double dipping jeremy hunt

So we are in recession again. The politics of this matters much more than the economics. Even if UK GDP were a few tenths of a percentage point higher, just enough to keep recession at bay, the economy would still be flatlining.

Has George Osborne got it wrong? Should we be borrowing even more than we are doing already to try and pump things up a bit? For me the most telling statistic to emerge in the last few days has been the Budget Deficit for 2012. At £126bn it is only £10bn lower than 2011. If Osborne's critics had their way we would be reducing the Deficit a bit slower, so let's assume that if he had reduced the deficit by only £5bn they would have been a bit happier. What would the result of the injection of that extra £5bn into the economy have been? Probably peanuts. It would have amounted to about %0.3 of GDP.

An injection of demand big enough to make a difference would have made the Deficit grow instead of shrinking modestly. In a climate where the gilt markets - who do not have to lend to us - are shying at government bonds like nervous thoroughbreds at a briar hedge, increasing the Deficit on a promise of cutting it one day would be a very dangerous move. There probably isn't much Osborne can do to make things better other than hold his nerve - we are not going to see any significant growth until the Eurozone sorts itself out. I'm not holding my breath on this one.

Of course all the half-baked half-wits who think that there's a magic button Osborne could press to make everything right will be all over the media, broadcast and print, for 48 hours, adding to the impression of a government in disarray. There is something David Cameron could do about this immediately which would make him look competent, decisive and straight - fire Jeremy Hunt.

After Vince Cable was forced to step aside after boasting to some fruity young tape-recorder wielding young women that he was out to trash Rupert Murdoch, his replacement seems to have been out to rectify Cable's perceived bias on the BSkyB issue. Cable was fired because he was partisan; how on earth could Hunt imagine his own manifest enthusiasm for the Murdoch bid was OK? The Torygraph put it exceptionally well this morning: "No 10 said that Mr Cameron believed Mr Cable's anti-Murdoch comments were 'totally unacceptable and inappropriate'. It seems that Mr Hunt's pro-Murdoch bias was both acceptable and appropriate". Well yes.

It's a good day to bury bad news about the economy. Hunt must go. And if he doesn't, what does that tell us about the Government? It's normally well on into an administration's life when failure to spot the flippin' obvious becomes endemic. Two years in is way too soon. If I were one of Cameron's friends I'd be worried.

PS A few days after writing this, it appears that Cameron has decided headlines about Jeremy Hunt might be preferable to headlines about the economy. Hunt lives because we are in recession.

Paul Weller - successful middle-aged capitalist

Am I the only person to find excessive the praise and adulation poured over the so-called Modfather, Paul Weller?

To be clear, when I first heard In The City, in about 1977, I thought I was in heaven. Its pithy, guitar-driven anger seemed to sum up my (just about) teenage times, and it would still be up there now in my top 5 ever singles (since you ask, along with Todd Rundgren's I Saw the Light, Backfield in Motion by Mel and Tim, Hold Back the Night - the Trammps version, not Graham Parker's - and, a final guilty pleasure this, Jump, Van Halen's tribute to the Who). The highest tribute I can pay to In The City is that it made me want to be working class. Briefly.

But I never became a Jam fan, unlike so many of my friends. After that cracking start, their music seemed to me increasingly leaden and boring. Whilst Weller was a perfectly competent guitarist, bass player Bruce Foxton annoyed me with his twangy Rickenbacker, and Rick Buckler must surely be the luckiest bad drummer since Ringo (actually Ringo was a pretty good drummer, but that's another post on another day): surely the first obligation of a drummer is to be able to keep time? I increasingly found Weller vain and preachy, the righteous ire of his early stuff descending into mere shouting.

This view was sealed when an ex-girlfriend, whose company acted for him in a professional capacity, told me that she had seen Weller's accounts. They showed, she said, that he was spending £5,000 a year on hair replacement therapy. Now this was in the 80s, probably about the Style Council period, and £5,000 bought even more then than it does now. So the Red Wedge campaigner, scourge of the Tories, sea-green incorruptible chronicler of society's injustices and failings, was worried about losing his hair. This seemed to confirm my impression that Weller was not the genuine article.

Over the years I have not followed Weller's career closely, but I thought about him recently when an admiring profile appeared in the Graun penned by notorious druggie Decca Aitkenhead. Weller is still taking care of his appearance, it seems. Aitkenhead writes that he "resembles an elder statesman of rock so precisely, he looks almost too perfect to be true - like a flawlessly styled, slightly over-obsessive lead singer in a Paul Weller tribute band". Weller, it turns out, has two children by his first wife, singer Dee C Lee, a third by a make-up artist, a fourth and fifth by one Samantha Stock, whom he recently ditched, taking up with a backing singer half his age with whom he now has children number six and seven. The children go to private school, and Weller lives in Maida Vale in London.

None of this makes Weller a bad person, or even, necessarily, a bad artist. Neither does it matter much that it makes him a different person from the one he seemed to be in 1977. It does however make it slightly surprising that this man, whose reputation rests at least partly on his integrity and radicalism, should be revered for living the life of the successful selfish middle-aged capitalist.

P.S. A report in Popbitch in October 2015 reported Weller's presence at University College School Hampstead's Open Day.  Fees £15,000 per year.  Up the workers!

Animal dies for human pleasure shock

So two horses died in the Grand National. I am not remotely interested in horse-racing, which contravenes Simpson's First Rule of Sport (that it should involve a ball), but the furore this has occasioned reminds me of what a stupid and hypocritical society we are.

How many cattle, pigs and chickens do we eat every year? No matter. It's a lot. Let all those on their high horse about National Hunt racing investigate their contents of their freezer. And their shoe-rack.

Yes my friends, for those who truly wish to polish their self-righteousness, there's always lentils.

the guardian - up the amazon

This morning the Guardian leads with the revelation that Amazon has been avoiding paying UK corporation tax by means of obscure offshore company structures. What Amazon has done may be perfectly legal, but I do wonder whether I really want to buy books from a retailer that doesn't pay any tax here.

Nowhere in the many column inches the Graun devotes to this story on pages 1, 2 and 5 is there room for its journalists to mention that a few years ago Guardian Media Group bought the publisher Emap via a similar offshore device.

If I'm not sure I want to buy a newspaper that uses offshoring to minimise its tax liabilities, I certainly don't want to read one that can't acknowledge its own hypocrisy. The Guardian's holier-than-thou self-righteousness is its least attractive quality even when it occupies the moral high ground. This morning it is struggling up the Amazon, minus paddle.

As the Guardian doesn't mention its awkward Emap purchase, it falls to Private Eye to remind readers every now and again. Helpfully, this week's Eye also tells us that the Guardian's Open Weekend, which punters paid upwards of £50 to attend, ended up losing the paper more than £150,000. Editor Alan Rusbridger said, "Last weekend we did something extraordinary".

Surely some mistake. Since it lost money, the Open Weekend merely continued something the paper does every day.

john lanchester in the lrb

John Lanchester has been writing about Marx in the LRB. I detect a creeping change of tone in Lanchester's writing. One of the attractive qualities of his journalism used to be the self-deprecating air bewilderment as he delved deeper and deeper into the murky cupboard of capitalism's baser practices; increasingly this is being replaced by self-assurance and a willingness to pronounce. If he's not careful he will end up sounding like a blogger, or worse, referring to himself in the third person.

But what of Marx? Lanchester speculates about what the great man might have made of recent events from his redoubt in the British Library reading room. He would surely have been astounded, not just at the level of material prosperity we enjoy in the West, but at the social welfare programmes which have brought child mortality down from the eye watering levels endured in 19th c. Britain.

He might also have asked whether the economies of the West have merely outsourced their proletariat to the Far East, getting dollar-a-day wage slaves in China to do the dirty work that used to be done down mines by nine year old children here. Of course the Chinese may well have the last laugh, lending us the money to buy their goods and getting affluent on the proceeds, as well as getting the West by the financial short and curlies, borrowing from China the money we need to pay back the money we'd borrowed from them previously.

Lanchester records the recent outrage at revelations about Apple's manufacturing plants, admitting that Western revulsion had led to a 25% increase in wages overnight. He might have commented that even before the dramatic pay-hike many Chinese still thought they were better off making iPads for you and me than labouring in the paddy fields.

Personally I think we are living through a crisis in capitalism, rather than a crisis of capitalism. We have had the boom, and must now endure the bust. Seen in larger terms, capitalism is only doing what it does so well, enabling people who are prepared to make things cheaper to get prosperous, and punishing those who have become affluent and complacent. That is no comfort to those losing their jobs in the West, but that's where we are. In time the Chinese will start demanding higher wages and the pendulum will begin to swing the other way.

I wonder if I'm the only person to notice that there's a contradiction in asking for both better living standards and more jobs. The higher our wages are, the less we'll export and the fewer jobs there'll be. If we paid ourselves less, exports would go up and there'd be more jobs to go round. Thank God we are not enduring the kind of internal devaluation membership of the Euro has forced upon Greece et al; but what is a wage freeze but a de facto internal devaluation? In a typically British way, we are having a mild external and internal devaluation. Moderation in all things!

The real crisis of capitalism will come - and here's where I read Lanchester at last with relief - when there are too many people and not enough resources to go round. Where will the growth come from then?

Genre fatigue - the Piano Quartet

A couple of weeks ago I went to a chamber music concert for an evening of Piano Quartets (that's to say piano plus violin, viola and cello). There were three pieces, an early Beethoven, really not very distinctive and too similar in style to the much better Mozart that followed it, and thirdly the Brahms C Minor.

One of the players told us that the Mozart had been part of a projected set of six quartets which his publisher had cancelled, complaining that the first two were too difficult for prospective purchasers.

Who were these purchasers to have been? In the days before radio, TV and cinema, when all households who could afford one had a pianoforte, a lot of people played chamber music. There was good money to be made selling sheet music in various instrumental combinations. String quartets, piano duets, piano trios, string trios, clarinet quartets and so on. Listening to the Mozart quartet I found myself sympathising with the publisher. The piano part in particular was little short of a concerto, something which even a good amateur would struggle to get round, lovely though the music was.

The problems with the genre were even more evident in the Brahms. Again, a ferociously difficult piano part, written much more heavily than the Mozart, against which the three strings struggled to make themselves heard. And the substance of the music, darker, weightier, did not have the character of a salon piece: this was a concert work on a symphonic scale, ending in C major, but a troubled C major more like the dominant of F minor, with that sense of major key unease that Brahms does so well. Who could imagine the enthusiastic amateur sitting down after dinner to bash through this?

I mention all this because the piano quartet seems to me to exemplify a tired genre. Yes of course, you could still write one now: if you got rid of the heaviness of the piano writing, and used the instrument to colour and harmonise the weaving string lines, there would still be plenty of mileage in it. But who would play it, and where? Not amateurs of course; but what about professionals?

The players I went to listen to, all solid pros from the city's Conservatoire, are trying to set up a chamber music series, and must have been dismayed to find themselves playing to about thirty people. It was early days of course, and these things sometimes take time to grow. The concert had a retiring collection rather than an entrance fee, as we were reminded at least once too often by the players, but you cannot make a living from the contributions of thirty divided by four. As someone with ten years' experience of putting on concerts to a public that is largely indifferent to classical music, there was a certain rueful recognition in this: the sight of people protected to some extent from the realities of the outside world being brought up sharp by row upon row of empty seats.

For the problem faced by Mozart and his publisher is still with us. Who are the purchasers of chamber music - live or in sheet music form - now? For that matter, who are the purchasers of orchestral music now? That's a subject for another day, save to say that for every hundred people who go to a few orchestral concerts a year, there will be only half a dozen who go to a few chamber concerts as well.

John Lanchester's Whoops!

A couple of things in the papers this morning reminded me that I have been meaning for a month or so to write about John Lanchester's Whoops!. Lanchester, an amiable and intelligent man by all accounts, is author of one very good novel (The Debt to Pleasure) and others not quite so good. He also writes for the Left-leaning London Review of Books, in whose pages he has become a kind of guru on The Financial Crisis.

Whoops!, his collected thoughts on What Went Wrong, is well worth a read. Lanchester has realised that the Credit Crunch (and subsequent events) has been the big news story of the last five years or so, a jaw-droppingly dramatic and serious shudder in the foundations of the economic West, readable and informative in equal measure. To his great credit, Lanchester really has bothered to learn about the minutiae of the market in derivatives, credit default swaps and the like. His astonishment and anger at the behaviour of the bankers is refreshing and immediate.

So what's wrong with Whoops!? Well Lanchester's surprise that bankers should behave greedily smacks a little of naivety. What next? Bears squatting down in the woods? He isn't keen to emphasise the role played in this by Labour, the party he supported, both in terms of its deregulation of the City and its irresponsible, counter-cyclical running of a deficit after 2001. I know from his writing in the LRB that he believes the Government should be stimulating the economy by higher public spending, which is all very well but ignores (and Lanchester always does ignore this) that such spending can only be got by borrowing (of which more later); it also falls into the trap of assuming that for every problem there is a pain-free solution.

Lanchester says he has spent the last two years thinking and researching about the financial crisis, and it shows, both in his impressive command of the detail and his failure to grasp the bigger picture. I have been thinking about economics for nearer ten years than two, and while I learned a lot of new stuff reading Lanchester's book, I can't help thinking he has missed the wood for the trees (perhaps the same trees amongst which the bears are squatting).

For the sad reality about Britain's economic plight is that even if the bankers had behaved themselves (and even if Gordon Brown had discovered Keynes when there was still time to do the hard part - put money aside for a rainy day) it would not have affected our long-term economic position. This was very well expressed in Robert Peston's TV programme about the crash. The jobs we used to have in manufacturing have gone East, and with them has gone our prosperity. We have been allowed to maintain it only because the East was willing to lend its surpluses back to Western governments; which then recycled the money to its consumers; who then bought more Chinese goods. Viewed from this perspective, all the bankers did was find more and more ingenious ways of keeping the party going.

Poignantly, Peston showed archive footage of trade union meetings from the 1970s (a feast of bad clothes, bad hair and bad glasses), at which the comrades were voting not to accept management's offer. Again and again. You can hardly blame them. The unions wanted to improve the lot of their members. Management on the other hand wanted to protect their profits. They were both fighting a losing battle. I remember my Dad saying of some industrial dispute, "They're pricing themselves out of jobs". How right he was.

At some point the West's borrowing spree would have come to an end. China could not continue to lend us the money to buy its goods indefinitely. Actually it would probably have come to and end sooner if the bankers had not used their imagination to persuade us all that loans to people with no visible means of support were a good idea.

To put it the other way, anyone who thinks - and Lanchester apparently does - that if it had not been for the banker induced Credit Crunch none of this would have happened, and we would all be sailing serenely on as before, is wrong. The reality is that we would all have started to feel worse off anyway, and perhaps a lot sooner. The readjustment we are all having to make in our public and private spending would have happened at some point, Credit Crunch or no Credit Crunch. It would have happened even if Gordon Brown had not gone on his spending spree. At some point our outgoings would have had to begin to fall in line with our income.

This is happening now, but painfully slowly. I said there were two things in the papers this morning which reminded me of Whoops! The first was a piece in this morning's Torygraph by Jeff Randall. Randall points out that Britain's debt, despite the Coalition's efforts to cut the deficit, is increasing by £2 billion a day. Lanchester wants the Government to stimulate the economy by borrowing even more. Randall reminds us that the Government has hardly begun to cut public spending, quoting an analyst from Tullet Prebon as follows: "No one has yet explained why the British state must spend £700 billion today, having managed perfectly well on £450 billion, at today's values, 10 years ago."

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Lanchester's book is not what is between the covers, but what it represents. Lanchester's political class - well-educated, liberal - is not on the whole interested in the nitty-gritty of economics. For them businessmen fall into two categories, both equally unappealing. On the one hand is the besuited City capitalist, eating babies for breakfast. On the other, the manufacturer of widgets from the East Midlands, boring and, no doubt, speaking with something of a Birmingham accent. Money just is, or just happens. The prosperity we need to provide schools, hospitals and benefits comes from, well, where? The government? Traditionally the Left likes spending it, but doesn't much like investigating where it comes from. A book like Lanchester's would not have been possible, or necessary, or intellectually respectable were it not for the ignorance of the constituency to which it appeals.

The other thing which reminded me of Whoops! was the news that at the Guardian's open weekend the speaker at a seminar about the future of capitalism was - John Lanchester.

Pope is Catholic shock.