The SNP, the NHS and the elderly

I've written before about the NHS's shameful treatment of the elderly (http://nicksimpsonmusic.blogspot.com/2011/05/coming-soon-serbia.html), and it came as a depressing no-surprise to find the Care Quality Commission reporting yesterday that of 100 hospitals it inspected recently, only 45% were providing proper service to elderly patients, and 20% were so bad that they were actually breaking the law.

I'm not going to waste time thinking of terms adequate to excoriate those responsible for this situation. Obviously individual callousness and inhumanity plays a part, but so also do overtraining (nurses with degrees, so the theory goes, are not overly keen to wipe up excrement), overwork and lack of money.

There is a connection between this story and another in the papers today. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, has appalled campaigners concerned about British obesity levels by urging people to eat less and by trying to persuade manufacturers to cut calorie levels in food. Why is this so bad? Because, as Jamie Oliver says, manufacturers won't do it, and everyone already knows we should eat more healthily and exercise more.

About 60% of British adults and 30% of children are obese or overweight. Obese people get ill more and are more likely to end up in hospital. More pressure on hospitals means more work for nurses and more money spent treating people who, frankly, don't have to be there. All of which means worse treatment for other patients; including the elderly.

The Tories, sadly, seem reluctant to do anything which might offend their friends in big business. Lansley has fallen into the error of thinking that a laudable Tory idea ("people should take responsibility for their own actions") can be taken in isolation; whereas in this instance people failing to take responsibility means a drain on NHS resources, with consequences which are only too obvious.

Alcohol abuse probably costs the state even more than obesity, which is why the Scots have proposed a minimum price on drink.

When you find yourself yearning to be governed by the SNP, something somewhere has gone badly wrong.

One long right wing rant

The other day a young acquaintance, messing around with friends, said, "Of course, Hitler didn't really go far enough".

My wife and I were appalled. This person is not the first 16 year old to say something stupid to shock an audience, and won't be the last; he is in truth impeccably liberal in all his views. But I told him that he could get into serious trouble at school if he were overheard coming out with that sort of thing; and as I was speaking I found myself realising that this was actually true. Is that a good thing?

Of course, as well as getting into trouble he ran the risk of offending other people; but I find I mind this less. There isn't any right not to be offended: in a free society people should be able to say that Hitler didn't go far enough without official sanction. The proper sanction is that right-thinking people shun and avoid someone with such poisonous views.

When this exchange was over, my wife told me that a colleague of hers had looked at this blog and said it was "one long right-wing rant"; I could, she said, suffer professionally by expressing opinions openly in a field which is on the whole left rather than right of centre. This may well be true. Whilst conservatives (and I can't really as a Frank Field fan be called a Conservative) regard Lefties as nice but ultimately deluded, the Left sees the Tories as the Nasty Party. It's a shame. Most people interested in politics want the best for society. There aren't many Pol Pots or Stalins. Or Hitlers for that matter.

Recognising that someday I may miss out on a gig because someone doesn't like my politics, it would be tempting to say Adieu to blogging and get on with some work. But I find I can't. And for a reason that is uncharacteristically pretentious.

I am an artist. And artists do not trim.

Ed Balls - cake eater

Hearing the dismal jobless figures on the news yesterday, I was struck by a fresh irony about Labour's calls for a growth policy.

Labour only discovered Keynes when it was too late to do the hard part, when it was too late to put money aside against a rainy day. Labour's policy was, essentially, borrow during the good times, and when the bad times come, borrow even more. In case you doubt me, Labour ran a deficit from about 2001 to 2010, and continues to advocate more borrowing now. Whatever else that is, it's not Keynesian. My admiration for Frank Field - my Favourite Living Politician: charisma-free but scrupulous, far-sighted, and with an intellectual fearlessness Orwell would have admired - went up a further notch yesterday when I heard him say that Labour got the economy wrong, and should apologise, unreservedly, for its misdoings in office.

What's this got to with Labour's growth policy? Well, the Government says, not unreasonably, that it can't pump prime the economy with a Keynesian stimulus because that could only be done by more borrowing; and it would be dangerous to increase borrowing in the febrile atmosphere where countries have been driven by this very course to the brink of default. Only this morning the Torygraph reports James Carrick, economist at Legal & General Investment Management, as saying stimulus spending of the type Balls and Miliband are calling for would help lift growth but hasten a downgrade of Britain's credit rating.

The irony is that if Labour had been reading Keynes in the 2000s, if they had improved Britain's fiscal position, the Government could have done what Ed Miliband is demanding now. In fact it would have been irresponsible for the Government not to do what Labour wants.

It is Labour's failure to act like proper Keynesians when in office which has made it so difficult for the Government to act like Keynesians now. If I were George Osbourne I'd be pretty p'd off at being lectured by Ed Balls, former Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Ed Balls is urging Osborne to eat the cake which he and his former mentor consumed long, long ago.

Steve Jobs - a Luddite speaks

I am writing this as the proud owner of a new phone. For too long, to the genuine embarrassment of my family, I have carted about the five-year old cast-off my daughter had for her 11th birthday. How could anything so relatively new look so old already? Attempting to get it to charge, or looking bemusedly at incoming texts apparently sent three days ago, always reminded me of the moment in Star Wars when Han Solo, unable to get his space ship to start, thumps vigorously on the dash board - cue the lights coming on and the engines firing up.

My wondrous new gadget, an iPhone knock-off with its GPS, email, camera and no doubt all manner of other devices calculated to make the jaw drop, would not have happened, or at least not so soon, without Steve Jobs, finally overcome by cancer yesterday after a long struggle.

Would we have been worse off without stuff like the iPhone? Without the computers which I'm using to write this and you to read it? There's an easy way to tell. Just think back to what it was like beforehand. I don't remember the pre-digital age being so bad. We got by with books, maps and landlines. We certainly weren't tempted to waste time blogging when there was ironing to be done and music to write.

Jobs' iPhone and iPad are things of beauty and ingenuity, but perhaps we didn't really need them. If Apple and Pixar aren't enough to satisfy you as to Jobs' worth, hunt out his Commencement Address to Stanford Students. I heard parts of it on the radio and it makes moving listening. There's a transcription here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/09/steve-jobs-stanford-commencement-address. This speech alone makes Jobs quite a man.

The Nasty Party and the Euro

One consequence of my lurch towards the clutches of The Nasty Party has been the process of getting to know the columnists of the Torygraph as well as I do those of the Grauniad. For while the Graun has those hand-wringing numpties Freedland, Toynbee and Kettle, a dismal roster redeemed only partly by the brilliance and common sense of Deborah Orr, the Telegraph has its own parade of usual suspects, foam-flecked and angry where their Left of centre counterparts are anguished.

You wouldn't expect them to be angry, not when their party is in power; but they are. Partly of course this is because the Tories, constrained by the Lib Dems and by Cameron's desire to appeal to the centre ground, are nothing like Tory enough for them. But I have detected a new note of anger and impatience in recent days, about the EU.

To the extent that the debacle over the Euro has vindicated the Eurosceptic right, and revealed the architects of the single currency (and their cheerleaders in Britain) as arrogant and foolish, some of this anger is justified. But The Tory Pundits aren't satisfied with being right. They know they have been vindicated, and so, I think, would any impartial and fair minded person; they said monetary union wouldn't work without fiscal union, and by golly it hasn't. But why, they want to know, isn't there any blood on the carpet? Why hasn't Greece defaulted yet? Why hasn't the Eurozone gone up in flames? Why isn't there any concrete proof of failure?

Because, it seems to me, it never pays to underestimate the capacity of European leaders, both at domestic and EU level, to do things their electorates don't want.

Very few people get to the top in European politics by being Eurosceptic. Even domestic leaders like Merkel and Sarkozy have got there by subscribing to the consensus rather than opposing it. These people are not going to give up on the Euro, or on Greece's membership of it, without a heroic struggle. If that has to involve signing away billions of taxpayers' money, so be it. The German parliament's ratification of the July 20 plan to pump money into the EFSF was hailed as a triumph, even though it was opposed by the majority of Germans and, by common consent, won't be enough. Now the Eurocrats are reported to be looking for ways to leverage the fund (by which they mean use the fund as security to borrow yet more money), again in the face of the opposition by their electorates. Belatedly, EU leaders are looking for ways to foster greater fiscal union. Their electorates probably don't want it, and it certainly isn't provided for in EU treaties. But their leaders will do it if they can.

Will any of this keep Greece in the Euro? Probably not. Monetary union without fiscal union was bound to lead to fatal imbalances; the EU set it up anyway. Greece didn't meet the criteria for entry into the Euro; she was allowed in nonetheless. The Greeks haven't met the conditions required to get the next tranche of their bail-out money; but you can bet that the EU will give it to them anyway.

This willingness to trim and shuffle to evade the demands of the moment tells you all you need to know about the way the Eurozone was set up and why it is in its present crisis. It is also why The Tory Pundits may have to wait a bit longer for their pound of flesh.

Lies, Damned Lies and Ed Balls

Gordon Brown is the most dishonest politician I can remember.

I am not going to defend this controversial view here - Jeffrey Archer? Jonathan Aitken anyone? - merely show that Brown's Mini-Me, Ed Balls is running his mentor very close.

In his Labour party conference speech yesterday Balls made some very public confessions. Labour had made mistakes - the 75p pension rise; immigration (hallelujah); failure of bank regulation (another No Shit Sherlock moment). But we should always be wary of politicians who apologise. Their commonest deception exploits the public's inability to distinguish "sorry that" from "sorry for". Saying "I am sorry that your economy is wrecked" is not quite the same thing as saying "I am sorry for wrecking your economy".

A more subtle ploy is to make a list of errors in the hope that the public will think that it is complete, tactfully forgetting other matters in the hope that we do too. To be fair to Balls, he has a novel variation on this one. His list of errors is followed by a ringing declaration of something he is not going to apologise for: "Don't let anyone tell you", he blustered, "that a Labour government was profligate with public money, when we went into the crisis with lower national debt than we inherited in 1997". So even though we got these things wrong, here is one thing we definitely got right, and don't you dare tell us otherwise!

But Balls is not comparing like with like. When Labour came into office in 1997, Britain was only five years out of the 1990-1992 recession. You would expect the public finances to be in bad shape. By 2008 we hadn't had a recession for sixteen years. In fact, as I weary of writing, the period 1993 - 2008 was the longest consistent period of economic growth in British history. You would expect the government to be sitting on a pile of cash. It wasn't. Gordon Brown had spent it all, and was running a substantial deficit.

Does Balls know this? Of course he does. And like his mentor, his pants are well and truly on fire.

Pierre Boulez, great Wagner conductor

Listening to Start the Week this morning I was reminded what a great Wagner conductor Pierre Boulez was.

One of Andrew Marr's guests on the programme had written a book on Wagner and Verdi, and another was long-time Boulez associate the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, so the subject naturally came up in conversation. Aimard was there to plug his forthcoming festival, Liszt and Boulez - Composers of the Future, taking place on the South Bank in the next few days.

What depths of irony lie in that title. Liszt was without doubt a great musician, and a great pianist. But he was not a great composer, and neatly exemplifies my long held view that talent will only get you so far in composition. Liszt is famous not because the public likes his music, but because he was a vastly talented pianist who wrote music which pianists enjoy playing. That is not the same thing.

My favourite Liszt story concerns the visit paid to him by Edvard Grieg. At the time Liszt was one of the most famous musicians in the world, and Grieg very much the young supplicant. As they played through the last movement of the Norwegian's Piano Concerto, reaching the grand tutti where the spacious A major theme is heard for the final time, subtly altered from its first appearance, Liszt cried out approvingly, "Of course! The G sharp this time!", thereby conferring the magisterial weight of his approval on Grieg's effort.

And yet Grieg's Concerto, although far from being his best work, is worth all of Liszt's compositions put together. Grieg was no intellectual, but he was a real composer, as distinct from someone who knew how to compose but not why. His music has artless tenderness and grace, with a melodic gift Liszt could only have dreamed of. It will live as long as there are people to listen. Yet whilst it is impossible to imagine the South Bank having a Grieg festival - the opportunity was passed up in 2007 on the centenary of his death - Liszt is, apparently, a Composer of the Future.

This seems unlikely in both major senses. Firstly Liszt was not a terribly influential composer. Secondly if Liszt had been going to take a grip on the public imagination you might have thought that would have happened by now. But it hasn't, and I wouldn't waste a tenner betting that it will in the next fifty years.

What then about Boulez? Another of Andrew Marr's guests was Simon Jenkins, who bravely voiced the opinion that he didn't much take to the Frenchman's music - it reminded him, he said, of the brutalist architecture of the 1960s. Interestingly Jenkins, not a man given to displays of public humility, made this confession in apologetic terms. But why? I don't like Liszt, or Saint-Saens, or for that matter Phil Collins, Kasabian, Dido and a hundred other mediocrities. It's nothing to apologise for.

When Aimard was asked to describe Boulez, I knew, in the pause which followed, what he was going to say. An intellectual, replied Aimard. But if Boulez is an intellectual, I'm a banana. An intellectual is someone brainier than the rest of us who thinks rarified thoughts and reaches the right conclusion. But Boulez reached the wrong conclusion. He thought that the rigorous systems of total serialism would make "better" music (whatever that means); moreover he poured buckets of personal vitriol over those who disagreed with him, and used his own personal power to dominate the institutions of French music - and the aesthetics of modern music generally - for half a century. That a man as forthright as Jenkins should feel obliged to apologise for disliking Boulez's music is a measure of the extraordinary cultural cringe that he and his disciples have succeeded in imposing on intelligent people who like music. Hilariously, Alex Ross (in The Rest is Noise) has Boulez responding to a question about why so few major works of the fifties and sixties had become repertory pieces by saying, "Well, perhaps we did not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener". No shit, Sherlock. I'm not even sure that Ross understands how funny this remark is.

Boulez might be better described as a Composer of the Present, in the sense that he has made a pretty good career out of ruthlessly aggressive obscurantism, exploiting the gullibility and pretentiousness of the French political classes to fund and promulgate his own work, and his view of what other people's work should be like. This view, based on the modern age's desire to incorporate the technical language of science into something - composition - which is palpably unscientific (there is after all no scientific explanation why Grieg has the x factor and Liszt does not), has caused immense damage to the cause of classical music and kept bums off seats in concert halls across the western world.

Boulez will be lucky if his music lasts as long as Liszt's. Certainly only a statistically insignificant proportion of people like it now. If he is a composer of the future, classical music is in big trouble. His tragedy, if such a successful and lucrative career can be thus described, is that he had the talent to do great things.

Perhaps he should have stuck to conducting Wagner.