Nadiya Hussain's husband, GBBO and multiculturalism

"Nadiya has done more to further the cause of Asian women - and men - than countless government policies, think-tanks, initiatives and councils put together have achieved in the past half-century".

So writes Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Daily Mail about Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain.

Two themes have emerged from the inevitable post Bake Off mediastorm.

One, Nadiya "only won because she was a Muslim".  This attracts the inevitable riposte "Nadiya won because she was the best baker".  Neither is true.  To deal with the riposte first, having watched half the shows, it seemed to me that Nadiya probably wasn't the best baker overall. That was probably the weedy but industrious and imaginative Ian, repeatedly Star Baker earlier in the series. But GBBO is a knock-out competition and Ian floundered at the last.

I'm absolutely sure the programme-makers will have been delighted with Nadiya's win, but it didn't look fixed to me. Where the carpers might have a point though is in Nadiya's selection to the final twelve.

The overwhelming majority of capable amateur bakers in Britain will be middle-aged white women. But the producers know that's a demographic which doesn't make a ratings-winning programme. They want instead a mixture of young and old, both sexes, straight, gay and ethnic minorities, preferably with a couple of fanciable women thrown in.

And, curiously enough that's what they got.  The final twelve had a couple of middle aged white women but also a young hipster (out in the first round), a gay man of Asian ethnicity, the delightful Filipino chap Alvin, a young mixed race woman, the beautiful Flora, the beautiful Lithuanian Ugne, a working class builder, the ingenious Ian and Nadiya with the headscarf.

I bet when they saw Nadiya's application and realised she could actually cook they thought all their Christmases had come at once.

There will have been plenty of other middle-aged white women just as competent as Nadiya who didn't make the twelve because their profile didn't fit. But they didn't fail because they weren't headscarf-wearing Muslims. They failed because they didn't tick any of the other boxes either.

The producers will have dozens of eligible candidates. They pick the ones they want. If there was one of the twelve who really shouldn't have been there it was the hat-wearing musician Stu, who fell at the first hurdle. There will have been dozens of better bakers than Stu who didn't fit the programme's diverse agenda. That's showbiz.

The second thing that's struck me post-Bake Off is the Nadiya's-win-proves-multiculturalism-is-OK trope of which the Alibhai-Brown article is an example. Liberal Britain seems to be having a Nadiya moment just now, frothing from every orifice in a jouissance of feel-goodery.

I think that actually Nadiya's instant elevation to National Treasure proves the reverse.

What has been so delightful about getting to know Nadiya (via the admittedly tricksy medium of reality TV) has been the revelation that this person, beneath the chador which many find off-putting, is just like us. Ah, we think. Good old Muslims! They like baking too! And, with it, "how liberal we are!"

But actually the point about Nadiya is that she is not a typical chador-wearing Muslim woman. She is strongly atypical. For one thing, her husband Abdal let her go out and mix with other people (and associate with gay men). Moreover he took over the childcare while she was doing it. Not unknown, but not routine either.

If you still think Nadiya is typical, consider her valedictory words. "I'm never going to put boundaries on myself ever again", she said, after winning. "I'm never going to say I can't. I'm never going to say maybe". Admirable perhaps, but a sentiment more Californian than Koranic.

Further, our relief at Nadiya's Britishness (her cake! her self-deprecation!) is relief at her similarity to us. And similarity is not what multiculturalism is about. Instead it is about celebrating difference. It's about saying, "well that lot don't behave like the rest of us, but we respect that and will go along with it".

The outpouring of affection for Nadiya arises from a feeling which is the polar opposite. "Thank God she's the same as us", it says.

Nadiya deserved it on the night and I'm glad she won, but her popularity is the best demonstration I've ever seen both of the weakness of multiculturalism and the failure of its most ardent admirers to understand what it really is.

Why I love . . . #13 Patricia Highsmith

Neither of my parents would describe themselves as intellectuals, but they have always read books, and as a child I worked my way steadily through their shelves of detective stories. Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Raymond Chandler (hallelujah) and even Robert Robinson (Landscape With Dead Dons, since you ask). For some reason I never got round to The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, though I well remember it being there. Perhaps Mum and Dad thought it might be a bit strong for a nine year old - certainly other titles, The Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas and Mailer's An American Dream for example, disappeared mysteriously after I was found standing on a chair looking at their somewhat racy covers.

But Ms Highsmith and I met at last a couple of weeks ago when the Males from Hale, the book group of which I am a kind of expat member (I can't afford to live in Hale) decided to take on the first of her Ripley series of books. And what a book it is. Any crime novel that's fit to stand alongside The Big Sleep is a towering book. I'd go further. I thought The Talented Mr Ripley as good as Crime and Punishment (and I love Dostoevsky).

Briefly - and no spoiler here - TTMR concerns a young American, Tom Ripley, asked to go to Europe to persuade another young American he knows slightly to return home. It then deals with Tom Ripley's crimes and misdemeanours and his attempts to evade discovery for them. The re-print jacket blurb says the book is unputdownable.  But I found it hard to pick up, so gruelling was the story's tension. 

Highsmith writes tersely. There is enough description, but not very much. The imagination fills in the details. The book is consummately plotted, complicatedly so, but with a simple story arc that carries you past the complexities. The pacing is true, with Highsmith able to linger painfully on some scenes yet deal with the quick passage of time lightly and unobtrusively. 

Though technically dazzling, these aren't the greatest of her achievments. The story is told entirely through the eyes of Tom Ripley, and something about his clubbable there's-a-good-fellow name, and the way she refers to him throughout as Tom - Tom this, Tom that - gives the reader the uncomfortable feeling of being in cahoots with him. Agonisingly, as he comes closer to detection, and then further away, and then closer still, we don't know whether to hope he will get caught or, feeling his fear as vividly as we do, hope he escapes. 

Ripley is a weak, damaged and dangerous man, the kind of person on whom it never pays to turn your back. All the other characters are seen through his eyes. The errant young man's father. His would-be girlfriend. Our perception of them is Tom's perception. We scarcely see them as suspicious, grieving or heartbroken. They are merely the tedious inconveniences with which Ripley has to deal.

So when I was reading TTMR I felt unclean; and when I finished it (twenty minutes ago) it was with a sense of admiration and relief.

Highsmith wrote another four Ripley novels. But I don't think I'm man enough to read them.

Bono smells the coffee

Every now and again I read something so striking that everything must be dropped and everything within my limited power done to bring it to a wider audience (not much wider, obviously).

Today someone posted a link on Twitter to devex.com, a website which seems to concern itself with overseas development.  An article on devex features the following quote from Bono.

"I'm late to realizing that it's you guys, it's the private sector, it's commerce that's going to take the majority of people out of extreme poverty and, as an activist, I almost found that hard to say".

How to describe this moment of eclaircissement?  A no-shit-Sherlock moment? A statement of the bleedin' obvious? Or merely long overdue?

Jeremy Corbyn - strong message here

Not the least of the problems Jeremy Corbyn poses for the Left is what his election tells us about the Labour party. It tells us that the Labour party is the kind of demographic that elects Mr Corbyn. For those of us who aren't involved in political activism - and that's the overwhelming majority of British people - it tells us that the Labour party thinks Corbyn is the best leader they've got.

And what a leader he is. I didn't listen to all Mr Corbyn's first party conference speech yesterday, but I did listen to some of the highlights. Putting aside the substance (most of which, as a Blairite of old, I disagree with), Corbyn is one of the worst public speakers I have ever heard. And this wasn't an improvised soap-box rant, it was a set piece party conference speech.  Live TV on all channels. It was rambling, stumbling, flat, avoided hard questions and recycled old material from a hack speechwriter rejected by previous Labour leaders. Of course all political leaders employ speechwriters. But that's not exactly the authentic straight talking Corbyn promised.

And yet after a leadership campaign lasting months, Labour people voted for this guy. I find it baffling.

Maybe they didn't vote for him because of his speaking ability, I hear you say.  But I think that's exactly what they did. Meeting after meeting - every night for weeks - was packed with people desperate to hear Jeremy. Wide-eyed activists spoke of the electrifying atmosphere he generated. Twitter was abuzz with talk of a new beginning.

So here's another unpalatable fact. The Left hears Corbyn and goes weak at the knees. Old New Labour voters like me hear him and think, "Obsessive bloke you try and avoid at a party". Call me shallow, but as Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Graun this morning, this was Corbyn's last chance to create a good first impression. And what an impression it was.

To be clear, none of this means Corbyn can't win in 2020. David Cameron will no longer be Prime Minister then. I think George Osborne has done a good job in difficult circumstances, but he is a more divisive figure. Moreover if a week is a long time in politics, five years is an aeon. The world changed utterly between 2005 and 2010. It can happen again.

I still think Corbyn probably won't win though. The more successful he is at getting Labour to take on his policies, the further he will take the party away from the political mainstream. He didn't mention immigration or the deficit yesterday, but we caught a glimpse of what his attitude might be in the context of Trident renewal. His tactic was to mention the size of his mandate from Labour's electorate. I won with an overwhelming majority, he said, in terms, so I have the authority to rid the UK of nuclear weapons, even if not everyone in the party agrees with me.

This seems reasonable enough. I think Corbyn will have to prevail, because the alternative is for him to lead a party with policies he's on the record as opposing. That suggests that on a broad policy front, from immigration and the economy to defence and welfare Labour is going be fighting the next election on the most left wing manifesto in a generation.

Corbyn's MPs won't like it, but some of them will toe the line, because the ones that don't could soon find themselves out on their ear. For all his talk about being nice (although not to the Tories, obviously), people only survive in politics as long as Corbyn has by being masters of procedural warfare. He will know that internal opposition will have to be faced down, and I would imagine he'll set about suppressing it sooner rather than later.

Perhaps the most pertinent part of Corbyn's conference speech yesterday was the bit where he read out part of the autocue stage directions by mistake. "Strong message here", he intoned. I should say so.

Pinning down the fiscal multiplier. Or not.

As a late convert to Twitter I've been surprised and delighted by the way you stumble across people with interesting things to say about all aspects of political and cultural life. Recently I've been chatting to a guy called Bruce Greig about the economics of government borrowing. Bruce's view, expressed here is that the tax returns on increased growth more than pay for the investment, even when you have to borrow the money to do it. It works because of something called the fiscal multiplier. Here's my reply.

Hi Bruce.

Firstly, let's be candid about our various levels of expertise. I'm not an economist and I suspect neither are you. We are both probably interested amateurs trying to make sense of the economic and political landscape. So we turn to outside sources to try and buttress what may be instinctive views.

In your post you rely on the IMF. Fine. But just how reliable is the IMF?

In January 2013 its chief economist admitted in a paper that the fiscal multiplier – put at 0.5 - it had used to calculate the effect of austerity measures on European economies had been wrong. You’ll remember in January 2013 the same economist – Olivier Blanchard – criticised George Osborne’s economic policy and said “there should be a reassessment of fiscal policy”; Osborne was “playing with fire”. When growth returned to the UK economy later that year Blanchard had to admit he was “pleasantly surprised” by the UK’s performance. By January 2015 Blanchard’s boss Christine Lagarde was saying, “It’s obvious that what happened in the UK actually worked”.

I recite this to show that the IMF is fallible. Its staff don’t even agree with each other. Here's another IMF paper. Its authors say on Page 1 that “the fiscal multiplier is . . . zero in economies operating under flexible exchange rates”. 

Yes, that’s zero. Not 1.5 or 2.5. 

On Page 26 we get “in economies open to trade or operating under flexible exchange rates, a fiscal expansion leads to no significant output gains. Further, fiscal stimulus may be counterproductive in highly-indebted countries; in countries with debt levels as low as 60 percent of GDP, government consumption shocks may have strong negative effects on output”.

The UK’s current debt to GDP is 82%.

Even the IMF paper you cited yourself is equivocal.  Have a look at page 83.  It states that a “debt-financed” public investment shock of 1% of GDP increases output by 2.9% over four years.

 

That’s a multiplier of less than 1 isn’t it? How is that going to pay for itself when you take into account the cost of the debt?

I offer you the following propositions –

1.       The fiscal multiplier will vary according to the situation.

2.       No-one knows exactly what it is in any given situation.

3.       In some circumstances an increase in expenditure will pay for itself, but sometimes it won’t. Given 1 and 2 above a degree of circumspection is understandable.

One other consideration.  Where will the money HMG borrows to fund this expenditure come from? About 70% of UK government bonds are held by UK individuals and institutions. If new bonds are issued roughly in the same proportion, most of the money will come from within the UK. 

In other words the expenditure HMG undertakes on the back of this borrowing will not be new money.  It will not be new demand.  It will be money that would have been spent or invested in the UK anyway.  The likelihood is that the multiplier will be reduced by 70% accordingly.

Even economists can’t agree about the effect and size of the fiscal multiplier. For we amateurs that’s a consolation, but also a warning – maybe this is a subject which is as much an art as a science. Perhaps we should be warier than we have been of stating categorically what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps we should accept that, maybe, we just don’t know.

Professor Brian Cox - overpaid wanker?

Recently I had a Twitter spat with Professor Brian Cox, the floppy fringed scientist and TV presenter.

I wrote that his having signed the so-called "luvvies letter" in support of the BBC was compromised by the fact that he worked for the Corporation. Professor Cox accused me of having made an ad hominem attack on him. There was some to-ing and fro-ing over this issue, of the handbags-at-thirty-paces variety, and the Tweeting flurry gently expired with Cox pointing out that he wasn't employed by the BBC and my responding that, since he had worked for them in the past and intended to do so again, this was a distinction without a difference.

I now rather regret not asking Cox whether he was asked to sign the letter, as others were, by the BBC's Director of Television Danny Cohen.

So far so inconsequential. But what's this? An interview in the UK Press Gazette by another celebrity who doesn't work for the BBC, the Editor of Private Eye Ian Hislop. It turns out that Hislop was asked to sign the "luvvies letter" too. He refused. Why?

Hislop said,“Had I seen my own name on the list, I would have thought: ‘You overpaid wanker - why should I care what you say? . . . But God no – entirely inappropriate. And it does no good. I mean if there was a letter from 50 midwives saying: ‘The only thing that makes our lives bearable is watching Poldark’ – that’s a worthwhile letter. To have a letter from a load of famous people saying ‘I like the BBC and I get paid by them’, I mean, so what?”

Hislops other remarks are worth quoting too. "I think it’s playing all its cards very, very badly at the moment. And I think the BBC has a huge amount of things going for it. And, you know, I’m a huge fan of the Proms – I think paying for four orchestras is fabulous – I like a lot of radio, which I think is very, very good. But it’s allowed itself to get into a position where everything it does appears to be self-defeating. And I hate the thought that that’s going to end up with them emasculated and feeble. In our business you know pretty well why the Mail and the Murdoch empire, every time the Beeb do anything, they get slammed. But there’s a feebleness and a lack of robustness about the Beeb – and obviously cack-handedness – that has allowed it to be in this position of people going: ‘Ooh, the BBC, it’s a big worry.’“I mean, you look at what the does week after week and it shouldn’t be a problem. I watched two documentaries last week alone, which I think were worth the licence fee.“The quality isn’t a problem. But I think the management is.”

I agree with all of that. Including the bit about overpaid wankers.

The Labour leadership - why Jeremy Corbyn is going to be even worse for Labour than you thought

Many years ago when I was a Legal Aid lawyer in London I used to spend my days suing local Councils. It was illuminating. The Labour ones meant well but could not organise the proverbial piss-up. Even when your client had a very thin case it was worth pushing it because chances were the Council might be sufficiently disorganised and incompetent to give you what you wanted.

The Tories on the other hand were well run but tight as a gnat's chuff. If they said no, they meant no; and it was probably because someone capable had looked at the file and decided you had no case. My political sympathies didn't lie in their direction, but I came to develop a grudging admiration for their method.

In this context, and leaving aside the folly of giving non party-members a vote, I am still staggered by Labour's extraordinary election of Jeremy Corbyn. How could they have done such a thing?

Research carried out by Jon Cruddas confirms what many had suspected, namely that Labour lost the election because people didn't think Ed Miliband was an impressive leader and because they didn't think Labour was credible on the economy. So what does Labour do? It elects someone with a history of links to terrorists in both Ireland and the Middle East who has never run so much as Parliamentary committee. It elects someone who favours an economic policy founded on heroic tax raising assumptions and money printing which a majority of reputable economists (Richard Murphy, Corbyn's tax advisor, is an accountant, not an economist) think is dangerous.

I wrote recently about Robert Conquest's dictum that the behaviour of any large organisation may be explained by the hypothesis that it has been taken over by a secret cabal of its enemies. I suspect George Osborne has not in fact managed to infiltrate the Labour party, but if he had he would no doubt have been pushing for the Labour leader who would have least chance of becoming prime minister but would do most damage to the Party in the process of failing. Mr Corbyn fits the bill perfectly.

It's not just that the substance of Corbyn's policies have such a limited appeal in the UK. It's that he is uncharismatic, has a chequered past, showed repeatedly in his thirty years as an MP that he is incapable of loyalty to the Parliamentary Party and is unpopular with his colleagues at Westminster. He seems to have no concept of the need to co-operate with the press, already cancelling interviews and ducking questions.

He is also a truly terrible speaker. I listened to the results being announced on Saturday. The new Deputy Leader Tom Watson came over as a machine politician, unimaginative, tough, clever, the product of the Unions which have made him. But Corbyn sounded like one of those people you used to see trying to sell the SWP magazine outside Sainsbury's on Stoke Newington High Street. Rambling, bitter, obsessive.  Come to think of it Corbyn probably was one of those people. Modern politics requires leaders who are articulate, measured and sound reasonable, at least in public. Corbyn was none of these things. How is he going to cope with the necessity of getting Labour's message across?

At this stage (Monday morning 48 hours in) Corbyn's shadow cabinet is not fully formed. But Oh Jesus the people. John McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor? Really? Diane Abbott? Hilary Benn? Yes, Hilary Benn - interestingly Benn said that Labour would be campaigning to stay in Europe, which is funny because Corbyn apparently told another former front bencher the opposite only yesterday.

Half the shadow cabinet have declined to serve under Corbyn. Two who haven't are Lord Falconer, an old chum of Tony Blair's, as Shadow Justice Minister, and Andy Burnham as Shadow Home Secretary. These men must be desperate. Andy Burnham argued against everything Corbyn stood for, at least until it looked as if Corbyn might win; then he trimmed his sails to try and catch some of Corbyn's votes.

The words Last Throw of the Dice spring to mind as far as Mr Burnham is concerned. He must have calculated that chucking his lot in with Corbyn is better than risking deselection and the wilderness. It is a calculation that has self-interest written all over it. Burnham may of course be right; but it's striking how many of his former colleagues thought the odds favoured the opposite move.

I think Corbyn is wrong about virtually everything - defence, taxation, the economy, foreign policy generally - but more importantly his views on these matters are at odds with those of most other people as well.  He lacks the personal qualities good leadership requires, and is going to have a lot of trouble dealing with parliamentary colleagues, who on the whole despise him.

And yet in a way this isn't the worst news for Labour. Worse still is what the Tories will tell the rest of us about Labour. They will tell us that if we want to know what Labour would be like in power, they are the party which was daft enough to elect Jeremy Corbyn on a 60% landslide. And they will be right.