I'm trying to remember where I was when I first heard Reelin' in the Years. Probably in my parents' bedroom listening to the radio. This was a place more or less guaranteed to be unoccupied during the day, and therefore free from the fierce disapproval of my father, who hated pop music. This would be about 1973, I think. I have been listening to Steely Dan and therefore to the work of Walter Becker, whose death was announced yesterday, for nearly 45 years.
Thanks Walt. To say that Becker's death leaves a hole in the world of music would probably not be true, since the years between 1972 and 1978, when Steely Dan released the six albums at the heart of their output, are decades in the past and their work still lives. But it's sad all the same. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, and all that.
Such is the pleasure their music has brought me, I once reflected that amongst the downsides of death would be that I would no longer be able to listen to it.
Unlike many great songwriters, Becker and Donald Fagen's material doesn't travel well to other artists. Almost none of their best songs have been covered by others, partly because they were so brilliantly realised by the odd mix of Becker and Fagen themselves, regular players like Jeff Baxter and Denny Dias, and a coterie of session wizards; but perhaps more pertinently because the material was so idiosyncratic and so obviously a consequence of their own hipsterish personae.
Becker and Fagen liked jazz as well as rock and roll, and the idea of the Sonny Rollins-loving cool cat with the black polo neck, the pallor of late nights, the succession of cigarettes and the copy of The Naked Lunch in the pocket oozes from their work, and from the way they presented themselves.
Although enthusiastic about jazz, it's hard to imagine Becker and Fagen being in favour of much else. A rich vein of cynicism courses through their stuff, and if they ever considered charting the obvious emotions it rarely shows. There's little doubt that this was what Becker and Fagen were really like - there are interviews online which display their mordant humour to good effect: it wasn't a front.
They were sceptics at a young age. Whilst still students at Bard College, New York, they quickly grasped that the 1968 Summer of Love was a sham. "I heard it was you", Fagen sang on Only A Fool Would Say That a few years later, "Talking 'bout a world where all was free / It just couldn't be / And only a fool would say that". Cynicism and irony can be overdone however - they are good responses to some aspects of life, but other emotions are useful too. Becker and Fagen sometimes struggled in their personal lives, and Becker's descent into heroin addiction was one reason for the long hiatus in the pair's collaboration which followed Aja in 1978.
Nevertheless, some of their best work displays a wonderful tenderness and subtlety. Their songs are musical short stories. I read Gaucho as a monologue by a man who returns home to find his gay lover with a young Hispanic. Glamour Profession may or may not be the tedious boasting of a Hollywood driver-to-the-celebs. Kid Charlemagne recounts the panic stricken flight of LA drug dealers.
And all these songs are set to a dazzling variety of jazz inflected stylings - ballad, rock and roll, gospel, waltz, reggae, disco, funk and blues. Some - for example Your Gold Teeth II and Home At Last - seem to invent a new genre all of their own. For me, it's no accident that the pair's most popular tunes - Reelin' in the Years, Rikki Don't Lose That Number, Deacon Blue, Do It Again - are the ones whose subject matters veer closest to the mainstream (they could have made a lot more money if they'd wanted). Coincidentally or not, female Dan-heads are in short supply.
And yet I also feel that Becker and Fagen saw the limitations of jazz. They worked very hard and spent huge sums of record company money to find soloists who could add something other than virtuosity - although there was plenty of that - to their material. They were aware of the possibility of empty note-spinning, and of the blandness of jazz-rock fusion. Music always says something, and a good deal of the genre seems to devote itself to saying, "Look at this F sharp 7th chord suspended over an A/G diad", or "Look how many million notes per minute I can play". Not in Becker and Fagen's hands. The writer Richard Williams described Steely Dan recently as "clever" above all else. Not so. Yes, they were clever. Smart arse if you like. But they never allowed cleverness to be the goal.
Becker was a decent enough bass player and rather underrated guitarist, who also played a bit of keyboards. Like Fagen, he preferred others to play on the band's records, and only performed himself when he had to. Although he never sang on a Steely Dan record, those who bought his first solo album, Eleven Tracks of Whack, were surprised at the strength of his scratchy baritone voice. With Donald Fagen, he mined an art form with results that can induce dizzying pleasure, and charted the underbelly of the American (and human) condition with rueful wit. Thanks again Walt.
Tuesday 5 September 2017
Monday 26 June 2017
Andrea Leadsom, Mishal Husain and diversity at the BBC.
Andrea Leadsom MP has been widely mocked on Twitter for telling the BBC presenter Mishal Husain that it would be a good thing if some journalists could be a bit more patriotic.
This was a stupid remark, for obvious reasons, not the least of which is that it gave the government's opponents the opportunity to ridicule Ms Leadsom for her naive devotion to the idea that a bit of patriotrism might be a good thing.
But there is another reason why Leadsom gave the wrong answer to Ms Husain's question, now forgotten in the hoo-ha, and this tells us a good deal more about the interviewer, and about Britain. The question was, in terms, "Is anything going right for the government?" It was Husain's persistent repetition of this question which made Leadsom snap.
The answer she should have given was, "Well, since 2010 we have had a steadily growing economy, we've created hundreds of thousands of jobs, unemployment is at historically low levels, and we have succeeded in reducing the deficit from £150bn a year down to about £50bn, a fall of about two thirds. So I would say quite a lot is going right for the government, wouldn't you?" Game, set and match to Leadsom.
But if Leadsom's was a stupid answer, Husain's was a stupid question. It was stupid because she should have expected to receive both barrels from Leadsom. But Husain didn't anticipate the answer Leadsom could have given. Why not? Because Husain, a low-wattage intellect who surely was promoted from the ranks of other low-wattage intellects (and perhaps even higher-wattage ones) because of her beauty and diversity box-ticking qualities, does not think the government has achieved anything worth mentioning. She genuinely thought she was asking Leadsom a hard question. It was actually a long-hop outside leg stump which Leadsom, not the sharpest herself, comprehensively missed.
Partly that's the government's fault. It didn't campaign sufficiently on its steady economic record during the election. Partly its because people take the present situation for granted. But partly its because the BBC tends to employ people who went straight into the Corporation with a good humanities degree from a good university, where they were taught by academics who had never left university themselves after attaining their own humanities degree (recent research shows that the overwhelming majority of British academics are Labour voters). So of course Ms Husain is a Hampstead liberal of cliche whose distaste for Toryism is visceral.
I have no enthusiasm for Ms Leadsom, and I hope she isn't the next Tory leader, but it just goes to show that the BBC's enthusiasm for diversity only goes as far as diversity of appearance. Diversity of view? Not so much.
This was a stupid remark, for obvious reasons, not the least of which is that it gave the government's opponents the opportunity to ridicule Ms Leadsom for her naive devotion to the idea that a bit of patriotrism might be a good thing.
But there is another reason why Leadsom gave the wrong answer to Ms Husain's question, now forgotten in the hoo-ha, and this tells us a good deal more about the interviewer, and about Britain. The question was, in terms, "Is anything going right for the government?" It was Husain's persistent repetition of this question which made Leadsom snap.
The answer she should have given was, "Well, since 2010 we have had a steadily growing economy, we've created hundreds of thousands of jobs, unemployment is at historically low levels, and we have succeeded in reducing the deficit from £150bn a year down to about £50bn, a fall of about two thirds. So I would say quite a lot is going right for the government, wouldn't you?" Game, set and match to Leadsom.
But if Leadsom's was a stupid answer, Husain's was a stupid question. It was stupid because she should have expected to receive both barrels from Leadsom. But Husain didn't anticipate the answer Leadsom could have given. Why not? Because Husain, a low-wattage intellect who surely was promoted from the ranks of other low-wattage intellects (and perhaps even higher-wattage ones) because of her beauty and diversity box-ticking qualities, does not think the government has achieved anything worth mentioning. She genuinely thought she was asking Leadsom a hard question. It was actually a long-hop outside leg stump which Leadsom, not the sharpest herself, comprehensively missed.
Partly that's the government's fault. It didn't campaign sufficiently on its steady economic record during the election. Partly its because people take the present situation for granted. But partly its because the BBC tends to employ people who went straight into the Corporation with a good humanities degree from a good university, where they were taught by academics who had never left university themselves after attaining their own humanities degree (recent research shows that the overwhelming majority of British academics are Labour voters). So of course Ms Husain is a Hampstead liberal of cliche whose distaste for Toryism is visceral.
I have no enthusiasm for Ms Leadsom, and I hope she isn't the next Tory leader, but it just goes to show that the BBC's enthusiasm for diversity only goes as far as diversity of appearance. Diversity of view? Not so much.
Monday 19 June 2017
Reflections on the Grenfell Tower tragedy
After horror at the events last week, and trailing a long way behind, my strongest reaction has been contempt for the press. Not just the person from the Sun who posed as a relative to try and reach one of the injured in hospital, but for all those who jumped to conclusions about the fire and then excoriated Theresa May for failing to go and visit the survivors straight away. Never have so many people have become experts in fire regulations and types of exterior cladding in so little time.
If you think you know why the fire happened, why aren't you calling for the cancellation of the public inquiry? After all, it's just a waste of money now.
Journalists don't know why the fire started, how it spread so quickly, whether the wrong type of cladding was used, whether it breached fire regulations, whether the fire regulations were adequate, whether different cladding might have prevented any fatalities, why sprinklers weren't fitted, whether sprinklers might have stopped the fire, whether it could have been stopped if it weren't for cuts in the fire services or whether the instruction for tenants to stay in their flats rather than crowd the staircase led to unnecessary deaths. Journalists don't know any of these things (and neither do the rest of us). They should wait for the public enquiry to report rather than pretending that they've already worked the answers out. The Times journalist who described the heads of various sprinkler trade bodies as "experts" (instead of "salesmen") deserves particular contempt.
I would be willing to bet quite a large sum that the panels fitted conformed to building regulations.
As for Mrs May, she is no doubt not at her best in situations which require her to interact with other carbon-based bipeds, but the response to her failure to visit the survivors straight away is hysterical. These people have lost their homes, their possessions and in many cases friends and family. I very much doubt whether any of them is saying, "What really pisses me off is that the Prime Minister didn't come and see me". Tellingly, it is other people who have been complaining.
You can learn a good deal about the leader of the Labour party and his acolytes from this catastrophe. Mr Corbyn was very quick to lay the blame on "austerity", even as public spending continues to rise. I guess we shouldn't be surprised by this sort of opportunism, but when a block of council flats, whose cheap rents are subsidised by others, has just had nearly £10 million spent on a face-lift, "austerity" is not the word which immediately springs to mind.
As for the Labour call for the displaced to be housed in the vacant properties of RBK&C's millionaires, this is populism writ large. Don't like the fact that other people have got a lot of money? Fine. Let's just confiscate their assets. Never mind that, in time, the rich will sue for damages and your gesture politics will end up costing the state and the council far, far more than, for example, bed and breakfast accommodation. We hate the rich, so let's do something than hurts them.
Messrs Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott, Lavery and Milne are dangerous people, for whom the rule of law means little. If you think this is hyperbole, McDonnell has called for a "million strong march" to drive the Tories from office.
It's must be so tempting, when you feel the wind of public opinion in your sails, to disregard an election result and the rule of law. Like Donald Trump, Mr Corbyn tells his supporters what they want to hear. You only have to substitute "the rich" for "the Mexicans" to see the similarities.
Lastly, a word about the "poor". Let's be realistic about the residents of the Grenfell Tower. In some respects they had uniquely privileged position. They had a council tenancy at a low rent in a tower block in one of the richest cities in the world where jobs are widely available. Having lived nearby for many years at the end of the twentieth century, I can testify that Notting Hill and its environs are a great place to live.
Ask any of the residents a month ago if they'd prefer to swap their flat for a bedsit in the private rented sector at the same price. You would have had no takers. Compared to the overwhelming majority of people at the bottom end of the socio economic scale in London they were well off.*
This doesn't mean that their deaths don't matter, or aren't a tragedy, or that those at fault do not deserve to be punished. It does mean however that once again the Left and the unthinking press have a very sketchy relationship with the truth, particularly when distorting it can tug heart-strings and stir self-righteous anger.
*A couple of days after the fire I heard one of the residents interviewed on PM. He complained that the £5,000 bank transfer provided to residents by the Government was not enough. "It's a joke", he said. "My bed and my TV cost more than that".
PS As the days have rolled by, it has emerged that some dozens of tower blocks have been fitted with the same non-fire retardant cladding. Many of them in Labour controlled areas. Many during the Blair governments. These revelations make a mockery of Corbyn's attempts to blame Grenfell on "Tory austerity".
*A couple of days after the fire I heard one of the residents interviewed on PM. He complained that the £5,000 bank transfer provided to residents by the Government was not enough. "It's a joke", he said. "My bed and my TV cost more than that".
PS As the days have rolled by, it has emerged that some dozens of tower blocks have been fitted with the same non-fire retardant cladding. Many of them in Labour controlled areas. Many during the Blair governments. These revelations make a mockery of Corbyn's attempts to blame Grenfell on "Tory austerity".
General Election 2017 - the big picture
It's easy to get lost in the minutiae of election results - swings, demographics, careers busted and revived. Here's a wider view.
The welfare state was created at a time when life expectancies were much lower and healthcare procedures much less sophisticated. Nearly 70 years later we are living longer. Elderly people are expensive to keep alive, both because they require more medical intervention than the young and because the state has to pay them a pension. The increased complexity of new medical techniques has driven the cost of healthcare upwards.
At the same time Britain has effectively outsourced its manufacturing industry to countries in the Far East where labour costs are lower. This has reduced the price of consumer goods, but has been devastating for Britain's balance of payments because the money we use to buy such goods goes out of the country. It pays workers abroad, whose taxes go to their governments, not ours.
To put it bluntly, running Britain has got more expensive just as our ability to pay for it has declined. The 2008 crash is symptomatic of this. It happened because both consumers and governments tried to sustain their living standards by borrowing.
When income declines and costs go up, a number of solutions are possible. One is to say "We must spend less". This has been the Tory approach since 2010; and it has been successful to the extent that the deficit (excess of spend over income) has been reduced from about £150bn per year to about £1bn per week. However there is now a perceptible effect on public services, and in the meantime Britain's public sector debt has continued to balloon towards a danger point whose exact location is of course unknown.
The other solution is to say, the best way to reduce long-term borrowing is more short-term borrowing. The economy runs faster and companies are encouraged to invest. A virtuous circle is created whereby investment begets investment and both beget growth. That growth raises the taxes which therefore pay for the extra borrowing (or at least makes the extra borrowing smaller as a proportion of newly increased GDP).
One weakness of this latter proposal is that economic policy is always implemented by politicians, whose view of the limits of prudence is always taken with an eye on the next election. In a way it is fatuous to point out such defects, because there will always be a section of the public, of politicians and of the economics profession which wants it to be true even if it is not. That section can become influential enough to contest a general election, as the events of last week demonstrate.
I heard again again, from Mr Corbyn, his supporters and the media that "people are tired of austerity". I take this to mean, "people are tired of attempting to live within their means", which is not the same thing as "people think the case for living within your means has not been made out". The Times headline this morning is "Austerity is over, May tells Tories", so even the Nasty Party seems to have accepted that the public mood is against them, never mind that if you look at the figures, public spending has actually continued to rise.
I believe that ultimately we will have to live more or less within the limits of our income, and that we will all come to realise that sooner or later. I'm not surprised that a lot of people haven't grasped it yet, but they will, and I suppose it's only to be expected that they will only do so after all the vaguely plausible alternatives have been tried. Eventually, a Government will try to spend its way out of debt. I'm sure they will fail. Eventually the markets will rebel.
What society will look like then I shudder to think. The affluent (in other words anyone with a good job or who has built up some savings) will be told they must bear their fair share of the burden (this will be whatever the party demanding the money says it means at the time of the demand). Tax rates will rise to punitive levels, enterprise will be discouraged and mobile money will leave the country. It will, in other words, be a return to the '70s, but with this crucial difference: then the UK's debt to GDP ratio was below 50% and falling. It is now above 80% and rising.
Be afraid. The culture of entitlement has a sharp grip on the British public imagination, and the first response of many to the realisation that it is in jeopardy will be anger and denial.
The welfare state was created at a time when life expectancies were much lower and healthcare procedures much less sophisticated. Nearly 70 years later we are living longer. Elderly people are expensive to keep alive, both because they require more medical intervention than the young and because the state has to pay them a pension. The increased complexity of new medical techniques has driven the cost of healthcare upwards.
At the same time Britain has effectively outsourced its manufacturing industry to countries in the Far East where labour costs are lower. This has reduced the price of consumer goods, but has been devastating for Britain's balance of payments because the money we use to buy such goods goes out of the country. It pays workers abroad, whose taxes go to their governments, not ours.
To put it bluntly, running Britain has got more expensive just as our ability to pay for it has declined. The 2008 crash is symptomatic of this. It happened because both consumers and governments tried to sustain their living standards by borrowing.
When income declines and costs go up, a number of solutions are possible. One is to say "We must spend less". This has been the Tory approach since 2010; and it has been successful to the extent that the deficit (excess of spend over income) has been reduced from about £150bn per year to about £1bn per week. However there is now a perceptible effect on public services, and in the meantime Britain's public sector debt has continued to balloon towards a danger point whose exact location is of course unknown.
The other solution is to say, the best way to reduce long-term borrowing is more short-term borrowing. The economy runs faster and companies are encouraged to invest. A virtuous circle is created whereby investment begets investment and both beget growth. That growth raises the taxes which therefore pay for the extra borrowing (or at least makes the extra borrowing smaller as a proportion of newly increased GDP).
One weakness of this latter proposal is that economic policy is always implemented by politicians, whose view of the limits of prudence is always taken with an eye on the next election. In a way it is fatuous to point out such defects, because there will always be a section of the public, of politicians and of the economics profession which wants it to be true even if it is not. That section can become influential enough to contest a general election, as the events of last week demonstrate.
I heard again again, from Mr Corbyn, his supporters and the media that "people are tired of austerity". I take this to mean, "people are tired of attempting to live within their means", which is not the same thing as "people think the case for living within your means has not been made out". The Times headline this morning is "Austerity is over, May tells Tories", so even the Nasty Party seems to have accepted that the public mood is against them, never mind that if you look at the figures, public spending has actually continued to rise.
I believe that ultimately we will have to live more or less within the limits of our income, and that we will all come to realise that sooner or later. I'm not surprised that a lot of people haven't grasped it yet, but they will, and I suppose it's only to be expected that they will only do so after all the vaguely plausible alternatives have been tried. Eventually, a Government will try to spend its way out of debt. I'm sure they will fail. Eventually the markets will rebel.
What society will look like then I shudder to think. The affluent (in other words anyone with a good job or who has built up some savings) will be told they must bear their fair share of the burden (this will be whatever the party demanding the money says it means at the time of the demand). Tax rates will rise to punitive levels, enterprise will be discouraged and mobile money will leave the country. It will, in other words, be a return to the '70s, but with this crucial difference: then the UK's debt to GDP ratio was below 50% and falling. It is now above 80% and rising.
Be afraid. The culture of entitlement has a sharp grip on the British public imagination, and the first response of many to the realisation that it is in jeopardy will be anger and denial.
Monday 12 June 2017
General Election 2017 - are the baby boomers to blame?
In a post-election interview Jeremy Corbyn claimed that the Tories had "lost" the election and that Labour had "won". These strange interpretations of the words suggest that "post-truth" phenomena are not limited to the loonier reaches of the Republican party in the United States.
The Tories won most seats, and the biggest percentage of the popular vote. They won the election.
Just not as well as they expected.
I saw an analysis of constituencies into which the Tories had poured resources. It turned out that they had tried hard in areas which turned out to be unwinnable, neglecting more realistic constituencies which, had they won, would have given them an increased majority. Hubris, you might say. You might also ask why the Tories did not implement the Boundary Commission report while they had the opportunity. Doing so would have given them dozens more seats.
A good deal of blame has been attached to Mrs May for calling an "unnecessary" election. I think it's misplaced. Some people have reacted with horror to the notion that a politician might try and outmanouevre their opponents by exploiting a time of weakness. That's fake outrage. Labour would have done the same; and keeping a foot on your enemy's throat is a legitimate and necessary posture in any oppositional endeavour. Besides, Mrs May can argue that even as things stand she has bought for HMG a further two years in which to get Brexit done and implemented, instead of the electoral cycle coinciding awkwardly with the end of the negotiations. She can even argue that the country has benefited from that extra period of grace. She has also shot the SNP fox.
It's surely OK for Tories to criticise May for running an ineffective campaign, but for her opponents to lambast her for not winning by a big enough margin is an approach which scarcely qualifies as a thought, let alone one which has been pursued to its end.
All depends on May being able to stay in office long enough. At this stage a confidence and supply agreement has been reached with the DUP in principle. May's critics are outraged by the party's more fundamentalist aspects, but unpalatable as the DUP may be, these are the same people who excused Tim Farron's attitude to gay sex just a few short weeks ago.
You see, it's different when liberals are homophobic.
No, we must blame the result on the electorate. They - we - voted like this. Now they - we - must live with it.
The most depressing aspect of the result is not the what but the why. Corbyn's Labour Party showed that if you promise people the thing they most want and tell them that someone else will pay for it, they will vote for you en masse. Large numbers of young people have no experience of Labour's propensity for wrecking the economy. They don't know that every Labour administration has ended with unemployment higher than when it began. They see Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness as benign paternal figures rather than the cold-eyed murderers they were when Corbyn was cuddling up to them. They shrug when you point out that an MP (Naz Shah) who had to apologise for anti-Semitism only last year is still in the Labour Party and was re-elected last week with a massively increased majority.
The young shriek that they are hard done by, and yet they have enjoyed staggeringly higher standards of living than the baby boomers they despise, and emerge from the - far more extensive - higher education opportunities available to them to find massive numbers of jobs available. I contrast this with my own experience as a school-leaver in 1977 and despair at the impossibility of getting even my own children to accept they are better off.
The young seem to have one legitimate grievance, which is the shortage and expense of housing. And yet this too is a chimera. In the first place housing is expensive because of the excess of demand over supply. Which demographic is most likely to approve of the migration which has substantially caused it? Why, it's the young. Moreover, once you can get on the housing ladder, interest rates are the lowest they have been in my lifetime, making mortgage repayments reasonably consistent with historical standards.
The problem is the deposit required to buy your first house. Deposits are high because house prices are high. It requires saving. And yet when I go about of an evening, I don't see empty pubs, restaurants, theatres and cinemas. I see young people out spending and enjoying themselves. Perhaps my generation has taught them to live for today. But that is I think the only responsibility we should bear.
Some claim it is legitimate for Labour to appeal to pensioners because the Tories appeal to the old. But there is a difference. The Tories are insisting on protecting the interests of vulnerable people on less than £10,000 a year. Labour is trying to protect people in their first flush, with their peak earning years ahead of them.
Those of us on the centre and right of British politics thought that the lessons of socialism had been learned. We were wrong. Unless the Tories are very very careful in the next five years they are going to have to be learned all over again.
The Tories won most seats, and the biggest percentage of the popular vote. They won the election.
Just not as well as they expected.
I saw an analysis of constituencies into which the Tories had poured resources. It turned out that they had tried hard in areas which turned out to be unwinnable, neglecting more realistic constituencies which, had they won, would have given them an increased majority. Hubris, you might say. You might also ask why the Tories did not implement the Boundary Commission report while they had the opportunity. Doing so would have given them dozens more seats.
A good deal of blame has been attached to Mrs May for calling an "unnecessary" election. I think it's misplaced. Some people have reacted with horror to the notion that a politician might try and outmanouevre their opponents by exploiting a time of weakness. That's fake outrage. Labour would have done the same; and keeping a foot on your enemy's throat is a legitimate and necessary posture in any oppositional endeavour. Besides, Mrs May can argue that even as things stand she has bought for HMG a further two years in which to get Brexit done and implemented, instead of the electoral cycle coinciding awkwardly with the end of the negotiations. She can even argue that the country has benefited from that extra period of grace. She has also shot the SNP fox.
It's surely OK for Tories to criticise May for running an ineffective campaign, but for her opponents to lambast her for not winning by a big enough margin is an approach which scarcely qualifies as a thought, let alone one which has been pursued to its end.
All depends on May being able to stay in office long enough. At this stage a confidence and supply agreement has been reached with the DUP in principle. May's critics are outraged by the party's more fundamentalist aspects, but unpalatable as the DUP may be, these are the same people who excused Tim Farron's attitude to gay sex just a few short weeks ago.
You see, it's different when liberals are homophobic.
No, we must blame the result on the electorate. They - we - voted like this. Now they - we - must live with it.
The most depressing aspect of the result is not the what but the why. Corbyn's Labour Party showed that if you promise people the thing they most want and tell them that someone else will pay for it, they will vote for you en masse. Large numbers of young people have no experience of Labour's propensity for wrecking the economy. They don't know that every Labour administration has ended with unemployment higher than when it began. They see Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness as benign paternal figures rather than the cold-eyed murderers they were when Corbyn was cuddling up to them. They shrug when you point out that an MP (Naz Shah) who had to apologise for anti-Semitism only last year is still in the Labour Party and was re-elected last week with a massively increased majority.
The young shriek that they are hard done by, and yet they have enjoyed staggeringly higher standards of living than the baby boomers they despise, and emerge from the - far more extensive - higher education opportunities available to them to find massive numbers of jobs available. I contrast this with my own experience as a school-leaver in 1977 and despair at the impossibility of getting even my own children to accept they are better off.
The young seem to have one legitimate grievance, which is the shortage and expense of housing. And yet this too is a chimera. In the first place housing is expensive because of the excess of demand over supply. Which demographic is most likely to approve of the migration which has substantially caused it? Why, it's the young. Moreover, once you can get on the housing ladder, interest rates are the lowest they have been in my lifetime, making mortgage repayments reasonably consistent with historical standards.
The problem is the deposit required to buy your first house. Deposits are high because house prices are high. It requires saving. And yet when I go about of an evening, I don't see empty pubs, restaurants, theatres and cinemas. I see young people out spending and enjoying themselves. Perhaps my generation has taught them to live for today. But that is I think the only responsibility we should bear.
Some claim it is legitimate for Labour to appeal to pensioners because the Tories appeal to the old. But there is a difference. The Tories are insisting on protecting the interests of vulnerable people on less than £10,000 a year. Labour is trying to protect people in their first flush, with their peak earning years ahead of them.
Those of us on the centre and right of British politics thought that the lessons of socialism had been learned. We were wrong. Unless the Tories are very very careful in the next five years they are going to have to be learned all over again.
Friday 9 June 2017
General Election 2017 - God protect them from ignorance and inexperience
Early reflections on the election.
1. It's been a really crap night for Lynton Crosby.
2. Theresa May now lacks authority. At the time of writing the word is that May will stay on (an announcement is due in an hour's time, at 10 a.m.). On the face of it this looks absurd. She increased her party's vote share, but she called an election thinking it would increase her majority. It didn't.
1. It's been a really crap night for Lynton Crosby.
2. Theresa May now lacks authority. At the time of writing the word is that May will stay on (an announcement is due in an hour's time, at 10 a.m.). On the face of it this looks absurd. She increased her party's vote share, but she called an election thinking it would increase her majority. It didn't.
I would prefer her to go. For one thing, she would be widely hated otherwise, and have to run again in a few years in a general election when the public would no doubt relish booting her out. In the intervening period she would be unlikely to have become any more persuasive a campaigner. A successor would come to the job with a clean pair of hands.
My preferred choice, having thought about it for 30 seconds, would be David Davis. But whoever (please not Andrea Leadsom), he would struggle for a working parliamentary majority, and would have no electoral mandate. He might have even less authority than May. Neither option looks great.
2. Pro-Remain Twitter is agog this morning with the thought that this might be the end of Brexit. I would invite them to look at the results. Parties running on a pro-Brexit manifesto will take up the overwhelming majority of seats in Westminster.
3. It's been a bad night for the SNP, but quite a good one for Nicola Sturgeon. The SNP has seen its seat count almost halved, but they're still the largest party in Scotland. That's good for Ms Sturgeon because it makes no practical difference to her at Holyrood but she will now be able to resist pressure from her supporters for a 2nd Independence referendum which she knows she cannot presently win. Those of us hoping peak-SNP has passed will be cheered by the ousting of Wee Eck himself, Alex Salmond. So will La Sturgeon. Her back-seat driver has just been booted onto the verge.
4. The Labour leader's acceptance speech was revealing. He said, "[P]eople have said they have had quite enough of austerity politics, they have had quite enough of cuts in public expenditure, underfunding our health service, underfunding our schools and our education service and not giving our young people the chance they deserve in our society. People are voting for hope in the future and turning their backs on austerity".
He's right in his analysis, but the Labour voters he is referring are not. Labour supporters are wishing for something without first making sure it is practicable. The intractable economic reality is that even current spending is not affordable at current rates of tax, let alone the vast sums that Corbyn wants to splash out. Corbyn thinks all this can be fixed by borrowing and taxing the rich more. It can't. His supporters are voting for pie in the sky. They're voting for jam today. For La La Land. Indications are that the surge in Labour support could be accounted for by a surge in turnout by the young. God protect them from their own ignorance and inexperience.
5. I enjoy politics far too much to have been depressed by the result. Besides, Labour's better than expected showing has cheered my wife up no end. She woke up at 6 a.m. and shagged me before breakfast.
He's right in his analysis, but the Labour voters he is referring are not. Labour supporters are wishing for something without first making sure it is practicable. The intractable economic reality is that even current spending is not affordable at current rates of tax, let alone the vast sums that Corbyn wants to splash out. Corbyn thinks all this can be fixed by borrowing and taxing the rich more. It can't. His supporters are voting for pie in the sky. They're voting for jam today. For La La Land. Indications are that the surge in Labour support could be accounted for by a surge in turnout by the young. God protect them from their own ignorance and inexperience.
5. I enjoy politics far too much to have been depressed by the result. Besides, Labour's better than expected showing has cheered my wife up no end. She woke up at 6 a.m. and shagged me before breakfast.
Wednesday 7 June 2017
General Election 2017 - campaign vs. manifesto
The 2017 General Election is tomorrow. Some thoughts.
This is very much squeaky bum time, as all polls show a narrowing of Mrs May's previously unassailable lead, and some of them show the race to be very close. How have the Tories come within an ace of throwing it away?
Firstly, the press has hated the Tories' boring election campaign. It may have protected Mrs May from exposure as a charisma-free zone, but it gave journalists nothing to write about. So they wrote that May was wooden and reclusive instead. When the Tory manifesto turned out to have plans for dementia care which were unfair and attacked the middle-classes, they leapt on the discovery. When May did a U-turn they leapt on that too.
The fact that the social care plan represented a genuine and courageous (if misguided) attempt squarely to face an intractable problem got lost in the media glee.
That's pretty much all the stick the press has had with which to beat the Tories, but boy have they wielded it hard and frequently.
Now contrast Labour. The deficiencies of the Party's manifesto and leadership are so vast that as a journalist you wouldn't quite know where to begin. Taxes? The party is putting them up, despite evidence that doing so tends to bring in less, rather than more, revenue. The nation's finances? Labour is going to borrow and borrow in a fiscal situation that is already parlous; breaking even is always a "rolling" five years away. Tuition fees? Labour is going to abolish them, largely for the benefit of middle-class kids, at a cost of £10 billion. Terrorism? Labour encouraged multiculturalism, is too terrified of racism accusations to make hard decisions, is in hock to the Islamic vote, and is led by people who can't quite seem to decide (vide the IRA and Hamas) which terrorists are OK and which aren't. National security? Mr Corbyn won't press the nuclear button. Brexit? The party is utterly divided on the issue, and the manifesto says that even a bad deal for Britain is better than no deal (I bet M. Barnier was rubbing his hands when he heard that one).
For journalists there is so much material to go on that the mind reels at Labour's inadequacies. To be clear, I'm not saying the press as a whole is pro-Labour (only some of it is); merely that the deficiencies of the Tory campaign (dullness, social care) pale into insignificance compared to those of the Labour manifesto. But both deficiencies have been given equal emphasis.
And this is a crucial difference. Mr Corbyn has proved a capable stump campaigner. After all, he's spent his political lifetime campaigning rather than governing. Labour's campaign has been quite good, although its manifesto is a monstrous, gleaming pile of unaffordable crap. The Tory campaign on the other hand has been ill-judged; but their manifesto is on the whole sensible and realistic. If I had to point to a failure of reportage it would be that the press hasn't distinguished the two things (manifesto vs. campaign) well or at all.
But if Labour wins, or, God forbid, there is a hung parliament, it won't be because of the press. It will be because enough people took Labour's promises seriously, in particular perhaps its tuition-fee bribe of the young, who don't just have short memories but no memories of pre-Thatcherite Britain. For those of us who consider even a lacklustre May infinitely more persuasive than Corbyn, our hope must be that the young won't turn out to vote and that the reports from party foot-soldiers - who say that Labour is doing really well in the big cities but terribly everywhere else - turn out to be true. Otherwise we are all fucked.
Voting is about the choice between two evils. Let's hope the lesser of the two wins then implements the Boundary Commission report a.s.a.p.
This is very much squeaky bum time, as all polls show a narrowing of Mrs May's previously unassailable lead, and some of them show the race to be very close. How have the Tories come within an ace of throwing it away?
Firstly, the press has hated the Tories' boring election campaign. It may have protected Mrs May from exposure as a charisma-free zone, but it gave journalists nothing to write about. So they wrote that May was wooden and reclusive instead. When the Tory manifesto turned out to have plans for dementia care which were unfair and attacked the middle-classes, they leapt on the discovery. When May did a U-turn they leapt on that too.
The fact that the social care plan represented a genuine and courageous (if misguided) attempt squarely to face an intractable problem got lost in the media glee.
That's pretty much all the stick the press has had with which to beat the Tories, but boy have they wielded it hard and frequently.
Now contrast Labour. The deficiencies of the Party's manifesto and leadership are so vast that as a journalist you wouldn't quite know where to begin. Taxes? The party is putting them up, despite evidence that doing so tends to bring in less, rather than more, revenue. The nation's finances? Labour is going to borrow and borrow in a fiscal situation that is already parlous; breaking even is always a "rolling" five years away. Tuition fees? Labour is going to abolish them, largely for the benefit of middle-class kids, at a cost of £10 billion. Terrorism? Labour encouraged multiculturalism, is too terrified of racism accusations to make hard decisions, is in hock to the Islamic vote, and is led by people who can't quite seem to decide (vide the IRA and Hamas) which terrorists are OK and which aren't. National security? Mr Corbyn won't press the nuclear button. Brexit? The party is utterly divided on the issue, and the manifesto says that even a bad deal for Britain is better than no deal (I bet M. Barnier was rubbing his hands when he heard that one).
For journalists there is so much material to go on that the mind reels at Labour's inadequacies. To be clear, I'm not saying the press as a whole is pro-Labour (only some of it is); merely that the deficiencies of the Tory campaign (dullness, social care) pale into insignificance compared to those of the Labour manifesto. But both deficiencies have been given equal emphasis.
And this is a crucial difference. Mr Corbyn has proved a capable stump campaigner. After all, he's spent his political lifetime campaigning rather than governing. Labour's campaign has been quite good, although its manifesto is a monstrous, gleaming pile of unaffordable crap. The Tory campaign on the other hand has been ill-judged; but their manifesto is on the whole sensible and realistic. If I had to point to a failure of reportage it would be that the press hasn't distinguished the two things (manifesto vs. campaign) well or at all.
But if Labour wins, or, God forbid, there is a hung parliament, it won't be because of the press. It will be because enough people took Labour's promises seriously, in particular perhaps its tuition-fee bribe of the young, who don't just have short memories but no memories of pre-Thatcherite Britain. For those of us who consider even a lacklustre May infinitely more persuasive than Corbyn, our hope must be that the young won't turn out to vote and that the reports from party foot-soldiers - who say that Labour is doing really well in the big cities but terribly everywhere else - turn out to be true. Otherwise we are all fucked.
Voting is about the choice between two evils. Let's hope the lesser of the two wins then implements the Boundary Commission report a.s.a.p.
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