New music - no way to run a railway?

The other night I went to a concert.  A friend of mine was having a piece played.  A set of pieces actually, for voice and a small ensemble.  It took place in a small and chi-chi performance room in a reclaimed industrial building with the usual bare brick, entrance through a small temple to cappucino.  

I liked my friend's piece.  S/he is a talented composer.  There was a degree of hip-hoppery, with a bit of minimalism and some Second Viennese School spread over all.  The performers were all young, or aspiring to look young; black clad, with the disappointed but defiant mien that contemporary music specialists share with minor functionaries in a revolutionary state who have just learned that they have been denounced as fifth columnists by former colleagues.

The audience for this event numbered between 25 and 30. As far as I could tell from the social interaction, almost all were either friends, family or students of the composer (and/or the players).

Turning the programme over I saw that the event was made possible with the support of a variety of public funded organisations, including the Arts Council and other usual suspects.

An art that is dying?  A monument to elitism and cronyism?  Or merely no way to run a railway?

Philip Collins, Jeremy Corbyn and the social democratic dream.

"The electorate selects a Labour government to push the nation down the road of progress", writes Philip Collins in the Times today.

Ah, the P word.  A section of political thought describes itself with a self-approbatory adjective, and rests self-satisfied on its intellectual laurels.  So far, so tendentious.

But what's this?  Collins continues, "That effort inevitably leads to an excess of public spending . . . (the electorate) call on the Conservative Party to tidy up".

An admission.  Crikey.  A fascinating insight into the mental world of a Social Democrat, occasionally called to serve as speechwriter at Tony Blair's table.

 Mr Collins is too complacent.  Whilst UK's debt to GDP ratio fell consistently from the highs of WWII, it began to rise again with Gordon Brown's spending spree, doubling from about 30% in 2002 to 60% by the time the coalition government came into office in 2010.  Since then HMG has struggled to deal with the aftermath of the 2008 crash, bearing down on public spending to restore some order to the public finances.

Labour meanwhile has tried to have it both ways, criticising the Tories for cuts as well as for borrowing too much money. The worm in Mr Collins' bud is that, although now marginally falling, debt to GDP is now wobbling between 80 and 90% of GDP.  It has tripled in 15 years.  It would be astonishing if the ratio had dipped significantly by the time this Parliament limps to an end. 

Thus it is overwhelmingly likely that the next Labour government will take office with a background of vastly higher existing debt levels than at any time since the 1960s.   I wonder where Mr Collins thinks a Corbyn/McDonnell government would leave Britain's fiscal position?

The reality is that the cosy dualism Collins describes is broken.  The Tories have struggled to restore the public finances in an age of low inflation.  Public services are undoubtedly suffering (although when we are still borrowing £1bn every week just to stay afloat that's hardly austerity - profligacy lite anyone?).  An incoming Labour government will ratchet up spending still further. A crunch is coming.  The public's expectation of decent public services is meeting economic reality.  The Social Democratic dream is over.  Britain is going to look very different when the progressives wake up.

Finishing War and Peace

I have just finished War and Peace. Like most readers, I endured rather than enjoyed Tolstoy's ruminations on the nature of history and philosophy which interrupt and then bookend the trials and tribulations of Natasha, Pierre, their friends and families.  But I can see their importance, partly because the contingency of the characters' complex affairs makes in a human way the point about history Tolstoy sets out in his theoretical disquisitions.

War and Peace doesn't really finish - it sinks back into the earth, and so imperceptibly that at the end I had to leaf back through the pages to find the last mention of the people in it. That's where the real glory of the book lies.  Tolstoy shows the weaknesses of his characters without ever really seeming to condemn.  His is the magnanimity we might hope for from God.

He also shows something true about life which the translator Anthony Briggs puts so well in the introduction.  "Virtually everyone - even people in privileged or advantageous circumstances - finds the living of life a worrying and difficult business most of the time".

So true; and funny that when I read those words in the afterglow of finishing the book, I thought immediately of Larry McMurtry's peerless Lonesome Dove.  For McMurtry has the same compassion, and the same lofty sense of observing poor humans doing their best to be happy despite their manifold self-inflicted mistakes.  As much wisdom as folly is given to Woodrow F Call and Augustus McCrae in Lonesome Dove, and you don't have to search far into one of the many fan sites devoted to McMurtry's book (and, more particularly, the TV spin-off which followed) to come across the following.

(Lorie is the young prostitute yearning for the bright lights of San Francisco.  Her interlocutor is McCrae, the lazy, sardonic old Texas Ranger).

"Lorie darlin'", says McCrae, "life in San Francisco, you see, is still just life.  If you want any one thing too badly, it's likely to turn out to be a disappointment. The only healthy way to live life is to learn to like all the little everyday things, like a sip of good whiskey in the evening, a soft bed, a glass of buttermilk, or a feisty gentleman like myself".

Amen to that.  But of course the genius of Tolstoy and McMurtry is that their characters are poignantly unable to take their own advice.  

I might just have to start on Lonesome Dove again.