Why I love . . . #3 Frank Field

In the last ten years the British population has increased by 3.7 million (2011 census).

More than 500,000 Polish people now live in the UK (2011 census).

In the period of the last Labour government more than 50% of new jobs created went to people born overseas (HMG figures).

UK unemployment figures are currently about 2.5 million.  Young black men are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as young white men.  More than 50% of young black men are unemployed (Guardian, March 2012).

Fewer than 2 million new homes have been built in last ten years (my rough calculation from NHBC figures).

RIBA calls for an extra 300,000 homes to be built every year (Independent, 26 Oct 2012) to deal with the housing crisis.

Nick Boles, housing minister, calls for 1,500 square miles of greenfield sites to be built on (Telegraph, 27 November).

"The main threat to biodiversity, the variety of species alive on earth, is human activity . . . One of the biggest problems that human activity causes is habitat loss, the physical environment that provides a homes to populations of different species" (Merci, Environmental pressure group).

The UK population is now over 57 million.  The population density of the South East is about 450 residents per square km (ONS report), third amongst major countries behind only Bangladesh (1,045 per sq km) and South Korea (498 per sq km).

Most of Britain's population growth in the last ten years has come from immigration (2011 census).

Frank Field, the former Labour minister, said (Telegraph, today 13th December) the population increase should now be treated as a "state of emergency . . . This is not so much a wake up call, it is almost time for the firing squad for politicians who have allowed this to happen".  He accused his own party of lacking "humility" over its role in allowing immigration to go unchecked.

That's Frank.  Fearless.  Even handed.  And better still, usually right.

PS A day or so after I posted this, Ed Miliband gave a speech acknowledging some of Labour's mistakes in office.  "The capacity of our economy to absorb new migrants was greater than the capacity of some of our communities to adapt", he said.  I suppose I should be relieved to find that I am no longer confined to the lunatic fringe.  I'm going to post more fully on this in a minute.

Viva Berlusconi - no, really

Italian stockmarkets slumped yesterday on the news that Silvio Berlusconi's party had withdrawn its support from the country's governing coalition, prompting the resignation of stand-in PM Mario Monti and early elections next year.  Berlusconi has pledged to stand for a fourth term in office.

In a small way this is a good thing.

Why?  A year or so ago I wrote a post suggesting that Greece would probably be out of the Eurozone by the end of 2012.  I was wrong.  A large debt write down following by billions in the way of EZ hand outs has contrived to keep Greece in the game.  I underestimated the ruthlessness and resourcefulness of EZ leaders.  Of course this has only been possible because draconian austerity policies have been forced on ordinary Greeks (and not just the Greeks - the Portuguese and Spanish too).

Although there have been riots and protests, no EZ country has a major political party with a policy of withdrawal from the Eurozone.  Even the Greek Anti-Austerity party doesn't want to withdraw.  It's easy to understand why this should be.  The current generation of European leaders have been brought up on the idea of European integration.  It was in their mothers' milk.  They're not going to turn round and admit that the Euro has been a gigantic mistake.

And so the Eurozone slips backwards towards recession, as the deficit countries (just about everyone) tighten their belts and the surplus countries (mostly Germany) look smug and refuse to spend any more.

If it's very difficult to see how this will play out, it's also very hard to see it ending anything other than badly.  Growth is going to be in short supply in Europe generally; economies that aren't growing will struggle to reduce their deficits; as economies shrink the pressure applied to the populations will grow and grow.  How long will people put up with it?  And what will happen when they've had enough?  In the mainstream parties there is a vacuum of leadership tailor-made for the extreme Right.

That's why Silvio Berlusconi's assertion that Sgr Monti's policies have dragged Italy "to the edge of the abyss" strikes a chord.  It's not that Berlusconi has explicitly called for Italy's exit from the Euro.  He hasn't.  But any EZ leader willing to stand up and say, "Hang on, this isn't working" is swimming refreshingly against the tide.  Hold your nose.  Viva Berlusconi.

Crisis at Christmas

In the Guardian and on the news the run of stories about hardship at Christmas is just beginning.  Housing benefit cuts and mortgage defaults are putting people on the streets, and the Government's austerity policies are to blame.

This may be true, but the Government's opponents talk of austerity as if it were a choice.  The suggestion is that there might be a painless alternative which Ed Balls is just waiting to implement, and as if there will come a point at which it is over.  George Osborne's latest prognosis talks in terms of cuts lasting until 2018 or thereabouts, and after that date, we're told, everything will return to normal.  If only incompetent Chancellor Osborne didn't keep putting it off!

I think that view is delusional.  Austerity is not optional but inevitable.  The idea that when your economy is at rock bottom and you are borrowing millions of pounds a day just to stay afloat it might be rational to carry on public spending as before is beyond ridicule.  Austerity is with us for the forseeable future, and if, as I expect, Labour returns to power in 2015 we will merely have Labour's version instead.

What will it look like?  You would hope they would have learned that there is only a certain mileage to be gained from taxing the wealthy.  A week or so ago the Torygraph reported that the numbers of people declaring an annual income of more than £1 million fell from 16,000 to 6,000 after the introduction of the 50p tax rate; the Treasury reckon they lost £7 billion.  But I wouldn't bet my mortgage on it.  By 2015 the clamour from Labour's natural constituencies for a bout of rich-bashing will be more intense than it is now.  It won't plug the hole in the UK's budget, and, like the 50p tax rate, it might cost the Treasury more than it gains; but it'll happen all the same.  Parties pander to their supporters.

All of which brings me back to a point I've been making for three or four years, one which is worth dragging out into the light every now and again.  It is that the credit crunch is not a crisis of Capitalism.  Rather it is a crisis for Social Democrats.  Why?  Boom and bust is just what capitalism does - capital is misallocated; there is mispricing of risk; it all goes pear-shaped.  This was a particularly big one, exacerbated by globalisation.  In the decades ahead it will eventually work through the system, as the Far East gets richer and the West gets poorer.  In the end the cycle will start again, with any luck featuring better safeguards in future (it probably won't, but one can hope).

Social Democracy, on the other hand, is dead in the water.  It is predicated on an extensive system of support for people who have been unfortunate or who have made bad choices.  For western countries expecting high standards of living it was unaffordable in the good times; we know Britain couldn't afford it, because overall we ran a deficit during the longest period of economic growth in British history, from Black Wednesday in 1993 to summer 2008.  It will be doubly so in the bad times which now stretch away into the future.  Way beyond 2018.

Personally I don't think Labour is anywhere near working out what might be a plausible substitute; not that that will spoil their chances in 2015.  Most of their natural support haven't even grasped the nature of the problem - it still astonishes me how many people still think it was all the fault of the banks (or Gordon Brown for that matter), without asking themselves what it was the banks were doing.  Answer - working out more and more ingenious ways of making it look OK to lend to people and governments that couldn't afford to pay it back.  Trying to prop up Western living standards that couldn't be supported without that lending.

No, if I were a Social Democrat I'd be chewing my fingernails.  If I were on the Hard Left, on the other hand, I'd be feeling rather chipper.

George Osborne - bash carefully

The Chancellor has been getting some stick recently, and no doubt after today's Autumn statement (delivered on December 5th? - not very Autumnal, George) he'll be in for some more.

I was watching the Ten O'clock News and Newsnight last night.  Criticism seems to be two-fold.  One, Osborne hasn't got the economy to grow.  Two, he's borrowed too much.  But considered together these criticisms collapse into a heap.

By universal consent, the economy has failed to grow because of weak demand.  How could Osborne boost demand?  Only by borrowing more.

You think he's borrowed too much already?  Fine.  Cut spending.  But that would only lead to demand being still weaker.

His critics can't have it both ways.  Either he's borrowed too much, or he's at fault for low growth.  But not both.

Labour has been at the forefront of having its critical cake and eating it, which is a bit rich because we have ended up with borrowing levels pretty close to what they planned before the 2010 election.

Of course, it's possible that Osborne is to blame for neither.  Trying to revitalise the economy when you are up to your eyes in debt, with the eurozone in crisis, America emerging from recession and growth faltering in the Far East is about as near a futile exercise as I can imagine.  The truly depressing thing about recent economic news is that it is very difficult to think of anything else the Chancellor could do.

Which strikes me as the biggest and most telling charge to make against Osborne.  He is two and a half years into the job, and is probably more fairly described as dogged rather than imaginative.  Yes, it's hard, but he is paid to think creatively about the economy, which the rest of us aren't.

My annual Rachmaninov 2

Early next year the Halifax Symphony Orchestra will be playing Rachmaninov's 2nd Symphony.  We had the first rehearsal last night.  When I was young I had Andre Previn's magisterial version of the piece, recorded with the LSO in the 70s, and in the years before I went to music college and became cynical, its passion and lyricism were often a mental soundtrack to my life.

To describe Rach 2 as sumptuous would be to short-change it.  The symphony is nearly an hour's worth of musical velvet.  I have conducted it before, an experience I remember chiefly for the long stretches of rehearsal spent cajoling the second violins to play fig. 33 correctly in the second movement; I remember too having to signal to one of the double basses who had turned up late for the concert how many beats I was going to give before the start of the last movement; that and the relief, as the music crested the last hill and began to wind itself up for the exuberant final bars, that we had got through it without disaster; Rach 2 is technically hard for the players, thickly scored and ambitious.

I also remember thinking - and this struck me last night too - "I no longer believe what Rachmaninov is telling me".  It might be worth considering what exactly that is.  Rachmaninov speaks of present unhappiness and of longing for something that is just out of reach, a longing expressed with almost fetishistic care and obsessive length.  Only at the very end do we feel that we might have actually attained it, and it is that feeling of consummation and achievement which makes the final couple of pages so exhilarating.

How useful is that for living?  In my experience not much.  It may be difficult to get something you really want, and miserable when you haven't got it; but few things are as good (or bad) as they first appear, and an even bigger task is how to be happy once you have got something long desired.  Rachmaninov isn't alone in focusing short-sightedly on this near term goal at the expense of what lies beyond it: many other Romantic composers strove to express loss, want and attainment.  Why not?  They are powerful feelings.

But for me this just makes the more emotionally mature achievements of other composers all the greater - I'm thinking particularly of Brahms, Nielsen and Sibelius.  There is a quality of stoicism and resignation in Brahms' music which seems to recognise that the Romantic outlook is only a small part of human experience; as for Nielsen his two masterworks, the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, are explicit attempts to wrestle with how to live as an adult.  They are not the most radical pieces of twentieth century music, but they see the world with a clarity and acuity far removed from Rachmaninov's sentimental vision.  After writing the Violin Concerto, Sibelius went beyond the subjective play of human emotions into a rarefied musical sphere which reflects the relationship between man and the physical world.

Everyone should listen to Rach 2 once every year or so.  It is a great piece of music, challenging and emotional, vividly orchestrated and full of memorable tunes.  But it is not the whole story.

Boycotting Amazon

Last June I posted about the thorny issue of tax dodging (Jimmy Carr and Amazon), pointing out that "Amazon do millions, if not billions, of business in the UK.  But they don't pay any tax here.  Amazon have the right to arrange their tax affairs in any legal way they like.  But we don't have to buy books from them.  I find www.abebooks.co.uk a perfectly good substitute."

I might have added Starbucks and Google to Amazon; and now it appears that Starbucks are going to re-arrange their affairs to increase their tax exposure.  Hooray.  These people need our goodwill and custom.

Incidentally, if Starbucks were really making no profits from their UK business, why do they have one?  Why don't they just close it down?  That Starbucks think it worth operating here gives the lie to the pretence that they aren't making any money.

That still leaves Amazon (and no doubt plenty of others).  Every pound we don't spend there increases the pressure on them.  Come on citizens!  Keep your wallets in your pockets!

Ignoring the Leveson Report

Like you, I haven't read Brian Leveson's report; I doubt whether even Leveson himself has read all of it.  But like you, that doesn't stop me having opinions about it, and here they are.

Leveson seems to have opted for some kind of independent Regulator, like the PCC but set up on a statutory basis to prevent the government fiddling with it.

Sounds very worthy, but here are three things that are wrong with it.

First, given that any regulator is inevitably going to proceed on the basis of rules, why are newspapers more likely to obey a Leveson-type regulator than they were the Press Complaints Commission?  To put it another way, the press not only broke the PCC rules but the criminal law also.  Anyone who thinks a Leveson-compliant regulator would have more of an impact on journalists than the prospect of a prison sentence is crazy.

Secondly, what if some newspaper refuses to co-operate, as the Spectator has threatened?  Richard Desmond, it will be remembered, refused to allow his publications to be scrutinised by the PCC.  And here's where Leveson gets nasty.  He seems to be suggesting that refuseniks will be dealt with by Ofcom, a state sponsored body, instead, and face harsher costs penalties in litigation than publications that comply.  But who is head of Ofcom?  Why, it's none other than Ed Richards, a former apparatchik of Gordon Brown.  In other words, co-operate with Leveson's Regulator or a state-sponsored body with a political appointee at its head will get you.  When Leveson says there is a world of difference between his scheme and state regulation he is being disingenuous.  Leveson is proposing to use state regulation to compel compliance with his scheme.

Thirdly, the remit of Leveson's Regulator won't apply to the internet.  His vast four-volume report apparently devotes only one page to it in a total exceeding 2000.  We could soon find ourselves in the bizarre situation that a print copy of an offending newspaper story might fall foul of the rules but an online one might not.  It's hard to think of a better way of sinking print media altogether, making it irrelevant in comparison to the net's unrestricted Wild West.

On the whole we get the press we deserve.  I bet even the people who have suffered most egregiously from the attentions of Fleet Street - in this case perhaps the Dowler parents and the McCanns - will have read the News of the Screws or the Sunday People in their time.  I know I have.  Yes, the press is unscrupulous and all the rest, but they are in business because we keep buying their papers.  And sometimes they come up with some gold.  The phone-hacking story, remember, was broken by a newspaper.

I don't feel terribly sorry for the celebrities like Steve Coogan and Hugh Grant who have added their bleating to Hacked Off's campaign.  All of them have at some time or other used the press to further their careers - Coogan has made films for Rupert Murdoch's companies, for God's sake.  All of them are free at any time to go and seek a life of suburban obscurity.  It's surprisingly easy.  People like the Dowlers and McCanns are blameless of course; but hard cases make bad law.  Those who hacked their phones are in prison, and some of the people who put them up to it will probably be joining them pretty soon.

Surprisingly, I think David Cameron is right to resist Leveson's self-righteous allure.