myth-busting # 1

Credit crunch myths - a guide for the Left.

1. "It was all the bankers' fault".

Because after all, no-one could have possibly predicted that when left to their own devices bankers would go for short-term gain and self-enrichment ahead of economic stability, could they? What next? Bears defecating in the woods? And the Government had no idea whatsoever that the City was parcelling up mortgage obligations and selling them on the open market; it had no idea that high-street lenders were offering 125% loan-to-value on houses, or that with so-called Lie To Buy (oh OK, Self-Certification) mortgages you could write any income you liked on the application form and no one would ever check whether it was true or not.

I'm wearied by my own irony - of course HMG knew about all these things; and did nothing about them. Why? Because the going was good, that's why. The City was booming, the High Street was thronged with shoppers, unemployment was low, house prices were buoyant (removed by one G Brown from the measure used by the Bank of England to target inflation), tax revenues were flooding into the Treasury coffers and then out again into the public sector. What was not to like? After all, the Chancellor told us he had put an end to Tory boom and bust. Where could bust possibly come from?

The Government rode the wave of debt like a surfer who can't believe there are rocks ahead. But rocks there were, and when the economy hit them Brown discovered a new variant on Keynes - borrow when the good times are rolling, and when the bad times come, borrow even more. And so the debt piles up, or at least it does as long as the gilt markets will carry on lending to us.

All the bankers fault. Yeah right.

nostalgia not what it used to be shock

I should have known when, a couple of years ago, there was a minor kerfuffle in the media about the thirtieth anniversary of punk - the features, the documentaries, the grizzled veterans, the ubiquity of Billy Bragg - that following hard on its heels would come the New Romantics. And here they are: a dramatisation of Boy George - the early years - on TV; the reformation (no, not that one) of Duran Duran (or is it Spandau Ballet? Or both?) - anyway, the reunion tours, the features, the documentaries, the ubiquity of some style guru or other. And so wearyingly on.

I have an interest to declare here, because I was a punk before you were a punk (perhaps: at least I was a punk after seeing the Stranglers play at the Doncaster Gaumont on June 16th 1977, a date that must have changed my life because I've remembered it for all this time). And after the stripped-down truth-seeking rawness of the best that punk had to offer, the mincing synthesisers (Ooh Vienna!), awful clothing, awful haircuts and vacuous partying of the New Romantics signalled less of a new dawn than a return to the proggish self-indulgence of the 70s. Plus ca change.

Other people's nostalgia is usually less attractive than your own, but my dislike of this latest outbreak is tempered by a chastening recollection. My generation, in its forties and fifties, in power in TV, in the newspapers and in politics, looks back fondly on its funny clothes, its hairstyles, the drugs it took and the music it listened to. What did my parents look back on in their flabby nostalgia for their own glory years? The austerity of the war and the struggle against Hitler.

Ignoring the critics

A review by Andrew Clements of James Macmillan's trumpet concerto in this morning's Graun has put my back up.

 Clements wrote "(The soloist's) virtuosity was unfailingly impressive, MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch as depressing as ever".

 It's worth pausing for a moment to savour the use of language here. Note that Clements doesn't say, "MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch was as depressing as ever". No. The was is in the previous clause praising the soloist, and we the readers carry it by inference into the criticism which follows.

Why so shy Andrew? Surely you don't lack the cojones to come right out with it?

Note also that MacMillan's bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch are taken as a given. Clements has no room to persuade us that MacMillan's music features such qualities, preferring to record his own reaction at finding those things.

As ever with criticism, this is opinion masquerading as objectivity. After all, one person's bombast is another's grandeur, and my kitsch may well be your expressiveness.

But these are run of the mill objections to art criticism, I hear you say. Fair enough. Yet what irked me about Clements's snide little put-down was not the inherent weaknesses of the shabby trade it reveals, but the sheer lack of manners and class.  Whatever else you can say about MacMillan, it seems pretty certain that he is ten times the musician Andrew Clements is. Does the critic not feel even moderately embarrassed to find himself excoriating in print someone who has forgotten more about the composer's trade then he himself will ever know?

Sibelius once said, "Ignore the critics. No statue was ever erected to a critic."

 If only it were so easy.

Thierry Henry and Climate Change

Climate change deniers the world over will have been delighted by the mass hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. What a can of worms they reveal.

Details are all over the web, but in summary they destroy the credibility of a leading climate change Cassandra, Professor Phil Jones. They reveal him in turn to be conspiring to suppress papers by climate change sceptics ("Kevin and I will keep them out somehow", he writes), conspiring to marginalise a journal which had published papers by sceptics ("I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor"), trying to downplay the extent of the Mediaeval Warm Period on the basis of a "gut feeling, no science", threatening to resist Freedom of Information requests to reveal data even to the extent of destroying it, and proposing a "trick" to substitute one set of data for another in a publication. More extraordinary still they show him corresponding with a colleague baffled at absence of recent warming ("The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't... ").

So should we stop worrying? Probably not. The people revealed by these leaks to be manipulative anti-scientists are not the only ones working in the field. They are merely some of the most influential. I do realise that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I was in the Alps in the summer and I saw with my own eyes how the glaciers were retreating.

But hasn't the climate always changed? Didn't we have glaciers in Scotland at the end of the 19th Century? Hasn't humanity has always managed to adapt, hating change at the same time as being really good at dealing with it? And though the science is persuasive, can we really be sure that humanity is actually responsible for global warming? What if it's just nature? And shouldn't we be worrying about the next ice age instead?

On the whole I, like Professor Jones, would rather keep the Climate Change gravy train going. Not because my department's funding and my reputation depends on it, but because it offers the best hope of getting out of the ludicrous cycle of consumption and over-population which besets Western society, wrecking natural habitats and turning us all into mall-zombies.

But when that arch clown George Monbiot apologises in the Guardian today for misleading his readers, revealing himself unexpectedly to be a bigger man by far than Thierry Henry, the handball cheat whose manual assist got France into the World Cup finals and kept the Irish out, you know that something truly extraordinary has happened.

Houllebeq's "Atomised" (2)

Attentive readers (if there are any) of this blog may recall a piece back in May on Michel Houllebeq's novel Atomised. It tells, I wrote at the time, "the miserable life stories of two French half brothers Bruno and Michel, abandoned by their hippy mother in childhood. Bruno turns out an inadequate sex pest; Michel an unfeeling scientist. The West, Houellebecq tell us, has given itself over to a cult of individualism. The more selfishly we behave, the more unhappy we are." I agreed with much of Houllebeq's analysis, whilst disliking his book thoroughly, finding it badly written and boring.

Now what's this in today's Guardian? A Comment piece which contains the following - "But just because big government has helped atomise (my italics) our society, it doesn't follow that smaller government would automatically bring us together again". And later, "The big government approach has spawned multiple perverse incentives that either discourage responsibility or actively encourage irresponsibility. The paradox at the heart of big government is that by taking power and responsibility away from the individual, it has only served to individuate them (great verb, individuate). What is seen in principle as an act of social solidarity has in practice led to the greatest atomisation of our society."

Has the Graun taken to commissioning op-ed pieces from reclusive French writers now resident in Ireland? Er, no. This was by David Cameron.

I guess the disparagement of big government would be the give-away.

He goes on, "The once natural bonds that existed between people - of duty and responsibility - have been replaced by the synthetic bonds of the state - regulation and beauracracy." Spot on.

So now we know: the Tory leader has been reading Atomised. Is this a good thing? Probably: after Messrs. Thatcher and Major, whose tastes ranged from Milton Friedman all the way to Jeffrey Archer and the cricket scores, any fiction-reading Tory leader would be progress. Can he fix Broken Britain? Probably not. But identifying what's wrong might be the first step.

The BNP on Question Time redux

Apologies for revisiting a story that already feels like stale buns.

As predicted, Nick Griffin was less than impressive on Question Time. He isn't a bright bloke, but I suppose it shouldn't come as any surprise that a party of meat-heads can't find anyone better. You would have thought however that in the absence of brains, the BNP could at least come up with someone with a bit of charisma. Think of Wodehouse's Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts: now there was a man to make the average arts graduate quail.

What garment should Griffin endorse? There is something of a fascist John Major about him, and I favour a variant on the underwear theme. The Black Y-Fronts has a certain ring to it.

After the show was broadcast Griffin made a complaint against the BBC, saying he felt as if he had been attacked by a lynch mob. Since he's admitted to having shared a platform with a Ku Klux Klan leader, this might not have been the most tactful way of expressing himself. Although I suppose intimates of the Klan ought to know if anyone does what a lynch mob is like.

I found it heartening the other day to hear Rio Ferdinand telling all and sundry that Griffin had the right to be heard. You can tell the depths of folly the liberal no-platform lobby has plumbed when a fading Manchester United central defender has a better grasp of the issues than Oxbridge-educated Guardianistas.

The BNP on Question Time

OK. Disclaimer time. I am not a BNP supporter and I would never vote for them.

Now that's out of the way, what to make of the furore surrounding Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time tonight?

Well, first I have been absolutely baffled by the people who say he shouldn't be given the platform. Really? Don't they understand what democracy's about? It isn't a spectator sport. It's something everyone can have a go at; otherwise it's not democracy at all. Mrs Thatcher made a similar mistake when she banned the IRA from the airwaves. So hats off to the BBC for giving Griffin an appearance - a refreshing display of moral courage from Mark Thompson.

I believe Griffin will be condemned out of his own mouth. I once heard him interviewed on Radio 5, and for a Cambridge graduate he was woefully ineffectual. I find his assertion that you can't be black and British repellent, but also perplexing. I really don't understand how you can say that someone born and raised here can't be British just because they have a brown skin. I am a bit old school on this - for me Kevin Pietersen shouldn't be playing cricket for England: living here for a few years doesn't count. On the other hand Monty Panesar is as English as buttered toast, and it's irrelevant that he's a Sikh. He's a Luton boy through and through.

The Guardian has been full of hand-wringing nonsense about Griffin in recent weeks. Its leader writers settled for opposition to his Question Time appearance, illustrating that one of the seductive tendencies of extremism is to make otherwise reasonable people into idiots. Gary Younge, writing in today's paper, urges that the solution to racism might be, er, anti-racism. I'm afraid I have no idea at all what this means.

The reality is that the BNP is thriving because it is the only political party which opposes immigration. Its leadership and supporters may well be racist, but I suspect most of the people who vote for it aren't. There is a case to be made against immigration on grounds of economics, the environment and cultural cohesion, and yet public discussion of the issue has been as thoroughly vetoed by today's polite society as discussion of prostitution was vetoed in the Victorian drawing room. There's an interesting article here (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/6400553/Cowardice-on-immigration-has-allowed-the-BNP-to-flourish.html) by Frank Field and Nicholas Soames of the Parliamentary cross-party Balanced Migration group which makes exactly this point.

Incidentally the BBC reported the Office for National Statistics' quite extraordinary prediction yesterday of a population increase to 70 million in the near future as largely attributable to "migration". I suppose we should be grateful the prediction was reported at all, but it's precisely because of this kind of mealy-mouthed attempt to avoid drawing attention to the consequences of unrestricted immigration that the BNP are on Question Time tonight.