I've been arguing for some time that the issue of which currency an independent Scotland would use is a serious stumbling block for the Nationalists, and today comes a report from the National Institute for Economic and Social Research which bears this out. You can find Scotland's Currency Options on the internet, but for the time-strapped they've produced a really good cartoon which summarises the arguments here.
It's a measure of how far the arguments have come that the SNP has abandoned any thought of joining the Euro, and the NIESR doesn't even consider this. Alex Salmond currently says Scotland will keep the pound, either in an informal or formal currency union, but as the NIESR points out, this is fraught with difficulties. In either case, control of interest rates would be retained by the Bank of England, without regard to economic events in Scotland. In a formal union, the BoE could only agree to act as lender of last resort if Scotland agreed to spending plans endorsed by Westminster. What price independence then? In an informal union there would be no lender of last resort, with damaging consequences for the rate at which Holyrood could borrow on the money markets. The NIESR thinks the best option might be for Scotland to have its own currency, something I've argued before here. There are difficulties with this too, but at least Scotland would be able to control its own interest rates, print money and act as lender of last resort.
The NIESR also argues that Scotland will be saddled with a formidable amount of debt post-Independence, and that selling its oil revenues to the rest of the UK would be a good way of paying it down. Little though I like Salmond, I wish him luck selling that argument to the Scots electorate.
All of this is I think chastening for the SNP. I don't like nationalism much - an unholy mixture of sentimentality and fascism - and this big Romantic idea, like many such, flounders in the face of brute economic reality. That doesn't mean the Yes campaign won't win. It just means that if it does, stupidity (and dislike of the English) will have trumped commonsense.
On the same Youtube page as the NIESR cartoon is a short video of Nigel Farage on Question Time. In it Farage makes the point that by becoming independent Scotland would merely be swapping the Westminster yoke for the Brussels yoke. This might be true if Scotland joined the Euro, but it looks as though even if it keeps the pound the Scots would still be tied to Westminster's apron strings.
Wednesday 18 September 2013
Banning the Y-word
Should use of the word - and please let's not be all Lord Voldemort about this - "yid" be banned in football grounds? In the last 24 hours the media has been full of prominent Jews - Danny Finkelstein and David Baddiel amongst others - denouncing the word as a "racist slur", so perhaps we should start by putting that canard to rest.
I don't agree with much Richard Dawkins says, at least not on the subject of religion, but the other day he wrote, "Yes, you can convert to Judaism and no, the Jews are not a race. You can argue about whether Judaism is a religion or a cultural tradition, but whatever else it is not a race".
Correct. And so whatever else it might be - sectarian abuse perhaps - "yid" is not a racist slur. If you're still not convinced, look at these two pictures here and here. All Jewish people. Ask yourself whether they are the same race.
"Words", Paddy McAloon wrote, "Are trains / For moving past what / Really has no name". Words are mere signifiers. So what does the word actually signify? It depends who utters it of course. Amongst Tottenham Hotspur fans "yid" means "us". Amongst Jew-haters it means "you Jewish people who we loathe and despise". Amongst Chelsea or Arsenal fans it means "you supporters of our most bitterly hated rivals", perhaps with a bit of anti-semitism thrown in.
It won't come as any surprise to Jews to find that some people don't like them. It is a sad fact of life. Will the Jew-haters, if any, amongst Spurs' North London rivals, dislike Jews any less because they can be banned from football grounds for shouting "yid"? No. It will not stop them disliking Jews. It will only stop them articulating their dislike in a football ground. I hope Jewish people find that some consolation, but I rather doubt they will.
There is a small element of Arsenal and Chelsea's support that likes to make a hissing sound at Spurs games, to mimic the gas chambers of Auschwitz. That this is in desperately bad taste I don't doubt. Actually not many of Spurs supporters are Jewish, but of the ones that are I'm absolutely sure that some will have relatives who died in Auschwitz.
What to make of such insouciant stupidity? Do you ban it to protect the feelings of Jewish supporters? Perhaps. I can't think of a better demonstration that words are particular arrangements of sounds that carry meaning to and fro than this evidence that a mere hiss can be ten times as offensive as the word "yid".
I am on the whole in favour of people being able to say what they like, unless it is really, really necessary to stop them. Abusing the other team's fans has always been a part of football, and it's one whose rich inventiveness would be desperately missed, even by members of the prawn sandwich brigade like me. As an occasional attender at Old Trafford, I have sometimes found myself in the middle of thousands of others all shouting "You Scouse bastard", or singing "Could be worse / Could be a Scouse / Eating rats in a Council house". "Scouse" here also means "you supporters of our most bitterly hated rivals". Liverpudlians are, like Jews, another social group who might well be able to argue for an end to this pejorative slur. Liverpudlians, like Jews, are not a race. But if Jewish people can get away with it, why not Liverpudlians?
Like another well-known thoroughfare, the East Lancs Road is paved with good intentions.
I don't agree with much Richard Dawkins says, at least not on the subject of religion, but the other day he wrote, "Yes, you can convert to Judaism and no, the Jews are not a race. You can argue about whether Judaism is a religion or a cultural tradition, but whatever else it is not a race".
Correct. And so whatever else it might be - sectarian abuse perhaps - "yid" is not a racist slur. If you're still not convinced, look at these two pictures here and here. All Jewish people. Ask yourself whether they are the same race.
"Words", Paddy McAloon wrote, "Are trains / For moving past what / Really has no name". Words are mere signifiers. So what does the word actually signify? It depends who utters it of course. Amongst Tottenham Hotspur fans "yid" means "us". Amongst Jew-haters it means "you Jewish people who we loathe and despise". Amongst Chelsea or Arsenal fans it means "you supporters of our most bitterly hated rivals", perhaps with a bit of anti-semitism thrown in.
It won't come as any surprise to Jews to find that some people don't like them. It is a sad fact of life. Will the Jew-haters, if any, amongst Spurs' North London rivals, dislike Jews any less because they can be banned from football grounds for shouting "yid"? No. It will not stop them disliking Jews. It will only stop them articulating their dislike in a football ground. I hope Jewish people find that some consolation, but I rather doubt they will.
There is a small element of Arsenal and Chelsea's support that likes to make a hissing sound at Spurs games, to mimic the gas chambers of Auschwitz. That this is in desperately bad taste I don't doubt. Actually not many of Spurs supporters are Jewish, but of the ones that are I'm absolutely sure that some will have relatives who died in Auschwitz.
What to make of such insouciant stupidity? Do you ban it to protect the feelings of Jewish supporters? Perhaps. I can't think of a better demonstration that words are particular arrangements of sounds that carry meaning to and fro than this evidence that a mere hiss can be ten times as offensive as the word "yid".
I am on the whole in favour of people being able to say what they like, unless it is really, really necessary to stop them. Abusing the other team's fans has always been a part of football, and it's one whose rich inventiveness would be desperately missed, even by members of the prawn sandwich brigade like me. As an occasional attender at Old Trafford, I have sometimes found myself in the middle of thousands of others all shouting "You Scouse bastard", or singing "Could be worse / Could be a Scouse / Eating rats in a Council house". "Scouse" here also means "you supporters of our most bitterly hated rivals". Liverpudlians are, like Jews, another social group who might well be able to argue for an end to this pejorative slur. Liverpudlians, like Jews, are not a race. But if Jewish people can get away with it, why not Liverpudlians?
Like another well-known thoroughfare, the East Lancs Road is paved with good intentions.
Tuesday 17 September 2013
Banning the niqab
A Muslim woman from East London, Rebekah Dawson, has been charged with intimidating a witness. Should she be allowed to wear the full-face niqab in Court?
Personally I don't support the outright ban the French brought in a couple of years ago. It seems unnecessarily restrictive. But self-evidently it's harder to communicate with someone whose face you can't see, and it's not hard to think of contexts where this might prevent proper functioning of civil society or commerce.
It's also not hard to think of contexts in which a young girl might be forced to wear a niqab. By her parents, for example.
If Ms Dawson wears the niqab in the witness box, she will effectively be giving evidence from behind a screen. We allow witnesses to do this where national security is apparently at stake, but not defendants (It's curious how Ms Dawson has had the support of Liberty, the civil rights pressure group, who are not on the whole well disposed to secret agents giving evidence in private). Of course, a Defendant can decline to give evidence at all, and if so the Judge can invite the jury to draw inferences from that failure. A Defendant could also (in my day - it's a long time since I was a criminal lawyer), draft a statement with his brief in a police station, give no interview and subsequently no evidence in Court. Again, inferences could be drawn.
If you were starting from scratch you might say that a Defendant should be allowed to wear the niqab, but that inferences could be drawn from her desire to keep her face out of the jury's sight. Because undoubtedly we communicate with our faces as well as our words. It doesn't seem unreasonable to say that the jury should be entitled to see how the evidence is given as well as hear the words themselves; after all, being in the grasp of the criminal process already puts constraints on so many aspects of a person's liberty. So removal of the niqab is not a qualitative shift in the Defendant's position vis a vis the state.
The Judge in Ms Dawson's case has ruled that she can wear it in court, but not when she gives evidence. A very British compromise. But while our willingness to meet other people half way is one of the most characteristic and attractive things about our culture, it can also be a weakness. Some of the people we are compromising with have a very much sharper and less forgiving attitude.
Personally I don't support the outright ban the French brought in a couple of years ago. It seems unnecessarily restrictive. But self-evidently it's harder to communicate with someone whose face you can't see, and it's not hard to think of contexts where this might prevent proper functioning of civil society or commerce.
It's also not hard to think of contexts in which a young girl might be forced to wear a niqab. By her parents, for example.
If Ms Dawson wears the niqab in the witness box, she will effectively be giving evidence from behind a screen. We allow witnesses to do this where national security is apparently at stake, but not defendants (It's curious how Ms Dawson has had the support of Liberty, the civil rights pressure group, who are not on the whole well disposed to secret agents giving evidence in private). Of course, a Defendant can decline to give evidence at all, and if so the Judge can invite the jury to draw inferences from that failure. A Defendant could also (in my day - it's a long time since I was a criminal lawyer), draft a statement with his brief in a police station, give no interview and subsequently no evidence in Court. Again, inferences could be drawn.
If you were starting from scratch you might say that a Defendant should be allowed to wear the niqab, but that inferences could be drawn from her desire to keep her face out of the jury's sight. Because undoubtedly we communicate with our faces as well as our words. It doesn't seem unreasonable to say that the jury should be entitled to see how the evidence is given as well as hear the words themselves; after all, being in the grasp of the criminal process already puts constraints on so many aspects of a person's liberty. So removal of the niqab is not a qualitative shift in the Defendant's position vis a vis the state.
The Judge in Ms Dawson's case has ruled that she can wear it in court, but not when she gives evidence. A very British compromise. But while our willingness to meet other people half way is one of the most characteristic and attractive things about our culture, it can also be a weakness. Some of the people we are compromising with have a very much sharper and less forgiving attitude.
Monday 16 September 2013
Living standards and economic growth
I am having a wrangle with a friend at the moment about who will win the next election. He thinks the Tories will scrape home, whereas I think the combination of UKIP's rise and the Lib Dems' scuppering of boundary reform will do the same for Labour. We agree that one of Labour's difficulties lies in presenting a coherent argument about the economy, but whereas he says Labour is thinking hard about how to get better public services for the same money, I think that's not enough - they should be looking to get better services for less money: after all we know we can't afford current spending, so whoever wins in 2015 will have to make cuts.
My friend is a Labour insider, and I think his slip is revealing, because it seems to show that even in its most intelligent core the party has not come to terms with the financial crisis. You can see this in all its utterances about the economy, but most recently with its change of tack on growth. First Miliband and Balls said austerity would prevent growth; when that turned out not to be true they said it was the wrong kind of growth; now the mantra seems to be that growth may be back, but living standards are still falling.
There are two assumptions here, namely that rising living standards are our due, and that they are unequivocally a good thing. Neither assumption bears examination. Leaving aside the environmentalist point that rising living standards are destroying the planet, higher wages for some mean fewer jobs for all. In the private sector, higher wages increase a company's cost base and erode its competitiveness. In the public sector, higher wages for dustmen, for example, mean less money to spend on education.
But its worse than that. High wages were what got us into this mess in the first place.
Britain became prosperous because 150 years ago we made things and sold them to the rest of the world. Then we sold the machines for making things abroad and discovered to our horror that foreigners could make them cheaper - and often better - than we did, because wages and living standards were lower in the Far East. Then to make up the income gap we borrowed money to keep our economies going. Then when that got harder and harder, our banks devised all sorts of ingenious products to enable risk to be spread, so that loans could be made to people who might well not be able to pay them back. Then when it turned out that quite a lot of people couldn't pay them back, no-one knew exactly which banks were exposed to default. Inter-bank lending dried up. Hence the 2008 crash.
The bankers may have been repellent, but they got rich on the proceeds of lending to westerners who were greedy for credit.
Viewed in this context, it was the expectation of high wages and high living standards which led to the erosion of manufacturing capacity and hence to the debt ridden mire in which we're currently floundering. If you are a person who has had no pay rise for the last five years, that is not much fun. But our best hope may be that our living standards drift downwards while those in the Far East drift upwards. It would be fairer, and it would give more people jobs in the West.
Higher wages are the last thing Britain needs. There is a curious delusion that cuts across party lines to the effect that in this country we are somehow entitled to affluence. We aren't. We can only justify affluence - and the Social Democratic public spending that affluence might make affordable - by making things or providing services that other countries want to buy. Higher wages just make that happy position harder to achieve.
My friend is a Labour insider, and I think his slip is revealing, because it seems to show that even in its most intelligent core the party has not come to terms with the financial crisis. You can see this in all its utterances about the economy, but most recently with its change of tack on growth. First Miliband and Balls said austerity would prevent growth; when that turned out not to be true they said it was the wrong kind of growth; now the mantra seems to be that growth may be back, but living standards are still falling.
There are two assumptions here, namely that rising living standards are our due, and that they are unequivocally a good thing. Neither assumption bears examination. Leaving aside the environmentalist point that rising living standards are destroying the planet, higher wages for some mean fewer jobs for all. In the private sector, higher wages increase a company's cost base and erode its competitiveness. In the public sector, higher wages for dustmen, for example, mean less money to spend on education.
But its worse than that. High wages were what got us into this mess in the first place.
Britain became prosperous because 150 years ago we made things and sold them to the rest of the world. Then we sold the machines for making things abroad and discovered to our horror that foreigners could make them cheaper - and often better - than we did, because wages and living standards were lower in the Far East. Then to make up the income gap we borrowed money to keep our economies going. Then when that got harder and harder, our banks devised all sorts of ingenious products to enable risk to be spread, so that loans could be made to people who might well not be able to pay them back. Then when it turned out that quite a lot of people couldn't pay them back, no-one knew exactly which banks were exposed to default. Inter-bank lending dried up. Hence the 2008 crash.
The bankers may have been repellent, but they got rich on the proceeds of lending to westerners who were greedy for credit.
Viewed in this context, it was the expectation of high wages and high living standards which led to the erosion of manufacturing capacity and hence to the debt ridden mire in which we're currently floundering. If you are a person who has had no pay rise for the last five years, that is not much fun. But our best hope may be that our living standards drift downwards while those in the Far East drift upwards. It would be fairer, and it would give more people jobs in the West.
Higher wages are the last thing Britain needs. There is a curious delusion that cuts across party lines to the effect that in this country we are somehow entitled to affluence. We aren't. We can only justify affluence - and the Social Democratic public spending that affluence might make affordable - by making things or providing services that other countries want to buy. Higher wages just make that happy position harder to achieve.
Thursday 12 September 2013
Britain without the BBC
It's being reported this morning that the BBC has commissioned a review into the relationship between the BBC and the BBC Trust.
The Corporation quite often does this sort of thing. In 2012 it asked for a review into its handling of the immigration issue from ex ITV CEO Stuart Prebble. The review came to the conclusion that the BBC had a "deep liberal bias". It thus cost £175,000 to find out something anyone with two eyes and ears could have told them for nothing.
So what does the BBC do when it turns out that it's been wasting millions of licence-fee payers' money overpaying departing staff? Answer, it wastes hundreds of thousands in further navel gazing. Across the Corporation more lowly staff must be reduced to scratching their heads, having of course torn all their hair out over the last few weeks.
Meanwhile the BBC leadership sails blithely, on unaware that, having done its best to cast the Corporation's reputation down with its nest-feathering profligacy, it is now dancing blindly around, trampling it into the mud.
I am with Allison Pearson, who writes in the Torygraph this morning, "I have no desire to live in a Britain without the BBC. At the end of this unedifying week, that terrible prospect has come a little closer".
The Corporation quite often does this sort of thing. In 2012 it asked for a review into its handling of the immigration issue from ex ITV CEO Stuart Prebble. The review came to the conclusion that the BBC had a "deep liberal bias". It thus cost £175,000 to find out something anyone with two eyes and ears could have told them for nothing.
So what does the BBC do when it turns out that it's been wasting millions of licence-fee payers' money overpaying departing staff? Answer, it wastes hundreds of thousands in further navel gazing. Across the Corporation more lowly staff must be reduced to scratching their heads, having of course torn all their hair out over the last few weeks.
I am with Allison Pearson, who writes in the Torygraph this morning, "I have no desire to live in a Britain without the BBC. At the end of this unedifying week, that terrible prospect has come a little closer".
Tuesday 10 September 2013
General Patten and the BBC mutiny
That luminary of the Public Accounts Committee, Margaret Hodge, has apparently described the appearance of former and current BBC bosses before the committee as "an unedifying experience". In the dispute about whether severance payments were necessary, and whether the BBC Trust knew about them or not - Mark Thompson says they did, Lord Patten says they didn't - it seems to be common ground that in the period 2009 to 2012 the BBC paid out £3 million to departing senior staff that contractually it didn't have to. In anyone's terms this is a disgrace.
The licence fee is a tax (and a poll tax at that, since it doesn't reflect ability to pay). If you want to own a TV you have to fork out. Would a government department be able to get away with paying its civil servants to depart like this out of taxpayers' money, at a cost to public services? Not in a million years.
Senior BBC executives are paid too much. Mark Thompson was paid £460,000. The argument used to be run that this was the going commercial rate. Curious therefore that the BBC seems to have been able to lure Covent Garden supremo Tony Hall for somewhat less than that amount.
The Corporation is effectively a Quango that is not subject to democratic control. Yes, it is meant to be regulated by the BBC Trust, but the Trust has an uneasy dual role as regulator and cheerleader, and unsurprisingly does both rather badly. The Corporation is staffed at the top level by people who live in a bubble, detached from rank-and-file staff and from the rest of us. How else to explain their kleptocratic behaviour?
The Trust is staffed by the same kind of people, the Great and Good whose lives oscillate between agreeable restaurants in London and weekends in the Cotswolds or Chiantishire. Unsurprising then that they should think there was nothing wrong with the payoffs. People like that expect to have their paths smoothed before them.
BBC executives had no incentive to stop the gravy train - they knew that when their turn came to leave they would also benefit from the public's generosity - and neither had the Trust. People working for the Trust know that their interests are congruent with the BBC itself, since damage to the Corporation jeopardises their own jobs. Why make a fuss about the size of severance payments? Bound to get into the papers, old boy.
What BBC staff further down the ladder must make of this, God only knows, told on the one hand that programme budgets are to be cut, and on the other that millions are being spent encouraging top staff from London to go.
There is a pleasing irony of the most mordant kind in the reflection that at a period when the BBC admitted it had a "liberal bias", its senior staff were fleecing the people left right and centre. This is the kind of behaviour you'd expect from a South American dictator or a crooked City capitalist, not from West London's bien pensants.
What lessons to learn from this?
One, the BBC Trust isn't doing its job properly. Ofcom anyone?
Two, spending other people's money is a lot less painful than spending your own.
P.S. It's being reported this morning that the BBC has commissioned a review into the relationship between the BBC and the BBC Trust. The Corporation quite often does this. In 2012 it asked for a review into its handling of the immigration issue from ex ITV CEO Stuart Prebble. The review came to a conclusion anyone with two eyes and ears could have reached, namely that the BBC had a "deep liberal bias". It cost £175,000 to find this out.
So what does the BBC do when it turns out that it's been wasting millions of licence-fee payers' money? It wastes hundreds of thousands in further navel gazing. I guess that's an advance of a sort, but the BBC leadership sails blithely, on unaware that, having done its best to cast the Corporation's reputation down, it is now dancing blindly around, trampling it into the mud. I am with Allison Pearson, who writes in the Torygraph this morning, "I have no desire to live in a Britain without the BBC. At the end of this unedifying week, that terrible prospect has come a little closer".
The licence fee is a tax (and a poll tax at that, since it doesn't reflect ability to pay). If you want to own a TV you have to fork out. Would a government department be able to get away with paying its civil servants to depart like this out of taxpayers' money, at a cost to public services? Not in a million years.
Senior BBC executives are paid too much. Mark Thompson was paid £460,000. The argument used to be run that this was the going commercial rate. Curious therefore that the BBC seems to have been able to lure Covent Garden supremo Tony Hall for somewhat less than that amount.
The Corporation is effectively a Quango that is not subject to democratic control. Yes, it is meant to be regulated by the BBC Trust, but the Trust has an uneasy dual role as regulator and cheerleader, and unsurprisingly does both rather badly. The Corporation is staffed at the top level by people who live in a bubble, detached from rank-and-file staff and from the rest of us. How else to explain their kleptocratic behaviour?
The Trust is staffed by the same kind of people, the Great and Good whose lives oscillate between agreeable restaurants in London and weekends in the Cotswolds or Chiantishire. Unsurprising then that they should think there was nothing wrong with the payoffs. People like that expect to have their paths smoothed before them.
BBC executives had no incentive to stop the gravy train - they knew that when their turn came to leave they would also benefit from the public's generosity - and neither had the Trust. People working for the Trust know that their interests are congruent with the BBC itself, since damage to the Corporation jeopardises their own jobs. Why make a fuss about the size of severance payments? Bound to get into the papers, old boy.
What BBC staff further down the ladder must make of this, God only knows, told on the one hand that programme budgets are to be cut, and on the other that millions are being spent encouraging top staff from London to go.
There is a pleasing irony of the most mordant kind in the reflection that at a period when the BBC admitted it had a "liberal bias", its senior staff were fleecing the people left right and centre. This is the kind of behaviour you'd expect from a South American dictator or a crooked City capitalist, not from West London's bien pensants.
What lessons to learn from this?
One, the BBC Trust isn't doing its job properly. Ofcom anyone?
Two, spending other people's money is a lot less painful than spending your own.
P.S. It's being reported this morning that the BBC has commissioned a review into the relationship between the BBC and the BBC Trust. The Corporation quite often does this. In 2012 it asked for a review into its handling of the immigration issue from ex ITV CEO Stuart Prebble. The review came to a conclusion anyone with two eyes and ears could have reached, namely that the BBC had a "deep liberal bias". It cost £175,000 to find this out.
So what does the BBC do when it turns out that it's been wasting millions of licence-fee payers' money? It wastes hundreds of thousands in further navel gazing. I guess that's an advance of a sort, but the BBC leadership sails blithely, on unaware that, having done its best to cast the Corporation's reputation down, it is now dancing blindly around, trampling it into the mud. I am with Allison Pearson, who writes in the Torygraph this morning, "I have no desire to live in a Britain without the BBC. At the end of this unedifying week, that terrible prospect has come a little closer".
Friday 6 September 2013
Why I love . . . #9 Prefab Sprout
Please may I introduce you to Simpson's Coefficient, a new concept which measures the relationship between the quality of a band's music and the coolness of their name. A low reading is obtained by having a cool name (Queens of the Stone Age, for example) and terrible music (Queens of the Stone Age again), whereas the highest reading so far recorded has been for the band with the worst name of all but the most heavenly music. Step forward Prefab Sprout.
In particular, step forward Paddy McAloon, singer/songwriter and now alas only member of the band, at least on the new album, Crimson / Red. The Sprouts started life in the Newcastle area as a three piece with Paddy, his brother Martin on bass, and a succession of drummers. Fan Wendy Smith joined on backing vocals, the band signed to Kitchenware Records in the early 80s and then made a succession of records of increasing gorgeousness, from Swoon to Steve McQueen, and having a chart hit with When Love Breaks Down.
Things then went rather badly wrong. Paddy's relationship with Wendy really did break down, and his pitch for an ambitious concept album were vetoed by a suspicious record company. Not long afterwards he started to suffer health problems associated with Meuniere's disease, including tinnitis and partial deafness. A series of bootleg and demo albums surfaced sporadically in the following twenty years (no-one does long-lost demos like the Sprouts), but McAloon retreated to the North East, where he devoted himself to family life, going grey and growing a luxuriantly Brahmsian beard.
I haven't heard Crimson / Red, which McAloon wrote, recorded and produced himself, but I am thrilled and fearful at the prospect. To say McAloon is a great songwriter is a bit like saying the weather in Manchester is changeable. His muse is a kind of masculinity which lies a million miles away from macho stereotype. Paddy is sensitive, romantic, but also somewhat shrewd. "Don't look at me and say", he writes on Couldn't Bear to be Special, "That I'm the very one / Who makes the cornball things occur / The shiver of the fur / I'm just an also ran / There's a mile between the way / You see me and the way I am". There's a streak of nostalgia and regret running a mile wide here too. "After that last unholy row / I never ever play basketball now / it joins the list of things I'll miss / like fencing foils and lovely girls I'll never kiss" (I Never Play Basketball Now).
But also humour. Here he is on the Beatles tribute, Electric Guitars: "I'd a dream that we were rock stars / And that flash bulbs popped the air / And girls fainted every time we shook our hair / We were songbirds, we were Greek Gods / We were singled out by fate / We were quoted out of context / It was great".
Paddy also sees that some things are too awful for pop to encompass, hence Cars and Girls, his attack on Bruce Springsteen: "Brucie dreams life's a highway / Too many roads bypass my way / or they never begin / Innocence coming to grief / At the hands of life's stinkin' car thief / That's my concept of sin".
The difficulties of being an artist, real if not the worst, get an airing on Nightingales ("If singing birds must sing / No question of choice / then living is our song / indeed our voice / best agree, you and me / are probably nightingales") and Music is a Princess ("I'm just a boy, in rags / I'd gladly spend my life / carrying her bags / If their weight is much greater than I first supposed / I'd remember my oath of allegiance / true love is a monarch who won't be deposed / treason hasn't a chance").
And all this set to tunes which owe something to the Beach Boys and Hollywood musicals, sung in a voice of honeyed gold. Why Prefab Sprout were not huge is beyond me. Truly they laid pearls before swine.
I said I am thrilled and fearful of the first new Sprout album for a decade. Fearful because Paddy's star was at its highest when the band teamed up with producer Thomas Dolby, a brilliant arranger and sonic wunderkind. But Dolby has dropped out Paddy's worldview, whether because of personal differences, because Paddy can't afford him or because Paddy now thinks he can do it all himself. As anyone who has tried to self-produce knows, total control robs you of perspective and deprives you of the ideas of others. Nothing Paddy has produced post-Dolby quite matches the highs of Steve McQueen or Langley Park to Memphis. Not because Paddy has stopped writing great songs, but because Dolby helped him realise them perfectly.
But if control is double-edged sword, who better than Paddy McAloon to be swinging it gleefully about his head?
In particular, step forward Paddy McAloon, singer/songwriter and now alas only member of the band, at least on the new album, Crimson / Red. The Sprouts started life in the Newcastle area as a three piece with Paddy, his brother Martin on bass, and a succession of drummers. Fan Wendy Smith joined on backing vocals, the band signed to Kitchenware Records in the early 80s and then made a succession of records of increasing gorgeousness, from Swoon to Steve McQueen, and having a chart hit with When Love Breaks Down.
Things then went rather badly wrong. Paddy's relationship with Wendy really did break down, and his pitch for an ambitious concept album were vetoed by a suspicious record company. Not long afterwards he started to suffer health problems associated with Meuniere's disease, including tinnitis and partial deafness. A series of bootleg and demo albums surfaced sporadically in the following twenty years (no-one does long-lost demos like the Sprouts), but McAloon retreated to the North East, where he devoted himself to family life, going grey and growing a luxuriantly Brahmsian beard.
I haven't heard Crimson / Red, which McAloon wrote, recorded and produced himself, but I am thrilled and fearful at the prospect. To say McAloon is a great songwriter is a bit like saying the weather in Manchester is changeable. His muse is a kind of masculinity which lies a million miles away from macho stereotype. Paddy is sensitive, romantic, but also somewhat shrewd. "Don't look at me and say", he writes on Couldn't Bear to be Special, "That I'm the very one / Who makes the cornball things occur / The shiver of the fur / I'm just an also ran / There's a mile between the way / You see me and the way I am". There's a streak of nostalgia and regret running a mile wide here too. "After that last unholy row / I never ever play basketball now / it joins the list of things I'll miss / like fencing foils and lovely girls I'll never kiss" (I Never Play Basketball Now).
But also humour. Here he is on the Beatles tribute, Electric Guitars: "I'd a dream that we were rock stars / And that flash bulbs popped the air / And girls fainted every time we shook our hair / We were songbirds, we were Greek Gods / We were singled out by fate / We were quoted out of context / It was great".
Paddy also sees that some things are too awful for pop to encompass, hence Cars and Girls, his attack on Bruce Springsteen: "Brucie dreams life's a highway / Too many roads bypass my way / or they never begin / Innocence coming to grief / At the hands of life's stinkin' car thief / That's my concept of sin".
The difficulties of being an artist, real if not the worst, get an airing on Nightingales ("If singing birds must sing / No question of choice / then living is our song / indeed our voice / best agree, you and me / are probably nightingales") and Music is a Princess ("I'm just a boy, in rags / I'd gladly spend my life / carrying her bags / If their weight is much greater than I first supposed / I'd remember my oath of allegiance / true love is a monarch who won't be deposed / treason hasn't a chance").
And all this set to tunes which owe something to the Beach Boys and Hollywood musicals, sung in a voice of honeyed gold. Why Prefab Sprout were not huge is beyond me. Truly they laid pearls before swine.
I said I am thrilled and fearful of the first new Sprout album for a decade. Fearful because Paddy's star was at its highest when the band teamed up with producer Thomas Dolby, a brilliant arranger and sonic wunderkind. But Dolby has dropped out Paddy's worldview, whether because of personal differences, because Paddy can't afford him or because Paddy now thinks he can do it all himself. As anyone who has tried to self-produce knows, total control robs you of perspective and deprives you of the ideas of others. Nothing Paddy has produced post-Dolby quite matches the highs of Steve McQueen or Langley Park to Memphis. Not because Paddy has stopped writing great songs, but because Dolby helped him realise them perfectly.
But if control is double-edged sword, who better than Paddy McAloon to be swinging it gleefully about his head?
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