I owe Sir Keir Starmer, the new Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras, a great deal. He is an old friend of my wife's, and it's probably true to say that I would not be married to her without his involvement in a case I helped with when he was a junior barrister and I was a young composer moonlighting as a solicitor's outdoor clerk.
In his capacity as Shadow Brexit Secretary Sir Keir is pressing the Government for parliamentary scrutiny of negotiations. This is fine until you start to think about the practicalities.
In any negotiation the sensible starting position is miles away from where you're willing to end up. Britain's opening position in Brexit talks will bear only superficial resemblance to the negotiated result. If I'm right about this, what will be the point of parliamentary approval or discussion? What attitude should HMG take? "Don't worry chaps, this isn't what we really think. This is just our opening gambit, and we'll settle for anything which gives us full access to the single market"? Or should the Government have to defend a position to which it has no intention of sticking?
No doubt when agreement finally limps into view there will be calls for Parliamentary endorsement. So what do we do if the Government is unable to command a majority? Do we go to Mrs Merkel and say, "Sorry Angela, but you know this deal we've spent years negotiating - we're going to have to start again because parliament doesn't like it"?
Even if Parliament did approve a draft agreement, what if the Lords, stuffed with Lib Dem peers and overwhelmingly hostile to Brexit, keep the issue ping-ponging back and forth with an eye on the 2020 election and the chance to scupper Leave once and for all?
Parliamentary approval at any stage is unworkable where not actually counter-productive. Parliament wants to get involved because even Tory MPs cannot bear to be sidelined on the issue.
But hold on, you say, Parliament is the law-making body in this country. How can the Government do something as fundamental as this without getting Parliamentary endorsement? Well there's the Royal Prerogative, for starters. But in any event the Tories have a mandate. Their 2015 manifesto said that they'd have an In-Out referendum. If Leave won, who did Remainers - inside and outside Parliament - think was going to handle negotiations? The Greens? The Lib Dems? The inference that it would be the Tories doing so is the only reasonable one available.
As for Labour, how can they argue that they deserve the right to interfere with a process they didn't mention in their manifesto and would have stopped outright if they could?
The Tories have a mandate to secure Brexit on the best terms they possibly can according to their own judgment. Politicians and pundits may not like this, but it is the only practicable way available.
Why? Please consider what would happen if, at any stage in the process, there was a vote and the Government was defeated. That would be because they were outnumbered by Labour, the SNP and the Lib Dems. Did any of those parties promise a referendum if they were elected to govern? No. To be clear, the will of the people, as expressed in both the referendum and in the 2015 general election, would have been thwarted by MPs with no mandate whatsoever in either forum.
The sovereignty of Parliament has been much invoked in the aftermath, as if that institution were the only source of legitimacy, but pardoxically in this situation I can't think of any better way to bring Parliament into disrepute.
Labour's new Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the EU has made the mistake of assuming that because there's something unsatisfactory about the Government's mandate for the specifics of Brexit (and clearly it's not ideal to say the least) there must somewhere be a perfect way of dealing with it. There may be (although I can't think of one), but the way Sir Keir proposes is actually less democratic and therefore worse.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Parliamentary scrutiny won't happen. It will. The Tory majority is too small, and God knows the party has enough dim and fractious MPs. Brexit terms will be debated in Parliament, the whole business will be a dog's breakfast of interference and we will get a worse deal as a result.
Many years ago I used to play 5-a-side football against Sir Keir. My abiding memory is of his footsteps approaching at speed: if you got the ball, he would be coming, and if you lingered long enough he would take it off you. I've got no doubt that Theresa May will hear his footsteps coming too, for Keir is a person whose brains and charisma put him in a different league to any Labour politician since Blair.
Brains and charisma aren't the only qualities a politician needs though. Amongst many others, there's also judgment.
PS You can see, incidentally, the way this is going to go by Newsnight's report last night that HMG is willing to pay very significant contributions to the EU in order to retain unfettered single market access. HMG's negotiating position is going to be undermined at every turn, and not just by Parliament.
PPS The financial markets have a reputation for seeing straight to the unsentimental core of politics. How is this? A sixth-former could see that May's Hard Brexit rehetoric is merely the outer skin of the onion. If I had dollars I'd be buying as many pounds as I could afford. At some point it's going to occur to currency traders that maybe the government's position is not quite as tough as it looks.
Wednesday 12 October 2016
Wednesday 5 October 2016
Brexit Reflections #12 - David Runciman, Michael Gove and the education gap
An excellent article in the Graun here by academic David Runciman has some interesting things to say about Brexit and the education divide.
Runciman points out that the University-educated were overwhelmingly likely to vote Remain, whilst the rest generally voted Leave. But it's what he says about the significance of this that I find interesting. Here are some bits:
"The Brexit campaign had its own Trumpian moment, courtesy of Michael Gove, who told [Sky News] that "the British people have had enough of experts". Gove was . . . widely mocked . . . But what he said struck a deep chord, because it contained a large element of truth. The experts . . . had been telling the British public that the risks of Brexit far outweighted any potential benefits. Gove insisted that the voters should decide this for themselves, on the basis of their own experiences, rather than listening to elite voices that had a vested interest in the outcome".
Hallelujah.
"There was consternation here [in Cambridge] following the result. It was accompanied by a barely suppressed feeling that ignorance had won the day. I lost count of the number of times I was told that one of the top trending searches on Google in the immediate aftermath of the vote was "What is the EU?".
"Hearing educated remainers mock those who asked that question the day after the vote was an uncomfortable experience - and not just because the story about Google searches was largely apocryphal . . . The split between the university towns and other parts of the country did not arise because one set of people understood what was truly at stake and the others were just taking a wild guess. Both sides were guessing. Even now, no one truly knows what is going to happen."
Hallelujah.
"The better-educated cleaved to one set of predictions because these chimed with what they already believed in. Polling . . . found that university graduates thought that [a Brexit vote] would produce an immediate financial crash, whereas those with fewer qualifications thought it much more likely that things would carry on as before. Prior political preferences shape what we think the evidence shows, not the other way round . . . we all have a tendency to favour the worldview that enhances our future prospects. The preference of university graduates for remaining in the EU echoes the benefits that EU membership gives them: the free movement of labour and easy access to European networks is better for those with the qualifications to take advantage of a knowledge economy. . . [But] Education does not simply divide us on the grounds of what is in our interests. It sorts us according to where we feel we belong.
Higher numbers of graduates, Runciman goes on to say, "have reinforced the education divide by enabling the better-educated to start congregating together: socially, geographically, romantically . . . If you went to university, ask yourself: how many of your friends didn't go . . . ? And among your friends, how many of those who did are married to people who didn't?"
It's fair to say that I don't personally have any friends who don't have a degree*. My only acquaintances who don't are the window cleaner, various people who work in shops in the village and some players in the orchestras I conduct.
"Social media now enhances these patterns. Friendship groups of like-minded individuals reinforce each other's worldviews. Facebook's news feed is designed to deliver information that users are more inclined to "like". Much of the shock that followed the Brexit result in educated circles came from the fact that few people had been exposed to arguments that did not match their preferences. Education does not provide any protection against these social media effects. It reinforces them."
For me that was the most striking thing post-Brexit. Time and again I found myself speaking to people who didn't seem to have met a Leave voter. Ever. Their reactions varied from curiosity ("I must say that had never occurred to me", said one well-educated Left-leaning friend when I pointed out that the jobless and low paid perhaps didn't benefit too much from unrestricted migration) to unfeigned horror and hostility.
"Many of the safeguards that have been put in place to bypass popular politics", writes Runciman, "have had the effect of empowering a new class of experts, for whom education is a prerequisite of entry into the elite . . . not just the bankers, but the lawyers, the doctors, the civil servants, the technicians, the pundits, the academics. Not all of the educated are winners in this world, but almost all of the winners are educated. It gives the impression that knowledge has become a proxy for influence.
When Gove suggested that the experts should not be trusted because they have a vested interest in what they are saying, that was his point: once knowledge becomes a prerequisite of power, then it no longer speaks for itself. It appears to speak for the worldview of the people who possess it. At that point it ceases to be knowledge and simply becomes another mark of privilege . . . Once knowledge is assumed to be just another one of the perks of power, then the basis to trust others to take decisions for us becomes eroded. Asserting the facts and asserting your privilege grow increasingly difficult to distinguish . . . These days the rich find it quite hard to get away with the presumption that their wealth is proof of their virtue. When they seek protection from the system, it is pretty clear what they are up to: they are looking after their interests. But when the educated look out for themselves they can dress it up as something ostensibly better than that: expertise . . . To those on the receiving end, it stinks. It stinks of hypocrisy, and it also stinks of self-interest.
I think this is all very perceptive, and I query only one aspect. I absolutely take the point that the educated tended to be in favour of Remain because they - we - benefit from the EU; and I also accept that the esteem in which knowledge and education are held is diminished thereby, although I very much doubt that anyone (with or without a degree) ever thinks of this in any other than the vaguest way. But because Runciman fails to distinguish between different forms of expertise he misses a narrower point that Michael Gove was making too: why should we believe economic experts when they are almost all almost always wrong?
The great unwashed may be ignorant, but they can detect bullshit a mile off. When economic experts say there'll be a crash if we leave the EU the proles say, "Nah. Don't think so. We'll just muddle through". When experts say, "Migration is good for the economy", those at the bottom end look around them at low-wage jobs, unemployment, queues for housing and the NHS and say, "Well it's not good for me mate".
No-one is expert on the future, and working class Leavers have just as much chance of being right as Mark Carney, George Osborne and David Cameron.
*I do however have a number of friends who only have one degree :)
Runciman points out that the University-educated were overwhelmingly likely to vote Remain, whilst the rest generally voted Leave. But it's what he says about the significance of this that I find interesting. Here are some bits:
"The Brexit campaign had its own Trumpian moment, courtesy of Michael Gove, who told [Sky News] that "the British people have had enough of experts". Gove was . . . widely mocked . . . But what he said struck a deep chord, because it contained a large element of truth. The experts . . . had been telling the British public that the risks of Brexit far outweighted any potential benefits. Gove insisted that the voters should decide this for themselves, on the basis of their own experiences, rather than listening to elite voices that had a vested interest in the outcome".
Hallelujah.
"There was consternation here [in Cambridge] following the result. It was accompanied by a barely suppressed feeling that ignorance had won the day. I lost count of the number of times I was told that one of the top trending searches on Google in the immediate aftermath of the vote was "What is the EU?".
"Hearing educated remainers mock those who asked that question the day after the vote was an uncomfortable experience - and not just because the story about Google searches was largely apocryphal . . . The split between the university towns and other parts of the country did not arise because one set of people understood what was truly at stake and the others were just taking a wild guess. Both sides were guessing. Even now, no one truly knows what is going to happen."
Hallelujah.
"The better-educated cleaved to one set of predictions because these chimed with what they already believed in. Polling . . . found that university graduates thought that [a Brexit vote] would produce an immediate financial crash, whereas those with fewer qualifications thought it much more likely that things would carry on as before. Prior political preferences shape what we think the evidence shows, not the other way round . . . we all have a tendency to favour the worldview that enhances our future prospects. The preference of university graduates for remaining in the EU echoes the benefits that EU membership gives them: the free movement of labour and easy access to European networks is better for those with the qualifications to take advantage of a knowledge economy. . . [But] Education does not simply divide us on the grounds of what is in our interests. It sorts us according to where we feel we belong.
Higher numbers of graduates, Runciman goes on to say, "have reinforced the education divide by enabling the better-educated to start congregating together: socially, geographically, romantically . . . If you went to university, ask yourself: how many of your friends didn't go . . . ? And among your friends, how many of those who did are married to people who didn't?"
It's fair to say that I don't personally have any friends who don't have a degree*. My only acquaintances who don't are the window cleaner, various people who work in shops in the village and some players in the orchestras I conduct.
"Social media now enhances these patterns. Friendship groups of like-minded individuals reinforce each other's worldviews. Facebook's news feed is designed to deliver information that users are more inclined to "like". Much of the shock that followed the Brexit result in educated circles came from the fact that few people had been exposed to arguments that did not match their preferences. Education does not provide any protection against these social media effects. It reinforces them."
For me that was the most striking thing post-Brexit. Time and again I found myself speaking to people who didn't seem to have met a Leave voter. Ever. Their reactions varied from curiosity ("I must say that had never occurred to me", said one well-educated Left-leaning friend when I pointed out that the jobless and low paid perhaps didn't benefit too much from unrestricted migration) to unfeigned horror and hostility.
"Many of the safeguards that have been put in place to bypass popular politics", writes Runciman, "have had the effect of empowering a new class of experts, for whom education is a prerequisite of entry into the elite . . . not just the bankers, but the lawyers, the doctors, the civil servants, the technicians, the pundits, the academics. Not all of the educated are winners in this world, but almost all of the winners are educated. It gives the impression that knowledge has become a proxy for influence.
When Gove suggested that the experts should not be trusted because they have a vested interest in what they are saying, that was his point: once knowledge becomes a prerequisite of power, then it no longer speaks for itself. It appears to speak for the worldview of the people who possess it. At that point it ceases to be knowledge and simply becomes another mark of privilege . . . Once knowledge is assumed to be just another one of the perks of power, then the basis to trust others to take decisions for us becomes eroded. Asserting the facts and asserting your privilege grow increasingly difficult to distinguish . . . These days the rich find it quite hard to get away with the presumption that their wealth is proof of their virtue. When they seek protection from the system, it is pretty clear what they are up to: they are looking after their interests. But when the educated look out for themselves they can dress it up as something ostensibly better than that: expertise . . . To those on the receiving end, it stinks. It stinks of hypocrisy, and it also stinks of self-interest.
I think this is all very perceptive, and I query only one aspect. I absolutely take the point that the educated tended to be in favour of Remain because they - we - benefit from the EU; and I also accept that the esteem in which knowledge and education are held is diminished thereby, although I very much doubt that anyone (with or without a degree) ever thinks of this in any other than the vaguest way. But because Runciman fails to distinguish between different forms of expertise he misses a narrower point that Michael Gove was making too: why should we believe economic experts when they are almost all almost always wrong?
The great unwashed may be ignorant, but they can detect bullshit a mile off. When economic experts say there'll be a crash if we leave the EU the proles say, "Nah. Don't think so. We'll just muddle through". When experts say, "Migration is good for the economy", those at the bottom end look around them at low-wage jobs, unemployment, queues for housing and the NHS and say, "Well it's not good for me mate".
No-one is expert on the future, and working class Leavers have just as much chance of being right as Mark Carney, George Osborne and David Cameron.
*I do however have a number of friends who only have one degree :)
Tuesday 20 September 2016
In defence of Paul Gascoigne
Actually, Paul Gascoigne's request to his black bouncer (alleged to have been "can you smile please, because I can't see you") is indefensible. So no, I have nothing to say in Gascoigne's defence.
However just because I can't find anything good to say about Gascoigne's comment doesn't mean the ex-footballer should have got a criminal conviction.
Gascoigne was apparently charged under section 31(1)(c) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. A person is guilty of this offence if he commits an offence under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 which is racially or religiously aggravated. That's to say to commit an offence under the 1998 Act you must have committed an offence under the earlier Act with some religious or racial aggravation added on.
Section 5 of the POA says you're guilty of an offence if (inter alia) you use "threatening or abusive words or behaviour . . . within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby." Gascoigne certainly didn't use any threatening behaviour, so the allegation must have been that he used "abusive words".
Is "Can you smile please, because I can't see you" abusive? It suggests of course that by reason of the bouncer's dark skin he was hard to see. But that's not exactly abuse. Calling someone a fat cunt is abuse. Gascoigne's words may have been humiliating and insulting, but it isn't an offence to humiliate or insult someone (actually we know this specifically in the case of s.5 because it contained the word insulting until February 2014, when it was removed from the Act).
If Gascoigne's words aren't abusive he hasn't committed an offence. And were his words likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress? Harassment suggests a continuous course of behaviour; this was a one-off. A bouncer employed by Gascoigne is unlikely to have felt alarm. Distress seems a bit nearer the mark, although I'm surprised Gascoigne's barrister didn't argue that distress requires a degree of extreme pain beyond annoyance and offence.
So it looks as if Gascoigne had a reasonable chance of acquittal on either the meaning of abusive or the meaning of distress. And yet he, presumably on the advice of his brief, decided to plead guilty. Strange.
I worry desperately about the use of the law to impose liberalism's norms on public discourse. In case you think I'm alone in this, here's Matthew Norman, writing on the Gascoigne case recently in the Independent - "Personally, I think the infringement of the criminal law into matters of taste is clumsy and generally counterproductive, and that the sanctity of freedom of speech outweighs the need to protect people from being offended . . . in what surreal madhouse is an offensive joke automatically conflated with a criminal offence? Here we find the quality of mercy strained to destruction".
There is a place for constraint of free speech. Well actually two of them. The first is that if the words are defamatory you should be able to secure damages in the civil courts. The second is where the words either put a person in fear of violence, or make it likely that violence will ensue. Free speech is too precious to mess about with in any other circumstances.
And the best remedy for people like Gascoigne is to know them, pity them and, if persistent, shun and avoid them.
However just because I can't find anything good to say about Gascoigne's comment doesn't mean the ex-footballer should have got a criminal conviction.
Gascoigne was apparently charged under section 31(1)(c) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. A person is guilty of this offence if he commits an offence under Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 which is racially or religiously aggravated. That's to say to commit an offence under the 1998 Act you must have committed an offence under the earlier Act with some religious or racial aggravation added on.
Section 5 of the POA says you're guilty of an offence if (inter alia) you use "threatening or abusive words or behaviour . . . within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby." Gascoigne certainly didn't use any threatening behaviour, so the allegation must have been that he used "abusive words".
Is "Can you smile please, because I can't see you" abusive? It suggests of course that by reason of the bouncer's dark skin he was hard to see. But that's not exactly abuse. Calling someone a fat cunt is abuse. Gascoigne's words may have been humiliating and insulting, but it isn't an offence to humiliate or insult someone (actually we know this specifically in the case of s.5 because it contained the word insulting until February 2014, when it was removed from the Act).
If Gascoigne's words aren't abusive he hasn't committed an offence. And were his words likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress? Harassment suggests a continuous course of behaviour; this was a one-off. A bouncer employed by Gascoigne is unlikely to have felt alarm. Distress seems a bit nearer the mark, although I'm surprised Gascoigne's barrister didn't argue that distress requires a degree of extreme pain beyond annoyance and offence.
So it looks as if Gascoigne had a reasonable chance of acquittal on either the meaning of abusive or the meaning of distress. And yet he, presumably on the advice of his brief, decided to plead guilty. Strange.
I worry desperately about the use of the law to impose liberalism's norms on public discourse. In case you think I'm alone in this, here's Matthew Norman, writing on the Gascoigne case recently in the Independent - "Personally, I think the infringement of the criminal law into matters of taste is clumsy and generally counterproductive, and that the sanctity of freedom of speech outweighs the need to protect people from being offended . . . in what surreal madhouse is an offensive joke automatically conflated with a criminal offence? Here we find the quality of mercy strained to destruction".
There is a place for constraint of free speech. Well actually two of them. The first is that if the words are defamatory you should be able to secure damages in the civil courts. The second is where the words either put a person in fear of violence, or make it likely that violence will ensue. Free speech is too precious to mess about with in any other circumstances.
And the best remedy for people like Gascoigne is to know them, pity them and, if persistent, shun and avoid them.
Tuesday 13 September 2016
Grammar schools and the centre ground
Like a lot of people wobbling around the centre ground of British politics, I viewed the elevation of Theresa May with a certain amount of relief. She was bright, thorough, hard-working and capable. And she was not either Andrea Leadsom or Jeremy Corbyn.
But oh Theresa, what's this stuff about education?
Two quick points. Grammar schools suck in the brightest and best. Bully for them; but where does that leave everyone else? One of the biggest problems besetting working class children is that they are more likely to be brought up by parents who never got anything out of education themselves, and are less likely to be committed to its benefits. I know from my own kids' experiences that there is a strong anti-education ethos among some denizens of comprehensive schools. Bright, well-supported middle class kids are a modest corrective in such places. Diminishing their numbers would be a disaster.
And letting faith schools select more children by religious practice runs the return of grammars close for stupidity. Leaving aside the injustice (it's unfair to tell people that their children can't go to the local school their taxes have helped pay for, just because they practice the wrong - or no - religion), what does such division do for integration? It prevents it. Labour MP Angela Rayner stood up in the Commons and accused May of "Segregation, segregation, segregation". Given Labour's dismal record of encouraging multiculturalism that's galling to hear. But Ms Rayner is right. What Britain urgently needs is 20 years or so of kids of all faiths going to school together, falling in love, doing sport, going out clubbing, drinking cider in bus stops and all the rest.
Personally I would do away with state-funded faith schools altogether. When I put this to a Christian friend he said, "Yes, but you're forgetting that C of E schools are the last repository in society for teaching Christian values". Whether you think this is a good thing depends on your point of view; as a non-Christian I can value the immense contribution of Christianity to the Enlightenment whilst thinking that perhaps Christian values should sink or swim on their own. Certainly I think (and the Birmingham Trojan Horse experience bears this out) that Islamic schools are a catastrophe in the making (a family friend who works with the Government's Prevent scheme tells me he is very worried about radicalisation, which he says is breeding a society within a society; and this guy is staunch Old Labour with a lifetime's experience in social work).
I went to a private school (which, God knows, was like the Wild West in some ways), but I am not an enthusiast. Not even a Corbyn government would ban them (and I wouldn't want to live in a society so authoritarian), but their tax privileges are hard to justify. Private schools are not charities; not in a society where state education is freely available. They exist to provide safe haven and advantage for the children of the monied. Removing their charitable status would force many more bright, well-supported children into the state system. Those kids would cope, and their presence help the less fortunate.
Centre ground? Perhaps I've got so right-wing that I'm coming round the other way again. May out! Corbyn in!
But oh Theresa, what's this stuff about education?
Two quick points. Grammar schools suck in the brightest and best. Bully for them; but where does that leave everyone else? One of the biggest problems besetting working class children is that they are more likely to be brought up by parents who never got anything out of education themselves, and are less likely to be committed to its benefits. I know from my own kids' experiences that there is a strong anti-education ethos among some denizens of comprehensive schools. Bright, well-supported middle class kids are a modest corrective in such places. Diminishing their numbers would be a disaster.
And letting faith schools select more children by religious practice runs the return of grammars close for stupidity. Leaving aside the injustice (it's unfair to tell people that their children can't go to the local school their taxes have helped pay for, just because they practice the wrong - or no - religion), what does such division do for integration? It prevents it. Labour MP Angela Rayner stood up in the Commons and accused May of "Segregation, segregation, segregation". Given Labour's dismal record of encouraging multiculturalism that's galling to hear. But Ms Rayner is right. What Britain urgently needs is 20 years or so of kids of all faiths going to school together, falling in love, doing sport, going out clubbing, drinking cider in bus stops and all the rest.
Personally I would do away with state-funded faith schools altogether. When I put this to a Christian friend he said, "Yes, but you're forgetting that C of E schools are the last repository in society for teaching Christian values". Whether you think this is a good thing depends on your point of view; as a non-Christian I can value the immense contribution of Christianity to the Enlightenment whilst thinking that perhaps Christian values should sink or swim on their own. Certainly I think (and the Birmingham Trojan Horse experience bears this out) that Islamic schools are a catastrophe in the making (a family friend who works with the Government's Prevent scheme tells me he is very worried about radicalisation, which he says is breeding a society within a society; and this guy is staunch Old Labour with a lifetime's experience in social work).
I went to a private school (which, God knows, was like the Wild West in some ways), but I am not an enthusiast. Not even a Corbyn government would ban them (and I wouldn't want to live in a society so authoritarian), but their tax privileges are hard to justify. Private schools are not charities; not in a society where state education is freely available. They exist to provide safe haven and advantage for the children of the monied. Removing their charitable status would force many more bright, well-supported children into the state system. Those kids would cope, and their presence help the less fortunate.
Centre ground? Perhaps I've got so right-wing that I'm coming round the other way again. May out! Corbyn in!
Wednesday 31 August 2016
Conducting, the death of ambition and getting what you need
I can remember the moment when it first occurred to me that I could be a professional conductor. I was round at a friend's. His Mum was a music teacher and we were listening to some music, or perhaps watching it on TV. I suddenly thought, "I could do this", for I knew instinctively that I was musical enough, personable enough, confident, eloquent and manipulative enough to stand on the box telling other people what to do and basking in the attention.
I also thought, "Oh bugger", because I was about 20 and had just started a Law degree.
As it happened, about the same time I began writing classical music seriously, and, thanks to a startling piece of good fortune, managed in my mid-20s to get a second grant to study composition with John Tavener at what was then Trinity College of Music. Swiftly I got my second study (piano) changed to conducting, and spent my last three years at College putting on concerts with other students. I liked it and was quite good at it; at any rate I won the College's conducting prize twice.
However by this time I thought conducting a second rate profession in comparison to composition, and when College finished I knew I wouldn't have the time (or money) to carry on. I was living in London, scratching a living with temp jobs. My parents showed no sign of wanting to pay for post-grad study, which was perhaps not surprising since by this stage I'd been a full-time student for seven years. In truth, I had little appetite for it either - I was going to be a composer, and the world was there to be conquered.
Trinity had no kind of programme for trying to ease its most promising graduates into the profession (unlike the RNCM, which does pretty well now), but right at the end of my time at Trinity my conducting teacher, Bernard Keeffe, had made what now seems a very generous offer. "A choir of which I am President", he said, "needs a new conductor. They have a concert next week. If you would like to come along I'll introduce you to the Chairman". But I didn't want to be a choral conductor, I thought, and went out with my girlfriend instead.
I regret this not so much for the loss of opportunity it undoubtedly represented (which if modest was real - who knows where it might have led?), but because of the snub to Bernard (a man from whom I learned at least as much about music as from Tavener). It's true that we hadn't always seen eye to eye, but if anything that made his expression of faith in me all the more generous. He deserved better.
So that was that with conducting, for fifteen years, until 2003 when, thanks to the indisposition of a friend, I got the chance to take a rehearsal with an amateur orchestra in Manchester. On the basis of that rehearsal they gave me a concert, and on the basis of that concert made me Music Director. And so I began conducting orchestras again.
During the decade that has followed I've sometimes wondered whether I might make it into the profession. I've often conducted orchestras some of whose players have been paid, or some of whom have been ex-pros. I am usually paid myself (although I would willingly conduct a good orchestra for nothing). But I've never conducted a salaried professional orchestra, and I've always wanted to, partly to find out whether I was good enough, partly because the better the players the more you can get into the really interesting stuff (as opposed to fixing the stuff which keeps going wrong) and partly because the money would stop my wife telling me to go and get a proper job.
It hasn't been a burning issue, but I hear so many stories from musician friends about incompetent, underprepared or downright nasty conductors who are out there (Getting work! Having agents! Earning good money!) that you can't help but think - why not me?
The answer to that of course is that, like most glamour professions, conducting is way oversubscribed. You are competing against people who always knew this was what they wanted to do, who were better looking, better resourced, better connected and possibly even harder working and more talented than you are. On the whole those are the kind of people who are going to get on, not composers who started conducting as a side-line in their early forties (and who now increasingly resemble Frank Dobson, the former Labour member for Holborn and St Pancras).
I sometimes think it's possible that I'll be asked to conduct a professional orchestra in one of my own pieces, and that, beguiled by my cheery attitude and insistence on short rehearsals, I'll be invited back to do a tour of Belorussia where we'll do Brahms 4 a dozen times in two weeks. But it hasn't happened. And until last year I minded. Slightly.
Then in 2015 I went to see the BBC Phil play at the Bridgewater in Mancester. The repertoire was Beatrice and Benedict, the Brahms fiddle concerto, La Valse and Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements. I found myself thinking, I could conduct all these pieces, but it's a big programme. And God I'd have been bricking it the night before. I mean, all those time changes. The players won't know some of it all that well. They'll be depending on me. What if I go wrong? One mistake and we're all fucked. And that's just the Stravinsky. La Valse isn't easy. Neither is the Berlioz. And the Brahms concerto - well, you never know what soloists are going to do.
So while I knew I could do it all, I knew that it would have been a major undertaking. Yet the BBC Phil's conductor, a young Frenchman, made it look easy. He stood there, an elegant mess of beguiling dark curls, one hand on the rail, smiling at the orchestra, hardly looking at the score, a picture of the art which conceals art.
For I knew how much work it would have cost him to master such a programme so thoroughly. Hours and hours of labour - reading, learning and marking up the scores. Learning it not so that it would go right, but so that it could not possibly go wrong. And I thought, I do not have time to do this. Not and compose as well. And, knowing me, I would have found the job of learning the Stravinsky a terrible drudge. For I do not like Stravinsky much, finding a lot of his music devoted mostly to showing the listener how clever the composer is. And I am not very good at doing things I don't like.
As a conductor of amateur orchestras, some of which are pretty good, I can by and large choose the music I conduct. Moreover I get loads of rehearsal time. Over the years I've conducted all the greats. Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen - and quite a lot of my own music as well. Conducting has given me a mechanic's view into the engine of some of the greatest pieces of art Western civilisation has ever devised. What a privilege. When I look back at my early orchestral pieces I don't shudder at their incompetence: they're surprisingly good considering I knew next to nothing about how to write for orchestra. But conducting has made me far, far better at it.
I have also learned a good deal about myself. Before I became a conductor I was always one of the people who sat at the back of the room trying to be funny (sometimes) and clever (less often). Conducting forced me to take responsibility. I haven't enjoyed that part of it, but it's the flip side of being in charge. It still astonishes me that, often after many years working together, there are musicians who are not just willing to tolerate me but who appear to actually like me. How could that have happened? Finally it also taught me the limits of ambition. It turned out that actually I didn't want to be a professional conductor after all.
Of course I'm aware that the mind eventually finds ways of accommodating the unpalatable (perhaps even death, in due course), and that this could merely be some mid-life ex post facto rationalisation. But all the same I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones You Can't Always Get What You Want. For Jagger / Richards continued "But if you try sometimes / you might just find / you get what you need".
I also thought, "Oh bugger", because I was about 20 and had just started a Law degree.
As it happened, about the same time I began writing classical music seriously, and, thanks to a startling piece of good fortune, managed in my mid-20s to get a second grant to study composition with John Tavener at what was then Trinity College of Music. Swiftly I got my second study (piano) changed to conducting, and spent my last three years at College putting on concerts with other students. I liked it and was quite good at it; at any rate I won the College's conducting prize twice.
However by this time I thought conducting a second rate profession in comparison to composition, and when College finished I knew I wouldn't have the time (or money) to carry on. I was living in London, scratching a living with temp jobs. My parents showed no sign of wanting to pay for post-grad study, which was perhaps not surprising since by this stage I'd been a full-time student for seven years. In truth, I had little appetite for it either - I was going to be a composer, and the world was there to be conquered.
Trinity had no kind of programme for trying to ease its most promising graduates into the profession (unlike the RNCM, which does pretty well now), but right at the end of my time at Trinity my conducting teacher, Bernard Keeffe, had made what now seems a very generous offer. "A choir of which I am President", he said, "needs a new conductor. They have a concert next week. If you would like to come along I'll introduce you to the Chairman". But I didn't want to be a choral conductor, I thought, and went out with my girlfriend instead.
I regret this not so much for the loss of opportunity it undoubtedly represented (which if modest was real - who knows where it might have led?), but because of the snub to Bernard (a man from whom I learned at least as much about music as from Tavener). It's true that we hadn't always seen eye to eye, but if anything that made his expression of faith in me all the more generous. He deserved better.
So that was that with conducting, for fifteen years, until 2003 when, thanks to the indisposition of a friend, I got the chance to take a rehearsal with an amateur orchestra in Manchester. On the basis of that rehearsal they gave me a concert, and on the basis of that concert made me Music Director. And so I began conducting orchestras again.
During the decade that has followed I've sometimes wondered whether I might make it into the profession. I've often conducted orchestras some of whose players have been paid, or some of whom have been ex-pros. I am usually paid myself (although I would willingly conduct a good orchestra for nothing). But I've never conducted a salaried professional orchestra, and I've always wanted to, partly to find out whether I was good enough, partly because the better the players the more you can get into the really interesting stuff (as opposed to fixing the stuff which keeps going wrong) and partly because the money would stop my wife telling me to go and get a proper job.
It hasn't been a burning issue, but I hear so many stories from musician friends about incompetent, underprepared or downright nasty conductors who are out there (Getting work! Having agents! Earning good money!) that you can't help but think - why not me?
The answer to that of course is that, like most glamour professions, conducting is way oversubscribed. You are competing against people who always knew this was what they wanted to do, who were better looking, better resourced, better connected and possibly even harder working and more talented than you are. On the whole those are the kind of people who are going to get on, not composers who started conducting as a side-line in their early forties (and who now increasingly resemble Frank Dobson, the former Labour member for Holborn and St Pancras).
I sometimes think it's possible that I'll be asked to conduct a professional orchestra in one of my own pieces, and that, beguiled by my cheery attitude and insistence on short rehearsals, I'll be invited back to do a tour of Belorussia where we'll do Brahms 4 a dozen times in two weeks. But it hasn't happened. And until last year I minded. Slightly.
Then in 2015 I went to see the BBC Phil play at the Bridgewater in Mancester. The repertoire was Beatrice and Benedict, the Brahms fiddle concerto, La Valse and Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements. I found myself thinking, I could conduct all these pieces, but it's a big programme. And God I'd have been bricking it the night before. I mean, all those time changes. The players won't know some of it all that well. They'll be depending on me. What if I go wrong? One mistake and we're all fucked. And that's just the Stravinsky. La Valse isn't easy. Neither is the Berlioz. And the Brahms concerto - well, you never know what soloists are going to do.
So while I knew I could do it all, I knew that it would have been a major undertaking. Yet the BBC Phil's conductor, a young Frenchman, made it look easy. He stood there, an elegant mess of beguiling dark curls, one hand on the rail, smiling at the orchestra, hardly looking at the score, a picture of the art which conceals art.
For I knew how much work it would have cost him to master such a programme so thoroughly. Hours and hours of labour - reading, learning and marking up the scores. Learning it not so that it would go right, but so that it could not possibly go wrong. And I thought, I do not have time to do this. Not and compose as well. And, knowing me, I would have found the job of learning the Stravinsky a terrible drudge. For I do not like Stravinsky much, finding a lot of his music devoted mostly to showing the listener how clever the composer is. And I am not very good at doing things I don't like.
As a conductor of amateur orchestras, some of which are pretty good, I can by and large choose the music I conduct. Moreover I get loads of rehearsal time. Over the years I've conducted all the greats. Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen - and quite a lot of my own music as well. Conducting has given me a mechanic's view into the engine of some of the greatest pieces of art Western civilisation has ever devised. What a privilege. When I look back at my early orchestral pieces I don't shudder at their incompetence: they're surprisingly good considering I knew next to nothing about how to write for orchestra. But conducting has made me far, far better at it.
I have also learned a good deal about myself. Before I became a conductor I was always one of the people who sat at the back of the room trying to be funny (sometimes) and clever (less often). Conducting forced me to take responsibility. I haven't enjoyed that part of it, but it's the flip side of being in charge. It still astonishes me that, often after many years working together, there are musicians who are not just willing to tolerate me but who appear to actually like me. How could that have happened? Finally it also taught me the limits of ambition. It turned out that actually I didn't want to be a professional conductor after all.
Of course I'm aware that the mind eventually finds ways of accommodating the unpalatable (perhaps even death, in due course), and that this could merely be some mid-life ex post facto rationalisation. But all the same I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones You Can't Always Get What You Want. For Jagger / Richards continued "But if you try sometimes / you might just find / you get what you need".
Monday 22 August 2016
Orwell's statue and the BBC
The other day I learned that Westminster City Council has given planning permission for a bronze statue of George Orwell to be placed outside New Broadcasting House. The BBC has welcomed this, although the initiative didn't come from them and has in fact been paid for by private subscription.
A rousing two and a half cheers. Orwell is clearly the greatest Left wing British writer, and one of the greatest British Left wing thinkers. Whatever his shortcomings as a novelist (personally I think he's a much better essayist), 1984 and Animal Farm were books which changed the world. Very few writers can say they've done that. These two books helped destroy the intellectual case for Communism and were, it's often forgotten, works which required great moral courage to write, given that the author was swimming against a flood tide of pro-Soviet consensus amongst his friends, colleagues and political class generally.
I like to think that, had he lived, a man as fearless and scrupulous as Orwell would have tempered his Leftism in the face of the way the world changed after the 39-45 war. As Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?" In Orwell's absence, the rest of us must look at the example of his method and try and live up to it.
But back to the BBC, where Orwell worked for two years during the war. The inscription behind his statue is to be, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear".
Worryingly, this is a principle which I would guess is more controversial and less widely accepted now than at any time since Orwell's death, not least at the BBC itself. For the Corporation itself has a less than noble record of not listening to things it doesn't want to hear.
I'm thinking of immigration, where the BBC has repeatedly had to concede (In its own 2007 report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, and five years later in the Stuart Prebble report of 2013 for the BBC Trust) that it ignored the concerns of the general public.
Then there's Brexit, where the editorial staff seemed to have no idea that there were people beyond West London who might not actually benefit from EU membership; the look of shock on reporters' faces when the result came in spoke volumes for the collision they had just endured with the views of ordinary people.
So I would have thought another quote from Orwell might be more apposite behind his statue. How about this from The Lion and the Unicorn?
"Underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia - their severance from the common culture of the country".
Or maybe a gloss on the original quote -
"If public service broadcasting means anything at all, it means listening to the people even when you don't want to hear what they're saying".
A rousing two and a half cheers. Orwell is clearly the greatest Left wing British writer, and one of the greatest British Left wing thinkers. Whatever his shortcomings as a novelist (personally I think he's a much better essayist), 1984 and Animal Farm were books which changed the world. Very few writers can say they've done that. These two books helped destroy the intellectual case for Communism and were, it's often forgotten, works which required great moral courage to write, given that the author was swimming against a flood tide of pro-Soviet consensus amongst his friends, colleagues and political class generally.
I like to think that, had he lived, a man as fearless and scrupulous as Orwell would have tempered his Leftism in the face of the way the world changed after the 39-45 war. As Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?" In Orwell's absence, the rest of us must look at the example of his method and try and live up to it.
But back to the BBC, where Orwell worked for two years during the war. The inscription behind his statue is to be, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear".
Worryingly, this is a principle which I would guess is more controversial and less widely accepted now than at any time since Orwell's death, not least at the BBC itself. For the Corporation itself has a less than noble record of not listening to things it doesn't want to hear.
I'm thinking of immigration, where the BBC has repeatedly had to concede (In its own 2007 report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, and five years later in the Stuart Prebble report of 2013 for the BBC Trust) that it ignored the concerns of the general public.
Then there's Brexit, where the editorial staff seemed to have no idea that there were people beyond West London who might not actually benefit from EU membership; the look of shock on reporters' faces when the result came in spoke volumes for the collision they had just endured with the views of ordinary people.
So I would have thought another quote from Orwell might be more apposite behind his statue. How about this from The Lion and the Unicorn?
"Underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia - their severance from the common culture of the country".
Or maybe a gloss on the original quote -
"If public service broadcasting means anything at all, it means listening to the people even when you don't want to hear what they're saying".
Monday 25 July 2016
Brexit reflections #11 - the emergency brake redux
Yesterday the papers reported a startling fact. "UK officials" had, as the Guardian put it, confirmed that an emergency brake on immigration was "on the table" in Brexit talks.
Most of the comment which followed this story (unspecific as to who "UK officials" might have been, but nevertheless so widely printed that you'd think it had some basis in fact) concerned the outrage of Tory MPs hostile to immigration. They had not, they fulminated, fought for so long for Brexit only to have one of its principal charms taken away at the moment of victory.
I guess you can see their point; but for me the really astonishing facet of this story, assuming it to be broadly true, lay elsewhere.
David Cameron went to Brussels to ask for concessions which would enable him to sell Remain to the British. He went to see Angela Merkel, we are told, and asked for an emergency brake on immigration. Nein, said Frau Merkel. Not a chance. Cameron had to make do with minor concessions on benefits for migrants, which by the time of the Referendum hadn't been agreed by other EU countries (and would in any case have been dependent on their unanimous agreement). Britain duly voted to Leave.
So this is where we are. A variation on the principle of free movement which Cameron was refused in the months before the Referendum now suddenly appears to be possible, and may be combined with continued access to the single market now we have voted Leave.
Wow.
If you assume it's true that other EU countries were mostly dismayed by the Brexit vote and would, whatever their reservations about Britain, have largely preferred us to stay, what are we to infer from this extraordinary volte face?
It must be agonising for EUrophiles to contemplate the effect this concession might have had if it been made, say, at the beginning of June. David Cameron would have been able to say, "Look! At last we have some means of stopping this unending flow of migrants. 330,000 net last year. A group of people roughly the size of Bristol. At last we'll be able to start bringing that figure down". A lot of people would have voted differently. The Referendum result would probably have different.
For EUrosceptics this change of heart prompts at the very least a grim shake of the head. For does it not show the staggering incompetence of the EU leadership? Migration might have been the most important issue in the Referendum, but an emergency brake, a sign that the tide might begin to slow, could have had a huge impact on the result. You'd have to imagine that EU leaders are kicking themselves.
What does this extraordinary mistake make Merkel, Juncker, Schwarz and Hollande et al look like?
Well here's a few things. Proud, inflexible, ill-informed (what were their UK diplomats doing?), unimaginative and doctrinaire for starters.
What absolutely crap leadership.
Aha, say the old Brexit hands. We told you that's what they were like.
Most of the comment which followed this story (unspecific as to who "UK officials" might have been, but nevertheless so widely printed that you'd think it had some basis in fact) concerned the outrage of Tory MPs hostile to immigration. They had not, they fulminated, fought for so long for Brexit only to have one of its principal charms taken away at the moment of victory.
I guess you can see their point; but for me the really astonishing facet of this story, assuming it to be broadly true, lay elsewhere.
David Cameron went to Brussels to ask for concessions which would enable him to sell Remain to the British. He went to see Angela Merkel, we are told, and asked for an emergency brake on immigration. Nein, said Frau Merkel. Not a chance. Cameron had to make do with minor concessions on benefits for migrants, which by the time of the Referendum hadn't been agreed by other EU countries (and would in any case have been dependent on their unanimous agreement). Britain duly voted to Leave.
So this is where we are. A variation on the principle of free movement which Cameron was refused in the months before the Referendum now suddenly appears to be possible, and may be combined with continued access to the single market now we have voted Leave.
Wow.
If you assume it's true that other EU countries were mostly dismayed by the Brexit vote and would, whatever their reservations about Britain, have largely preferred us to stay, what are we to infer from this extraordinary volte face?
It must be agonising for EUrophiles to contemplate the effect this concession might have had if it been made, say, at the beginning of June. David Cameron would have been able to say, "Look! At last we have some means of stopping this unending flow of migrants. 330,000 net last year. A group of people roughly the size of Bristol. At last we'll be able to start bringing that figure down". A lot of people would have voted differently. The Referendum result would probably have different.
For EUrosceptics this change of heart prompts at the very least a grim shake of the head. For does it not show the staggering incompetence of the EU leadership? Migration might have been the most important issue in the Referendum, but an emergency brake, a sign that the tide might begin to slow, could have had a huge impact on the result. You'd have to imagine that EU leaders are kicking themselves.
What does this extraordinary mistake make Merkel, Juncker, Schwarz and Hollande et al look like?
Well here's a few things. Proud, inflexible, ill-informed (what were their UK diplomats doing?), unimaginative and doctrinaire for starters.
What absolutely crap leadership.
Aha, say the old Brexit hands. We told you that's what they were like.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)