Petroc Trelawney and the Bridcut amnesia

A strange case of amnesia seems to attend people reading John Bridcut's book Britten's Children.   Petroc Trelawney is one of several who don't seem to have been paying attention.  Otherwise he wouldn't have written the following in the Torygraph: "Yes, Britten found working with young people exciting and inspiring – but that was as far as it went. In current times, it’s reassuring that we can listen to Britten comfortable in the knowledge that he is unlikely to be the subject of a posthumous tabloid exposé".

Actually Bridcut's book sets out in some detail the curious case of the chorister Harry Morris. In 1937 Britten, then 24, took Morris, aged 13, on holiday to Crantock in Cornwall with his family. Britten had bought Morris new pyjamas. Whilst there an incident occurred; Morris returned to London and a stand-up row took place between Britten and his elder brother; they were estranged for a time afterwards. Bridcut writes (p.52) that later in life Morris said he had been alarmed "by what he understood as a sexual approach from Britten in his bedroom. He said he screamed and hit Britten with a chair. This brought Beth (Britten's sister) rushing into the room, who, he said, shouted at her brother. She and Ben left, and Beth locked the door. Harry got dressed, packed his bags, and sat waiting for the morning. Without speaking, Beth took him to the station, and dispatched him to London. When he reached home, he told his mother what had happened, but she told him off and refused to believe his story. He never told his father." Morris died in 2002. Bridcut notes (p.46) that "as an old man he had revisited Crantock, and the experience had made him feel ill".

With all the participants dead, it is impossible to be specific about what happened between Britten and Morris. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that this was an incident where Britten's interest in young (and therefore vulnerable) boys crossed the line. It may be the only time Britten did so; it may not be. In either event, Bridcut's general conclusion about Britten's conduct and proclivities - that he was blameless - is somewhat undermined.

Britten's admirers are prone, like Trelawney , to drawing a veil over the less pleasant side of his personality. Extraordinarily, Bridcut himself is just as guilty as Trelawney. A couple of years ago he wrote to the Guardian defending Britten on the paedophilia charge. "There was no suggestion of impropriety", he wrote. Had he forgotten about Harry Morris? Had he not read his own book?

Actually there is a clue to Bridcut's approach in its title - Britten's Children. It should have been called Britten's Boys. There are no girls in it.

As a fellow toiler in the field I admire Britten's talent. He could do anything he chose and do it brilliantly. But like all composers he was limited by the constraints of his personality and preoccupations, which in Britten's case were focused on the corruption of innocence (my suspicion is that Britten knew about this corruption from both sides - corrupter and corrupted). But this is a narrow theme and Britten mined it to the point of tedium.

In any case musical history is littered with examples of the prodigiously talented who are now forgotten. Talent is not everything. Hector Berlioz, a far far greater composer than Britten, has been described as a "genius without talent". If this is slightly unfair to Berlioz on the talent front, it well makes the point that genius and talent are separable.

(It's also worth pointing out that for all his genius, Berlioz never succeeded in co-opting the French musical establishment - when he finally got a job at the Paris Conservatoire it was as assistant librarian - whereas Britten was a master at rising up the greasy pole and discarding those who were no longer any use to him.  I genuinely think this does account for at least some of his pre-eminence today. There is a deeply unpleasant vignette in Britten's letters where he and Lennox Berkeley are recorded as spending an evening sniggering over Vaughan Williams' scores, laughing at the "mistakes" in the orchestration; this the same RVW who interceded on Britten's behalf when the LSO were ridiculing Our Hunting Fathers, the composer's first major orchestral work.)

Ultimately what makes music last is the quality of the invention, and it is on this front that Britten, for me, falls down. I have seen most of his operas and conducted some of his music but I can't remember a note of any of them. Perhaps a few bits of the Four Sea Interludes. People will be whistling and playing John Williams in a hundred years; I'm not sure about Britten.

And I have to correct Petroc Trelawney about the popularity of his work. I went to see Midsummer Night's Dream recently - it left me cold, although that's not the point: the point is that the theatre was half empty. Doesn't Trelawney know that these shows are put on not because the public wants them, but because the world of state-subsidised arts administration has decided the public should have them?  It'll be interesting to see how that pans out.

Lastly, Britten is often accused of scuttling off to America in 1939. To be fair, the evidence suggests that he and Pears didn't go because of impending war (although of course everyone knew it was coming). But I have always thought the War Requiem (one of his best works) both telling and evasive in its choice of poetry: much easier, after all, to make the pacifist case in the context of the 1914-18 war than the one which had just finished.  If I could have asked Britten one question today it would have been this: "If more people had been pacifists and we had lost the war, how long do you think it would have been before the fascist regime had allowed gay marriage?" I hope the irony that this reform was enacted by the kind of conservatives that Britten savaged in Peter Grimes would not have been lost on him. 

Yesterday I had the good fortune to conduct the D Minor Piano Concerto by Brahms in a stunning performance by the Indian pianist Julian Clef, aka Julian Pulimagath.  Now Britten despised Brahms, saying that he played some through once a year to remind himself how bad it was.  And yet the Brahms D Minor has a degree of pathos, dignity, tenderness, determination and finally warmth which I find conspicuously lacking in Britten's music.  The sad thing is not that Britten couldn't have done all that if he'd wanted to.  It's that he didn't want to.

Ken Livingstone and the tax gap

These are strange days indeed.  Before the weekend the Torygraph reported Ken Livingstone as criticising Gordon Brown for "borrowing £20 billion a year at the height of the boom in the first decade of this century in order to avoid having to increase taxes, because he wanted to increase public spending".  Speaking at a "Labour Assembly Against Austerity" Mr Livingstone described this as "an act of cowardice".

Before one raises a hallelujah for the sinner that repenteth and so on, it's worth pointing out a) that Livingstone blames the Tories too for excessive borrowing, b) that he would like Labour to put up taxes to fill the gap and c) his figures are wrong - actually during the height of the boom Brown borrowed about £40 billion (plus or minus a few billion) for five successive years.

I realise that this is a old tune now, but it's one I never mind playing: the new Keynesians who wanted Osborne to reflate the economy by increasing borrowing (before Osborne proved them wrong) are merely Keynesians-lite - they were silent when Brown passed up the opportunity to swallow the hard part of the great man's prescription - run a surplus during the good times. I don't remember Owen Jones and his ilk shouting for higher taxes or lower public spending then.

When the Blair government briefly balanced the books at the beginning of the first term it was because Labour had pledged to stick to Tory spending plans in an effort to avoid a repeat of the "Labour's tax bombshell" headlines said to have done for John Smith in 1992.  Otherwise Brown defiantly ran a counter-cyclical deficit, promising that he had done away with Tory boom and bust.

Nevertheless I think Livingstone's outburst is good news, because it may be a sign of increasing focus on the issue that matters, namely, what sort of public services can we afford with the tax take which the public is willing to bear?  He is also correct that borrowing to consume is inherently dubious because it is living today off our children's future income.

There is a delusion on the Left to the effect that Britain's fiscal gap can be closed solely by taxing the rich more.  They're wrong.  Firstly, there aren't enough rich people.  Secondly, when you put marginal tax rates up the rich call their accountants, arrange their affairs differently or go elsewhere.  As it happens the richest 1% in the UK currently pay nearly 30% of all income tax; in the late 70's when marginal rates were nearer 90% the figure was about 11%.

Livingstone is right that we can have whatever public services we want, but the reality is that it isn't just the rich who will have to pay more tax, but the rest of us as well.

RIP John Tavener

Desperately sad to hear last night of the death of John Tavener.  It must be awful for his wife and family.  He was only 69.

I wrote a few months ago about my four years of lessons with John, and you can read the post here if you're interested.  He was a nice man and a thoroughly distinctive and utterly fearless composer working in a time of conformism masquerading as radicalism.

So now the tributes will come flooding in.  I heard one of them last night, an interview with ex-Radio 3 controller Nicholas Kenyon on Front Row.  Kenyon said that in the 1980s Tavener had been an unfashionable composer, and that it was heartening to see his reputation growing again.  When I heard Kenyon say this I did wonder, Unfashionable with whom?

Tavener's relationship with the BBC was an uneasy one.  I remember seeing him literally shaking with anger at a rebuff that one of his favourite sopranos had received.  He had overcome the Corporation's reservations about this girl, and persuaded them to allow her to broadcast one of his pieces, but afterwards a producer had written to her to point out that this occasion was a one-off, and that as far as he was concerned she still had not passed her BBC audition.

Tavener was white with anger.  I can't remember exactly what he said, but it contained words like "petty", "mean" and "vindictive".  And then he said - and I do remember this clearly - "They hate me.  They hate me because I'm popular".  This while pacing up and down his living room in Wembley Park.  "But because I'm popular, they can't ignore me".

The question of what music was for was one we discussed many many times.  It was easy for composers like Bach or Haydn who worked for patrons, the church and the aristocracy respectively, but afterwards more difficult.  He was sure though that music had to communicate with an audience, and that if it didn't there was probably something wrong with it.  At the time - the mid 1980s - this was not a widely held view in the British musical establishment, and it's probably fair to say that an artificial reverence for the recondite and intimidating still lurks in mouldy corners.

Personally I am not a great fan of Tavener's music.  As I've written here many times before, it's about the invention, stupid - you either like it or you don't.  And I don't, or not that much.  I like his attitude to the world and his humility (although like a lot of humble people, John defended his humility with a certain amount of ferocity) more than I like the music which those attitudes inspired.  But undoubtedly he was a wildly, extravagantly ambitious composer who wrote music a lot of people loved.  That is a very rare thing now, and I'm not sure there's another living British composer who inspires such affection.

The last time I saw Tavener was from row J at the Bridgewater Hall last July.  My wife told me to go and say hello, and I wish now I had overcome my scruples.  I know he would have been absolutely charming and it would have been good to have said - however unwittingly - goodbye.

Ha-Joon Chang, Ed Miliband and the energy companies

Ha-Joon Chang will be familiar to some readers as author of 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism.  Today he is on the Graun's op-ed pages supporting Ed Miliband's idea of getting companies to pay their staff more.  Chang's thesis is that companies could afford to pay their staff higher wages, but choose not to.  "Many companies do in fact have significant influence over what they charge . . . it may be (they have market power) because they face little competition, like the railway companies . . . So at least companies with market power are perfectly capable of paying their workers more by charging customers more, if they so wanted - except that they don't".

Let's examine what might happen if a company facing "little competition" decided to put its prices up to pay its workers more.  I happen to know a bit about this because I am trying to get a new landline put in at the moment, and there is only one provider of landlines, BT (anti-plug for BT - they have been totally rubbish).

If BT put its prices up the cost will, as Chang says, be passed on to consumers.  So ordinary people who have a landline will be made poorer merely to pay BT staff more. Moreover, some people who don't like BT's price increase might decide to get rid of a landline altogether and rely on a cable connection or mobile phone instead.  BT's market share would decline, as would its profits. As its business shrank it would lay off workers.

As I wrote yesterday this looks suspiciously like a Tory policy, taking money from the many to give to the few. Yet it was Ed Miliband's idea, and Mr Chang, who teaches economics at Cambridge, supports it.  The expression "ivory tower" springs to mind.

In the face of such madness it is reassuring to turn to the Torygraph, which has enough fruitcakes of its own, but also the reassuringly sensible Jeremy Warner, who writes today that our problems are "not going to be solved by Labour's economically illiterate mix of price controls on energy and tax incentives to create higher wages.  This will only succeed in raising unemployment . . . In truth there are no easy fixes for falling real incomes, since the underlying cause is endemically poor productivity . . . You cannot spend what you don't earn unless you borrow the difference".

Amen.

One last point about Ha-Joon Chang. I can think of a number of companies which face "little competition" and which could pay their workers more by raising prices. The big six energy companies for example. I wonder what Ed Miliband would think of that?

Suzanne Moore, Russell Brand - high expectations

A spirited defence of Russell Brand comes from Suzanne Moore, deploring "the ranks of the professionally sensible" who have attacked him.  It's a novelty to find oneself bracketed, however unwittingly, as professionally sensible, but there we are.

Writing in the Graun, Moore thinks that Brand "nicely highlights the narrowness of our present political discourse . . . that discourse needs busting open . . . all the retorts amount to a defence of parliamentary democracy, a political process that many are clearly alienated from (sic) . . . those who accuse Brand of naivety are themselves naive about what voting achieves . . . Brand hits home because politics as it is enacted is dull and conformist . . . This system is so dead and closed that there feels little choice . . . In reality people are falling away from political parties. Brand's idealism is in part a response to this. . . He is right on many counts and while we are far from revolution we have a younger generation with high expectations and no means to meet them.  

Some points in no particular order:

Parliamentary democracy has got flaws, but, as Churchill said, the alternatives are worse. Brand, as he readily admits, doesn't have a programme; but if he did, how would he go about implementing it?

Since parliamentary democracy is apparently deplored, I could only imagine this would be by violence.

Actually such an attempt would fail, partly because the machinery of the state would be exercised to suppress it, and partly because it wouldn't command majority support; but I hope it's enough for me destroy Brand's credibility to point out that violence would be the only plausible means. After all, he doesn't intend to do it via the ballot box.

Surely Suzanne Moore, writing for the benevolent falafel-chewing gluten-free Guardian, couldn't be endorsing violence, could she?

Secondly, the Anonymous protestors, with their sweat-shop made face masks, may be right about some things, but they don't represent anyone but themselves. Brand and his new friends may rail against Parliament, but the truth is that even tired old Parliament has more democratic legitimacy than they do.

Thirdly, if there feels little choice in our parliamentary democracy it's because, essentially, the big intellectual arguments have long ago been won and lost.  There is a general consensus in Britain that people want a sort of social democratic capitalism, in which the market's dynamism is harnessed and tamed to provide economic freedom but also an adequate safety net for the poor.

This sort of model has been discredited by events of the last five years, partly because the capitalism which made a few people rich by providing debt to the rest of us collapsed in a heap; and partly because its collapse revealed that the welfare system paid for with the fruits of that debt wasn't affordable. But most people believe and hope it can still be made to work, and this is where British politics is now - arguing about the details. It might change, but the views of Brand and Moore are still in a tiny minority.

Lastly, the "younger generation with high expectations and no means to meet them" is almost worth a blog in itself, but I think Moore's analysis is partly right. It's quite possible that the rising generation might be the first in a long time to end up being poorer than their parents.  I say might because when I look back at my own childhood I remember wooden toys, an orange in your stocking at Christmas, holidays in rainy Scotland, and not daring to ask if I could share a room when my girlfriend came to stay; whereas even the least fortunate of my children's contemporaries have had computer games and phones that would have made us gasp, cheap holidays in the sun, endless restaurant meals and no-questions-asked room-sharing when significant others come round. Living standards have gone up dramatically in the last forty years.

Ah, say Moore and her ilk, but what about jobs? What about getting on the housing ladder?

Boring I know, but unemployment was much higher during the Thatcher years, and as for the housing ladder, most people didn't ever think they would ever own their own property anyway; ironically it was Mrs Thatcher who put the notion into the public's mind. I didn't own a house until I was thirty six.  It was the first time since leaving home that I had gone upstairs to bed, because I hadn't lived anywhere with two floors.

Actually, although loan-to-value levels are high, the proportion of mortgage payments to average earnings is very low by historical standards because interest rates are so low.  People can't get on the housing ladder not because prices are too high but because, post-credit crunch, mortgage companies are demanding a sizeable deposit which they don't have. None of us is used to saving, and that's because we got used to a period in the nineties and twenty-hundreds when credit was easy to get: if you wanted something, you just went to the bank and the money was handed over.

This is where I agree with Moore.  The younger generation has high expectations and no means to meet them.  If they had a little more curiosity about the last hundred years of British history (and there are after all quite a lot of people available to ask about it) they would see that they are in fact incredibly fortunate - they have grown up in a time of enormous personal liberty, freedom from strife, unparalelled life expectancy and material affluence.  It's a crisis of expectation.  But not any other kind of crisis.

Reflections on Russell Brand

As befits a comedian, Russell Brand has always seemed to me essentially a joke figure.  Surprisingly, other people seem to be taking his ideas seriously.  He's been on Question Time, been interviewed by Paxo on Newsnight, guest-edited an edition of the New Statesman and now has been given a full page article in the Grauniad.

Essentially Brand's argument is that the main political parties don't represent the views of ordinary people. They are in hock to the City and in any event are run by the pusillanimous and the corrupt.  Democracy isn't working. We need to send a signal to politicians, and we can start by refusing to vote.

So far so sixth-form.  But is he right about any of it?

First of all Brand is wrong to say that parties don't represent ordinary people.  Actually a whole industry has grown up to inform politicians what ordinary people are thinking.  Polling gurus read the runes and tell the parties what the man in the street is concerned about.  The parties may be slow to react, but react they do.

For example, the number one issue which concerns the British - rightly or wrongly - is immigration.  Poll after poll shows this to be true. For years both parties - but particularly Labour - ignored the issue, hence the apparently irresistible rise of the EDL and UKIP. The main parties have now responded; there isn't much they can do about the issue (our right to control our own borders has been largely ceded to the EU) but their policies have changed in so far as it is within their power to do so.

That's the way that two-party politics works. Labour and Conservative may be superficially the same old parties, but they do alter over time.  The Labour party of Michael Foot was a different beast from the same party under Kinnock; it changed again under Tony Blair, and it's changing again under man-of-principle Ed Miliband. The same is true for the Tories.

So Brand's contention that the parties don't represent ordinary people seems unlikely to be true, because if there was something British voter were desperately concerned about the focus groups would be telling the pollsters, and the pollsters would be telling their political paymasters.

I think what Russell Brand means is that the parties don't represent him.  That seems inevitable given that he has been given space in the press precisely because his views aren't mainstream.

Democracy's flaw is that to work well electorates should be intelligent and well informed. Ours isn't, and no-one exemplifies this better than Brand himself.  I'm willing to believe he's an intelligent guy - he writes beautifully - but like many people who have other things to preoccupy them than the tedious detail of politics and economics, he doesn't actually know very much. Judging from his article in the Guardian today, his knowledge of what caused the financial crash and continues to impede economic growth is absolutely minimal.

I wonder whether, if you asked him, he would be able to tell you, without looking it up, what our debt to GDP ratio was currently, what Britain's current deficit was, how many years out of the last 50 we have run a surplus, when that was and why it happened, what activity the bankers were engaged in which enabled them to make so much money, how many jobs the City of London supports, how much tax revenue and foreign investment it brings in, why Alastair Darling had no choice but to bail out the banks, what the Glass Steagall Act was and why it was repealed, or what was distinctive about the period 1993 to 2008.

My guess would be that Brand would know no more than one or two of these things at most. And yet he thinks he knows better than everyone else what's wrong with our economy. That's democracy in a nutshell. It gives people who know next to nothing the same electoral influence as those who take an obsessive interest in politics. And that's as it should be. You can't have enfranchisement tests.

Ah, Brand might say, but hardly anyone else knows these things either; and he'd be right. And that's why we are wrong to complain about our politicians - they are the product of our own apathy and ignorance.

As for not voting, Brand is welcome to it. The fewer people vote, the more my vote counts for. His brand of Trustafarianism sounds to the outsider like the whining of a disappointed narcissist. I was going to suggest that he take a good look at himself in the mirror. But he's probably doing that anyway.

P.S. It occurred to me after writing this that the most plausible argument that our society needs sweeping away and starting anew is that so many people in it think Brand's arguments warrant attention.  I guess I'm as guilty as anyone.

Brimming with political ideas - Ed Miliband and the living wage

Ed Miliband has demonstrated again his ruthless mastery of politics. I am not being ironic. The BBC reports today that he has "unveiled plans to deliver a living wage of at least £7.45 per hour for millions of people if Labour wins the next election".

Let's examine what the consequences of this would be. In the public sector, it would mean that there was less money to go round other areas of public spending. In the private sector it would make companies forced to go along with the proposal less competitive at a stroke.

In both cases it would mean a little more pay for some, but fewer jobs for others. You could caricature this as being more like a Tory than a Labour policy, concentrating wealth in the hands of the employed rather than those looking for work (who would now of course be less likely to find it).

I am absolutely sure that Miliband, who once taught economics at Harvard, knows full well what the consequences of this policy would be. And yet he promises it nonetheless. This is why I call him ruthless. Just as with his energy price cap, he knows that there are plenty of people in Britain ill-informed and desperate enough to vote for him on this prospectus.

I think we're going to see a great deal more of this before the next election.  There's a distinction between policy and politics.  Sadly, Miliband looks to me brimming over with political ideas but woefully short of plausible policy.

Ultimately there's only one way to widespread prosperity, which is for this country to pay its own way in the world by providing products and services that people in other countries want to buy. If living standards are falling, it's because we aren't doing that well enough. It's depressing to sound like an unattractive character in a Northern mill drama (or, for that matter, like Alderman Roberts of Grantham), but sometimes the truth is hard to swallow.