I raised a weary eyebrow the other day when Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, berated various BBC bigwigs, including DG Tony Hall, in a Commons select committee hearing for the Corporation's "racist approach" to diversity.
Hall has apparently planned a boost to black, Asian and ethnic minority representation in the Corporation's output, and Davies' objection is that this is itself racist because it ignores the white working class.
Whilst Davies is clearly wrong - if it's class discrimination it can't have anything to do with race - his argument is slightly more nuanced and interesting than it first appears. "I think the true racist sees everything in terms of race or colour", he said. "Surely what we should be aiming to be is colour blind".
I thought something along these lines a couple of years ago when the Spanish golfer Sergio Garcia said that he intended to cook fried chicken for Tiger Woods. The brilliant American tweeted his displeasure about this apparent piece of racial stereotyping, and Garcia, jumped on by the media, apologised for his remarks. Then the head of the European Golf Tour George O'Grady tried - ineptly - to stand up for Garcia, saying he had "most of his friends are coloured American athletes".
Only someone well out of the metropolitan loop could have made such a schoolboy error. O'Grady soon found himself up to the nostrils in the media thick and sloppy.
The word "coloured" is now well out of order. As far as I can remember it was replaced by "black" at least twenty years ago, although now, at least in the US, the favoured expression seems to be "people of colour". I have no idea what the correct parlance is and personally use the "black", because that was the inoffensive term amongst "black" people when I was growing up.
We have become such a rainbow nation however that "black" no longer fits the bill accurately, not when latte is a more common colour on Britain's streets. I can't bring myself to use "people of colour" (it is ploddingly over-elaborate). "African-American" and "Afro-Caribbean" are cumbersome, and "coloured" reminds me rather too much of Apartheid South Africa. "Black" people have the right to call themselves whatever they choose, but it is of course patronising in itself to imagine that "black" people are a single homogenous group; the reality is that individuals will have different ideas about how they'd like to be addressed. It can be bafflingly difficult for the average white person to avoid giving offence. Sergio Garcia may be a prick, but he probably isn't a racist prick, and as for Mr O'Grady the words "well-intentioned" and "hapless" spring to mind.
All of which brings us back to Philip Davies MP. And yes, "what we should be aiming to be is colour blind". Absolutely. Britain is not a colour blind country, but it has made such massive strides in that direction that I sometimes wonder whether hyper-sensitivity about race is counter-productive. If we're trying to get to a situation where race doesn't matter, why do people so often make such a fuss about it on such modest pretexts? Of course there are various withering put-downs possible to that question, but are we not at least approaching the point where saying "Oh well, never mind" every now and again might at least be an option worth considering?
If Tiger Woods had simply shrugged and said, "Sergio can cook me fried chicken whenever he likes", he would have emerged from the furore with his reputation (and by association that of his fellow - cringe - people of colour) very much enhanced.
Thursday 17 July 2014
Wednesday 16 July 2014
Sir Harrison Birwistle at 80
Harrison Birtwistle is 80 round about now, and an article appears on the Guardian's leader page praising the old controversialist. Sir Harrison is a "profoundly British composer" it seems, perhaps even "a natural successor to composers such as Elgar, Holst and Delius . . .as powerfully distinctive as that of any composer alive today".
It won't surprise my friends and enemies to learn that I am not a Birtwistle fan. I tried listening to Earth Dances again this morning, and, after the marvellously effective opening low brass and percussion notes had begun to blend and criss-cross each-other I found myself thinking, "this is actually quite boring". It took about a minute and a half. I felt as if I were being beaten over the head with a rubber truncheon. For me, Birtwistle has never learned that it is not what you say - everyone has something interesting to say, and most of us can come up with the profound from time to time - it is how you say it. Art is a mediation of experience, and we won't persist with it if it doesn't mediate in a way which generates pleasure.
But this is of course just a personal view, even if it's one which is widely shared in Britain. The Guardian's comparison with Holst, Elgar, Butterworth, RVW is instructive. I have been a musician for about fifty years, soberingly, and in truth I have never once heard anyone say, "Did you hear that piece of Birtwistle's on the radio last week?" or "I'm playing some Birtwistle at the moment", or "I really like that piece of Birtwistle's". And of course I couldn't whistle anything of his, nor have I ever met anyone who could. Neither have I ever met anyone in all this time in and around the profession who was interested in Birtwistle's music.
What's really striking about Birtwistle is that, notwithstanding that the Guardian's leader writer (probably Andrew Clements) thinks he is of a similar stature to Elgar et al, he is almost totally absent from British musical life. He is our most celebrated composer, but almost no-one involved in the business (whether as a listener, and amateur or a professional player) pays any attention to what he does. And this despite the many hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money that, over the years, has been pushed in his direction (much of it via the Royal Opera House, the biggest recipient of Arts Council money in the UK).
In the year after Elgar's First Symphony was premiered it received over one hundred performances in Britain. That's because people like Elgar's music and were willing to pay to hear it. Other of his pieces have entered the national consciousness, so that even now most British people will recognise Nimrod or the Pomp and Circumstance marches; and those with an interest in classical music will have listened hundreds of times to or performed the symphonies, the Cello Concerto, Gerontius, the Serenade for Strings and the Introduction and Allegro (I could of course go on).
The same is not quite true of Holst and Delius, but it's much truer of them than it is of Birtwistle. The Planets is a work which every musician, like it or not, recognises as a ubiquitous part of the cultural fabric of British life. The same goes for the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending with RVW.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, Birtwistle has ever written has come remotely close to entering the consciousness of the British people. His music hasn't even entered the consciousness of those charged professionally with the task of delivering it to the public. I had dinner with a professional orchestral player last night. Had she ever played any Birtwhistle? She thought she must have; after all, she'd been in the business for twenty years. But if so she couldn't remember anything about it.
(Incidentally, it's quite funny to finding the Guardian defining something as British, since the general drift of its comment on recent utterances by David Cameron is loftily sceptical. "So Mr Rusbridger, what did the Guardian mean when it said Birtwistle was a very British composer . . . " As someone commented on its website, the newspaper is in danger of falling through its own thin ice.)
How then have we got to the stage where, despite this strange absence from British musical life, Birtwistle can merit a leader in the Guardian on his 80th birthday?
The short answer is that the Graun is not short of the kind of people who admire people like Birtwistle; but there's more to it than that.
Birtwistle was very fortunate when, in 1959, William Glock was made controller of Radio 3 and decided that the cow-pat school of British music was outdated. What the public really needed, Glock thought, was a good dose of European total serialism. This rejection of the politer art of the old school tied in rather well with the working class revivalism which followed Look Back in Anger (1956), and it must have helped that Birtwistle was a Northener from Accrington.
At any rate Birtwistle was taken up by Glock, as was Peter Maxwell Davies, and their two careers flourished accordingly. Birtwistle in particular became a poster boy for the kind of "challenging" and "edgy" art whose advocates felt divided them from the safe and suburban Mr and Mrs Concert Goer, arriving in a coach party from Frodsham. "But it hasn't got a tune", these tedious provincials wailed, bolstering the hipsters' sense (already pretty strong) that they themselves were breathing an altogether more rareified atmosphere.
So Birtwistle over the years came to be not just a purveyor of music that almost no-one wanted to listen to, but a symbol (for both sides of the argument) of the idea that avant gardism was not so much paving the way for the masses to follow as constituting an end in itself, a kind of super-art that only a certain tiny percentage of society was intelligent enough to "get".
Of course the fact that the masses were paying for their pleasure did not trouble the elite (nor, apparently, Sir Harrison).
So actually Birtwistle is really a British composer only in the sense that the British have paid for him to become what he is. He might be more accurately described as a European composer, firstly because his music owes much more to the European influences which took root on the continent and which, pre-Glock, British composers regarded with some suspicion, and secondly because the idea that a self-appointed elite should sit at the apex of a system, political or cultural, is one which has more parallels in recent European history than in Britain, with its long democratic traditions.
Ironically then, Birtwistle's eminence speaks much more eloquently about British cultural life in the second half of the twentieth century than his music ever has to British people. In this sense, and only this, is Birtwistle "a profoundly British composer". His fame tells us something important about British society.
This is not an argument against public subsidy in art. Still less is it an argument that what the masses like must by definition be good. It involves instead a recognition that between Birtwistle at one end of the continuum and Karl Jenkins at the other there exists a great body of composers whose music the public might have liked if it had had a chance to hear it. It says that while it may be legitimate to use public money to pay for something for a bit to see if it catches on, there comes a point when the public's distaste becomes clear.
That point was reached with Birtwistle many decades ago. But, as so often, the people who dish our money out knew better.
It won't surprise my friends and enemies to learn that I am not a Birtwistle fan. I tried listening to Earth Dances again this morning, and, after the marvellously effective opening low brass and percussion notes had begun to blend and criss-cross each-other I found myself thinking, "this is actually quite boring". It took about a minute and a half. I felt as if I were being beaten over the head with a rubber truncheon. For me, Birtwistle has never learned that it is not what you say - everyone has something interesting to say, and most of us can come up with the profound from time to time - it is how you say it. Art is a mediation of experience, and we won't persist with it if it doesn't mediate in a way which generates pleasure.
But this is of course just a personal view, even if it's one which is widely shared in Britain. The Guardian's comparison with Holst, Elgar, Butterworth, RVW is instructive. I have been a musician for about fifty years, soberingly, and in truth I have never once heard anyone say, "Did you hear that piece of Birtwistle's on the radio last week?" or "I'm playing some Birtwistle at the moment", or "I really like that piece of Birtwistle's". And of course I couldn't whistle anything of his, nor have I ever met anyone who could. Neither have I ever met anyone in all this time in and around the profession who was interested in Birtwistle's music.
What's really striking about Birtwistle is that, notwithstanding that the Guardian's leader writer (probably Andrew Clements) thinks he is of a similar stature to Elgar et al, he is almost totally absent from British musical life. He is our most celebrated composer, but almost no-one involved in the business (whether as a listener, and amateur or a professional player) pays any attention to what he does. And this despite the many hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money that, over the years, has been pushed in his direction (much of it via the Royal Opera House, the biggest recipient of Arts Council money in the UK).
In the year after Elgar's First Symphony was premiered it received over one hundred performances in Britain. That's because people like Elgar's music and were willing to pay to hear it. Other of his pieces have entered the national consciousness, so that even now most British people will recognise Nimrod or the Pomp and Circumstance marches; and those with an interest in classical music will have listened hundreds of times to or performed the symphonies, the Cello Concerto, Gerontius, the Serenade for Strings and the Introduction and Allegro (I could of course go on).
The same is not quite true of Holst and Delius, but it's much truer of them than it is of Birtwistle. The Planets is a work which every musician, like it or not, recognises as a ubiquitous part of the cultural fabric of British life. The same goes for the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending with RVW.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, Birtwistle has ever written has come remotely close to entering the consciousness of the British people. His music hasn't even entered the consciousness of those charged professionally with the task of delivering it to the public. I had dinner with a professional orchestral player last night. Had she ever played any Birtwhistle? She thought she must have; after all, she'd been in the business for twenty years. But if so she couldn't remember anything about it.
(Incidentally, it's quite funny to finding the Guardian defining something as British, since the general drift of its comment on recent utterances by David Cameron is loftily sceptical. "So Mr Rusbridger, what did the Guardian mean when it said Birtwistle was a very British composer . . . " As someone commented on its website, the newspaper is in danger of falling through its own thin ice.)
How then have we got to the stage where, despite this strange absence from British musical life, Birtwistle can merit a leader in the Guardian on his 80th birthday?
The short answer is that the Graun is not short of the kind of people who admire people like Birtwistle; but there's more to it than that.
Birtwistle was very fortunate when, in 1959, William Glock was made controller of Radio 3 and decided that the cow-pat school of British music was outdated. What the public really needed, Glock thought, was a good dose of European total serialism. This rejection of the politer art of the old school tied in rather well with the working class revivalism which followed Look Back in Anger (1956), and it must have helped that Birtwistle was a Northener from Accrington.
At any rate Birtwistle was taken up by Glock, as was Peter Maxwell Davies, and their two careers flourished accordingly. Birtwistle in particular became a poster boy for the kind of "challenging" and "edgy" art whose advocates felt divided them from the safe and suburban Mr and Mrs Concert Goer, arriving in a coach party from Frodsham. "But it hasn't got a tune", these tedious provincials wailed, bolstering the hipsters' sense (already pretty strong) that they themselves were breathing an altogether more rareified atmosphere.
So Birtwistle over the years came to be not just a purveyor of music that almost no-one wanted to listen to, but a symbol (for both sides of the argument) of the idea that avant gardism was not so much paving the way for the masses to follow as constituting an end in itself, a kind of super-art that only a certain tiny percentage of society was intelligent enough to "get".
Of course the fact that the masses were paying for their pleasure did not trouble the elite (nor, apparently, Sir Harrison).
So actually Birtwistle is really a British composer only in the sense that the British have paid for him to become what he is. He might be more accurately described as a European composer, firstly because his music owes much more to the European influences which took root on the continent and which, pre-Glock, British composers regarded with some suspicion, and secondly because the idea that a self-appointed elite should sit at the apex of a system, political or cultural, is one which has more parallels in recent European history than in Britain, with its long democratic traditions.
Ironically then, Birtwistle's eminence speaks much more eloquently about British cultural life in the second half of the twentieth century than his music ever has to British people. In this sense, and only this, is Birtwistle "a profoundly British composer". His fame tells us something important about British society.
This is not an argument against public subsidy in art. Still less is it an argument that what the masses like must by definition be good. It involves instead a recognition that between Birtwistle at one end of the continuum and Karl Jenkins at the other there exists a great body of composers whose music the public might have liked if it had had a chance to hear it. It says that while it may be legitimate to use public money to pay for something for a bit to see if it catches on, there comes a point when the public's distaste becomes clear.
That point was reached with Birtwistle many decades ago. But, as so often, the people who dish our money out knew better.
Monday 7 July 2014
The Ring of the Nibelung - could have done better?
I have had opera up to the eyeballs. Last week I went with my wife to Glyndebourne to see Rosenkavalier, and on Saturday sat through Opera North's concert performance of Gotterdammerung in Salford.
Salford / Glyndebourne. You choose.
At last I can say I have seen The Ring. The Twilight of the Gods was the last instalment of the Opera North's four-year cycle, and OK it was only semi-staged, but rarely did we think any of it could have been improved by full production.
Is The Ring any good? That's a very large question. In 1990 Radio 3 broadcast it in a sequence of one act per night, and I listened to it religiously in a remote cottage on the island of Lewis in between bouts of reading Anna Karenina and writing a very bad orchestral piece. At the time I wrote in my diary, "A stupid story, but what wonderful music". Nearly twenty five years later I can't disagree much with that.
It was reassuring to find that enthusiastic Wagnerians like George Bernard Shaw felt Gotterdammerung was the weakest of the four operas. So did we. Oddly, Wagner wrote its libretto first, and The Ring was conceived when Wagner realised that he would have to include a lot of back story for Gotterdammerung to make sense.
If the narration was cut down, it didn't show. The opening scene with the Norns felt like padding, and, even though I love Wagner, Act I, at 2 hours 15 minutes, was interminable. Shaw thought that Gotterdammerung was a reversion to the Grand Opera Wagner had been trying to avoid in the first three parts of The Ring, and whilst this may be true he nevertheless dealt with the grand passions of the characters in a majestic fashion. Brunnhilde's refusal to part with the ring even as Siegfried is unwittingly betraying her was magnificently written.
Nonetheless I felt the overarching dramatic scheme of The Ring would have been improved by a professional dramaturg like Hugo von Hoffmansthal. Hoffmansthal's work with Strauss in Rosenkavalier (and elsewhere) has a roundedness that Wagner's libretto lacks (and probably wouldn't have aspired to). The operas would have been better, shorter and more dramatically effective. Hoffmansthal might have done more with a character like Gutrune, the woman whom Siegfriend, under the influence of a magic potion (stupid story, remember), has betrayed Brunnhilde. Gutrune is thrust in front of us after the prologue and, embroiled in the plot immediately without any opportunity to establish herself as a character, remains an unengaging cipher.
However the character most conspicuously missing from Gotterdammerung is Wotan. He has banished Brunnhilde to the high rock, but Siegfried has rescued her, redeemed her even, with human courage and love. I would have given a good deal to see Wotan walk back on stage at the end. What music Wagner could have summoned up for a confrontation with Brunnhilde! But Wotan should also surely have been present for the fall of Valhalla - in his absence the collapse of the Gods is like Hamlet without the prince. It would have been good to know a little more of why the return of the ring to the Rhinemaidens necessarily meant the end of the old world and beginning of the new. After all, the Rhinemaidens had the ring at the beginning of Rhinegold, and that seemed to work for the Gods. And why should we think that the new world would be any better? Wagner doesn't tell us.
It may seem picky to find fault with The Ring's plotting and pacing, but that is the sort of exacting engagement Wagner would have expected and wanted. It's impossible to imagine his being satisfied with an audience which walked out thinking "Well that was nice", and then went home for tea and toast. We left talking about what we'd seen, and were still talking about it an hour later.
Of course, the heavenly length of The Ring, its unwieldy structure and dramatic raggedness, are part of its peculiar charm. The fact that it could have so easily been better still merely adds to the compelling nature of Wagner's creation.
I haven't mentioned the music. The best bits are amongst the best bits of 19th century Romanticism, and therefore amongst the best in any genre anywhere. In some of it Wagner seems to be treading water slightly, but in an idiom which you have to credit him for inventing, exploiting and finally growing out of. It is an amazing achievement.
On Saturday the Opera North orchestra played mostly well in a desperately unflattering acoustic, and Richard Farnes, who has lovely hands, conducted unflappably. I could have perhaps done with a bit more flapping. It won't be to everyone's taste, but here is George Solti conducting the Vienna Phil with Birgid Nilsson in the Immolation Scene. This gives a sense of the possibility of a no-holds-barred style of Wagner conducting which sometimes The Ring cries out for.
Salford / Glyndebourne. You choose.
At last I can say I have seen The Ring. The Twilight of the Gods was the last instalment of the Opera North's four-year cycle, and OK it was only semi-staged, but rarely did we think any of it could have been improved by full production.
Is The Ring any good? That's a very large question. In 1990 Radio 3 broadcast it in a sequence of one act per night, and I listened to it religiously in a remote cottage on the island of Lewis in between bouts of reading Anna Karenina and writing a very bad orchestral piece. At the time I wrote in my diary, "A stupid story, but what wonderful music". Nearly twenty five years later I can't disagree much with that.
It was reassuring to find that enthusiastic Wagnerians like George Bernard Shaw felt Gotterdammerung was the weakest of the four operas. So did we. Oddly, Wagner wrote its libretto first, and The Ring was conceived when Wagner realised that he would have to include a lot of back story for Gotterdammerung to make sense.
If the narration was cut down, it didn't show. The opening scene with the Norns felt like padding, and, even though I love Wagner, Act I, at 2 hours 15 minutes, was interminable. Shaw thought that Gotterdammerung was a reversion to the Grand Opera Wagner had been trying to avoid in the first three parts of The Ring, and whilst this may be true he nevertheless dealt with the grand passions of the characters in a majestic fashion. Brunnhilde's refusal to part with the ring even as Siegfried is unwittingly betraying her was magnificently written.
Nonetheless I felt the overarching dramatic scheme of The Ring would have been improved by a professional dramaturg like Hugo von Hoffmansthal. Hoffmansthal's work with Strauss in Rosenkavalier (and elsewhere) has a roundedness that Wagner's libretto lacks (and probably wouldn't have aspired to). The operas would have been better, shorter and more dramatically effective. Hoffmansthal might have done more with a character like Gutrune, the woman whom Siegfriend, under the influence of a magic potion (stupid story, remember), has betrayed Brunnhilde. Gutrune is thrust in front of us after the prologue and, embroiled in the plot immediately without any opportunity to establish herself as a character, remains an unengaging cipher.
However the character most conspicuously missing from Gotterdammerung is Wotan. He has banished Brunnhilde to the high rock, but Siegfried has rescued her, redeemed her even, with human courage and love. I would have given a good deal to see Wotan walk back on stage at the end. What music Wagner could have summoned up for a confrontation with Brunnhilde! But Wotan should also surely have been present for the fall of Valhalla - in his absence the collapse of the Gods is like Hamlet without the prince. It would have been good to know a little more of why the return of the ring to the Rhinemaidens necessarily meant the end of the old world and beginning of the new. After all, the Rhinemaidens had the ring at the beginning of Rhinegold, and that seemed to work for the Gods. And why should we think that the new world would be any better? Wagner doesn't tell us.
It may seem picky to find fault with The Ring's plotting and pacing, but that is the sort of exacting engagement Wagner would have expected and wanted. It's impossible to imagine his being satisfied with an audience which walked out thinking "Well that was nice", and then went home for tea and toast. We left talking about what we'd seen, and were still talking about it an hour later.
Of course, the heavenly length of The Ring, its unwieldy structure and dramatic raggedness, are part of its peculiar charm. The fact that it could have so easily been better still merely adds to the compelling nature of Wagner's creation.
I haven't mentioned the music. The best bits are amongst the best bits of 19th century Romanticism, and therefore amongst the best in any genre anywhere. In some of it Wagner seems to be treading water slightly, but in an idiom which you have to credit him for inventing, exploiting and finally growing out of. It is an amazing achievement.
On Saturday the Opera North orchestra played mostly well in a desperately unflattering acoustic, and Richard Farnes, who has lovely hands, conducted unflappably. I could have perhaps done with a bit more flapping. It won't be to everyone's taste, but here is George Solti conducting the Vienna Phil with Birgid Nilsson in the Immolation Scene. This gives a sense of the possibility of a no-holds-barred style of Wagner conducting which sometimes The Ring cries out for.
Tuesday 1 July 2014
Luis Suarez - biting by accident?
Leaving aside the football itself - and what a gripping struggle last night's Germany -v- Algeria game was - the World Cup continues to provide peerless entertainment off the field.
Trying to explain how an Italian defender ended up with teeth marks in his shoulder, Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez claimed, "After the impact . . . I lost my balance, making my body unstable and falling on top of my opponent . . . At that moment I hit my face against the player leaving a small bruise on my cheek and a strong pain in my teeth".
This reminds me rather of the captain of the cruise liner Costa Concordia who, it will be recalled, left his sinking ship by accident when he tripped and fell into the lifeboat.
So far, so implausible. But fervent were the denials from Uruguayan people and press. It was an Italian plot. It was an English plot. It was a European plot. Suarez was innocent.
Except that it now turns out that he wasn't. Writing on Twitter, Suarez said. "I have had the opportunity to regain my calm and reflect on the reality of what occurred . . . the truth is my colleague Giorgio Chiellini suffered the physical result of a bite in the collision he suffered with me. For this I deeply regret what occurred, apologise to Giorgio Chiellini and the entire football family and I vow to the public there will never be another incident like it".
So Suarez did bite Chiellini. Certainly this is what the press is now reporting, although - once a lawyer, always a lawyer - read closely the statement looks more like an acknowledgment of the bite together with the claim that it was an accident. Chiellini did "suffer the physical result of a bite", even if Suarez didn't mean to do it.
Still, everyone seems to think it is an admission, so perhaps that's what it is.
Suarez is still appealing the four-month ban FIFA handed out. If FIFA think his original denial was a lie, might they not be tempted to increase the ban rather than reduce it?
In Brazil the entertainment goes on and on.
Trying to explain how an Italian defender ended up with teeth marks in his shoulder, Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez claimed, "After the impact . . . I lost my balance, making my body unstable and falling on top of my opponent . . . At that moment I hit my face against the player leaving a small bruise on my cheek and a strong pain in my teeth".
This reminds me rather of the captain of the cruise liner Costa Concordia who, it will be recalled, left his sinking ship by accident when he tripped and fell into the lifeboat.
So far, so implausible. But fervent were the denials from Uruguayan people and press. It was an Italian plot. It was an English plot. It was a European plot. Suarez was innocent.
Except that it now turns out that he wasn't. Writing on Twitter, Suarez said. "I have had the opportunity to regain my calm and reflect on the reality of what occurred . . . the truth is my colleague Giorgio Chiellini suffered the physical result of a bite in the collision he suffered with me. For this I deeply regret what occurred, apologise to Giorgio Chiellini and the entire football family and I vow to the public there will never be another incident like it".
So Suarez did bite Chiellini. Certainly this is what the press is now reporting, although - once a lawyer, always a lawyer - read closely the statement looks more like an acknowledgment of the bite together with the claim that it was an accident. Chiellini did "suffer the physical result of a bite", even if Suarez didn't mean to do it.
Still, everyone seems to think it is an admission, so perhaps that's what it is.
Suarez is still appealing the four-month ban FIFA handed out. If FIFA think his original denial was a lie, might they not be tempted to increase the ban rather than reduce it?
In Brazil the entertainment goes on and on.
Rolf Harris and the effect of Operation Yewtree
Is Operation Yewtree a witch-hunt? That is apparently what Terry Gilliam and Chris Tarrant think. Gilliam described it as "like something you'd expect to find in the former Soviet Union", and Tarrant said he "found what was happening terrifying".
There isn't any suggestion that Tarrant himself has anything to fear from the investigation.
Operation Yewtree's record is mixed. Freddie Starr, Jim Davidson and Jimmy Tarbuck were all arrested (Starr four times) before being told they would face no further action. Dave Lee Travis was tried on multiple counts and acquitted on most of them, the jury being unable to reach a decision on the others. Michael Le Vell and William Roache were acquitted. On the other hand both Max Clifford and Rolf Harris have been convicted and others are pending.
Is this, as an article in the Guardian suggests today, a "vindication" of Operation Yewtree? Well, yes and no. But mostly no.
Firstly, Yewtree is sometimes guilty of applying today's thou-shalt-not-touch standards to the very different social mores that applied in the 60s and 70s. Rape then would be rape now, but some of the other behaviour would have been regarded as boorish rather than criminal. One of Rolf Harris's victims complained that he had "groped her bottom". I'm afraid that's just what people did. Perhaps they shouldn't have, but as one of the people who complained about Dave Lee Travis said in court, at the time she did not regard his touching her as a sexual assault. That says everything you need to know about changing standards.
Secondly, although you'd expect prosecutions to have a failure rate, Yewtree's is rather high. It has left wreckage behind. And even leaving aside the trauma of an early morning arrest, the shame of the investigation and the crippling legal fees, once you are arrested for a sexual offence you never get your reputation back. People will always wonder, "Did he really do it after all?"
Thirdly, a long trial costs the state an awful lot of money. Does such a high failure rate justify the cost?
Fourthly, for the last 18 plus months rather a lot of Metropolitan Police officers have been tied up trying to find out what ageing celebrities did the last century. To say that these officers can't be in two places at once is not to minimise the misery and suffering of people who have lived with the memory of serious sexual assault for a long time. It's merely to acknowledge that other people are suffering now and serious criminals are walking free because Met Police officers are working on Operation Yewtree instead.
(Of course the police must love it, because they get to meet TV personalities and their cases are all over the papers. Much more glamorous than bringing your run-of-the-mill scrote up before the beak.)
As it happens I know a number of lawyers who've been involved in Yewtree cases, some on the prosecution side, some on the defence. There is a clear consensus. Other important police work - particularly in relation to gangs - is being neglected. The CPS are incompetent and badly prepared. Some of the prosecutions look desperately thin (one complainant said she had been in a car with the accused and thought something must have happened, but she couldn't remember what it was). And lastly, Operation Yewtree is happening because senior officals, under pressure from the commentariat, wanted to be seen to be doing something about sex crime.
So Operation Yewtree marches on. But potting the elderly Rolf Harris is a poor sort of vindication.
There isn't any suggestion that Tarrant himself has anything to fear from the investigation.
Operation Yewtree's record is mixed. Freddie Starr, Jim Davidson and Jimmy Tarbuck were all arrested (Starr four times) before being told they would face no further action. Dave Lee Travis was tried on multiple counts and acquitted on most of them, the jury being unable to reach a decision on the others. Michael Le Vell and William Roache were acquitted. On the other hand both Max Clifford and Rolf Harris have been convicted and others are pending.
Is this, as an article in the Guardian suggests today, a "vindication" of Operation Yewtree? Well, yes and no. But mostly no.
Firstly, Yewtree is sometimes guilty of applying today's thou-shalt-not-touch standards to the very different social mores that applied in the 60s and 70s. Rape then would be rape now, but some of the other behaviour would have been regarded as boorish rather than criminal. One of Rolf Harris's victims complained that he had "groped her bottom". I'm afraid that's just what people did. Perhaps they shouldn't have, but as one of the people who complained about Dave Lee Travis said in court, at the time she did not regard his touching her as a sexual assault. That says everything you need to know about changing standards.
Secondly, although you'd expect prosecutions to have a failure rate, Yewtree's is rather high. It has left wreckage behind. And even leaving aside the trauma of an early morning arrest, the shame of the investigation and the crippling legal fees, once you are arrested for a sexual offence you never get your reputation back. People will always wonder, "Did he really do it after all?"
Thirdly, a long trial costs the state an awful lot of money. Does such a high failure rate justify the cost?
Fourthly, for the last 18 plus months rather a lot of Metropolitan Police officers have been tied up trying to find out what ageing celebrities did the last century. To say that these officers can't be in two places at once is not to minimise the misery and suffering of people who have lived with the memory of serious sexual assault for a long time. It's merely to acknowledge that other people are suffering now and serious criminals are walking free because Met Police officers are working on Operation Yewtree instead.
(Of course the police must love it, because they get to meet TV personalities and their cases are all over the papers. Much more glamorous than bringing your run-of-the-mill scrote up before the beak.)
As it happens I know a number of lawyers who've been involved in Yewtree cases, some on the prosecution side, some on the defence. There is a clear consensus. Other important police work - particularly in relation to gangs - is being neglected. The CPS are incompetent and badly prepared. Some of the prosecutions look desperately thin (one complainant said she had been in a car with the accused and thought something must have happened, but she couldn't remember what it was). And lastly, Operation Yewtree is happening because senior officals, under pressure from the commentariat, wanted to be seen to be doing something about sex crime.
So Operation Yewtree marches on. But potting the elderly Rolf Harris is a poor sort of vindication.
Thursday 26 June 2014
Land and freedom
Sometimes reports appear in the press which, ostensibly unrelated, set off the car alarm in one's mind.
The first, which you can see here, suggests that Britain's population has been growing twice as fast as the rest of Europe for the last decade, gaining as many people as in the entire previous generation.
The Torygraph report today says that immigration accounts for "at least 60 per cent of the growth in the last decade . . . That does not include the knock-on effect of immigration on birth rates, with around a quarter of new babies in the UK being born to foreign mothers". In the year to mid 2013 the UK's population grew by about 400,000, adding "the equivalent of the population of Bristol in a single year".
The figures are from the Office for National Statistics, by the way.
Yesterday several papers ran a story about a report on the UK's food supply produced by the University of Cambridge. The BBC's version is here. Britain is apparently running out of land for food, and "faces a potential shortfall of two million hectares by 2030". The UK's population is expected to exceed 70 million by 2030, but already we run a food, feed and drink trade deficit of £18.6bn.
So there we are. Not enough land. Too many people.
Since this is a drum I've been banging for some time, I should be feeling quite smug. And I would, if I didn't have three children myself.
The first, which you can see here, suggests that Britain's population has been growing twice as fast as the rest of Europe for the last decade, gaining as many people as in the entire previous generation.
The Torygraph report today says that immigration accounts for "at least 60 per cent of the growth in the last decade . . . That does not include the knock-on effect of immigration on birth rates, with around a quarter of new babies in the UK being born to foreign mothers". In the year to mid 2013 the UK's population grew by about 400,000, adding "the equivalent of the population of Bristol in a single year".
The figures are from the Office for National Statistics, by the way.
Yesterday several papers ran a story about a report on the UK's food supply produced by the University of Cambridge. The BBC's version is here. Britain is apparently running out of land for food, and "faces a potential shortfall of two million hectares by 2030". The UK's population is expected to exceed 70 million by 2030, but already we run a food, feed and drink trade deficit of £18.6bn.
So there we are. Not enough land. Too many people.
Since this is a drum I've been banging for some time, I should be feeling quite smug. And I would, if I didn't have three children myself.
Wednesday 25 June 2014
Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and the press
The professional Yorkshireman Godfrey Bloom, it will be remembered, lost the UKIP party whip because he was recorded telling some party workers at a meeting that they were "sluts".
I am not an admirer of UKIP (an electoral phenomenon rather than a serious political party) or of Bloom (a man who makes the robustly outspoken Sir Geoffrey Boycott look mealy-mouthed), but I couldn't help but feel the MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber was hard done by.
Mr Bloom was, according to the Torygraph, "challenged at a women's fringe event by Jane Collins, a former by-election candidate, who told him: "I have never cleaned behind my fridge". Bloom is reported to have replied, "This place is full of sluts", to general laughter.
Yet at this remark the media descended on Bloom like a pack of wolves and the whip was duly withdrawn by Nigel Farage. Actually, as Bloom tried to make clear, the word "slut" has two meanings - a promiscuous woman, or on the other hand a woman who is untidy and slovenly. It was clear from the context - the fridge, remember - that Bloom was using the word in the latter sense. And yet the press reported the story as if Bloom had uttered some dreadful insult.
I was reminded of this with reporting of the verdicts in the Rebekah Brooks / Andy Coulson trial yesterday. As I wrote at the time she was arrested, I was glad Ms Brooks had to face the law over her newspaper's phone hacking. She had overall responsibility for what happened on the paper, and there was a serious possibility that she had known about the hacking. Moreover for too long those close to the Murdoch empire had been looking over the Government's shoulder, and seemed to imagine that being wealthy and powerful they were above the law. Instilling the notion that they aren't is well worth the expense of the trial. Even, in Brooks' case, an unsuccessful one.
This morning the Guardian ran the story on the front page under the headline "Coulson: the criminal who had Cameron's confidence". David Cameron, it will be remembered, employed Coulson as press adviser for rather under a year from May 2010. By this point Coulson hadn't been News of the World editor for three years, and anyway had always denied any personal involvement in the phone hacking saga. It must have seemed a reasonable call by Cameron at the time, but it now appears that Coulson was a liar.
Nevertheless, the Guardian's opening paragraph seems guilty of hyperbole. It reads, "Seven years of deceit by David Cameron's former director of communications were undone in the Old Bailey yesterday".
The paragraph would more accurately have read, "Seven years of deceit by Andy Coulson about his conduct before becoming David Cameron's director of communications . . ."; but when did a journalist ever make their reputation by underplaying a story?
And of course, it's not just the Graun. All the papers are at it. Even Nick Robinson at the BBC, a well-known Tory sympathiser, weighs in with his "apology . . . will not be enough to silence the questions David Cameron now faces".
What utter bollocks. The phone-hacking story is important, because it shows how a powerful media organisation abused its position (and suborned the police). But that is the real story. The David Cameron angle is just noise.
In the Godfrey Bloom affair, I couldn't understand why no journalist had the balls to write, "In shock news yesterday the nation's entire news media deliberately misunderstood the meaning of the word 'slut' in order to end a politician's career and have something to write about".
So here. Journalists pretend that something Andy Coulson did years before David Cameron employed him is a political problem for the Prime Minister. It isn't. It's a media problem. That's why Cameron has apologised.
Cameron has calculated that less damage would be sustained by saying sorry for the minor infraction of employing somebody who turned out to be a criminal, than would be the case if he pointed out that the criminality occurred some time before Coulson came to work for him.
It must be galling for him, but Cameron knows the press are shits and that he has to play the game.
So, curiously, a story which started with the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies, ends (or perhaps that should be continues) with, er, the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies. Who would have thought?
I am not an admirer of UKIP (an electoral phenomenon rather than a serious political party) or of Bloom (a man who makes the robustly outspoken Sir Geoffrey Boycott look mealy-mouthed), but I couldn't help but feel the MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber was hard done by.
Mr Bloom was, according to the Torygraph, "challenged at a women's fringe event by Jane Collins, a former by-election candidate, who told him: "I have never cleaned behind my fridge". Bloom is reported to have replied, "This place is full of sluts", to general laughter.
Yet at this remark the media descended on Bloom like a pack of wolves and the whip was duly withdrawn by Nigel Farage. Actually, as Bloom tried to make clear, the word "slut" has two meanings - a promiscuous woman, or on the other hand a woman who is untidy and slovenly. It was clear from the context - the fridge, remember - that Bloom was using the word in the latter sense. And yet the press reported the story as if Bloom had uttered some dreadful insult.
I was reminded of this with reporting of the verdicts in the Rebekah Brooks / Andy Coulson trial yesterday. As I wrote at the time she was arrested, I was glad Ms Brooks had to face the law over her newspaper's phone hacking. She had overall responsibility for what happened on the paper, and there was a serious possibility that she had known about the hacking. Moreover for too long those close to the Murdoch empire had been looking over the Government's shoulder, and seemed to imagine that being wealthy and powerful they were above the law. Instilling the notion that they aren't is well worth the expense of the trial. Even, in Brooks' case, an unsuccessful one.
This morning the Guardian ran the story on the front page under the headline "Coulson: the criminal who had Cameron's confidence". David Cameron, it will be remembered, employed Coulson as press adviser for rather under a year from May 2010. By this point Coulson hadn't been News of the World editor for three years, and anyway had always denied any personal involvement in the phone hacking saga. It must have seemed a reasonable call by Cameron at the time, but it now appears that Coulson was a liar.
Nevertheless, the Guardian's opening paragraph seems guilty of hyperbole. It reads, "Seven years of deceit by David Cameron's former director of communications were undone in the Old Bailey yesterday".
The paragraph would more accurately have read, "Seven years of deceit by Andy Coulson about his conduct before becoming David Cameron's director of communications . . ."; but when did a journalist ever make their reputation by underplaying a story?
And of course, it's not just the Graun. All the papers are at it. Even Nick Robinson at the BBC, a well-known Tory sympathiser, weighs in with his "apology . . . will not be enough to silence the questions David Cameron now faces".
What utter bollocks. The phone-hacking story is important, because it shows how a powerful media organisation abused its position (and suborned the police). But that is the real story. The David Cameron angle is just noise.
In the Godfrey Bloom affair, I couldn't understand why no journalist had the balls to write, "In shock news yesterday the nation's entire news media deliberately misunderstood the meaning of the word 'slut' in order to end a politician's career and have something to write about".
So here. Journalists pretend that something Andy Coulson did years before David Cameron employed him is a political problem for the Prime Minister. It isn't. It's a media problem. That's why Cameron has apologised.
Cameron has calculated that less damage would be sustained by saying sorry for the minor infraction of employing somebody who turned out to be a criminal, than would be the case if he pointed out that the criminality occurred some time before Coulson came to work for him.
It must be galling for him, but Cameron knows the press are shits and that he has to play the game.
So, curiously, a story which started with the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies, ends (or perhaps that should be continues) with, er, the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies. Who would have thought?
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