Michael Gove and the re-writing of history

How to celebrate, if that's the word, the centenary of 1914?  Michael Gove seems to think our perspective on the Great War has been skewed by pacifist nonsense like the famous episode of Blackadder, one only of a number of fictions, from Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That to Oh What a Lovely War, which have peddled the "lions led by donkeys" line.

It so happens that I am in the middle of reading Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War and am therefore slightly less ill-informed than usual on this topic.

Ferguson is a strange writer.  His principal motive seems not to be to find out what happened, but to point out where earlier historians got it wrong.  This contrarianism can be a tiresome end in itself, and moreover its methods sometimes seem strained.  Here he is on events in 1918:

"It was not Allied tactical superiority which ended the war . . . it was a crisis of German morale"(p.313).  "A tired and sick man after the failure of his offensives, Ludendorff jumped to the conclusion that the army would collapse if he did not secure an armistice; it seems more likely that his desire for an armistice was what made it collapse".  

The neat paradoxical inversion is typical of the style.  But Ferguson doesn't show how Ludendorff's personal troubles communicated themselves to rank and file German soldiers many miles away.  It seems unlikely that the figurehead of Germany's Junker class was articulating his personal troubles to subordinates in the touchy-feely Californian manner.

Then there is the vexed issue of surrender.  Ferguson shows that after the failure of Ludendorff's 1918 offensive, German troops began to surrender in large numbers.  He attributes this partly to the dawning realisation that it was safe to do so.  This may seem surprising, since we fondly imagine the British treated their prisoners well, but Ferguson sets out in some detail how the killing of prisoners was routinely carried out on both sides.  What he does not do however is show whether there was any policy change in 1918 by the British and French towards prisoners, and if so how that change was communicated to the Germans. Strange.

As Ferguson must know, asserting something without evidence is OK for a blogger but not good enough for a historian.

Where Ferguson really does score is in showing just how much better Germans were at killing our chaps than the reverse.  Undoubtedly we started the war badly and slowly got better as it went on (developing the tank, learning how to co-ordinate artillery and infantry), but even then the Germans were still better than we were.  They lost because their ordinary soldiers weren't in the end willing to put up with the horrendous conditions any more, preferring to surrender than fight.

Does this make the Great War a glorious episode in British history?  Well no.  To read yourself back into the mind of politicians a hundred years ago is to find that the great European powers were punch-drunk on territorial expansionism.  The conflict was as much about Imperial ambitions as about Gavriol Princip and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  The Germans wanted ports on the Channel coast of France.  Had Britain stayed aloof France would have been overrun.  You can argue until you're blue in the face that such an outcome might have been better than the Nazism which followed Versailles, but politicians have to deal with the way things are now.  They are not gifted with foresight.  Britain's involvement was bungled, but also understandable and even necessary.

As for Blackadder, I watched the offending episode again the other night.  I have always loved it.  But Rowan Atkinson's dead-eyed and doomed soldier is an attempt to impose today's values and knowledge on an era which had the luxury of neither.

RIP Simon Hoggart. And the Christmas Round Robin.

So farewell then Simon Hoggart.  Like most right-thinking people I mourn the death of the Guardian's great parliamentary sketch writer.

But here are two views you won't read in the hagiographies which inevitably accompany his passing.

One, Hoggart didn't really write about politics.  He wrote about personalities.  He was at his most amusing when describing the way politicians talked or looked.  His most memorable pieces concerned things like the way Sir Peter Tapsell spoke, or Michael Fabricant's wig.  Without wishing to sound sanctimonious, I'd rather read someone laying into what politicians do.  Satire of the type employed by Private Eye is much cleverer, much more useful and much funnier.  We think poorly enough of politicians anyway without someone like Hoggart mocking their personal qualities.

Two, Hoggart has single-handedly killed the Round Robin letter.  Ten years ago no Christmas card opening was complete unless accompanied by the exultant shout of "It's a Round Robin!".  At which point every sentient being would gather round to read the smug, complacent and vainglorious outpourings of friends and relatives.  Hoggart used to publish a selection of these in the Guardian early in the New Year, and latterly produced two compilations, of which The Cat That Could Open the Fridge was one.

My favourite shocker was the one about the writer's offspring who had "spent the summer on a yacht in the Ionian Sea with some other beautiful young people from Balliol, and beat the Poet Laureate's son at Scrabble!"  

If you went round with an axe and beat the sender to a bloody pulp, no jury would convict.

Where are the Round Robins now?  The public ridicule Hoggart heaped on them as made even the least self-aware keep schtum.  We had only two in 2013, one from some very nice people who write in full knowledge of the medium's absurdity, the other from a Lib Dem councillor in Watford who wouldn't know what self-awareness was if it landed on her head from a great height.  We are all poorer as a result.

Marks and Spencer - not exactly kosher

My astonishment at yesterday's news that Marks and Spencer was allowing Muslim till staff to direct customers with alcohol or pork to other tills was swiftly followed by the conclusion that this was a policy which wasn't going to last.

Never mind the fury which erupted on Facebook, imagine the anger amidst the mayhem of Christmas shopping when the person queuing for ten minutes with a groaning trolley is told she must go elsewhere. Imagine too being the poor cashier who has to tell the customer.  Clearly this one wasn't going to survive 24 hours.

And so it has proved.  M&S now apparently say Muslim staff will be allowed to work in other areas of their stores (no doubt not shifting crates of champagne around in the back office).  With any luck the tide of ill-will which has flowed their way won't dent their Christmas figures too much.

Personally I have no objection whatsoever with someone not wanting to sell alcohol or pork.  The best way for an individual to avoid this is probably not to apply for a job with one of the UK's biggest food retailers. Marks and Spencer selling wine and sausages?  Who would have guessed?

A pluralist society requires all sorts of tolerances.  Perhaps surprisingly for someone who regards Islam's treatment of women with a certain amount of dismay, I think France's ban on the burqa is wrong.  I don't like the headscarf very much, but I wouldn't patronise those who wear it by assuming that all of them are coerced or brainwashed.  But selling pork and alcohol is not the same thing as eating them yourself (if it were so, tens of thousands of Pakistani corner shops would have gone out of business years ago); and declining to serve those who do sends out a signal to wider society about Islam which is totally counterproductive.

What were Marks and Spencer thinking of?  Michael Marks, a Belorussian Jew who founded the company with Thomas Spencer in 1894, must be turning in his grave.  

Clare Balding, UCL and a British version of Islam

A couple of weeks ago on a long motorway drive I found myself listening to Clare Balding's Desert Island Discs.  Why, Kirsty Young wanted to know, did Ms Balding decline to take part in coverage of the Open Golf championship at Muirfield, a club which refuses entry to women, whereas she was willing to go to the Winter Olympics in Russia, a country whose government is notoriously homophobic?

Balding's answer, that in the UK her stance had some resonance whereas in Russia no-one knew or cared who she was, seemed reasonable enough, and I forgot about it until the hoo-hah last week over the debate at University College London.  You may remember that UCL is in trouble for hosting a Muslim-organised debate where audience members were offered mixed or segregated seating.

Like most small "l" liberals I incline to the view that people should be able to do more or less what they like where possible, and as someone with religious sympathies if not actual religious beliefs that view extends to the practice of religion.  However where religious rights and other rights clash there's an ambigous middle ground that I suspect we will see increasingly fought over.

If you are inclined towards an absolutist take on religious freedom, consider the practice of compulsory female circumcision, a manifestation of religious belief in action.  Still think people should always be able to do what they like?  No, nor me.

In reality our willingness to tolerate other people's religious practices is not absolute, but depends on the extent to which those practices differ from our own.  Someone who thinks segregating a meeting is OK might not mind too much compulsory clitoridectomy; someone who finds segregation an affront to feminism is going to be horrified by it.

UCL seem to have followed the policy arrived at by Universities UK - namely that segregation is OK if it's voluntary and if there's a third area of mixed seating.  Subsequently UUK now seem to have withdrawn this policy in the face of criticism from David Cameron and Michael Gove. Lord knows what they are going to replace it with.

Areas where potential rights conflict, in this case female equality versus religious freedom, are probably not subject to being forensically unpicked: at root politics is about power, and about imposing your vision of society on others.  We haven't tried to accommodate those North African Muslims who practice female circumcision: we think it's wrong, so they can't do it legally. The UK government has essentially imposed its views on them.

Unlike Clare Balding, I personally don't think there's much wrong with Muirfield golf club having a men-only membership.  It's a private organisation; other golf clubs are available.  I as a man am free to take my maximum-handicap hacking elsewhere if I choose.  Nor would I mind a private Mosque having segregated prayers, if that's what its members want.

(Don't ask me why a men-only golf club is just about OK, but a whites-only one wouldn't be; let's stick to the topic)

A university on the other hand is, whatever the niceties of ownership, essentially a public institution.  If it wants to ban segregated meetings it should be able to do so.  Muslims are free to campaign against it and it's up to them to see if they can prevail.

As for Ms Balding, three quarters of an hour in her radio company was quite enough.  I couldn't quite put my finger on what I disliked about her.  And no, it wasn't that she was a lesbian.  I realised afterwards it was that she was a female version of a male type I have always envied and disliked - the Jock.  Cheerful, unreflective, competitive and enthusiastic, she played a series of quite dreadful records.

Lastly, a mention for the Inclusive Mosque Initiative, an organisation which is trying, in the face of some resistance, to promote what are effectively unisex mosques.  I have always thought that for the UK to come to an unacknowledged truce with Muslims a British version of Islam would have to emerge, and this is an enormously encouraging sign.

Radio Mandela makes the news

To get one thing clear at the outset, I admired Nelson Mandela.

I am also astonished and bored by the outpouring of flannel and hagiographies at his death. A serviceable but dull BBC4 programme about Byzantium on Friday night was interrupted by a banner advertising "Breaking news on BBC1". Was nuclear armageddon upon us? Was a tsunami roaring up the Mersey estuary? No. Mandela had died.

I can't think of any reason why I should have needed to know sooner rather than later. After all, the coverage was still going on on Monday morning, when Radio 5 was inviting listeners to share their "memories of Mandela". There was no chance of any of us missing the news. You might have thought the station had been renamed Radio Mandela; apparently the BBC has received over 1000 complaints about excessive coverage. I'm surprised it's so few.

Against my better judgment I watched News at 10 that night. Too many of the contributors struck the kind of solipsistic tone which Private Eye would satirise as "The day Nelson Mandela met me". Among them was John Simpson, who is experienced enough to know the pitfalls of personalisation but let his vanity get the better of him. In the Guardian of course it was even worse, although the paper redeemed itself by printing a magisterial obituary by David Beresford which you can read here, and which I urge anyone who thinks I'm unduly cynical to look at before giving up on this post.

As Beresford makes clear, Mandela was a complex man, absent from the world during much of his adult life, emerging from prison an ingenue, and finding himself the poster boy for liberal opinion the world over. This was a position he subsequently struggled to justify, with one striking exception, an exception so startling that it goes a long way to explaining the reverence felt for Mandela around the world.

It was that he forgave his captors, and by doing so made possible the peaceful transition to majority rule in South Africa. No small thing.

But news organisations are not meant to be cheerleaders. When a great public figure like Mandela passes on, their job isn't to exalt.  I don't imagine though that Pravda's tributes to Josef Stalin were any more lavish than those the liberal media bestowed on Madiba.

Nowhere in the coverage I saw was there any mention of his penchant for hobnobbing with celebrities, his attempts to milk the rich for unspecific "good causes" (some of which appeared to have close connections to his own family), his cosying up to foreign governments like Indonesia, Taiwan and Nigeria in exchange for donations to the ANC or his reluctance to speak out about AIDS. Neither was there any mention of Mandela's endorsement, while still in prison, of Winnie Mandela's notorious necklacing speech - Beresford's obit alleges that proof of this endorsement was removed from journalist Anthony Sampson's official biography when Mandela threatened to withdraw co-operation from the project.

None of these things make Mandela more of a bad man than a good one. Neither does the corruption of his successors in the ANC make his legacy toxic. But their absence from the news coverage shames journalists' professionalism.

How could this have happened?

Most of us on who grew up politically in the 70s and 80s worshipped Mandela.  He appeared to stand for something decent and true, yet was unjustly imprisoned for fighting against something hateful and false. For we white liberals, he was a black man who was palpably westernised (a lawyer). His words at the Rivonia trial had the authoritative ring of Shakespeare and the King James Bible (not surprisingly since Mandela was assisted in his speech by the novelist Nadime Gordimer and by Anthony Sampson).

Growing up in a society which was learning to cope with black immigration, we young white people could admire Mandela from afar. He gave us the luxury of demonstrating our own Anti-Racism, whilst not actually having to have anything to do with him personally. Moreover because he was imprisoned, we had no opportunity to find out whether our idol had feet of clay or not.

My generation is now in charge in the media. When someone who was totemic for our far off youth dies, we are going to go for it in a big way. Does anyone remember the fanfares which accompanied Lou Reed's passing a few weeks ago?

The coverage of Mandela's death reveals as clearly as any story in recent years that what appears in the news media, both in quality and quantity, is a reflection of the personal history and opinions of the journalists and editors involved. Most of the time it's easy to forget this, but the coverage of Mandela's death reminds us that it's true, and it's true all of the time.

P.S.  The sight of the bogus sign-language expert gesticulating next to that old fraud Jacob Zuma at Mandela's funeral said a great deal about the quality of the people who have risen to the top in the new South Africa.  In a sentence, I'd say that a wicked regime has been replaced by one which is incompetent and corrupt.

Married with benefits

Is marriage a good thing or not? Sir Paul Coleridge, described by the Torygraph as "a senior High Court Judge", apparently thinks so, for he has waded into the debate with some pithy remarks after his Think Tank, the Marriage Foundation, published a report showing that children of unmarried parents were twice as likely to suffer family break up as those whose parents were married.

I didn't know judges were allowed to have Think Tanks, which just goes to show you learn something new every day, even if it isn't anything terribly interesting.

I'm sympathetically inclined to Mr Justice Coleridge's view, but the trouble with "research" like this is that it fails to take into account that people who get married are self-selecting: that's to say, the kind of people who make such a public commitment are precisely the kind of people who are likely to stick with it when the gloss wears off. Of course their children are less likely to suffer family break up.

Sir Paul is clearly aware of the controversy his remarks might stir up, for he insisted that he was not intending to "preach morality". 

"If your relationship is not stable enough to cope with children", he wrote, "you should not have them".  Well maybe, but the trouble is people's relationships tend to come under most strain after the children have come along.  If the state really wanted to minimise family break up it would discourage couples unlikely to stick together from having children in the first place.

How could it do this? By restricting child-related benefits to married couples. Young men are pretty stupid and irresponsible, but young women aren't. "I'm not having your baby", would be the cry, "until you marry me". Watch the birth rate plummet.

But of course this won't happen.  For one, the piteous plight of single unmarried mothers would soon be winging its way to a TV screen near you. Cathy Come Home Redux. In the face of such emotionalism the right of young men to father a child and then slope off without a backward glance or social censure will always be placed ahead of the desirability that children should have both parents in attendance. When some children suffer conspicuous poverty, a policy which nevertheless beggars many more emotionally will always be preferred.

"You have no right to have children", said Mr Justice Coleridge, "you only have responsibilities if you have them".

Not a widespread view in Britain now.

George Osborne's Autumn statement - squaring the fiscal circle

Amidst the kerfuffle surrounding the Chancellor's Autumn statement, it might be a good moment to take the political temperature.

George Osborne has been attacked by Labour for the last three and half years on the basis that his economic recipe wouldn't work.  It now looks as if they were wrong.  Plan A has got Britain back into growth.  Of course Ed Balls would say that it would have happened quicker if we'd done what Labour wanted, but that would have involved higher borrowing and higher interest rates.  The deficit, which has stalled at about £120 billion, might well have increased, sending out a disastrous signal to the debt markets, from whom we must borrow about £2.5 billion every week.

In middle-age my political sympathies tend to lie with the parties that have had the most credible economic plan, because it's only when you have an economy which works that you can afford the kind of public services most people would like to see.  In all my adult life I can't remember a single Labour policy devoted to balancing the books, and, looking back, I'm amazed to find that I voted for them so many times.

In the months leading up to the 97 election Labour promised to stick to Tory spending plans for a couple of years in order to head off a repeat of the "Labour's tax bombshell" headlines said to have done for John Smith in 92, but since it was explicitly a Tory policy that was being copied, I don't think this counts.  Actually it's adoption led to a brief period - the last such - when Britain ran a surplus.

I think Osborne, like him or loathe him, has followed the least bad course of action open to him - none of them were good - and stuck to his guns despite overwhelming public, political and media hostility.  He deserves his political reward. We don't hear too much about Plan B nowadays. Of course we are having the wrong kind of recovery, whipped up out of QE and the housing market, but it is better than none, and when you consider that the EU, one of our principal export markets, is flat on its back, we should be grateful for what we've got.

But about Osborne's political reward. There isn't much of it. Ed Balls has given up telling the Chancellor he was doing the wrong thing and avoided the temptation to claim that growth would have happened sooner on his watch, seeing more fertile ground in the protest that, for most people, living standards are falling, growth notwithstanding. Labour's lead in the polls is modest but shows no sign of going away.

On several grounds this is an infantile objection. In the first place, an economy only a few months out of recession is not going to be uprooting many trees. In the second, wages have been stagnant at best (adjusted for inflation) for some years, and it didn't just start when the Coalition got into office. Thirdly, there are assumptions in Balls' criticism which are totally unwarranted, namely that we are entitled to eternally rising living standards - we aren't - and that there is some magic button Osborne could press if he chose which could restore them - there isn't.

As I've argued on here before, in the last half century we exported our manufacturing capacity and tried to fill the income gap with borrowing (that's what the bankers were doing before it all went wrong - finding more and more ingenious ways of lending us money).  The only way of returning to widespread employment is by restoring some lost competitiveness.  Lower wages is one way of achieving that.  Labour is so far from understanding this that it recently suggested that companies with "market power" should charge consumers more in order to raise wages for their staff.

Companies like, er, the big six energy companies?  They certainly have plenty of market power.

One of George Osborne's announcements today was of future increases in the pension age. This is one way of lowering the benefit cost of an ageing population. It sounds and is harsh, but bear in mind that at the time the welfare state was set up, life expectancy for working men was about 48.

Another way of making sure the UK will be able to pay its pensioners in future is by a dramatic increase in immigration. But the UK is already one of the most crowded countries in the world (the South East of England would I think be third, behind Hong Kong and Bangladesh), housing is increasingly unaffordable, building land scarce and expensive, and immigration very unpopular with most people.  Moreover immigrants themselves become old in time, and a future plan which proposes more of them to solve our budgetary problems looks increasingly like a demographic Ponzi scheme.

All of this - a senescent population, an overspending government, falling wages and a housing shortage looks to me like one of those situations which can't go on forever and which must therefore stop. Judging by Labour's lead in the opinion polls an awful lot of people don't see it this way.

There seems to me a divide between those who view this particular circle as one that can't be squared, and those who think an incoming Labour government can restore the natural pre-2008 order of things. But an incoming Labour government will, in 2015, face exactly the same problems the Coalition currently faces, and will I think swiftly discover that taxing the rich a bit more won't darn the hole in the fiscal sock.

The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that the post-war welfarist society those of us of a certain age have grown up with cannot go on as it is. Pension age is merely a harbinger. From welfare benefits and care for the elderly to taxation and retirement, things are going to change whether we like it or not. I don't personally think it will be pretty.