Richard Murphy and the 50p tax rate

So it turns out, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, that the 50p tax rate is costing the Treasury money. "Up to £500 million a year", according to an article on the Torygraph website this morning.

Given that we all know the IFS is as infallible as the Pope, it'll be interesting whether this revives last week's debate on the subject, and what the Martin Luther of the bash-the-rich campaign, Richard Murphy, has to say on the subject. Actually, beyond the headlines, Paul Johnson,director of the IFS sounds a bit less certain. He's quoted as saying, “It looks like the 50p rate may be too high and that it is possible it will reduce tax revenues." Hmmn. "Up to £500 million", "looks like", "possible it will reduce". We're not quite there yet.

I have followed this subject with interest ever since I discovered that a close family member pays a small amount of tax at the 50p rate. It's a salutary experience, discovering that the Government is taking half your marginal income. For some reason, whenever the BBC wants to get two people to go head to head, it wheels out Richard Murphy, director of Tax Research LLP, an articulate, passionate and well-informed maker of the case for higher taxation, and some Chicago-school back woodsman like Patrick Minford, from whose gabble it swiftly appears he made up his mind that lower taxes were a good thing back in 1946 and hasn't thought about it for longer than two minutes since.

That may be just a coincidence. In these debates the presenters always talk about "taxing the rich", as if the term were not itself loaded. Although I know quite a lot of people who undoubtedly pay tax at the highest rate, I wouldn't describe them as "rich". For me, the rich are people born with a silver spoon in their mouths sitting on their backsides in a country retreat, whose children are rah-rahing all the way to Klosters. The people I know merely have good jobs. That's not the same thing. The true rich tend not to have jobs at all. Moreover, none of the those people got where they are because of daddy's largesse. They got it by working really hard for the last thirty years. So when I hear people talk about "taxing the rich more", I have to give myself a nudge: they're really talking about taxing more the hardest-working. It doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Of course, when a country is broke, as we are, the Government needs every penny it can get. You can hardly blame it for taxing people who, if not actually "rich", at least have a fair bit of wine in the cellar. So does the 50% rate bring in more tax or doesn't it? Obviously I personally have no idea. I know of course about the Laffer curve, which postulates that there must come a point at which raising taxes brings in less revenue not more. But leaving aside the view of the IFS, reputed to be a thoroughly scrupulous organisation, I have sometimes thought that the way that Richard Murphy conducts himself in argument suggests that he might secretly hold the opposite to his publicly stated view.

Murphy always dismisses the idea that people might leave the country because of tax rises. His position is that quite a lot of people say they will leave, but he hasn't been able to find any evidence that any of them do. Now this begs the question, how hard have you looked? Which invites the possibility that some people may be leaving but Murphy doesn't know about them. Certainly when the Thatcher government cut marginal rates from close to 90%, a number of high earners returned to the UK, Michael Caine and Phil Collins among them (was this a good thing: discuss).

But more interesting is the stuff Murphy doesn't mention. One is that the truly rich, reluctant to up sticks themselves, might nevertheless move their assets somewhere else. That does not require removal men. It takes a couple of phone calls. Another is that a marginal tax rate hike from 40 to 50% provides people with a massive incentive to people who have never bothered with tax avoidance measures to start bothering now. Furthermore avoidance measures which didn't make economic sense two years ago can suddenly become viable when tax on marginal income has effectively increased by 25%.

I have never heard Richard Murphy acknowledge these factors.

A close family member reports in the following terms. "A couple of months ago we went on a routine visit to the accountant. He told us that as a result of the tax rise it now made economic sense to formalise the ad hoc work I did to support my partner's business. I would have to pay tax myself, of course, but at a much lower rate. The result of this was that the Revenue would now get about £3000 less tax from us than when the marginal rate was 40%. As far as we were concerned, the tax rise had cost the Revenue money".

This is tax avoidance, and perfectly legal. It turns out that Mr Murphy has been doing some avoidance of his own. Blogger Tim Worstall appears to be suggesting here - http://timworstall.com/2010/08/24/in-which-we-are-challenged-by-richard-murphy/ - that Murphy has gone further, in particular that he set up a company and paid himself and his wife equal dividends, even though his wife did little work. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but the blog is well worth a read and includes Murphy's response.

Stop press: Although I don't do Twitter, I understand Murphy's tweeted response to the IFS report is that the 50% tax rate must be working, or else no one would want to get rid of it. A superficially impressive point. If, thinking back to the Laffer curve, the marginal rate were 99% and people wanted to get rid of it, would Murphy still be saying that the rate must be working? No. That people want to get rid of a tax is no guide either way to its effectiveness.

Proust and the rioters

During the extensive period in which I attempted to cut an intellectual figure by reading books none of my friends had, I spent the best part of two years labouring away at the literary marathon that is Proust's A La Recherche. For those who've never bothered, there are occasional flashes of brilliance, but many, many tedious pages describing what this or that member of an imaginary Parisian aristocracy might have meant when they glanced across the Duchess de Guermantes' drawing room. Yadda yadda yadda.

For those seeking the long roman a fleuve, Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence is shorter, funnier and equips those temperamentally suited to its stoic outlook with a mental armoury for dealing with the more unpleasant characteristics exhibited by people in pursuit of power. It's also British.

However Proust is so exhaustive in his examination of, well, just about everything, that for a long time afterwards all other writers seemed pretty superficial. And the enforced abstinence from reading anything else had the effect of cutting me off from new novels, an intermission from which I have never really caught up.

I mention this because the post-Proust out-of-touch feeling is tenuously analogous to the one experienced when you go on holiday and come back to find that in your absence the world has changed. In August quite a lot of people came out onto the streets and rioted; or rather rioted, looted and burned. Viewed on TV from the remote north of Scotland it looked rather weird and threatening ("Look", we cried, baffled, "there's the Arndale Centre. And it's on fire!"). The political and social environment doesn't seem quite the same as it did when we went away at the end of July, and it's irrationally annoying that its changed without our consent. Irrationally because if we'd been here it would have happened anyway.

What to make of the rioters' behaviour? Obviously looters are primarily a law and order problem rather than a political one, but it doesn't seem a complete waste of time to try and work out why they looted, if only to formulate ways of minimising the possibility of it happening again and to see what it might say about British society.

Are these people bad? Perhaps some of them; if they all are, we certainly have a lot of bad people in this country. But when I was a criminal lawyer I only came across one or two truly wicked people; the rest were stupid, feckless, greedy, desperate for drugs or drunk; or indeed any combination of the preceding. Given that even those of us that don't riot probably answer some of those descriptions some of the time, having those qualities clearly isn't enough to make you smash a window and nick trainers from JD Sports.

Much has been made of the revelation that four fifths of those arrested were known to the police in one way or other, and that most of them came from poor areas. I don't think this signifies. We shouldn't be surprised that most people committing criminal offences exhibit a habit of criminal behaviour; nor does the fact that most of them don't seem to have had much money mean that they stole and burned because they were poor. The riots were apparently organised by people who owned Blackberrys, which are expensive, and perhaps that's a clue. Perhaps they should have spent their Blackberry money on more useful things. But when you haven't got much money, spending a lot of it on something high-status but unnecessary might be a classic sign that you are going to do plenty of other stupid things as well. It's possible that the rioters who were out of work ended up out of work for the same reasons they ended up in trouble with the police, namely that they were stupid, feckless or drunk, as per the previous paragraph; in other words, their low socio-economic status and their criminality might both be effects of another cause.

If it's hard working out what makes people behave like this, what could we do that might minimise the risk of them doing it again?

I heard several rioters, or people sympathetic to them, complaining that "the Poles had taken all the jobs". Some of the complainants would evidently have had difficulty holding down a job till lunchtime on day one, since by then they would either have nicked something or told the boss to Eff Off. But they surely have a point. Surely some of the rioters would have stayed at home if they'd had jobs to go to, or prospects of a job. Unfortunately in 2004, when eight new countries joined the EU, the then Labour government allowed free entry of their citizens into the UK. By 2006 a BBC news report I found in a ten-second search said that the best part of 600,000 Eastern Europeans had come to Britain.

At that time the intellectually fearless Labour MP Frank Field, reported as saying that the number of migrants was "unmanageable and made it increasingly difficult for local people to get jobs", was a lone voice of dissent. Happily there is now much wider agreement that this open door policy kept wages down at the bottom end and made it much harder for British people (whether white, black, brown or any variant on the same) to get off the sofa and into work. In an economic boom, the last government missed a golden opportunity to shift a whole section of society into jobs, importing instead a labour force from overseas. As I weary of telling people, the Government's own figures tell us that over 50% of new jobs created in the period 1997 to 2008 went to people born abroad.

Saying that we shouldn't have started from here doesn't help solve our present problems, but you would hope that next time we get some economic growth (assuming we ever do), the Government of the day might try a little harder to make sure jobs go to the British.

All this assumes that jobs and the economic growth which creates them are a good thing; but surely another reason for looting is that our society is predicated on the seductiveness of shopping; people who can't shop, or can't shop much, feel entitled to loot. Blessed with more money than most people (although less desire to buy things than most), I am ill-placed to lecture others about the fatuity of this fetish. But buying things, and having things, is essentially shallow. It's doing things which is interesting. In this, if nothing else, I have some sympathy with the looters. Shorn of the ability to do something which society tells them is both their entitlement and the ultimate good, they have nothing to fall back on.

Of course, shopping and eternal growth are not just shallow. They're unsustainable. They can only be created by increased use of resources. And we are using far too much already. The world needs fewer people, and so does Britain. Ultimately we are going to have to work out how to set up a just society with fewer people and less growth.

We could start doing this by stopping paying people to have large families. As recent economic events have demonstrated with ruthless starkness, we cannot afford our current public spending. My favourite measure to reverse this trend is to restrict future child benefit payments to the first two children. Lots of people who don't work and have never worked, who aren't in a stable relationship and haven't ever seriously tried to maintain one, are being paid by the state to have children. Their children are disproportionately unlikely to work, disproportionately unlikely to form stable relationships, and, yes, disproportionately likely to take part in riots. Why subsidise them?

The liberal answer to this is to say, "Because they will have more than two children anyway, and those children will be brought up in even greater poverty". To which I would say, "Some of them will have more than two children, but not all, and perhaps quite a lot fewer. Moreover the parents who do have large families without being able to afford them might start to take greater responsibility for their decisions." Incidentally, no-one with enough to eat, a roof over their heads and access to free health care and education can truly be described as living in"poverty", and anyone who suggests otherwise is jumping up and down on language with heavy boots, as well as insulting the huge numbers of people around the world who will never own a Blackberry.

Thus the liberal's dilemma in a nutshell. You make a provision to help people who get into trouble; but as decades pass getting into trouble becomes more acceptable and more people do it. The liberal then asks for more and more provision to help them. The conservative says, No, you must allow people to take more responsibility for their actions, because then they will behave better. The liberal cries, But the children will suffer. So be it, says the conservative. It's an unattractive position, but not necessarily wrong.

Which brings me finally to absent fathers. It doesn't do young men any good to be brought up in families without a father. This isn't to say that it isn't possible. Just that young boys are surrounded by role models - footballers, pop stars, video games - which give them no clues whatsoever in how an ordinary adult man might live with dignity and self-worth. My Dad was a paragon - didn't get drunk, didn't womanise, didn't hit my Mum, held down a job he didn't like much - but even with his example I still find those things hard to do. Men who disappear as soon as there's a nappy to be changed aren't subject to any effective social censure. We wring our hands and say what a shame it is.

The solution to this problem is beyond one blog, beyond one person, and possibly beyond the reach of us all.

A postscript. This morning I read in the paper that, amongst others I have never heard of, a novel by one Patrick de Witt has made the Booker shortlist. Amazingly, I have read it already. My wife bought it for me when we were going on holiday. It's an engaging dead-pan Western called The Sisters Brothers. It has taken me twenty years, but once more I am, if not ahead of the race, at least running on the same lap as the leaders.

Or rather my wife is.

Norrington, Mahler and vibrato

As recorded elsewhere in this blog, the only thing I miss about not living in London any more is The Proms. During the season I still listen to bits of it; last night as the washing up was coming to an end, we switched the radio on. It was clearly Mahler 9, about ten minutes into the first movement. I used to really like it.

"Bit of a thin string tone", I said to S. "Wonder who's playing?"

A few minutes later a suspicion began to dawn.

"I bet it's Norrington and the Stuttgart orchestra. Where's the paper?"

The cat was sitting on it, as he does on just about any useful bit of paper, and looked most aggrieved to be moved.

"What did I say? It's Norrington and his no-vibrato wonders".

"I've been telling you that for the last two minutes", S said. "I heard a trailer for it earlier on".

"Did you?", I said, aware only that she had been talking and, excited about the possibility of being right about something, I had been ignoring her.

Either I was very lucky, or Sir Roger has contrived a sound for his orchestra which renders it utterly distinctive. I personally don't like it. I heard him playing Elgar a while back, and it felt as natural as wearing socks in the bath. But hats off to him. No vibrato is Norrington's USP, and he has made a career out of it, firstly with the classics, then on to Brahms and now, inevitably, Elgar and Mahler.

I don't like Norrington's conducting, but I have to acknowledge that he is very good at it. In comparison with some stick-wavers, Norrington's movements impart useful information about speed, volume, phrasing and articulation (compare him to some other toilers in the field: "How on earth do you cope when X is conducting?", I asked a friend in the Halle. "Oh we just don't watch when we have him", she said).

But back to vibrato. I have never studied the history of string playing, and I am not in a position to say that Sir Roger, who undoubtedly has, is wrong to get his orchestra to leave the vibrato out; only that I don't like the results. I have my own theory as to why vibrato was introduced, based on absolutely zero research but instead on quite a bit of playing experience, a theory which explains why playing the Romantics without it leaves me - and it must be said most other people - cold.

In the high Baroque we find that instrumental music is largely contrapuntal. That's to say that rather than music having a tune and accompaniment, it tends to be all tunes, or at least mostly tunes, woven together like a plait. Now if you have the tune, you can do phrasing. By phrasing a musician means altering the volume and weight of a melodic line to impart musical direction: the feeling that the line is going somewhere, and having got there, is going away again. Most phrases have a point of weight towards and away from which they move. To take the opening line of God Save the Queen as an example, the weight there would be on the first syllable of gracious; gracious in fact. Interestingly, if you were to speak the line aloud, the stress would be on Queen; but Haydn's tune imposes musical obligations strong enough to override natural speech rhythms. That's why the Messiah aria And We Like Sheep makes me laugh every time I hear it.

Now if you play a line without phrasing or vibrato it doesn't just sound "thin", the usual complaint about vibrato-less playing, it also sounds static. I think that if players didn't use vibrato until about a hundred years ago (the Norrington view, although many people disagree, feeling that the conductor has read his sources selectively), they must have had to work much harder at phrasing, because that was what made their music come alive. I think that in the pre-vibrato era, melodic lines were always either growing or waning.

How would the players have done this? By varying the speed and pressure of the bow. Volume is, to put it crudely, a coefficient of these two things. The harder you press the bow down (and the quicker you move it) the greater the volume produced. So in baroque music, where most people have a melodic line most of the time, the players look instinctively - and this can even be done sight-reading - for the high or low point in the line and aim for it.

Now as the 18th century matures and passes into the 19th, musical textures change. If there is a tune at all, it is more likely to be a tune with an accompaniment, that's to say a figuration, static or mobile, which provides chordal support for the melodic line. As a player with one of these supporting lines, it is much harder to know where the weight in the phrase (which you are not yourself playing) should lie. This is the crux of the difficulty, and in my view it's where vibrato comes from. Playing these passages, lacking on the face of it obvious opportunities for phrasing, imposes the need for animating them. Hence vibrato. Because if you do use vibrato, you don't have to work anything like as hard with the phrasing. Your line sounds pleasing even when it is static.

I didn't just find the Stuttgart orchestra's tone thin in Mahler; it also lacked direction (the problem was even worse with Elgar because the players didn't know the piece well). It isn't enough just to get rid of vibrato - you also have to re-educate the players in the necessity of phrasing with the bow. And in this late Romantic repertoire that means putting shape on every bar of the music, no matter how static the individual part.

Of course, this is all speculation. I am not a musical academic and I can't prove it. But here are a couple of bits of circumstantial evidence. The first is that in order to produce this ever waxing / waning tone, you need to move the bow quicker, which means you run out of bow sooner. That means fewer slurs for the players and much more bowing as-it-comes. Now look at old fiddle parts. There isn't much in the way of bowing. It looks as if slurs, where many notes are gathered together in one bow, start to arrive en masse when players discover that vibrato enables them to utilise a slower bow speed and that fewer bow changes are necessary.

Recently I found myself bowing a Handel Concerto Grosso from a 19th century edition for a performance without vibrato. The thing I did most was cross out slurs and write in hairpins, trying to get living players to do what their 18th century forebears would have done instinctively.

I'm not against no-vibrato performances in the right period. I love the English Concert's performances of Haydn symphonies. But it isn't enough to think that getting rid of vibrato alone is a good musical solution. What would be really interesting would be to see how a Baroque group managed with some romantic repertoire. What would the English Concert make of Elgar's Serenade for Strings?

The Norrington concert got five stars in the Guardian. Martin Kettle, the reviewer, described it as "quite simply, one of the most important symphonic concerts in a very long time", a statement in which pomposity jostles with hyperbole for the upper hand.

Kettle likes music a lot, but he is the chief leader writer, not an arts critic, and his musical qualifications are, so far as I know, approximately zero.

On the whole people should stick to their field of expertise. I have no current plans to pass judgement on the efforts of participants in the Tour de France, even though forty years ago I passed my cycling proficiency test.

Steve Coogan and Princess Diana - a discussion

The stats counter on this site tells me that there's nothing like putting a celebrity's name at the top of a page to attract readers, and my all-time most popular post thus far, in an admittedly uncompetitive field, has been Steve Coogan and the Mexicans, musings on the comedian's excoriation of Top Gear for racism in the light of his own contribution to Mexico's drug-addled woes.

So if there's water in the well, let's go there again.

Coogan was on Newsnight the other night laying into a hapless tabloid journalist over the News of the World phone-hacking saga. Emily Maitlis did her (incompetent) best from stopping Coogan talking over the hack, but there was no holding him. "Morally bankrupt", was the comedian's repeated cry, as if repetition trumped all argument.

Before I deal with get this, a digression in the direction of Princess Diana. Not being one of those stricken by the bizarre wailing and gnashing of teeth when the Princess died, I found it curious even then how the thousands lining the Mall and gushing out their feelings in the book of condolences did not see their own complicity in their idol's death. For Diana's car crashed because the paparazzi were chasing it; the paparazzi chased it because they knew that newspapers would pay handsomely for their photos; and the papers were prepared to pay because a large section of the public, the same by and large gripped by the Princess's death, were willing to buy newspapers with her picture in.

There is something here analogous with the Coogan situation. The press is interested in what Steve Coogan does because they know his fans will buy newspapers featuring stories about him; and this is the element missing when Coogan goes on Newsnight to shout at some tabloid cockroach. Coogan is rich and feted because people will pay to watch his work; because they like his work they want to read stories about him; because people want to read stories about people like Coogan, the tabloids seek stories out (or make them up) and print them. Just like Princess Diana, Coogan is in a tri-partite dance with the press and the public which pays his wages. Viewed from this angle, the press are not the simple villains Coogan thinks, merely the mediators between him and us.

Coogan ought to know by now that in showbiz you cannot have riches without fame, and you cannot have fame without public interest in your private life. When he goes on Newsnight and accuses the red tops of printing stories about him "just because it sells newspapers", he thinks he is making an accusation about the press; instead he is just stating the reality of his relationship with them and with the public.

He's entitled to try and manage this relationship to his own advantage (Diana did when it suited her), but he is not entitled to do as he did on Newsnight and accuse the hapless hack of "moral bankruptcy". Actually Coogan has elected to join a dance all of whose participants - celebs, press and public - are compromised.

My knowledge of what it's like to be famous is less than zero, but I imagine it helps if you don't cheat on your wife with a pair of hookers, or spend a fortnight in a hotel room with Courtney Love shoving ounces of Mexico's finest up your nose. Perhaps next time temptation calls, Steve, you could try staying in with a good book. See if the tabloids want to print that.

And when someone offers you a few million quid to appear in Night at the Museum Parts 1 and 2, you might read the name on the cheque first. Apparently the films were produced by Twentieth Century Fox (prop. one R Murdoch). But obviously you didn't know that when you agreed to appear in them. Because if you had known, you would have turned the money down, wouldn't you?

Full steam ahead, Captain Brown!

I discovered the other day that the Guardian archives blog posts on its CommentIsFree website. Now as someone who has spent an excessive amount of time bashing the qwerty keyboard on CommentIsFree, arguing the toss with three or four other wastrels, I was curious to revisit Time Wasting: The Early Days to see just how bilious was the colour of my bile way back in 2007. One post caught my eye. It was in response to a Guardian leader in February that year on the spending choices facing Gordon Brown's government, ending thus:

The chancellor can also take comfort from less-reported aspects of yesterday's report, which underlined just how impressive his record has been. The books are in better shape than they were in 1997 - an achievement that stands out for having been delivered in tandem with the extra resources for health, education and alleviating poverty. Mr Brown's credibility has suffered from his bending of the yardsticks by which his performance is measured. But the underlying purpose of these fiscal rules is to avoid things spinning out of control, and he continues to avoid that. Yesterday's report concludes that the track Mr Brown is following can be sustained economically - if not in terms of public services - without tax rates going up.

Yes, in the light of subsequent events it does read rather like an interim report from the Captain of a certain well-known ocean liner, just before the iceberg strikes. I am rather proud of my response, which read as follows:

So "The books are in better shape than they were in 1997" are they? I seem to remember the Tories delivered Brown a fairly hefty public account surplus when he arrived in office (this is actually wrong); and where are we now? A deficit of £35 billion or thereabouts, that's where. Only in cloud cuckoo land are the books in better shape.

"Yesterday's report concludes that the track Mr Brown is following can be sustained economically - if not in terms of public services - without tax rates going up." But public services are the whole point, aren't they? It's a bit like saying "the Titanic is doing fine, except in terms of floating".

We have enjoyed a decade of economic good times built on both government and citizens spending money they did not have. We now learn that the government can't afford its spending plans without either raising taxes or cutting spending, both of which will reduce economic activity and risk recession. We may well find that the trad Keynesian way out of recession is unavailable because the Government borrowed too much during the good times. And let's not forget that current Government provision is looking inadequate in areas other than health and education - the armed forces, prisons and care for the elderly spring to mind.

The Brown Boom will end in tears.

You read it there first, 18 months before the credit crunch.

Or at least three or four of you did.

Fudging the Dilnot report

So Andrew Dilnot thinks that the elderly and incapable with assets of over £100,000 should pay £35,000 towards their long-term care. Speaking as someone with, at the moment anyway, a bit more than that in the way of assets, I suppose I should be pleased. If I had no more than £135,000 I'd be a bit hacked off - why, I'd be asking, should I be taxed at 25% when someone with more money would pay a lower rate?

Something strange is going on here. We all happily pay taxes so the NHS can provide cancer treatment that we may not need ourselves. I think we would all do the same to provide long term care for others, even though the clammy fingers of dementia and incontinence might never close around our own necks. But instead Dilnot has come up with a system, however much better than the disgraceful existing one, where the unlucky individual pays directly (unless of course he has been too feckless or unfortunate to build up any assets, in which case he pays nothing), and then when the limit is reached the state takes over. This has all the hallmarks of a compromise; and if it looks like a compromise and walks like a compromise, it's probably a fudge.

I'm with Dilnot in that we need a system that spreads the load widely across society, so everyone contributes according to their means. Fortunately we have just such a system in place already. It's called taxation. Funnily enough a report commissioned by Tony Blair over a decade ago came to just this conclusion. That Blair shelved the idea in a time of plenty (preferring to spend money instead on diversity co-ordinators, street football facilitators and the war in Iraq) should tell us a lot about the chances of this approach being adopted by the Cameron government today, and perhaps also about the process which informed the Dilnot approach: after all, why recommend the simple and logical solution that HMG has recently rejected when you can adopt a complex and untried one that costs the Government less, taking the money instead from people who were naive enough to acquire modest savings?

It seems to me that there are two things to infer from this, one obvious, the other not. The less obvious one is that we are now entering the debatable lands where public spending priorities, previously taken for granted, compete with each other for favour. And that existing commitments, however unappealing, are more likely to survive than new ones, however meritorious, are to be taken on.

The other point is that if you have built up an asset, the Government will come for you. In the end. If it doesn't happen after the Dilnot report, it will happen eventually. New Labour left Britain borderline broke, and if you've got some money, the Government will be looking for ways to take it off you.

BBC sees the Light

Just as Glastonbury is getting under way, the BBC is having a light music moment, the Light Fantastic, I think it's called, and on Saturday Radio 3 ran a discussion on the subject with Petroc Trelawney, Anne Dudley, the estimable John Wilson and one or two other worthies.

There is a poignant connection between these two phenomena.

I have to declare a lack of interest here, because light music is not my thing. On the other hand, since I started conducting amateur orchestras five or six years ago I've had to perform a fair bit of it, something I did with a certain sniffiness at first, then with a degree of grudging admiration and latterly almost with enthusiasm (I am trying to stop it going any further).

Often with discussions like this one the really interesting thing is not what's said, but what the broadcasters leave out. This was a rare occasion however where the issue you think they aren't going to touch on at all is not just included, but actually given a full five minutes of full-frontal, that issue here being the extent of the BBC's own involvement in light music's decline.

Now obviously there are many reasons for the decline, economics being one of them, technology being another, the rise of pop culture another still. But undoubtedly the BBC played its part, setting up Radios 2 and 3 without dealing adequately with how light music was going to be catered for. Light music was pushed into the margins on Radio 2, and in the Glock-era it was ridiculous to imagine that Radio 3 was going to be playing any Haydn Wood when it couldn't bring itself to love Robert Simpson. There are apparently numerous anguished memos written by a BBC bigwig to Radio 3 wondering why so little light music was getting played. One might as well ask why bears were defecating in the woods.

Hats off to the BBC for allowing these heretical views to be heard. My son, who was in the kitchen whilst I was listening to this self-flagellation, said, "You can't imagine Sky doing that".

Several other things stood out for me. One was the often-told story of Ernest Tomlinson, furious at the BBC proposing to clear out its light music library, an act of musical Stalinism if ever there was one, offering the use of a barn on his Lancashire farm in which the thousands of orchestral sets could be stored. Tomlinson, a very fine composer, set up a library of light music, still going today, which did much to preserve music which would otherwise have been lost. He is said to have come upon a skip full of parts outside the London Palladium and hired a van on the spot to save them from destruction. A friend tells me that MGM destroyed its sheet music library in Hollywood - to build a car park. Yes, a car park.

The other stand-out was Anne Dudley recounting her experience at Music College of finding the composition department dominated by the avant garde (as most music departments in most conservatoires were and still are), and being bemused to find Eric Coates regarded as a joke figure rather than a serious musician. This is an experience I had too, although I was lucky to have lessons with John Tavener, who stood firmly outside the mainstream, a place I have stood myself ever since.

The widespread assumption, shared by the programme, that light music is a different genre to classical music, or at best a sub-genre, isn't really accurate in my view. Lots of classical composers - Mozart, Elgar, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and many others - have written light music (by which I mean music which sets out to entertain), and this should give us a clue that there is a bigger and broader question hanging in the air here, about the approachability of light music, and the extent to which it that quality has been lost from classical music generally in the last century.

To put the question the other way round, to what extent is it legitimate for a classical composer to set out not to entertain? Two things seem obvious to me. One, that all music (indeed perhaps all art) should be entertaining (I use that word in a very wide sense, as I'll explain in a minute). The other is that a lot of music is being written, indeed has been written in the last century or so, which has no intention of entertaining whatsoever. Indeed, if you ask its composers and performers, many would scorn the idea of doing anything so base as to give their audiences a good time. For me, entertaining means many things - stimulating, challenging yes, but also soothing and consoling. The point about art is that it is a mediation of human experience, not the experience itself (the most horrifying opera I've ever seen is Idomeneo, a terrible story mediated by music of unsurpassed luminosity and grace).

Ultimately it is easy to regret the decline of light music, because it is readily, though I think inaccurately, rendered as a separate genre whose exponents were once famous and who, amongst musicians at least, are still household names. What is much less easy, because it is harder to identify them, is to lament the obscurity of all the composers at the more serious end of the classical spectrum who did not disdain their audiences, and who wrote music that was approachable, that sought to entertain in the very broadest sense, and who were pushed into obscurity by the same institutional forces (the conservatoires, the universities, the broadcasters) that did for so-called light music.

Why is the fate of these individuals important? Because on the whole the public is not interested in avant-garde music, and, particularly in a time of austerity, the public subsidy which keeps the infrastructure of classical music going is harder to justify when so much of its output is devoted to pushing a kind of music which, statistically speaking, almost no-one likes. Less money for classical music does not just mean fewer performances of Boulez and Berio. It also means less Berlioz and Brahms.

Ultimately, those of us who love classical music have to find new repertoire which can enthuse the public. Otherwise classical music will become increasingly marginalised in schools, in the public imagination and in public spending priorities. At the moment it doesn't seem to me that anyone is trying to reverse this trend.

Traditionally the middle-class turn to classical music in middle-age. The weekend of the Light Fantastic however, many of my middle-class middle-aged friends have gone off to Glastonbury.