Faced with a choice between Mohammed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood and some stooge from the old regime, Egypt's voters installed the former, many of them holding their noses at the same time. Now it's all gone wrong. Morsi turns out not to have been a one-nation conciliator after all, imprisoning journalists, shutting newspapers and packing the committee devising a constitution with his own supporters.
But if Morsi was naive to expect Egypt's newly energised voters to bear this high-handedness for long, so too were his opponents. You can argue that Morsi's own conduct undermined his democratic credentials, but try explaining that to the hundreds of thousands of supporters who will only see that between them the army and opposition have torn down a democratically elected government. To be replaced by what? This is not the greatest start to the new Egypt, and it might have been better if the opposition had instead just gritted its teeth and waited for the next election.
One of the arguments used to oppose the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that the Iraqis had no democratic tradition and would be unable to cope with the forbearance democracy requires of its citizens. It looks in Egypt as if that argument might be vindicated; as if people who might have been expected not to know any better in theory, actually didn't know better in practice.
Speaking of naivety, the European Court of Human Rights has outraged a section of cross-party opinion (including David Blunkett, the Blairite former Home Secretary) by striking down the UK's life-means-life prison sentence as "inhuman and degrading". A bevy of mass murderers took HMG to Brussels to argue successfully for a system of review after twenty five years.
To be clear, a review system strikes me as the better option, but the ECHR's decision vividly shows up everything that's wrong with the EU. It's a decision made by unelected judges which strikes down a law made by the British Parliament, elected by you and me. Parliament has democratic legitimacy. The ECHR has almost none.
A close family member, who still practises law, sighed that at least the judges could have had an eye for the political sensitivities; instead their decision is a disaster for Euro-enthusiasts and manna from heaven for UKIP; and this at a time when it looks as if we will get an in-out referendum in the next couple of years. But, she said, at least it shows the judges aren't interested in the political consequences of their decision.
Perhaps. But to me that lack of interest essentially means lack of accountability. We didn't elect the ECHR; nor did we elect the people who put them in place; none of which would matter if they hadn't struck down a law passed by our Government. And if you don't like the Government, reflect that it's not the Government they're striking at, but its electorate. Us in other words.
Ah, says my close family member, but the ECHR is just doing what UK Courts do all the time with the common law. To explain, Britain's highest courts have long done a certain amount of legal interpretation, which essentially involves making law. Rules on the degree of intent required for murder for example, or for the warning a judge must give a jury where the prosecution relies solely on identification evidence, were for years known to lawyers by the names of the cases in which the judges made the rules (Caldwell and Turnbull respectively). Whole branches of law, from judicial review to medical negligence were essentially made up by the courts.
But there is the world of a difference between interpreting statutes passed by Parliament, which is what our courts do, and striking those statutes down, which is what the ECHR has done. If Parliament doesn't like the law-making decisions of our courts it is at liberty to pass statutes overriding them. Or rather it was. This ruling shows that even that is no longer true.
The fact that the ECHR is almost entirely staffed by non-British judges is not the most important point, but it doesn't make the process any more attractive either.
No-one who values democracy can relish the prospect of a small unelected group of people telling the British electorate, via the medium of its Government, what it can and can't do. Somewhere in a saloon bar near you, Nigel Farage must be laughing his head off.
Thursday 11 July 2013
Tuesday 9 July 2013
Wagner, the Moonlight Sonata and cultural foreshortening
At a performance of Opera North's wonderful Siegfried a few days ago, a friend of mine, not a Wagnerite but willing to be converted, asked when the music was written. Oh, mid 1800s, I said, guessing. This turns out to have been broadly true, though Wagner abandoned Siegfried for a decade after writing Act II to attend to the small matter of writing Tristan and Meistersinger.
This morning I googled the term "cultural foreshortening", and was pleased to find no reference to it on the net. I might therefore claim to have coined it. This is my name for the phenomenon, analagous to the visual foreshortening effect where something far away seems closer than it actually is, where a piece of culture created a long time ago is ubiquitous now and therefore seems contemporary. If I were to pick a piece of music pretty much at random, Albinioni's Adagio is familiar to us in a dozen contexts as backdrop to modern life, in lifts, in supermarkets, films, adverts so that it might have been written twenty years ago. In fact, given that it was expanded from an Albinioni fragment by an Italian academic in the 1950s but is widely accepted as a piece from antiquity, the Adagio might in fact be quite a good example of how this works.
But it isn't just music which has become familiar through its public repetition. Even novelties can seem contemporary. From the invention of the printing press onwards, accelerated by the public library, the gramophone record, the photocopier, the internet and now Spotify, a process has been set in train by which today virtually all the music ever written or recorded is available at the touch of a button. We live in an age where all music is contemporary.
As a composer I'm interested in the consequences of this. Much though I dislike post-modernism, which at its worst tends towards a kind of nothing-much-matters aesthetic, it seems to formalise the idea that there is no such thing as an absolute style. Recently I conducted a symphony by a pupil of Haydn, Paul Wranitzky, which probably hadn't been played in the last 200 years. It wasn't as good as Haydn, and I would be surprised if it gets an outing in the next couple of centuries, but one of the striking things about it was how like Haydn it was. You really could have been listening to one of the middle period extrovert C major symphonies, the Maria Theresa perhaps. And this is similarity of style is also true of Mozart and Haydn: most of us who scrape a living round the fringes of classical music can tell the difference between the two composers, but most of us can also remember occasions when, confronted with a work we didn't know, we got it humiliatingly wrong.
I guess my point is that awareness of the possibility of other styles undermines one's faith in the idea that there is just one way of writing. Classical music has quite often been prepared to look back (and I'm not just thinking of obvious examples like the Holberg Suite or Dumbarton Oaks, but also of pieces like Brahms 1st Piano Concerto, in which Bach's music is woven into the fabric of what was offered as a piece of new music). Periods of stylistic hegemony have become increasingly rare, and the Great Serialist Terror, which dominated new music in the middle years of the 20th century, was in the end undermined by the gramophone record, which prevented great composers like Sibelius from oblivion, no matter how unfashionable they were with critics and academics. We now live in an era where music is surprisingly plural, where minimalists rub shoulders in concert programmes with ageing post-Webernists and thrusting young Spectralists. I think this is partly because of the old music which is all around us, which seems nevertheless new, and which teaches us above all else that there is more than one way of doing things.
If Beethoven had been born in a cave at the end of the last ice age would he have written the Moonlight Sonata? Of course not. Music is a product of the composer's personality, sure, but also of the prevailing cultural, social and political atmosphere, the technological resources available and factors harder to quantify like the quality of light and landscape. There was nothing inevitable about the Moonlight Sonata.
What this seems to me to signify is that we should feel free to write what we like, in whatever style we like, responding to the music of the past in whatever way we like, co-opting some parts of it and discarding others. In two hundred years no-one will care whether what we did was fashionable or not.
Knowing when Wagner wrote Siegfried is only a very small part of the pleasure to be had from listening to it, and my friend's astonishment at its modernity, considering it came only about twenty years after Beethoven's death, must be an even smaller part still. These things matter mostly for musicologists.
This morning I googled the term "cultural foreshortening", and was pleased to find no reference to it on the net. I might therefore claim to have coined it. This is my name for the phenomenon, analagous to the visual foreshortening effect where something far away seems closer than it actually is, where a piece of culture created a long time ago is ubiquitous now and therefore seems contemporary. If I were to pick a piece of music pretty much at random, Albinioni's Adagio is familiar to us in a dozen contexts as backdrop to modern life, in lifts, in supermarkets, films, adverts so that it might have been written twenty years ago. In fact, given that it was expanded from an Albinioni fragment by an Italian academic in the 1950s but is widely accepted as a piece from antiquity, the Adagio might in fact be quite a good example of how this works.
But it isn't just music which has become familiar through its public repetition. Even novelties can seem contemporary. From the invention of the printing press onwards, accelerated by the public library, the gramophone record, the photocopier, the internet and now Spotify, a process has been set in train by which today virtually all the music ever written or recorded is available at the touch of a button. We live in an age where all music is contemporary.
As a composer I'm interested in the consequences of this. Much though I dislike post-modernism, which at its worst tends towards a kind of nothing-much-matters aesthetic, it seems to formalise the idea that there is no such thing as an absolute style. Recently I conducted a symphony by a pupil of Haydn, Paul Wranitzky, which probably hadn't been played in the last 200 years. It wasn't as good as Haydn, and I would be surprised if it gets an outing in the next couple of centuries, but one of the striking things about it was how like Haydn it was. You really could have been listening to one of the middle period extrovert C major symphonies, the Maria Theresa perhaps. And this is similarity of style is also true of Mozart and Haydn: most of us who scrape a living round the fringes of classical music can tell the difference between the two composers, but most of us can also remember occasions when, confronted with a work we didn't know, we got it humiliatingly wrong.
I guess my point is that awareness of the possibility of other styles undermines one's faith in the idea that there is just one way of writing. Classical music has quite often been prepared to look back (and I'm not just thinking of obvious examples like the Holberg Suite or Dumbarton Oaks, but also of pieces like Brahms 1st Piano Concerto, in which Bach's music is woven into the fabric of what was offered as a piece of new music). Periods of stylistic hegemony have become increasingly rare, and the Great Serialist Terror, which dominated new music in the middle years of the 20th century, was in the end undermined by the gramophone record, which prevented great composers like Sibelius from oblivion, no matter how unfashionable they were with critics and academics. We now live in an era where music is surprisingly plural, where minimalists rub shoulders in concert programmes with ageing post-Webernists and thrusting young Spectralists. I think this is partly because of the old music which is all around us, which seems nevertheless new, and which teaches us above all else that there is more than one way of doing things.
If Beethoven had been born in a cave at the end of the last ice age would he have written the Moonlight Sonata? Of course not. Music is a product of the composer's personality, sure, but also of the prevailing cultural, social and political atmosphere, the technological resources available and factors harder to quantify like the quality of light and landscape. There was nothing inevitable about the Moonlight Sonata.
What this seems to me to signify is that we should feel free to write what we like, in whatever style we like, responding to the music of the past in whatever way we like, co-opting some parts of it and discarding others. In two hundred years no-one will care whether what we did was fashionable or not.
Knowing when Wagner wrote Siegfried is only a very small part of the pleasure to be had from listening to it, and my friend's astonishment at its modernity, considering it came only about twenty years after Beethoven's death, must be an even smaller part still. These things matter mostly for musicologists.
Monday 8 July 2013
Learning with John Tavener
Last night I went to a concert of John Tavener's music at the Bridgewater. For four years in the mid 1980s I had composition lessons with Tavener, getting the metropolitan Line to Wembley Park every other Wednesday and walking up the hill to the bland suburban road in which he then lived. There was always a Rolls Royce parked in the drive (his family had money).
At the time Tavener was about forty, but seemed much older. He'd had a minor stroke not long previously, and walked as he spoke, slowly and stiffly. Almost invariably dressed in loose white clothes, as if a small part of Greece had come to Wembley, he wore his thinning sun-bleached hair long. I never worked out how much of his florid complexion was attributable to sun-worship and how much to high blood pressure.
To call my fortnightly visits lessons would be misleading. Sometimes I'd bring pieces I'd written, but only once can I remember his suggesting an alteration. Construing the term teacher narrowly, he wasn't much use; but this was probably my fault. I always thought that I could work out the details for myself, and that what I needed from him was the bigger picture. I know now that this was a mistake, but Tavener was happy to go along with my young man's overconfidence.
Our conversations ranged widely, but returned again and again to women, religion and aesthetics. Tavener's first marriage had come to an end, and his current relationship was running into difficulties. He was extremely reluctant to have children, fearing that fatherhood would interfere with his writing. There were matters which it would perhaps be unfair to air here, but issues of responsibility and commitment would occupy us for hours at a time. I like to think the fact that John does now have children might be to a very small degree attributable to my having urged this on him.
Although not entirely without vanity and worldliness, the aura of spirituality associated with Tavener seemed to me genuine. He once told me he'd seen the devil (as I remember, outside his bathroom window), and although this seemed unlikely for a variety of reasons, his sincerity was convincing. Apart from a bitter dislike of Catholicism, he was without any of the doctrinaire stupidity often associated with the enthusiastically religious. In our discussions I took the part of the agnostic, and found him perfectly willing to accept that some aspects of belief are hard to swallow. I remember asking the hoary old question: why if God loves us is there so much suffering in the world? "I don't know", he replied. "Perhaps the most we can say is that it is a mystery. And that if we are to believe in God then we have to have faith, and believe even though there are some things about the world we can't understand." There are plenty of glib answers to this question, but Tavener's at least had the merit of some humility.
Aesthetically we seemed on the face of it worlds apart. Tavener's attitude to composition was informed by the austere formality of the Orthodox icons decorating his house, and for him art had been going downhill since the Renaissance. I once bemoaned the absence of conflict in his music. "Conflict's been done", he said. In a way this is true; but conflict hasn't done with us, and every generation needs to find new ways of dealing with it. Nevertheless there was a parallel between the simplicity of Tavener's best music and the Quaker aesthetic of my family background which I find satisfying and inspiring. If I learned anything from Tavener it was to avoid unnecessary complexity.
John was dismissive of peers who failed to heed this maxim. Once he'd been at a dinner at which the American composer Gunther Schuller was also present. A guest had enthused about Tavener's music, remarking how many people were drawn to it. Schuller complained that no-one wanted to hear his own music. John told me, "I felt like saying, What d'you expect when it's such a fucking racket?"
By the end of my second year I'd got to know Tavener reasonably well, and felt emboldened to ask him round to dinner at the two-room flat I shared in Notting Hill with my girlfriend. The custom of bringing some drink to such events seemed to have passed Tavener by, and the solitary bottle of white we'd laid in was soon finished. Fortunately there was an off-licence next door, and I nipped out to buy another with some foreboding in view of John's much vaunted drinking prowess and our relative poverty. I needn't have worried. Shortly afterwards he began to exhibit tell-tale signs, and well before the second bottle was finished he slipped sideways off his chair onto the floor. To be fair, it wasn't the most stable of chairs.
"I must come again sometime", he said, getting unsteadily into the taxi at the end of the evening. I've no doubt that if I'd asked him he'd have come; but that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted him to make an effort too, to demonstrate that my liking for him was reciprocated. But the dinner invitation wasn't returned, and feeling that the limits of our relationship had been neatly illustrated I didn't repeat the offer. At this time I had still over a year left at Trinity, and I didn't like him any less for this minor snub.
In some ways Tavener was extremely kind to me. His end of year reports were glowing, he recommended me to his publisher, and in particular he supported me wholeheartedly in a dispute I had with the college.
Extraordinarily, there was no provision for composition students to have their music performed at Trinity: we were left to our own devices. Looking back, the College should have been ashamed to take our tuition money, because a few performances are worth any amount of lessons; at the time we took the situation more or less for granted. I had a lot of chamber music played by friends, but putting on anything more substantial was impossible. In 1987 I wrote an orchestral piece which came third in the (national) Yehudi Menhuin competition. Feeling this achievement was due some sort of recognition, I attempted to persuade the College to put its resources behind a performance. The attempt eventually ended up on the desk of the principal, Meredith Davies. Tavener wrote a supportive letter, but Davies was dismissive. He returned Tavener's letter with a note scribbled at the foot. It was felt I had "already done very well out of" my time at Trinity. There could be no performance. Tavener commented, "The man's a shit. He doesn't even have the courtesy to write back."
When I left Trinity in July 1988 it was with no expectation that I should stop seeing Tavener; he still owed me a lot of lessons for one thing. "You must still come and see me", he said. However in the autumn I began to find him elusive. He had for some time been contemplating an affair with a girl very much younger, and I wonder now whether he thought I'd disapprove (they subsequently married). I rang him once and she answered the phone. "I'll go and see if he's in", she said. Tavener's house wasn't enormous, and the idea that a search would be required was absurd. "He's not here", she said, returning. This didn't seem very likely, but I left a message asking him to call me.
Whilst I'd been his pupil, taking the initiative to contact Tavener hadn't seemed onerous. Now in a matter of weeks everything had changed. I wasn't his student any longer, and the only possible relationship left to us was friendship. I didn't find his failure to call me back particularly surprising, but it wasn't the stuff of which friendship is made. Although The Protecting Veil was still a few years away, John was already a well-known composer, and although I liked him, my interest must have been exaggerated by the reflected glory of his acquaintance. The reverse was also probably true: although I think he liked me too, I was only his pupil, a person he got paid for seeing for a couple of hours every fortnight. I could have repeated my phone calls, and perhaps I'd have got through in the end, but what would it have been worth, and what would have been the point?
I was surprised to find that the piece I enjoyed most last night was In Alium, a very characteristic late 60s collage in which a high soprano fought to be audible over multiple pre-recorded versions of herself, with crashing interruptions of organ and piano. For my taste, the rest of it flirted too proximately with religious kitsch. And it was all so static.
But it was impossible not to be moved when the old boy shuffled up on stage at the end to take his bow. In the foyer afterwards loomed two tall girls who could only be his daughters. My wife said I should wait for him and say hello. But I said, He still owes me dinner. How daft is that?
At the time Tavener was about forty, but seemed much older. He'd had a minor stroke not long previously, and walked as he spoke, slowly and stiffly. Almost invariably dressed in loose white clothes, as if a small part of Greece had come to Wembley, he wore his thinning sun-bleached hair long. I never worked out how much of his florid complexion was attributable to sun-worship and how much to high blood pressure.
To call my fortnightly visits lessons would be misleading. Sometimes I'd bring pieces I'd written, but only once can I remember his suggesting an alteration. Construing the term teacher narrowly, he wasn't much use; but this was probably my fault. I always thought that I could work out the details for myself, and that what I needed from him was the bigger picture. I know now that this was a mistake, but Tavener was happy to go along with my young man's overconfidence.
Our conversations ranged widely, but returned again and again to women, religion and aesthetics. Tavener's first marriage had come to an end, and his current relationship was running into difficulties. He was extremely reluctant to have children, fearing that fatherhood would interfere with his writing. There were matters which it would perhaps be unfair to air here, but issues of responsibility and commitment would occupy us for hours at a time. I like to think the fact that John does now have children might be to a very small degree attributable to my having urged this on him.
Although not entirely without vanity and worldliness, the aura of spirituality associated with Tavener seemed to me genuine. He once told me he'd seen the devil (as I remember, outside his bathroom window), and although this seemed unlikely for a variety of reasons, his sincerity was convincing. Apart from a bitter dislike of Catholicism, he was without any of the doctrinaire stupidity often associated with the enthusiastically religious. In our discussions I took the part of the agnostic, and found him perfectly willing to accept that some aspects of belief are hard to swallow. I remember asking the hoary old question: why if God loves us is there so much suffering in the world? "I don't know", he replied. "Perhaps the most we can say is that it is a mystery. And that if we are to believe in God then we have to have faith, and believe even though there are some things about the world we can't understand." There are plenty of glib answers to this question, but Tavener's at least had the merit of some humility.
Aesthetically we seemed on the face of it worlds apart. Tavener's attitude to composition was informed by the austere formality of the Orthodox icons decorating his house, and for him art had been going downhill since the Renaissance. I once bemoaned the absence of conflict in his music. "Conflict's been done", he said. In a way this is true; but conflict hasn't done with us, and every generation needs to find new ways of dealing with it. Nevertheless there was a parallel between the simplicity of Tavener's best music and the Quaker aesthetic of my family background which I find satisfying and inspiring. If I learned anything from Tavener it was to avoid unnecessary complexity.
John was dismissive of peers who failed to heed this maxim. Once he'd been at a dinner at which the American composer Gunther Schuller was also present. A guest had enthused about Tavener's music, remarking how many people were drawn to it. Schuller complained that no-one wanted to hear his own music. John told me, "I felt like saying, What d'you expect when it's such a fucking racket?"
By the end of my second year I'd got to know Tavener reasonably well, and felt emboldened to ask him round to dinner at the two-room flat I shared in Notting Hill with my girlfriend. The custom of bringing some drink to such events seemed to have passed Tavener by, and the solitary bottle of white we'd laid in was soon finished. Fortunately there was an off-licence next door, and I nipped out to buy another with some foreboding in view of John's much vaunted drinking prowess and our relative poverty. I needn't have worried. Shortly afterwards he began to exhibit tell-tale signs, and well before the second bottle was finished he slipped sideways off his chair onto the floor. To be fair, it wasn't the most stable of chairs.
"I must come again sometime", he said, getting unsteadily into the taxi at the end of the evening. I've no doubt that if I'd asked him he'd have come; but that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted him to make an effort too, to demonstrate that my liking for him was reciprocated. But the dinner invitation wasn't returned, and feeling that the limits of our relationship had been neatly illustrated I didn't repeat the offer. At this time I had still over a year left at Trinity, and I didn't like him any less for this minor snub.
In some ways Tavener was extremely kind to me. His end of year reports were glowing, he recommended me to his publisher, and in particular he supported me wholeheartedly in a dispute I had with the college.
Extraordinarily, there was no provision for composition students to have their music performed at Trinity: we were left to our own devices. Looking back, the College should have been ashamed to take our tuition money, because a few performances are worth any amount of lessons; at the time we took the situation more or less for granted. I had a lot of chamber music played by friends, but putting on anything more substantial was impossible. In 1987 I wrote an orchestral piece which came third in the (national) Yehudi Menhuin competition. Feeling this achievement was due some sort of recognition, I attempted to persuade the College to put its resources behind a performance. The attempt eventually ended up on the desk of the principal, Meredith Davies. Tavener wrote a supportive letter, but Davies was dismissive. He returned Tavener's letter with a note scribbled at the foot. It was felt I had "already done very well out of" my time at Trinity. There could be no performance. Tavener commented, "The man's a shit. He doesn't even have the courtesy to write back."
When I left Trinity in July 1988 it was with no expectation that I should stop seeing Tavener; he still owed me a lot of lessons for one thing. "You must still come and see me", he said. However in the autumn I began to find him elusive. He had for some time been contemplating an affair with a girl very much younger, and I wonder now whether he thought I'd disapprove (they subsequently married). I rang him once and she answered the phone. "I'll go and see if he's in", she said. Tavener's house wasn't enormous, and the idea that a search would be required was absurd. "He's not here", she said, returning. This didn't seem very likely, but I left a message asking him to call me.
Whilst I'd been his pupil, taking the initiative to contact Tavener hadn't seemed onerous. Now in a matter of weeks everything had changed. I wasn't his student any longer, and the only possible relationship left to us was friendship. I didn't find his failure to call me back particularly surprising, but it wasn't the stuff of which friendship is made. Although The Protecting Veil was still a few years away, John was already a well-known composer, and although I liked him, my interest must have been exaggerated by the reflected glory of his acquaintance. The reverse was also probably true: although I think he liked me too, I was only his pupil, a person he got paid for seeing for a couple of hours every fortnight. I could have repeated my phone calls, and perhaps I'd have got through in the end, but what would it have been worth, and what would have been the point?
I was surprised to find that the piece I enjoyed most last night was In Alium, a very characteristic late 60s collage in which a high soprano fought to be audible over multiple pre-recorded versions of herself, with crashing interruptions of organ and piano. For my taste, the rest of it flirted too proximately with religious kitsch. And it was all so static.
But it was impossible not to be moved when the old boy shuffled up on stage at the end to take his bow. In the foyer afterwards loomed two tall girls who could only be his daughters. My wife said I should wait for him and say hello. But I said, He still owes me dinner. How daft is that?
Tanya Gold and the struggle against sexism
The Guardian prints a long op-ed piece by Tanya Gold this morning deploring John Inverdale's description of Ladies Singles winner Marion Bartoli as "not a looker". Inverdale, she wrote, should be sacked.
Sexism in the media is rife, and as Ms Gold was glancing through the papers over her muesli it must have infuriated her to read the following description of former Apprentice contestant Katie Hopkins - "Pearls, highlights, infinitely loathable face - basically one standard measure of privately schooled posh blonde".
And where was this ad hominem attack printed? G2, page 3.
Sexism in the media is rife, and as Ms Gold was glancing through the papers over her muesli it must have infuriated her to read the following description of former Apprentice contestant Katie Hopkins - "Pearls, highlights, infinitely loathable face - basically one standard measure of privately schooled posh blonde".
And where was this ad hominem attack printed? G2, page 3.
Thursday 4 July 2013
Immigration and conservative bias
The BBC is flagellating itself again over immigration. A BBC Trust report, based on research by Cardiff University, concedes that for a long time the Corporation failed to reflect fairly the views of immigration sceptics. You have to give it credit for trying to find out whether this was true, although I guess that, being paid by all of us to do its job, the BBC has an obligation other broadcasters don't have to try and represent a fair range of views.
But it's interesting to reflect on the words the Trust uses and the evidence put before it to see what they say about the BBC generally, its recruitment policies and the way it views the world.
The Trust thinks the BBC got it wrong because the agenda of debate was "too driven by politicians". The report's author, Stuart Prebble, said that the BBC had too closely followed the Westminster agenda and for many years mainstream politicians had been reluctant to discuss the issue.
I wonder whether that's true. As far as I remember the Tories, from backbench level downwards, have always been opposed to immigration (often for racist as well as utilitarian reasons). But they were simply not given airtime to express their views. No doubt when younger I would have been quite pleased about that.
The BBC did not force governments to be complacent about immigration, but given that it is the window through which most British people view the world, its handling of the issue clearly has some bearing on the climate of debate out of which policy grows. It can't wash its hands of all responsibility.
Former director of news Helen Boaden told the Trust that when she came into the job in 2004 she was aware of a "deep liberal bias" in the way the BBC approached the topic. As I've written elsewhere on this blog, if you mostly recruit from middle-class metrocentric Humanities graduates, you are going to get a liberal bias. It's not complicated.
But I think liberal bias is an expression which tries to thwart meaning just as much as it tries to communicate it. Essentially it is trying to foster the impression of a cultural bias whilst stifling the suggestion that there might rather be a political one. But this is to minimise the extent to which culture fosters politics, and you can see how this works by asking what the reverse of a liberal bias might be. A conservative bias, you might think.
The BBC is very largely staffed by social liberals. "Thank goodness!", you may say. But now go on and try to justify the licence fee.
A former Today programme reporter who gave evidence to the BBC Trust said the Corporation "was damaged by a "fundamental niceness" and reluctance to give offence that stopped it covering a subject such as immigration properly".
I'm not sure this will do. As a former member of the bien pensant metropolitan Left, I would say that it was characterised by a fundamental niceness only for the causes it favours. It exhibits a fundamental contempt for the causes it abhors, for example the views of the provincial Right. And in any case, let's not forget that being nice about immigration meant being horrid to the people who were opposed to it. Whoever the editors and opinion formers were who kept debate about immigration off the air, they chose to whom they wanted to be nice, and their choice is revealing.
As ever in these circumstances, the Trust was keen to stress that it's all OK at the Corporation nowadays. A spokesman said, "We agree it is always vital to guard against unconscious bias or "group think" and will continue do so and we've committed to a number of actions to improve our coverage even further". You would hope this was so. But I've included here some extracts from another BBC Trust report, "From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel".
"Stephen Whittle, former Controller Editorial Policy, pointed to what he called ‘the lack of intellectual curiosity’ in the BBC. ‘It’s monochrome in its thinking.’ He said it wasn’t diverse – in terms not just of colour, religion and culture, but of radical ideas about society. ‘It’s actually about not asking yourself hard enough questions – not actively getting out beyond the comfortable circle in the office in W1 or W12 into where the intellectual debate is happening.’
Justin Webb, the BBC’s Washington correspondent, said the BBC and other broadcasters failed to ask serious questions about why the USA is ‘as successful as it is, why the system it invented works. And, in the tone of what we say about America, we have a tendency to scorn and deride. We don’t give America any kind of moral weight in our broadcasts.’ When Webb was asked about ‘a casual anti-Americanism’, he said he consciously tried to redress it.
Andrew Marr, former Political Editor, said that the BBC is ‘a publiclyfunded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people’ compared with the population at large.’ All this, he said, ‘creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC’.
Michael Buerk said he believed the problem lay with an insufficiently diverse employment policy. ‘Most of the people working for the BBC are middleclass, well-educated, young metropolitan people.’ He said that, although the BBC had made great efforts to widen ethnic and gender diversity, ‘the actual intake of those people has narrowed quite appreciably in terms of age, social category, and education’.
Roger Mosey, Director of Sport, thought that ‘the BBC has in the past been too closed to a wide range of views and we’ve had too narrow an agenda. And I have some sympathies with what Janet Daley says generally about a liberal/pinko agenda at times.’ Mosey, in his time as Head of Television News, had an . . . experience, in the case of a film about census returns in parts of east London, showing that ethnic communities had become the majority. The film included interviews with council officials, members of the Asian community, and one white resident – who pronounced himself happy with his neighbourhood. Questioned as to whether this voxpop was really representative of the white community, the reporter replied with pride: ‘Oh no, we had to work really hard to find him!
When (Jeff Randall) was there, this was not up for grabs. Multiculturalism was ‘a good thing’. The BBC supported it. Don’t take my word for it because, when I complained to the BBC about our coverage of asylum-seekers, this is what I got back from a very senior BBC news executive: ‘Jeff, the BBC internally is not neutral about multiculturalism. It believes in it, and it promotes diversity. Let’s face up to that.’ Now, does that sound like impartiality to you?"
It's worth asking in the light of the above whether there might be a "deep liberal bias" towards any other issues as well as immigration.
No doubt when From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel came out, the BBC Trust was assuring us that all was well too. The report dates from 2007.
But it's interesting to reflect on the words the Trust uses and the evidence put before it to see what they say about the BBC generally, its recruitment policies and the way it views the world.
The Trust thinks the BBC got it wrong because the agenda of debate was "too driven by politicians". The report's author, Stuart Prebble, said that the BBC had too closely followed the Westminster agenda and for many years mainstream politicians had been reluctant to discuss the issue.
I wonder whether that's true. As far as I remember the Tories, from backbench level downwards, have always been opposed to immigration (often for racist as well as utilitarian reasons). But they were simply not given airtime to express their views. No doubt when younger I would have been quite pleased about that.
The BBC did not force governments to be complacent about immigration, but given that it is the window through which most British people view the world, its handling of the issue clearly has some bearing on the climate of debate out of which policy grows. It can't wash its hands of all responsibility.
Former director of news Helen Boaden told the Trust that when she came into the job in 2004 she was aware of a "deep liberal bias" in the way the BBC approached the topic. As I've written elsewhere on this blog, if you mostly recruit from middle-class metrocentric Humanities graduates, you are going to get a liberal bias. It's not complicated.
But I think liberal bias is an expression which tries to thwart meaning just as much as it tries to communicate it. Essentially it is trying to foster the impression of a cultural bias whilst stifling the suggestion that there might rather be a political one. But this is to minimise the extent to which culture fosters politics, and you can see how this works by asking what the reverse of a liberal bias might be. A conservative bias, you might think.
The BBC is very largely staffed by social liberals. "Thank goodness!", you may say. But now go on and try to justify the licence fee.
A former Today programme reporter who gave evidence to the BBC Trust said the Corporation "was damaged by a "fundamental niceness" and reluctance to give offence that stopped it covering a subject such as immigration properly".
I'm not sure this will do. As a former member of the bien pensant metropolitan Left, I would say that it was characterised by a fundamental niceness only for the causes it favours. It exhibits a fundamental contempt for the causes it abhors, for example the views of the provincial Right. And in any case, let's not forget that being nice about immigration meant being horrid to the people who were opposed to it. Whoever the editors and opinion formers were who kept debate about immigration off the air, they chose to whom they wanted to be nice, and their choice is revealing.
As ever in these circumstances, the Trust was keen to stress that it's all OK at the Corporation nowadays. A spokesman said, "We agree it is always vital to guard against unconscious bias or "group think" and will continue do so and we've committed to a number of actions to improve our coverage even further". You would hope this was so. But I've included here some extracts from another BBC Trust report, "From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel".
"Stephen Whittle, former Controller Editorial Policy, pointed to what he called ‘the lack of intellectual curiosity’ in the BBC. ‘It’s monochrome in its thinking.’ He said it wasn’t diverse – in terms not just of colour, religion and culture, but of radical ideas about society. ‘It’s actually about not asking yourself hard enough questions – not actively getting out beyond the comfortable circle in the office in W1 or W12 into where the intellectual debate is happening.’
Justin Webb, the BBC’s Washington correspondent, said the BBC and other broadcasters failed to ask serious questions about why the USA is ‘as successful as it is, why the system it invented works. And, in the tone of what we say about America, we have a tendency to scorn and deride. We don’t give America any kind of moral weight in our broadcasts.’ When Webb was asked about ‘a casual anti-Americanism’, he said he consciously tried to redress it.
Andrew Marr, former Political Editor, said that the BBC is ‘a publiclyfunded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people’ compared with the population at large.’ All this, he said, ‘creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC’.
Michael Buerk said he believed the problem lay with an insufficiently diverse employment policy. ‘Most of the people working for the BBC are middleclass, well-educated, young metropolitan people.’ He said that, although the BBC had made great efforts to widen ethnic and gender diversity, ‘the actual intake of those people has narrowed quite appreciably in terms of age, social category, and education’.
Roger Mosey, Director of Sport, thought that ‘the BBC has in the past been too closed to a wide range of views and we’ve had too narrow an agenda. And I have some sympathies with what Janet Daley says generally about a liberal/pinko agenda at times.’ Mosey, in his time as Head of Television News, had an . . . experience, in the case of a film about census returns in parts of east London, showing that ethnic communities had become the majority. The film included interviews with council officials, members of the Asian community, and one white resident – who pronounced himself happy with his neighbourhood. Questioned as to whether this voxpop was really representative of the white community, the reporter replied with pride: ‘Oh no, we had to work really hard to find him!
When (Jeff Randall) was there, this was not up for grabs. Multiculturalism was ‘a good thing’. The BBC supported it. Don’t take my word for it because, when I complained to the BBC about our coverage of asylum-seekers, this is what I got back from a very senior BBC news executive: ‘Jeff, the BBC internally is not neutral about multiculturalism. It believes in it, and it promotes diversity. Let’s face up to that.’ Now, does that sound like impartiality to you?"
It's worth asking in the light of the above whether there might be a "deep liberal bias" towards any other issues as well as immigration.
No doubt when From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel came out, the BBC Trust was assuring us that all was well too. The report dates from 2007.
Wednesday 3 July 2013
Edward Snowden, Barack Obama and Guantanamo Bay
When Barack Obama was elected in 2008 I watched the inauguration with my wife and kids. Although Obama was evidently not the Messiah and this wasn't the second coming, it was clearly momentous that the USA should elect a black man.
It struck me then that it wouldn't be a bad idea for America's underclass to grasp that Obama was just as likely to make a mediocre president as any half-witted white Texan, in just the same way as it probably did the women's movement a world of good to discover that Mrs Thatcher turned out to be a power-mad harridan rather than a touchy-feely conciliator. Part of a process of maturing.
And so it has proved. Obama doesn't seem from this distance to have been an absolutely terrible president, at least not compared with whatever Tea Party sponsored lunatic the Republicans might have been able to come up with, and he has of course been hamstrung by having lost control of Congress half way through his first term. But his main skill is as an orator. He probably doesn't write his own speeches, but boy can he deliver. He is a man of enormous charisma and gravitas, who doesn't look half so self-assured when asked to answer a question to which someone else hasn't previously written down the answer.
And then there's this funny business with Edward Snowden. It's as well to be clear about this. I don't think we can criticise the FBI for monitoring British emails. It's called spying. Everybody does it. I hope GCHQ is doing its damnedest to monitor what's going on in the US. The really serious thing is that the FBI appears to be snooping on its own citizens as well. That's where Snowden comes in, and why what he's saying is important. In this country the police and security services can only monitor what we're doing if they persuade a judge to give them permission. At least that's the theory. I imagine it's the same in the States. If the FBI is snooping on its own citizens without permission, as Snowden alleges, some serious rules have been broken, not least in the US constitution.
What is Obama's response to this? Answer, to try and press for Snowden's extradition so he can face trial.
This is not the Obama the liberal half of the US population thought they were electing. It is not the Obama who promised before 2008 that he would close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, for example.
No, it is the Obama who five years on, allows Guantanamo to remain open, its occupants outlaws in the true sense of the word. They are after all beyond the reach of any law - US, Cuban or otherwise - which might be used to assist or condemn them.
It struck me then that it wouldn't be a bad idea for America's underclass to grasp that Obama was just as likely to make a mediocre president as any half-witted white Texan, in just the same way as it probably did the women's movement a world of good to discover that Mrs Thatcher turned out to be a power-mad harridan rather than a touchy-feely conciliator. Part of a process of maturing.
And so it has proved. Obama doesn't seem from this distance to have been an absolutely terrible president, at least not compared with whatever Tea Party sponsored lunatic the Republicans might have been able to come up with, and he has of course been hamstrung by having lost control of Congress half way through his first term. But his main skill is as an orator. He probably doesn't write his own speeches, but boy can he deliver. He is a man of enormous charisma and gravitas, who doesn't look half so self-assured when asked to answer a question to which someone else hasn't previously written down the answer.
And then there's this funny business with Edward Snowden. It's as well to be clear about this. I don't think we can criticise the FBI for monitoring British emails. It's called spying. Everybody does it. I hope GCHQ is doing its damnedest to monitor what's going on in the US. The really serious thing is that the FBI appears to be snooping on its own citizens as well. That's where Snowden comes in, and why what he's saying is important. In this country the police and security services can only monitor what we're doing if they persuade a judge to give them permission. At least that's the theory. I imagine it's the same in the States. If the FBI is snooping on its own citizens without permission, as Snowden alleges, some serious rules have been broken, not least in the US constitution.
What is Obama's response to this? Answer, to try and press for Snowden's extradition so he can face trial.
This is not the Obama the liberal half of the US population thought they were electing. It is not the Obama who promised before 2008 that he would close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, for example.
No, it is the Obama who five years on, allows Guantanamo to remain open, its occupants outlaws in the true sense of the word. They are after all beyond the reach of any law - US, Cuban or otherwise - which might be used to assist or condemn them.
Stephanie Flanders and the wrong sort of growth
At the end of May I wrote the following -
"I've been reflecting on how the news that the British economy grew by 0.3% in the first quarter of the year will be received.
Here's a prediction. The people who criticised George Osborne for failing to get any growth won't shut up. Neither will the people who said there would never be any growth with his policies. They will just start saying something else.
Yes, the Chancellor will have succeeded in stimulating growth, but of the wrong sort. To misquote the Starship Enterprise's surgeon, Bones McCoy, it's growth Jim, but not as we know it."
It's been a wait, but at last on Radio 4's PM programme yesterday a pundit, responding to another positive set of economic figures, said, "The economy's growing, but it's the wrong sort of growth".
The pundit? Step forward Stephanie Flanders.
In case you were wondering, she's the BBC's economics correspondent. Who was at Oxford with (and dated both) Ed Balls and Ed Miliband.
PS A week later here is the Torygraph's Jeremy Warner jumping on the bandwagon - "Unbalanced and unsustainable - this is the wrong kind of growth", runs the headline.
"I've been reflecting on how the news that the British economy grew by 0.3% in the first quarter of the year will be received.
Here's a prediction. The people who criticised George Osborne for failing to get any growth won't shut up. Neither will the people who said there would never be any growth with his policies. They will just start saying something else.
Yes, the Chancellor will have succeeded in stimulating growth, but of the wrong sort. To misquote the Starship Enterprise's surgeon, Bones McCoy, it's growth Jim, but not as we know it."
It's been a wait, but at last on Radio 4's PM programme yesterday a pundit, responding to another positive set of economic figures, said, "The economy's growing, but it's the wrong sort of growth".
The pundit? Step forward Stephanie Flanders.
In case you were wondering, she's the BBC's economics correspondent. Who was at Oxford with (and dated both) Ed Balls and Ed Miliband.
PS A week later here is the Torygraph's Jeremy Warner jumping on the bandwagon - "Unbalanced and unsustainable - this is the wrong kind of growth", runs the headline.
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