fulminating about this at the time. Even if McManaman didn't get a start, I thought, he was exactly the kind of player you'd want to come on with 20 minutes to go when you were a goal down to Brazil and facing exit from the competition. He might just create something.

Unfortunately this scenario came to pass exactly on 21st June 2002 when, in the quarter finals against Brazil, England were a goal down thanks to Ronaldinho's miraculous lob over David Seaman. Eriksson looked along his subs bench for a player who could change the game. Not finding one, he instructed Trevor Sinclair to remove the tracksuit instead.  I hope that at this moment he realised the awfulness of his mistake. Steve McManaman, who, to be fair, might also have achieved as little as Sinclair, was watching at home. England lost 2-1.

Like most England fans, I would have liked to see Harry Redknapp get the job in the wake of Fabio Capello's dreary reign. But in one crucial respect Roy Hodgson has proved we doubters wrong. He has revealed himself to be a gambler rather than a pragmatist, a Cavalier rather than a Roundhead, and a romantic rather than a rationalist. He has stuffed his squad with the kind of rapid, fearless youthful attacking talent that seasoned, experienced defenders hate playing against. Raheem Sterling, Ross Barkley, Jack Wilshere, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Daniel Sturridge are exactly the kind of players England fans want to watch. I didn't like losing to Italy last night, but it was a game we could very well have won had things worked out very slightly differently, and it was a performance which will have made the world sit up and take notice. England actually aren't bad at football after all.

I hope Mr Hodgson does get us out of the group stage and into the quarters, but if he doesn't I hope the FA lets him keep the job. He's already shown that he understands more about football than any England manager since Terry Venables.

Independent Scotland - a North Korean Brigadoon?

I have put a couple of quid on the Nationalists winning the Independence referendum. This isn't because I think they're going to win - I hope they won't - but because, if they do, my winnings will add to the gaiety of the occasion. The bookies were offering 11/4, meaning that if you put £4 on and the Nats win you'll get £11 back. Odds on a victory were more generous: a £1 stake will get you £4.  So the bookies think the No campaign will win.

I think so too, probably, though it may well be close. I was confirmed in this view by two recent events. The first is that J.K.Rowling has given the Better Together campaign a million quid. The Yes campaign has had a lot more money than the No because of donations by two lottery winners (in an irony they would no doubt enjoy, the funds largely provided by poor people in England), and undoubtedly the Rowling Million will help.

The second is the revelation that, according to Jenny Hjul, an Edinburgh based journalist writing in the Torygraph yesterday (Are Scottish artists too afraid to say No?), Scottish luvvies are overwhelmingly in favour of independence. It was in the context of the Alternative Vote referendum that I first suggested the principle that if luvvies are in favour of something, they'll be wrong. The mere addition of, say, Colin Firth's weight to a cause is both a symptom that its advocates are mistaken, and advance warning that it will fail. So perhaps here.

Actually Ms Hjul goes further - she says Scottish luvvies are so determined to say Yes that anyone who wants to have a career in the arts in Scotland had better at the very least keep their mouth shut if they disagree. To do so would have the same effect as for any English artist admitting a soft spot for the Tories. The famed tolerance of those in the arts does not extend to people who disagree with them. Ms Hjul records the composer James MacMillan saying "artists are too scared to back the Union publicly, so fearful are they of the backlash". MacMillan wrote on Twitter "Major Scottish artist to me this morning: I am afraid to speak.  I don't want to get my head kicked in".

Now I don't live in Scotland and I can't be sure this atmosphere of intimdation is real or imaginary. But MacMillan does, and he thinks it's real. That's pretty persuasive.

As it happens, Rowling is exactly the kind of person I would expect to back the Yes campaign. Which is to say, she has exactly the kind of utopian political outlook shared by so many Nationalists (some of whom seem blissfully unaware of the nostrum that things are very rarely as good as they first appear). But perhaps extreme riches have given her a knowledge of financial affairs, which are after all at the heart of the case against Independence.

As for the SNP, I wrote some time ago that their pitch seemed to be the mixture of fascism and sentimentality familiar to nationalist movements everywhere.  The vitriol some of the Nats come up with is entirely consistent with this view. A letter in the Graun this morning derided Rowling's Scottishness (she's lived there for over 20 years) yet described her, perversely, as a "traitor".

Of course, since the case for independence relies on the idea that by securing the oil revenues it will make Scotland better off, this will, if the Nationalists are right, have the effect of making the rest of the UK poorer. Which must mean that the Nationalists are gathering round an idea of fairness, equality and social justice to be achieved by taking resources away from others.  In a situation where comedy is in short supply, it's very funny that people enmired in their own righteousness should be so blissfully unaware of how greedy and selfish they look. If Scotland is truly richer than the rest of us are, shouldn't the worthy Nats want to share its wealth with their neighbours? Er, no. Because their neighbours are English.

This is what happens when you put dislike for another ethnic or national group in an uneasy alliance with a kind of sub-Braveheart bens-and-glens mentality. In an independent Scotland there will be a Sure Start in every hamlet and in every urban housing scheme a traditional music workshop plus creche. It will be a North Korean Brigadoon lite.

And it may yet happen. But if it does, at least those of us south of the border won't be paying for it any more.

The World Cup is for the mentally-negligible

Is there anything edifying about the World Cup at all?

If sweeteners were distributed and consumed by FIFA officials when the competition was awarded to Qatar, it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that Brazil did its fair share of palm-greasing to get the competition too.  We then have the tawdry spectacle of a country whose citizens mostly live in conditions which justify outrage spending billions to build the necessary infrastructure, that infrastructure being shoddily done and in some cases unfinished by the time the football started last night.

Ah, but the football, you say.  It's all about the football.

OK then, the football.  After Croatia get a slightly fortuitous early goal, a Brazilian player elbows an opponent in the throat and escapes with a yellow card. Then after the hosts have equalized, a Brazilian forward, Fred, throws himself to the ground in the area, but instead of booking him for a dive the referee gives a penalty.  Because after all, we can't have the hosts faltering at the group stage can we?

The World Cup is a tournament funded on the backs of the poor, organised by the corrupt, played by cheats and refereed by the incompetent.  The whole thing is squalid beyond belief.  Only the mentally-negligible, to adopt Wodehouse's phrase, take any interest in it.

Which possibly, soberingly, explains why when England line up against Italy tomorrow night, I will be there, beer in hand, perched nervously in front of the TV.

Why I love . . . #11 Lonesome Dove

I can't remember what peculiar combination of circumstances led me to go into Waterstone's a couple of weeks ago and pick up a copy of Larry McMurtry's 1985 novel Lonesome Dove.  Sometimes you'll read a reference to something in the paper or on the internet which sticks like a little burr; and then after a time someone else mentions it, and lo and behold you're in a bookshop and there it is.

I got more pleasure out of reading Lonesome Dove than from any novel I have read for ages.  Set in the uncertain years of the mid 19th century, the Indians not quite beaten, the West not quite settled, it is on the face of it a simple story of two ageing Texas Rangers who decide to drive a herd of stolen cattle north to Montana, a journey of more than 2000 miles.  And though it isn't what you might call highbrow fiction, it addresses eloquently many of the questions highbrow fiction often purports to address - the purpose of life, relations between men and women, the nature of fear and courage, good and evil.  All in the context of an utterly gripping adventure story. It's also very funny.

McMurtry's prose style is simple without being self-consciously so, but gives a wonderful sense of the landscape, the people and the events, harrowing, comic and poignant, which befall the two Rangers, Call and McRae, their trail hands, Newt, Dish Boggett, Jake Spoon, Josh Deets and Pea Eye.  McMurtry also writes wonderfully well about women.  Although his style is laconic rather than flowery, on two or three occasions he inserts the novel's point of view into the mind of a dying man in a way that is almost hallucinatory.  And all these shifts in tone without any obvious strain, a feat very few writers can accomplish - Dickens and Dostoevsky perhaps, but few others. Anthony Powell said he spent hours reading and re-reading Dickens to try and work out how it was done, and there are parts of A Dance To The Music of Time where he manages it magnificently.

In the U.S. Lonesome Dove is a celebrated novel - it won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a TV mini-series with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. I get the sense that it's much less well known here. The Males from Hale, a book club which indulges me as a member, hadn't heard of it. I wonder whether this is because we categorise novels like this as genre fiction, in this case a western. Michael Chabon in his book Maps and Legends makes an eloquent plea for literary entertainment in general and genre fiction in particular. Chabon's own interest is superhero fiction, which leaves me cold, but his point is a good one. Genre fiction is looked down on. It's Not Serious.

As a child I loved westerns, ploughing through Shane, Riders of the Purple Sage, Jack London and many, many dozens of Louis L'Amour books (I remember going to a bookshop to buy another Louis L'Amour novel, and finishing it on the bus home with the ashamed sensation which accompanies a guzzled cake). Shane in particular is a very fine novel, though not I think up to McMurtry's standard.  And incidentally McMurtry makes Cormac McCarthy, a novelist ploughing much the same furrow, seem like small and rather bitter beer.

As with all art, entertainment is surely the ultimate goal, construing the word in the broadest possible terms. And by God Lonesome Dove is entertaining. As I read the final chapter the world could have ended, the DFS sofa sale come to an end and England won the World Cup without my noticing.

It was over much, much too soon.  All nine-hundred pages of it.