Barbara Hewson, Stuart Hall and the age of consent

In the wake of Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall, Freddie Starr, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, barrister Barbara Hewson has stuck her foot in it just somewhat with a piece in Spiked magazine.  According to the BBC, she called for the age of consent to be lowered to 13.  About the prosecutions she wrote, "What we have here is the manipulation of the British criminal justice system to produce scapegoats on demand.  It's a grotesque spectacle . . . It's time to end this prurient charade, which has nothing to do with justice or the public interest."  You can read the story here.

Now I'm not about to defend Hewson's view of the age of consent, nor to waste much time attacking her Chambers, which described itself as "shocked by the views she expressed" (personally I find their failure to defend her freedom of speech distinctly more shocking).  It seems to me that while the law banning sex under 16 is an arbitrary figure intended to protect the vulnerable (and some 16 year olds will be vulnerable, some 15 year olds not), there's little to be gained from exposing an even larger tranche of young people to the attention of those who want to groom them for their own gratification.

But I do have just the faintest sympathy for Hewson's sense of outrage.  Here it is.

I'm old enough to remember the 70s, and what it was like to be attracted to women then.  For those born in a more enlightened age, it was very different.  That's not to say that groping a 9 year old, one of the accusations levelled at Stuart Hall, was widely regarded as alright.  It wasn't (although I'll come back to that).  It's more that the occasional remark about the size of a girl's breasts, a bottom pinch here, a wolf-whistle there, was considered (at least by men) as part of the rough and tumble of everyday interaction.  I'm not defending it.  But that's how things were.

That impinges on the current slew of celebrities and teachers undergoing trial by ordeal in this way: behaviour like fondling your students while they're playing the violin, getting them drunk on an awayday and having sex with them in your car, taking advantage of teenage (and perhaps underage) fans in your dressing room while your BBC minders look the other way, this all now seems a long way from today's mores.  Thirty or forty years ago it was a lot closer to what most people took for granted as part of everyday life.

What seems like extraordinary behaviour now, was then not so far removed from everyday conduct.  Remember, the pill had burst upon society, skirts were short, and the expression "free love" had not attracted overtones of naivety and cynicism, .  For men (and particularly for men with authority or power) it was open season.  That's why when one of the girls at the Menhuin School complained about a staff member, she was was told to make sure she wasn't alone with him; that's why girls in St James's Leeds were told by a nurse to feign sleep when Jimmy Savile did his loathsome ward rounds.  The people who let the vulnerable down were not necessarily bad people, but they were certainly people from a society which had different attitudes.

I find the almost puritanical absence of sexual reference in the world of work or education now slightly strange, when our society fetishises, trivialises and monetises sex at every opportunity, when - apparently - young people copulate, usually while drunk, at the drop of a hat and pornography is freely available to every teenager.  And pre-teenager.  I wonder whether we are not the new Victorians, clamping down on sexualised behaviour in some contexts, while waving our knickers in the air in others.

And I guess this is my point.  I wouldn't go back to the way things were, but I'm not totally sure our society is much better.  Who can honestly say that in forty years we won't be horrified by some current celebrity's squalid and opportunistic behaviour?  My money says we will.

And there's another thing.  We make judgments about what people did thirty or forty years ago, smug in the assumption that the next generation will share the same values and congratulate us for our outrage.  But they might not.  Society's sense of what's right and wrong is constantly shifting, and our condemnation of Savile and Hall could just as well look smug and self-satisfied.

why I love . . . #7 Sir Alex Ferguson

"Stop the clocks", wrote Auden, "Cut off the telephone".  OK, it's not as bad as that.  Sir Alex Ferguson hasn't died.  Only announced his retirement.

It feels like a little death just the same.

My route to Manchester United has been long, circuitous and ambiguous.  My Dad took my brother and I to watch City a couple of times when I was a kid.  Briefly, I was a City fan.  Sometimes I went to watch United with a neighbour.  Then, when I went away to school and was old enough to leave the premises on my own, I started going to the nearest town, Barnsley, to watch the Tykes prise their way out of the old Fourth Division and into the Second.  Years later I was jumping up and down when Ashley Ward, our lumpen striker, prodded the ball through Bruce Grobelaar's legs at Anfield for an improbable 1-0 victory during Barnsley's only season in the Premiership.

Around that time, 1992 or 3, there were stirrings from Manchester.  I was living in London, a disaffected Northener.  Alex Ferguson, hanging onto the job by his fingernails, some said, had signed a charismatic but eccentric French midfielder from the previous season's champions, Leeds.  With Lee Sharpe flying down one wing and a willowy young man called Ryan Giggs on the other, United were playing the kind of football that prompted Nick Hornby to write a piece in the Guardian entitled "Manchester United's moral right to win the Premiership".  The combination of my exile, United's exhilarating football, Eric Cantona's Gallic panache and the comically gruff Glaswegian standing on the touchline orchestrating everything made the lure of Old Trafford irresistible.  Then there was the small matter of the Champions League Final in 1999.

When I moved back to Manchester at the end of the decade I might have told you I was a United fan; but it's really more complex than that.  In February 1998 Barnsley played United in the FA Cup, and, watching the game on TV in a North London pub, I found myself wanting Barnsley to win, which they did 3.2.   And the last game of the 2012/13 season was an odd one, with City needing to win to take the title for the first time in decades; unable to watch it on TV I went to the allotment with my wife, and stood by the car in the closing moments of the game as the clock ran out on City's chances.  When Aguero scored the winning goal with seconds remaining I was interested to find that I was gutted; but at the same time thinking "Well we've won it loads, so maybe it's their turn".  So perhaps the years have made me into a United fan after all, but not so much of one that I couldn't feel that losing was good for Manchester.

Some words to describe the manager - Gruff.  Irascible.  Twinkling.  Manipulative.  Shrewd.  Determined.  But above all successful.  Thank you, Sir Alex, for all the pleasure you've given me.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.

PS I think the board will go for Mourhino.  But I hope they don't.  Mourinho will stay for a couple of years, dazzle, infuriate, fall out with someone and leave an unhappier club behind.  Give it to David Moyes.

Ed Miliband - peeing in his own shoe

"Whereof one cannot speak", goes Wittgenstein's well-known phrase or saying, "thereof one must remain silent".

This gnomic utterance has been taken to heart by Ed Miliband, who refused repeatedly on The World At One to confirm that his party's proposed VAT cut would lead to increased borrowing.  Hats off to Martha Kearney for persisting.  Eight times, apparently, she asked.

How Labour must wish it had got the other Miliband instead.  In a close race Ed was installed ahead of David by virtue of Trade Union block votes.  (I am reading Tony Blair's biography at the moment, and in it he states that the Unions were the only party donors he came across whilst in office who explicitly demanded policy changes in exchange for their money).

Ed Miliband has admitted he made a mistake.  Not that the policy was a mistake, you understand, just the refusal to answer the question.  According to the Guardian, he said he had declined to admit to the borrowing because "I suppose I felt it was rather a commonplace".  His aides said he had just been through an "emotionally charged" question and answer session on Newcastle under Lyme high street.

I had not previously thought to see the words "emotionally charged" in the same sentence as that particular Midlands town.

But how about the policy?  Yes, a temporary VAT cut would do something to stimulate economic growth, but at a cost of about £12 billion a year, money that would not just cost extra in interest rates but also push up the interest rates on the rest of the new borrowing Britain would have to do.  And when the year was over, would the fundamentals have changed?  Not one jot.

Moreover it's worth considering that the Bank of England has indirectly injected nearly £400 billion into the UK economy by way of QE.  Did that kick-start the economy into urgent life again?  Not as far as you'd notice.  The effect of Miliband's £12 bn tax cut would be tiny.

The British economy will struggle to grow just as long as the Eurozone limps onwards.  Even now there are signs that recession is creeping from the periphery to the core.  Temporary VAT cuts won't alter that.

Here's another well-known phrase or saying for Ed Miliband to ponder.  Well-known in Iceland at any rate.

"Peeing in your own shoe won't keep your foot warm for long".

Fighting over Everest

Today comes the news that a gang of unruly Sherpas threatened and beat three climbers on Everest.

To understand this story it is necessary to understand that Everest is big business.  Lots of people are willing to pay a lot of money to climb the mountain.  Nepalis can earn quite a good living - at least by local standards - helping to ferry parties up and down.  In this instance a party of Sherpas appear to have been fixing ropes (a great time-saving device) when the Europeans may or may not have got in their way.

A couple of years ago I went to hear a climber give a lecture which included an account of his ascent of Everest.  He described how the mountain is littered with the bodies of the 1 in 10 who failed to make it back down, frozen where they gave up.  And how, whilst passing beneath the Lhotse face, a Japanese climber fell on the glacier a matter of yards away.  The lecturer, a GP in civilian life, said that he had seen enough road traffic accident victims to know that the climber had broken just about every bone in his body.

None of this seemed to put him off however, and he duly got to the top.

To me the GP did not seem a proper mountaineer.  Sure, he was fit and determined, but somehow he had missed the point of it.  The aim of climbing is not just the summit.  It is about what happens on the way.  I've often thought that the effort, expense and risk of going to the Himalaya was disproportionate for a fleeting moment on top of the world; but when you must step around the dead to do it, what then?

The pioneering Scottish climber, writer and environmentalist, W H Murray, was deputy leader of the Everest reconaissance expedition of 1951, and, had things worked out slightly differently, could have been on John Hunt's successful expedition two years later.  Murray must be turning in his grave.  Even then he had grasped what moral and cultural effect sustained attempts on the mountain would have.

"Because it's there", replied George Mallory, when someone asked him why he wanted to climb Everest.  That was a good answer at the time because Everest was unclimbed.  Now hundreds of people have done it, it's a less good one.

A much better explanation of climbing had been given a generation previously by the Cambridge academic, philosopher and Alpine pioneer Sir Leslie Stephen.  "We climb", he said, "to remind ourselves what it's like".  And this nails it.  It's about the experience while it's happening.  Not the end result.

"High camps in the Himalaya and Everest itself are becoming dumps strewn with every conceivable detritus of previous expeditions", wrote Bill Murray, "from discarded oxygen cylinders to discarded bodies".  That's how it is on Everest.  Why remind yourself what it's like?

Stephen Hough and road to the Good Society

"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.

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.

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.