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.
