I yield to no-one in my love for Star Wars. As I've written here before, I saw the original films when they came out in the 70s, and was young enough to be overwhelmed by them, although old enough to recognise that the moral, personal and political world they portrayed was fundamentally tosh.
I made my wife, my eldest and a friend come out and watch Rogue One with me yesterday, because it was my birthday. This is what I thought.
1. It was an enjoyable way to spend two and quarter hours. The film looks great, although once SPOILER ALERT you know that the fleeting cameos of Peter Cushing and the young Princess Leia are merely CGI mock-ups, you can tell. Interesting that the human face should prove so hard to fake.
2. Rogue One is, as Mark Kermode keeps telling us, dark; which is all very well, except part of the attraction of the original three films was that the darkness (particularly in The Empire Strikes Back, easily the best of them) was nicely mixed with humour, a variety of tone which is very, very difficult to accomplish without the one undermining the other. No such luck here. The new 'droid, whose name escapes me, was often funny, but the other characters were wooden dullards by comparison.
3. The original characters were interesting and memorable. Any one of Han Solo, Leia, Vader, C3PO, the other 'droid, Obi or Yoda has more interest than the whole of Rogue One's cast put together. The new baddie, played by Aussie actor Ben Mendelsohn, looks like a middle-manager at Debenhams who has just been told the company golf day has been cancelled, again. I didn't care SPOILER ALERT that the cast were overwhelmed by the Death Star at the end, because they failed to come alive in the first place.
4. The plausibility issue. The blind martial arts bloke who thinks the Force will protect him, and then finds out that it won't could have made tragic viewing, but Rogue One just made it look the idea of the blind ninja ridiculous. The hero of David Carradine's Kung Fu series in the 70s looked daft enough fighting men with guns, and he could actually see. Why do the Death Star operators don hats which look to this (retired) cricketer as they have put their heads inside a bowling machine? We don't know, and the film doesn't tell us.
5. My son points out that the Empire in the Star Wars franchise is perhaps the only one in (cultural) history to have no ideology. It's almost as if the Empire is so bad that its sole purpose lies in being bad, just for its own sake. And then there was the lazy set design - Darth Vader lives in a ghastly evil genius tower set at the heart of an Icelandic CGI lava flow. Why? Did he go to some architect and say, "I'd like an evil genius tower please"? It's almost as if the film makers had got together and said, "How could we find somewhere for Darth Vader to live which will look like every villain's retreat ever since cinema began?" As for the transmission tower from which, at the denouement, our heroine - the heroically dull Felicity Jones - must send the Death Star plans to the Rebel mothership, how curious and unimaginative that the clunking controls should be on the outside of the tower, exposed to the elements and in plain view of passing Empire vessels. Yes, expecting Star Wars to be realistic is naive. But what we expect from fantasy adventure is not realism: it is internal consistency. If the world is to be like that, we want it to make sense on its own terms. This is something Mervyn Peake does so well in Gormenghast, and, for that matter, George RR Martin in Game of Thrones.
6. The music. John Williams has taken a back seat, and the reins have been taken by Michael Giacchino, who first came to my attention with The Incredibles. Giacchino does a decent job, but he is not Williams, and the few occasions when he uses the master's tunes only remind one how operatic and varied were the original scores. I listened to Luke and Leia today from The Empire. Now that is quality.
7. That so half-hearted, ill thought through and badly written a film (the Council scene is beyond lame) could have been given a reasonable reception goes to show that film critics my age who were brought up on the originals are almost willing the new films to be as good as the first three. I think the truth is that the first three mixed adventure, humour, great characters, peerless scores, a new world of special effects and a sort of camp approach to cliche which induced a suspension of disbelief in a young audience which is now well on into middle age.
So on the whole B or B minus. But I'll still be going to see the next one. My birthday or not.
Wednesday 21 December 2016
Wednesday 7 December 2016
Brexit reflections #16 - Judicial activism, Article 50 and the irony of Miller
That amiable denizen of Pinner, Danny Finkelstein, has written an article in the Times this morning which lays bare the bitter irony of the Supreme Court's handling of the Article 50 case. He writes, "Courts have to interpret the law, and the point of law the Supreme Court is interpreting is . . . whether the power of governments to agree treaties extends to their power over Article 50".
In a way Finkelstein's clumsy syntax makes the problem clear. The Court is not "interpreting . . . whether". It is deciding whether.
Let me explain.
No one knows what the legal position is regarding Article 50 and the Royal Prerogative. If anyone did, the case would never have come to Court. If, for example, triggering Art 50 without a vote was manifestly unlawful, the Government's advisers would have said, "Look chaps. Don't waste public money. You're going to lose". But actually both sides' advisers will have said, "You've a chance of winning because you've got an arguable case. But we really don't know because these circumstances have never arisen before."
So the law is not clear. The Court will clarify it. But consider what that process involves. It involves picking from various options. There may be only two (Options A and B, say), but it's much more realistic to say that there will be half a dozen.
In picking one option rather than all the others the Court is making a decision. It is deciding what the law is. Not interpreting.
So we have the bitter irony that a case brought to prevent the Government triggering Art 50 without democratic scrutiny by Parliament will be decided instead by the judicial activism of the Supreme Court.
Thus a Government elected by the people on a manifesto pledge to hold an In-Out referendum and to implement the outcome if Leave won, buttressed by the votes of nearly 18 million citizens, will be stymied and obstructed by eleven unelected judges.
What particularly grates about the prospect of a victory by Ms Miller and her City chums is that a case designed to prevent law-making by the executive - never mind its double mandate from the electorate - will have been decided instead by the law-making of a tiny group of people with no mandate at all. At any time. Ever.
Of course the fact that the judges are from the exact demographic which opposed Brexit so passionately and sneered at the mugs from the provinces who, you know, didn't think the EU worked so well for them, just makes it worse.
If the Court upholds the earlier decision - which I think it will, albeit for different and more carefully argued reasons, perhaps with a couple of dissenting voices - it will do so in terms which do their best to disguise its legal activism. It will say that this is what the law has always been, and that they have merely interpreted it afresh.
The pro-Remain press - of which Danny Finkelstein is a reasonable and articulate exemplar - will ignore the Court's activism (at best, or fail to notice it at worst), and dismiss the resulting surge of pro-Brexit anger as the inchoate howl of the ignorant and uneducated.
I've referred before on here to the historian Tom Holland's identification of this clash as one between democracy and the law. I think that's a fair characterisation on the whole. But a finding for Ms Miller will be to prefer one sort of decision making (the undemocratic one of the Court) to one backed up by an election-winning manifesto pledge and referendum result.
That is not a clash between democracy and the law. It is a clash between democracy and anti-democracy, in which democracy is the loser.
In a way Finkelstein's clumsy syntax makes the problem clear. The Court is not "interpreting . . . whether". It is deciding whether.
Let me explain.
No one knows what the legal position is regarding Article 50 and the Royal Prerogative. If anyone did, the case would never have come to Court. If, for example, triggering Art 50 without a vote was manifestly unlawful, the Government's advisers would have said, "Look chaps. Don't waste public money. You're going to lose". But actually both sides' advisers will have said, "You've a chance of winning because you've got an arguable case. But we really don't know because these circumstances have never arisen before."
So the law is not clear. The Court will clarify it. But consider what that process involves. It involves picking from various options. There may be only two (Options A and B, say), but it's much more realistic to say that there will be half a dozen.
In picking one option rather than all the others the Court is making a decision. It is deciding what the law is. Not interpreting.
So we have the bitter irony that a case brought to prevent the Government triggering Art 50 without democratic scrutiny by Parliament will be decided instead by the judicial activism of the Supreme Court.
Thus a Government elected by the people on a manifesto pledge to hold an In-Out referendum and to implement the outcome if Leave won, buttressed by the votes of nearly 18 million citizens, will be stymied and obstructed by eleven unelected judges.
What particularly grates about the prospect of a victory by Ms Miller and her City chums is that a case designed to prevent law-making by the executive - never mind its double mandate from the electorate - will have been decided instead by the law-making of a tiny group of people with no mandate at all. At any time. Ever.
Of course the fact that the judges are from the exact demographic which opposed Brexit so passionately and sneered at the mugs from the provinces who, you know, didn't think the EU worked so well for them, just makes it worse.
If the Court upholds the earlier decision - which I think it will, albeit for different and more carefully argued reasons, perhaps with a couple of dissenting voices - it will do so in terms which do their best to disguise its legal activism. It will say that this is what the law has always been, and that they have merely interpreted it afresh.
The pro-Remain press - of which Danny Finkelstein is a reasonable and articulate exemplar - will ignore the Court's activism (at best, or fail to notice it at worst), and dismiss the resulting surge of pro-Brexit anger as the inchoate howl of the ignorant and uneducated.
I've referred before on here to the historian Tom Holland's identification of this clash as one between democracy and the law. I think that's a fair characterisation on the whole. But a finding for Ms Miller will be to prefer one sort of decision making (the undemocratic one of the Court) to one backed up by an election-winning manifesto pledge and referendum result.
That is not a clash between democracy and the law. It is a clash between democracy and anti-democracy, in which democracy is the loser.
Friday 2 December 2016
Brexit reflections #15 - the myth of judicial independence
Following the High Court's Article 50 hearing there's been a lot of rubbish written recently about judicial impartiality. Judges are independent, goes the cry (you can tell that a lot of the writers, even the ones on the Left, would really like to carry on with a few choice extracts from Henry V).
But if you think about it for a moment, judicial independence is a myth.
It's true that, once they get into office, judges are free to apply the law as they see fit, always subject to the humiliation of being overturned on appeal. However there's the vexed question of how they get to be judges in the first place, and moreover what qualities they bring with them to the post.
In the old days becoming a judge was, like the process of becoming Queen's Counsel, a matter of a tap on the shoulder. Is old Scroggins a sound chap? Very much so. Not bad for a Wykehamist. Sign him up then, pronto. That all changed in the Blair years. Exhaustive application forms were to be filled in. Applicants were invited to state the steps they had taken to promote diversity (one QC applicant failed on this part of the test; surprising, since he was married to a black woman, a fact he didn't dare mention). Interview panels were set up. A small cottage industry (in which I once made a fleeting appearance) grew up to assist applicants, one which was so successful that some forms now require hopefuls to state whether they have used its services.
The effect of this process has been to accelerate what was in any event a tendency. The old Sir Bufton Tufton judges one still occasionally came across in my sojourn in the profession have been gradually replaced by the impeccably liberal types who toked on the occasional spliff at Oxford in the 60s or pogo'd to the Clash in the 70s. These men and women are in the 50s and 60s, and I know a good many of them. They are civilised, interesting, intelligent and, almost invariably, Left of centre and pro-EU.
In a way it's true that they are independent; but they are not independent of themselves. They come into judicial office as fully formed mature individuals, with views of the world and of British society they take with them into office. The only one I can think of who is not of the liberal Left claims to shoot rabbits through his bathroom window whilst at stool (notwithstanding the grotesqueries, this is a picture I would quite like to see).
And so do these people put their weltanschauung to one side whilst on the bench? They may honourably try. But, as I've written elsewhere, judges so often, consciously or otherwise, look for the meritorious party and then search for the legally defensible way of finding for them. They do not merely examine the law. Legal history is full of the antics of these judicial contortionists, and their hapless thrashing around has given rise to the old cliche, "hard cases make bad law".
The thorough trashing the High Court got for their handling of the Art 50 case (even from pro-Remain legal academics) suggests either that such motivations may have been at work or alternatively that the judges in the Miller case were simply way out of their depth.
Expect a more sophisticated version of the same in the Supreme Court. Judicial independence is a load of tosh.
But if you think about it for a moment, judicial independence is a myth.
It's true that, once they get into office, judges are free to apply the law as they see fit, always subject to the humiliation of being overturned on appeal. However there's the vexed question of how they get to be judges in the first place, and moreover what qualities they bring with them to the post.
In the old days becoming a judge was, like the process of becoming Queen's Counsel, a matter of a tap on the shoulder. Is old Scroggins a sound chap? Very much so. Not bad for a Wykehamist. Sign him up then, pronto. That all changed in the Blair years. Exhaustive application forms were to be filled in. Applicants were invited to state the steps they had taken to promote diversity (one QC applicant failed on this part of the test; surprising, since he was married to a black woman, a fact he didn't dare mention). Interview panels were set up. A small cottage industry (in which I once made a fleeting appearance) grew up to assist applicants, one which was so successful that some forms now require hopefuls to state whether they have used its services.
The effect of this process has been to accelerate what was in any event a tendency. The old Sir Bufton Tufton judges one still occasionally came across in my sojourn in the profession have been gradually replaced by the impeccably liberal types who toked on the occasional spliff at Oxford in the 60s or pogo'd to the Clash in the 70s. These men and women are in the 50s and 60s, and I know a good many of them. They are civilised, interesting, intelligent and, almost invariably, Left of centre and pro-EU.
In a way it's true that they are independent; but they are not independent of themselves. They come into judicial office as fully formed mature individuals, with views of the world and of British society they take with them into office. The only one I can think of who is not of the liberal Left claims to shoot rabbits through his bathroom window whilst at stool (notwithstanding the grotesqueries, this is a picture I would quite like to see).
And so do these people put their weltanschauung to one side whilst on the bench? They may honourably try. But, as I've written elsewhere, judges so often, consciously or otherwise, look for the meritorious party and then search for the legally defensible way of finding for them. They do not merely examine the law. Legal history is full of the antics of these judicial contortionists, and their hapless thrashing around has given rise to the old cliche, "hard cases make bad law".
The thorough trashing the High Court got for their handling of the Art 50 case (even from pro-Remain legal academics) suggests either that such motivations may have been at work or alternatively that the judges in the Miller case were simply way out of their depth.
Expect a more sophisticated version of the same in the Supreme Court. Judicial independence is a load of tosh.
An end to austerity?
I'm not the only person to think that last week's Autumn Statement marks a shift in economic outlook by the Government. This may seem arcane, but it says a lot about where Britain is as a nation.
You'll recall that in the dim and distant past of his Chancellorship, George Osborne had plans to bring down the deficit to zero by the end of this Parliament. His successor, Philip Hammond, has abandoned these plans. There will be a number of reasons for this. The first might well be the economic uncertainty of approaching Brexit - the last thing the UK needs is an avoidable recession caused by a further squeeze on HMG spending.
It's the other reasons which are interesting though.
One is that the Government thinks that it can stand to borrow a bit more in an era of historically low rates. This is what Labour has been saying for years (although they have also, incoherently, been criticising the Tories for borrowing too much). Another is that a significant part of Osborne's plan for getting borrowing down lay in bearing down on tax credits, the in-work benefits introduced by Gordon Brown. Many Tory MPs, fearful at the reaction of their constituents, refused point blank to countenance this and the plan was quietly dropped.
I can't think of a better example of the ratchet effect of public spending - giving benefits to people is very easy; taking them away is very difficult.
What will the effect be of Hammond's purse-string slackening? The obvious one is that as the deficit remains stubbornly high our stock of debt goes up still further. Hammond's spending is calculated to take Britain's stock of debt to 90% of GDP, the point at which, according to some research, interest repayments start to impede an economy's ability to grow. Interest rates on bonds are low now, but in the future borrowing will have to be rolled over, at rates which are unknown but could scarcely be lower than at present. Every extra £ borrowed is a gamble on future interest rates.
The proposition that a state cannot go on living beyond its means forever is susceptible to the observation that provided GDP (or more accurately tax revenue) continues to grow more quickly than accumulated debt it is likely that markets will continue to lend at affordable rates. The trouble with this calculation in the case of the UK is the reverse is happening. Public debt is rising faster than tax revenues. In other words, we are spending an ever increasing amount of our national income on interest payments.
So the situation is that with a narrow but serviceable Tory majority in the Commons, the opposition in disarrary, there are insufficient fiscal conservatives at Westminster to grasp the nettle. We are back in the land of Please-Lord-make-me-solvent-but-not-yet. To a return to a point made many times on this blog, we cannot afford to pay for our public services. We appear to be intent on continuing to live unaffordably forever, the pain of living within our means being too great for it to be contemplated.
This state of affairs will continue until the pain of living beyond our means is even greater. I shudder to think about what our country will be like at that point.
You'll recall that in the dim and distant past of his Chancellorship, George Osborne had plans to bring down the deficit to zero by the end of this Parliament. His successor, Philip Hammond, has abandoned these plans. There will be a number of reasons for this. The first might well be the economic uncertainty of approaching Brexit - the last thing the UK needs is an avoidable recession caused by a further squeeze on HMG spending.
It's the other reasons which are interesting though.
One is that the Government thinks that it can stand to borrow a bit more in an era of historically low rates. This is what Labour has been saying for years (although they have also, incoherently, been criticising the Tories for borrowing too much). Another is that a significant part of Osborne's plan for getting borrowing down lay in bearing down on tax credits, the in-work benefits introduced by Gordon Brown. Many Tory MPs, fearful at the reaction of their constituents, refused point blank to countenance this and the plan was quietly dropped.
I can't think of a better example of the ratchet effect of public spending - giving benefits to people is very easy; taking them away is very difficult.
What will the effect be of Hammond's purse-string slackening? The obvious one is that as the deficit remains stubbornly high our stock of debt goes up still further. Hammond's spending is calculated to take Britain's stock of debt to 90% of GDP, the point at which, according to some research, interest repayments start to impede an economy's ability to grow. Interest rates on bonds are low now, but in the future borrowing will have to be rolled over, at rates which are unknown but could scarcely be lower than at present. Every extra £ borrowed is a gamble on future interest rates.
The proposition that a state cannot go on living beyond its means forever is susceptible to the observation that provided GDP (or more accurately tax revenue) continues to grow more quickly than accumulated debt it is likely that markets will continue to lend at affordable rates. The trouble with this calculation in the case of the UK is the reverse is happening. Public debt is rising faster than tax revenues. In other words, we are spending an ever increasing amount of our national income on interest payments.
So the situation is that with a narrow but serviceable Tory majority in the Commons, the opposition in disarrary, there are insufficient fiscal conservatives at Westminster to grasp the nettle. We are back in the land of Please-Lord-make-me-solvent-but-not-yet. To a return to a point made many times on this blog, we cannot afford to pay for our public services. We appear to be intent on continuing to live unaffordably forever, the pain of living within our means being too great for it to be contemplated.
This state of affairs will continue until the pain of living beyond our means is even greater. I shudder to think about what our country will be like at that point.
Thursday 3 November 2016
Hello to (and from) Voice of Peason.
Ed Vaizey, the former culture minister, was quoted recently in the Torygraph as saying the arts Establishment in Britain was suffering from relentlessly Left-wing groupthink. As someone who's laboured in this field in a minor capacity, my response to this apercu was of the No-Shit-Sherlock variety.
That's why, after five years blogging under my real name, with a modest but growing readership, I've finally become too worried about who might be reading it, and opted instead for the title Voice of Peason (Peason being Molesworth's "grate friend" in How To Be Topp, and other deathless titles from the pens of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle).
It's a shame that Britain now has to be like this.
Artists are prone to Left-wingery for a variety of reasons. They - we - want to be nice. We're concerned with morality. We wish resolutely to create and interpret the world on our own terms. Those terms do not necessarily include close study of the externalities, which can get in the way of our vision. We also find the sobering nuts and bolts of economics somewhat tedious; I used to be the same, but then I became interested and have never looked back. As Mrs Thatcher said, the facts of life are Conservative.
Why is it that the Left hate the Tories so much? Despite thirty years as a Lefty, I still can't answer that satisfactorily. I suppose I thought the Tories were mean, favoured the rich and hated the poor. If that were true it would make Conservatives eminently dislikeable. In fact because the Tories tend to run the economy better than Labour they provide more jobs, and because they are more tight-fisted they tend to run public services on a more sustainable basis. But these are arguments that, in my experience, no-one on the Left wants to hear. Speaking to friends I detect a refuge taken in self-righteousness, as if the more they hate the Tories for their alleged heartlessness the better it makes them feel about themselves.
So what do I believe, and do my beliefs make me repellent?
I am in favour of free-speech unless it threatens or might cause violence; I don't believe anyone has the right not to be offended.
I believe we can't afford our public services in an age when we're living well into our 80s; in the long run the country must live within its means.
I don't care what colour someone's skin is, but I do care very much what they do, and I don't think we should be afraid of saying we don't like someone's culture. I'm baffled why we let into Britain so many people who persist in clinging to the practices which made their own countries such a mess.
I don't think we should be ashamed of our imperial past which, as well as much that's bad, included action to stop slavery and exporting some of the best aspects of our culture; we always need to ask what the countries we colonised would have been like if we had left them alone.
I'm opposed to Scottish independence because it would make Scots dramatically poorer, but I'm pleased we voted to leave the EU because whilst it benefits me, I can see around me all the time the deleterious consequences of uncontrolled migration for people at the bottom end of British society.
If these views sound anathema, please don't deprive yourself of the opportunity to listen to someone who disagrees with you.
That's why, after five years blogging under my real name, with a modest but growing readership, I've finally become too worried about who might be reading it, and opted instead for the title Voice of Peason (Peason being Molesworth's "grate friend" in How To Be Topp, and other deathless titles from the pens of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle).
It's a shame that Britain now has to be like this.
Artists are prone to Left-wingery for a variety of reasons. They - we - want to be nice. We're concerned with morality. We wish resolutely to create and interpret the world on our own terms. Those terms do not necessarily include close study of the externalities, which can get in the way of our vision. We also find the sobering nuts and bolts of economics somewhat tedious; I used to be the same, but then I became interested and have never looked back. As Mrs Thatcher said, the facts of life are Conservative.
Why is it that the Left hate the Tories so much? Despite thirty years as a Lefty, I still can't answer that satisfactorily. I suppose I thought the Tories were mean, favoured the rich and hated the poor. If that were true it would make Conservatives eminently dislikeable. In fact because the Tories tend to run the economy better than Labour they provide more jobs, and because they are more tight-fisted they tend to run public services on a more sustainable basis. But these are arguments that, in my experience, no-one on the Left wants to hear. Speaking to friends I detect a refuge taken in self-righteousness, as if the more they hate the Tories for their alleged heartlessness the better it makes them feel about themselves.
So what do I believe, and do my beliefs make me repellent?
I am in favour of free-speech unless it threatens or might cause violence; I don't believe anyone has the right not to be offended.
I believe we can't afford our public services in an age when we're living well into our 80s; in the long run the country must live within its means.
I don't care what colour someone's skin is, but I do care very much what they do, and I don't think we should be afraid of saying we don't like someone's culture. I'm baffled why we let into Britain so many people who persist in clinging to the practices which made their own countries such a mess.
I don't think we should be ashamed of our imperial past which, as well as much that's bad, included action to stop slavery and exporting some of the best aspects of our culture; we always need to ask what the countries we colonised would have been like if we had left them alone.
I'm opposed to Scottish independence because it would make Scots dramatically poorer, but I'm pleased we voted to leave the EU because whilst it benefits me, I can see around me all the time the deleterious consequences of uncontrolled migration for people at the bottom end of British society.
If these views sound anathema, please don't deprive yourself of the opportunity to listen to someone who disagrees with you.
brexit reflections 14 - the High Court rules on Article 50
So at mid-day today the High Court has ruled that the Government must get Parliamentary approval to invoke Article 50. What are we to make of this?
The most obvious consequence will be to slow down the Brexit process. The Government's appeal to the Supreme Court won't come to a conclusion till January. If HMG loses, there may have to be an Act of Parliament, which can be held up by MPs or by the Lords. Clauses could be inserted which tie the Government's hands, and it might even be defeated altogether. Mrs May's stated intention of invoking Article 50 by March looks dead in the water. Months of uncertainty await.
Twitter has been awash with gleeful Remainers, pointing out how funny it is that Leavers, having so desperately wanted Parliamentary sovereignty, have been effectively hoist by their own petard. Parliament, the Court has said, is sovereign, and the Royal Prerogative does not extend to overturning Parliament's 1972 legislation putting Britain into the EEC (as it then was).
There are two responses to this, one glib and one more complex. The glib one is that it is also of course comic to see Remainers, happy to see Parliament's sovereignty eroded by EU membership, trumpeting its merits from the rooftops when it suits them.
The more subtle point is that by having a Referendum at all Parliament deliberately chose to step outside our system of representative democracy. It went directly for the democratic jugular. The Court's statement that Parliament is sovereign looks weak and irrelevant when you consider that sovereignty only arises because Parliament has a mandate from the people. No electoral mandate in my lifetime has ever been as specific as that delivered on 23rd June.
Parties run for election on an extensive electoral programme and it is a rare voter that likes everything about the party he votes for. The Brexit referendum was about one issue only however, and Leave won.
Just how exactly, in circumstances where a one-issue Referendum has given the Government a specific mandate, does Parliament's sovereignty trump the clearly expressed will of the people?
The truth is that by granting a Referendum in the first place Parliament opened up the possibility of a second form of democratic legitimacy, running alongside (and potentially in conflict with) the legitimacy of Parliament.
It's worth pausing a moment in this potential conflict to consider just how much of a mandate pro-Remain MPs actually have. I heard Labour MPs Keir Starmer and Pat McFadden on WATO this lunchtime arguing for Parliamentary approval for the triggering of Article 50. But both these men fought tooth and nail in the 2010 General Election to prevent any referendum happening. They lost. They then fought tooth and nail for the Remain campaign. They lost again. In what world do they think they should legitimately be able to delay or stop Article 50?
The same goes of course for the Lib Dems, SNP and Greens.
The historian Tom Holland summed up the present dilemma very well when he Tweeted, 'I'm wondering if Britain has ever before had to decide which is the more important: democracy or the rule of law'.
Ah yes, the law. The court decided, as I said, that the Royal Prerogative did not extend so far as to enable HMG to put in train a process which, after two years, must involve the nullification of the 1972 legislation (it could have circumvented this point by arguing that Art 50 could be revoked part way through, but apparently did not). Outwith the Prerogative, only Parliament can make or unmake UK law.
That's the theory. I am familiar from personal experience with the way the law works. What often happens is that the judges decide which party looks like the more meritorious and then tries to find a defensible legal way of finding for them. The three High Court Judges have said that their decision is not political, but these are men who will have had a view on Brexit long before they ever imagined they might find themselves being involved in such a life or death decision. Who are they and what do we know about their background?
Baron Thomas of Cwmgiedd is the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. He is one of the Founding Members of the European Law Institute, a non-profit organisation devoted to European legal development.
Lord Justice Sales, a.k.a Philip Sales QC, is an old friend and colleague of Tony Blair and Derry Irvine, those well-known Eurosceptics.
Sir Terence Etherton, the current Master of the Rolls, is the first High Court judge to enter into a civil partnership.
No doubt these three men did their very best to come to a fair decision on the law and facts. But their education, status, and financial and social position are typical of those who benefit from EU membership and who voted to Remain in it.
Lord Thomas should have recused himself from the bench for this case. The website of his brainchild, the European Law Institute, says it is devoted to 'better law-making in Europe and the enhancement of European legal integration'. It goes on to say that one of its core tasks is 'to evaluate and stimulate the development of EU law, legal policy, and practice, and in particular make proposals for the further development of the acquis and for the enhancement of EU law implementation by the Member States'.
And yet, amazingly, this man's verdict obstructs the path to Britain's leaving the EU. Who could have predicted that?
Justice may have been done, but it doesn't much look like it.
PS In the 24 hours after I wrote this I've come upon the utterances of three legal academics who say the Court got the law wrong. Mark Elliott, Professor of Public Law at Cambridge University writes that the conclusion "is highly contestable. Perhaps . . . the most surprising aspect of (the case) is that the confident certainty of the terms in which the judgment is framed obscures almost entirely the complexity and contestability of the questions to which it gives rise . . ." Ouch.
John Finnis, Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy at Oxford, points to clear parallels between the way that the Royal Prerogative is used to change the law in relation to some tax provisions and the manner in which European elections are called, on the one hand, and the way HMG proposed to trigger Article 50 on the other. In Prof Finnis' words "no one should doubt that notification under Article 50 of the The European Union can likewise (be done without any Parliamentary approval)." Prof Finnis doesn't appear to think much of HMG's legal team.
Thirdly barrister Carl Gardner writes, "the judgment is surprising, it's problematic, and I think it's wrongly decided". The High Court thinks that triggering Art 50 would change the law, and that the law can't be changed except by Parliament. But Gardner thinks that the Court is confused about this, and that the executive often does change the law without recourse to Parliament. Gardner's ringing conclusion is worth quoting at length - "If in 1972 Parliament really did end the government's power by prerogative to (as the court thinks) change UK law by doing anything that alters EU law, then surely every change to EU treaties agreed by Prime Ministers have been unlawful. Why, if this judgment stands, was it lawful for Mrs Thatcher to agree to the Single European Act? Why was it lawful for Mr Blair to sign up . . . to the Social Chapter. The High Court implies . . . that he had no prerogative power to do so. . . What power have ministers ever had to agree . . . to EU measures such as Directives that (as the High Court sees it) change the law in this country when adopted? It seems to me at least arguable that, according to the High Court, all of this was unlawful."
Gardner thinks the Supreme Court won't overturn the decision though.
PPS I've now read commentaries by seven (pro-Remain) legal academics. They all think the Court was wrong.
The most obvious consequence will be to slow down the Brexit process. The Government's appeal to the Supreme Court won't come to a conclusion till January. If HMG loses, there may have to be an Act of Parliament, which can be held up by MPs or by the Lords. Clauses could be inserted which tie the Government's hands, and it might even be defeated altogether. Mrs May's stated intention of invoking Article 50 by March looks dead in the water. Months of uncertainty await.
Twitter has been awash with gleeful Remainers, pointing out how funny it is that Leavers, having so desperately wanted Parliamentary sovereignty, have been effectively hoist by their own petard. Parliament, the Court has said, is sovereign, and the Royal Prerogative does not extend to overturning Parliament's 1972 legislation putting Britain into the EEC (as it then was).
There are two responses to this, one glib and one more complex. The glib one is that it is also of course comic to see Remainers, happy to see Parliament's sovereignty eroded by EU membership, trumpeting its merits from the rooftops when it suits them.
The more subtle point is that by having a Referendum at all Parliament deliberately chose to step outside our system of representative democracy. It went directly for the democratic jugular. The Court's statement that Parliament is sovereign looks weak and irrelevant when you consider that sovereignty only arises because Parliament has a mandate from the people. No electoral mandate in my lifetime has ever been as specific as that delivered on 23rd June.
Parties run for election on an extensive electoral programme and it is a rare voter that likes everything about the party he votes for. The Brexit referendum was about one issue only however, and Leave won.
Just how exactly, in circumstances where a one-issue Referendum has given the Government a specific mandate, does Parliament's sovereignty trump the clearly expressed will of the people?
The truth is that by granting a Referendum in the first place Parliament opened up the possibility of a second form of democratic legitimacy, running alongside (and potentially in conflict with) the legitimacy of Parliament.
It's worth pausing a moment in this potential conflict to consider just how much of a mandate pro-Remain MPs actually have. I heard Labour MPs Keir Starmer and Pat McFadden on WATO this lunchtime arguing for Parliamentary approval for the triggering of Article 50. But both these men fought tooth and nail in the 2010 General Election to prevent any referendum happening. They lost. They then fought tooth and nail for the Remain campaign. They lost again. In what world do they think they should legitimately be able to delay or stop Article 50?
The same goes of course for the Lib Dems, SNP and Greens.
The historian Tom Holland summed up the present dilemma very well when he Tweeted, 'I'm wondering if Britain has ever before had to decide which is the more important: democracy or the rule of law'.
Ah yes, the law. The court decided, as I said, that the Royal Prerogative did not extend so far as to enable HMG to put in train a process which, after two years, must involve the nullification of the 1972 legislation (it could have circumvented this point by arguing that Art 50 could be revoked part way through, but apparently did not). Outwith the Prerogative, only Parliament can make or unmake UK law.
That's the theory. I am familiar from personal experience with the way the law works. What often happens is that the judges decide which party looks like the more meritorious and then tries to find a defensible legal way of finding for them. The three High Court Judges have said that their decision is not political, but these are men who will have had a view on Brexit long before they ever imagined they might find themselves being involved in such a life or death decision. Who are they and what do we know about their background?
Baron Thomas of Cwmgiedd is the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. He is one of the Founding Members of the European Law Institute, a non-profit organisation devoted to European legal development.
Lord Justice Sales, a.k.a Philip Sales QC, is an old friend and colleague of Tony Blair and Derry Irvine, those well-known Eurosceptics.
Sir Terence Etherton, the current Master of the Rolls, is the first High Court judge to enter into a civil partnership.
No doubt these three men did their very best to come to a fair decision on the law and facts. But their education, status, and financial and social position are typical of those who benefit from EU membership and who voted to Remain in it.
Lord Thomas should have recused himself from the bench for this case. The website of his brainchild, the European Law Institute, says it is devoted to 'better law-making in Europe and the enhancement of European legal integration'. It goes on to say that one of its core tasks is 'to evaluate and stimulate the development of EU law, legal policy, and practice, and in particular make proposals for the further development of the acquis and for the enhancement of EU law implementation by the Member States'.
And yet, amazingly, this man's verdict obstructs the path to Britain's leaving the EU. Who could have predicted that?
Justice may have been done, but it doesn't much look like it.
PS In the 24 hours after I wrote this I've come upon the utterances of three legal academics who say the Court got the law wrong. Mark Elliott, Professor of Public Law at Cambridge University writes that the conclusion "is highly contestable. Perhaps . . . the most surprising aspect of (the case) is that the confident certainty of the terms in which the judgment is framed obscures almost entirely the complexity and contestability of the questions to which it gives rise . . ." Ouch.
John Finnis, Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy at Oxford, points to clear parallels between the way that the Royal Prerogative is used to change the law in relation to some tax provisions and the manner in which European elections are called, on the one hand, and the way HMG proposed to trigger Article 50 on the other. In Prof Finnis' words "no one should doubt that notification under Article 50 of the The European Union can likewise (be done without any Parliamentary approval)." Prof Finnis doesn't appear to think much of HMG's legal team.
Thirdly barrister Carl Gardner writes, "the judgment is surprising, it's problematic, and I think it's wrongly decided". The High Court thinks that triggering Art 50 would change the law, and that the law can't be changed except by Parliament. But Gardner thinks that the Court is confused about this, and that the executive often does change the law without recourse to Parliament. Gardner's ringing conclusion is worth quoting at length - "If in 1972 Parliament really did end the government's power by prerogative to (as the court thinks) change UK law by doing anything that alters EU law, then surely every change to EU treaties agreed by Prime Ministers have been unlawful. Why, if this judgment stands, was it lawful for Mrs Thatcher to agree to the Single European Act? Why was it lawful for Mr Blair to sign up . . . to the Social Chapter. The High Court implies . . . that he had no prerogative power to do so. . . What power have ministers ever had to agree . . . to EU measures such as Directives that (as the High Court sees it) change the law in this country when adopted? It seems to me at least arguable that, according to the High Court, all of this was unlawful."
Gardner thinks the Supreme Court won't overturn the decision though.
PPS I've now read commentaries by seven (pro-Remain) legal academics. They all think the Court was wrong.
Monday 24 October 2016
Phillip Blond - Red Tory redux
An excellent piece on the Res Publica website reprints an interview Phillip Blond, the man who dreamed up Red Toryism, gave to Le Figaro recently about Brexit. You can read the whole thing here, but here's a bit of cut-and-paste (Blond, I need scarcely add, is a Remainer).
Blond believes that had EU leaders like Juncker and Schulz behaved a bit more sensibly after the vote there might have been no need for Brexit at all. These EU mandarins pretty much killed off the Remain campaign with their hostility, he says. He points out that the much vaunted Four Freedoms (including freedom of movement) are far from absolute, and that France and Germany "have progressively vetoed any real free movement in capital or services". Blond thinks that if the EU made an offer on migration he suspects Theresa May's government "may well put it to the vote, either in another referendum or more likely in a snap general election where the PM decides to argue to stay in the EU".
Personally I think Blond is in cloud cuckoo land here, both on the likelihood of the EU making a renewed offer on migration and of May's government having a change of heart. As I've written before, the EU leadership is too stolid to grasp that the key to the organisation's survival is flexibility. After all, they didn't budge on migration when the referendum was hanging over them. And anyway can you imagine the uproar in the Tory party if May did a volte face?
Blond writes that "whilst Europe understands the perils of external migration and what importing hostile minorities might mean, (the UK working class) experienced internal EU migration as directly threatening their . . . economic security. . . Britain has functioned as the European employer of last resort as the Euro and German austerity have destroyed the labour markets for so many young Europeans. But for working class Britons this has meant a direct threat to their . . . livelihoods, which is why low skilled low educated people voted so heavily to leave the EU. If you want evidence of this - try to get served by a Briton in London, it's virtually impossible. All the waiting staff are charming, degree level educated Europeans, no wonder the white working class thought there was no working future for them in such a Europe".
Amen to that. And then, this being an interview in a French paper, Blond proceeds to stick the boot in to France.
"French secularism has been wholly incapable of engaging with and integrating its Muslim population. . . Even after all the dreadful massacres and killings in France you still have the French state insisting that Islamic radicalism is down to economic inequality which is an idealogical fiction wholly without any evidential basis . . . this blinds France to the issues it must confront".
Britain, on the other hand, "is not in the state of incipient civil war . . . (our) mixed constitution allows difference to be expressed and welcomed into the British social compact whereas France . . . allows no place for . . . the development of integrated identities . . . all difference is suppressed in the name of a generic identity . . . France's political identity is too brittle to incorporate others . . ."
I'm not sure he's right that Britain's more accommodating outlook has been a good thing. It also means we've let in a lot of people whose ethos sits uneasily, to put it mildly, with ours, without making any effort to assimilate them.
And then, pertinently, Blond has this interesting passage on the absolutism of Islam, as a contrast to the mediated thought of European Jews and Christians.
"But far too much of modern Islam is dangerous, because much of the modern Islamic mainstream has rejected its mystical or mediated elements and is therefore committed . . . to a form of absolutism which paradoxically is exactly what French secularism is - hence you have a conflict of the absolutes. In Britain we . . . deny any absolutism to politics. In the end though . . . Europe must rediscover its Greek, Jewish and Christian heritage - all of which thought through the absolute and created intermediate thinking that believe we knew but could never completely know the absolute".
I agree that Britain is a less absolutist country than France (the cry of the French intellectual - "This may work in practice; but does it work in theory?!"), but I don't think we are any better placed to engage with fundamentalist Islam - our tendency to try and accommodate, to muddle along just means we are less likely to confront it head on. To our cost.
Blond goes on to deplore Conservatism's fixation with liberalism - the me-first culture. Globalism hasn't helped either, for "the Western working (and lower middle) classes have not seen any real terms wage rises . . . for a generation, it's the . . . developing world and the very very rich of the West who have massively benefited from the liberal settlement . . . Indeed, coupled with mass migration and the license that social liberalism gives to it - not only are people hit economically but also socially and culturally. Traditional centuries-long identities are repudiated and ignored, and sectarian communities are imported and set up with little or no effort at integration. So it is a great relief to see Conservative party draw a line of distinction between neo-liberal policies of both left and right and to try to set up a conservative offer that seeks to create an inclusive and mutually self and other enhancing capitalism and the social and cultural bonds that such a system needs in order to function . . . (I think he's much too optimistic about conservatism here). Yes the working classes have been abandoned since the ascension of Mrs Thatcher, even then before Thatcherism the working classes were not well served by their advocates . . ., who began through social liberalism to take apart stable working class communities and attack the extended and the nuclear family as patriarchal and outmoded . . .
And on to the City, which Blond says "is a massive British financial asset but it does not really serve Britain as well as it might, it has no patriotic capital, no interest except in the centralization and arbitrage of money, and it has no wish or incentive in decentralizing capital to invest in the regions . . . outside of London. So a break with that model of the City would be most welcome and will I think occur".
"In a time of deep insecurity people's identities and cultures need protection and fostering, and part of this does mean the need to limit unprecedented levels of migration, some which is deeply hostile to European values . . . globalisation was hollowing out working class lives and . . . especially on the right we needed to talk about how to re-endow ordinary people with assets and wealth. I think social conservation and economic enfranchisement is the only political offer that can now win a majority and protect us against the extremists".
I think Blond has had it with social conservatism. Its decline started with Cathy Come Home and gay marriage (which I have come round to) is the final nail in its coffin. Personally there's a lot of this kind of thing I don't mind, but I'm not so daft as to think that the stuff I don't like can be put back in its box. It can't be, and perhaps shouldn't be.
Blond goes on to talk about multiculturalism, which he thinks will work as a gambit for the Left in London, but not outside, where "it will be a huge negative for the left and will lose it elections. The left basically needs a new answer to modern capitalism that isn't welfare or taxation. There is little sign anywhere in the world of it making this intellectual leap, so . . . it is hard to see a Labour comeback (in either the long or short term).
Here I think he is bang on the money. The left's answer to our problems is tax and spend, or in Jeremy Corbyn's case tax, spend, borrow and print. My own view is that this problem is insoluble for the left, and it's not so much a case of unwillingness to make the intellectual leap Blond talks about as unawareness that the leap needs to be made at all. As it is I don't know of anyone on either left or right who has a plausible way out of the left's dilemma, which is, essentially, that we can't afford our public services in an era when people tend to live on into their 80s.
Blond believes that had EU leaders like Juncker and Schulz behaved a bit more sensibly after the vote there might have been no need for Brexit at all. These EU mandarins pretty much killed off the Remain campaign with their hostility, he says. He points out that the much vaunted Four Freedoms (including freedom of movement) are far from absolute, and that France and Germany "have progressively vetoed any real free movement in capital or services". Blond thinks that if the EU made an offer on migration he suspects Theresa May's government "may well put it to the vote, either in another referendum or more likely in a snap general election where the PM decides to argue to stay in the EU".
Personally I think Blond is in cloud cuckoo land here, both on the likelihood of the EU making a renewed offer on migration and of May's government having a change of heart. As I've written before, the EU leadership is too stolid to grasp that the key to the organisation's survival is flexibility. After all, they didn't budge on migration when the referendum was hanging over them. And anyway can you imagine the uproar in the Tory party if May did a volte face?
Blond writes that "whilst Europe understands the perils of external migration and what importing hostile minorities might mean, (the UK working class) experienced internal EU migration as directly threatening their . . . economic security. . . Britain has functioned as the European employer of last resort as the Euro and German austerity have destroyed the labour markets for so many young Europeans. But for working class Britons this has meant a direct threat to their . . . livelihoods, which is why low skilled low educated people voted so heavily to leave the EU. If you want evidence of this - try to get served by a Briton in London, it's virtually impossible. All the waiting staff are charming, degree level educated Europeans, no wonder the white working class thought there was no working future for them in such a Europe".
Amen to that. And then, this being an interview in a French paper, Blond proceeds to stick the boot in to France.
"French secularism has been wholly incapable of engaging with and integrating its Muslim population. . . Even after all the dreadful massacres and killings in France you still have the French state insisting that Islamic radicalism is down to economic inequality which is an idealogical fiction wholly without any evidential basis . . . this blinds France to the issues it must confront".
Britain, on the other hand, "is not in the state of incipient civil war . . . (our) mixed constitution allows difference to be expressed and welcomed into the British social compact whereas France . . . allows no place for . . . the development of integrated identities . . . all difference is suppressed in the name of a generic identity . . . France's political identity is too brittle to incorporate others . . ."
I'm not sure he's right that Britain's more accommodating outlook has been a good thing. It also means we've let in a lot of people whose ethos sits uneasily, to put it mildly, with ours, without making any effort to assimilate them.
And then, pertinently, Blond has this interesting passage on the absolutism of Islam, as a contrast to the mediated thought of European Jews and Christians.
"But far too much of modern Islam is dangerous, because much of the modern Islamic mainstream has rejected its mystical or mediated elements and is therefore committed . . . to a form of absolutism which paradoxically is exactly what French secularism is - hence you have a conflict of the absolutes. In Britain we . . . deny any absolutism to politics. In the end though . . . Europe must rediscover its Greek, Jewish and Christian heritage - all of which thought through the absolute and created intermediate thinking that believe we knew but could never completely know the absolute".
I agree that Britain is a less absolutist country than France (the cry of the French intellectual - "This may work in practice; but does it work in theory?!"), but I don't think we are any better placed to engage with fundamentalist Islam - our tendency to try and accommodate, to muddle along just means we are less likely to confront it head on. To our cost.
Blond goes on to deplore Conservatism's fixation with liberalism - the me-first culture. Globalism hasn't helped either, for "the Western working (and lower middle) classes have not seen any real terms wage rises . . . for a generation, it's the . . . developing world and the very very rich of the West who have massively benefited from the liberal settlement . . . Indeed, coupled with mass migration and the license that social liberalism gives to it - not only are people hit economically but also socially and culturally. Traditional centuries-long identities are repudiated and ignored, and sectarian communities are imported and set up with little or no effort at integration. So it is a great relief to see Conservative party draw a line of distinction between neo-liberal policies of both left and right and to try to set up a conservative offer that seeks to create an inclusive and mutually self and other enhancing capitalism and the social and cultural bonds that such a system needs in order to function . . . (I think he's much too optimistic about conservatism here). Yes the working classes have been abandoned since the ascension of Mrs Thatcher, even then before Thatcherism the working classes were not well served by their advocates . . ., who began through social liberalism to take apart stable working class communities and attack the extended and the nuclear family as patriarchal and outmoded . . .
And on to the City, which Blond says "is a massive British financial asset but it does not really serve Britain as well as it might, it has no patriotic capital, no interest except in the centralization and arbitrage of money, and it has no wish or incentive in decentralizing capital to invest in the regions . . . outside of London. So a break with that model of the City would be most welcome and will I think occur".
"In a time of deep insecurity people's identities and cultures need protection and fostering, and part of this does mean the need to limit unprecedented levels of migration, some which is deeply hostile to European values . . . globalisation was hollowing out working class lives and . . . especially on the right we needed to talk about how to re-endow ordinary people with assets and wealth. I think social conservation and economic enfranchisement is the only political offer that can now win a majority and protect us against the extremists".
I think Blond has had it with social conservatism. Its decline started with Cathy Come Home and gay marriage (which I have come round to) is the final nail in its coffin. Personally there's a lot of this kind of thing I don't mind, but I'm not so daft as to think that the stuff I don't like can be put back in its box. It can't be, and perhaps shouldn't be.
Blond goes on to talk about multiculturalism, which he thinks will work as a gambit for the Left in London, but not outside, where "it will be a huge negative for the left and will lose it elections. The left basically needs a new answer to modern capitalism that isn't welfare or taxation. There is little sign anywhere in the world of it making this intellectual leap, so . . . it is hard to see a Labour comeback (in either the long or short term).
Here I think he is bang on the money. The left's answer to our problems is tax and spend, or in Jeremy Corbyn's case tax, spend, borrow and print. My own view is that this problem is insoluble for the left, and it's not so much a case of unwillingness to make the intellectual leap Blond talks about as unawareness that the leap needs to be made at all. As it is I don't know of anyone on either left or right who has a plausible way out of the left's dilemma, which is, essentially, that we can't afford our public services in an era when people tend to live on into their 80s.
Friday 21 October 2016
Not I, Daniel Blake
I won't be going to see the new Ken Loach film, I, Daniel Blake.
It's difficult in any story to know how much weight we should load onto a character. The vicious Indians in Larry McMurtry's wonderful Lonesome Dove, the treacherous Portuguese Jews in John Buchan, feckless Bertie Wooster, conniving Shylock, angry Othello - these are not intended, we tell ourselves, as exemplars of their race, religion or class. To see them as such is to rob the characters of individuality. And yet our suspicion remains that they stand totemically, inviting us to draw unappealing conclusions about their offstage peers.
In Loach's new film the eponymous hero is a good man recovering from a heart attack, who falls through the cracks of the benefits system despite his inability to work. According to the Times' four star review, Blake meets at every turn "pusillanimous jobsworths who can’t see beyond spreadsheets and questionnaires. They impassively grind him down, forcing him into a Kafta-esque form-filling nightmare and ultimately denying him his rightful state support."
What exactly is Loach's point? Is it that all benefit claimants are good and deserving? Possibly not. That Blake or the single mum he befriends are deserving may not be intended to reassure taxpaying cinema-goers that their money is well-spent. But if this isn't the aim, what is the point of the drama? To show what happened to these people and these people alone?
That seems unlikely, because the baddie in Loach's scenario is the benefits system itself, and the way that medically unqualified staff are cutting off the needy. Whilst you can argue that a bad screen Muslim, for example, does not stand for Muslims generally, the portrayal of a bad UK benefits system is effectively an allegation that our actual benefits system is bad. That's certainly what the Guardian thought Loach was doing. Peter Bradshaw's four star review thought the film showed "a system that is almost deliberately planned to create just those desperate, futile shouting matches in the benefits office that lead to sanctions and punishments".
And that may be so. I don't know, because I don't have any dealings with it. But I do know that some people defraud the system, and I know personally some people who have been on health-related benefits for years and who are cheating the rest of us. She is said to have an untreatable hernia. He is said to have an incapacitating back injury. In fact both are active, hale and hearty, and enjoying an early retirement at our expense. I should report them, I suppose.
I don't believe these are typical of the majority of benefit claimants. There will be some cheats always. But firstly our system, tight-fisted as it may be, has not yet succeeded in finding these two out. It will be even less able to do so when, partly because of pressure by the likes of Ken Loach, the government stops testing the long-term sick at all. Secondly, benefit tests are stringent for a reason. It is that Britain cannot afford its public spending. We are currently borrowing about one and a half billion pounds every week just to stay afloat. We cannot afford to pay people benefits who are not eligible for them.
What does Loach's film have to say about that? Does the budget deficit get a mention? Does Loach show any of the undeserving poor? Does it tell viewers that there are some areas of Glasgow where, extraordinarily, the majority of the working age population are on sickness benefit?
As I haven't seen the film I don't know. But I believe Loach doesn't show his protagonists having a drink. Or a smoke, or a bet, or an expensive satellite TV contract, or a mobile phone. I'll bet Loach keeps these things well away from the screen.
But back to The Merchant of Venice. Just as Shylock, Shakespeare might argue, doesn't stand for all Jews, the characters in I, Daniel Blake, Loach might say, don't stand for all benefit claimants. This argument is much harder to sustain where the institution grinding Blake's face into the dust is a real one. For if the benefits system Loach depicts isn't genuine, what is the point of his film? Daniel Blake was made to show that the system we have is farcically inhumane, and by failing to set out the economic context in which it functions, by failing to acknowledge the difficulties of restricting sickness benefits to those entitled to them and by showing benefit claimants as the bien-pensant middle class would love them to be - thrifty, sober, continent and hardworking - it surely loads the dice too predictably in Loach's favour for good art.
Please someone who has seen Loach's film write in and tell me I'm wrong. He isn't getting a penny from me.
P.S. "When Daniel fails the initial test by just a few arbitrarily conceived points", writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, "you find yourself thinking, If only he wasn't so honest . . . But in so doing, he would become precisely that kind of TV stock figure, that Shameless or Benefits Street cheat whose presence in black comedy and reactionary political gossip justified the whole setup to begin with".
It's worth noting that Bradshaw's concern is not that Daniel should cheat, but that he should risk becoming a "kind of TV stock figure" in doing so. What are these stock figures? Shameless was fiction (although probably no less accurate than Loach's own fiction). Benefits Street showed real people. What is Bradshaw's point? Is he saying that there aren't any real benefit cheats? Or is he saying he doesn't want Loach to show anyone cheating in case people get the idea that, you know, there might be people actually out there doing it?
P.P.S. When I read that Loach's film was co-produced by BBC Films, I wanted to sink to the floor in despair. Am I the only person to think that the BBC would never have funded a film which focused on benefit cheats? That in an era where the Corporation is struggling to fight off a reputation for left of centre bias putting money behind Ken Loach's mouth might not have been the greatest of ideas?
It's difficult in any story to know how much weight we should load onto a character. The vicious Indians in Larry McMurtry's wonderful Lonesome Dove, the treacherous Portuguese Jews in John Buchan, feckless Bertie Wooster, conniving Shylock, angry Othello - these are not intended, we tell ourselves, as exemplars of their race, religion or class. To see them as such is to rob the characters of individuality. And yet our suspicion remains that they stand totemically, inviting us to draw unappealing conclusions about their offstage peers.
In Loach's new film the eponymous hero is a good man recovering from a heart attack, who falls through the cracks of the benefits system despite his inability to work. According to the Times' four star review, Blake meets at every turn "pusillanimous jobsworths who can’t see beyond spreadsheets and questionnaires. They impassively grind him down, forcing him into a Kafta-esque form-filling nightmare and ultimately denying him his rightful state support."
What exactly is Loach's point? Is it that all benefit claimants are good and deserving? Possibly not. That Blake or the single mum he befriends are deserving may not be intended to reassure taxpaying cinema-goers that their money is well-spent. But if this isn't the aim, what is the point of the drama? To show what happened to these people and these people alone?
That seems unlikely, because the baddie in Loach's scenario is the benefits system itself, and the way that medically unqualified staff are cutting off the needy. Whilst you can argue that a bad screen Muslim, for example, does not stand for Muslims generally, the portrayal of a bad UK benefits system is effectively an allegation that our actual benefits system is bad. That's certainly what the Guardian thought Loach was doing. Peter Bradshaw's four star review thought the film showed "a system that is almost deliberately planned to create just those desperate, futile shouting matches in the benefits office that lead to sanctions and punishments".
And that may be so. I don't know, because I don't have any dealings with it. But I do know that some people defraud the system, and I know personally some people who have been on health-related benefits for years and who are cheating the rest of us. She is said to have an untreatable hernia. He is said to have an incapacitating back injury. In fact both are active, hale and hearty, and enjoying an early retirement at our expense. I should report them, I suppose.
I don't believe these are typical of the majority of benefit claimants. There will be some cheats always. But firstly our system, tight-fisted as it may be, has not yet succeeded in finding these two out. It will be even less able to do so when, partly because of pressure by the likes of Ken Loach, the government stops testing the long-term sick at all. Secondly, benefit tests are stringent for a reason. It is that Britain cannot afford its public spending. We are currently borrowing about one and a half billion pounds every week just to stay afloat. We cannot afford to pay people benefits who are not eligible for them.
What does Loach's film have to say about that? Does the budget deficit get a mention? Does Loach show any of the undeserving poor? Does it tell viewers that there are some areas of Glasgow where, extraordinarily, the majority of the working age population are on sickness benefit?
As I haven't seen the film I don't know. But I believe Loach doesn't show his protagonists having a drink. Or a smoke, or a bet, or an expensive satellite TV contract, or a mobile phone. I'll bet Loach keeps these things well away from the screen.
But back to The Merchant of Venice. Just as Shylock, Shakespeare might argue, doesn't stand for all Jews, the characters in I, Daniel Blake, Loach might say, don't stand for all benefit claimants. This argument is much harder to sustain where the institution grinding Blake's face into the dust is a real one. For if the benefits system Loach depicts isn't genuine, what is the point of his film? Daniel Blake was made to show that the system we have is farcically inhumane, and by failing to set out the economic context in which it functions, by failing to acknowledge the difficulties of restricting sickness benefits to those entitled to them and by showing benefit claimants as the bien-pensant middle class would love them to be - thrifty, sober, continent and hardworking - it surely loads the dice too predictably in Loach's favour for good art.
Please someone who has seen Loach's film write in and tell me I'm wrong. He isn't getting a penny from me.
P.S. "When Daniel fails the initial test by just a few arbitrarily conceived points", writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, "you find yourself thinking, If only he wasn't so honest . . . But in so doing, he would become precisely that kind of TV stock figure, that Shameless or Benefits Street cheat whose presence in black comedy and reactionary political gossip justified the whole setup to begin with".
It's worth noting that Bradshaw's concern is not that Daniel should cheat, but that he should risk becoming a "kind of TV stock figure" in doing so. What are these stock figures? Shameless was fiction (although probably no less accurate than Loach's own fiction). Benefits Street showed real people. What is Bradshaw's point? Is he saying that there aren't any real benefit cheats? Or is he saying he doesn't want Loach to show anyone cheating in case people get the idea that, you know, there might be people actually out there doing it?
P.P.S. When I read that Loach's film was co-produced by BBC Films, I wanted to sink to the floor in despair. Am I the only person to think that the BBC would never have funded a film which focused on benefit cheats? That in an era where the Corporation is struggling to fight off a reputation for left of centre bias putting money behind Ken Loach's mouth might not have been the greatest of ideas?
Monday 17 October 2016
The Highland Clearances
As a long-time Hibernophile my view of the tragedy of the Highland clearances was formed by reading John Prebble's famous book in the 1970s. It's a devastating narrative of greed and displacement. In some coastal places you can still see the Black houses, so-called because the tenants were said to have been burned out by avaricious southern landlords.
I'm used to the idea that most of the iconic ideas about Scottish history are more or less bunkum, a phenomenon that finds its locus classicus in the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. Bonnie Prince Charlie was not the heir to the throne; he was the son of the heir. He spoke neither English or Gaelic; his first language was Italian. The conflict which followed his landing was not an English / Scottish one; it is better described as a Stuart / Hanoverian, or Catholic / Protestant or Lowland / Highland one. Many of the chieftains who fought with Charles did so reluctantly (as did many of their clansmen). More Scots fought on the government side at Culloden than on that of the rebels.
And so on and so forth. That hasn't stopped the conflict being cast in the popular mind as a product of English wickedness (largely because of the reprisals exacted on the Highlands by the vengeful Hanoverian goverment in London). No doubt it exerts a tendentious mental sway on the Independence movement even today.
But surely the Clearances - that really happened? No?
Well, yes and no. I've just been reading The Highland Clearances by Australian historian Eric Richards, and it's an eye-opener for everyone interested in Scotland, and in this subject. The Clearances did take place, but not in the manner or for the reasons that a resentful national myth perpetuates.
Contrary to popular belief -
- An idyllic agrarian community did not exist in the glens until disrupted by landlords; in fact Highlanders often lived in squalid conditions beset by poverty and famine.
- The property did not belong to the tenants, but to the landlord, who was entitled to remove them upon giving proper notice. Such notice was generally a year.
- The tenants had generally not held their land since time immemorial - on the contrary there was significant turnover.
- Almost always due notice to quit was given.
- In some cases tenants were given years to prepare for removal.
- Many of the people cleared were squatters who had no right to be there.
- In many cases landlords were owed significant arrears of rent, which was often waived upon clearance.
- In some cases landlords spent thousands of pounds providing alternative land by the coasts.
- In many cases landlords spent thousands of pounds trying to set up alternative industries such as fishing and kelp farming.
- Most clearances were not accompanied by violence.
- Property was destroyed or burned after evictions to prevent tenants returning, rather than in order to force them to leave in the first place.
- The only person tried for violent evictions - Patrick Sellar - was accused by a man he had previously caught poaching. Sellar was acquitted by an Inverness jury.
- Many people left the land voluntarily because they could not make a living. One contemporary writer said that even if the land had been given rent free, it would have been impossible to make a decent living there. Even today it is very hard to get by in the Highlands.
- Almost all the landlords were Scots, as were the overwhelming majority of sheep-farmers who replaced the tenants. Some of these were men from the Lowlands, but a significant minority were themselves Highlanders. Almost none of them were English.
- The most significant English participant, the Earl of Stafford, came into the story only because he married the Countess of Sutherland. The Countess had plans for "improvement" but lacked the means to carry them out. Her new husband was wealthy, and together they ploughed what were then vast sums of money (from England, for what it's worth) into the Sutherland estates, believing that new coastal communities would benefit both the estate and the tenants. The Duke and Duchess were horrified by allegations of Patrick Sellar's brutality and he was sacked. The bulk of the money invested was never recovered and by 1820 it had become apparent that the resettlement schemes were a failure.
Of course what is immediately obvious from the above list is that although, for example, "in some cases tenants were given years to prepare for removal", in some cases they weren't. That would also go for removal by violence. Some tenants were violently removed. But overall the picture I have had for years, one in which all landlords behaved dreadfully, is refuted. They did not. They often did their incompetent best in impossible circumstances. The tragedy for the tenants was that there were few other places to go, other than the big cities or, often, Canada.
Moreover the picture Richards paints is of a landscape beset by poverty (as was much of rural Europe), the burden of which in the Highlands fell on the landlord, who was expected to care for his tenants in hard times. And this, incidentally, goes to what I felt was a weakness in the book. Here is a society where the old feudal system of mutual obligation is breaking down. The idea that the relationship with a tenant is a commercial rather than patriarchal one is a modern one. Nowadays for example we are quite used to the idea of a landlord seeking to regain control over his property after giving due notice to quit. Not so in the late 18th century. Where did this modern idea derive? What did people think of it at the time, and how was it formulated?
Nevertheless this is a fascinating story, and a neat marginal destruction of another small piece of the SNP's intellectual jigsaw.
I'm used to the idea that most of the iconic ideas about Scottish history are more or less bunkum, a phenomenon that finds its locus classicus in the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. Bonnie Prince Charlie was not the heir to the throne; he was the son of the heir. He spoke neither English or Gaelic; his first language was Italian. The conflict which followed his landing was not an English / Scottish one; it is better described as a Stuart / Hanoverian, or Catholic / Protestant or Lowland / Highland one. Many of the chieftains who fought with Charles did so reluctantly (as did many of their clansmen). More Scots fought on the government side at Culloden than on that of the rebels.
And so on and so forth. That hasn't stopped the conflict being cast in the popular mind as a product of English wickedness (largely because of the reprisals exacted on the Highlands by the vengeful Hanoverian goverment in London). No doubt it exerts a tendentious mental sway on the Independence movement even today.
But surely the Clearances - that really happened? No?
Well, yes and no. I've just been reading The Highland Clearances by Australian historian Eric Richards, and it's an eye-opener for everyone interested in Scotland, and in this subject. The Clearances did take place, but not in the manner or for the reasons that a resentful national myth perpetuates.
Contrary to popular belief -
- An idyllic agrarian community did not exist in the glens until disrupted by landlords; in fact Highlanders often lived in squalid conditions beset by poverty and famine.
- The property did not belong to the tenants, but to the landlord, who was entitled to remove them upon giving proper notice. Such notice was generally a year.
- The tenants had generally not held their land since time immemorial - on the contrary there was significant turnover.
- Almost always due notice to quit was given.
- In some cases tenants were given years to prepare for removal.
- Many of the people cleared were squatters who had no right to be there.
- In many cases landlords were owed significant arrears of rent, which was often waived upon clearance.
- In some cases landlords spent thousands of pounds providing alternative land by the coasts.
- In many cases landlords spent thousands of pounds trying to set up alternative industries such as fishing and kelp farming.
- Most clearances were not accompanied by violence.
- Property was destroyed or burned after evictions to prevent tenants returning, rather than in order to force them to leave in the first place.
- The only person tried for violent evictions - Patrick Sellar - was accused by a man he had previously caught poaching. Sellar was acquitted by an Inverness jury.
- Many people left the land voluntarily because they could not make a living. One contemporary writer said that even if the land had been given rent free, it would have been impossible to make a decent living there. Even today it is very hard to get by in the Highlands.
- Almost all the landlords were Scots, as were the overwhelming majority of sheep-farmers who replaced the tenants. Some of these were men from the Lowlands, but a significant minority were themselves Highlanders. Almost none of them were English.
- The most significant English participant, the Earl of Stafford, came into the story only because he married the Countess of Sutherland. The Countess had plans for "improvement" but lacked the means to carry them out. Her new husband was wealthy, and together they ploughed what were then vast sums of money (from England, for what it's worth) into the Sutherland estates, believing that new coastal communities would benefit both the estate and the tenants. The Duke and Duchess were horrified by allegations of Patrick Sellar's brutality and he was sacked. The bulk of the money invested was never recovered and by 1820 it had become apparent that the resettlement schemes were a failure.
Of course what is immediately obvious from the above list is that although, for example, "in some cases tenants were given years to prepare for removal", in some cases they weren't. That would also go for removal by violence. Some tenants were violently removed. But overall the picture I have had for years, one in which all landlords behaved dreadfully, is refuted. They did not. They often did their incompetent best in impossible circumstances. The tragedy for the tenants was that there were few other places to go, other than the big cities or, often, Canada.
Moreover the picture Richards paints is of a landscape beset by poverty (as was much of rural Europe), the burden of which in the Highlands fell on the landlord, who was expected to care for his tenants in hard times. And this, incidentally, goes to what I felt was a weakness in the book. Here is a society where the old feudal system of mutual obligation is breaking down. The idea that the relationship with a tenant is a commercial rather than patriarchal one is a modern one. Nowadays for example we are quite used to the idea of a landlord seeking to regain control over his property after giving due notice to quit. Not so in the late 18th century. Where did this modern idea derive? What did people think of it at the time, and how was it formulated?
Nevertheless this is a fascinating story, and a neat marginal destruction of another small piece of the SNP's intellectual jigsaw.
Call me Ali? OK, no problem
A salutary tale.
Last week I needed to order some expensive domestic goods. A friend steered me in the direction of an Ebay seller in Yorkshire who flogs these items refurbished, significantly cheaper than new. I phoned the mobile number on the website, and after a few minutes conversation found I had ordered two items. "You can pay by bank transfer", said the pleasant young man. "If you drop me an email confirming the order I'll send you my bank details". He gave me his email address, which was an Asian-sounding name followed by google.com. "That's me", he said, "but call me Ali. They all do".
A little later it occurred to me that I was about to wire £500 to someone I hadn't met and who didn't even have his own website. So I googled Ali's name, which took me to a page on social media which was clearly that of the same guy. You could tell, because amongst the other stuff on the page were some images concerning a kitchen supply business in Yorks.
Feeling a bit of a voyeur (although of course this stuff was publicly available) I scrolled down the photos and posts. They showed a nice looking young British Asian man with a delightful looking baby daughter. No pictures of Mrs Ali. Quite a lot of stuff about the Hajj pilgrimage, which he seemed to have made. Then things got a bit darker. An unpleasant caricature of Tony Blair with the word "Murderer" written across his forehead. A heroic reference to George Galloway. Some fiery looking Islamic preachers. And finally, inevitably, some stuff about Jews. To be fair, most of it about Israel, but also about Jews, and a hateful picture of one of the Rothschilds lined up alongside the evil Mr Burns from The Simpsons. Something about funding all world wars.
No reference to ISIL's crimes against humanity. No indication of contact with wider non-Muslim British society.
I sent an email to Ali saying I didn't want to go through with the purchase. "To be clear", I wrote, "I’m not Jewish and I think Israel has often treated the Palestinians shamefully. On the other hand I know from many conversations with Jews over the years that there is a clear distinction between Zionism and Judaism which some people, both inside and outside the Muslim world, don’t make sufficiently clearly, where they’re willing to make it at all. I don’t really want to do business with someone like that. Sorry."
(I wish now I'd also written, "I would have done just the same thing if there'd been Islamophobic comments.")
Back came the laconic reply: "OK, no problem".
Now I need to go and find another, more expensive, kitchen supply company.
Last week I needed to order some expensive domestic goods. A friend steered me in the direction of an Ebay seller in Yorkshire who flogs these items refurbished, significantly cheaper than new. I phoned the mobile number on the website, and after a few minutes conversation found I had ordered two items. "You can pay by bank transfer", said the pleasant young man. "If you drop me an email confirming the order I'll send you my bank details". He gave me his email address, which was an Asian-sounding name followed by google.com. "That's me", he said, "but call me Ali. They all do".
A little later it occurred to me that I was about to wire £500 to someone I hadn't met and who didn't even have his own website. So I googled Ali's name, which took me to a page on social media which was clearly that of the same guy. You could tell, because amongst the other stuff on the page were some images concerning a kitchen supply business in Yorks.
Feeling a bit of a voyeur (although of course this stuff was publicly available) I scrolled down the photos and posts. They showed a nice looking young British Asian man with a delightful looking baby daughter. No pictures of Mrs Ali. Quite a lot of stuff about the Hajj pilgrimage, which he seemed to have made. Then things got a bit darker. An unpleasant caricature of Tony Blair with the word "Murderer" written across his forehead. A heroic reference to George Galloway. Some fiery looking Islamic preachers. And finally, inevitably, some stuff about Jews. To be fair, most of it about Israel, but also about Jews, and a hateful picture of one of the Rothschilds lined up alongside the evil Mr Burns from The Simpsons. Something about funding all world wars.
No reference to ISIL's crimes against humanity. No indication of contact with wider non-Muslim British society.
I sent an email to Ali saying I didn't want to go through with the purchase. "To be clear", I wrote, "I’m not Jewish and I think Israel has often treated the Palestinians shamefully. On the other hand I know from many conversations with Jews over the years that there is a clear distinction between Zionism and Judaism which some people, both inside and outside the Muslim world, don’t make sufficiently clearly, where they’re willing to make it at all. I don’t really want to do business with someone like that. Sorry."
(I wish now I'd also written, "I would have done just the same thing if there'd been Islamophobic comments.")
Back came the laconic reply: "OK, no problem".
Now I need to go and find another, more expensive, kitchen supply company.
Wednesday 12 October 2016
Brexit reflections #13 - how not to negotiate
I owe Sir Keir Starmer, the new Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras, a great deal. He is an old friend of my wife's, and it's probably true to say that I would not be married to her without his involvement in a case I helped with when he was a junior barrister and I was a young composer moonlighting as a solicitor's outdoor clerk.
In his capacity as Shadow Brexit Secretary Sir Keir is pressing the Government for parliamentary scrutiny of negotiations. This is fine until you start to think about the practicalities.
In any negotiation the sensible starting position is miles away from where you're willing to end up. Britain's opening position in Brexit talks will bear only superficial resemblance to the negotiated result. If I'm right about this, what will be the point of parliamentary approval or discussion? What attitude should HMG take? "Don't worry chaps, this isn't what we really think. This is just our opening gambit, and we'll settle for anything which gives us full access to the single market"? Or should the Government have to defend a position to which it has no intention of sticking?
No doubt when agreement finally limps into view there will be calls for Parliamentary endorsement. So what do we do if the Government is unable to command a majority? Do we go to Mrs Merkel and say, "Sorry Angela, but you know this deal we've spent years negotiating - we're going to have to start again because parliament doesn't like it"?
Even if Parliament did approve a draft agreement, what if the Lords, stuffed with Lib Dem peers and overwhelmingly hostile to Brexit, keep the issue ping-ponging back and forth with an eye on the 2020 election and the chance to scupper Leave once and for all?
Parliamentary approval at any stage is unworkable where not actually counter-productive. Parliament wants to get involved because even Tory MPs cannot bear to be sidelined on the issue.
But hold on, you say, Parliament is the law-making body in this country. How can the Government do something as fundamental as this without getting Parliamentary endorsement? Well there's the Royal Prerogative, for starters. But in any event the Tories have a mandate. Their 2015 manifesto said that they'd have an In-Out referendum. If Leave won, who did Remainers - inside and outside Parliament - think was going to handle negotiations? The Greens? The Lib Dems? The inference that it would be the Tories doing so is the only reasonable one available.
As for Labour, how can they argue that they deserve the right to interfere with a process they didn't mention in their manifesto and would have stopped outright if they could?
The Tories have a mandate to secure Brexit on the best terms they possibly can according to their own judgment. Politicians and pundits may not like this, but it is the only practicable way available.
Why? Please consider what would happen if, at any stage in the process, there was a vote and the Government was defeated. That would be because they were outnumbered by Labour, the SNP and the Lib Dems. Did any of those parties promise a referendum if they were elected to govern? No. To be clear, the will of the people, as expressed in both the referendum and in the 2015 general election, would have been thwarted by MPs with no mandate whatsoever in either forum.
The sovereignty of Parliament has been much invoked in the aftermath, as if that institution were the only source of legitimacy, but pardoxically in this situation I can't think of any better way to bring Parliament into disrepute.
Labour's new Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the EU has made the mistake of assuming that because there's something unsatisfactory about the Government's mandate for the specifics of Brexit (and clearly it's not ideal to say the least) there must somewhere be a perfect way of dealing with it. There may be (although I can't think of one), but the way Sir Keir proposes is actually less democratic and therefore worse.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Parliamentary scrutiny won't happen. It will. The Tory majority is too small, and God knows the party has enough dim and fractious MPs. Brexit terms will be debated in Parliament, the whole business will be a dog's breakfast of interference and we will get a worse deal as a result.
Many years ago I used to play 5-a-side football against Sir Keir. My abiding memory is of his footsteps approaching at speed: if you got the ball, he would be coming, and if you lingered long enough he would take it off you. I've got no doubt that Theresa May will hear his footsteps coming too, for Keir is a person whose brains and charisma put him in a different league to any Labour politician since Blair.
Brains and charisma aren't the only qualities a politician needs though. Amongst many others, there's also judgment.
PS You can see, incidentally, the way this is going to go by Newsnight's report last night that HMG is willing to pay very significant contributions to the EU in order to retain unfettered single market access. HMG's negotiating position is going to be undermined at every turn, and not just by Parliament.
PPS The financial markets have a reputation for seeing straight to the unsentimental core of politics. How is this? A sixth-former could see that May's Hard Brexit rehetoric is merely the outer skin of the onion. If I had dollars I'd be buying as many pounds as I could afford. At some point it's going to occur to currency traders that maybe the government's position is not quite as tough as it looks.
In his capacity as Shadow Brexit Secretary Sir Keir is pressing the Government for parliamentary scrutiny of negotiations. This is fine until you start to think about the practicalities.
In any negotiation the sensible starting position is miles away from where you're willing to end up. Britain's opening position in Brexit talks will bear only superficial resemblance to the negotiated result. If I'm right about this, what will be the point of parliamentary approval or discussion? What attitude should HMG take? "Don't worry chaps, this isn't what we really think. This is just our opening gambit, and we'll settle for anything which gives us full access to the single market"? Or should the Government have to defend a position to which it has no intention of sticking?
No doubt when agreement finally limps into view there will be calls for Parliamentary endorsement. So what do we do if the Government is unable to command a majority? Do we go to Mrs Merkel and say, "Sorry Angela, but you know this deal we've spent years negotiating - we're going to have to start again because parliament doesn't like it"?
Even if Parliament did approve a draft agreement, what if the Lords, stuffed with Lib Dem peers and overwhelmingly hostile to Brexit, keep the issue ping-ponging back and forth with an eye on the 2020 election and the chance to scupper Leave once and for all?
Parliamentary approval at any stage is unworkable where not actually counter-productive. Parliament wants to get involved because even Tory MPs cannot bear to be sidelined on the issue.
But hold on, you say, Parliament is the law-making body in this country. How can the Government do something as fundamental as this without getting Parliamentary endorsement? Well there's the Royal Prerogative, for starters. But in any event the Tories have a mandate. Their 2015 manifesto said that they'd have an In-Out referendum. If Leave won, who did Remainers - inside and outside Parliament - think was going to handle negotiations? The Greens? The Lib Dems? The inference that it would be the Tories doing so is the only reasonable one available.
As for Labour, how can they argue that they deserve the right to interfere with a process they didn't mention in their manifesto and would have stopped outright if they could?
The Tories have a mandate to secure Brexit on the best terms they possibly can according to their own judgment. Politicians and pundits may not like this, but it is the only practicable way available.
Why? Please consider what would happen if, at any stage in the process, there was a vote and the Government was defeated. That would be because they were outnumbered by Labour, the SNP and the Lib Dems. Did any of those parties promise a referendum if they were elected to govern? No. To be clear, the will of the people, as expressed in both the referendum and in the 2015 general election, would have been thwarted by MPs with no mandate whatsoever in either forum.
The sovereignty of Parliament has been much invoked in the aftermath, as if that institution were the only source of legitimacy, but pardoxically in this situation I can't think of any better way to bring Parliament into disrepute.
Labour's new Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the EU has made the mistake of assuming that because there's something unsatisfactory about the Government's mandate for the specifics of Brexit (and clearly it's not ideal to say the least) there must somewhere be a perfect way of dealing with it. There may be (although I can't think of one), but the way Sir Keir proposes is actually less democratic and therefore worse.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Parliamentary scrutiny won't happen. It will. The Tory majority is too small, and God knows the party has enough dim and fractious MPs. Brexit terms will be debated in Parliament, the whole business will be a dog's breakfast of interference and we will get a worse deal as a result.
Many years ago I used to play 5-a-side football against Sir Keir. My abiding memory is of his footsteps approaching at speed: if you got the ball, he would be coming, and if you lingered long enough he would take it off you. I've got no doubt that Theresa May will hear his footsteps coming too, for Keir is a person whose brains and charisma put him in a different league to any Labour politician since Blair.
Brains and charisma aren't the only qualities a politician needs though. Amongst many others, there's also judgment.
PS You can see, incidentally, the way this is going to go by Newsnight's report last night that HMG is willing to pay very significant contributions to the EU in order to retain unfettered single market access. HMG's negotiating position is going to be undermined at every turn, and not just by Parliament.
PPS The financial markets have a reputation for seeing straight to the unsentimental core of politics. How is this? A sixth-former could see that May's Hard Brexit rehetoric is merely the outer skin of the onion. If I had dollars I'd be buying as many pounds as I could afford. At some point it's going to occur to currency traders that maybe the government's position is not quite as tough as it looks.
Wednesday 5 October 2016
Brexit Reflections #12 - David Runciman, Michael Gove and the education gap
An excellent article in the Graun here by academic David Runciman has some interesting things to say about Brexit and the education divide.
Runciman points out that the University-educated were overwhelmingly likely to vote Remain, whilst the rest generally voted Leave. But it's what he says about the significance of this that I find interesting. Here are some bits:
"The Brexit campaign had its own Trumpian moment, courtesy of Michael Gove, who told [Sky News] that "the British people have had enough of experts". Gove was . . . widely mocked . . . But what he said struck a deep chord, because it contained a large element of truth. The experts . . . had been telling the British public that the risks of Brexit far outweighted any potential benefits. Gove insisted that the voters should decide this for themselves, on the basis of their own experiences, rather than listening to elite voices that had a vested interest in the outcome".
Hallelujah.
"There was consternation here [in Cambridge] following the result. It was accompanied by a barely suppressed feeling that ignorance had won the day. I lost count of the number of times I was told that one of the top trending searches on Google in the immediate aftermath of the vote was "What is the EU?".
"Hearing educated remainers mock those who asked that question the day after the vote was an uncomfortable experience - and not just because the story about Google searches was largely apocryphal . . . The split between the university towns and other parts of the country did not arise because one set of people understood what was truly at stake and the others were just taking a wild guess. Both sides were guessing. Even now, no one truly knows what is going to happen."
Hallelujah.
"The better-educated cleaved to one set of predictions because these chimed with what they already believed in. Polling . . . found that university graduates thought that [a Brexit vote] would produce an immediate financial crash, whereas those with fewer qualifications thought it much more likely that things would carry on as before. Prior political preferences shape what we think the evidence shows, not the other way round . . . we all have a tendency to favour the worldview that enhances our future prospects. The preference of university graduates for remaining in the EU echoes the benefits that EU membership gives them: the free movement of labour and easy access to European networks is better for those with the qualifications to take advantage of a knowledge economy. . . [But] Education does not simply divide us on the grounds of what is in our interests. It sorts us according to where we feel we belong.
Higher numbers of graduates, Runciman goes on to say, "have reinforced the education divide by enabling the better-educated to start congregating together: socially, geographically, romantically . . . If you went to university, ask yourself: how many of your friends didn't go . . . ? And among your friends, how many of those who did are married to people who didn't?"
It's fair to say that I don't personally have any friends who don't have a degree*. My only acquaintances who don't are the window cleaner, various people who work in shops in the village and some players in the orchestras I conduct.
"Social media now enhances these patterns. Friendship groups of like-minded individuals reinforce each other's worldviews. Facebook's news feed is designed to deliver information that users are more inclined to "like". Much of the shock that followed the Brexit result in educated circles came from the fact that few people had been exposed to arguments that did not match their preferences. Education does not provide any protection against these social media effects. It reinforces them."
For me that was the most striking thing post-Brexit. Time and again I found myself speaking to people who didn't seem to have met a Leave voter. Ever. Their reactions varied from curiosity ("I must say that had never occurred to me", said one well-educated Left-leaning friend when I pointed out that the jobless and low paid perhaps didn't benefit too much from unrestricted migration) to unfeigned horror and hostility.
"Many of the safeguards that have been put in place to bypass popular politics", writes Runciman, "have had the effect of empowering a new class of experts, for whom education is a prerequisite of entry into the elite . . . not just the bankers, but the lawyers, the doctors, the civil servants, the technicians, the pundits, the academics. Not all of the educated are winners in this world, but almost all of the winners are educated. It gives the impression that knowledge has become a proxy for influence.
When Gove suggested that the experts should not be trusted because they have a vested interest in what they are saying, that was his point: once knowledge becomes a prerequisite of power, then it no longer speaks for itself. It appears to speak for the worldview of the people who possess it. At that point it ceases to be knowledge and simply becomes another mark of privilege . . . Once knowledge is assumed to be just another one of the perks of power, then the basis to trust others to take decisions for us becomes eroded. Asserting the facts and asserting your privilege grow increasingly difficult to distinguish . . . These days the rich find it quite hard to get away with the presumption that their wealth is proof of their virtue. When they seek protection from the system, it is pretty clear what they are up to: they are looking after their interests. But when the educated look out for themselves they can dress it up as something ostensibly better than that: expertise . . . To those on the receiving end, it stinks. It stinks of hypocrisy, and it also stinks of self-interest.
I think this is all very perceptive, and I query only one aspect. I absolutely take the point that the educated tended to be in favour of Remain because they - we - benefit from the EU; and I also accept that the esteem in which knowledge and education are held is diminished thereby, although I very much doubt that anyone (with or without a degree) ever thinks of this in any other than the vaguest way. But because Runciman fails to distinguish between different forms of expertise he misses a narrower point that Michael Gove was making too: why should we believe economic experts when they are almost all almost always wrong?
The great unwashed may be ignorant, but they can detect bullshit a mile off. When economic experts say there'll be a crash if we leave the EU the proles say, "Nah. Don't think so. We'll just muddle through". When experts say, "Migration is good for the economy", those at the bottom end look around them at low-wage jobs, unemployment, queues for housing and the NHS and say, "Well it's not good for me mate".
No-one is expert on the future, and working class Leavers have just as much chance of being right as Mark Carney, George Osborne and David Cameron.
*I do however have a number of friends who only have one degree :)
Runciman points out that the University-educated were overwhelmingly likely to vote Remain, whilst the rest generally voted Leave. But it's what he says about the significance of this that I find interesting. Here are some bits:
"The Brexit campaign had its own Trumpian moment, courtesy of Michael Gove, who told [Sky News] that "the British people have had enough of experts". Gove was . . . widely mocked . . . But what he said struck a deep chord, because it contained a large element of truth. The experts . . . had been telling the British public that the risks of Brexit far outweighted any potential benefits. Gove insisted that the voters should decide this for themselves, on the basis of their own experiences, rather than listening to elite voices that had a vested interest in the outcome".
Hallelujah.
"There was consternation here [in Cambridge] following the result. It was accompanied by a barely suppressed feeling that ignorance had won the day. I lost count of the number of times I was told that one of the top trending searches on Google in the immediate aftermath of the vote was "What is the EU?".
"Hearing educated remainers mock those who asked that question the day after the vote was an uncomfortable experience - and not just because the story about Google searches was largely apocryphal . . . The split between the university towns and other parts of the country did not arise because one set of people understood what was truly at stake and the others were just taking a wild guess. Both sides were guessing. Even now, no one truly knows what is going to happen."
Hallelujah.
"The better-educated cleaved to one set of predictions because these chimed with what they already believed in. Polling . . . found that university graduates thought that [a Brexit vote] would produce an immediate financial crash, whereas those with fewer qualifications thought it much more likely that things would carry on as before. Prior political preferences shape what we think the evidence shows, not the other way round . . . we all have a tendency to favour the worldview that enhances our future prospects. The preference of university graduates for remaining in the EU echoes the benefits that EU membership gives them: the free movement of labour and easy access to European networks is better for those with the qualifications to take advantage of a knowledge economy. . . [But] Education does not simply divide us on the grounds of what is in our interests. It sorts us according to where we feel we belong.
Higher numbers of graduates, Runciman goes on to say, "have reinforced the education divide by enabling the better-educated to start congregating together: socially, geographically, romantically . . . If you went to university, ask yourself: how many of your friends didn't go . . . ? And among your friends, how many of those who did are married to people who didn't?"
It's fair to say that I don't personally have any friends who don't have a degree*. My only acquaintances who don't are the window cleaner, various people who work in shops in the village and some players in the orchestras I conduct.
"Social media now enhances these patterns. Friendship groups of like-minded individuals reinforce each other's worldviews. Facebook's news feed is designed to deliver information that users are more inclined to "like". Much of the shock that followed the Brexit result in educated circles came from the fact that few people had been exposed to arguments that did not match their preferences. Education does not provide any protection against these social media effects. It reinforces them."
For me that was the most striking thing post-Brexit. Time and again I found myself speaking to people who didn't seem to have met a Leave voter. Ever. Their reactions varied from curiosity ("I must say that had never occurred to me", said one well-educated Left-leaning friend when I pointed out that the jobless and low paid perhaps didn't benefit too much from unrestricted migration) to unfeigned horror and hostility.
"Many of the safeguards that have been put in place to bypass popular politics", writes Runciman, "have had the effect of empowering a new class of experts, for whom education is a prerequisite of entry into the elite . . . not just the bankers, but the lawyers, the doctors, the civil servants, the technicians, the pundits, the academics. Not all of the educated are winners in this world, but almost all of the winners are educated. It gives the impression that knowledge has become a proxy for influence.
When Gove suggested that the experts should not be trusted because they have a vested interest in what they are saying, that was his point: once knowledge becomes a prerequisite of power, then it no longer speaks for itself. It appears to speak for the worldview of the people who possess it. At that point it ceases to be knowledge and simply becomes another mark of privilege . . . Once knowledge is assumed to be just another one of the perks of power, then the basis to trust others to take decisions for us becomes eroded. Asserting the facts and asserting your privilege grow increasingly difficult to distinguish . . . These days the rich find it quite hard to get away with the presumption that their wealth is proof of their virtue. When they seek protection from the system, it is pretty clear what they are up to: they are looking after their interests. But when the educated look out for themselves they can dress it up as something ostensibly better than that: expertise . . . To those on the receiving end, it stinks. It stinks of hypocrisy, and it also stinks of self-interest.
I think this is all very perceptive, and I query only one aspect. I absolutely take the point that the educated tended to be in favour of Remain because they - we - benefit from the EU; and I also accept that the esteem in which knowledge and education are held is diminished thereby, although I very much doubt that anyone (with or without a degree) ever thinks of this in any other than the vaguest way. But because Runciman fails to distinguish between different forms of expertise he misses a narrower point that Michael Gove was making too: why should we believe economic experts when they are almost all almost always wrong?
The great unwashed may be ignorant, but they can detect bullshit a mile off. When economic experts say there'll be a crash if we leave the EU the proles say, "Nah. Don't think so. We'll just muddle through". When experts say, "Migration is good for the economy", those at the bottom end look around them at low-wage jobs, unemployment, queues for housing and the NHS and say, "Well it's not good for me mate".
No-one is expert on the future, and working class Leavers have just as much chance of being right as Mark Carney, George Osborne and David Cameron.
*I do however have a number of friends who only have one degree :)
Tuesday 20 September 2016
In defence of Paul Gascoigne
Actually, Paul Gascoigne's request to his black bouncer (alleged to have been "can you smile please, because I can't see you") is indefensible. So no, I have nothing to say in Gascoigne's defence.
However just because I can't find anything good to say about Gascoigne's comment doesn't mean the ex-footballer should have got a criminal conviction.
Gascoigne was apparently charged under section 31(1)(c) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. A person is guilty of this offence if he commits an offence under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 which is racially or religiously aggravated. That's to say to commit an offence under the 1998 Act you must have committed an offence under the earlier Act with some religious or racial aggravation added on.
Section 5 of the POA says you're guilty of an offence if (inter alia) you use "threatening or abusive words or behaviour . . . within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby." Gascoigne certainly didn't use any threatening behaviour, so the allegation must have been that he used "abusive words".
Is "Can you smile please, because I can't see you" abusive? It suggests of course that by reason of the bouncer's dark skin he was hard to see. But that's not exactly abuse. Calling someone a fat cunt is abuse. Gascoigne's words may have been humiliating and insulting, but it isn't an offence to humiliate or insult someone (actually we know this specifically in the case of s.5 because it contained the word insulting until February 2014, when it was removed from the Act).
If Gascoigne's words aren't abusive he hasn't committed an offence. And were his words likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress? Harassment suggests a continuous course of behaviour; this was a one-off. A bouncer employed by Gascoigne is unlikely to have felt alarm. Distress seems a bit nearer the mark, although I'm surprised Gascoigne's barrister didn't argue that distress requires a degree of extreme pain beyond annoyance and offence.
So it looks as if Gascoigne had a reasonable chance of acquittal on either the meaning of abusive or the meaning of distress. And yet he, presumably on the advice of his brief, decided to plead guilty. Strange.
I worry desperately about the use of the law to impose liberalism's norms on public discourse. In case you think I'm alone in this, here's Matthew Norman, writing on the Gascoigne case recently in the Independent - "Personally, I think the infringement of the criminal law into matters of taste is clumsy and generally counterproductive, and that the sanctity of freedom of speech outweighs the need to protect people from being offended . . . in what surreal madhouse is an offensive joke automatically conflated with a criminal offence? Here we find the quality of mercy strained to destruction".
There is a place for constraint of free speech. Well actually two of them. The first is that if the words are defamatory you should be able to secure damages in the civil courts. The second is where the words either put a person in fear of violence, or make it likely that violence will ensue. Free speech is too precious to mess about with in any other circumstances.
And the best remedy for people like Gascoigne is to know them, pity them and, if persistent, shun and avoid them.
However just because I can't find anything good to say about Gascoigne's comment doesn't mean the ex-footballer should have got a criminal conviction.
Gascoigne was apparently charged under section 31(1)(c) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. A person is guilty of this offence if he commits an offence under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 which is racially or religiously aggravated. That's to say to commit an offence under the 1998 Act you must have committed an offence under the earlier Act with some religious or racial aggravation added on.
Section 5 of the POA says you're guilty of an offence if (inter alia) you use "threatening or abusive words or behaviour . . . within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby." Gascoigne certainly didn't use any threatening behaviour, so the allegation must have been that he used "abusive words".
Is "Can you smile please, because I can't see you" abusive? It suggests of course that by reason of the bouncer's dark skin he was hard to see. But that's not exactly abuse. Calling someone a fat cunt is abuse. Gascoigne's words may have been humiliating and insulting, but it isn't an offence to humiliate or insult someone (actually we know this specifically in the case of s.5 because it contained the word insulting until February 2014, when it was removed from the Act).
If Gascoigne's words aren't abusive he hasn't committed an offence. And were his words likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress? Harassment suggests a continuous course of behaviour; this was a one-off. A bouncer employed by Gascoigne is unlikely to have felt alarm. Distress seems a bit nearer the mark, although I'm surprised Gascoigne's barrister didn't argue that distress requires a degree of extreme pain beyond annoyance and offence.
So it looks as if Gascoigne had a reasonable chance of acquittal on either the meaning of abusive or the meaning of distress. And yet he, presumably on the advice of his brief, decided to plead guilty. Strange.
I worry desperately about the use of the law to impose liberalism's norms on public discourse. In case you think I'm alone in this, here's Matthew Norman, writing on the Gascoigne case recently in the Independent - "Personally, I think the infringement of the criminal law into matters of taste is clumsy and generally counterproductive, and that the sanctity of freedom of speech outweighs the need to protect people from being offended . . . in what surreal madhouse is an offensive joke automatically conflated with a criminal offence? Here we find the quality of mercy strained to destruction".
There is a place for constraint of free speech. Well actually two of them. The first is that if the words are defamatory you should be able to secure damages in the civil courts. The second is where the words either put a person in fear of violence, or make it likely that violence will ensue. Free speech is too precious to mess about with in any other circumstances.
And the best remedy for people like Gascoigne is to know them, pity them and, if persistent, shun and avoid them.
Tuesday 13 September 2016
Grammar schools and the centre ground
Like a lot of people wobbling around the centre ground of British politics, I viewed the elevation of Theresa May with a certain amount of relief. She was bright, thorough, hard-working and capable. And she was not either Andrea Leadsom or Jeremy Corbyn.
But oh Theresa, what's this stuff about education?
Two quick points. Grammar schools suck in the brightest and best. Bully for them; but where does that leave everyone else? One of the biggest problems besetting working class children is that they are more likely to be brought up by parents who never got anything out of education themselves, and are less likely to be committed to its benefits. I know from my own kids' experiences that there is a strong anti-education ethos among some denizens of comprehensive schools. Bright, well-supported middle class kids are a modest corrective in such places. Diminishing their numbers would be a disaster.
And letting faith schools select more children by religious practice runs the return of grammars close for stupidity. Leaving aside the injustice (it's unfair to tell people that their children can't go to the local school their taxes have helped pay for, just because they practice the wrong - or no - religion), what does such division do for integration? It prevents it. Labour MP Angela Rayner stood up in the Commons and accused May of "Segregation, segregation, segregation". Given Labour's dismal record of encouraging multiculturalism that's galling to hear. But Ms Rayner is right. What Britain urgently needs is 20 years or so of kids of all faiths going to school together, falling in love, doing sport, going out clubbing, drinking cider in bus stops and all the rest.
Personally I would do away with state-funded faith schools altogether. When I put this to a Christian friend he said, "Yes, but you're forgetting that C of E schools are the last repository in society for teaching Christian values". Whether you think this is a good thing depends on your point of view; as a non-Christian I can value the immense contribution of Christianity to the Enlightenment whilst thinking that perhaps Christian values should sink or swim on their own. Certainly I think (and the Birmingham Trojan Horse experience bears this out) that Islamic schools are a catastrophe in the making (a family friend who works with the Government's Prevent scheme tells me he is very worried about radicalisation, which he says is breeding a society within a society; and this guy is staunch Old Labour with a lifetime's experience in social work).
I went to a private school (which, God knows, was like the Wild West in some ways), but I am not an enthusiast. Not even a Corbyn government would ban them (and I wouldn't want to live in a society so authoritarian), but their tax privileges are hard to justify. Private schools are not charities; not in a society where state education is freely available. They exist to provide safe haven and advantage for the children of the monied. Removing their charitable status would force many more bright, well-supported children into the state system. Those kids would cope, and their presence help the less fortunate.
Centre ground? Perhaps I've got so right-wing that I'm coming round the other way again. May out! Corbyn in!
But oh Theresa, what's this stuff about education?
Two quick points. Grammar schools suck in the brightest and best. Bully for them; but where does that leave everyone else? One of the biggest problems besetting working class children is that they are more likely to be brought up by parents who never got anything out of education themselves, and are less likely to be committed to its benefits. I know from my own kids' experiences that there is a strong anti-education ethos among some denizens of comprehensive schools. Bright, well-supported middle class kids are a modest corrective in such places. Diminishing their numbers would be a disaster.
And letting faith schools select more children by religious practice runs the return of grammars close for stupidity. Leaving aside the injustice (it's unfair to tell people that their children can't go to the local school their taxes have helped pay for, just because they practice the wrong - or no - religion), what does such division do for integration? It prevents it. Labour MP Angela Rayner stood up in the Commons and accused May of "Segregation, segregation, segregation". Given Labour's dismal record of encouraging multiculturalism that's galling to hear. But Ms Rayner is right. What Britain urgently needs is 20 years or so of kids of all faiths going to school together, falling in love, doing sport, going out clubbing, drinking cider in bus stops and all the rest.
Personally I would do away with state-funded faith schools altogether. When I put this to a Christian friend he said, "Yes, but you're forgetting that C of E schools are the last repository in society for teaching Christian values". Whether you think this is a good thing depends on your point of view; as a non-Christian I can value the immense contribution of Christianity to the Enlightenment whilst thinking that perhaps Christian values should sink or swim on their own. Certainly I think (and the Birmingham Trojan Horse experience bears this out) that Islamic schools are a catastrophe in the making (a family friend who works with the Government's Prevent scheme tells me he is very worried about radicalisation, which he says is breeding a society within a society; and this guy is staunch Old Labour with a lifetime's experience in social work).
I went to a private school (which, God knows, was like the Wild West in some ways), but I am not an enthusiast. Not even a Corbyn government would ban them (and I wouldn't want to live in a society so authoritarian), but their tax privileges are hard to justify. Private schools are not charities; not in a society where state education is freely available. They exist to provide safe haven and advantage for the children of the monied. Removing their charitable status would force many more bright, well-supported children into the state system. Those kids would cope, and their presence help the less fortunate.
Centre ground? Perhaps I've got so right-wing that I'm coming round the other way again. May out! Corbyn in!
Wednesday 31 August 2016
Conducting, the death of ambition and getting what you need
I can remember the moment when it first occurred to me that I could be a professional conductor. I was round at a friend's. His Mum was a music teacher and we were listening to some music, or perhaps watching it on TV. I suddenly thought, "I could do this", for I knew instinctively that I was musical enough, personable enough, confident, eloquent and manipulative enough to stand on the box telling other people what to do and basking in the attention.
I also thought, "Oh bugger", because I was about 20 and had just started a Law degree.
As it happened, about the same time I began writing classical music seriously, and, thanks to a startling piece of good fortune, managed in my mid-20s to get a second grant to study composition with John Tavener at what was then Trinity College of Music. Swiftly I got my second study (piano) changed to conducting, and spent my last three years at College putting on concerts with other students. I liked it and was quite good at it; at any rate I won the College's conducting prize twice.
However by this time I thought conducting a second rate profession in comparison to composition, and when College finished I knew I wouldn't have the time (or money) to carry on. I was living in London, scratching a living with temp jobs. My parents showed no sign of wanting to pay for post-grad study, which was perhaps not surprising since by this stage I'd been a full-time student for seven years. In truth, I had little appetite for it either - I was going to be a composer, and the world was there to be conquered.
Trinity had no kind of programme for trying to ease its most promising graduates into the profession (unlike the RNCM, which does pretty well now), but right at the end of my time at Trinity my conducting teacher, Bernard Keeffe, had made what now seems a very generous offer. "A choir of which I am President", he said, "needs a new conductor. They have a concert next week. If you would like to come along I'll introduce you to the Chairman". But I didn't want to be a choral conductor, I thought, and went out with my girlfriend instead.
I regret this not so much for the loss of opportunity it undoubtedly represented (which if modest was real - who knows where it might have led?), but because of the snub to Bernard (a man from whom I learned at least as much about music as from Tavener). It's true that we hadn't always seen eye to eye, but if anything that made his expression of faith in me all the more generous. He deserved better.
So that was that with conducting, for fifteen years, until 2003 when, thanks to the indisposition of a friend, I got the chance to take a rehearsal with an amateur orchestra in Manchester. On the basis of that rehearsal they gave me a concert, and on the basis of that concert made me Music Director. And so I began conducting orchestras again.
During the decade that has followed I've sometimes wondered whether I might make it into the profession. I've often conducted orchestras some of whose players have been paid, or some of whom have been ex-pros. I am usually paid myself (although I would willingly conduct a good orchestra for nothing). But I've never conducted a salaried professional orchestra, and I've always wanted to, partly to find out whether I was good enough, partly because the better the players the more you can get into the really interesting stuff (as opposed to fixing the stuff which keeps going wrong) and partly because the money would stop my wife telling me to go and get a proper job.
It hasn't been a burning issue, but I hear so many stories from musician friends about incompetent, underprepared or downright nasty conductors who are out there (Getting work! Having agents! Earning good money!) that you can't help but think - why not me?
The answer to that of course is that, like most glamour professions, conducting is way oversubscribed. You are competing against people who always knew this was what they wanted to do, who were better looking, better resourced, better connected and possibly even harder working and more talented than you are. On the whole those are the kind of people who are going to get on, not composers who started conducting as a side-line in their early forties (and who now increasingly resemble Frank Dobson, the former Labour member for Holborn and St Pancras).
I sometimes think it's possible that I'll be asked to conduct a professional orchestra in one of my own pieces, and that, beguiled by my cheery attitude and insistence on short rehearsals, I'll be invited back to do a tour of Belorussia where we'll do Brahms 4 a dozen times in two weeks. But it hasn't happened. And until last year I minded. Slightly.
Then in 2015 I went to see the BBC Phil play at the Bridgewater in Mancester. The repertoire was Beatrice and Benedict, the Brahms fiddle concerto, La Valse and Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements. I found myself thinking, I could conduct all these pieces, but it's a big programme. And God I'd have been bricking it the night before. I mean, all those time changes. The players won't know some of it all that well. They'll be depending on me. What if I go wrong? One mistake and we're all fucked. And that's just the Stravinsky. La Valse isn't easy. Neither is the Berlioz. And the Brahms concerto - well, you never know what soloists are going to do.
So while I knew I could do it all, I knew that it would have been a major undertaking. Yet the BBC Phil's conductor, a young Frenchman, made it look easy. He stood there, an elegant mess of beguiling dark curls, one hand on the rail, smiling at the orchestra, hardly looking at the score, a picture of the art which conceals art.
For I knew how much work it would have cost him to master such a programme so thoroughly. Hours and hours of labour - reading, learning and marking up the scores. Learning it not so that it would go right, but so that it could not possibly go wrong. And I thought, I do not have time to do this. Not and compose as well. And, knowing me, I would have found the job of learning the Stravinsky a terrible drudge. For I do not like Stravinsky much, finding a lot of his music devoted mostly to showing the listener how clever the composer is. And I am not very good at doing things I don't like.
As a conductor of amateur orchestras, some of which are pretty good, I can by and large choose the music I conduct. Moreover I get loads of rehearsal time. Over the years I've conducted all the greats. Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen - and quite a lot of my own music as well. Conducting has given me a mechanic's view into the engine of some of the greatest pieces of art Western civilisation has ever devised. What a privilege. When I look back at my early orchestral pieces I don't shudder at their incompetence: they're surprisingly good considering I knew next to nothing about how to write for orchestra. But conducting has made me far, far better at it.
I have also learned a good deal about myself. Before I became a conductor I was always one of the people who sat at the back of the room trying to be funny (sometimes) and clever (less often). Conducting forced me to take responsibility. I haven't enjoyed that part of it, but it's the flip side of being in charge. It still astonishes me that, often after many years working together, there are musicians who are not just willing to tolerate me but who appear to actually like me. How could that have happened? Finally it also taught me the limits of ambition. It turned out that actually I didn't want to be a professional conductor after all.
Of course I'm aware that the mind eventually finds ways of accommodating the unpalatable (perhaps even death, in due course), and that this could merely be some mid-life ex post facto rationalisation. But all the same I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones You Can't Always Get What You Want. For Jagger / Richards continued "But if you try sometimes / you might just find / you get what you need".
I also thought, "Oh bugger", because I was about 20 and had just started a Law degree.
As it happened, about the same time I began writing classical music seriously, and, thanks to a startling piece of good fortune, managed in my mid-20s to get a second grant to study composition with John Tavener at what was then Trinity College of Music. Swiftly I got my second study (piano) changed to conducting, and spent my last three years at College putting on concerts with other students. I liked it and was quite good at it; at any rate I won the College's conducting prize twice.
However by this time I thought conducting a second rate profession in comparison to composition, and when College finished I knew I wouldn't have the time (or money) to carry on. I was living in London, scratching a living with temp jobs. My parents showed no sign of wanting to pay for post-grad study, which was perhaps not surprising since by this stage I'd been a full-time student for seven years. In truth, I had little appetite for it either - I was going to be a composer, and the world was there to be conquered.
Trinity had no kind of programme for trying to ease its most promising graduates into the profession (unlike the RNCM, which does pretty well now), but right at the end of my time at Trinity my conducting teacher, Bernard Keeffe, had made what now seems a very generous offer. "A choir of which I am President", he said, "needs a new conductor. They have a concert next week. If you would like to come along I'll introduce you to the Chairman". But I didn't want to be a choral conductor, I thought, and went out with my girlfriend instead.
I regret this not so much for the loss of opportunity it undoubtedly represented (which if modest was real - who knows where it might have led?), but because of the snub to Bernard (a man from whom I learned at least as much about music as from Tavener). It's true that we hadn't always seen eye to eye, but if anything that made his expression of faith in me all the more generous. He deserved better.
So that was that with conducting, for fifteen years, until 2003 when, thanks to the indisposition of a friend, I got the chance to take a rehearsal with an amateur orchestra in Manchester. On the basis of that rehearsal they gave me a concert, and on the basis of that concert made me Music Director. And so I began conducting orchestras again.
During the decade that has followed I've sometimes wondered whether I might make it into the profession. I've often conducted orchestras some of whose players have been paid, or some of whom have been ex-pros. I am usually paid myself (although I would willingly conduct a good orchestra for nothing). But I've never conducted a salaried professional orchestra, and I've always wanted to, partly to find out whether I was good enough, partly because the better the players the more you can get into the really interesting stuff (as opposed to fixing the stuff which keeps going wrong) and partly because the money would stop my wife telling me to go and get a proper job.
It hasn't been a burning issue, but I hear so many stories from musician friends about incompetent, underprepared or downright nasty conductors who are out there (Getting work! Having agents! Earning good money!) that you can't help but think - why not me?
The answer to that of course is that, like most glamour professions, conducting is way oversubscribed. You are competing against people who always knew this was what they wanted to do, who were better looking, better resourced, better connected and possibly even harder working and more talented than you are. On the whole those are the kind of people who are going to get on, not composers who started conducting as a side-line in their early forties (and who now increasingly resemble Frank Dobson, the former Labour member for Holborn and St Pancras).
I sometimes think it's possible that I'll be asked to conduct a professional orchestra in one of my own pieces, and that, beguiled by my cheery attitude and insistence on short rehearsals, I'll be invited back to do a tour of Belorussia where we'll do Brahms 4 a dozen times in two weeks. But it hasn't happened. And until last year I minded. Slightly.
Then in 2015 I went to see the BBC Phil play at the Bridgewater in Mancester. The repertoire was Beatrice and Benedict, the Brahms fiddle concerto, La Valse and Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements. I found myself thinking, I could conduct all these pieces, but it's a big programme. And God I'd have been bricking it the night before. I mean, all those time changes. The players won't know some of it all that well. They'll be depending on me. What if I go wrong? One mistake and we're all fucked. And that's just the Stravinsky. La Valse isn't easy. Neither is the Berlioz. And the Brahms concerto - well, you never know what soloists are going to do.
So while I knew I could do it all, I knew that it would have been a major undertaking. Yet the BBC Phil's conductor, a young Frenchman, made it look easy. He stood there, an elegant mess of beguiling dark curls, one hand on the rail, smiling at the orchestra, hardly looking at the score, a picture of the art which conceals art.
For I knew how much work it would have cost him to master such a programme so thoroughly. Hours and hours of labour - reading, learning and marking up the scores. Learning it not so that it would go right, but so that it could not possibly go wrong. And I thought, I do not have time to do this. Not and compose as well. And, knowing me, I would have found the job of learning the Stravinsky a terrible drudge. For I do not like Stravinsky much, finding a lot of his music devoted mostly to showing the listener how clever the composer is. And I am not very good at doing things I don't like.
As a conductor of amateur orchestras, some of which are pretty good, I can by and large choose the music I conduct. Moreover I get loads of rehearsal time. Over the years I've conducted all the greats. Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen - and quite a lot of my own music as well. Conducting has given me a mechanic's view into the engine of some of the greatest pieces of art Western civilisation has ever devised. What a privilege. When I look back at my early orchestral pieces I don't shudder at their incompetence: they're surprisingly good considering I knew next to nothing about how to write for orchestra. But conducting has made me far, far better at it.
I have also learned a good deal about myself. Before I became a conductor I was always one of the people who sat at the back of the room trying to be funny (sometimes) and clever (less often). Conducting forced me to take responsibility. I haven't enjoyed that part of it, but it's the flip side of being in charge. It still astonishes me that, often after many years working together, there are musicians who are not just willing to tolerate me but who appear to actually like me. How could that have happened? Finally it also taught me the limits of ambition. It turned out that actually I didn't want to be a professional conductor after all.
Of course I'm aware that the mind eventually finds ways of accommodating the unpalatable (perhaps even death, in due course), and that this could merely be some mid-life ex post facto rationalisation. But all the same I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones You Can't Always Get What You Want. For Jagger / Richards continued "But if you try sometimes / you might just find / you get what you need".
Monday 22 August 2016
Orwell's statue and the BBC
The other day I learned that Westminster City Council has given planning permission for a bronze statue of George Orwell to be placed outside New Broadcasting House. The BBC has welcomed this, although the initiative didn't come from them and has in fact been paid for by private subscription.
A rousing two and a half cheers. Orwell is clearly the greatest Left wing British writer, and one of the greatest British Left wing thinkers. Whatever his shortcomings as a novelist (personally I think he's a much better essayist), 1984 and Animal Farm were books which changed the world. Very few writers can say they've done that. These two books helped destroy the intellectual case for Communism and were, it's often forgotten, works which required great moral courage to write, given that the author was swimming against a flood tide of pro-Soviet consensus amongst his friends, colleagues and political class generally.
I like to think that, had he lived, a man as fearless and scrupulous as Orwell would have tempered his Leftism in the face of the way the world changed after the 39-45 war. As Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?" In Orwell's absence, the rest of us must look at the example of his method and try and live up to it.
But back to the BBC, where Orwell worked for two years during the war. The inscription behind his statue is to be, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear".
Worryingly, this is a principle which I would guess is more controversial and less widely accepted now than at any time since Orwell's death, not least at the BBC itself. For the Corporation itself has a less than noble record of not listening to things it doesn't want to hear.
I'm thinking of immigration, where the BBC has repeatedly had to concede (In its own 2007 report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, and five years later in the Stuart Prebble report of 2013 for the BBC Trust) that it ignored the concerns of the general public.
Then there's Brexit, where the editorial staff seemed to have no idea that there were people beyond West London who might not actually benefit from EU membership; the look of shock on reporters' faces when the result came in spoke volumes for the collision they had just endured with the views of ordinary people.
So I would have thought another quote from Orwell might be more apposite behind his statue. How about this from The Lion and the Unicorn?
"Underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia - their severance from the common culture of the country".
Or maybe a gloss on the original quote -
"If public service broadcasting means anything at all, it means listening to the people even when you don't want to hear what they're saying".
A rousing two and a half cheers. Orwell is clearly the greatest Left wing British writer, and one of the greatest British Left wing thinkers. Whatever his shortcomings as a novelist (personally I think he's a much better essayist), 1984 and Animal Farm were books which changed the world. Very few writers can say they've done that. These two books helped destroy the intellectual case for Communism and were, it's often forgotten, works which required great moral courage to write, given that the author was swimming against a flood tide of pro-Soviet consensus amongst his friends, colleagues and political class generally.
I like to think that, had he lived, a man as fearless and scrupulous as Orwell would have tempered his Leftism in the face of the way the world changed after the 39-45 war. As Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?" In Orwell's absence, the rest of us must look at the example of his method and try and live up to it.
But back to the BBC, where Orwell worked for two years during the war. The inscription behind his statue is to be, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear".
Worryingly, this is a principle which I would guess is more controversial and less widely accepted now than at any time since Orwell's death, not least at the BBC itself. For the Corporation itself has a less than noble record of not listening to things it doesn't want to hear.
I'm thinking of immigration, where the BBC has repeatedly had to concede (In its own 2007 report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, and five years later in the Stuart Prebble report of 2013 for the BBC Trust) that it ignored the concerns of the general public.
Then there's Brexit, where the editorial staff seemed to have no idea that there were people beyond West London who might not actually benefit from EU membership; the look of shock on reporters' faces when the result came in spoke volumes for the collision they had just endured with the views of ordinary people.
So I would have thought another quote from Orwell might be more apposite behind his statue. How about this from The Lion and the Unicorn?
"Underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia - their severance from the common culture of the country".
Or maybe a gloss on the original quote -
"If public service broadcasting means anything at all, it means listening to the people even when you don't want to hear what they're saying".
Monday 25 July 2016
Brexit reflections #11 - the emergency brake redux
Yesterday the papers reported a startling fact. "UK officials" had, as the Guardian put it, confirmed that an emergency brake on immigration was "on the table" in Brexit talks.
Most of the comment which followed this story (unspecific as to who "UK officials" might have been, but nevertheless so widely printed that you'd think it had some basis in fact) concerned the outrage of Tory MPs hostile to immigration. They had not, they fulminated, fought for so long for Brexit only to have one of its principal charms taken away at the moment of victory.
I guess you can see their point; but for me the really astonishing facet of this story, assuming it to be broadly true, lay elsewhere.
David Cameron went to Brussels to ask for concessions which would enable him to sell Remain to the British. He went to see Angela Merkel, we are told, and asked for an emergency brake on immigration. Nein, said Frau Merkel. Not a chance. Cameron had to make do with minor concessions on benefits for migrants, which by the time of the Referendum hadn't been agreed by other EU countries (and would in any case have been dependent on their unanimous agreement). Britain duly voted to Leave.
So this is where we are. A variation on the principle of free movement which Cameron was refused in the months before the Referendum now suddenly appears to be possible, and may be combined with continued access to the single market now we have voted Leave.
Wow.
If you assume it's true that other EU countries were mostly dismayed by the Brexit vote and would, whatever their reservations about Britain, have largely preferred us to stay, what are we to infer from this extraordinary volte face?
It must be agonising for EUrophiles to contemplate the effect this concession might have had if it been made, say, at the beginning of June. David Cameron would have been able to say, "Look! At last we have some means of stopping this unending flow of migrants. 330,000 net last year. A group of people roughly the size of Bristol. At last we'll be able to start bringing that figure down". A lot of people would have voted differently. The Referendum result would probably have different.
For EUrosceptics this change of heart prompts at the very least a grim shake of the head. For does it not show the staggering incompetence of the EU leadership? Migration might have been the most important issue in the Referendum, but an emergency brake, a sign that the tide might begin to slow, could have had a huge impact on the result. You'd have to imagine that EU leaders are kicking themselves.
What does this extraordinary mistake make Merkel, Juncker, Schwarz and Hollande et al look like?
Well here's a few things. Proud, inflexible, ill-informed (what were their UK diplomats doing?), unimaginative and doctrinaire for starters.
What absolutely crap leadership.
Aha, say the old Brexit hands. We told you that's what they were like.
Most of the comment which followed this story (unspecific as to who "UK officials" might have been, but nevertheless so widely printed that you'd think it had some basis in fact) concerned the outrage of Tory MPs hostile to immigration. They had not, they fulminated, fought for so long for Brexit only to have one of its principal charms taken away at the moment of victory.
I guess you can see their point; but for me the really astonishing facet of this story, assuming it to be broadly true, lay elsewhere.
David Cameron went to Brussels to ask for concessions which would enable him to sell Remain to the British. He went to see Angela Merkel, we are told, and asked for an emergency brake on immigration. Nein, said Frau Merkel. Not a chance. Cameron had to make do with minor concessions on benefits for migrants, which by the time of the Referendum hadn't been agreed by other EU countries (and would in any case have been dependent on their unanimous agreement). Britain duly voted to Leave.
So this is where we are. A variation on the principle of free movement which Cameron was refused in the months before the Referendum now suddenly appears to be possible, and may be combined with continued access to the single market now we have voted Leave.
Wow.
If you assume it's true that other EU countries were mostly dismayed by the Brexit vote and would, whatever their reservations about Britain, have largely preferred us to stay, what are we to infer from this extraordinary volte face?
It must be agonising for EUrophiles to contemplate the effect this concession might have had if it been made, say, at the beginning of June. David Cameron would have been able to say, "Look! At last we have some means of stopping this unending flow of migrants. 330,000 net last year. A group of people roughly the size of Bristol. At last we'll be able to start bringing that figure down". A lot of people would have voted differently. The Referendum result would probably have different.
For EUrosceptics this change of heart prompts at the very least a grim shake of the head. For does it not show the staggering incompetence of the EU leadership? Migration might have been the most important issue in the Referendum, but an emergency brake, a sign that the tide might begin to slow, could have had a huge impact on the result. You'd have to imagine that EU leaders are kicking themselves.
What does this extraordinary mistake make Merkel, Juncker, Schwarz and Hollande et al look like?
Well here's a few things. Proud, inflexible, ill-informed (what were their UK diplomats doing?), unimaginative and doctrinaire for starters.
What absolutely crap leadership.
Aha, say the old Brexit hands. We told you that's what they were like.
Wednesday 13 July 2016
Labour's troubles are even worse than we think
On a heady morning in May 1997, dazed from lack of sleep, I made my way to work up the Essex Road, Islington on the top deck of a No.73 bus. It may well not have been the morning after Tony Blair's landslide election victory, but might have been the morning after that: for I was reading a column in the Guardian - of course - by Hugo Young, reflecting on Labour's historic triumph.
At the time Young, now long dead, was the Graun's big shot columnist. I wish I could remember his exact words, but their thrust was plain. The Tories, he wrote, are now finished. Forever.
Even then, euphoric at Blair's victory, I remember thinking, "Oh come on. Life's not like that. Nor is politics".
As I write this Theresa May is about to be installed as PM after a mercifully truncated leadership campaign and the Tories are the only plausible governing party in Britain. Young was wrong. Tory exile from power lasted a mere 13 years.
On the other hand Labour's NEC met last night to establish whether its leader Jeremy Corbyn, hated by the majority of his parliamentary colleagues, needed their support to get on the ballot paper to contest Angela Eagle's leadership challenge. The NEC decided Corbyn could run as of right. This morning it appears that Owen Smith MP has thrown his hat in the ring too, an act of incomprehensible political self-harm.
Labour has been virtually wiped out in Scotland. The EU referendum result appears to confirm what the 2015 election suggested - that the party is now losing its core support in the north and midlands to UKIP. So is Labour finished?
In 1997 the Tories had merely lost an election. Labour's position is far, far worse. But actually I think it's even worse than the most of the party realises.
For me the overarching lesson of the 2008 crash was that our economy had been dependent for too long on borrowing, both public and private. Labour briefly ran a surplus inherited from the Tories, but in about 2001 Gordon Brown began to spend. Even while the economy was growing, he ran a counter-cyclical counter-Keynesian spending splurge. Public spending nearly doubled under Blair/Brown. The bankers assisted Brown mightily by lending to any Tom, Dick or Harry with a job. The economy boomed, and private debt levels rocketed.
Now the bankers must take their share of the blame, but people forget to ask what would have happened if they had behaved responsibly. Answer - the boom would have come to a halt even sooner. The 2008 crash distracts by its apocalyptic nature from the underlying reality, which is that our standard of living - as private individuals and as consumers of public services - had been kept artificially high by borrowing from future income streams. As Frank Field wrote long before 2008 (I paraphrase), "In future, public services will have to be provided for less money, not more". After George Osborne became chancellor his much vaunted austerity succeeded only in halving Britain's deficit. In other words, we are merely racking up debt at half the rate we were doing when he became Chancellor in 2010. We are borrowing about £1.5 billion every week just to stay afloat.
The gap between our ability to pay for our standard of living and our ability to fund it has widened, as globalisation has sent manufacturing jobs abroad and growing longevity has increased strain on pensions and the NHS. The days of Gordon Brown's lavish spending increases are gone. I suggest they will never come back. You can argue whether that's a good or bad thing till you're blue in the face, but it would be pointless because even if you would like them to return, the money is not there.
I think Labour supporters are divided into roughly three groups. The smallest group contains people like Frank Field and Maurice Glasman who recognise the financial realities. The largest group thinks 2008 was largely the bankers' fault and that without the crash we'd still be tootling on as before (but this group, in which I'd include the overwhelming majority of the PLP, is slightly at a loss as to how to improve on Tory solutions). The last group includes the hard left entryists of the Corbynite persuasion. They think there's a magic button which can be pressed - spending, printing, borrowing, taxing the rich - which will get the state's coffers filling again. They are fantasists of course, but the certainty and simplicity of their prescription, its la-la-not-listening to the harsh realities of economic and social circumstance explains its appeal to a growing of Labour supporters. Hence Corbyn and his Momentum chums.
Labour's problems are worse than it realises because even if this last group can be seen off - and events of the last few weeks make that seem a slim hope - the others have no intellectually defensible or practical answers to the problems facing Britain. You may hate the Tories all you like, but their policy of bearing down on public spending and trying to encourage business to generate the taxes which will make Britain's public finances sustainable has at least the merit of coherence (it also, coincidentally, chimes with our own experiences as citizens in trying to run our own lives). When you add together that - in contrast to Labour's mediocre offerings - they have a new leader with a long history of performing competently in one of the great offices of state, it's difficult to see how Labour are going to claw their way back into contention.
At this stage the proposition that Labour are in deep trouble seems like a woeful underestimation of their problems. Unlike Hugo Young I wouldn't risk saying Labour is finished as a party. In politics things change of course. But I think they'll have to change quite a lot before Labour can form a government again.
At the time Young, now long dead, was the Graun's big shot columnist. I wish I could remember his exact words, but their thrust was plain. The Tories, he wrote, are now finished. Forever.
Even then, euphoric at Blair's victory, I remember thinking, "Oh come on. Life's not like that. Nor is politics".
As I write this Theresa May is about to be installed as PM after a mercifully truncated leadership campaign and the Tories are the only plausible governing party in Britain. Young was wrong. Tory exile from power lasted a mere 13 years.
On the other hand Labour's NEC met last night to establish whether its leader Jeremy Corbyn, hated by the majority of his parliamentary colleagues, needed their support to get on the ballot paper to contest Angela Eagle's leadership challenge. The NEC decided Corbyn could run as of right. This morning it appears that Owen Smith MP has thrown his hat in the ring too, an act of incomprehensible political self-harm.
Labour has been virtually wiped out in Scotland. The EU referendum result appears to confirm what the 2015 election suggested - that the party is now losing its core support in the north and midlands to UKIP. So is Labour finished?
In 1997 the Tories had merely lost an election. Labour's position is far, far worse. But actually I think it's even worse than the most of the party realises.
For me the overarching lesson of the 2008 crash was that our economy had been dependent for too long on borrowing, both public and private. Labour briefly ran a surplus inherited from the Tories, but in about 2001 Gordon Brown began to spend. Even while the economy was growing, he ran a counter-cyclical counter-Keynesian spending splurge. Public spending nearly doubled under Blair/Brown. The bankers assisted Brown mightily by lending to any Tom, Dick or Harry with a job. The economy boomed, and private debt levels rocketed.
Now the bankers must take their share of the blame, but people forget to ask what would have happened if they had behaved responsibly. Answer - the boom would have come to a halt even sooner. The 2008 crash distracts by its apocalyptic nature from the underlying reality, which is that our standard of living - as private individuals and as consumers of public services - had been kept artificially high by borrowing from future income streams. As Frank Field wrote long before 2008 (I paraphrase), "In future, public services will have to be provided for less money, not more". After George Osborne became chancellor his much vaunted austerity succeeded only in halving Britain's deficit. In other words, we are merely racking up debt at half the rate we were doing when he became Chancellor in 2010. We are borrowing about £1.5 billion every week just to stay afloat.
The gap between our ability to pay for our standard of living and our ability to fund it has widened, as globalisation has sent manufacturing jobs abroad and growing longevity has increased strain on pensions and the NHS. The days of Gordon Brown's lavish spending increases are gone. I suggest they will never come back. You can argue whether that's a good or bad thing till you're blue in the face, but it would be pointless because even if you would like them to return, the money is not there.
I think Labour supporters are divided into roughly three groups. The smallest group contains people like Frank Field and Maurice Glasman who recognise the financial realities. The largest group thinks 2008 was largely the bankers' fault and that without the crash we'd still be tootling on as before (but this group, in which I'd include the overwhelming majority of the PLP, is slightly at a loss as to how to improve on Tory solutions). The last group includes the hard left entryists of the Corbynite persuasion. They think there's a magic button which can be pressed - spending, printing, borrowing, taxing the rich - which will get the state's coffers filling again. They are fantasists of course, but the certainty and simplicity of their prescription, its la-la-not-listening to the harsh realities of economic and social circumstance explains its appeal to a growing of Labour supporters. Hence Corbyn and his Momentum chums.
Labour's problems are worse than it realises because even if this last group can be seen off - and events of the last few weeks make that seem a slim hope - the others have no intellectually defensible or practical answers to the problems facing Britain. You may hate the Tories all you like, but their policy of bearing down on public spending and trying to encourage business to generate the taxes which will make Britain's public finances sustainable has at least the merit of coherence (it also, coincidentally, chimes with our own experiences as citizens in trying to run our own lives). When you add together that - in contrast to Labour's mediocre offerings - they have a new leader with a long history of performing competently in one of the great offices of state, it's difficult to see how Labour are going to claw their way back into contention.
At this stage the proposition that Labour are in deep trouble seems like a woeful underestimation of their problems. Unlike Hugo Young I wouldn't risk saying Labour is finished as a party. In politics things change of course. But I think they'll have to change quite a lot before Labour can form a government again.
Monday 11 July 2016
Brexit reflections #10 - Professor Vernon Bogdanor; getting the cold shoulder
I don't think there's ever been a political issue which has divided us more. I live in a divided household. Since the referendum a number of social events have had to take place without me (it was felt that Remainer friends needed a good cry and it was best this take place without my provocative presence). Although my wife, two and a half weeks in, is showing signs of forgiving me for disagreeing with her, I have been given the cold shoulder by people I thought were my friends.
One such sent round an email. It read as follows -
"I know you might be sick of it, but this is a really important moment in our country's history. Please think about this, it is like a second chance to vote".
There followed a link to a petition to stop Article 50 being invoked.
"Now we have a chance to show the rest of Europe and parliament what we really want. Sign this petition if you want to stop Brexit."
Goodness, I thought; and there was me thinking we'd already had a chance to vote on Brexit. In the Referendum.
Something else struck me. This "second chance to vote" was only open to Remainers. That's a stroke of genius, I thought. That's the way to defeat the Leave supporters. Deny them the franchise!
My friend went on, "There is some confusion about the referendum result and what it means."
Actually Leave won by a small but clear majority. Or did they?
"Only 37% of the British electorate put a cross in the Leave box on 23rd June. The 52/48% split was not the percentage of the British electorate but the percentage of the turnout on that day. So Brexit is not the will of the people. Since then many Leave voters have changed their mind. So the figure of 37% voting for Leave is even less now . . . the majority of the British people do not want this."
But hang on. If only 37% of the British electorate voted Leave, mustn't the percentage who voted Remain have been even smaller? Something like 34%?
Who is to say that the people that didn't vote were all Remainers? Or all Leavers for that matter? Or split along the lines of those that did vote? Or split some other way? Isn't the point about public votes that they give an opportunity for those who care enough to make their opinion clear? And don't they entitle politicians to disregard the views of those that can't be bothered to turn out?
"Parliament has no mandate to vote for Brexit. If it does so it will be against the wishes of the people and undemocratic. So, to make it absolutely clear to parliament that the majority of the British people don't want to leave please sign this. Please don't think it is a lost cause, because it isn't. It is more important than the vote you made on 23rd June in many ways. It is a chance to get this country back on an even keel, to right the terrible mistakes that were made, which several of the politicians who were campaigning for Brexit now admit were wrong. People who want to remain are in the majority. Let's show really clearly that we are not going to let democracy be manipulated any more".
Oh Jesus. "More important than the vote you made on 23rd June in many ways". Give me strength.
How do we know what the "wishes of the people" are? Or what the majority of "the British people" want? We could ask them! And conveniently we just did! In a national Referendum with polling stations and a proper voter registration system!
They voted Leave.
To be fair my friend is correct about one thing. The Referendum result is not mandatory but advisory. Parliament doesn't have to go along with it. Most MPs are Remainers.
What would be the effect of ignoring the result? I don't know what disenchanted Leavers would do, but if you accept that we, the much-invoked British people, voted Leave because it offered an opportunity for the poorest to protest about their effective disenfranchisement on one of the issues about which they feel most strongly, it's not difficult to imagine the impact on faith in democracy.
At this stage we still don't know who's going to win the Tory leadership contest, or whether there'll be a snap General Election, but it's not hard to imagine the electoral consequences for any political party which ran on a pledge to ignore the Referendum result. UKIP got nearly 4 million votes in the last election. More than 17 million people voted Leave. It's not hard to see how UKIP could eat into the Labour vote in the north, or, at a time when outright parliamentary majorities are hard to come by, hold the balance of power in a coalition. I doubt my friend wants to see that any more than I do.
The other thing which struck me when I read her email related not so much to its content, but to the fact of its having been sent at all. Reading the names of the other people to whom it had been circulated I couldn't help notice that she had left out acquaintances in common whom she must have known would be Leavers. Sadly, she had thought I must be one of the Nice People who would have voted Remain. She had made an assumption about me which took my breath away.
This presented me with a dilemma. Should I ignore her email and resolve not to mention the subject next time we met? Or should I respond, pointing out politely the flaws and dangers in her argument? In the end I did neither. I wrote as follows -
"I know you'll think less of me for this, but I'm afraid I'm one of the people who voted Leave.
I guess I should be flattered by our assumption that I must have been one of the nice Remainers, but I'm not.
I could have just not responded at all, but I felt that in the interests of friendship (and I have a very high regard for you) it was best to be candid. For what it's worth my wife voted Remain and is very cross with me.
I'd be happy to explain why I voted the way I did, not to try and persuade you that you're wrong, but to advance the idea that there is a case for Leave which a reasonably intelligent and well-informed person could find decent and plausible. But I understand it may well be too late for that!
With love as always,
Nick"
That was last week. So far there's been no reply.
Should my friend stumble across this blog I would like to refer her to a letter from Professor Vernon Bogdanor of Kings College London, who wrote to the Times recently -
". . . Yet (Leave voters) are now told by academics, lawyers and others that the outcome of the referendum should be ignored on the ground that, as the former Bishop of Durham suggests, they were not voting on the EU at all but on "longstanding social grievances". Others also have suggested that Leave voters did not know what they were doing, or were bigoted (though bigotry in the form of antisemitism is more likely to be found among university students or on the Labour left that in the pubs of Sunderland or Hartlepool).
The arguments against accepting the legitimacy of the outcome of the referendum are similar to those used in the 19th century against extending the franchise. Were they to succeed, the poorer members of the community might well begin to ask whether democracy has anything at all to offer them; and that would indeed be a very dangerous development".
Bang on. And by the way, Professor Bogdanor voted Remain.
One such sent round an email. It read as follows -
"I know you might be sick of it, but this is a really important moment in our country's history. Please think about this, it is like a second chance to vote".
There followed a link to a petition to stop Article 50 being invoked.
"Now we have a chance to show the rest of Europe and parliament what we really want. Sign this petition if you want to stop Brexit."
Goodness, I thought; and there was me thinking we'd already had a chance to vote on Brexit. In the Referendum.
Something else struck me. This "second chance to vote" was only open to Remainers. That's a stroke of genius, I thought. That's the way to defeat the Leave supporters. Deny them the franchise!
My friend went on, "There is some confusion about the referendum result and what it means."
Actually Leave won by a small but clear majority. Or did they?
"Only 37% of the British electorate put a cross in the Leave box on 23rd June. The 52/48% split was not the percentage of the British electorate but the percentage of the turnout on that day. So Brexit is not the will of the people. Since then many Leave voters have changed their mind. So the figure of 37% voting for Leave is even less now . . . the majority of the British people do not want this."
But hang on. If only 37% of the British electorate voted Leave, mustn't the percentage who voted Remain have been even smaller? Something like 34%?
Who is to say that the people that didn't vote were all Remainers? Or all Leavers for that matter? Or split along the lines of those that did vote? Or split some other way? Isn't the point about public votes that they give an opportunity for those who care enough to make their opinion clear? And don't they entitle politicians to disregard the views of those that can't be bothered to turn out?
"Parliament has no mandate to vote for Brexit. If it does so it will be against the wishes of the people and undemocratic. So, to make it absolutely clear to parliament that the majority of the British people don't want to leave please sign this. Please don't think it is a lost cause, because it isn't. It is more important than the vote you made on 23rd June in many ways. It is a chance to get this country back on an even keel, to right the terrible mistakes that were made, which several of the politicians who were campaigning for Brexit now admit were wrong. People who want to remain are in the majority. Let's show really clearly that we are not going to let democracy be manipulated any more".
Oh Jesus. "More important than the vote you made on 23rd June in many ways". Give me strength.
How do we know what the "wishes of the people" are? Or what the majority of "the British people" want? We could ask them! And conveniently we just did! In a national Referendum with polling stations and a proper voter registration system!
They voted Leave.
To be fair my friend is correct about one thing. The Referendum result is not mandatory but advisory. Parliament doesn't have to go along with it. Most MPs are Remainers.
What would be the effect of ignoring the result? I don't know what disenchanted Leavers would do, but if you accept that we, the much-invoked British people, voted Leave because it offered an opportunity for the poorest to protest about their effective disenfranchisement on one of the issues about which they feel most strongly, it's not difficult to imagine the impact on faith in democracy.
At this stage we still don't know who's going to win the Tory leadership contest, or whether there'll be a snap General Election, but it's not hard to imagine the electoral consequences for any political party which ran on a pledge to ignore the Referendum result. UKIP got nearly 4 million votes in the last election. More than 17 million people voted Leave. It's not hard to see how UKIP could eat into the Labour vote in the north, or, at a time when outright parliamentary majorities are hard to come by, hold the balance of power in a coalition. I doubt my friend wants to see that any more than I do.
The other thing which struck me when I read her email related not so much to its content, but to the fact of its having been sent at all. Reading the names of the other people to whom it had been circulated I couldn't help notice that she had left out acquaintances in common whom she must have known would be Leavers. Sadly, she had thought I must be one of the Nice People who would have voted Remain. She had made an assumption about me which took my breath away.
This presented me with a dilemma. Should I ignore her email and resolve not to mention the subject next time we met? Or should I respond, pointing out politely the flaws and dangers in her argument? In the end I did neither. I wrote as follows -
"I know you'll think less of me for this, but I'm afraid I'm one of the people who voted Leave.
I guess I should be flattered by our assumption that I must have been one of the nice Remainers, but I'm not.
I could have just not responded at all, but I felt that in the interests of friendship (and I have a very high regard for you) it was best to be candid. For what it's worth my wife voted Remain and is very cross with me.
I'd be happy to explain why I voted the way I did, not to try and persuade you that you're wrong, but to advance the idea that there is a case for Leave which a reasonably intelligent and well-informed person could find decent and plausible. But I understand it may well be too late for that!
With love as always,
Nick"
That was last week. So far there's been no reply.
Should my friend stumble across this blog I would like to refer her to a letter from Professor Vernon Bogdanor of Kings College London, who wrote to the Times recently -
". . . Yet (Leave voters) are now told by academics, lawyers and others that the outcome of the referendum should be ignored on the ground that, as the former Bishop of Durham suggests, they were not voting on the EU at all but on "longstanding social grievances". Others also have suggested that Leave voters did not know what they were doing, or were bigoted (though bigotry in the form of antisemitism is more likely to be found among university students or on the Labour left that in the pubs of Sunderland or Hartlepool).
The arguments against accepting the legitimacy of the outcome of the referendum are similar to those used in the 19th century against extending the franchise. Were they to succeed, the poorer members of the community might well begin to ask whether democracy has anything at all to offer them; and that would indeed be a very dangerous development".
Bang on. And by the way, Professor Bogdanor voted Remain.
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