"Do musicians tend to be socialists?", asked pianist Stephen Hough in the Torygraph a week or so ago.
A fair question, and one you might ask about artists more generally. Hough's answer - broadly yes, because it's only a few generations ago that musicians were treated like servants - doesn't seem to me to hold water. Few people allow their great-grandfather's vocation or politics to influence their views. Anyway, many professional musicians won't have an ancestor who trod the same path.
But if artists do tend to be left wing, why might that be? The immediately obvious answer - that they tend to depend on state subsidy and are therefore more likely to support the parties that provide most of it - strikes me as only part of the story.
Speaking as an artist who is not left wing but is nevertheless significantly to the left of Genghis Khan, I would say it is because artists are interested in the human condition; what it is like to be human; how humans interact with each other; how humans relate to the broader physical world. At the heart of that interest is compassion for humanity. It's a compassion that artists are often surprisingly bad at extending to their friends and family, but nevertheless there's a striking congruity between the focus of art and the sort of institutionalised compassion that is at the heart of left wing politics.
To reverse Hough's question, how could any artist not be left wing? My personal answer would be that parties which promise institutionalised compassion sometimes fail dismally to apply it in practice; that such compassion alters the way which whole populations behave, and not necessarily for the good; and that the version of it which the left wants to see enacted is not affordable anyway.
Amongst artists, views like these confine one to leper status, which is a shame. Artists are meant to think, and there is more than one road to the Good Society.
Tuesday 30 April 2013
Thursday 25 April 2013
Avoiding triple dip
So Britain has avoided, pro tem, triple dip recession. The economy grew marginally in the first quarter of the year, providing a bit of much needed good news for the lachrymose Chancellor, George Osborne. The figures aren't actually that comforting when looked at closely: manufacturing declined again, and the sectors spurring growth were North Sea oil and service industries. Nevertheless the economy grew, which is biggish news.
You wouldn't know it listening to The World At One. It was after twenty past when WATO got round to noticing this story, and when it did it was to wheel on an amiable old gent with a failing spectacle manufacturing business in Blackburn. Just in case anyone might have thought the figures were good. And after him, airtime for Ed Balls.
It's worth considering how this might have played if the figures had been different. Then, Britain's first recorded triple dip would have been the lead item. As it was, the lead was an extended discussion, with two studio guests, of a new Royal Charter scheme dreamed up by the newspaper industry as a rival to Parliament's own. Not that any newspapers have actually signed up to this parallel scheme, mind. But a story about the media is obviously much more important than something which might have been construed as good news for the Government.
As for Ed Balls, the bellicose shadow Chancellor was given space to say, eventually, what his alternative strategy would be. It involved a temporary tax cut and other sweeteners.
The presenter didn't ask the obvious question, which was how all this would be paid for.
And so wearingly on from the Corporation.
You wouldn't know it listening to The World At One. It was after twenty past when WATO got round to noticing this story, and when it did it was to wheel on an amiable old gent with a failing spectacle manufacturing business in Blackburn. Just in case anyone might have thought the figures were good. And after him, airtime for Ed Balls.
It's worth considering how this might have played if the figures had been different. Then, Britain's first recorded triple dip would have been the lead item. As it was, the lead was an extended discussion, with two studio guests, of a new Royal Charter scheme dreamed up by the newspaper industry as a rival to Parliament's own. Not that any newspapers have actually signed up to this parallel scheme, mind. But a story about the media is obviously much more important than something which might have been construed as good news for the Government.
As for Ed Balls, the bellicose shadow Chancellor was given space to say, eventually, what his alternative strategy would be. It involved a temporary tax cut and other sweeteners.
The presenter didn't ask the obvious question, which was how all this would be paid for.
And so wearingly on from the Corporation.
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.
Tuesday 23 April 2013
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.
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.
Monday 22 April 2013
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.
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.
Thursday 18 April 2013
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.
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.
Monday 15 April 2013
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.
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.
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