Here are some common myths about the UK parliament's decision to bomb ISIL's positions in Syria:
1. It represents a major new departure for the UK.
No it doesn't. We are currently bombing ISIL in Iraq (at the invitation of the Iraqi government), and the UN has authorised member states to extend operations to the part of Syria occupied by them. ISIL do not recognise the Iraq/Syria border (they think all the land belongs to them) and in practice it no longer exists anyway.
2. Bombing will make no difference.
Yes it will. It may not make much difference, but that's not the same as no difference. US bombing in Iraq is credited with turning ISIL back only 50 miles away from Baghdad. The more states are involved, the more difficult life will be for ISIL on the ground.
3. No civilian casualties are occurring in Syria.
Yes they are. This is such a potent myth that Stop the War in fact never need to utter it. They merely say "innocent people will be killed", as if no innocent people are being killed at the moment. In fact innocent people are being killed by ISIL in numbers and in a manner which any decent person would find revolting. A more respectable argument goes "even though you may defeat ISIL, more innocent people would be killed in the process than ISIL would kill if left to their own devices". More respectable, but still I think likely to be wrong.
4. It is possible to have a foolproof plan for war.
No it isn't. Leaving aside von Moltke's commonplace "no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy", contemplate Churchill in 1939 - "Winston, are you sure we are right to support Poland? After all, you have no plan for the post-war settlement once Germany has been defeated!". It may be true there's no plan, but criticising the Government for lacking one is to make the assumption that a plan could be devised and then stuck to.
5. David Cameron described the opposition as terrorist sympathisers.
The Guardian alleged that Cameron said to Tory MPs "you should not be walking through the lobbies with Jeremy Corbyn and a bunch of terrorist sympathisers". This was treated by Labour and the SNP as an attack on them in general, and a good part of their early contributions to the Commons debate were preoccupied with attempts to get Cameron to apologise. But Cameron isn't alleged to have said that all the opposition were terrorist sympathisers; the highest gloss that can be put on his remarks is that they implied some of them were. And some of them are. Corbyn and John McDonnell's support for Hezbollah and the IRA are a matter of public record. Get over it, Labour, and enough with the faux outrage. Don't pretend you didn't know what these people were like when you elected them.
6. It will make the UK a terrorist target.
The UK is already a terrorist target. This won't make a bad situation any worse.
7. Hilary Benn's closing remarks showed what the real Labour party is like.
I watched Benn's speech and thought it a magnificent - if theatrical - display of moral authority. But he was only able to persuade about one fifth (one fifth!) of Labour MPs to vote with him. Despite the free vote, the overwhelming majority of the PLP voted with Jeremy Corbyn. And the PLP are meant to be the sensible wing of Labour! If Hilary Benn represented the party nowadays, it would be like a return to a golden era. But it's the foam-flecked finger-jabbers outside Parliament who represent the real Labour now. Hilary Benn is an outlier.
8. The choice for the UK is between one self-evidently good thing and one self-evidently bad.
No it isn't. War is a bad thing. People are killed, huge sums of money are wasted and over all hangs the Law of Unintended Consequences. But leaving ISIL free to go on the rampage across the Middle East is a bad thing as well. The choice is between two bad things. The grown-up response is to accept this and make an earnest decision to pick the least worst.
9. Only one side in this argument has moral authority.
Not true. Both sides wish to minimise suffering, and differ only in the best way of going about it.
10. Both sides have intellectual authority.
For all the praise MPs heaped on themselves for the great quality of the speeches, I didn't hear anyone make a persuasive case against bombing. The antis have unreasonable expectations of what is possible in the matter of pre-war planning, and are reluctant to face the terrible plight of people in Iraq and Syria under ISIL. They may not all be terrorist sympathisers, but their desperation to cling to the belief that the West is wrong at all times and their reluctance to defend the values which inform Western liberalism have impeded their intellectual honesty.
Friday 4 December 2015
Wednesday 2 December 2015
Adele, Edward Elgar and the decline of classical music.
How strong is support for classical music in Britain today? Here is some anecdotal evidence.
A colleague tells me that at the famous conservatoire he's involved with, only seven students are studying his (mainstream) woodwind instrument. That's seven across all years, including postgrad. Less than two per year.
Another colleague at the same conservatoire tells me that recently the Head of Composition was forced to accept four students he wanted to reject "just to make up the numbers".
A major symphony orchestra in one of Britain's biggest cities recently put on a concert whose centrepiece was a concerto by a well-known living composer. The hall was about one fifth full. 200 people paid, and 500 complimentary tickets were given away. Not all the people who got comps bothered to come.
In the last week of November Adele's new album sold 3.4 million copies. The #1 classical album (Yo Yo Ma's 60th birthday album) sold just 493.
I have written again and again on this blog about the reasons for the decline of classical music, and what might be done to combat it. Classical music has diverged every more widely from popular taste; concession to popularity is decried; accessible composers are marginalised; the repertoire has failed to renew itself; pop music has become elevated from a derided to a revered idiom; the acoustic instruments on which classical music relies have become supplanted by electronic ones; acoustic instruments are not novel and will never be novel again; digital signal processing has transformed electronic music; classical music has suffered a consequent loss of cultural prestige; the political case for arts subsidy has become harder to justify; the educational case for classical music has fallen victim to child-centred learning ("it's difficult, and they aren't interested in it"); the economic basis for classical music has been undermined as fewer people go to concerts (and those that do are getting older); fewer young people want to learn classical instruments, curtailing future audiences; fewer young people want to study at conservatoire level, realising that the chances of actually working in the profession are minimal; conservatoires find it harder to fill places so standards fall.
Meanwhile the Titanic continues to steam steadily for the iceberg as those with secure jobs in the industry carry on as if nothing was wrong and contemplate their pensions.
If you think it was ever thus and that I am just the Cheadle Cassandra (now there's a title) here's a comparison. Last Saturday I conducted the Halifax Symphony Orchestra in Elgar's 1st Symphony. In the twelve months after its premiere in 1908 it was performed nearly one hundred times to rapturous acclaim. What are the chances of something similar happening now?
Wednesday 21 October 2015
Seamus Milne, Lee Rigby and Oliver's Army
All the time we're finding out more about what Jeremy Corbyn's like.
Today comes the announcement that he's appointed Seamus Milne as his press officer. Milne, for the uninitiated, is the son of the former BBC Director General Alasdair Milne, educated at Winchester and Oxford, writes for the Guardian from what you might generously call a post-Stalinist position. You might sum his views up by saying that pretty much everything the West does is bad, and the things other people do are not as bad as the Western capitalist media makes out.
Life is too short and Milne too contemptible a figure to spend the whole morning listing his views, which range from the barmy to the unpleasant. But I would like to mention something he said about the death of Fusilier Lee Rigby, hacked to death a couple of years ago outside Woolwich barracks by two Muslim extremists.
"Rigby was a British soldier who had taken part in multiple combat operations in Afghanistan", wrote Milne in December 2013. "So the attack wasn't terrorism in the normal sense of an indiscriminate attack on civilians". He went on to write that there'd be a lot more of this sort of thing "unless pressure grows to halt the terror war abroad". Funnily enough, that's rather like something one of the killers said at the scene of the crime. "Leave our lands and you can live in peace".
But Milne is wrong, and here's why. In a democracy the army is merely the military wing of the state. We elect the government. They decide the foreign policy imperatives and, so far as this involves the use of force, the army then carries them out. In other words the army is neutral, and its soldiers not responsible for the direction of policy. If the next government has different foreign policy objectives, the army will carry those out too. So in this sense Rigby really was a civilian, a small mute actor carrying out the policy of a democratically elected government. The mistakes of British foreign policy were not his fault.
Of course Rigby's killers did not understand this. You could hardly expect them to. Islam does not sit easily alongside democracy. For many Muslims, laws are God-made, not man-made. But Milne's expensive education (PPE at Balliol, no less) should have equipped him to understand adequately the nature of Rigby's position and the difference between the British army and that of a military state.
No-one who follows Milne's writing could be surprised to find him implying that an act of such barbarism was as much the fault of the British government as two madmen, but I found it interesting that he should be willing to put on one side for the moment one of his other characteristic positions.
As you would expect from an old Leftie like Milne, the working class are always right (although of course sometimes prone to false-consciousness when they vote Tory or oppose immigration). Not apparently on this occasion. The fact that opportunities for modestly-educated young men like Lee Rigby are few and far between did not wash with Milne. It elicited no sympathy.
I was reminded of Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello. "You could be in Palestine / or over the border on the Chinese line / with the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne / But there's no danger / it's a professional career / and it could be arranged / just a word in Mr Churchill's ear".
Where has Milne's compassion for the working class gone? Absent without leave. Pity for Rigby has been forgotten in the excitement of an opportunity to prove, once more, that the West is fundamentally to blame for even the worst atrocities.
I did once think about writing a Threnody for Lee Rigby. But some pieces are just too painful to contemplate.
And now Seamus Milne is Jeremy Corbyn's press officer. By their fruits shall ye know them.
Today comes the announcement that he's appointed Seamus Milne as his press officer. Milne, for the uninitiated, is the son of the former BBC Director General Alasdair Milne, educated at Winchester and Oxford, writes for the Guardian from what you might generously call a post-Stalinist position. You might sum his views up by saying that pretty much everything the West does is bad, and the things other people do are not as bad as the Western capitalist media makes out.
Life is too short and Milne too contemptible a figure to spend the whole morning listing his views, which range from the barmy to the unpleasant. But I would like to mention something he said about the death of Fusilier Lee Rigby, hacked to death a couple of years ago outside Woolwich barracks by two Muslim extremists.
"Rigby was a British soldier who had taken part in multiple combat operations in Afghanistan", wrote Milne in December 2013. "So the attack wasn't terrorism in the normal sense of an indiscriminate attack on civilians". He went on to write that there'd be a lot more of this sort of thing "unless pressure grows to halt the terror war abroad". Funnily enough, that's rather like something one of the killers said at the scene of the crime. "Leave our lands and you can live in peace".
But Milne is wrong, and here's why. In a democracy the army is merely the military wing of the state. We elect the government. They decide the foreign policy imperatives and, so far as this involves the use of force, the army then carries them out. In other words the army is neutral, and its soldiers not responsible for the direction of policy. If the next government has different foreign policy objectives, the army will carry those out too. So in this sense Rigby really was a civilian, a small mute actor carrying out the policy of a democratically elected government. The mistakes of British foreign policy were not his fault.
Of course Rigby's killers did not understand this. You could hardly expect them to. Islam does not sit easily alongside democracy. For many Muslims, laws are God-made, not man-made. But Milne's expensive education (PPE at Balliol, no less) should have equipped him to understand adequately the nature of Rigby's position and the difference between the British army and that of a military state.
No-one who follows Milne's writing could be surprised to find him implying that an act of such barbarism was as much the fault of the British government as two madmen, but I found it interesting that he should be willing to put on one side for the moment one of his other characteristic positions.
As you would expect from an old Leftie like Milne, the working class are always right (although of course sometimes prone to false-consciousness when they vote Tory or oppose immigration). Not apparently on this occasion. The fact that opportunities for modestly-educated young men like Lee Rigby are few and far between did not wash with Milne. It elicited no sympathy.
I was reminded of Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello. "You could be in Palestine / or over the border on the Chinese line / with the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne / But there's no danger / it's a professional career / and it could be arranged / just a word in Mr Churchill's ear".
Where has Milne's compassion for the working class gone? Absent without leave. Pity for Rigby has been forgotten in the excitement of an opportunity to prove, once more, that the West is fundamentally to blame for even the worst atrocities.
I did once think about writing a Threnody for Lee Rigby. But some pieces are just too painful to contemplate.
And now Seamus Milne is Jeremy Corbyn's press officer. By their fruits shall ye know them.
Sunday 18 October 2015
Vaughan Williams' London Symphony, Modernism and Matthew Arnold
An interesting article by William Cook in The Spectator the other week records the influence on British public life of the "vast wave of Germanic immigration" that came here from the 1930s onwards, as tens of thousands fled Nazism's "violent, superstitious tyranny". You can read it online here.
Just to list a few of the names is to get a sense of their influence - Fritz Busch, Hans Keller, Stefan Zweig, Kurt Schwitters, Oskar Kokoschka, Emeric Pressburger, Karel Reisz, Gerard Hoffnung, Kurt Joos, Rudolf Laban, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Claus Moser, George Weidenfeld, Martin Esslin, Nikolaus Pevsner, Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Bing, Friedrich Hayek, Max Born, Karl Popper, Hans Eysenck, Eric Hobsbawm. Many were Jewish, but not all, and as Cook says, that "hardly mattered . . . They were champions of civilised enlightened values, rather than members of a certain religion, or a certain race".
I showed this article to my wife. She was inclined to dismiss it as a typical piece of Speccie Little Englandism. But in truth anyone familiar with the majority of the names in the above paragraph (I recognised them all apart from Kurt Joos (dance) and Max Born (mathematics)) would have to acknowledge that these were hugely influential people in 20th century Britain.
The story of how they achieved pre-eminence is one of one of amazing courage, persistence and resilience, although it's worth bearing in mind that "the English intelligentsia are Europeanized", as Orwell wrote: always ready to be critical of their own culture and cringe in the face of others. The emigres may often have been pushing at an open door.
Their story, writes Cook, "is usually told as a story with a happy ending, a triumph of progressive values over reactionary . . . But although Britain gained a great deal from this flood of foreign talent, you can't help feeling, looking back, that something was lost along the way. Before the war, British culture was much more staid, but more in tune with public opinion. Since 1945 our artistic institutions have become much more Middle European: avant-garde, conceptual and out of step with popular taste . . . modernism has become the new orthodoxy, but this Mitteleuropaische aesthetic has never really been accepted by the population as a whole . . . This is a legacy of the Hitler emigres, and the modernist movement they inspired."
"Even at the time", Cook continues, "some Britons feared this continental influx would change the nature of our island's cultural life". The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was invited to become a patron of a new Anglo-Austrian Music Society, formed by Austrian musicians who'd fled to Britain. He replied as follows. "The great thing that frightens me is that it will entirely devour the tender little flower of our English culture . . . We cannot swallow the strong meat of your culture. Our stomachs are not strong enough". I thought of this last week when I went to see the Halle play RVW's London Symphony.
As a child I loved the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending, but when I was a student in the 1980s his music was about as unfashionable as it was possible to be, its turgid pastoralism and naive parallel triads symptomatic of everything that seemed wrong with pre-war English music.
Times change though, and adults are more forgiving. Whereas, in the true Orwellian tradition, I once felt that Englishness was "slightly disgraceful" I have come round to the view that we are no worse that most countries in most things (and in some things a bit better) and this, pathetically you may feel, in turn has led me to look more kindly on the works of Vaughan Williams, Gerald Finzi and George Butterworth, to name but three composers. RVW in particular, like Elgar, seems to epitomise the nation in music, informing our sense of what England means in much the same way of our sense of the American is shaped by Bernstein and John Williams.
Even if the Tallis and The Lark are the best of RVW (and they are pieces I would now give my right arm to have written), I've since conducted the D major 5th Symphony and the London itself too. What pieces they are! The 5th was written during the war, but gives absolutely no sense of the violence and uncertainty which was the context of its creation. The London is a much earlier piece (1913) and the London Vaughan Williams was writing about had disappeared by the time the 5th was premiered thirty years later. Today of course he would find London still harder to recognise, with its core of the international super-rich living alongside a diaspora of the poor from Far East and Deep South, a city with the specific London qualities he captured all but effaced.
The symphony is still mightily affecting though, speaking eloquently of the full-on noise and bustle of the big city as well as the grandeur of its buildings and intimate silences of its smaller out-of-hours thoroughfares. Last Thursday the Halle did it true justice, and I found it heartening to see the German conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens looking thoroughly immersed in the music. Perhaps he will go home and tell his colleagues in the Berlin Phil how good it is. Have they ever performed it? I somehow doubt it. That's a shame, because the London is a thoroughly convincing piece of writing, and I think the finale works much better than any Tchaikovsky symphony (apart from the Pathetique), better even - lawks - than Mahler 5, whose endless note-spinning perambulations towards the chorale finale I endured on the way to the dry-cleaners the other day.
What happened to that "tender little flower" of English music then? It has surely been erased by the mighty bulldozer of modernism. I can't think of a single composer now who you might describe as typically English. I can't even claim it for myself. My own models have always been much more the Scandinavians Sibelius and Nielsen, even in pieces like Absence of Clouds, a recent thirty-minute work rooted in the Cumbrian weather and landscape.
Blaming Hitler's emigres for this rubbing out is perhaps a bit steep. Foreign mores have always been seductively attractive to the English, as Orwell noted. We would probably have embraced modernism in the end anyway. Fritz Bush and Hans Keller did not invent Birtwistle or Maxwell Davies. But William Cook is right, in music anyway, that something has been lost, and that its loss has been accompanied by a slow cutting adrift of public taste. In the end everyone in Britain who loves classical music will be the loser for this, and I suspect I'm not alone in hearing again Matthew Arnold's "melancholy long withdrawing roar".
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.
Just to list a few of the names is to get a sense of their influence - Fritz Busch, Hans Keller, Stefan Zweig, Kurt Schwitters, Oskar Kokoschka, Emeric Pressburger, Karel Reisz, Gerard Hoffnung, Kurt Joos, Rudolf Laban, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Claus Moser, George Weidenfeld, Martin Esslin, Nikolaus Pevsner, Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Bing, Friedrich Hayek, Max Born, Karl Popper, Hans Eysenck, Eric Hobsbawm. Many were Jewish, but not all, and as Cook says, that "hardly mattered . . . They were champions of civilised enlightened values, rather than members of a certain religion, or a certain race".
I showed this article to my wife. She was inclined to dismiss it as a typical piece of Speccie Little Englandism. But in truth anyone familiar with the majority of the names in the above paragraph (I recognised them all apart from Kurt Joos (dance) and Max Born (mathematics)) would have to acknowledge that these were hugely influential people in 20th century Britain.
The story of how they achieved pre-eminence is one of one of amazing courage, persistence and resilience, although it's worth bearing in mind that "the English intelligentsia are Europeanized", as Orwell wrote: always ready to be critical of their own culture and cringe in the face of others. The emigres may often have been pushing at an open door.
Their story, writes Cook, "is usually told as a story with a happy ending, a triumph of progressive values over reactionary . . . But although Britain gained a great deal from this flood of foreign talent, you can't help feeling, looking back, that something was lost along the way. Before the war, British culture was much more staid, but more in tune with public opinion. Since 1945 our artistic institutions have become much more Middle European: avant-garde, conceptual and out of step with popular taste . . . modernism has become the new orthodoxy, but this Mitteleuropaische aesthetic has never really been accepted by the population as a whole . . . This is a legacy of the Hitler emigres, and the modernist movement they inspired."
"Even at the time", Cook continues, "some Britons feared this continental influx would change the nature of our island's cultural life". The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was invited to become a patron of a new Anglo-Austrian Music Society, formed by Austrian musicians who'd fled to Britain. He replied as follows. "The great thing that frightens me is that it will entirely devour the tender little flower of our English culture . . . We cannot swallow the strong meat of your culture. Our stomachs are not strong enough". I thought of this last week when I went to see the Halle play RVW's London Symphony.
As a child I loved the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending, but when I was a student in the 1980s his music was about as unfashionable as it was possible to be, its turgid pastoralism and naive parallel triads symptomatic of everything that seemed wrong with pre-war English music.
Times change though, and adults are more forgiving. Whereas, in the true Orwellian tradition, I once felt that Englishness was "slightly disgraceful" I have come round to the view that we are no worse that most countries in most things (and in some things a bit better) and this, pathetically you may feel, in turn has led me to look more kindly on the works of Vaughan Williams, Gerald Finzi and George Butterworth, to name but three composers. RVW in particular, like Elgar, seems to epitomise the nation in music, informing our sense of what England means in much the same way of our sense of the American is shaped by Bernstein and John Williams.
Even if the Tallis and The Lark are the best of RVW (and they are pieces I would now give my right arm to have written), I've since conducted the D major 5th Symphony and the London itself too. What pieces they are! The 5th was written during the war, but gives absolutely no sense of the violence and uncertainty which was the context of its creation. The London is a much earlier piece (1913) and the London Vaughan Williams was writing about had disappeared by the time the 5th was premiered thirty years later. Today of course he would find London still harder to recognise, with its core of the international super-rich living alongside a diaspora of the poor from Far East and Deep South, a city with the specific London qualities he captured all but effaced.
The symphony is still mightily affecting though, speaking eloquently of the full-on noise and bustle of the big city as well as the grandeur of its buildings and intimate silences of its smaller out-of-hours thoroughfares. Last Thursday the Halle did it true justice, and I found it heartening to see the German conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens looking thoroughly immersed in the music. Perhaps he will go home and tell his colleagues in the Berlin Phil how good it is. Have they ever performed it? I somehow doubt it. That's a shame, because the London is a thoroughly convincing piece of writing, and I think the finale works much better than any Tchaikovsky symphony (apart from the Pathetique), better even - lawks - than Mahler 5, whose endless note-spinning perambulations towards the chorale finale I endured on the way to the dry-cleaners the other day.
What happened to that "tender little flower" of English music then? It has surely been erased by the mighty bulldozer of modernism. I can't think of a single composer now who you might describe as typically English. I can't even claim it for myself. My own models have always been much more the Scandinavians Sibelius and Nielsen, even in pieces like Absence of Clouds, a recent thirty-minute work rooted in the Cumbrian weather and landscape.
Blaming Hitler's emigres for this rubbing out is perhaps a bit steep. Foreign mores have always been seductively attractive to the English, as Orwell noted. We would probably have embraced modernism in the end anyway. Fritz Bush and Hans Keller did not invent Birtwistle or Maxwell Davies. But William Cook is right, in music anyway, that something has been lost, and that its loss has been accompanied by a slow cutting adrift of public taste. In the end everyone in Britain who loves classical music will be the loser for this, and I suspect I'm not alone in hearing again Matthew Arnold's "melancholy long withdrawing roar".
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.
Monday 12 October 2015
Nadiya Hussain's husband, GBBO and multiculturalism
"Nadiya has done more to further the cause of Asian women - and men - than countless government policies, think-tanks, initiatives and councils put together have achieved in the past half-century".
So writes Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Daily Mail about Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain.
Two themes have emerged from the inevitable post Bake Off mediastorm.
One, Nadiya "only won because she was a Muslim". This attracts the inevitable riposte "Nadiya won because she was the best baker". Neither is true. To deal with the riposte first, having watched half the shows, it seemed to me that Nadiya probably wasn't the best baker overall. That was probably the weedy but industrious and imaginative Ian, repeatedly Star Baker earlier in the series. But GBBO is a knock-out competition and Ian floundered at the last.
I'm absolutely sure the programme-makers will have been delighted with Nadiya's win, but it didn't look fixed to me. Where the carpers might have a point though is in Nadiya's selection to the final twelve.
The overwhelming majority of capable amateur bakers in Britain will be middle-aged white women. But the producers know that's a demographic which doesn't make a ratings-winning programme. They want instead a mixture of young and old, both sexes, straight, gay and ethnic minorities, preferably with a couple of fanciable women thrown in.
And, curiously enough that's what they got. The final twelve had a couple of middle aged white women but also a young hipster (out in the first round), a gay man of Asian ethnicity, the delightful Filipino chap Alvin, a young mixed race woman, the beautiful Flora, the beautiful Lithuanian Ugne, a working class builder, the ingenious Ian and Nadiya with the headscarf.
I bet when they saw Nadiya's application and realised she could actually cook they thought all their Christmases had come at once.
There will have been plenty of other middle-aged white women just as competent as Nadiya who didn't make the twelve because their profile didn't fit. But they didn't fail because they weren't headscarf-wearing Muslims. They failed because they didn't tick any of the other boxes either.
The producers will have dozens of eligible candidates. They pick the ones they want. If there was one of the twelve who really shouldn't have been there it was the hat-wearing musician Stu, who fell at the first hurdle. There will have been dozens of better bakers than Stu who didn't fit the programme's diverse agenda. That's showbiz.
The second thing that's struck me post-Bake Off is the Nadiya's-win-proves-multiculturalism-is-OK trope of which the Alibhai-Brown article is an example. Liberal Britain seems to be having a Nadiya moment just now, frothing from every orifice in a jouissance of feel-goodery.
I think that actually Nadiya's instant elevation to National Treasure proves the reverse.
What has been so delightful about getting to know Nadiya (via the admittedly tricksy medium of reality TV) has been the revelation that this person, beneath the chador which many find off-putting, is just like us. Ah, we think. Good old Muslims! They like baking too! And, with it, "how liberal we are!"
But actually the point about Nadiya is that she is not a typical chador-wearing Muslim woman. She is strongly atypical. For one thing, her husband Abdal let her go out and mix with other people (and associate with gay men). Moreover he took over the childcare while she was doing it. Not unknown, but not routine either.
If you still think Nadiya is typical, consider her valedictory words. "I'm never going to put boundaries on myself ever again", she said, after winning. "I'm never going to say I can't. I'm never going to say maybe". Admirable perhaps, but a sentiment more Californian than Koranic.
Further, our relief at Nadiya's Britishness (her cake! her self-deprecation!) is relief at her similarity to us. And similarity is not what multiculturalism is about. Instead it is about celebrating difference. It's about saying, "well that lot don't behave like the rest of us, but we respect that and will go along with it".
The outpouring of affection for Nadiya arises from a feeling which is the polar opposite. "Thank God she's the same as us", it says.
Nadiya deserved it on the night and I'm glad she won, but her popularity is the best demonstration I've ever seen both of the weakness of multiculturalism and the failure of its most ardent admirers to understand what it really is.
So writes Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Daily Mail about Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain.
Two themes have emerged from the inevitable post Bake Off mediastorm.
One, Nadiya "only won because she was a Muslim". This attracts the inevitable riposte "Nadiya won because she was the best baker". Neither is true. To deal with the riposte first, having watched half the shows, it seemed to me that Nadiya probably wasn't the best baker overall. That was probably the weedy but industrious and imaginative Ian, repeatedly Star Baker earlier in the series. But GBBO is a knock-out competition and Ian floundered at the last.
I'm absolutely sure the programme-makers will have been delighted with Nadiya's win, but it didn't look fixed to me. Where the carpers might have a point though is in Nadiya's selection to the final twelve.
The overwhelming majority of capable amateur bakers in Britain will be middle-aged white women. But the producers know that's a demographic which doesn't make a ratings-winning programme. They want instead a mixture of young and old, both sexes, straight, gay and ethnic minorities, preferably with a couple of fanciable women thrown in.
And, curiously enough that's what they got. The final twelve had a couple of middle aged white women but also a young hipster (out in the first round), a gay man of Asian ethnicity, the delightful Filipino chap Alvin, a young mixed race woman, the beautiful Flora, the beautiful Lithuanian Ugne, a working class builder, the ingenious Ian and Nadiya with the headscarf.
I bet when they saw Nadiya's application and realised she could actually cook they thought all their Christmases had come at once.
There will have been plenty of other middle-aged white women just as competent as Nadiya who didn't make the twelve because their profile didn't fit. But they didn't fail because they weren't headscarf-wearing Muslims. They failed because they didn't tick any of the other boxes either.
The producers will have dozens of eligible candidates. They pick the ones they want. If there was one of the twelve who really shouldn't have been there it was the hat-wearing musician Stu, who fell at the first hurdle. There will have been dozens of better bakers than Stu who didn't fit the programme's diverse agenda. That's showbiz.
The second thing that's struck me post-Bake Off is the Nadiya's-win-proves-multiculturalism-is-OK trope of which the Alibhai-Brown article is an example. Liberal Britain seems to be having a Nadiya moment just now, frothing from every orifice in a jouissance of feel-goodery.
I think that actually Nadiya's instant elevation to National Treasure proves the reverse.
What has been so delightful about getting to know Nadiya (via the admittedly tricksy medium of reality TV) has been the revelation that this person, beneath the chador which many find off-putting, is just like us. Ah, we think. Good old Muslims! They like baking too! And, with it, "how liberal we are!"
But actually the point about Nadiya is that she is not a typical chador-wearing Muslim woman. She is strongly atypical. For one thing, her husband Abdal let her go out and mix with other people (and associate with gay men). Moreover he took over the childcare while she was doing it. Not unknown, but not routine either.
If you still think Nadiya is typical, consider her valedictory words. "I'm never going to put boundaries on myself ever again", she said, after winning. "I'm never going to say I can't. I'm never going to say maybe". Admirable perhaps, but a sentiment more Californian than Koranic.
Further, our relief at Nadiya's Britishness (her cake! her self-deprecation!) is relief at her similarity to us. And similarity is not what multiculturalism is about. Instead it is about celebrating difference. It's about saying, "well that lot don't behave like the rest of us, but we respect that and will go along with it".
The outpouring of affection for Nadiya arises from a feeling which is the polar opposite. "Thank God she's the same as us", it says.
Nadiya deserved it on the night and I'm glad she won, but her popularity is the best demonstration I've ever seen both of the weakness of multiculturalism and the failure of its most ardent admirers to understand what it really is.
Wednesday 7 October 2015
Why I love . . . #13 Patricia Highsmith
Neither of my parents would describe themselves as intellectuals, but they have always read books, and as a child I worked my way steadily through their shelves of detective stories. Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Raymond Chandler (hallelujah) and even Robert Robinson (Landscape With Dead Dons, since you ask). For some reason I never got round to The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, though I well remember it being there. Perhaps Mum and Dad thought it might be a bit strong for a nine year old - certainly other titles, The Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas and Mailer's An American Dream for example, disappeared mysteriously after I was found standing on a chair looking at their somewhat racy covers.
But Ms Highsmith and I met at last a couple of weeks ago when the Males from Hale, the book group of which I am a kind of expat member (I can't afford to live in Hale) decided to take on the first of her Ripley series of books. And what a book it is. Any crime novel that's fit to stand alongside The Big Sleep is a towering book. I'd go further. I thought The Talented Mr Ripley as good as Crime and Punishment (and I love Dostoevsky).
Briefly - and no spoiler here - TTMR concerns a young American, Tom Ripley, asked to go to Europe to persuade another young American he knows slightly to return home. It then deals with Tom Ripley's crimes and misdemeanours and his attempts to evade discovery for them. The re-print jacket blurb says the book is unputdownable. But I found it hard to pick up, so gruelling was the story's tension.
Highsmith writes tersely. There is enough description, but not very much. The imagination fills in the details. The book is consummately plotted, complicatedly so, but with a simple story arc that carries you past the complexities. The pacing is true, with Highsmith able to linger painfully on some scenes yet deal with the quick passage of time lightly and unobtrusively.
Though technically dazzling, these aren't the greatest of her achievments. The story is told entirely through the eyes of Tom Ripley, and something about his clubbable there's-a-good-fellow name, and the way she refers to him throughout as Tom - Tom this, Tom that - gives the reader the uncomfortable feeling of being in cahoots with him. Agonisingly, as he comes closer to detection, and then further away, and then closer still, we don't know whether to hope he will get caught or, feeling his fear as vividly as we do, hope he escapes.
Ripley is a weak, damaged and dangerous man, the kind of person on whom it never pays to turn your back. All the other characters are seen through his eyes. The errant young man's father. His would-be girlfriend. Our perception of them is Tom's perception. We scarcely see them as suspicious, grieving or heartbroken. They are merely the tedious inconveniences with which Ripley has to deal.
So when I was reading TTMR I felt unclean; and when I finished it (twenty minutes ago) it was with a sense of admiration and relief.
Highsmith wrote another four Ripley novels. But I don't think I'm man enough to read them.
But Ms Highsmith and I met at last a couple of weeks ago when the Males from Hale, the book group of which I am a kind of expat member (I can't afford to live in Hale) decided to take on the first of her Ripley series of books. And what a book it is. Any crime novel that's fit to stand alongside The Big Sleep is a towering book. I'd go further. I thought The Talented Mr Ripley as good as Crime and Punishment (and I love Dostoevsky).
Briefly - and no spoiler here - TTMR concerns a young American, Tom Ripley, asked to go to Europe to persuade another young American he knows slightly to return home. It then deals with Tom Ripley's crimes and misdemeanours and his attempts to evade discovery for them. The re-print jacket blurb says the book is unputdownable. But I found it hard to pick up, so gruelling was the story's tension.
Highsmith writes tersely. There is enough description, but not very much. The imagination fills in the details. The book is consummately plotted, complicatedly so, but with a simple story arc that carries you past the complexities. The pacing is true, with Highsmith able to linger painfully on some scenes yet deal with the quick passage of time lightly and unobtrusively.
Though technically dazzling, these aren't the greatest of her achievments. The story is told entirely through the eyes of Tom Ripley, and something about his clubbable there's-a-good-fellow name, and the way she refers to him throughout as Tom - Tom this, Tom that - gives the reader the uncomfortable feeling of being in cahoots with him. Agonisingly, as he comes closer to detection, and then further away, and then closer still, we don't know whether to hope he will get caught or, feeling his fear as vividly as we do, hope he escapes.
Ripley is a weak, damaged and dangerous man, the kind of person on whom it never pays to turn your back. All the other characters are seen through his eyes. The errant young man's father. His would-be girlfriend. Our perception of them is Tom's perception. We scarcely see them as suspicious, grieving or heartbroken. They are merely the tedious inconveniences with which Ripley has to deal.
So when I was reading TTMR I felt unclean; and when I finished it (twenty minutes ago) it was with a sense of admiration and relief.
Highsmith wrote another four Ripley novels. But I don't think I'm man enough to read them.
Friday 2 October 2015
Bono smells the coffee
Every now and again I read something so striking that everything must be dropped and everything within my limited power done to bring it to a wider audience (not much wider, obviously).
Today someone posted a link on Twitter to devex.com, a website which seems to concern itself with overseas development. An article on devex features the following quote from Bono.
"I'm late to realizing that it's you guys, it's the private sector, it's commerce that's going to take the majority of people out of extreme poverty and, as an activist, I almost found that hard to say".
How to describe this moment of eclaircissement? A no-shit-Sherlock moment? A statement of the bleedin' obvious? Or merely long overdue?
Today someone posted a link on Twitter to devex.com, a website which seems to concern itself with overseas development. An article on devex features the following quote from Bono.
"I'm late to realizing that it's you guys, it's the private sector, it's commerce that's going to take the majority of people out of extreme poverty and, as an activist, I almost found that hard to say".
How to describe this moment of eclaircissement? A no-shit-Sherlock moment? A statement of the bleedin' obvious? Or merely long overdue?
Wednesday 30 September 2015
Jeremy Corbyn - strong message here
Not the least of the problems Jeremy Corbyn poses for the Left is what his election tells us about the Labour party. It tells us that the Labour party is the kind of demographic that elects Mr Corbyn. For those of us who aren't involved in political activism - and that's the overwhelming majority of British people - it tells us that the Labour party thinks Corbyn is the best leader they've got.
And what a leader he is. I didn't listen to all Mr Corbyn's first party conference speech yesterday, but I did listen to some of the highlights. Putting aside the substance (most of which, as a Blairite of old, I disagree with), Corbyn is one of the worst public speakers I have ever heard. And this wasn't an improvised soap-box rant, it was a set piece party conference speech. Live TV on all channels. It was rambling, stumbling, flat, avoided hard questions and recycled old material from a hack speechwriter rejected by previous Labour leaders. Of course all political leaders employ speechwriters. But that's not exactly the authentic straight talking Corbyn promised.
And yet after a leadership campaign lasting months, Labour people voted for this guy. I find it baffling.
Maybe they didn't vote for him because of his speaking ability, I hear you say. But I think that's exactly what they did. Meeting after meeting - every night for weeks - was packed with people desperate to hear Jeremy. Wide-eyed activists spoke of the electrifying atmosphere he generated. Twitter was abuzz with talk of a new beginning.
So here's another unpalatable fact. The Left hears Corbyn and goes weak at the knees. Old New Labour voters like me hear him and think, "Obsessive bloke you try and avoid at a party". Call me shallow, but as Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Graun this morning, this was Corbyn's last chance to create a good first impression. And what an impression it was.
To be clear, none of this means Corbyn can't win in 2020. David Cameron will no longer be Prime Minister then. I think George Osborne has done a good job in difficult circumstances, but he is a more divisive figure. Moreover if a week is a long time in politics, five years is an aeon. The world changed utterly between 2005 and 2010. It can happen again.
I still think Corbyn probably won't win though. The more successful he is at getting Labour to take on his policies, the further he will take the party away from the political mainstream. He didn't mention immigration or the deficit yesterday, but we caught a glimpse of what his attitude might be in the context of Trident renewal. His tactic was to mention the size of his mandate from Labour's electorate. I won with an overwhelming majority, he said, in terms, so I have the authority to rid the UK of nuclear weapons, even if not everyone in the party agrees with me.
This seems reasonable enough. I think Corbyn will have to prevail, because the alternative is for him to lead a party with policies he's on the record as opposing. That suggests that on a broad policy front, from immigration and the economy to defence and welfare Labour is going be fighting the next election on the most left wing manifesto in a generation.
Corbyn's MPs won't like it, but some of them will toe the line, because the ones that don't could soon find themselves out on their ear. For all his talk about being nice (although not to the Tories, obviously), people only survive in politics as long as Corbyn has by being masters of procedural warfare. He will know that internal opposition will have to be faced down, and I would imagine he'll set about suppressing it sooner rather than later.
Perhaps the most pertinent part of Corbyn's conference speech yesterday was the bit where he read out part of the autocue stage directions by mistake. "Strong message here", he intoned. I should say so.
And what a leader he is. I didn't listen to all Mr Corbyn's first party conference speech yesterday, but I did listen to some of the highlights. Putting aside the substance (most of which, as a Blairite of old, I disagree with), Corbyn is one of the worst public speakers I have ever heard. And this wasn't an improvised soap-box rant, it was a set piece party conference speech. Live TV on all channels. It was rambling, stumbling, flat, avoided hard questions and recycled old material from a hack speechwriter rejected by previous Labour leaders. Of course all political leaders employ speechwriters. But that's not exactly the authentic straight talking Corbyn promised.
And yet after a leadership campaign lasting months, Labour people voted for this guy. I find it baffling.
Maybe they didn't vote for him because of his speaking ability, I hear you say. But I think that's exactly what they did. Meeting after meeting - every night for weeks - was packed with people desperate to hear Jeremy. Wide-eyed activists spoke of the electrifying atmosphere he generated. Twitter was abuzz with talk of a new beginning.
So here's another unpalatable fact. The Left hears Corbyn and goes weak at the knees. Old New Labour voters like me hear him and think, "Obsessive bloke you try and avoid at a party". Call me shallow, but as Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Graun this morning, this was Corbyn's last chance to create a good first impression. And what an impression it was.
To be clear, none of this means Corbyn can't win in 2020. David Cameron will no longer be Prime Minister then. I think George Osborne has done a good job in difficult circumstances, but he is a more divisive figure. Moreover if a week is a long time in politics, five years is an aeon. The world changed utterly between 2005 and 2010. It can happen again.
I still think Corbyn probably won't win though. The more successful he is at getting Labour to take on his policies, the further he will take the party away from the political mainstream. He didn't mention immigration or the deficit yesterday, but we caught a glimpse of what his attitude might be in the context of Trident renewal. His tactic was to mention the size of his mandate from Labour's electorate. I won with an overwhelming majority, he said, in terms, so I have the authority to rid the UK of nuclear weapons, even if not everyone in the party agrees with me.
This seems reasonable enough. I think Corbyn will have to prevail, because the alternative is for him to lead a party with policies he's on the record as opposing. That suggests that on a broad policy front, from immigration and the economy to defence and welfare Labour is going be fighting the next election on the most left wing manifesto in a generation.
Corbyn's MPs won't like it, but some of them will toe the line, because the ones that don't could soon find themselves out on their ear. For all his talk about being nice (although not to the Tories, obviously), people only survive in politics as long as Corbyn has by being masters of procedural warfare. He will know that internal opposition will have to be faced down, and I would imagine he'll set about suppressing it sooner rather than later.
Perhaps the most pertinent part of Corbyn's conference speech yesterday was the bit where he read out part of the autocue stage directions by mistake. "Strong message here", he intoned. I should say so.
Friday 18 September 2015
Pinning down the fiscal multiplier. Or not.
As a late convert to Twitter I've been surprised and delighted by the way you stumble across people with interesting things to say about all aspects of political and cultural life. Recently I've been chatting to a guy called Bruce Greig about the economics of government borrowing. Bruce's view, expressed here is that the tax returns on increased growth more than pay for the investment, even when you have to borrow the money to do it. It works because of something called the fiscal multiplier. Here's my reply.
Hi Bruce.
Firstly, let's be candid about our various levels of
expertise. I'm not an economist and I suspect neither are you. We are both
probably interested amateurs trying to make sense of the economic and political
landscape. So we turn to outside sources to try and buttress what may be
instinctive views.
In your post you rely on the IMF. Fine. But just how reliable
is the IMF?
In January 2013 its chief economist admitted in a paper that the fiscal multiplier – put at 0.5 - it had used to calculate the effect
of austerity measures on European economies had been wrong. You’ll remember in January 2013 the same
economist – Olivier Blanchard – criticised George Osborne’s economic policy and
said “there should be a reassessment of fiscal policy”; Osborne was “playing
with fire”. When growth returned to the UK economy later that year Blanchard
had to admit he was “pleasantly surprised” by the UK’s performance. By January
2015 Blanchard’s boss Christine Lagarde was saying, “It’s obvious that what
happened in the UK actually worked”.
I recite this to show that the IMF is fallible. Its staff
don’t even agree with each other. Here's another IMF paper.
Its authors say on Page 1 that “the fiscal multiplier is . . . zero in
economies operating under flexible exchange rates”.
Yes, that’s zero. Not 1.5
or 2.5.
On Page 26 we get “in economies open to trade or operating under
flexible exchange rates, a fiscal expansion leads to no significant output
gains. Further, fiscal stimulus may be counterproductive in highly-indebted
countries; in countries with debt levels as low as 60 percent of GDP,
government consumption shocks may have strong negative effects on output”.
The UK’s current debt to GDP is 82%.
Even the IMF paper you cited yourself is equivocal. Have a look at page 83. It states that a “debt-financed” public
investment shock of 1% of GDP increases output by 2.9% over four years.
That’s a multiplier of less than 1 isn’t it? How is that
going to pay for itself when you take into account the cost of the debt?
I offer you the following propositions –
1.
The fiscal multiplier will vary according to the
situation.
2.
No-one knows exactly what it is in any given
situation.
3.
In some circumstances an increase in expenditure
will pay for itself, but sometimes it won’t. Given 1 and 2 above a degree of
circumspection is understandable.
One other consideration.
Where will the money HMG borrows to fund this expenditure come from? About
70% of UK government bonds are held by UK individuals and institutions. If new
bonds are issued roughly in the same proportion, most of the money will come
from within the UK.
In other words the expenditure HMG undertakes on the back
of this borrowing will not be new money.
It will not be new demand. It
will be money that would have been spent or invested in the UK anyway. The likelihood is that the multiplier will be
reduced by 70% accordingly.
Even economists can’t agree about the effect and size of the
fiscal multiplier. For we amateurs that’s a consolation, but also a warning –
maybe this is a subject which is as much an art as a science. Perhaps we should
be warier than we have been of stating categorically what works and what doesn’t.
Perhaps we should accept that, maybe, we just don’t know.
Professor Brian Cox - overpaid wanker?
Recently I had a Twitter spat with Professor Brian Cox, the floppy fringed scientist and TV presenter.
I wrote that his having signed the so-called "luvvies letter" in support of the BBC was compromised by the fact that he worked for the Corporation. Professor Cox accused me of having made an ad hominem attack on him. There was some to-ing and fro-ing over this issue, of the handbags-at-thirty-paces variety, and the Tweeting flurry gently expired with Cox pointing out that he wasn't employed by the BBC and my responding that, since he had worked for them in the past and intended to do so again, this was a distinction without a difference.
I now rather regret not asking Cox whether he was asked to sign the letter, as others were, by the BBC's Director of Television Danny Cohen.
So far so inconsequential. But what's this? An interview in the UK Press Gazette by another celebrity who doesn't work for the BBC, the Editor of Private Eye Ian Hislop. It turns out that Hislop was asked to sign the "luvvies letter" too. He refused. Why?
Hislop said,“Had I seen my own name on the list, I would have thought: ‘You overpaid wanker - why should I care what you say? . . . But God no – entirely inappropriate. And it does no good. I mean if there was a letter from 50 midwives saying: ‘The only thing that makes our lives bearable is watching Poldark’ – that’s a worthwhile letter. To have a letter from a load of famous people saying ‘I like the BBC and I get paid by them’, I mean, so what?”
Hislops other remarks are worth quoting too. "I think it’s playing all its cards very, very badly at the moment. And I think the BBC has a huge amount of things going for it. And, you know, I’m a huge fan of the Proms – I think paying for four orchestras is fabulous – I like a lot of radio, which I think is very, very good. But it’s allowed itself to get into a position where everything it does appears to be self-defeating. And I hate the thought that that’s going to end up with them emasculated and feeble. In our business you know pretty well why the Mail and the Murdoch empire, every time the Beeb do anything, they get slammed. But there’s a feebleness and a lack of robustness about the Beeb – and obviously cack-handedness – that has allowed it to be in this position of people going: ‘Ooh, the BBC, it’s a big worry.’“I mean, you look at what the does week after week and it shouldn’t be a problem. I watched two documentaries last week alone, which I think were worth the licence fee.“The quality isn’t a problem. But I think the management is.”
I agree with all of that. Including the bit about overpaid wankers.
I wrote that his having signed the so-called "luvvies letter" in support of the BBC was compromised by the fact that he worked for the Corporation. Professor Cox accused me of having made an ad hominem attack on him. There was some to-ing and fro-ing over this issue, of the handbags-at-thirty-paces variety, and the Tweeting flurry gently expired with Cox pointing out that he wasn't employed by the BBC and my responding that, since he had worked for them in the past and intended to do so again, this was a distinction without a difference.
I now rather regret not asking Cox whether he was asked to sign the letter, as others were, by the BBC's Director of Television Danny Cohen.
So far so inconsequential. But what's this? An interview in the UK Press Gazette by another celebrity who doesn't work for the BBC, the Editor of Private Eye Ian Hislop. It turns out that Hislop was asked to sign the "luvvies letter" too. He refused. Why?
Hislop said,“Had I seen my own name on the list, I would have thought: ‘You overpaid wanker - why should I care what you say? . . . But God no – entirely inappropriate. And it does no good. I mean if there was a letter from 50 midwives saying: ‘The only thing that makes our lives bearable is watching Poldark’ – that’s a worthwhile letter. To have a letter from a load of famous people saying ‘I like the BBC and I get paid by them’, I mean, so what?”
Hislops other remarks are worth quoting too. "I think it’s playing all its cards very, very badly at the moment. And I think the BBC has a huge amount of things going for it. And, you know, I’m a huge fan of the Proms – I think paying for four orchestras is fabulous – I like a lot of radio, which I think is very, very good. But it’s allowed itself to get into a position where everything it does appears to be self-defeating. And I hate the thought that that’s going to end up with them emasculated and feeble. In our business you know pretty well why the Mail and the Murdoch empire, every time the Beeb do anything, they get slammed. But there’s a feebleness and a lack of robustness about the Beeb – and obviously cack-handedness – that has allowed it to be in this position of people going: ‘Ooh, the BBC, it’s a big worry.’“I mean, you look at what the does week after week and it shouldn’t be a problem. I watched two documentaries last week alone, which I think were worth the licence fee.“The quality isn’t a problem. But I think the management is.”
I agree with all of that. Including the bit about overpaid wankers.
Monday 14 September 2015
The Labour leadership - why Jeremy Corbyn is going to be even worse for Labour than you thought
Many years ago when I was a Legal Aid lawyer in London I used to spend my days suing local Councils. It was illuminating. The Labour ones meant well but could not organise the proverbial piss-up. Even when your client had a very thin case it was worth pushing it because chances were the Council might be sufficiently disorganised and incompetent to give you what you wanted.
The Tories on the other hand were well run but tight as a gnat's chuff. If they said no, they meant no; and it was probably because someone capable had looked at the file and decided you had no case. My political sympathies didn't lie in their direction, but I came to develop a grudging admiration for their method.
In this context, and leaving aside the folly of giving non party-members a vote, I am still staggered by Labour's extraordinary election of Jeremy Corbyn. How could they have done such a thing?
Research carried out by Jon Cruddas confirms what many had suspected, namely that Labour lost the election because people didn't think Ed Miliband was an impressive leader and because they didn't think Labour was credible on the economy. So what does Labour do? It elects someone with a history of links to terrorists in both Ireland and the Middle East who has never run so much as Parliamentary committee. It elects someone who favours an economic policy founded on heroic tax raising assumptions and money printing which a majority of reputable economists (Richard Murphy, Corbyn's tax advisor, is an accountant, not an economist) think is dangerous.
I wrote recently about Robert Conquest's dictum that the behaviour of any large organisation may be explained by the hypothesis that it has been taken over by a secret cabal of its enemies. I suspect George Osborne has not in fact managed to infiltrate the Labour party, but if he had he would no doubt have been pushing for the Labour leader who would have least chance of becoming prime minister but would do most damage to the Party in the process of failing. Mr Corbyn fits the bill perfectly.
It's not just that the substance of Corbyn's policies have such a limited appeal in the UK. It's that he is uncharismatic, has a chequered past, showed repeatedly in his thirty years as an MP that he is incapable of loyalty to the Parliamentary Party and is unpopular with his colleagues at Westminster. He seems to have no concept of the need to co-operate with the press, already cancelling interviews and ducking questions.
He is also a truly terrible speaker. I listened to the results being announced on Saturday. The new Deputy Leader Tom Watson came over as a machine politician, unimaginative, tough, clever, the product of the Unions which have made him. But Corbyn sounded like one of those people you used to see trying to sell the SWP magazine outside Sainsbury's on Stoke Newington High Street. Rambling, bitter, obsessive. Come to think of it Corbyn probably was one of those people. Modern politics requires leaders who are articulate, measured and sound reasonable, at least in public. Corbyn was none of these things. How is he going to cope with the necessity of getting Labour's message across?
At this stage (Monday morning 48 hours in) Corbyn's shadow cabinet is not fully formed. But Oh Jesus the people. John McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor? Really? Diane Abbott? Hilary Benn? Yes, Hilary Benn - interestingly Benn said that Labour would be campaigning to stay in Europe, which is funny because Corbyn apparently told another former front bencher the opposite only yesterday.
Half the shadow cabinet have declined to serve under Corbyn. Two who haven't are Lord Falconer, an old chum of Tony Blair's, as Shadow Justice Minister, and Andy Burnham as Shadow Home Secretary. These men must be desperate. Andy Burnham argued against everything Corbyn stood for, at least until it looked as if Corbyn might win; then he trimmed his sails to try and catch some of Corbyn's votes.
The words Last Throw of the Dice spring to mind as far as Mr Burnham is concerned. He must have calculated that chucking his lot in with Corbyn is better than risking deselection and the wilderness. It is a calculation that has self-interest written all over it. Burnham may of course be right; but it's striking how many of his former colleagues thought the odds favoured the opposite move.
I think Corbyn is wrong about virtually everything - defence, taxation, the economy, foreign policy generally - but more importantly his views on these matters are at odds with those of most other people as well. He lacks the personal qualities good leadership requires, and is going to have a lot of trouble dealing with parliamentary colleagues, who on the whole despise him.
And yet in a way this isn't the worst news for Labour. Worse still is what the Tories will tell the rest of us about Labour. They will tell us that if we want to know what Labour would be like in power, they are the party which was daft enough to elect Jeremy Corbyn on a 60% landslide. And they will be right.
The Tories on the other hand were well run but tight as a gnat's chuff. If they said no, they meant no; and it was probably because someone capable had looked at the file and decided you had no case. My political sympathies didn't lie in their direction, but I came to develop a grudging admiration for their method.
In this context, and leaving aside the folly of giving non party-members a vote, I am still staggered by Labour's extraordinary election of Jeremy Corbyn. How could they have done such a thing?
Research carried out by Jon Cruddas confirms what many had suspected, namely that Labour lost the election because people didn't think Ed Miliband was an impressive leader and because they didn't think Labour was credible on the economy. So what does Labour do? It elects someone with a history of links to terrorists in both Ireland and the Middle East who has never run so much as Parliamentary committee. It elects someone who favours an economic policy founded on heroic tax raising assumptions and money printing which a majority of reputable economists (Richard Murphy, Corbyn's tax advisor, is an accountant, not an economist) think is dangerous.
I wrote recently about Robert Conquest's dictum that the behaviour of any large organisation may be explained by the hypothesis that it has been taken over by a secret cabal of its enemies. I suspect George Osborne has not in fact managed to infiltrate the Labour party, but if he had he would no doubt have been pushing for the Labour leader who would have least chance of becoming prime minister but would do most damage to the Party in the process of failing. Mr Corbyn fits the bill perfectly.
It's not just that the substance of Corbyn's policies have such a limited appeal in the UK. It's that he is uncharismatic, has a chequered past, showed repeatedly in his thirty years as an MP that he is incapable of loyalty to the Parliamentary Party and is unpopular with his colleagues at Westminster. He seems to have no concept of the need to co-operate with the press, already cancelling interviews and ducking questions.
He is also a truly terrible speaker. I listened to the results being announced on Saturday. The new Deputy Leader Tom Watson came over as a machine politician, unimaginative, tough, clever, the product of the Unions which have made him. But Corbyn sounded like one of those people you used to see trying to sell the SWP magazine outside Sainsbury's on Stoke Newington High Street. Rambling, bitter, obsessive. Come to think of it Corbyn probably was one of those people. Modern politics requires leaders who are articulate, measured and sound reasonable, at least in public. Corbyn was none of these things. How is he going to cope with the necessity of getting Labour's message across?
At this stage (Monday morning 48 hours in) Corbyn's shadow cabinet is not fully formed. But Oh Jesus the people. John McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor? Really? Diane Abbott? Hilary Benn? Yes, Hilary Benn - interestingly Benn said that Labour would be campaigning to stay in Europe, which is funny because Corbyn apparently told another former front bencher the opposite only yesterday.
Half the shadow cabinet have declined to serve under Corbyn. Two who haven't are Lord Falconer, an old chum of Tony Blair's, as Shadow Justice Minister, and Andy Burnham as Shadow Home Secretary. These men must be desperate. Andy Burnham argued against everything Corbyn stood for, at least until it looked as if Corbyn might win; then he trimmed his sails to try and catch some of Corbyn's votes.
The words Last Throw of the Dice spring to mind as far as Mr Burnham is concerned. He must have calculated that chucking his lot in with Corbyn is better than risking deselection and the wilderness. It is a calculation that has self-interest written all over it. Burnham may of course be right; but it's striking how many of his former colleagues thought the odds favoured the opposite move.
I think Corbyn is wrong about virtually everything - defence, taxation, the economy, foreign policy generally - but more importantly his views on these matters are at odds with those of most other people as well. He lacks the personal qualities good leadership requires, and is going to have a lot of trouble dealing with parliamentary colleagues, who on the whole despise him.
And yet in a way this isn't the worst news for Labour. Worse still is what the Tories will tell the rest of us about Labour. They will tell us that if we want to know what Labour would be like in power, they are the party which was daft enough to elect Jeremy Corbyn on a 60% landslide. And they will be right.
Thursday 3 September 2015
Emma Thompson and the Syrian dead
The world throws its hands up in horror at the sight of an Italian policeman cradling the drowned corpse of a Syrian Kurdish boy. I'm slightly surprised about this. We have known for months if not years of the terrible plight of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East (mixed up with the not quite so terrible plight of the streams of economic migrants coming from those places). Is it really the case that there are amongst us those who cannot conceive of the realities of people-trafficking without seeing a photograph of its consequences? Apparently so.
Horror is not limited to the Left, although they do of course dominate it. Mixed in with this horror is a certain amount of hypocrisy. Labour leadership contender Yvette Cooper recently called upon Britain to take 10,000 refugees. I'm as certain as I can be that Ms Cooper was one of the Labour MPs who in August 2013 voted against a Coalition government proposal to take military action to support the rebels in Syria.
The rebels were at that time, remember, dominated by moderates rather than by ISIL. I can't be the only person puzzled by the spectacle of Cooper purporting to hold the government's feet to the fire over Syrian refugees when the actions of her and her colleagues prevented the Government doing the one thing which might have reduced dramatically the possibility of this dead boy's parents having to escape the country in the first place.
Of course it's not just Syria - the chaotic space inside that country provided and still provides ISIL with the base from which its operations across the Middle East have sallied forth. And it's not just Yvette Cooper either. Someone posted on Twitter this morning a wonderful juxtaposition of Natalie Bennett, the Green party leader, berating the Coalition in Parliament in 2013 for its military proposals with a picture of the same Ms Bennett yesterday holding a placard urging support for refugees. Truly these people have no shame.
And there are lots of them too. It's not just MPs. All across the media the airwaves are alive with the chirruping of the indignant, complaining about the government's failure to do more, utterly oblivious to the possibility that their own objection to military action in 2013 might have contributed to the present mess all across the south and east Mediterranean. "So of course you supported the Coalition Government in 2013 when they wanted to intervene on the side of the moderate Syrian rebels?", ask the interviewers. I'm kidding of course. The interviewers were probably against intervention too. After Iraq, isn't everyone?
The rebels were at that time, remember, dominated by moderates rather than by ISIL. I can't be the only person puzzled by the spectacle of Cooper purporting to hold the government's feet to the fire over Syrian refugees when the actions of her and her colleagues prevented the Government doing the one thing which might have reduced dramatically the possibility of this dead boy's parents having to escape the country in the first place.
Of course it's not just Syria - the chaotic space inside that country provided and still provides ISIL with the base from which its operations across the Middle East have sallied forth. And it's not just Yvette Cooper either. Someone posted on Twitter this morning a wonderful juxtaposition of Natalie Bennett, the Green party leader, berating the Coalition in Parliament in 2013 for its military proposals with a picture of the same Ms Bennett yesterday holding a placard urging support for refugees. Truly these people have no shame.
And there are lots of them too. It's not just MPs. All across the media the airwaves are alive with the chirruping of the indignant, complaining about the government's failure to do more, utterly oblivious to the possibility that their own objection to military action in 2013 might have contributed to the present mess all across the south and east Mediterranean. "So of course you supported the Coalition Government in 2013 when they wanted to intervene on the side of the moderate Syrian rebels?", ask the interviewers. I'm kidding of course. The interviewers were probably against intervention too. After Iraq, isn't everyone?
But as I have long argued, it isn't enough to point out that those making an argument are unattractive hypocrites getting off on what the writer Brendan O'Neill described as "death porn". Neither can people like me say, "I told you so" or "I wouldn't have started from here". You have to show that in this particular case they are wrong, and that some other way might be better.
So let's start with the morality of it. British law requires individuals to claim asylum in the first safe place they come to. Thus the people trying to hop onto trains and lorries at Calais are by definition not refugees. They are safe from persecution in France (incidentally they are also illegal immigrants in that country; but no-one in France seems to care and neither does the media or the political class here).
It's worth pointing out too that the child whose death has caused the current furore was not in this sense a refugee either. He had fled Syria with his family and had lived in Turkey for a year. No doubt they were living in pretty rotten circumstances in Turkey, but they were not in danger of persecution. They paid people traffickers because they thought they would have less rotten circumstances in Europe.
British law exists to keep the maximum number of refugees out. It says, "If you can get here, we'll consider your application. But if you are too weak, too poor, too unlucky or too encumbered by dependents to get here, too bad".
There is nothing moral about our refugee laws then. But before we condemn them it's worth considering the practicalities. There must be millions of people across Africa generally who could in theory claim asylum in Britain. Leave aside the economic migrants, there must be millions at risk of persecution. We cannot possibly take them all. It is simply impractical. In that context it's possible to look at our laws as a genuine attempt to allow a realistic number of people into Britain, whilst preventing a flood tide that would overwhelm our ability to process, absorb and pay for them.
Comically, the Yvette Coopers and Natalie Bennetts of this world are exactly the same people who are telling us that we have a housing crisis, that the NHS is collapsing and that there aren't enough school places to go round. They cannot conceive that this might be something to do with net migration of 325,000 per year, an astronomic number to which they are proposing the government should now add thousands of Syrians. Truly they are beyond satire.
At times like the present, plenty of decent people say, "Hang the rules. Let's just do the right thing". But what would the right thing look like? 10,000, says Yvette Cooper. Is that 10,000 this week? This month? This year? Why is 10,000 right, but 5,000 wrong? Come to that, why isn't 15,000 better still?
For those shattered into action by pictures of dead children, more is always better. If 15,000 is better than 10,000, 20,000 must also be better than 15,000. Yet even the most ardent enthusiast would have to accept that, even if taking more refugees entitles us to feel better about ourselves, there is going to come a point when we say, "Whoa there. That's enough for now". I have absolutely no doubt that Yvette Cooper is not suggesting we take 10,000 per week. It follows that there is no point in numerical terms where the moral high ground is attained: there is always going to be a higher number which would be better still.
Yet the higher number you admit, the closer you get to the limitations of practicality. Now or later we'll have to close the door on migrants, because their supply is limitless. No matter how many we take now there will always come a point at which we are going to have to limit asylum applications in much the same way as our law does at the moment. No matter how many we take the risk is that the people we don't take at number 10,001 on the list (or 20,001 and above; or whatever) die or are tortured or drown, usually unseen by the cameras. Not exactly a morally ideal solution.
It looks then as if we are not talking about doing something absolutely right, but something which is a messy compromise between practicality and virtue. It follows that there might be another approach which, however imperfect, might be better than taking a token 10,000.
Taking asylum seekers has its drawbacks. It encourages more to come. That's to say, it encourages more to take their chances with the people traffickers and their rickety overcrowded boats. How does that help stop children drowning? If you doubt me, look at the chaotic scenes at Hungarian railway stations as Germany's promise to take large numbers of refugees acts as a magnet for the desperate. And with the desperate come the economic migrants. What kind of system is which allows economic migrants to get in but keeps out genuine refugees?
Taking refugees (or, more likely, taking migrants some of whom will be refugees and some merely looking for a better life) is a palliative. It is a partial treatment of a symptom. What we should be doing is treating the cause. We should be removing the reasons why people want to escape in the first place. Surely this would be more "right" than taking an arbitrary number of Syrians to make ourselves feel better (and in case you feel this is harsh on people asking for kindness to individual Syrians, how else are we to describe those who did absolutely nothing for three years and suddenly discovered their consciences because they saw a harrowing photograph?)
A proper response would involve helping countries (by direct physical intervention if necessary) to get rid of despotic rulers and set up democratic governments. Allowing the youngest, fittest and most enterprising people to come to Europe only deepens the problems those countries have. If they must leave, let them be housed in adjacent countries from which they can go back, and by all means let Western countries, including Britain, pay for them to stay there.
It would really help if the section of Western societies which howled at the moon when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, opposed intervention in Syria and are now berating European governments for failing to take the ensuing flood of refugees could shut up for a while. The Middle East and North Africa are partly a mess because, at their behest, Western governments did nothing to help moderates topple Assad.
Luvvies like Emma Thompson, who suddenly turns out to have been sufficiently expert on refugees to appear on Newsnight (someone at the BBC must have felt it wasn't digging its own grave quickly enough), are people whose heartstrings are twanging a quarter-tone sharp. They feel bad, and want to do something (preferably in public) which will make them feel good. In a few weeks Thompson will be worrying about the Oscars or the BAFTAS. What people like her aren't willing to do is argue for the long term unglamorous strategic goals which might, in the long term, result in fewer people being drowned in the Mediterranean or beheaded by ISIL.
Taking migrants is cheap. It involves those arguing for it in almost no effort whatsoever. It makes them feel good. They can then move on to other causes with - they feel - a clear conscience. It also does nothing whatsoever to fix the problem, and may in fact make matters worse. It is understandable, but also infantile and short-termist. It is reached for as a way of making the individual feel better in the face something truly awful, not as a way of making a repeat of the truly awful less likely (I should know. I've given several hundred quid to Save the Children. I now feel great).
Long-term engagement on the other hand makes no-one feel better. It involves many dead, some of whom will be Western. It is expensive. It entails watching depressing news on the TV, sometimes for weeks on end. It is a process of two steps forward, one step back at best (and sometimes one step forward and two steps back). Politicians who advocate it face the ordeal of holding their nerve in the face of a hostile press, vocal and self-righteous opponents and ruthless enemies. Success, if it comes, will be partial and compromised. And yet it offers the only true hope of solving the refugee crisis.
Intervention, as Iraq demonstrates, is incredibly difficult. The Americans and British remained in the country for ten years, and it turned out to be not long enough. You cannot expect a country without a democratic tradition to start making the messy compromises required overnight. We are guilty of thinking that there is a solution to this problem that can be accomplished painlessly and straight away. There isn't. As the American writer Alan Wolfe said, "Behind every citizen lies a graveyard". Peace and justice in the Middle East will not be accomplished without many, many dead, some of them ours.
We'd do better to accept that sobering thought and act strategically upon it than kid ourselves that taking a few thousand Syrian kids is going to sort things out.
So let's start with the morality of it. British law requires individuals to claim asylum in the first safe place they come to. Thus the people trying to hop onto trains and lorries at Calais are by definition not refugees. They are safe from persecution in France (incidentally they are also illegal immigrants in that country; but no-one in France seems to care and neither does the media or the political class here).
It's worth pointing out too that the child whose death has caused the current furore was not in this sense a refugee either. He had fled Syria with his family and had lived in Turkey for a year. No doubt they were living in pretty rotten circumstances in Turkey, but they were not in danger of persecution. They paid people traffickers because they thought they would have less rotten circumstances in Europe.
British law exists to keep the maximum number of refugees out. It says, "If you can get here, we'll consider your application. But if you are too weak, too poor, too unlucky or too encumbered by dependents to get here, too bad".
There is nothing moral about our refugee laws then. But before we condemn them it's worth considering the practicalities. There must be millions of people across Africa generally who could in theory claim asylum in Britain. Leave aside the economic migrants, there must be millions at risk of persecution. We cannot possibly take them all. It is simply impractical. In that context it's possible to look at our laws as a genuine attempt to allow a realistic number of people into Britain, whilst preventing a flood tide that would overwhelm our ability to process, absorb and pay for them.
Comically, the Yvette Coopers and Natalie Bennetts of this world are exactly the same people who are telling us that we have a housing crisis, that the NHS is collapsing and that there aren't enough school places to go round. They cannot conceive that this might be something to do with net migration of 325,000 per year, an astronomic number to which they are proposing the government should now add thousands of Syrians. Truly they are beyond satire.
At times like the present, plenty of decent people say, "Hang the rules. Let's just do the right thing". But what would the right thing look like? 10,000, says Yvette Cooper. Is that 10,000 this week? This month? This year? Why is 10,000 right, but 5,000 wrong? Come to that, why isn't 15,000 better still?
For those shattered into action by pictures of dead children, more is always better. If 15,000 is better than 10,000, 20,000 must also be better than 15,000. Yet even the most ardent enthusiast would have to accept that, even if taking more refugees entitles us to feel better about ourselves, there is going to come a point when we say, "Whoa there. That's enough for now". I have absolutely no doubt that Yvette Cooper is not suggesting we take 10,000 per week. It follows that there is no point in numerical terms where the moral high ground is attained: there is always going to be a higher number which would be better still.
Yet the higher number you admit, the closer you get to the limitations of practicality. Now or later we'll have to close the door on migrants, because their supply is limitless. No matter how many we take now there will always come a point at which we are going to have to limit asylum applications in much the same way as our law does at the moment. No matter how many we take the risk is that the people we don't take at number 10,001 on the list (or 20,001 and above; or whatever) die or are tortured or drown, usually unseen by the cameras. Not exactly a morally ideal solution.
It looks then as if we are not talking about doing something absolutely right, but something which is a messy compromise between practicality and virtue. It follows that there might be another approach which, however imperfect, might be better than taking a token 10,000.
Taking asylum seekers has its drawbacks. It encourages more to come. That's to say, it encourages more to take their chances with the people traffickers and their rickety overcrowded boats. How does that help stop children drowning? If you doubt me, look at the chaotic scenes at Hungarian railway stations as Germany's promise to take large numbers of refugees acts as a magnet for the desperate. And with the desperate come the economic migrants. What kind of system is which allows economic migrants to get in but keeps out genuine refugees?
Taking refugees (or, more likely, taking migrants some of whom will be refugees and some merely looking for a better life) is a palliative. It is a partial treatment of a symptom. What we should be doing is treating the cause. We should be removing the reasons why people want to escape in the first place. Surely this would be more "right" than taking an arbitrary number of Syrians to make ourselves feel better (and in case you feel this is harsh on people asking for kindness to individual Syrians, how else are we to describe those who did absolutely nothing for three years and suddenly discovered their consciences because they saw a harrowing photograph?)
A proper response would involve helping countries (by direct physical intervention if necessary) to get rid of despotic rulers and set up democratic governments. Allowing the youngest, fittest and most enterprising people to come to Europe only deepens the problems those countries have. If they must leave, let them be housed in adjacent countries from which they can go back, and by all means let Western countries, including Britain, pay for them to stay there.
It would really help if the section of Western societies which howled at the moon when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, opposed intervention in Syria and are now berating European governments for failing to take the ensuing flood of refugees could shut up for a while. The Middle East and North Africa are partly a mess because, at their behest, Western governments did nothing to help moderates topple Assad.
Luvvies like Emma Thompson, who suddenly turns out to have been sufficiently expert on refugees to appear on Newsnight (someone at the BBC must have felt it wasn't digging its own grave quickly enough), are people whose heartstrings are twanging a quarter-tone sharp. They feel bad, and want to do something (preferably in public) which will make them feel good. In a few weeks Thompson will be worrying about the Oscars or the BAFTAS. What people like her aren't willing to do is argue for the long term unglamorous strategic goals which might, in the long term, result in fewer people being drowned in the Mediterranean or beheaded by ISIL.
Taking migrants is cheap. It involves those arguing for it in almost no effort whatsoever. It makes them feel good. They can then move on to other causes with - they feel - a clear conscience. It also does nothing whatsoever to fix the problem, and may in fact make matters worse. It is understandable, but also infantile and short-termist. It is reached for as a way of making the individual feel better in the face something truly awful, not as a way of making a repeat of the truly awful less likely (I should know. I've given several hundred quid to Save the Children. I now feel great).
Long-term engagement on the other hand makes no-one feel better. It involves many dead, some of whom will be Western. It is expensive. It entails watching depressing news on the TV, sometimes for weeks on end. It is a process of two steps forward, one step back at best (and sometimes one step forward and two steps back). Politicians who advocate it face the ordeal of holding their nerve in the face of a hostile press, vocal and self-righteous opponents and ruthless enemies. Success, if it comes, will be partial and compromised. And yet it offers the only true hope of solving the refugee crisis.
Intervention, as Iraq demonstrates, is incredibly difficult. The Americans and British remained in the country for ten years, and it turned out to be not long enough. You cannot expect a country without a democratic tradition to start making the messy compromises required overnight. We are guilty of thinking that there is a solution to this problem that can be accomplished painlessly and straight away. There isn't. As the American writer Alan Wolfe said, "Behind every citizen lies a graveyard". Peace and justice in the Middle East will not be accomplished without many, many dead, some of them ours.
We'd do better to accept that sobering thought and act strategically upon it than kid ourselves that taking a few thousand Syrian kids is going to sort things out.
Tuesday 11 August 2015
Songs of Praise, Calais and that old BBC bias thing
So the BBC proposes to do an edition of Songs of Praise from the Calais refugee camp. So what, you may think. The Daily Express is not so sanguine, splashing the story on its front page complete with quotes from Nigel Farage.
You don't have to read what he says. You can imagine very easily.
Is the BBC right?
Let's start by agreeing that migration is a sharply political issue. People (and parties) are divided about how much immigration we should have, and who should decide how much we should have. The issue of our continued EU membership might well turn on the question. We're also divided about the issue of African refugees. How should we treat them? How many should we take? Should we help them cross the Med? Should we round them up and send them straight back? Should there be a formal allocation across EU countries? What is the best way to help Africa become a continent people want to migrate to instead of from?
Against that background, a programme which humanises and makes poignant the plight of those who have risked their lives to cross Europe in the hope of a better life (even if many of them are economic migrants) has an unmistakable political resonance. Sympathy for the migrants is easily equated to sympathy for migration.
Of course the BBC can't be above politics. It is imbued with it. And the political outlook of its staff is reflected every day even in the non-news programmes it makes. I've been arguing for years that if you tend to employ humanities graduates you'll tend to get a certain type of political outlook. A long succession of current and former BBC staff have confirmed this suggestion of emergent group-think (the phrase is Andrew Marr's).
As so often with the question of BBC bias, the most compelling signs are of the dog-that-didn't-bark variety. Where are the current and former BBC staff complaining of right wing bias? There aren't any. None. I've never heard of one.
I wrote quite recently here about the film Pride (W1A, Pride and the BBC). This, readers will remember, is the BBC backed film which followed the tribulations of gay men and women from London trying to help striking miners in the (fiercely socially conservative) South Wales valleys. I enjoyed Pride, but I couldn't help asking myself whether BBC Films would have put its money behind a film which took the other view.
"Would it", I wrote, "have backed a film showing Arthur Scargill as an evil communist intent on bringing down the democratically elected Thatcher government? Or about Jack Jones taking money from the KGB? Would it have put money behind a story about dutiful women of South Wales Chapel righteously upset about the promiscuous Aids-bearing homosexuals from the capital? Even to ask the question is to realise how laughably unlikely that would be."
And so with Songs of Praise. By all means go to Calais and do a programme humanising the awful tragedy taking place there. By all means show the plight of the migrants. But do the other thing as well. And that's the problem. The BBC wouldn't. Pace Pride, can you imagine Songs of Praise going to, for example, an unemployment blackspot in the North East and showing the plight of people who say they can't get jobs because the local industries are now the province of East Europeans? Can you imagine them doing the programme from places where people can't get their kids into schools because of the pressure from migrants and their families? Or from places where the local health service is facing bankruptcy because of increased demand?
Me neither. The BBC would just never do it. Why not? The most obvious answer is because it tends to employ people who tend to think that immigration doesn't have a downside. I'm not suggesting that, to use the Songs of Praise example, there would be a production meeting in which the possibility of going to an area of East London frequented by the gay-hating Muslim Patrol (see internet for details) was mooted and rejected. I'm saying the possibility would never occur to them. The Corporation just doesn't employ people who think like that.
You have to ask yourself, at a time when Charter renewal is only a few months away, with a newly installed Conservative government confident in its diagnosis of BBC bias, in a context where alternative funding arrangements which could replace the licence fee are increasingly accepted across the industry, how could they be so stupid as to present their enemies with such a simple tap-in?
I hope the Government doesn't throw out the BBC baby with the bathwater. But if they do the Corporation will only have itself to blame.
You don't have to read what he says. You can imagine very easily.
Is the BBC right?
Let's start by agreeing that migration is a sharply political issue. People (and parties) are divided about how much immigration we should have, and who should decide how much we should have. The issue of our continued EU membership might well turn on the question. We're also divided about the issue of African refugees. How should we treat them? How many should we take? Should we help them cross the Med? Should we round them up and send them straight back? Should there be a formal allocation across EU countries? What is the best way to help Africa become a continent people want to migrate to instead of from?
Against that background, a programme which humanises and makes poignant the plight of those who have risked their lives to cross Europe in the hope of a better life (even if many of them are economic migrants) has an unmistakable political resonance. Sympathy for the migrants is easily equated to sympathy for migration.
Of course the BBC can't be above politics. It is imbued with it. And the political outlook of its staff is reflected every day even in the non-news programmes it makes. I've been arguing for years that if you tend to employ humanities graduates you'll tend to get a certain type of political outlook. A long succession of current and former BBC staff have confirmed this suggestion of emergent group-think (the phrase is Andrew Marr's).
As so often with the question of BBC bias, the most compelling signs are of the dog-that-didn't-bark variety. Where are the current and former BBC staff complaining of right wing bias? There aren't any. None. I've never heard of one.
I wrote quite recently here about the film Pride (W1A, Pride and the BBC). This, readers will remember, is the BBC backed film which followed the tribulations of gay men and women from London trying to help striking miners in the (fiercely socially conservative) South Wales valleys. I enjoyed Pride, but I couldn't help asking myself whether BBC Films would have put its money behind a film which took the other view.
"Would it", I wrote, "have backed a film showing Arthur Scargill as an evil communist intent on bringing down the democratically elected Thatcher government? Or about Jack Jones taking money from the KGB? Would it have put money behind a story about dutiful women of South Wales Chapel righteously upset about the promiscuous Aids-bearing homosexuals from the capital? Even to ask the question is to realise how laughably unlikely that would be."
And so with Songs of Praise. By all means go to Calais and do a programme humanising the awful tragedy taking place there. By all means show the plight of the migrants. But do the other thing as well. And that's the problem. The BBC wouldn't. Pace Pride, can you imagine Songs of Praise going to, for example, an unemployment blackspot in the North East and showing the plight of people who say they can't get jobs because the local industries are now the province of East Europeans? Can you imagine them doing the programme from places where people can't get their kids into schools because of the pressure from migrants and their families? Or from places where the local health service is facing bankruptcy because of increased demand?
Me neither. The BBC would just never do it. Why not? The most obvious answer is because it tends to employ people who tend to think that immigration doesn't have a downside. I'm not suggesting that, to use the Songs of Praise example, there would be a production meeting in which the possibility of going to an area of East London frequented by the gay-hating Muslim Patrol (see internet for details) was mooted and rejected. I'm saying the possibility would never occur to them. The Corporation just doesn't employ people who think like that.
You have to ask yourself, at a time when Charter renewal is only a few months away, with a newly installed Conservative government confident in its diagnosis of BBC bias, in a context where alternative funding arrangements which could replace the licence fee are increasingly accepted across the industry, how could they be so stupid as to present their enemies with such a simple tap-in?
I hope the Government doesn't throw out the BBC baby with the bathwater. But if they do the Corporation will only have itself to blame.
Monday 10 August 2015
How Jeremy Corbyn could win (Yes, really).
At the time of writing it looks as if Jeremy Corbyn has quite a decent chance of becoming Labour Party leader. The last time I voted Labour in a General Election was in 2005, so I don't on the face of it have much interest in the outcome of the party's leadership contest.
The tactical point made by Blairites and political journalists alike is that the electorate opted for the Tories when offered a choice last May between Centre Left and Centre Right. People are, the argument runs, unlikely to turn out in large numbers for a Labour Party further to the Left. Thus if Corbyn wins, Labour is bound to lose.
I actually think this is wrong.
The most obvious reason is the inherent uncertainty of politics. No one knows what's over the horizon. Harold Macmillan's "Events, dear boy, events", if you like. It's perfectly possible that a disaster so fundamental could overtake the Tories that Jeremy Corbyn would seem quite attractive by comparison.
But even in the absence of some Black Swan event, as Billy Bragg (one of Corbyn's celebrity endorsers) tweeted the other day, it's perfectly possible to calculate that if Labour shifts to the Left it will gain enough voters (particularly among the young) to win. It's a defensible tactic.
As it happens I think that Bragg has set his terms too narrowly. Yes, Labour will gain some otherwise apathetic first-timers. But, faced with the prospect of a Far Left government, some Labour voters will turn elsewhere (perhaps the Lib Dems or UKIP), lazy Tories will turn out who might not otherwise and some Lib Dems will vote tactically to keep Labour out.
Moving Left may be a gamble worth taking, but it's a bigger gamble than Billy Bragg realises.
If a Corbyn-led Labour Party isn't bound to lose, it nevertheless probably will, and to that extent as a former Labour voter I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
The overwhelming majority of Labour supporters, and a good many of its professional politicians, think that the financial crisis was all the fault of the City, that Labour did not overspend whilst in office, that Britain is suffering the yoke of Tory austerity, and that any alleged black hole in the public finances can be filled by taxing the rich a bit more. For them public spending should be limited by compassion, not affordability.
Then there is a group which understands that Gordon Brown's tinkering with the regulations gave the City more freedom to misbehave, that Labour ran substantial deficits during the 2000s which left the Treasury ill-prepared to deal with the downturn, and that if the bankers had behaved responsibly the lending spree which Labour rode with such ill-disguised glee ("No more Tory boom and bust") would have come to an end much sooner. They grasp that, despite alleged Tory austerity, public spending actually continues to rise and that the trouble with taxing the rich more is that there aren't very many of them, they don't on the whole get their money in an easily traceable PAYE cheque at the end of the month and they can afford accountants. These people also grasp that, ultimately, you can only have the public services you can afford.
The second group is a very small minority within Labour, and one largely grouped within the parliamentary party.
If you had to choose a demographic in Britain likely to contain the smallest number of people who took this second view, the Labour party membership would be a pretty good contender. Which is why polls show Liz Kendall lagging a distant fourth in the leadership race. That's the crushing irony. The people charged with deciding who is best placed to lead Labour back to power are those least likely to understand what's necessary to do so.
Labour can regard its election defeat in two ways. It can say that the electorate was wrong, and that all it needs to do is keep on persuading enough of us to change our minds.
Alternatively it could say that perhaps the electorate was in some respects right, and work out how it might change its pitch accordingly.
Unfortunately for Labour the first response requires nothing special. It merely requires its supporters to behave the way most people do faced with rejection. I was right! How dare they be so stupid! The second response on the other hand requires something exceptional - humility and openness. Since so many more of us are all too human it's not surprising that the first response has overwhelmed the second amongst the Labour faithful.
What makes it all the harder for them is that if the electorate were right, where does that leave Labour? If the days of the blank cheque are over, what is Labour for? The point of Social Democracy is that government taxes the surpluses capitalism produces, and uses the money to make a compendious safety net for the poor. But what if there isn't enough money to do that in the way Labour wants? How does it appeal to the electorate then? If it accepts Britain must live within its means, how does it differentiate itself from the Tories or Lib Dems?
This is the appeal of Corbynism. Rather than position itself as a Tory-lite party, the temptation is for Labour go the whole hog and stand proudly on the Bennite Left. The Blairite response to this proposition is, "But you will never win a general election". "Ah", say the Corbynites loftily, "but what is the point of winning when doing so would make us just as bad as our enemies?"
As I said, it's almost funny.
I can readily imagine circumstances in which I might vote Labour again. I think Liz Kendall is an incredibly impressive candidate. A good leader and some sensible policies might do it.
But Jeremy Corbyn? Come on.
In my lifetime Labour has gone on a journey which reflects both the vaulting ambition of its statism and the undermining of the industrial base which might once have been used to pay for it. It has gone from being the party of tax and spend (Wilson, Callaghan, Kinnock), to the party of tax, spend and borrow (Blair and Brown). Corbyn proposes a further transformation to the party of tax, spend, borrow and print money. Not on your Nelly.
The tactical point made by Blairites and political journalists alike is that the electorate opted for the Tories when offered a choice last May between Centre Left and Centre Right. People are, the argument runs, unlikely to turn out in large numbers for a Labour Party further to the Left. Thus if Corbyn wins, Labour is bound to lose.
I actually think this is wrong.
The most obvious reason is the inherent uncertainty of politics. No one knows what's over the horizon. Harold Macmillan's "Events, dear boy, events", if you like. It's perfectly possible that a disaster so fundamental could overtake the Tories that Jeremy Corbyn would seem quite attractive by comparison.
But even in the absence of some Black Swan event, as Billy Bragg (one of Corbyn's celebrity endorsers) tweeted the other day, it's perfectly possible to calculate that if Labour shifts to the Left it will gain enough voters (particularly among the young) to win. It's a defensible tactic.
As it happens I think that Bragg has set his terms too narrowly. Yes, Labour will gain some otherwise apathetic first-timers. But, faced with the prospect of a Far Left government, some Labour voters will turn elsewhere (perhaps the Lib Dems or UKIP), lazy Tories will turn out who might not otherwise and some Lib Dems will vote tactically to keep Labour out.
Moving Left may be a gamble worth taking, but it's a bigger gamble than Billy Bragg realises.
If a Corbyn-led Labour Party isn't bound to lose, it nevertheless probably will, and to that extent as a former Labour voter I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
The overwhelming majority of Labour supporters, and a good many of its professional politicians, think that the financial crisis was all the fault of the City, that Labour did not overspend whilst in office, that Britain is suffering the yoke of Tory austerity, and that any alleged black hole in the public finances can be filled by taxing the rich a bit more. For them public spending should be limited by compassion, not affordability.
Then there is a group which understands that Gordon Brown's tinkering with the regulations gave the City more freedom to misbehave, that Labour ran substantial deficits during the 2000s which left the Treasury ill-prepared to deal with the downturn, and that if the bankers had behaved responsibly the lending spree which Labour rode with such ill-disguised glee ("No more Tory boom and bust") would have come to an end much sooner. They grasp that, despite alleged Tory austerity, public spending actually continues to rise and that the trouble with taxing the rich more is that there aren't very many of them, they don't on the whole get their money in an easily traceable PAYE cheque at the end of the month and they can afford accountants. These people also grasp that, ultimately, you can only have the public services you can afford.
The second group is a very small minority within Labour, and one largely grouped within the parliamentary party.
If you had to choose a demographic in Britain likely to contain the smallest number of people who took this second view, the Labour party membership would be a pretty good contender. Which is why polls show Liz Kendall lagging a distant fourth in the leadership race. That's the crushing irony. The people charged with deciding who is best placed to lead Labour back to power are those least likely to understand what's necessary to do so.
Labour can regard its election defeat in two ways. It can say that the electorate was wrong, and that all it needs to do is keep on persuading enough of us to change our minds.
Alternatively it could say that perhaps the electorate was in some respects right, and work out how it might change its pitch accordingly.
Unfortunately for Labour the first response requires nothing special. It merely requires its supporters to behave the way most people do faced with rejection. I was right! How dare they be so stupid! The second response on the other hand requires something exceptional - humility and openness. Since so many more of us are all too human it's not surprising that the first response has overwhelmed the second amongst the Labour faithful.
What makes it all the harder for them is that if the electorate were right, where does that leave Labour? If the days of the blank cheque are over, what is Labour for? The point of Social Democracy is that government taxes the surpluses capitalism produces, and uses the money to make a compendious safety net for the poor. But what if there isn't enough money to do that in the way Labour wants? How does it appeal to the electorate then? If it accepts Britain must live within its means, how does it differentiate itself from the Tories or Lib Dems?
This is the appeal of Corbynism. Rather than position itself as a Tory-lite party, the temptation is for Labour go the whole hog and stand proudly on the Bennite Left. The Blairite response to this proposition is, "But you will never win a general election". "Ah", say the Corbynites loftily, "but what is the point of winning when doing so would make us just as bad as our enemies?"
As I said, it's almost funny.
I can readily imagine circumstances in which I might vote Labour again. I think Liz Kendall is an incredibly impressive candidate. A good leader and some sensible policies might do it.
But Jeremy Corbyn? Come on.
In my lifetime Labour has gone on a journey which reflects both the vaulting ambition of its statism and the undermining of the industrial base which might once have been used to pay for it. It has gone from being the party of tax and spend (Wilson, Callaghan, Kinnock), to the party of tax, spend and borrow (Blair and Brown). Corbyn proposes a further transformation to the party of tax, spend, borrow and print money. Not on your Nelly.
Tuesday 14 July 2015
Arvo Part - any good?
In the 1980s when I was having lessons with John Tavener, he played me part of a piece by Arvo Part. "People say he's like me. Or the other way round", the sage of Wembley Park said in his scratchy patrician voice, "I don't hear it myself though". I remember some chugging strings, fairly static; then an abrupt gear change. Then John turned the music off and we went on to other things.
A year or so later Part's Second Symphony appeared on the Proms programme. I went along. It sounded to me like an Estonian Vaughan Williams. I was somewhat against Vaughan Williams at the time and thought the piece dull; duller anyway than the brief snatch Tavener had played me.
While I was still at College I went to the British premiere of Part's St John Passion, sung by the Hilliard Ensemble. As I remember this piece meandered on for an hour or so in A minor, ending rather strikingly in a blaze of A major. I wasn't totally sure it was worth the wait.
Then that was that for a while. I remember people talking highly of a piece Part had written as a memorial to Britten, but heard nothing more of his music until the chance discovery of the cello version of Fratres, a slow meditative piece which the composer has arranged for many instrumental combinations. This I really liked - simple, but with a masterly grip of musical architecture.
So last Sunday's all-Part Manchester Camerata concert was the immersive experience for part-timers like me. What was it like?
Interesting and enjoyable. We got Fratres again, this time in a string orchestra version; I prefer the one for cellos, because the thumb-stopped harmonics at the start of the piece have a special unearthly quality that high violins can't match, but it's still very striking. There was a nice little unaccompanied choral piece sung by Vox Clamantis. Then the choir and the Camerata did the Stabat Mater, a longer and more substantial work, harmonically static, perhaps G minor this time, but often richly decorated. After the interval we had Da Pacem Domine, a minature version perhaps of the same idea, and then a much bigger orchestra arrived - triple woodwind no less - for Como cierva Sedienta, a solo motet for high soprano.
Como cierva Sedienta was perhaps the least successful performance, sometimes overscored and with the soprano inaudible in the lower register. I thought there was too much instrumental colour, like a pastiche of Richard Strauss with all the gorgeousness removed. Moreover the musical language seemed to reach back to the duller more romantic idiom of the Second Symphony. Music essentially lives and dies by the quality of its invention, and there was nothing in it I found memorable or interesting.
In the other more obviously liturgical pieces, scored for strings only, Part's ideas seemed to be better served by a narrower and more focused range of sounds. Their language suited his particular version of minimalism better too. You might describe it as Neo-Baroque if that didn't call to mind Stravinsky's hyperactive take on that idea nearly a hundred years earlier. It's less reliant on melodic ideas than Como cierva Sedienta, much more on Part's ability to spin extended musical paragraphs which sit there looking at the view.
Is Part a minimalist? Kind of. You could certainly walk in and out of the longer pieces without missing much. Perhaps that's the intention. My wife didn't think it was static music, but harmonically most of it is, very much so. Fratres was much the most inventive harmonically of the strings only pieces, but rests on a grounding open fifth in the basses; its tonality is never in doubt. The liturgical pieces had surface movement, but rested for very long periods in the same key. I was interested to find Part paying attention to the little orchestral details which composers use to help maintain the audience's interest. There were pizzicato punctuations in the Stabat Mater placed structurally in exactly the same way Elgar uses them in Nimrod. This was not ruthless minimalism of the Philip Glass variety, but minimalism in which the composer is doing his best to make sure the audience doesn't nod off.
But Part, like so many post-war composers, is either not very good at writing fast music or not very interested in it. I find a lot of Tavener's music too rooted in contemplation to make a whole evening's worth, and when Part did get busy in a couple of places in the Stabat Mater it was in brief flurries of elaboration rather than because the fundamental pace of events had quickened.
When conductor Gabor Takacs-Nagy, doing a fine job as usual, gestured towards the audience at the end, it took a moment for me to grasp that Part was actually there in the hall. I had no idea he was still alive, let alone in Manchester. To see this elderly chap, frail but still sprightly, make his way onto the stage was particularly moving. For one thing it was there that I last saw Tavener, only a few months before his death. But Part has made a great contribution to European music, and it was fantastic to see the hall - packed for contemporary music people like (as opposed to all the other stuff they don't but which gets foisted on them anyway) - rise as one in acknowledgment of his achievement.
Part, like all elderly composers, bore the marks of his struggle to produce great art, but also looked totally chuffed to receive the cheers of his admirers. As well he might.
A year or so later Part's Second Symphony appeared on the Proms programme. I went along. It sounded to me like an Estonian Vaughan Williams. I was somewhat against Vaughan Williams at the time and thought the piece dull; duller anyway than the brief snatch Tavener had played me.
While I was still at College I went to the British premiere of Part's St John Passion, sung by the Hilliard Ensemble. As I remember this piece meandered on for an hour or so in A minor, ending rather strikingly in a blaze of A major. I wasn't totally sure it was worth the wait.
Then that was that for a while. I remember people talking highly of a piece Part had written as a memorial to Britten, but heard nothing more of his music until the chance discovery of the cello version of Fratres, a slow meditative piece which the composer has arranged for many instrumental combinations. This I really liked - simple, but with a masterly grip of musical architecture.
So last Sunday's all-Part Manchester Camerata concert was the immersive experience for part-timers like me. What was it like?
Interesting and enjoyable. We got Fratres again, this time in a string orchestra version; I prefer the one for cellos, because the thumb-stopped harmonics at the start of the piece have a special unearthly quality that high violins can't match, but it's still very striking. There was a nice little unaccompanied choral piece sung by Vox Clamantis. Then the choir and the Camerata did the Stabat Mater, a longer and more substantial work, harmonically static, perhaps G minor this time, but often richly decorated. After the interval we had Da Pacem Domine, a minature version perhaps of the same idea, and then a much bigger orchestra arrived - triple woodwind no less - for Como cierva Sedienta, a solo motet for high soprano.
Como cierva Sedienta was perhaps the least successful performance, sometimes overscored and with the soprano inaudible in the lower register. I thought there was too much instrumental colour, like a pastiche of Richard Strauss with all the gorgeousness removed. Moreover the musical language seemed to reach back to the duller more romantic idiom of the Second Symphony. Music essentially lives and dies by the quality of its invention, and there was nothing in it I found memorable or interesting.
In the other more obviously liturgical pieces, scored for strings only, Part's ideas seemed to be better served by a narrower and more focused range of sounds. Their language suited his particular version of minimalism better too. You might describe it as Neo-Baroque if that didn't call to mind Stravinsky's hyperactive take on that idea nearly a hundred years earlier. It's less reliant on melodic ideas than Como cierva Sedienta, much more on Part's ability to spin extended musical paragraphs which sit there looking at the view.
Is Part a minimalist? Kind of. You could certainly walk in and out of the longer pieces without missing much. Perhaps that's the intention. My wife didn't think it was static music, but harmonically most of it is, very much so. Fratres was much the most inventive harmonically of the strings only pieces, but rests on a grounding open fifth in the basses; its tonality is never in doubt. The liturgical pieces had surface movement, but rested for very long periods in the same key. I was interested to find Part paying attention to the little orchestral details which composers use to help maintain the audience's interest. There were pizzicato punctuations in the Stabat Mater placed structurally in exactly the same way Elgar uses them in Nimrod. This was not ruthless minimalism of the Philip Glass variety, but minimalism in which the composer is doing his best to make sure the audience doesn't nod off.
But Part, like so many post-war composers, is either not very good at writing fast music or not very interested in it. I find a lot of Tavener's music too rooted in contemplation to make a whole evening's worth, and when Part did get busy in a couple of places in the Stabat Mater it was in brief flurries of elaboration rather than because the fundamental pace of events had quickened.
When conductor Gabor Takacs-Nagy, doing a fine job as usual, gestured towards the audience at the end, it took a moment for me to grasp that Part was actually there in the hall. I had no idea he was still alive, let alone in Manchester. To see this elderly chap, frail but still sprightly, make his way onto the stage was particularly moving. For one thing it was there that I last saw Tavener, only a few months before his death. But Part has made a great contribution to European music, and it was fantastic to see the hall - packed for contemporary music people like (as opposed to all the other stuff they don't but which gets foisted on them anyway) - rise as one in acknowledgment of his achievement.
Part, like all elderly composers, bore the marks of his struggle to produce great art, but also looked totally chuffed to receive the cheers of his admirers. As well he might.
Greece, Simon Schama and putting the cool people in charge
In November 2011 I wrote on this blog, "I can't see any way in which Greece will still be in the Euro by the end of 2012".
So that prediction went well.
What I had not then realised is that those who get to the top in the Game of Euros are by definition committed to the Project. They'll do pretty much anything to keep the show on the road. So the bail-outs, the interminable conferences, the late night agreements, the postponement of appointments with reality, the can-kicking forever and ever.
But in the last four years I have become wiser and thus am not terribly surprised this morning, 14th July 2015, to find that Greece is still in the Euro, 48 hours after its premier Mr Tsipras finally caved in to the Eurogroup's demands and agreed to take them back to Athens for ratification by the Greek parliament.
At the heart of this shambles is a problem of democracy. The Greeks desperately want to be in Europe - Tsipras said he had a mandate for rejecting European demands but not for leaving the single currency. The German government on the other hand answers to an electorate which is fed up of paying for Greek failure.
The electorates of both countries are deluded. The Greek people don't seem to have noticed that it's being in the Euro which is one of the prime causes of their troubles, or that you don't have to be in the Euro to be part of Europe (look at Britain). The German electorate on the other hand doesn't seem to have realised that not every country can be like theirs - not every country can have a strong economy whose exports have benefited enormously from having a currency lowered by its association with weaker economies like Greece - and that for every creditor nation there must by definition be a debtor nation.
Both Mrs Merkel and successive Greek leaders have lacked the guts to tell their electorates the truth.
And the consequence of all this? Greece has had it. It has apparently signed up for outside supervision and interference in the running of its economy. It must run a surplus. If it doesn't run a surplus it must cut spending further, thus guaranteeing its economic nosedive will steepen. It must find 50 bn Euros of state assets to sell, and put the money into a fund beyond Greek control to pay off its debts. And if it jumps through all these successive hoops then there might in future be a discussion of debt relief, at least in the form of extended maturities.
There seems absolutely no prospect of this plan working. Greece owes too much money. Some of it needs writing off. And while we wait for conclusive proof that the plan isn't working Greeks face a future of bleakness unimaginable to Britons.
What does this tell us about Europe? Firstly, that Germany is boss. Even though France apparently wanted kinder terms, their ridiculous bespectacled penguin of a leader was unable to face the Germans down. It tells us that all the talk about the club of nations, about solidarity, about co-operation is just so much flannel. It tells us that Euro area is not a currency union at all, but merely a hard currency peg from which smaller nations slip at their peril. The ECB, remember, pulled the plug on funding Greek banks a couple of weeks ago in what may well be a breach of its duty to ensure financial stability. That was a political act as much as an economic one.
None of the European leaders come out of this well. Mr Tsipras overplayed his hand. He gambled the Germans would give ground. They didn't. He made no preparations for a return to the drachma and when the banks had to close he had nowhere left to go. He ended up with a deal significantly worse than he and Varoufakis could have got five months ago, and significantly worse than the one his countrymen roundly rejected in a referendum.
That's what happens when you put the cool people in charge.
On a superficial analysis Mrs Merkel got what she wanted. But the plan she wanted won't work and we'll be back here again, perhaps within months. And that's even if the Greek parliament ratifies the deal. Moreover the watching world has learned things about the dynamics of Europe and the Eurozone which are exceptionally unpalatable. Essentially its partners were willing to let Greece go to the wall rather than face down their own electorates.
After so many earlier failures I am wary of making predictions. Better leave it to others. And here's a stonking great hostage to fortune. Two days ago Simon Schama wrote on Twitter, "If Tsipras was wearing the crown of King Pyrrhus this time last week, Merkel is wearing it now. Her ultimatum beginning of end of EU".
That's a big claim.
So that prediction went well.
What I had not then realised is that those who get to the top in the Game of Euros are by definition committed to the Project. They'll do pretty much anything to keep the show on the road. So the bail-outs, the interminable conferences, the late night agreements, the postponement of appointments with reality, the can-kicking forever and ever.
But in the last four years I have become wiser and thus am not terribly surprised this morning, 14th July 2015, to find that Greece is still in the Euro, 48 hours after its premier Mr Tsipras finally caved in to the Eurogroup's demands and agreed to take them back to Athens for ratification by the Greek parliament.
At the heart of this shambles is a problem of democracy. The Greeks desperately want to be in Europe - Tsipras said he had a mandate for rejecting European demands but not for leaving the single currency. The German government on the other hand answers to an electorate which is fed up of paying for Greek failure.
The electorates of both countries are deluded. The Greek people don't seem to have noticed that it's being in the Euro which is one of the prime causes of their troubles, or that you don't have to be in the Euro to be part of Europe (look at Britain). The German electorate on the other hand doesn't seem to have realised that not every country can be like theirs - not every country can have a strong economy whose exports have benefited enormously from having a currency lowered by its association with weaker economies like Greece - and that for every creditor nation there must by definition be a debtor nation.
Both Mrs Merkel and successive Greek leaders have lacked the guts to tell their electorates the truth.
And the consequence of all this? Greece has had it. It has apparently signed up for outside supervision and interference in the running of its economy. It must run a surplus. If it doesn't run a surplus it must cut spending further, thus guaranteeing its economic nosedive will steepen. It must find 50 bn Euros of state assets to sell, and put the money into a fund beyond Greek control to pay off its debts. And if it jumps through all these successive hoops then there might in future be a discussion of debt relief, at least in the form of extended maturities.
There seems absolutely no prospect of this plan working. Greece owes too much money. Some of it needs writing off. And while we wait for conclusive proof that the plan isn't working Greeks face a future of bleakness unimaginable to Britons.
What does this tell us about Europe? Firstly, that Germany is boss. Even though France apparently wanted kinder terms, their ridiculous bespectacled penguin of a leader was unable to face the Germans down. It tells us that all the talk about the club of nations, about solidarity, about co-operation is just so much flannel. It tells us that Euro area is not a currency union at all, but merely a hard currency peg from which smaller nations slip at their peril. The ECB, remember, pulled the plug on funding Greek banks a couple of weeks ago in what may well be a breach of its duty to ensure financial stability. That was a political act as much as an economic one.
None of the European leaders come out of this well. Mr Tsipras overplayed his hand. He gambled the Germans would give ground. They didn't. He made no preparations for a return to the drachma and when the banks had to close he had nowhere left to go. He ended up with a deal significantly worse than he and Varoufakis could have got five months ago, and significantly worse than the one his countrymen roundly rejected in a referendum.
That's what happens when you put the cool people in charge.
On a superficial analysis Mrs Merkel got what she wanted. But the plan she wanted won't work and we'll be back here again, perhaps within months. And that's even if the Greek parliament ratifies the deal. Moreover the watching world has learned things about the dynamics of Europe and the Eurozone which are exceptionally unpalatable. Essentially its partners were willing to let Greece go to the wall rather than face down their own electorates.
After so many earlier failures I am wary of making predictions. Better leave it to others. And here's a stonking great hostage to fortune. Two days ago Simon Schama wrote on Twitter, "If Tsipras was wearing the crown of King Pyrrhus this time last week, Merkel is wearing it now. Her ultimatum beginning of end of EU".
That's a big claim.
Friday 12 June 2015
Chris Addison, George Osborne and how the lofty are undone
A few years ago I wrote a post about the Guardian journalist Aditya Chakrabortty. Entitled - imaginatively - Valuing Aditya Chakrabortty, it explained how the paper's chief economics leader writer had misunderstood the nature of value in the context of the Government's sale of its stake in Northern Rock, the failed building society.
For people like me there is not much hope that the powerful will read what we write, but a couple of weeks later Chakrabortty did return to the subject with a snarky reference to nitpickers, so I like to think that at the very least he does Google his own name from time to time.
Now this may seem like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but it's worth repeating these arguments every now and again, and this time the culprit is the bouffant Left wing comedian Chris Addison.
Actually comedian may not be the right word for Addison, because I don't know if he is actually funny in person. He appears on game shows I don't watch and I know who he is only because of his acting role as a hapless special adviser in The Thick of It, a programme which is funny but rests on the premise that all politicians are venal and stupid, the implied subtext being that if its Left wing actors and writers went into politics they'd be much cleverer and more sensible.
If they could be bothered.
So what has Addison done to get my goat? He has repeated what I like to call the Chakrabortty Fallacy. You may have noticed that the Government is proposing to sell off part of its stake in Royal Bank of Scotland, the bank that had to be rescued in 2008 by a £37 billion injection of UK taxpayers money. At the time the shares were trading at about £5 each. They're now trading at £3.50.
Enter Chris Addison. Yesterday he Tweeted "If George has a share worth £5 and George sells that share for £3.50, explain why George is Chancellor of The Exchequer. Show working".
I'm sure you get the picture. Why is stupid George Osborne proposing to sell some of Britain's RBS shares for less than they're worth, losing the taxpayers billions in the process?
But Addison, like Chakrabortty, doesn't understand what value is. Something is worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it in an open market. But firstly Addison is failing to look at the upstream end of the equation. Yes, RBS shares were trading at about £5 in 2008. But the bank was essentially bust, and if the then Labour government had waited for this to make itself manifest in the hope of paying less, RBS might have crashed, with knock on effects in the British and global banking systems which don't bear thinking about. At the time RBS was one of the biggest banks in the world.
The figure of £5 per share didn't represent an ordinary open market price then. If the markets had known RBS's true situation the shares would have been worth much less. In fact in the following January the shares were trading at 10p each, a fall of some 97%. And that was after HMG had bailed it out.
So the Government paid a price which didn't represent ordinary open market value - it paid a price which represented, as with Northern Rock, the cost of preventing the British banking system from collapse, and the buyer was no ordinary one but perhaps the only party with both the means and the urgent will to stop that happening.
Moreover George Osborne does not, contra Addison, own shares "worth £5". He never has. As I've explained, the shares weren't even worth £5 then, at least not to the ordinary buyer. So in what way are they worth £5 now?
Actually Addison is too stupid to realise he has answered his own question. We know what the shares are worth. They're worth £3.50 because that's what people are willing to pay for them in an open market today. A journey, incidentally, upwards from 10p that looks nothing short of a minor miracle.
If Addison weren't so set on joining the general Leftist condemnation of George Osborne (who continues, annoyingly, to be a capable and cunning Chancellor), he might have put a more thoughtful and pertinent question.
"If HMG bought a share for £5, why is it now selling it for £3.50?".
This is the kind of question which every unsuccessful stock market punter has had to face from time to time. The best answer I can give is that the money has already gone, and the only way of getting it back is to gamble that the share price will recover in time and we will end up making some money. But this would be a gamble because we don't know how RBS will do in the years to come. No-one does.
And in the meantime the UK is borrowing nearly £2 billion every week just to stay afloat, and is paying billions in interest on its borrowing every year. In that context cashing in some assets to lower the deficit is a perfectly defensible strategy. It may turn out to be wrong in the long term, but no-one knows that, least of all Chris Addison. Making these sorts of decisions is precisely the kind of thing we elect politicians to do. Does anyone really think Osborne would have ordered the sales now in order to make less money than he could later?
What depths of plonkerdom has Chris Addison plumbed. His Tweet invites followers to share his disdain for the Chancellor and laugh at Mr Osborne's stupidity. To date about 5,000 people have favourited or R/Td it. Oh how they must have laughed! And yet it turns out that, despite his lofty tittering, it's actually Addison, failing to understand one of the most basic priniciples of economics, who's made an idiot of himself.
For people like me there is not much hope that the powerful will read what we write, but a couple of weeks later Chakrabortty did return to the subject with a snarky reference to nitpickers, so I like to think that at the very least he does Google his own name from time to time.
Now this may seem like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but it's worth repeating these arguments every now and again, and this time the culprit is the bouffant Left wing comedian Chris Addison.
Actually comedian may not be the right word for Addison, because I don't know if he is actually funny in person. He appears on game shows I don't watch and I know who he is only because of his acting role as a hapless special adviser in The Thick of It, a programme which is funny but rests on the premise that all politicians are venal and stupid, the implied subtext being that if its Left wing actors and writers went into politics they'd be much cleverer and more sensible.
If they could be bothered.
So what has Addison done to get my goat? He has repeated what I like to call the Chakrabortty Fallacy. You may have noticed that the Government is proposing to sell off part of its stake in Royal Bank of Scotland, the bank that had to be rescued in 2008 by a £37 billion injection of UK taxpayers money. At the time the shares were trading at about £5 each. They're now trading at £3.50.
Enter Chris Addison. Yesterday he Tweeted "If George has a share worth £5 and George sells that share for £3.50, explain why George is Chancellor of The Exchequer. Show working".
I'm sure you get the picture. Why is stupid George Osborne proposing to sell some of Britain's RBS shares for less than they're worth, losing the taxpayers billions in the process?
But Addison, like Chakrabortty, doesn't understand what value is. Something is worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it in an open market. But firstly Addison is failing to look at the upstream end of the equation. Yes, RBS shares were trading at about £5 in 2008. But the bank was essentially bust, and if the then Labour government had waited for this to make itself manifest in the hope of paying less, RBS might have crashed, with knock on effects in the British and global banking systems which don't bear thinking about. At the time RBS was one of the biggest banks in the world.
The figure of £5 per share didn't represent an ordinary open market price then. If the markets had known RBS's true situation the shares would have been worth much less. In fact in the following January the shares were trading at 10p each, a fall of some 97%. And that was after HMG had bailed it out.
So the Government paid a price which didn't represent ordinary open market value - it paid a price which represented, as with Northern Rock, the cost of preventing the British banking system from collapse, and the buyer was no ordinary one but perhaps the only party with both the means and the urgent will to stop that happening.
Moreover George Osborne does not, contra Addison, own shares "worth £5". He never has. As I've explained, the shares weren't even worth £5 then, at least not to the ordinary buyer. So in what way are they worth £5 now?
Actually Addison is too stupid to realise he has answered his own question. We know what the shares are worth. They're worth £3.50 because that's what people are willing to pay for them in an open market today. A journey, incidentally, upwards from 10p that looks nothing short of a minor miracle.
If Addison weren't so set on joining the general Leftist condemnation of George Osborne (who continues, annoyingly, to be a capable and cunning Chancellor), he might have put a more thoughtful and pertinent question.
"If HMG bought a share for £5, why is it now selling it for £3.50?".
This is the kind of question which every unsuccessful stock market punter has had to face from time to time. The best answer I can give is that the money has already gone, and the only way of getting it back is to gamble that the share price will recover in time and we will end up making some money. But this would be a gamble because we don't know how RBS will do in the years to come. No-one does.
And in the meantime the UK is borrowing nearly £2 billion every week just to stay afloat, and is paying billions in interest on its borrowing every year. In that context cashing in some assets to lower the deficit is a perfectly defensible strategy. It may turn out to be wrong in the long term, but no-one knows that, least of all Chris Addison. Making these sorts of decisions is precisely the kind of thing we elect politicians to do. Does anyone really think Osborne would have ordered the sales now in order to make less money than he could later?
What depths of plonkerdom has Chris Addison plumbed. His Tweet invites followers to share his disdain for the Chancellor and laugh at Mr Osborne's stupidity. To date about 5,000 people have favourited or R/Td it. Oh how they must have laughed! And yet it turns out that, despite his lofty tittering, it's actually Addison, failing to understand one of the most basic priniciples of economics, who's made an idiot of himself.
Thursday 14 May 2015
Mark Carney, Robert Peston and Jonathan Portes: immigration and inequality
So now we know. The Governor of the Bank of England thinks that immigration is helping to keep wages down.
Mark Carney said yesterday, "In recent years labour supply has expanded significantly owing to higher participation rates among older workers, a greater willingness to work longer hours and strong population growth, partly driven by higher net migration. . . These positive labour supply shocks have contained wage growth in the face of robust employment growth. Wages have grown by around 2 per cent in the past year - less than half the average rate before the global financial crisis - and a key risk is that these subdued growth rates continue."
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever thought for more than a couple of minutes about the effect of migration. If you provide more of something, the price tends to go down. Specifically, if foreign workers are arriving in the UK at a rate of about 250,000 per year (for this is the current rate of increase), employers are less likely to have to compete for staff by raising wages.
And to be clear, the general point that an influx of workers from abroad represents a weight on the pay of the indigenous population is a statement of the overwhelmingly obvious: it is simply a version of the law of supply and demand that the price of anything falls when supply rises relative to demand.
Anyone in any doubt about this merely needs to ask themselves why it is the Confederation of British Industry is so keen on immigration.
For me the truly perplexing thing is why so many on the Left are still so keen on open borders. As the pay of people at the bottom end languishes, so the gap between high and low pay widens. It's called inequality. But the Left is against this too, and for them the two realities grate against one another with a kind of political dissonance which induces denial, anger and - all too readily - name calling of people who point it out.
If you really want to make yourself unpopular, draw attention to the fact that British people trapped in low wages tend to have brown skins. They're the children and grandchildren of former generations of immigrants. Because naturally no bien pensant likes to think anyone on the Centre Right might actually be occupying the moral high ground on the subject of race.
To be fair, it's not all bad news. European immigrants are often better educated, better motivated and more skilled than the UK residents against whom they're competing for jobs. Unlike immigrants from the Asian subcontinent they're more likely to buy into Britain's basic post-Christian ethos. By keeping wages down, they also help to keep inflation down and interest rates down, making British goods more competitive and keeping the economy ticking over.
One of the most persistent and articulate of the pro-Immigration Left wingers is a man called Jonathan Portes, head of the NIESR. Portes used to be an economic adviser to Tony Blair, which is instructive. He is bullishly in favour of immigration, having no truck with the argument that immigrants take jobs from British workers (many of them black). Portes' case is that immigration helps the economy grow, which is undoubtedly true. The question is how much it helps, and whether the upside outweighs the down.
I had a Twitter spat with Portes recently, in which I tried to get him to confirm that he believed 100 migrants begat 100 jobs, so there was no net loss. Portes refused to answer this question and I suspect has now blocked or muted me. The difficulty for all participants in this argument is that it's impossible to do a control test. We all fall back on theory because practical tests aren't possible.
Incidentally Jonathan Portes' response to Peston was to Tweet - "I'm afraid first few paras are wrong, both theoretically and empirically". Who'd have thought it.
Since it's most unlikely that 100 extra workers create exactly 100 extra jobs, the likelihood is that every 100 extra either takes jobs from British people or creates some extra. The first problem for Portes is that not every migrant gets work. Different communities have different profiles, but whilst most Europeans find jobs, that isn't true of other migrants; the worst-performing are Bangladeshis at only 35%; the rest are presumably on benefits.
Moreover if Portes is right, and 100 migrants create 125 jobs, for example, the number of job opportunities would be rising faster than the numbers of workers, in which case you would expect wage inflation to be much higher than the current estimate of 2%. In fact for much of the last twenty years wage growth has been sluggish or negative.
Home Office research from 2012 suggests in fact that in times of recession there's a net job loss, and that every 100 immigrants probably create only 77 jobs, meaning 23 are taken from British people. Although to some extent they support my case, I think these figures are speculative and dubious and I prefer to rely on the fall in real-terms wages, which is suggestive of an excess of supply over demand for staff.
Incidentally, you have to wonder why Portes isn't arguing for migrants to be paid to come here. After all, if migrants create more jobs than they take, it would surely be cheaper to pay for more to come and push unemployed Britons into work.
According to more reliable figures from the Bank of England, in the last eighteen years the number of European workers has quadrupled to two million, accelerating in the mid 2000s as Labour opened the door to the populations of poor East European countries. If Jonathan Portes is right, this two million strong influx has created more than two million extra jobs. Yet unemployment remains stubbornly at - as it happens - just under two million. And in real terms wages are stagnant, particularly at the bottom end.
No wonder we have a housing crisis. No wonder the health service and schools are struggling to meet extra demand. No wonder Britain is such a crowded country. We have accommodated an extra one and a half million people from Europe alone in the last eighteen years.
How did the BBC report this story? Like this. "Carney: UK productivity not harmed by foreign workers". Not sure what Robert Peston thought of that, but Mr Portes will have been pleased.
Mark Carney said yesterday, "In recent years labour supply has expanded significantly owing to higher participation rates among older workers, a greater willingness to work longer hours and strong population growth, partly driven by higher net migration. . . These positive labour supply shocks have contained wage growth in the face of robust employment growth. Wages have grown by around 2 per cent in the past year - less than half the average rate before the global financial crisis - and a key risk is that these subdued growth rates continue."
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever thought for more than a couple of minutes about the effect of migration. If you provide more of something, the price tends to go down. Specifically, if foreign workers are arriving in the UK at a rate of about 250,000 per year (for this is the current rate of increase), employers are less likely to have to compete for staff by raising wages.
And to be clear, the general point that an influx of workers from abroad represents a weight on the pay of the indigenous population is a statement of the overwhelmingly obvious: it is simply a version of the law of supply and demand that the price of anything falls when supply rises relative to demand.
I should confess that I lifted that last paragraph from Robert Peston's piece today on the BBC website.
For me the truly perplexing thing is why so many on the Left are still so keen on open borders. As the pay of people at the bottom end languishes, so the gap between high and low pay widens. It's called inequality. But the Left is against this too, and for them the two realities grate against one another with a kind of political dissonance which induces denial, anger and - all too readily - name calling of people who point it out.
If you really want to make yourself unpopular, draw attention to the fact that British people trapped in low wages tend to have brown skins. They're the children and grandchildren of former generations of immigrants. Because naturally no bien pensant likes to think anyone on the Centre Right might actually be occupying the moral high ground on the subject of race.
To be fair, it's not all bad news. European immigrants are often better educated, better motivated and more skilled than the UK residents against whom they're competing for jobs. Unlike immigrants from the Asian subcontinent they're more likely to buy into Britain's basic post-Christian ethos. By keeping wages down, they also help to keep inflation down and interest rates down, making British goods more competitive and keeping the economy ticking over.
One of the most persistent and articulate of the pro-Immigration Left wingers is a man called Jonathan Portes, head of the NIESR. Portes used to be an economic adviser to Tony Blair, which is instructive. He is bullishly in favour of immigration, having no truck with the argument that immigrants take jobs from British workers (many of them black). Portes' case is that immigration helps the economy grow, which is undoubtedly true. The question is how much it helps, and whether the upside outweighs the down.
I had a Twitter spat with Portes recently, in which I tried to get him to confirm that he believed 100 migrants begat 100 jobs, so there was no net loss. Portes refused to answer this question and I suspect has now blocked or muted me. The difficulty for all participants in this argument is that it's impossible to do a control test. We all fall back on theory because practical tests aren't possible.
Incidentally Jonathan Portes' response to Peston was to Tweet - "I'm afraid first few paras are wrong, both theoretically and empirically". Who'd have thought it.
Since it's most unlikely that 100 extra workers create exactly 100 extra jobs, the likelihood is that every 100 extra either takes jobs from British people or creates some extra. The first problem for Portes is that not every migrant gets work. Different communities have different profiles, but whilst most Europeans find jobs, that isn't true of other migrants; the worst-performing are Bangladeshis at only 35%; the rest are presumably on benefits.
Moreover if Portes is right, and 100 migrants create 125 jobs, for example, the number of job opportunities would be rising faster than the numbers of workers, in which case you would expect wage inflation to be much higher than the current estimate of 2%. In fact for much of the last twenty years wage growth has been sluggish or negative.
Home Office research from 2012 suggests in fact that in times of recession there's a net job loss, and that every 100 immigrants probably create only 77 jobs, meaning 23 are taken from British people. Although to some extent they support my case, I think these figures are speculative and dubious and I prefer to rely on the fall in real-terms wages, which is suggestive of an excess of supply over demand for staff.
Incidentally, you have to wonder why Portes isn't arguing for migrants to be paid to come here. After all, if migrants create more jobs than they take, it would surely be cheaper to pay for more to come and push unemployed Britons into work.
According to more reliable figures from the Bank of England, in the last eighteen years the number of European workers has quadrupled to two million, accelerating in the mid 2000s as Labour opened the door to the populations of poor East European countries. If Jonathan Portes is right, this two million strong influx has created more than two million extra jobs. Yet unemployment remains stubbornly at - as it happens - just under two million. And in real terms wages are stagnant, particularly at the bottom end.
No wonder we have a housing crisis. No wonder the health service and schools are struggling to meet extra demand. No wonder Britain is such a crowded country. We have accommodated an extra one and a half million people from Europe alone in the last eighteen years.
How did the BBC report this story? Like this. "Carney: UK productivity not harmed by foreign workers". Not sure what Robert Peston thought of that, but Mr Portes will have been pleased.
Wednesday 13 May 2015
Why did Labour lose and what should they do now?
As previously suggested, no-one knows why Labour lost the election. But here's a guess.
Political times change. I remember the 1970s, when one industry or another seemed to be perpetually on strike. I remember the three day week, the oil crisis and eating dinner by candlelight. There were strikes by miners, dockers, bin men, British Leyland, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Union leaders, men with severe glasses and raincoats which barely covered their bellies, appeared on TV news going in and out of Downing Street. From smoke-filled rooms people were sent out for beer and sandwiches.
My Dad's response to this was characteristically pithy. He said, "They're pricing themselves out of jobs".
Globalisation has put a stop to most of this nonsense. Many years ago a majority of the British public realised that they were competing against people in the Far East who were willing to work in a factory for a dollar a day. They realised that if they were going to keep their jobs they had to remain competitive. Productivity was part of this, and so was wage restraint. Economic reality killed union militancy just as surely as Mrs Thatcher's reforms. No one in Britain can imagine now a return to the bad old days of disruption.
But if this is partly because of an irreversible shift in British attitudes, what if another shift is slowly taking place, making another hole in Labour's intellectual and moral armour?
I think you can divide Britain into two groups. The first believes that in the long run you can have what you can afford to pay for. The second believes that you can have what you deserve, and that if you tax rich people a bit more the numbers will work out for themselves. Most of this first group votes Tory. Most of the second votes Labour.
The nightmare for Labour might just possibly be that the first group is growing and that the second finds itself shrinking and isolated. Certainly the response to defeat last week sounded like a howl of cognitive dissonance, as the liberal commentariat struggled to come to terms with the inconvenient verdict of the electorate.
Some Conservative pundits have criticised this response on the basis that it amounted to "Why are voters so greedy / stupid / ill-informed / selfish?" Personally I don't mind abusing the electorate. An awful lot of voters are staggeringly ignorant, and that includes many who voted Tory. But at a gut level I think that people are reasonably savvy. More of them understand what the deficit is now than was the case in 2010. That's bad for Labour, which thrives on the plausibility of its spending promises. It's just possible that the more we understand the economic realities, the harder it will be for them to get back into office.
It has taken a long time for signs of understanding to creep into Labour discourse. In the 2010 campaign Gordon Brown told the electorate there was a choice between "Labour investment and Tory cuts". After Brown lost, Ed Miliband told us austerity was unnecessary and that there would never be any growth under George Osborne. Then when it turned out the economy was growing and there never had been a double-dip recession (let alone a triple dip), Ed Balls said it was the wrong type of growth. Finally there was an admission that bringing the defecit down was necessary after all, and that we should vote Labour because it would mean "fairer deficit reduction". Against a backdrop of such intellectual foot-dragging, Labour's boast that it had become the "party of fiscal responsibility" just looked bizarre. For this big lie alone Ed Miliband deserved to lose. And when in a TV debate he denied that Labour had spent too much in office, the audience's sharp intake of breath spoke eloquently of public contempt.
I've been asking for years, what does a Social Democratic party do when economic circumstances force the end of generous spending? It seems to me that Labour's fate will be determined by its response to this question. But if there's one location where people in the second group above - the ones who believe public spending is only limited by compassion - tend to be found, it's in the Labour party. When those people believe that the majority of Britons are wrong and they are right, how likely is it that they will change tack?
After the Tony Blair landslide in 1997 I got the 73 bus one glad confident Islington morning down the Essex Road to work, a Labour voter delighted after all those years of Tory sleaze. In the paper the Grauniad's star columnist, Hugo Young, gave his considered judgment. The Tories were out of office forever, he wrote.
Even I, at the high water mark of my infatuation with the People's Party, knew this was bollocks. The Tories would be back. It's hard to finish off a political party. Even the Lib Dems aren't finished, not even now (in fact in some ways it's easier to see a return to power for them than it is for Labour). But if Labour aren't finished, and common sense suggests they're not, they're nevertheless going to have to do some hard thinking in the next few months.
Political times change. I remember the 1970s, when one industry or another seemed to be perpetually on strike. I remember the three day week, the oil crisis and eating dinner by candlelight. There were strikes by miners, dockers, bin men, British Leyland, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Union leaders, men with severe glasses and raincoats which barely covered their bellies, appeared on TV news going in and out of Downing Street. From smoke-filled rooms people were sent out for beer and sandwiches.
My Dad's response to this was characteristically pithy. He said, "They're pricing themselves out of jobs".
Globalisation has put a stop to most of this nonsense. Many years ago a majority of the British public realised that they were competing against people in the Far East who were willing to work in a factory for a dollar a day. They realised that if they were going to keep their jobs they had to remain competitive. Productivity was part of this, and so was wage restraint. Economic reality killed union militancy just as surely as Mrs Thatcher's reforms. No one in Britain can imagine now a return to the bad old days of disruption.
But if this is partly because of an irreversible shift in British attitudes, what if another shift is slowly taking place, making another hole in Labour's intellectual and moral armour?
I think you can divide Britain into two groups. The first believes that in the long run you can have what you can afford to pay for. The second believes that you can have what you deserve, and that if you tax rich people a bit more the numbers will work out for themselves. Most of this first group votes Tory. Most of the second votes Labour.
The nightmare for Labour might just possibly be that the first group is growing and that the second finds itself shrinking and isolated. Certainly the response to defeat last week sounded like a howl of cognitive dissonance, as the liberal commentariat struggled to come to terms with the inconvenient verdict of the electorate.
Some Conservative pundits have criticised this response on the basis that it amounted to "Why are voters so greedy / stupid / ill-informed / selfish?" Personally I don't mind abusing the electorate. An awful lot of voters are staggeringly ignorant, and that includes many who voted Tory. But at a gut level I think that people are reasonably savvy. More of them understand what the deficit is now than was the case in 2010. That's bad for Labour, which thrives on the plausibility of its spending promises. It's just possible that the more we understand the economic realities, the harder it will be for them to get back into office.
It has taken a long time for signs of understanding to creep into Labour discourse. In the 2010 campaign Gordon Brown told the electorate there was a choice between "Labour investment and Tory cuts". After Brown lost, Ed Miliband told us austerity was unnecessary and that there would never be any growth under George Osborne. Then when it turned out the economy was growing and there never had been a double-dip recession (let alone a triple dip), Ed Balls said it was the wrong type of growth. Finally there was an admission that bringing the defecit down was necessary after all, and that we should vote Labour because it would mean "fairer deficit reduction". Against a backdrop of such intellectual foot-dragging, Labour's boast that it had become the "party of fiscal responsibility" just looked bizarre. For this big lie alone Ed Miliband deserved to lose. And when in a TV debate he denied that Labour had spent too much in office, the audience's sharp intake of breath spoke eloquently of public contempt.
I've been asking for years, what does a Social Democratic party do when economic circumstances force the end of generous spending? It seems to me that Labour's fate will be determined by its response to this question. But if there's one location where people in the second group above - the ones who believe public spending is only limited by compassion - tend to be found, it's in the Labour party. When those people believe that the majority of Britons are wrong and they are right, how likely is it that they will change tack?
After the Tony Blair landslide in 1997 I got the 73 bus one glad confident Islington morning down the Essex Road to work, a Labour voter delighted after all those years of Tory sleaze. In the paper the Grauniad's star columnist, Hugo Young, gave his considered judgment. The Tories were out of office forever, he wrote.
Even I, at the high water mark of my infatuation with the People's Party, knew this was bollocks. The Tories would be back. It's hard to finish off a political party. Even the Lib Dems aren't finished, not even now (in fact in some ways it's easier to see a return to power for them than it is for Labour). But if Labour aren't finished, and common sense suggests they're not, they're nevertheless going to have to do some hard thinking in the next few months.
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