No story is too old to be exhumed by this blog, and so here is another outing for the sad case of the UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom, forced to apologise for referring to countries in receipt of UK foreign aid as Bongo Bongo Land.
I wouldn't use the term myself, for reasons I'll come back to. But is it racist? People like Mr Bloom use the term as a derogatory epitethet for, generally, African countries (although he apparently doesn't like Pakistan much either). The only racist construction I can attribute to it is the suggestion - implicit at best - that the inhabitants of the countries he has in mind do nothing but sit around all day playing Bongos.
But where does this inference come from? Not from Mr Bloom. He suggested that UK aid went into the pockets of government officials in foreign countries. Undoubtedly sometimes this is true. He also suggested that it was immoral to pay money to foreigners when we had people going to food banks in the UK. It's a point of view. Nowhere did he say, "And by the way, these people are doing it because they're black, and that's the kind of thing black people do".
Not for the first time, the racial stereotypes come from the critics rather from Bloom himself.
But even if it isn't racist, is it right to use a derogatory term like this about another country at all? I don't often refer to Frogs and Krauts personally, but I'd quite like to retain the option if the need arose. Where do we draw the line? Can we no longer use the word Yanks? Jocks? Taffs? Ockers? Or if for some reason I don't like another country (for example because its people carry out female genital mutilation) and wish to speak derogatorily about it, is that OK just provided I use its proper name?
I said I wouldn't use the term Bongo Bongo Land myself. It's crass and unspecific, and, as Bloom has discovered, makes things easy for people who'd rather attack the messenger rather than discuss the message.
There is a case to be made against foreign aid. Some of it is stolen. In some cases it puts sticking plaster on problems which would otherwise have to be addressed directly by indigenous people. Some countries have a lower top rate of tax than we do (Pakistan). Some countries have a nuclear weapons programme (Pakistan). Every penny we spend in aid has to be borrowed by the Government on the wholesale money markets. We have plenty of people who don't have enough in the UK. Ringfencing the Aid budget has tightened the squeeze on other government departments.
Bloom might have been better couching his tirade in moderate terms; but then the Guardian would never have run the story or the BBC picked up on it.
The monstering of Bloom, coming on a slow news day in the silly season, seems to me just another in a long line of insidious failures, firstly, to think carefully about words and what they mean, and secondly, to consider what is the cumulative effect of compiling a kind of Thesaurus of words you're allowed to use and opinions you're allowed to hold.
At the moment we seem to be arguing about what the Thesaurus should contain. In my book we shouldn't have a Thesaurus at all.
Sunday 11 August 2013
Thursday 8 August 2013
Mark Carney and the feelgood factor
Two telling quotes in the Grauniad this morning.
"As Keynes explained, the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity." That's from one Paul Segal, economics lecturer at the University of Sussex.
And then here's the leader column: "What lies ahead is a recovery built on credit and house prices. Sound familiar?"
Yes, it does. But not from the pages of your newspaper, my friend. Only those with memories of the goldfish variety will have forgotten that the period of growth from 1997 to 2008 was fuelled by credit and rising house prices. What was the Guardian's line then? One of support for Gordon Brown - borrowing only to invest, abolishing Tory boom and bust, and so on. A little mea culpa wouldn't go amiss.
To return to Paul Segal, yes, the true Keynesian calls for central bankers to take away the punch bowl while the party is in full swing. But I don't remember him saying that in the Graun during Brown's glory years. Perhaps that's their fault for not asking him however.
To be fair to the Graun, hardly anyone on the Left was criticising Brown during the long boom. Can you imagine how it would have sounded? Labour MP urges Chancellor to spend less in case bust turns out not to have been abolished after all? A short way to death by deselection. But no such sanction awaited the commentariat, should they have chosen to put pen to paper. They, the new Keynesians, are Keynesians-lite, urging the government to do the easy bit (borrow) now it's too late to do the hard bit (save).
Thankfully it rather looks as if George Osborne has shot their fox. The economy is growing notwithstanding near slump in the Eurozone. The new BoE governor, Mark Carney, has given it a shove in the right direction by telling the markets he won't raise base rates for three years (probably). That should help it along.
Is it the wrong kind of growth? Perhaps. Plenty of people on the Right think that Carney's made a mistake. I'm a little more sanguine. House prices are already ridiculously high. I'm not sure whether there's room to have a repeat of the 2000s. This is true for debt also. How much more can we all borrow?
Osborne could be forgiven for feeling vindicated, both economically and politically, but I have long predicted that Labour would win in 2015. History shows that people are most likely to vote for "progressive" parties when they're feeling good.
"As Keynes explained, the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity." That's from one Paul Segal, economics lecturer at the University of Sussex.
And then here's the leader column: "What lies ahead is a recovery built on credit and house prices. Sound familiar?"
Yes, it does. But not from the pages of your newspaper, my friend. Only those with memories of the goldfish variety will have forgotten that the period of growth from 1997 to 2008 was fuelled by credit and rising house prices. What was the Guardian's line then? One of support for Gordon Brown - borrowing only to invest, abolishing Tory boom and bust, and so on. A little mea culpa wouldn't go amiss.
To return to Paul Segal, yes, the true Keynesian calls for central bankers to take away the punch bowl while the party is in full swing. But I don't remember him saying that in the Graun during Brown's glory years. Perhaps that's their fault for not asking him however.
To be fair to the Graun, hardly anyone on the Left was criticising Brown during the long boom. Can you imagine how it would have sounded? Labour MP urges Chancellor to spend less in case bust turns out not to have been abolished after all? A short way to death by deselection. But no such sanction awaited the commentariat, should they have chosen to put pen to paper. They, the new Keynesians, are Keynesians-lite, urging the government to do the easy bit (borrow) now it's too late to do the hard bit (save).
Thankfully it rather looks as if George Osborne has shot their fox. The economy is growing notwithstanding near slump in the Eurozone. The new BoE governor, Mark Carney, has given it a shove in the right direction by telling the markets he won't raise base rates for three years (probably). That should help it along.
Is it the wrong kind of growth? Perhaps. Plenty of people on the Right think that Carney's made a mistake. I'm a little more sanguine. House prices are already ridiculously high. I'm not sure whether there's room to have a repeat of the 2000s. This is true for debt also. How much more can we all borrow?
Osborne could be forgiven for feeling vindicated, both economically and politically, but I have long predicted that Labour would win in 2015. History shows that people are most likely to vote for "progressive" parties when they're feeling good.
Wednesday 7 August 2013
The only good polar bear . . .
All of us have irrational dislikes, and in the animal kingdom mine is the polar bear. It is an animal that is always hungry, and if it sees you its reaction is immediate and predictable - it will try and kill you. Then it will eat you. In this it differs to most predators, which tend to become aggressive only when cornered, which have more reliable sources of prey, which may have fed recently and which may not have developed a taste for human flesh (and this even goes for lions and tigers).
If there is a more unpleasant animal than the polar bear, it has yet to arrive on a TV screen near me. My prejudice against the bear even extends to its appearance: there is something about its flat forehead and mean little eyes which reminds me of the more meat-headed fans you used to see hanging around South London football grounds in the 1980s.
So I may well have been the only person to feel a small flicker of satisfaction at the photograph in the papers today of a dead polar bear on the arctic island of Svalbard.
Of course it was wrong of me. This bear had apparently been forced south by the absence of sea ice, home to the seals on which the bears feed. It had probably starved to death. Now polar bears starve every year, but in a media environment largely warmist in tone a dead one in the papers can quickly become symptomatic of the damage caused by global warming. Less sea ice equals fewer seals to feed on. Fewer seals equals fewer polar bears. Whilst some bear populations are apparently doing OK, rather more of them aren't. So the plight of the bear is our plight also.
I am not writing an anti-warmist rant here - I have seen myself the denuded slopes of Alpine mountains where glaciers once resided, and I can well believe the world is getting warmer. But if it's true, as the warmists believe, that humans are responsible for the warming, why are they only campaigning for reduced carbon emissions per capita?
The amount of carbon we pump into the atmosphere is dependent on our population size - to put it crudely, total emissions equals the number of people multiplied by the emissions of each person. By all means target individual emissions (although with living standards increasing across China, India and many other parts of the third world, good luck with that), but why the silence about population? As far as I know all predictions suggest that global population will increase for decades to come, and if that happens the chances of reducing emissions overall, even if you could reduce them per capita, must be zero. By then, if the warmists are right, it will be far too late.
So why not attack the problem from the other end? Why not population control? You don't have to adopt the Chinese scorched earth policy - you can do it by example, by encouragement, and in the UK via the tax system and by targeting state benefits more carefully.
We all know the answer to this. It's because population control smacks of eugenics.
But as long as the warmists fail to address population size they'll look like hand-wringers, crying over the decline of the polar bear whilst ignoring the one measure which offers a practical chance of making it less likely to be fatal.
If there is a more unpleasant animal than the polar bear, it has yet to arrive on a TV screen near me. My prejudice against the bear even extends to its appearance: there is something about its flat forehead and mean little eyes which reminds me of the more meat-headed fans you used to see hanging around South London football grounds in the 1980s.
So I may well have been the only person to feel a small flicker of satisfaction at the photograph in the papers today of a dead polar bear on the arctic island of Svalbard.
Of course it was wrong of me. This bear had apparently been forced south by the absence of sea ice, home to the seals on which the bears feed. It had probably starved to death. Now polar bears starve every year, but in a media environment largely warmist in tone a dead one in the papers can quickly become symptomatic of the damage caused by global warming. Less sea ice equals fewer seals to feed on. Fewer seals equals fewer polar bears. Whilst some bear populations are apparently doing OK, rather more of them aren't. So the plight of the bear is our plight also.
I am not writing an anti-warmist rant here - I have seen myself the denuded slopes of Alpine mountains where glaciers once resided, and I can well believe the world is getting warmer. But if it's true, as the warmists believe, that humans are responsible for the warming, why are they only campaigning for reduced carbon emissions per capita?
The amount of carbon we pump into the atmosphere is dependent on our population size - to put it crudely, total emissions equals the number of people multiplied by the emissions of each person. By all means target individual emissions (although with living standards increasing across China, India and many other parts of the third world, good luck with that), but why the silence about population? As far as I know all predictions suggest that global population will increase for decades to come, and if that happens the chances of reducing emissions overall, even if you could reduce them per capita, must be zero. By then, if the warmists are right, it will be far too late.
So why not attack the problem from the other end? Why not population control? You don't have to adopt the Chinese scorched earth policy - you can do it by example, by encouragement, and in the UK via the tax system and by targeting state benefits more carefully.
We all know the answer to this. It's because population control smacks of eugenics.
But as long as the warmists fail to address population size they'll look like hand-wringers, crying over the decline of the polar bear whilst ignoring the one measure which offers a practical chance of making it less likely to be fatal.
Sunday 28 July 2013
Stephen Hough plays Four Sea Interludes
A couple of weeks ago one of my daughters sang in the first night of the Proms. In case this sounds like a large claim, her role was a small one amongst hundreds, being part of the combined forces of the Halle Youth Choir along with a host of others from around the country. But this family involvement meant that I scanned the TV listings for the first night coverage with more interest than usual, and I was startled to learn from the Guardian that, amongst other unlikely sounding propositions, the pianist Stephen Hough was going to play the Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes.
It's in the nature of Proms programming that occasionally something wacky gets put on, and I thought, "I had no idea Britten had made a piano version", rather than, "Flippin' Grauniad. Can't get anything right".
In the event, as going to the concert revealed and as this week's Private Eye reports, Four Sea Interludes was in fact played by the BBC SO; Hough merely ran his fingers over the Rach / Pag Rhapsody and the Lutoslawski version of the same tune (he was fantastic). The Eye says the listings mistake arose because the broadsheets don't employ many people who know anything about classical music; and that this is because the papers don't print much about it. What the Eye didn't say is that this was because most people aren't interested in classical music, and the papers can't sell the advertising space.
Why is that? Amongst a whole host of reasons is the sad fact that since the 1960s in this country the repertoire has failed to renew itself in the way it did in the past. New pieces have not been played and come into the repertoire. Only a handful of the Second Viennese School pieces, whose influence dominated music in the last century, have managed it (the Berg Violin Concerto - now name four others). None of them come remotely close to emulating the joyous acceptance of Elgar's Symphony No. 1, which received over a hundred performances in the year after its first. Conductors and administrators have programmed music by composers the public didn't like. Unsurprisingly the public has turned its face away. As a whole, it has become disengaged. The mistake in the Guardian's listings is symptomatic.
A week or so later the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra played a piece in the Proms by Helmut Lachenmann, described by the Radio 3 announcer as "one of Germany's leading composers". God help them. It's worth remembering that the Great Serialist Terror began several decades earlier across the Channel, and has not died out there yet. I listened dutifully to Lachenmann's piece. It was rhythmically tedious, ugly and one-paced. It made a half-hearted attempt at sonic invention, but got nowhere near the felicity and verve of, say, Dusapin, nor indeed of the new dance records they play at my gym. It was grim, dull and unpleasant. And putting a worldwide audience off classical music.
Sadly, there are plenty of composers out there who are writing stuff the public do like, and I'm not just banging my own drum here - I listened today to a Piano Trio by Matthew Taylor on Spotify. Excellent. I can't wait to hear some of his orchestral music. Sadly, none of it seems to have been put on at the Proms.
It's in the nature of Proms programming that occasionally something wacky gets put on, and I thought, "I had no idea Britten had made a piano version", rather than, "Flippin' Grauniad. Can't get anything right".
In the event, as going to the concert revealed and as this week's Private Eye reports, Four Sea Interludes was in fact played by the BBC SO; Hough merely ran his fingers over the Rach / Pag Rhapsody and the Lutoslawski version of the same tune (he was fantastic). The Eye says the listings mistake arose because the broadsheets don't employ many people who know anything about classical music; and that this is because the papers don't print much about it. What the Eye didn't say is that this was because most people aren't interested in classical music, and the papers can't sell the advertising space.
Why is that? Amongst a whole host of reasons is the sad fact that since the 1960s in this country the repertoire has failed to renew itself in the way it did in the past. New pieces have not been played and come into the repertoire. Only a handful of the Second Viennese School pieces, whose influence dominated music in the last century, have managed it (the Berg Violin Concerto - now name four others). None of them come remotely close to emulating the joyous acceptance of Elgar's Symphony No. 1, which received over a hundred performances in the year after its first. Conductors and administrators have programmed music by composers the public didn't like. Unsurprisingly the public has turned its face away. As a whole, it has become disengaged. The mistake in the Guardian's listings is symptomatic.
A week or so later the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra played a piece in the Proms by Helmut Lachenmann, described by the Radio 3 announcer as "one of Germany's leading composers". God help them. It's worth remembering that the Great Serialist Terror began several decades earlier across the Channel, and has not died out there yet. I listened dutifully to Lachenmann's piece. It was rhythmically tedious, ugly and one-paced. It made a half-hearted attempt at sonic invention, but got nowhere near the felicity and verve of, say, Dusapin, nor indeed of the new dance records they play at my gym. It was grim, dull and unpleasant. And putting a worldwide audience off classical music.
Sadly, there are plenty of composers out there who are writing stuff the public do like, and I'm not just banging my own drum here - I listened today to a Piano Trio by Matthew Taylor on Spotify. Excellent. I can't wait to hear some of his orchestral music. Sadly, none of it seems to have been put on at the Proms.
Friday 26 July 2013
George Osborne - dancing like a baboon
His public utterances may have been modest and self-effacing, but inside George Osborne must have been dancing a little jig, thumbing his nose and baring his behind like a baboon. Yesterday's GDP figures show the economy growing at an annualised rate of 2.4%, nothing exceptional, but steady and with power to add, a sign, if you like, that things might be returning to normal.
Ed Balls, on the other hand, must have been gritting his teeth as he welcomed the good news, rather like the Australian spin bowler Nathan Lyon, dropped in favour of Ashton Agar only to see the rookie score 98 batting at No. 11 in the first Test. What little I heard of Balls on the airwaves yesterday suggested that he was rather struggling to find a coherent way to criticise the Chancellor, and the headlines this morning indicate that the best he could do was point out that this was the slowest recovery from recession for a hundred years. You can almost hear the voters yawning.
Actually there is something Balls could have said - if the Government had done what we suggested, this moment would have come sooner. It's taken three years for the economy to register significant growth, and we would have managed it quicker.
And that's probably true. But there are two things to say about that.
The first is that Ball's growth would have been achieved by more borrowing, which comes at a price, and higher public spending, both of which would have meant that a Balls Chancellorship would have been very unlikely to accomplish even the modest deficit reduction Osborne has managed. The picture would have been one of Government spending spiralling out of control.
The second is that although Osborne's cuts have been very modest overall, they have nevertheless involved shedding hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs (alongside the creation of many more in the private sector), a fundamental shift in the balance of employment in the UK which is merely a taste of things to come.
Britain has public spending commitments which were unaffordable during the very best of good times (Governments ran deficits during almost all the period of growth between 1992 and 2008, the longest in British history) and are disastrously so now. As Frank Field wrote as long ago as 2004, governments in the future are going to have to provide better public services with less money, not more. Osborne would probably argue that it was good to get this process under way as soon as possible.
If you look back at the Blair/Brown period, perhaps the cruellest thing about it was the creation of expectations regarding public sector services and employment which could not conceivably be sustained. Unwinding those expectations (and those jobs) is going to be one of the most painful things the UK is going to have to do in future. If the obligation of government is to provide a system of support for the needy which is the best it can possibly be within the constraints of affordability, no policy of the Brown years I can think of showed the slightest sign of having factored in the latter consideration.
Ed Balls, on the other hand, must have been gritting his teeth as he welcomed the good news, rather like the Australian spin bowler Nathan Lyon, dropped in favour of Ashton Agar only to see the rookie score 98 batting at No. 11 in the first Test. What little I heard of Balls on the airwaves yesterday suggested that he was rather struggling to find a coherent way to criticise the Chancellor, and the headlines this morning indicate that the best he could do was point out that this was the slowest recovery from recession for a hundred years. You can almost hear the voters yawning.
Actually there is something Balls could have said - if the Government had done what we suggested, this moment would have come sooner. It's taken three years for the economy to register significant growth, and we would have managed it quicker.
And that's probably true. But there are two things to say about that.
The first is that Ball's growth would have been achieved by more borrowing, which comes at a price, and higher public spending, both of which would have meant that a Balls Chancellorship would have been very unlikely to accomplish even the modest deficit reduction Osborne has managed. The picture would have been one of Government spending spiralling out of control.
The second is that although Osborne's cuts have been very modest overall, they have nevertheless involved shedding hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs (alongside the creation of many more in the private sector), a fundamental shift in the balance of employment in the UK which is merely a taste of things to come.
Britain has public spending commitments which were unaffordable during the very best of good times (Governments ran deficits during almost all the period of growth between 1992 and 2008, the longest in British history) and are disastrously so now. As Frank Field wrote as long ago as 2004, governments in the future are going to have to provide better public services with less money, not more. Osborne would probably argue that it was good to get this process under way as soon as possible.
If you look back at the Blair/Brown period, perhaps the cruellest thing about it was the creation of expectations regarding public sector services and employment which could not conceivably be sustained. Unwinding those expectations (and those jobs) is going to be one of the most painful things the UK is going to have to do in future. If the obligation of government is to provide a system of support for the needy which is the best it can possibly be within the constraints of affordability, no policy of the Brown years I can think of showed the slightest sign of having factored in the latter consideration.
Wednesday 24 July 2013
John Inverdale - defending the indefensible
The French tennis player, Marion Bartoli, was not, said John Inverdale, a looker. Cue outrage from all quarters. Of course Inverdale was wrong to say what he did, but it's important to work out why.
All of us, even those as long in the tooth as me, make judgments every day about the attractiveness of the people we meet. It's what nature has fitted us to do. We are hard-wired to be on the look out for a mate, and internally or otherwise, we are always sizing them up. Have Inverdale's critics never looked at a passer-by and thought "I don't fancy her much" or "he's alright"? Of course they have. They are crashing hypocrites.
The key words here are "internally or otherwise". Whilst it's OK, inevitable even, that we should judge other people's appearance, articulating our conclusions about them is rude. It's probably crass to complement someone on their beauty nowadays; certainly it is to do the reverse; disparaging them on air to an audience of millions is about as rude as you can get.
Inverdale has issued a sort-of apology, and Bartoli appears to have sort-of accepted it. Personally I wouldn't fancy a job which requires you to extemporise live, and where one lapse can get you fired.
It's funny how some of the most ardent advocates of tolerance can, when given the opportunity to be tolerant towards people they don't like, be the least forgiving of all.
All of us, even those as long in the tooth as me, make judgments every day about the attractiveness of the people we meet. It's what nature has fitted us to do. We are hard-wired to be on the look out for a mate, and internally or otherwise, we are always sizing them up. Have Inverdale's critics never looked at a passer-by and thought "I don't fancy her much" or "he's alright"? Of course they have. They are crashing hypocrites.
The key words here are "internally or otherwise". Whilst it's OK, inevitable even, that we should judge other people's appearance, articulating our conclusions about them is rude. It's probably crass to complement someone on their beauty nowadays; certainly it is to do the reverse; disparaging them on air to an audience of millions is about as rude as you can get.
Inverdale has issued a sort-of apology, and Bartoli appears to have sort-of accepted it. Personally I wouldn't fancy a job which requires you to extemporise live, and where one lapse can get you fired.
It's funny how some of the most ardent advocates of tolerance can, when given the opportunity to be tolerant towards people they don't like, be the least forgiving of all.
The Ashes - waiting for the wheel to turn
After England have won the first two Ashes Tests the press (and perhaps particularly the Australian press) have assumed the teams are ill-matched and the rest of the double-header series (three here, five down under in the winter) is a forgone conclusion. This may be premature. England won comprehensively at Lords and by a whisker at Trent Bridge. Had things worked out only very slightly differently it might have been one-all, in which case the papers would have been telling us how evenly matched it all was.
But if you assume it's going to be as one sided as the press, on modest evidence, thinks it is, what accounts for the disparity between the teams? Well, when we were getting beaten comprehensively in the 90s it always struck me that the difference was that the Aussies had the two best bowlers on either side, Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, the latter one of the greatest cricketers ever to take the field. England now have one of the best swing bowlers in world cricket, Jimmy Anderson, and probably the best spin bowler, Graeme Swann. You would expect England to win. The batting on both sides looks quite fragile, although England look to have more players who can play a long innings, and we haven't yet seen a contribution from Cook and Pietersen.
A lot of the column inches devoted to Aussie bashing has focused on the popularity of the one-day and T20 formats Down Under. The thesis goes that those used to the short form of the game don't develop the mental strength and resilience required to bat all day, and that hit-and-giggle cricket doesn't foster the purity of technique required to survive at Test level against better bowling attacks. Certainly if you watch Shane Watson playing round his front pad (an LBW waiting to happen), you could be forgiven for sympathising with that view.
But I prefer the simple explanation of one Dirk Nannes, a former Australian T20 player, skier, businessman and saxophonist.
"Too much is read into it,that it's the demise of Australian cricket, that it's the end", writes Nannes in the Grauniad today.
"But the wheel will turn and the Poms will be crap again".
I'm afraid he's right.
But if you assume it's going to be as one sided as the press, on modest evidence, thinks it is, what accounts for the disparity between the teams? Well, when we were getting beaten comprehensively in the 90s it always struck me that the difference was that the Aussies had the two best bowlers on either side, Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, the latter one of the greatest cricketers ever to take the field. England now have one of the best swing bowlers in world cricket, Jimmy Anderson, and probably the best spin bowler, Graeme Swann. You would expect England to win. The batting on both sides looks quite fragile, although England look to have more players who can play a long innings, and we haven't yet seen a contribution from Cook and Pietersen.
A lot of the column inches devoted to Aussie bashing has focused on the popularity of the one-day and T20 formats Down Under. The thesis goes that those used to the short form of the game don't develop the mental strength and resilience required to bat all day, and that hit-and-giggle cricket doesn't foster the purity of technique required to survive at Test level against better bowling attacks. Certainly if you watch Shane Watson playing round his front pad (an LBW waiting to happen), you could be forgiven for sympathising with that view.
But I prefer the simple explanation of one Dirk Nannes, a former Australian T20 player, skier, businessman and saxophonist.
"Too much is read into it,that it's the demise of Australian cricket, that it's the end", writes Nannes in the Grauniad today.
"But the wheel will turn and the Poms will be crap again".
I'm afraid he's right.
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