Enoch Powell to Anders Breivik - a liberal journey

Amidst the tragedy-porn of the Anders Breivik trial (which seems to have died down now in the UK, but which must make opening a newspaper unbearable in Norway), I wonder if anyone else has noticed the dog that didn't bark.  When Breivik explained the reasoning behind his slaughter of 70-odd people, he did not say that it was because the Norwegian government was being swamped by an influx of black people.  He said it was an influx of Muslims.  A small point perhaps.  But I wonder whether it is indicative of the way the debate has moved on across Europe since the days of Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech.

Powell was wrong, but it's important to understand why.  He was wrong because he thought race and culture were the same thing.  He thought that the white majority would never accept the black minority as their neighbours and that strife would ensue.  What he failed to understand was that black Afro-Caribbean immigrants came largely from the same Christian or post-Christian cultural background, and that when white children went to school with black children, then drank, partied and slept with them, it would quickly become apparent that colour was only skin deep.  The UK is not a colour blind country, but nevertheless I once heard a black girl of Nigerian extraction on the radio say she had never experienced racism here.  That anyone could sincerely say such a thing is astonishing.

What then of the Muslim immigration that Breivik hated and feared?  Islam is a cultural phenomenon which has very different ideas about the way men and women should behave to each other, some of which I admire but some of which are out of the Stone Age, some of which are against the law in the UK and none of which are readily compatible with the culture of the (black and white) majority.  British drunkenness and licentiousness are unattractive, but they are preferable to forced marriages and honour killings.

We have already had Anders Breiviks aplenty in the UK, of whom the 7/7 bombers were merely the only ones to succeed.  Just as Breivik allowed his hatred to overcome basic feelings of empathy towards his fellow human beings, the bombers thought it was OK to kill people because they didn't like British foreign policy.  Since their explosions also killed some of their fellow Muslims, let's hope that God was in a generous mood when they knocked on heaven's door.

Whether immigration is a good thing per se is a topic for another day.  During the Blair/Brown governments well over half the new jobs created went to people born outside the UK, most of whom were white Christians from Eastern Europe.  Islamic immigration in the UK will work if Muslim women decide that the role traditionally allotted to them by their culture is not good enough and that they want more.  Until that happens a pause for breath might be in order, lest we import anyone else who doesn't like British foreign policy.

PS On the day I wrote this post, four men from Luton were charged with terrorist offences relating to a bomb plot.  The next day another seven men were arrested in Coventry and Cardiff as part of an investigation into smuggling drugs to finance terrorism operations.  Breiviks aplenty here, it seems.

Sibelius and the music of the future

I have been re-reading Constant Lambert's wonderful book Music Ho!, retrieved from some distant second-hand shop by the miracle of the internet.

For those who haven't read it, Music Ho!, subtitled tellingly A Study of Music in Decline, is an assessment of the composition scene as Lambert saw it in the early 1930s. Of course it reads as a dated book now in some respects, yet when Lambert, who died in the early Fifties, wrote an introduction to the 1948 reprint he noted that "the situation still seems to me precisely the same", and I can't help thinking that might still have been his assessment. I read it with yelps of surprise and delight at the pertinacity of the writing.

When Lambert refers to "pre-War" he means the 1914-18 war, and it comes as a shock to realise that in the 30s Debussy was still considered new, and the experiments of the nationalist and Russian schools were of recent memory. Whilst admiring Iberia, Lambert is sniffy about Debussy. "Debussy's real revolution in harmony consists far more in the way he uses chords he uses .... The difficulty many people experienced on first hearing (his) work was ... created far more by the lack of rhetorical and emotional reasoning ... (his music) is entirely lacking in the thrust and counterthrust methods of the German Romantics."

Lambert detected a problem with the nationalists. "To put it vulgarly, the whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder." Admirers of Bartok might disagree with this, but nevertheless it's a sentence with which Lambert skewers many lesser figures.

Music Ho! is full of such treasurable one-liners. What of the revolutionaries, of Schoenberg and Stravinsky? "Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives", the first sentence of the book reads. Ouch. "... it is the ear that is the final judge", Lambert writes of Schoenberg. "It is no use claiming formal unity for a work on the theoretical grounds of its contrapuntal construction when this construction cannot possibly be observed by the listener who has not been primed, or supplied by the composer with a crib". Well quite. "However much one may admire Schoenberg's powerful imagination and unique genius, it is difficult not to feel that world of sound and thought that he opens up - though apparently iconoclastic - is au fond as restricted as the academicism it has supplanted."

How to explain composers' increasing pre-occupation with the darker side of human nature? "Others may see in the disintegrating brutality of Elektra, Le Sacre du Printemps, and other works, a reflection of the brutality of the succeeding war years, similar to the moral laxity, failure to keep up appearances before the servants, and general disintegration of behaviour that invariably precedes revolutions."

But Lambert is not really having this. "Horror and neurasthenia are absent from pre-Impressionist music for the simple reason that composers lacked the technical means to give as much expression to this side of their nature as was accomplished by the poets and novelists. Horror and neurasthenia in literature can be expressed without resorting to extremes of technique. (Poe) can convince us, for example, that Roderick Usher's personal variations on Weber's last waltz were strange and morbid by merely telling us so. But a composer treating the same subject could only convince us by making the waltz actually sound strange and morbid..."

Not that society at large should be excluded from musical considerations. "It is essential that we should see music against its social background ... For every technical argument for or against a method of composing, there is at least one social argument, and the social argument is often the more far reaching and convincing". As for the intellectual climate of a period, "It was the most natural thing in the world for Liszt to take his young countesses on Lake Como and read them Tasso and Victor Hugo. If anyone still thinks this spirit exists let him visualize himself taking his young woman on the Serpentine and reading her T.S.Eliot."

I'm not sure I'm with Lambert here. If the Romantics didn't still speak to us, we wouldn't be listening to them any more. The kind of quasi-hysterical feelings that prompted the Symphonie Fantastique may be ludicrously out of date, but music is sufficiently abstract an art for the musical consequences of those feelings to be compelling the best part of two centuries later. And of course if it is still OK to listen to music centuries old, one has to wonder why it isn't alright to write new pieces in that style. It's always seemed to me that the argument against doing so was that it might be tedious for the composer rather than for the audience.

Lambert has some musical tastes which would now be regarded as odd. He doesn't just like Satie and Glinka, but thinks them important. The largely forgotten Anglo-Dutch composer Bernard van Dieren is highly rated. He has no time for Brahms, and is positively dismissive about the New World symphony. And of course his book was ridiculed amongst modernists for the title of its final chapter - Sibelius and the music of the future. At the time Lambert wrote Music Ho! Sibelius had just begun the long silence which saw him produce nothing for 25 years. How could Sibelius teach the future anything?

Lambert is very careful in his terms here. "No composer can surprise us now with sensational technical discoveries ... The glamour of the anarchist and the mystery of the sphinx have begun to pall, and we are faced with the unenviable task of making constructive effort and plain statement appear interesting ... There is nothing in music which has really lost its meaning, no device of rhythm, no harmonic combination which the composer of vision cannot reanimate". Amen to that. "I am not suggesting for a moment that the important composers of the future will imitate Sibelius's form, any more than they will imitate Van Dieren's harmony, but I am convinced that they will draw more inspiration from the solitary figures of present-day music than from the various petty movements which spring up every five years - and disappear as rapidly."

This is a very funny book which everyone interested in classical music should read once a decade. Lambert is a clever man who is not afraid to look at the big picture and who delights in the barbed one-liner. Here he is on Ravel: "There is a definite limit to the length of time a composer can go on writing in one dance rhythm (this limit is obviously reached ... towards the end of La Valse and towards the beginning of Bolero)".

I wonder what he would have made of things now. "Elgar", he writes, "was the last serious composer to be in touch with the great public ... Sophisticated composers are either becoming more sophisticated, like Alban Berg, or they are deliberately turning their sophistication to popular account, like Kurt Weill ... In this process of splitting up, any music which does not belong specifically to either type will be ruthlessly disregarded. The middlebrow composer will disappear ..."

These were prophetic words; but Lambert does not consider what their long term consequences might be for the art we love. Not being granted the long term in which to consider his prophecy, he can hardly be blamed for that. Where most people don't listen to classical music, and where the maintenance of a professional symphony orchestra requires bums on seats and extensive state subsidy in a time of austerity, the continued courting of the sophisticated composer - the Kurt Weills have disappeared - looks increasingly like an indulgence which has cost classical music dear.

By coincidence, the cover of this morning's G2 splashes an article by Tom Service which is, in terms, a plea for people to get into contemporary music. When an art for has to plead for followers you know something has gone wrong.

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?