Cruising to the Edge; or possibly not

Finally, I have seen it all.  Nothing can surprise me any more.

I refer to the activities of Cruise to the Edge, a tour company which offers the combination of cruising to exotic destinations whilst being entertained by your favourite prog rockers.  Yes, really.  Prog rockers.  On a ship.

In a way it all makes sense.  In the 1960s and 70s lots of people liked progressive rock.  Those people are getting old.  Old people like going on cruises.  You have to concede there is a shrewd aspect to the plan.

But Oh Jesus.  Has it really come to this?  You can go aboard the Poesia and, after dining at the "wonderful sushi bar" watch members of Yes rendering extracts from Tales of Topographic Oceans, winding down afterwards by a massage at the "enchanting Balinese spa"? Not very rock and roll is it?

I'm aware that my horror at this prospect arises partly from the coupling together of two concepts I had previously thought unconnected.  Old people going on a cruise surely did not have anything to do with men playing electric guitars.  The answer turns out to have been that if you wait long enough, it will do.  Time has undone us all.

Just as worrying is the idea that a prog rock cruise might actually turn out to be quite fun.  And not just in an ironic way.  I always disliked Yes, but before punk came along I knew every word and nuance of the albums Genesis made when Peter Gabriel was at the helm, and one of the acts cruising to the edge is Steve Hackett, their self-effacing guitar player during that period.  My wife wouldn't come, but then again she might be glad of the chance to get rid of me for a week.

In an irony not acknowledged on the company's website, one of the acts is a band called Saga.

In the fullness of time there will I expect be a cruise ship for ageing punk rockers.  I'm saving for the deposit now. 

Alex Salmond gets my Groat - again

Unsurprisingly, a Treasury report issued this morning suggests an independent Scotland will have problems with its currency.  Unsurprising because the Westminster government is hostile to independence, but also because the problems are real and shouldn't be glossed over.

Scotland has four choices.  Keep the pound, either in a full fledged currency union or on an informal basis (much as Panama uses the dollar); join the Euro; or float its own currency.

A currency union is possible, but would require Westminster's agreement.  I shudder to think of the excoriating demands Westminster would make, but to protect sterling HMG would have to have strict control over Scotland's spending and borrowing.  There would also be the small matter of the Bank of England being Scotland's lender of last resort.

Using the pound on an informal basis would give Scotland no say in Bank of England base rates, and would deprive it of a lender of last resort.

The problems of currency union being writ large in the dole queues of southern Europe, Alex Salmond has set his face against Euro membership; but it's quite possible that the EU would make adoption of the currency a prerequisite of joining the union, which the Nationalists desperately want to do.

And then there's the groat.  Putting aside the expense of setting it up, a new Scottish currency would lead to higher trading costs, and the volatility of its exchange rate would lead to fluctuations in domestic wages and prices.

None of these options is easy.  Opting for currency union is fine in theory, but, awkwardly for the Nationalists, leaves Westminster in a position to dictate whatever terms it likes.  All these solutions, apart from the groat, would probably leave Scotland with less control over economic policy than it has at the moment.  What kind of independence is that?

No, if I were Alex Salmond I'd be urgently researching the Bitcoin.

David Graeber - misunderstanding Rogoff and Rheinhart

George Osborne had a bad week last week - tears at Mrs Thatcher's funeral, chided by the IMF and then the discrediting of a key paper by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Rheinhart which he and others had used to justify austerity policies.  Essentially Rogoff and Rheinhart's paper concludes that once a country's debt to GDP ratio gets above 90%, it's very hard to get economic growth.  However an American student noticed recently that the Harvard ecnomomists' data set had missed out some countries near the top of the alphabet - a presumably accidental spreadsheet error.

As so often, what's really interesting is not so much the mistake itself - Rogoff and Rheinhart say it doesn't affect their overall conclusion - but the response to it.  Anyone would think a coach and horses had been driven through Hayekian economics, and that George Osborne should be sitting inconsolable in a puddle of tears.  Here is one David Graeber, for example, writing in the Guardian today - "The intellectual justification for austerity lies in ruins . . . There is now no definite proof that high levels of debt necessarily lead to recession . . . Reinhart and Rogoff's study was wrong".

This is pretty typical.  But even if you put aside the hyperbole, Graeber is assuming that the argument against high debt to GDP ratios rests on Reinhart and Rogoff alone.  It doesn't.  It's not hard to see that the higher your borrowing, the greater percentage of your national wealth goes to servicing debt, the higher the taxes you need to finance the interest payments, and the less you have to spend on growth-generating investment.  Whether a ratio of above 90% is the exact point at which it becomes impossible for growth doesn't much matter; the point is, the more debt you have, the harder growth becomes.

And then there's the risk that you might go bust.  Graeber is sanguine about this.  Why, he wants to know, is a country like Japan, with one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios in the world, able to borrow at 1% on 10 year bonds?  Because "everyone knows that in an emergency, the Japanese government could simply print the money", Graeber writes.

There are two things to say about this.

One is that Japan is a classic example of an economy with cripplingly high debts which isn't growing.  Hasn't Graeber heard of the term "Lost Decade"?  It was coined for Japan.  The incoming Prime Minister, Mr Abe, has proposed a new massive programme of QE precisely to try and fix this problem.

Secondly, the idea that Japan (or the UK) can never go bust because it can print its own money is a fallacy, no matter how many times people repeat it.  A government which tries to print its way to solvency soon discovers that investors holding foreign currency will demand ever greater interest payments to hedge against the risk that it will decline in value.  Eventually the gilt markets will stop buying the currency altogether.  And then what?  QE in perpetuity?  Printing money is not a panacea.

Countries that can do it are in a much better position than, for example, Spain or Greece, hamstrung by their Eurozone membership.  But more flexibility doesn't mean they can kiss the back of their own head.

The Guardian describes Mr Graeber as "the author of The Democracy Project".  His Wikipedia page is not quite so coy.  He is apparently "an anthropologist and anarchist".  Why the Graun thinks his views on Rogoff and Rheinhart are worth printing is beyond me.  He knows even less about economics than I do.

Thatcher's funeral and the right to protest

Apparently there were a small number of protestors at Mrs Thatcher's funeral.  Some of them shouted slogans and waved placards, some of them just turned their backs on the procession.  In Goldthorpe, South Yorkshire, however, some 2,000 people had a right knees up, culminating in the burning of a Thatcher effigy.

People have a right to protest; but I wonder in this case whether they actually were protesting; and if so to whom, and against what?

You protest to show your opposition to some proposed course of action.  But that actions the protestors disliked took place 25 years ago and more.  In case they hadn't noticed, the focus of their objections hasn't been in office for nearly 23 of those years.  During that period she has been in no position to do anything that anyone might have usefully protested about.  Even her own party, for personal reasons rather than those of policy, effectively disowned her.  She was an ex-Prime Minister.  She is an ex-person.

Had Thatcher been alive, this could scarcely have been called a protest; now she's dead, the only people in a position to receive and understand the demonstrators' message are her friends, colleagues and family. Thatcher herself is beyond all that.

It strikes me as pointless at best, shabby at worst, to mark their day like this. And it's not even as if the protestors have in mind some particular part of Thatcher's legacy which they want undone. Some of them are too young to remember exactly what that legacy was, or what Britain was like beforehand.  Their message can be summed up like this - "We didn't like her. And we want you to know it".

Mrs Thatcher in her prime lived life as a politician; but for the last decades of her life she lived as a human being. The people who burned her effigy on the day of her funeral, in denying her that humanity, were guilty of the same inhumanity they say characterised her dealings with them.  Hypocrites all.

The issue of what kind of funeral Thatcher should have had is a vexed one, and the process by which this quasi state funeral came into being is shadowy and problematic.  Will we put on this show for John Major or for Gordon Brown?  I doubt it.  But if not, who is to decide?  It might be about time to have a protocol for ex Prime Ministers.  The funeral cost quite a lot of money, which might well have been better spent elsewhere, but I can't help think some of the critics wouldn't have noticed the cost if the deceased had been someone of their own political caste.  Personally I think that the nation is entitled to give a decent send off to someone who, whether we liked or loathed them, has been captain of the ship we all sail in.

I have never been to Goldthorpe, a former pit village to the south east of Barnsley, but I went to school near there in the 1970s, and in the five years leading up to the miners' strike frequently made the pilgrimage to Oakwell to watch Barnsley escape first from the old Fourth Division and then from the Third.  I can still remember the names of the stations we used to pass on the train from Sheffield - Attercliffe, Brightside, Chapeltown, Elsecar, Wombwell.  Even then, before the year long privation of the strike and the collapse of the mining industry, South Yorkshire was a bit of dump.  God knows what it was like afterwards.  And yet when I see the residents of Goldthorpe on TV, their voices still crackling with anger and hatred, I want to ask them some questions.

"Did you seriously expect every other working person in Britain to keep on paying part of their taxes to prop up miners' wages in perpetuity?  When miners had had a 43% pay increase in 1971 and a 35% increase in 1974?  When they had effectively brought down an elected government?"  Unfortunately it isn't in the nature of TV reporters to ask those kind of questions.  "You say Mrs Thatcher ushered in an era of selfishness", I'd have liked to ask, "But didn't the miners try and hold the country to ransom to suit their own purposes?  Wasn't that selfish too?"

It's much easier to show Goldthorpe as a benighted khazi with colourful locals than it is to ask why it ended up that way.

I didn't watch the funeral myself.  I wrote a few bars of the String Quartet I'm working on at the moment.  I didn't like Mrs Thatcher much either.

Why I love . . . #6 Colin Davis

Sad to hear this morning of the death of Sir Colin Davis.  I think it's fair to say that he was the greatest British conductor of his generation.  Apart from Mackerras I can't think of anyone else who runs him close.  Tod Handley?  Perhaps, but Handley never really got the chance to test himself on the biggest of stages whereas Davis ruled the roost at the LSO and worked extensively abroad, particularly with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

I'm struggling to recall the occasions on which I saw Davis conduct.  I know I did, because I can visualise him, dapper, economical of movement, controlled.  But it was his records that made an impression on me, and particularly his records of Berlioz, and of Sibelius symphonies, many of which I had on vinyl, with their distinctive covers of Edvard Munch paintings.

Davis was a great Sibelius conductor, who not only realised what a great composer the Finn was but - and this is not by any means the same thing - knew how to perform his work, faithful to the scores without being inflexible.  For me, even Karajan and Rattle didn't always understand Sibelius - I think with horror of Karajan's bruising end to the Fourth Symphony, a heavy fortissimo against Sibelius's notated mezzo-forte (all the colder for its restraint), or his excessive lingering on the C Major resolution of the the last bar of the Seventh.

Davis didn't make that kind of mistake.

Who will replace him?  Rattle's is a good claim, particularly with his work in new music.  But whereas I feel that Rattle is self-evidently a great rehearsal conductor, he doesn't always make reliable musical decisions in standard repertoire.  Clearly he is very very good though, or he wouldn't have survived so long in Berlin.

On Saturday night we went into Manchester to watch the Halle play Haydn.  Mark Elder reminds me a little of Colin Davis - the same economy, the same wonderfully appropriate gestures.  Clearly he needs to do more new music (particularly more music by Nicholas Simpson), but he does the standard repertoire really well, has an open mind, and must be there or thereabouts.  Rattle is languishing in Berlin.  Elder is here in Manchester.  RIP Sir Colin.  Regis est mortuus.  Vivat rex senior.

Game of Thrones and John Lanchester's Capital - Fantasy Lands

There comes a point where a cultural phenomenon reaches a point of ubiquity such that the London Review of Books, the Leftie literary magazine, feels it has no choice but to look down from on high and get one of its writers to pontificate thereon.  Such, recently, has been the lot of novelist John Lanchester, enthusing at some length over George RR Martin's epic fantasy series Game of Thrones, available in a WH Smiths near you and serialised on Sky for a third series.

Lanchester has done a similar job, repeatedly, for LRB readers on the subject of the financial crisis, and his novel Capital aims to put the fruits of his research into literary form.

I have read the first two Game of Thrones books; someone bought the first for my 13 year old daughter for Christmas (although given the amount of "seed spilling", as Martin often - very often - puts it, I rather wonder whether this was wise).  In the fictional worlds of Westeros and Esteros various houses - the Lannisters, Starks, Tyrells and so on - compete for influence under King Robert, and then (spoiler!) compete to replace him upon his demise.  Westeros is bounded to the north by a 700 foot wall of ice, keeping out the various rag-tag of wildlings and Undead who range beyond it.

If you like a sweeping narrative, full of knights, bleak landscapes, abrupt violence, serving wenches and intrigue, G of T serves a purpose.  It is competently written at least (far less turgid than Tolkein), though perhaps a little purple for my taste.  Martin's imaginary world is, at least at first, extremely convincing on its own terms.  Moreover its people behave in ways which struck me as rather life-like (certainly in comparison with Lanchester's Capital, which I'll come to in a minute).  That's to say quite often the people you are supposed to be rooting for do unpleasant things, whereas the horrible people sometimes do things that are unexpectedly nice.  The baddies survive when you hope they won't, whereas Martin is utterly ruthless in killing off really good people if he feels like it.

And there's another thing.  Although Game of Thrones is fantasy, Martin succeeded in persuading me at least that I was reading about real people whose behaviour faithfully reflected their culture.  There's an early scene in the first book where Lord Eddard Stark, played by Sean Bean in the TV series, beheads a man for desertion.  He insists on doing it personally because, he says, if you give the order you should be prepared to do it yourself, be prepared to listen to the man's last words.  It's not just that Martin is happy to see his readers like Eddard Stark less (he is actually one of the most attractive characters in the first book); the scene, viewed through the eyes of his watching children, is shocking, as is the discovery that all the onlookers think better of him for his willingness to as it were put his sword where his mouth is.  These are people who are like us, but whose sense of ethics and culture are utterly different.

How unlike the feted Hilary Mantel, I found myself thinking, whose characters talk and think like we do and yet behave differently in ways in which her novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies don't see fit to explain.

Martin's books are very long.  The second one was over 800 pages (approximately one for each foot of the ice wall).  Half way through it I thought with regret that there were only another 400 to go.  By the time I reached the end, however, I was pretty sure I wouldn't read any more.  There are too many characters, and despite all the room Martin allows himself, only a few of them are developed to any degree.  I found it hard to work out which knight was which, and harder to care.

Secondly, the supernatural element in the books, peripheral at first, becomes all pervasive.  Sorcery is a bit like CGI in the cinema: when anything is possible, part of the magic dissipates.  When Game of Thrones was brutally naturalistic, it packed a punch.  But when a boy becomes a wolf in his dreams, or a sorceress gives birth at will to a murderous succubus, the things which Martin made so real at first come to seem less substantial and important.  Although Martin is a much better prose writer than J K Rowling, one of the great achievements of the Potter books is that magic is integrated into the stories as a problematic, tricksy and unreliable element.  We know magic can't make everything right, particularly when the chief bad guy is so much better at it than almost everyone else.

The nicest thing I can say about John Lanchester's Capital is that I didn't want it to end.  Sometimes in a novel you get to like the characters, or some of them, so much that it's painful to tear yourself away from them.  Capital has been much touted as a State of the Nation novel, and I enjoyed it very much, but it seemed to me, although readable, engaging and intriguing, to say rather more about Lanchester (and perhaps more broadly his political and intellectual class) than about Britain.

Pepys Road in South London is one of those streets where the process of embourgeousification has left elderly Londoners living alongside nouveau bankers and Premiership footballers from Africa.  Lanchester constructs a varied cast of characters and a mystery to go with them in the months leading up to the collapse of Lehmann brothers in 2008.

The really striking thing about the book is that almost all the immigrants (or descendants of immigrants) - the owners of the Asian shop on the corner, the various Polish builders, the Hungarian nanny, the African footballer and his father, the asylum-seeking traffic warden, are lovable and sympathetically treated.  In a large cast of characters (thankfully smaller and better drawn than Martin's) only one foreigner (the fraudulent paymaster of the traffic warden, appearing in just a few pages) is unpleasant.  OK, Iqbal the Belgian may or may not be a terrorist, but all the others are really nice.

On the other hand, almost all of the white people are shits, obsessed by money and house-prices.  Of the bankers, Roger and his wife, her friend Saskia, Mark the creepy deputy, Little Tony, Jez, Eric the barbarian are horrible.  Mickey the football club's fixer admittedly gets a bit nicer as the book goes on; Smitty the conceptual artist does not; Parker his assistant gets worse.  Mill, the policeman, is a dreary non-entity, and the human rights solicitor is a vain publicity-seeker.

Again, all the asylum seekers are genuine asylum seekers, the arranged marriage between Ahmed and the sexy Rohinka works fine, the foreign workers aren't  taking jobs away from British-born people (of whatever skin colour), and the astronomical house-prices are all to do with City bonuses and nothing to do with excessive housing demand caused by immigration.

In view of the author's convenient name, it's tempting to call this La-La Land.  Capital is a book in which the dice are so heavily loaded in one direction that it's as boring dramatically as it is likeable.  The only man I know personally who might be described as a banker is also intelligent and thoughtful; so such people do exist.  A novel where some of the so-called bad guys were quite nice would have been much more interesting, and freed its readers to think a little more carefully about the issues.  A novel where all the bankers are horrible is just as tedious as one would be if, for example, all the asylum-seekers were fake or all benefit-claimants scroungers.

One of the reviews on Capital's cover describes the book as "humane", and perhaps it is, to the characters Lanchester wants you to like.  But Lanchester makes the other characters so lacking in virtue of any kind that I can't help but wonder if he isn't being patronising to his readers as well as his asylum seekers and Polish builders.

George RR Martin, aspiring only to tell a gripping story, is far less guilty of such authorial favouritism.  We know of course that writers decide who lives or dies, who prospers and who flounders, but Game of Thrones has some of the arbitrariness of life.  Although Lanchester writes beautifully, Martin's novels in this respect are so much truer and so much more demanding on the reader's sympathies.

The key to this is of course that Lanchester's studies in banker-land have led him to the conclusion, so beloved of the Left, that It Was All The Bankers' fault.  Actually his own novel gives a clue to the lie that this is.

Roger's firm goes under, we are told in an aside, because the wholesale money markets dried up.  That's to say, it caught the same disease as Northern Rock, borrowing short to lend long.  Why did that happen?  Because bankers had sought more and more ingenious ways of spreading the risk of loans made to people who were probably not going to be able to repay them.  In other words, to satisfy our society's demands for living off debt.  When those loans started to go wrong, no-one knew who was bearing the risk; banks stopped lending to each other.  Firms like Northern Rock and Roger's went under.  Thus the Credit Crunch.

If Lanchester had really wanted to write a novel about the attitudes which caused our current mess, Debt might have been a better title.  And better protagonists than the rich banker and his spendthrift wife (who end the book still financially afloat, having sold their £1.5 million house to retreat to the country) might have been people who borrowed too much and went under.  Now that would be a metaphor for the state of the nation.

Actually, like so many of the narratives beloved of the deluded, Capital reads more like a prop for Lanchester's world view, with its convenient scapegoats and multikulti feel-goodery, than it does an analysis of the real world outside his study window.  I read in Larry Elliott's column in the Guardian this morning that 85% of new jobs created in London between 1997 and 2010 went to people born outside the UK.  This is not new news - versions of this figure have been around for years, although I have never seen the number put so high.  The British people - quite a lot of them with brown or black skins, and the rest white working class - who didn't get these jobs don't figure in Lanchester's State of the Nation novel.

Like the rest of us, immigrants are good and bad in equal measure.  Like bankers, for example.  But the forces which allowed them to come to Britain, the forces which allowed bankers to lend their way to riches, and the consequences for British people generally are not explored in Capital.  Lanchester thinks it's enough to show bankers as greedy morons and immigrants as figures of cutesy wholesomeness, as if somehow this was a good enough way of dealing with two of the principal phenomena of Gordon Brown's boom years.

Reading Capital and Game of Thrones side by side, John Lanchester looks more like the writer living in fantasy land.

Nigel Farage right about something shock

Unlikely support for the proposition that the BBC's chart show should play "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead" if it gets to Number 1 on Sunday arrives today from Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP.  Farage is right of course.  If you believe in freedom of speech you have to accept things you find offensive.  Although I think it's tasteless to mock a person's death (and cruel when they have children who can't be held responsible for the parent's shortcomings), stopping the BBC from playing the record is far worse.

It's worth reminding ourselves that the BBC wouldn't play the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen during the Silver Jubilee of 1977.  That was craven.  Also that Mrs Thatcher herself censored the words of Irish Republicans at the height of the Troubles.  That was just stupid as well as wrong, because broadcasters merely got actors to read out their words.  I hope common sense prevails on Sunday.  We should be free to assess what people do and say.

The nouveau Judy Garland fans are celebrating prematurely anyway.  The Witch may well be dead, but her ideas are still stalking the land.

Incidentally, fact fans might like to look at a very informative piece by Jeremy Warner in the Torygraph here listing ten myths about Thatcher, which will interest enthusiasts and detractors alike.

P.S. Predictably, in its efforts to avoid offending anyone, the BBC ended up making a right Horlicks of "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead".  On its chart show the song featured only as a ten second clip in a news item; whereas the Thatcher lovers' riposte - The Notsensible's I'm In Love With Margaret Thatcher - was played nearly in full.  I find it very hard to understand how the Corporation's management can make such a bollocks of this.  They merely had to say, "The chart show reflects what records people are buying.  That's all", and wait for the Tory attacks to go away.  As it is they have made themselves look partial as well as censorious.  One despairs.