Sadiq Khan - extremists' poodle?

Last week Sadiq Khan was elected Mayor of London.  This was hailed in liberal circles as an extraordinary and marvellous thing.

I don't find it extraordinary at all.  Nearly half of all people living in London were born outside the UK.  London is now an international city rather than a British one.  Why is it surprising Londoners should elect Khan?

As for marvellous, a barrister friend of mine was once instructed by Khan, in the days when he was merely a stroppy Legal Aid solicitor. He said Khan was "bossy and ranting", at least as interested in pushing the political aspects of the case as acting in the client's best interest.

That might make him a bad lawyer, but it won't necessarily make him a bad Mayor.

The election campaign was, it is said, marred by accusations that Khan had consorted with extremists, and was by implication extremist himself, accusations contested with interest by the Khan camp as "racist" (because obviously if you call someone an extremist that must be because of their "race", right?  And Muslims are a race, aren't they?*)

On this subject I recommend an illuminating article by Maajid Nawaz, head of the Quilliam Foundation, entitled The Secret Life of Sadiq Khan.  Nawaz is as well positioned as anyone to assess whether Khan is an extremist, because Nawaz really was one himself, and because Khan was his lawyer.

Nawaz's verdict is uncompromising and plausible. Khan isn't an extremist, but he sucked up to extremists in London in order to get votes.

This isn't attractive behaviour, but he's a politician now, not a lawyer. It's a dirty job.

My own least favourite Khan moment came in 2009 when, as Minster of State for Communities in the Gordon Brown government, he described moderate Muslims in a TV interview as Uncle Toms. Now this really was pretty repulsive. It suggests of course that Khan did not regard himself as a "moderate Muslim" (whatever that is), but moreover it implies contempt not just for the Uncle Toms themselves but for the societal values Uncle Toms might be said to have espoused.

Values like free speech, education, democracy, the rule of law perhaps; the values, in other words, which had enabled the son of a Pakistani bus driver to rise to be first a human rights lawyer, then an MP, then a Minister of State in the British Government and then Mayor of London.

Uncle Toms indeed.  Amusingly, his own logic appears to make Khan himself an Uncle Tom, a point not lost on Maajid Nawaz. But Nawaz goes further than just pointing out Khan's hypocrisy.

"Today", he writes, "Muslim terrorists kill more Muslims than people from any other faith, after they dehumanize them for being "not Muslim enough".  In such a climate, labeling counter-extremist Muslims as "Uncle Toms", "House Muslims" or "native Informants" is comparable to calling someone a heretic during the Inquisition . . . Degrading the "Muslimness" of someone . . . is a prerequisite to their murder by terrorists . . . Khan knows all of this. He really should have known better".

So no, I don't think Khan's election is all that marvellous, and while Zac Goldsmith struck me as a pallid and lacklustre candidate I'm not sure his opponent's victory says anything good about London or Britain.

I suppose though the rest of us should be glad that Khan's self-interest now apparently lies in being the Establishment's lapdog rather than the extremists' poodle.

*My previous post has some reflections on these tired old assumptions.

Ken Livingstone, anti-semitism and a free society

At the time of writing the Labour party is engulfed in a row about racism, or, more specifically, anti-semitism. The Bradford MP Naz Shah has been suspended, and so, in his contorted attempts to justify her behaviour, has Ken Livingstone. Jeremy Corbyn reacted to Livingstone's transgressions with characteristic sloth. He can't be too happy at the prospect of losing his right hand man.

It won't come as any surprise to readers of this blog (all nineteen of them) that I am a long way away politically from the likes of Livingstone. Yet I have some sympathy with him. Here's why.

Anti-Semitism is popularly regarded as a form of racism, as if the term applied only to Jews. But the Semitic peoples are not confined to Jews - it's a term applied to a number of Middle Eastern countries, including some Arab ones - and not all Jews are from the Middle East.

Nor, to confound the issue still further, are Jews a race. Jews are a religious-ethnic group including people of many races.  There are white Jews from Europe and black Jews from Ethiopia. If Jews are a race, then so are Christians.

For what it's worth I once put this point to a family friend, who is an Orthodox Jew. He agreed with me.

But surely this is nit picking, I hear you cry. We all know anti-Jewish prejudice is bad, so what does it matter which words we use?

It matters a lot, not least because words are the things we use to try and ferry meaning between each other. In this as in so many areas of political conflict the party that controls the meaning of words has the upper hand.

Racism as a form of hatred towards people with different physical characteristics from ourselves is rightly reviled. Describing someone as racist in the West is a term of pejorative heft
only a few steps down from murderer, rapist or paedophile. As a consequence it provides an intellectual umbrella underneath which many have sought to shelter, most problematically in the context of religion.

Amidst the many unattractive features of Islam - its homophobia, its repression of women, its anti-democratic insistence on God-made law - is the insistence that criticism of the religion is racist. But Muslims, like Christians and Jews, are not a race either, and by allowing religions to shelter under the "racist" umbrella we stifle discussion and criticism.

If it's legitimate to criticise Islamic societies which permit (and sometimes institutionalise) FGM, for example, it must also be legitimate to criticise the use of sharia courts, and, by extension, the people who staff them. The problem is that if disliking people on the basis of their religion is racist, then the line between what it's legitimate to say and what society utterly condemns becomes impossibly narrow to draw. People retreat to a safe distance because they don't want invite the R-word. For a politician this is problematic because an allegation of racism can finish a career, but for civilised society it's a disaster, because freedom of speech is both one of that society's causes and one of its consequences.

Racism is incompatible with a good society, because it is wrong to revile people on the basis of characteristics they can't choose. On the other hand a good society can't function without the freedom to criticise people for the choices they make, including the religion they adhere to or the cultural practices they adopt.

Nowhere are the consequences of confusing racism with sectarianism (my preferred term) clearer or more ironic (or funnier) than in the current plight of the Labour party. In areas of West Yorkshire (as in parts of London) the Labour party is dominated by Muslims, many of whom take a dim view of Israel generally and it's treatment of the West Bank Palestinians in particular. Many of those, I would guess, don't make the distinction between Jews and Zionists very sharply.

People like the Bradford MP Naz Shah for example. Ms Shah has done a couple of things on social media in the last few days which I personally find very unsavoury and which seem to suggest anti-Jewish prejudice. She has apologised for her "the Jews are rising" comment, and the Labour party can decide whether or not it wants to keep her.

But Labour is reaping a whirlwind it has itself sown. The Left is so keen on the widest possible definition of what constitutes racism that it has made criticism of Islam very difficult (if you doubt me, look at the abuse heaped on Zac Goldsmith for pointing out that London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan has shared a platform with extremists) and turned a blind eye to some really very unsavoury people within its Muslim ranks. This is something the Quilliam Foundation head Maajid Nawaz described as "the left-wing bigotry of low expectations that holds Muslims to lesser, illiberal standards". If Labour hadn't been so myopic about Islam, Naz Shah would never have become an MP.

Ken Livingstone leapt to Ms Shah's defence with some comments which have now got him into trouble. He said there was a "well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby" to get rid of Ms Shah, and that it was "over the top" to "think of anti-Semitism and racism as the same thing". On this last point at least I agree with him.

He also pointed out that the Nazis had meetings in the early 1930s with Jewish leaders to discuss the prospect of moving Jews to the Middle East. I don't know whether this is true, still less why Livingstone thought it would be a good idea to make the claim, but it has landed him in hot water, not least with the Labour MP John Mann, who confronted Livingstone angrily on the stairs of a BBC studio and called him "a Nazi apologist" on camera.

(Journalists love this kind of thing, and are much more interested in the spats and resignations than in the substance of the dispute.)

Is there a "well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby"? Danny Finkelstein, a pundit I admire, wrote in the Times this morning that "the idea that the Jews pull the strings, are the puppet masters and have an all-powerful lobby is the most traditional of anti-semitic ideas". Fair enough; except Livingstone didn't say "Jewish lobby" but "Israel lobby", which is not the same thing.

Elsewhere Finkelstein writes, "the oldest theories of Jews as rich manipulators and financiers of evil have been merged with the new ideas about imperialism.  And they have given it a name: Zionism. No longer does that term mean a belief that there needs to be a small Jewish homeland. Now it is used to mean a global conquering force of money-lending, oil-stealing militarists".

Who said words didn't matter? It looks as if Finkelstein, never mind his misquote of Livingstone, is trying to give Zionism a new meaning, one which will immediately brand the user as a conspiracy-theorist fruitcake. Perhaps Finkelstein really does think Jewish and Israeli interests are coterminal, but if he does he can hardly cry foul when people criticise Jews for things Israel does.  Like Naz Shah, it doesn't look as if Finkelstein is making the distinction between Jews and Zionists very sharply.

Elsewhere Labour MP Chris Bryant said, "Only one sane sentence has Hitler and Jews in it.  We'll never forget Hitler was a genocidal murderer who slaughtered Jews in their millions". Is Bryant really arguing that, even if Livingstone got his facts right, it was wrong for him to utter them? Is an open society best served by prescribing what people can and can't say in this fashion? I doubt it. Meanwhile Bryant's colleague Luciana Berger said, "There is no hierarchy of racism". Depressingly, I take this to mean that for her anti-semitism nestles snugly beneath the umbrella of the R-word.

I don't think British politics would be signally worse off in the absence of Ken Livingstone, but there are lot of other people thrashing around on the muddy shores of the race debate, wrestling over the slipperiest of meanings, trying to set the boundaries of the permissible in a way which is thoughtless, ill-informed, tendentious and damaging to a free society.  We could well do without them too.

Brexit reflections #3 - Boris and Barack, Nick Cohen and the dim-witted censors.

Much fury on Twitter in the last 48 hours about Boris Johnson's anti-Obama diatribe.  A lot of writers I admire have poured scorn, mostly from the Left, on Boris's suggestion that Obama's stance on Brexit might be influenced by his Kenyan background. In particular Boris suggested that Obama might have been instrumental in the removal of a bust of Churchill from the White House.

Principal amongst Johnson's accusers was Nick Cohen, who wrote in the Spectator ("Boris Johnson's attack on Barack Obama belongs in the gutter") that the Mayor of London was "a man without principle or shame.  He is a braying charlatan, who lacks the courage even to be an honest bastard . . . but instead uses the tactics of the coward and the tricks of the fraudster to advance his worthless career". Cohen continues, "I'm not someone who throws accusations of racism around . . . But, come now, the fantasy that Obama is the heir of the Mau-Maus with no right to govern is a racist lie" which Johnson "perpetuates".

Golly. Is Cohen right? Certainly the Twitterati thought so. I wasn't so sure, and plunged into the 140 character mosh pit to try and establish what exactly Johnson had said which was racist. Interestingly, the responses tended to dry up on the second or third exchange of views. Typical was the Blairite hack John McTernan, who could manage no more than "It's racist.  Pure and simple".

(Update - the following day McTernan elaborated on his views.  He wrote, "It is sneery, de haut en bas, touch of the tarbrush, straight down the line English racism". I replied, "So you keep saying.  But you don't say why.  Forgive me for finding that a little lame."  Nothing back from McTernan so far.)

So what exactly did Johnson say which was so offensive? Cohen quotes him thus. "Some said (the removal of the Churchill bust) was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President's ancestral dislike of the British empire - of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender".

"Who are the ‘some’ who say that Obama is a Kenyan at heart?", demands Nick Cohen.

Inconveniently for him, one of the most vocal is Barack Obama himself, who, er, devoted a large part of his book Dreams of My Father to his Kenyan heritage. And rather awkwardly for Cohen and his fans, Obama went to Kenya on a state visit in July 2015, and began a speech there by saying, "I am proud to be the first American president to come to Kenya, and of course I'm the first Kenyan-American to be president of the United States". Kenyan-American. There you have it.

When the journalist Iain Martin tweeted these remarks there was some furious back-peddling by Cohen's supporters. You could almost hear them thinking, "Shit, Obama thinks he's part-Kenyan too. What are we going to say now?"

Obama is entitled to be proud of his ancestry (even though his Dad comes across as an utter flake in Dreams of my Father), but on the other hand is it really beyond plausibility to suggest that a man whose father was born in a British colony and whose grandfather was, apparently, imprisoned by the British, might not, well, be too keen on Britain? And yet to suggest that is, for Cohen and his supporters, to step into the gutter.

A much more fruitful avenue for Cohen to explore might have been to wonder whether Johnson was actually right. He might also have pondered what the consequences of Presidential anti-British bias might have been. After all, a President who disliked Britain would surely want the worst for us; and yet here's Obama firmly advocating Remain. Surely Boris missed a trick here. He should have been trumpeting that Obama's anti-British bias must mean he secretly felt it would be best for us to Leave. What an endorsement for Brexit that would have been.

But this is all too subtle for Cohen. "The fantasy that Obama is the heir of the Mau-Maus with no right to govern", he writes, "is a racist lie that appeals to deep, dark traditions in the US. From slavery, through the Civil War, the backlash against Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, the argument has been the same: blacks have no right to vote, and black politicans have no right to rule.  Johnson perpetuates the fraud".

It's worth noting that Cohen not only makes no attempt to demonstrate that Johnson is racist, but also doesn't try to justify his association of Johnson with these repellent manifestations of US racism.

If I were Boris I'd be rather peeved. Even if Kenyans were a race, which they're not, and even if Boris were wrong about Obama's hostility to Britain, which we can't know, where is Cohen's evidence that the remarks were motivated by hostility to Kenyans (or even Kenyan culture, for heavens' sake)?

Boris is not even suggesting that Obama would be wrong about any anti-British antipathy he might have. He's simply wondering whether it might have influenced Obama's views on Brexit. The answer to that might be a very short "no" (and that would probably get my vote), but it is a very very long way from that to suggesting, as Cohen does, that even to ask the question makes you a racist.

You may accuse me of overthinking this, but I'm simply baffled why a journalist and commentator of Cohen's calibre should get this so thoroughly wrong.

One last point. Nick Cohen has an honourable record as an advocate of free speech. And yet his dog-whistle cry has brought out the dim-witted censors in their droves.

Brexit reflections #2 - the Government's leaflet

At last the Government leaflet on the EU referendum has popped through my door.

Should the HMG have spent the best part of £10 million on it? Possibly not. But a genuine attempt to cut through the lies and distortions of both sides of the campaign would have been welcome and, who knows, might even have bolstered the Remain side if waverers had seen it as being candid and even-handed.

So I turned with interest to page 1 of the leaflet, where the following statement appears - "We will keep our own border controls".

We will keep our own border controls.

The mind flaps at this statement like a goalkeeper trying to grasp a spinning ball on a rain-sodden pitch. In what way can it possibly be true?

We, or rather the British electorate of forty years ago, signed up to free movement of people (at a time when the EU had only half a dozen countries, few of whose citizens had any economic incentive to come and live in the UK). We have to let EU nationals come and go freely because of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, and unless we leave we are stuck with it.

So we "keep our own border controls" only in the sense that the British government operates, administers and pays for its "own border controls". The substance of those border controls however is determined by the 1975 British commitment to the EU. The leaflet says we have "the right to check everyone, including EU nationals, arriving from continental Europe". The weasel words there are "check" and "arriving", because although we can "check" them to make sure they're EU nationals we can't put any limits on the number of EU nationals who "arrive".

If a British government elected by the British people in (oh I don't know) 2015 decided to introduce tighter border controls it would very swiftly find itself in front of the European Court of Human Rights. And it would have no defence. There is no better illustration of the powerlessness of the British government than David Cameron's election pledge to reduce net migration to the "low tens of thousands". He failed in that pledge precisely because we don't "keep our own border controls". If we had been able to maintain an immigration policy the Tories said they wanted, net migration would not now have been in the region of 300,000 annually.

"We will keep our own border controls" is then an outright lie.

Why does the Government do this? There is a case to be made for free movement (I don't agree with it, but many do). It is also arguable that post-Brexit a British government would have to accept free movement as the price of a trade deal (some countries have to, although not Canada). Why not make those arguments instead of just lying to us? Is it because they think we're stupid?

I can only assume so. After all, these statements don't appear in expensively printed leaflets by accident. Well-paid people sat for a long time drafting this missive, and at some point someone said, "What are we going to say about borders and migration?" And there was then a good deal of pencil chewing because everyone knows that migration is one of the two political issues (the other being the economy) which poll after poll shows the British people are concerned about most. These apparatchiks knew they had to say something. It had to be appear on the face of it to be true. So someone said, "Well in a sense we do keep our own border controls because we operate and administer them", and this statement, conflating slipperily the execution of border control and its substance, was greeted with relief all round the table.

It is a deliberate, contemptuous and cynical attempt to deceive. I very much hope it doesn't do so, because no Government should lie to its own people.

It's a shame the leaflet is so glossy.  I might have found a use for a cheaper, more absorbent version.

David Cameron, tax and the Guardian

Alastair Campbell once said that if a story about you is still on the front page after a week you're in trouble.  David Cameron is in trouble then.  The story about his father's Panama investment fund rumbles on.

Cameron has handled this badly.  First the stonewalling, then the partial revelation, then the more complete divulgence, then the tax return. The method doesn't look good, and it encourages journalists to think about what another layer off the onion might look like.

To be clear, I hold no brief for Cameron. He is a managerial centre-right type, capable, privileged, although not on the whole an ideologue. He has, I think, royally messed up the chance to extract concessions from Europe which would have enabled undecided voters like me to opt to stay In with a clear conscience. But when I look at the furore surrounding the leaked papers of Mossack Fonseca, I see only the malice, stupidity, confusion, opportunism and hypocrisy of his opponents.

You can cut to the chase quite simply by asking, "What did Cameron do wrong exactly?"

"Ah", comes the reply, "he invested money in an offshore fund".

"That's legal", you counter.

"That doesn't make it right".

"So why is it wrong then?"

"It's wrong because it's a way of avoiding tax".

"Putting money in an ISA is avoiding tax.  So is investing in a pension.  Why is using an offshore fund morally different?"

At that point the conversation tends to peter out, or relocate to the idea that David Cameron is a rich Tory bastard, as if that, even if true, were the clincher.

It's worth pointing out that the Cameron will have paid UK tax on the dividends that his investment paid each year, and would have paid capital gains tax when he sold it in 2010 on the gain the investment accrued if that had been big enough (it wasn't). The purpose of offshoring the fund seems to have been that the lower tax rates payable in Panama enabled the fund to grow more quickly, giving investors higher rates of return. If the fund had been domiciled in the UK it would have paid more UK tax on the growth but the Government would have received less from individual investors (whose dividends would have been lower).

That people don't understand this is not Cameron's fault.  That Cameron's opponents choose not to is understandable, if not exactly the "new kind of politics" that Jeremy Corbyn promised.  That the media flog the story to keep it running is also understandable, though forgivable only if one takes as read the cynicism with which the vast majority of journalists ply their trade.  That the Guardian in particular should have pursued Cameron with the zeal of a Witchfinder General is downright hypocrisy when you consider the offshore company acquisition deals which the paper used in the sale of EMAP publishing group in 2008. No wonder I stopped buying it.

Unlike his pursuers in the media, David Cameron was elected by people who almost without exception will have known that he was a toff and came from a moneyed family.  Since those are qualities which on the whole don't enamor an individual to the rest of us who don't share them, I think we can assume that most people don't care, and will conclude that Dave's persecutors belong to the ranks of the ignorant and spiteful.

PS  The publication of Cameron's accounts reveal how badly the PM is paid relative to most professional people of similar stature. Cameron gets £100k or so. This compares badly to most consultants and barristers of a similar age, never mind what they get in the City of London for snorting coke off a hooker's embonpoint. Bright and ambitious people (and yes, politicians need to be personally ambitious) are not going to go into politics for £150k. The Director of the Royal Opera House was getting nearly £700k last time I looked (quite a lot of it from public funds, incredibly). Which job do we think is more demanding? I think I know the answer. And now the press and the opposition want our leaders to publish their accounts? Jesus wept. I'd have resigned already. Chapeau to Cameron just for hanging on in there.

Wordsworth and James Rebanks: blood-and-soil provincialism

I don't know if Manchester has such a thing as a Great and Good, still less whether I am amongst its gilded number, but last year a friend of ours who sits on the board of the Portico Library invited my wife and I to the annual dinner at which the Portico Book Prize is awarded.  Lots of smartly dressed people sat in a big room, eating and drinking while the likes of Michael Wood and Val McDermid dished out awards.

Our table was divided between lawyers and writers.  The lawyers bought most of the wine and the artists did most of the drinking; the lawyers gazed benevolently on, perhaps thinking that although they led less glamorous lives they at least could afford to stand their round.

One of the prizes was given to a man called James Rebanks, for his book The Shepherd's Life.  Six months on I have finally got round to reading it.

Essentially Rebanks' book tells the story of his upbringing on a Cumbrian hill farm, his exile to a History degree at Oxford and subsequent return to his roots.  It is a description of the hill farmer's year and and an encomium to his farmer forebears.  Rebanks loves the land, and having sampled the bright lights of academic glory (a First, no less, and this from a man who went straight into A Levels without having any GCSEs) he tells us that country life is best.

I didn't particularly warm to Rebanks (not that that will bother him one jot), and not merely because he tells us in the opening pages that at his school (Workington or Keswick, I'm guessing) he and his classmates competed to smash the most expensive piece of equipment they could, or that a boy they bullied killed himself many years later. Hats off for confessing.  It would have been easier not to.

Rebanks tells us pretty early how much he dislikes the Wordsworthian view of the Lake District, and later makes clear his contempt for tourists, so lacking in true comprehension of the way of life sustained by Rebanks and his neighbours.  More than this, he has a sense of rootedness in the landscape, mirroring perhaps the heftedness of his beloved Herdwick sheep to their ancestral hillsides, which would not shame the most ardent Israeli West Bank settler or 1990s Serbian militiaman.  You would call it a blood-and-soil nationalist argument, although relating as it does to a modest part of northern Britain you'd probably have to call it blood-and-soil provincialism instead.

It's about as charming as it sounds.

Rebanks is clearly a formidable character.  He can write, and his book is absorbing and interesting. It's also, when you stop and think about it, rather unpleasant.  Here are some things he gets wrong.

1. The original Wordsworthian view of the Lake District is one rooted firmly in reality.  No one who has read Dorothy Wordsworth's diaries could be in any doubt about the hard life the poet and his sister led in Grasmere.

2. Moreover it is the widespread resonance of the Wordsworthian view (however inaccurately shared) which led to the Lakes being made a National Park, thus preserving it from the urbanisation which Rebanks despises.

3. The people who gave Rebanks the Portico Prize and bought his book were neo-Wordsworthians to a man and woman, and no doubt if and when his agents sell the film rights (Tom Hardy would make a very good Rebanks) it will be because the money men calculate, correctly, that there are enough Wordsworthians to keep the multiplexes busy.

4. The people who, Rebanks says, leave his gates open and allow their dogs to chase his sheep are also ultimately the customers for the lambs he sells.  The preservation of his livelihood (in sofar as it's viable at all) depends on them (I suspect that must hurt).

5. Without the Wordsworthians the Lake District would be in terrible trouble.  Tourism is the only successful industry the region has.  If Rebanks has any doubt, he should go to the less glamorous parts of rural Wales and see what sheep-farming without tourism looks like. Tourists may be inconvenient to Rebanks, but they bring money to other Cumbrians not so fortunate as to live on the family farm.

6. When I caught the drift of Rebanks' argument I started looking out for the word subsidy and wondering whether it would crop up.  It appears (on p.77) in the context of his grandfather hoodwinking a Ministry of Agriculture official over biodiversity (we're invited to conclude this makes him something of a card), but elsewhere is strangely absent.  Rebanks admits that his lifestyle is only viable because he does a bit of work for UNESCO on the side, and so you'd have to imagine that without the Single Farm Payment sustaining it would be considerably more difficult. Where does the SFP come from? Ultimately from taxpayers who eat Rebanks' produce and walk across his land.  Subsidy is the elephant in the room and Rebanks ignores it.

7. Rebanks would have the reader believe that his ilk are uniquely responsible for the condition of the landscape, and that without them it would return to wasteland.  What nonsense.  Without the overgrazing of sheep farming, the fells would quickly return to their natural state of scrub and forest. Much of Cumbria is a wet monocultural desert at present. Wildlife would flourish. Cumbria would probably be even more richly beautiful.

I have an interest to declare here, in that I'm part-owner of a house in Cumbria. It's in the middle of a working farm which must at one time have employed a number of men, but in the age of mechanisation gets by with just one plus the occasional help. Blood-and-soil provincialism is much in evidence there, but the house, let to visitors most of the time, brings in tens of thousands of pounds of income to the north west every year. That's almost certainly more than the farm does.

Rebanks is right that the image of the Lake District is a chocolate box one, and I can testify that farming all year round is a gruelling job requiring a hardiness and resistance to the elements of which most of us are not capable.  It's also true that the average visitor's notion of its beauty is perhaps a factitious one (although no more subjective than that of the farmer himself).

But what Rebanks doesn't seem to grasp is that the existence of his way of life is the result of the complex interaction of economic and social forces, an interaction which depends for its success on a thoroughgoing engagement with the wallets and aesthetic preferences of people he alternately sneers at and patronises (that's you and me, by the way). He paints a picture of his life which, for all its purported mud and gore realism, is a just as much a fantasy as the picture-postcard view of the Lakes he despises.

Far from Rebanks' much-vaunted rugged individualism, Cumbrian sheep farmers are in fact profoundly dependent on the consumers, holiday makers and taxpayers of urban Britain, without whom his "always been here, always will be" is just a few muddy fields and a mortgage to pay.

(I said that Rebanks wouldn't care one jot what was written about him, but I'm glad our house is on the other side of the Lakes. Judging by his jacket photo I'd say he wields a useful right hook.)

Farewell to Peter Maxwell Davies

Last week a great musician passed away, a man who brought pleasure to millions and had an incalculable influence on 20th century culture.

But that's enough about George Martin. What about Peter Maxwell Davies?

Opposite my parents in Manchester lived a girl who went to the Northern College of Music (as it then was).  She later played the viola in the Halle.  My mum remembers a young man coming round to her house.  That was Max.  I never saw him.

Twenty years later Maxwell Davies had become Britain's pre-eminent composer, along with Harrison Birtwhistle.  In the year before I went to Trinity to study with John Tavener I remember borrowing Maxwell Davies' first symphony - both score and vinyl - from a library, and struggling desperately to extract any pleasure or enlightenment from the experience. Faced with such incomprehensibility it is common to cringe; I'm rather proud that I thought instead, "Christ this is a load of shit".

A year or so later the RCM put on a performance of Maxwell Davies' A Mirror of Whitening Light at which the composer rehearsed the chamber group and discussed the piece. I was in the audience. At one point he had written something for the first violin which was actually off the instrument's register. "Here", he twinkled, "the player has to imagine the right notes even when he is actually unable to play them".

Adding to the faint but palpable atmosphere of bullshit in the room, he revealed that the piece's material was derived from the musical equivalent of a magic square, in which notes were laid out on a grid and the composer could choose which direction around the grid to travel. I remember thinking, "But since the listener can't hear that this process is going on, the point is what exactly? So that the composer doesn't have to think up any notes himself?"

Afterwards Tavener and I discussed this gloomily. He commented, "It's a beautiful title.  But what's the point of writing the piece when the title's so descriptive?" John was unimpressed by Maxwell Davies. Around the same time I went to a performance of the 3rd Symphony, which Kent Nagano conducted from memory.  I found it turgid.

To be fair, a number of the Orcadian exile's middle period pieces are quite likable (although Elliott Carter does something similar much better).  I always thought Maxwell Davies had a good ear for texture which the spare writing for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra concertos brought out. And I was at the first British performance of the 5th Symphony (under Simon Rattle); it was mightily impressive.

In his later years Maxwell Davies's star faded somewhat. The people who run classical music discovered Mark Turnage and then Thomas Ades. Maxwell Davies was apparently up north carrying on doing what he'd been doing in previous decades. Then a couple of revelations. First I heard his Orkney Wedding With Sunrise. It was a dreadful piece of Brigadoonery. And then on the radio, Farewell to Stromness, a solo piano piece which attempted the trad style. It was even worse: plodding, dreary, lumpen, unimaginative and - perhaps worst of all - incompetent.

Like many a modernist (although, to give him credit, not the recently deceased and unrepentant Pierre Boulez), Maxwell Davies suddenly appeared to grasp late in life that he had written almost nothing that anyone would want to listen to twice, and was flailing around to rectify the situation before the Reaper called. So far so unsurprising. What I found horrifying was the revelation that here was someone who couldn't even do the simple things properly. Was Maxwell Davies a fraud all along?

Well not necessarily. Any competent trad musician would have been able to write a much better piece than Maxwell Davies's faux-Jockery; but they couldn't have put together his 5th Symphony. I contend however that a really good classical composer should be able to do both. Everything, in fact. Davies couldn't.

(Incidentally I came upon a performance of the 7th Symphony last year without knowing who it was by, and my first thought was "This bloke has no idea how to write for orchestra". It was a further foray into a kind of late Romanticism, and I found it wretched. The discovery that it was by Maxwell Davies wasn't a surprise - it fitted the narrative of someone belatedly discovering that out there is something called an audience, but running out of time to learn the technical skill required to write the kind of music which might connect with it).

It will surprise readers to discover that I don't think Maxwell Davies was a bad composer.  Not so much bad as typical. My friends have heard repeatedly the thesis that most composers outside the first rank only write half a dozen really good pieces. That's likely to be as true of Maxwell Davies as anyone else. If you put Bach, Beethoven, Mozart et al in the first rank however, and people like Sibelius or Mahler in the second, where does that leave Davies?  In the third row with people like Percy Grainger? I would have said not. Music lasts because the quality of the invention, and because people want to listen to it. No doubt Davies will be all over Radio 3 for a few days, but the test of durability is a cold and ruthless one which I think his music is likely to fail.  Ironically the pieces most likely to survive are ones - like Orkney Wedding - which reveal the limits of his talent most starkly.

Davies was lucky to have been working in the years after the second world war during which to be Northern and working class appealed to the inverted snobbery of the time. He was lucky to be a modernist in a period when modernism was the height of fashion, and - for that reason - to attract the patronage of William Glock at the BBC.  He was also lucky to be living in a period when his sexuality was no longer the personal millstone and professional block it might have been only a few decades previously (perhaps the reverse in fact). But above all he was lucky to have made a long career out of a very modest talent.