I am not a gambler. I won 14 new pence on a fruit machine in a Pontefract pub in about 1975, and decided to quit while I was ahead. But six months or so ago I had a bet with a friend, my contention being that either the Germans would have to start paying to keep the Southern European economies afloat, or the ECB would have to start a QE programme; his that neither of these things would happen.
In middle age, these are the kinds of things you find exciting.
With the news yesterday that the ECB chief Mario Draghi is proposing what he calls the OMT, or Outright Monetary Transaction, a mechanism whereby the ECB can buy bonds of the Southern Europeans, I feel a phone call to my friend is in order. I am trying to remember if any money was at stake.
Will the OMT save the Euro? No. Why? Because, in a sop to the Germans, whose nominee at the ECB Jens Weidemann appears to have voted against the scheme, there will be strings attached for participating countries. That's to say countries whose economies are failing, cutting spending in a tail-chasing death spiral of austerity, are going to have to cut further and faster in order to please the ECB and the IMF. That would be counterproductive in a country that was doing well. But in a country like Spain, with a headline rate of unemployment at 25% and youth unemployment at 50%, it will be a disaster. The Spanish economy will get weaker, not stronger, making the argument for leaving the Euro altogether more attractive.
Moreover, being a can-kicking gesture even more expansive than Draghi's effort earlier this year (the Long Term Refinancing Operation), it will guarantee to make the patient's death throes more rather than less protracted, condemning those of us standing round the bedside to an even longer vigil.
We have had zombie banks and zombie economies. Welcome to the zombie continent.
Friday 7 September 2012
Tuesday 4 September 2012
Four Lions at the gym
One of the depressing things about going to the gym, other than it being boring and painful, is the exposure it brings to the world of TV. Obviously it is worse in the daytime than at night, and no doubt worse after the morning news programmes have finished and the stuff that follows has begun: re-runs of lower league Spanish soccer, pyjama cricket, Loose Women, antiques shows, soaps, aggressive rappers, singing strippers, then, as lunchtime approaches, news-lite. Physical exercise is supposed to be morally uplifting - mens sana and all that. It leaves me feeling somewhat defiled.
I was reminded of this, vaguely, when watching Chris Morris's Four Lions the other night. Omar, a young would-be terrorist, rants at his co-conspirators - "We have instructions to bring havoc to this bullshit, consumerist, godless, paki-bashing, Gordon Ramsay, Taste the Difference Speciality Cheddar, torture-endorsing, massacre-sponsoring, look-at-me-dancing-pissed-with-me-Knob-out, Sky One Uncovered, who gives a fuck about dead Afghanis Disneyland!" I sort of know how he feels.
I loved Four Lions. It is, apparently, a particularly difficult aspect of the novelist's art to combine in the same narrative elements of comedy and tragedy without perceptible change of tone. The greats can manage it - Dostoevsky, Anthony Powell, Waugh - but others struggle. Graham Greene said he spent hours reading Dickens to try and work out how it was done. In this film Morris makes it look easy.
There are obvious bits of knockabout - the scene where Omar fires an RPG the wrong way round in an attempt to destroy a US drone is pure Laurel and Hardy - and some terrific verbal invention in a real or imaginary British Pakistani patois; but while I sat there hoping things weren't going to work out as badly as I feared they might, the terrible denouement seemed properly to belong to the events leading up to it; even the funny ones.
More than this though, Morris has put together a satire in which pretty much everyone gets a kicking. The terrorists are stupid and callous. Special Branch close in on them but end up arresting the wrong man. Police marksmen shoot someone dressed as the honey monster and argue whether the honey monster is a bear or not. Omar's brother, a Muslim cleric who tells him what he is planning is wrong, nevertheless locks his wife in her room. There is a scene in which Omar and his wife tenderly discuss the suicide bomb plot, played painfully straight; I was thinking how acidic was Morris's attack when it occurred to me that things like this must have actually happened, and he was making us watch them.
The best British film I've seen in ages. It makes The King's Speech look bland and unambitious. As Omar's dim sidekick might Waj might have said, proper good art.
I was reminded of this, vaguely, when watching Chris Morris's Four Lions the other night. Omar, a young would-be terrorist, rants at his co-conspirators - "We have instructions to bring havoc to this bullshit, consumerist, godless, paki-bashing, Gordon Ramsay, Taste the Difference Speciality Cheddar, torture-endorsing, massacre-sponsoring, look-at-me-dancing-pissed-with-me-Knob-out, Sky One Uncovered, who gives a fuck about dead Afghanis Disneyland!" I sort of know how he feels.
I loved Four Lions. It is, apparently, a particularly difficult aspect of the novelist's art to combine in the same narrative elements of comedy and tragedy without perceptible change of tone. The greats can manage it - Dostoevsky, Anthony Powell, Waugh - but others struggle. Graham Greene said he spent hours reading Dickens to try and work out how it was done. In this film Morris makes it look easy.
There are obvious bits of knockabout - the scene where Omar fires an RPG the wrong way round in an attempt to destroy a US drone is pure Laurel and Hardy - and some terrific verbal invention in a real or imaginary British Pakistani patois; but while I sat there hoping things weren't going to work out as badly as I feared they might, the terrible denouement seemed properly to belong to the events leading up to it; even the funny ones.
More than this though, Morris has put together a satire in which pretty much everyone gets a kicking. The terrorists are stupid and callous. Special Branch close in on them but end up arresting the wrong man. Police marksmen shoot someone dressed as the honey monster and argue whether the honey monster is a bear or not. Omar's brother, a Muslim cleric who tells him what he is planning is wrong, nevertheless locks his wife in her room. There is a scene in which Omar and his wife tenderly discuss the suicide bomb plot, played painfully straight; I was thinking how acidic was Morris's attack when it occurred to me that things like this must have actually happened, and he was making us watch them.
The best British film I've seen in ages. It makes The King's Speech look bland and unambitious. As Omar's dim sidekick might Waj might have said, proper good art.
Monday 3 September 2012
Classical music: genre fatigue?
I've written here previously about genre fatigue, that's to say the idea that an art form - in this case the Piano Quartet - can outlive its usefulness. Let's apply the same idea for a moment to classical music generally.
The heyday of our art might be said to have come in the 18th and 19th centuries, when people flocked to concert halls to hear famous virtuosi and burgeoning orchestras. Both were symptoms of growing prosperity and an increasingly organised society. Individuals could devote their young lives to mastering an instrument, and as adults could make a reasonable living writing music, playing it and teaching it. The economic model worked because enough people were willing to pay to hear them play or to play themselves as amateurs.
We take the continuation of this infrastructure for granted. I think that's a mistake. Young people are willing to devote hours of their time (10,000, the theory goes) and pursue classical music as a career because they think that there is a reasonable prospect of success. In fact most of them don't make a career as performers, and you could argue that the conservatoires are in fact exploiting their students' naivety, peddling the dream of a stellar career which in most cases won't happen.
My contemporaries at College struggled to get into the profession in the UK, and the best oboist and horn player in my year now play professionally in Spain. Others are in non music-related jobs. More recently another friend who is a brilliant all-round musician finally got an orchestral job here when on the verge of packing it in. Two flautists I know worked busily for years as freelances in the North West; one is now retraining as an IFA, another persists in the hope of getting a seat. My heart goes out to both. A violinist friend, trying to set up a chamber orchestra, tells me that he is going to work in a call centre, "until the music thing takes off". I wonder whether he really believes that it will.
Despite these difficulties there is actually no shortage of young people wanting to become musicians. Even if that changes in the UK, and it might, our conservatoires are full of talented players from Europe and the Far East who could do the job instead.
What there definitely is a shortage of however is people willing to come and hear them play. And this is where things get serious. The income of professional classical ensembles comes partly from bums on seats, partly from sponsorships and partly from subsidy administered by the Arts Council but funded by taxpayers. In very difficult economic times (and times likely to get harder still) the argument for taxpayer subsidy of any art is more difficult to sustain. An art like classical music, with a dwindling and ageing audience, is likely to be viewed as less rather than more of a priority and less attractive to sponsors. How long before we see some professional orchestras close down? I think it will happen in the next twenty years.
Part of the problem with the symphony orchestra is that it is essentially a nineteenth century invention. A hundred years ago, it represented the flowering not just of prosperous industrial society, but also the apogee, or close to it, of technological possibility. If you doubt this, just look at the key mechanism on any woodwind instrument. But the electronic age quickly burst in, the developments in communication (the telephone, radio, TV) between the wars still dwarfing the achievements of the post-internet world, and the symphony orchestra became what it still is, a glorious antique. Attempts to change it have been modest and largely unsuccessful. Perhaps a modern orchestra will have a bit more percussion, but that's all.
The orchestra can still produce art of the greatest refinement and depth, but what it lacks is the sense of belonging to now, and while this is not the only cause of its peril it is a significant one. Whilst it may be true that its range and variety are infinite, we now know that, paradoxically, it is infinite only within certain constrained parameters. The average teenager can spend a couple of hundred quid on a PC and soundcard then download programs for free which will enable him or her to produce sounds you could never get out of a symphony orchestra in a million years. Moreover whilst it takes years to learn how to play an instrument really well, years to learn how to write for orchestra, and a long time to write sustained pieces of music which you will be lucky to get put on, an intelligent person can get started on a computer in an afternoon, burn a CD before teatime and have his music played in a club before midnight.
The banishment of tonality and regular rhythm in the latter half of the 20th century led classical composers to concentrate increasingly on timbre as a constructive device; I have often thought this inherently superficial, but the dazzling sophistication of computer Digital Signal Processing has made their efforts lame. There is more sonic invention in the average hip-hop track than in most modern scores. There's a limited amount an orchestra can do.
Many composers don't think it matters if most people don't like their music, and in a way they're right. It only matters if they expect the professional institutions which perform it to carry on existing. Then it matters very much indeed. The failure of modern composers as a group to write music which can enthuse an audience is another key element of classical music's decline.
So is classical music suffering from genre fatigue? The history of art is littered with examples of genres that have withered and died. The magic lantern. The Victorian ballad. Melodrama. It took me fifteen seconds to think of these. There must be dozens more. Why shouldn't classical music be one of them? When I was young I assumed it would go on forever, but there is no reason why it should.
I want to raise the possibility that, like other genres, classical music, for all its longevity and flexibility, has certain limits beyond which it cannot function. That is to say, it has developed in the last hundred years in a way which is possible within the technical constraints of the instruments which play it, but which may not be able to command the attention of a paying audience big enough to sustain it.
There would be no shame in this. I think it is only because classical music has over the centuries attracted such extraordinary prestige and cultural impact that adherents like me expect it to continue all-powerful. But it ain't necessarily so. Perhaps it is a genre with limitations. Bluegrass music, for example, tends to feature the banjo. Symphonic bluegrass played on synthesisers and theremins (I just made that up) might be interesting, but it might not attract an audience and it wouldn't be bluegrass any more.
Perhaps we have to accept that, like bluegrass, classical music also has limitations, and that once we go beyond them it may not be classical music any more, or at least not in a way which has mass appeal and is sustainable. The pursuit of originality has taken us a long way, but it hasn't taken a mass audience along with it.
The composer Nicholas Maw once gave an interview in which he was taxed on his lack of radicalism. I paraphrase, but Maw's reply was to this effect: "I see myself as the inheritor of a tradition and I don't want to depart too far from it". I would add that in my own work, such as it is, I feel a responsibility to pass that tradition on so that it survives the present century. At this stage that seems like quite an ambition.
There's a story to the effect that Rabbis in Auschwitz held a debate about the existence of God. Unsurprisingly, given their plight, they voted against. After the vote, the most senior Rabbi said, "Thank you, gentlemen, for an interesting evening. We will end as usual with prayers".
And so back to work.
The heyday of our art might be said to have come in the 18th and 19th centuries, when people flocked to concert halls to hear famous virtuosi and burgeoning orchestras. Both were symptoms of growing prosperity and an increasingly organised society. Individuals could devote their young lives to mastering an instrument, and as adults could make a reasonable living writing music, playing it and teaching it. The economic model worked because enough people were willing to pay to hear them play or to play themselves as amateurs.
We take the continuation of this infrastructure for granted. I think that's a mistake. Young people are willing to devote hours of their time (10,000, the theory goes) and pursue classical music as a career because they think that there is a reasonable prospect of success. In fact most of them don't make a career as performers, and you could argue that the conservatoires are in fact exploiting their students' naivety, peddling the dream of a stellar career which in most cases won't happen.
My contemporaries at College struggled to get into the profession in the UK, and the best oboist and horn player in my year now play professionally in Spain. Others are in non music-related jobs. More recently another friend who is a brilliant all-round musician finally got an orchestral job here when on the verge of packing it in. Two flautists I know worked busily for years as freelances in the North West; one is now retraining as an IFA, another persists in the hope of getting a seat. My heart goes out to both. A violinist friend, trying to set up a chamber orchestra, tells me that he is going to work in a call centre, "until the music thing takes off". I wonder whether he really believes that it will.
Despite these difficulties there is actually no shortage of young people wanting to become musicians. Even if that changes in the UK, and it might, our conservatoires are full of talented players from Europe and the Far East who could do the job instead.
What there definitely is a shortage of however is people willing to come and hear them play. And this is where things get serious. The income of professional classical ensembles comes partly from bums on seats, partly from sponsorships and partly from subsidy administered by the Arts Council but funded by taxpayers. In very difficult economic times (and times likely to get harder still) the argument for taxpayer subsidy of any art is more difficult to sustain. An art like classical music, with a dwindling and ageing audience, is likely to be viewed as less rather than more of a priority and less attractive to sponsors. How long before we see some professional orchestras close down? I think it will happen in the next twenty years.
Part of the problem with the symphony orchestra is that it is essentially a nineteenth century invention. A hundred years ago, it represented the flowering not just of prosperous industrial society, but also the apogee, or close to it, of technological possibility. If you doubt this, just look at the key mechanism on any woodwind instrument. But the electronic age quickly burst in, the developments in communication (the telephone, radio, TV) between the wars still dwarfing the achievements of the post-internet world, and the symphony orchestra became what it still is, a glorious antique. Attempts to change it have been modest and largely unsuccessful. Perhaps a modern orchestra will have a bit more percussion, but that's all.
The orchestra can still produce art of the greatest refinement and depth, but what it lacks is the sense of belonging to now, and while this is not the only cause of its peril it is a significant one. Whilst it may be true that its range and variety are infinite, we now know that, paradoxically, it is infinite only within certain constrained parameters. The average teenager can spend a couple of hundred quid on a PC and soundcard then download programs for free which will enable him or her to produce sounds you could never get out of a symphony orchestra in a million years. Moreover whilst it takes years to learn how to play an instrument really well, years to learn how to write for orchestra, and a long time to write sustained pieces of music which you will be lucky to get put on, an intelligent person can get started on a computer in an afternoon, burn a CD before teatime and have his music played in a club before midnight.
The banishment of tonality and regular rhythm in the latter half of the 20th century led classical composers to concentrate increasingly on timbre as a constructive device; I have often thought this inherently superficial, but the dazzling sophistication of computer Digital Signal Processing has made their efforts lame. There is more sonic invention in the average hip-hop track than in most modern scores. There's a limited amount an orchestra can do.
Many composers don't think it matters if most people don't like their music, and in a way they're right. It only matters if they expect the professional institutions which perform it to carry on existing. Then it matters very much indeed. The failure of modern composers as a group to write music which can enthuse an audience is another key element of classical music's decline.
So is classical music suffering from genre fatigue? The history of art is littered with examples of genres that have withered and died. The magic lantern. The Victorian ballad. Melodrama. It took me fifteen seconds to think of these. There must be dozens more. Why shouldn't classical music be one of them? When I was young I assumed it would go on forever, but there is no reason why it should.
I want to raise the possibility that, like other genres, classical music, for all its longevity and flexibility, has certain limits beyond which it cannot function. That is to say, it has developed in the last hundred years in a way which is possible within the technical constraints of the instruments which play it, but which may not be able to command the attention of a paying audience big enough to sustain it.
There would be no shame in this. I think it is only because classical music has over the centuries attracted such extraordinary prestige and cultural impact that adherents like me expect it to continue all-powerful. But it ain't necessarily so. Perhaps it is a genre with limitations. Bluegrass music, for example, tends to feature the banjo. Symphonic bluegrass played on synthesisers and theremins (I just made that up) might be interesting, but it might not attract an audience and it wouldn't be bluegrass any more.
Perhaps we have to accept that, like bluegrass, classical music also has limitations, and that once we go beyond them it may not be classical music any more, or at least not in a way which has mass appeal and is sustainable. The pursuit of originality has taken us a long way, but it hasn't taken a mass audience along with it.
The composer Nicholas Maw once gave an interview in which he was taxed on his lack of radicalism. I paraphrase, but Maw's reply was to this effect: "I see myself as the inheritor of a tradition and I don't want to depart too far from it". I would add that in my own work, such as it is, I feel a responsibility to pass that tradition on so that it survives the present century. At this stage that seems like quite an ambition.
There's a story to the effect that Rabbis in Auschwitz held a debate about the existence of God. Unsurprisingly, given their plight, they voted against. After the vote, the most senior Rabbi said, "Thank you, gentlemen, for an interesting evening. We will end as usual with prayers".
And so back to work.
Thursday 30 August 2012
The Dawkins Delusion #1
In 2006 I read – most of – Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. I didn't read it all because I found it so
infuriating. Why? Broadly for three reasons. Firstly, I don’t think Dawkins knows enough
about theology to do a decent demolition job.
Secondly, for someone who sets himself up as a rationalist, Dawkins’ own
reasoning is often – and I'm being as charitable as I can – slipshod. Thirdly, Dawkins makes assumptions about the
value of scientific truth which don't seem to me to be warranted, and which he
doesn't question.
To get my own position out of the way, I am not a Christian. Or a Jew or a Muslim. But I am interested in these things, as I think everyone should be, and I hate the vanity and hypocrisy which The God Delusion exudes. The following is an extract from a long article I wrote at the time. In the coming weeks I'll post further parts of it.
In writing TGD Dawkins faced a mammoth task. It's notoriously difficult to prove a
negative - that God doesn't exist, for example - and moreover to take only the
three Abrahamic religions is to confront a
bewildering variety of doctrines and sub-doctrines even within one of
them. Many religious people, when asked
“Does God exist?” would reply, “It depends what you mean by ‘God’ and what you
mean by ‘exist’ “.
This is not
nitpicking - it goes to the heart of what religion is about, and has
preoccupied religious scholars for thousands of years. That so many different answers have been
given presents problems for Dawkins, who plainly dislikes religion thoroughly
and moreover has a day job as a teacher of science: the idea of spending so
much free time immersing himself in these ideologies must have seemed
anathema. Moreover the effort would
hardly seem worthwhile since the task of attacking each strand of religious
thought in detail would be a lifetime's work.
If the question “Does God exist?” were expanded thus – “To what
extent was God responsible for Creation?
To what extent does God intervene in our lives?” - the scale of the
ensuing theological complexities becomes all the more dauntingly apparent.
That Dawkins can't resist dipping his toe into theology
unfortunately leaves him open to the charge of ignorantly misrepresenting the
beliefs he is attacking, and, more seriously, attacking only those that are
easy to knock down. Terry Eagleton’s
notorious review of TGD in the London
Review of Books described the experience as rather like reading a book on
biology by someone whose knowledge of the subject is confined to having studied
the Book of British Birds. There's an
element of comic exaggeration about this, but a grain of truth too.
Perhaps recognizing that dealing with all these varied beliefs in
detail is not going to be possible, Dawkins spends a great deal of the early
part of the TGD explaining why it is very unlikely that God was
responsible for creation. After all, if
God can be shown not to have done the things religion seems to say He did, then
that in itself might be strong grounds for his non-existence.
Chapter 4 of the book, Why
There Almost Certainly Is No God, contains what Dawkins describes as its
“central argument”. He explains (p.141 of the hardback)
that physicists “have calculated that, if
the laws and constants of physics had been even slightly different, the
universe would have developed in such a way that life would have been
impossible”. How could it be that
the universe is fine-tuned to allow chemicals to form and life to
flourish?
Theists, Dawkins writes, say
that God tuned the fundamental constants of the universe so that each one lay
in the ideal range for the production of life.
But “As ever (p.143) the theist’s answer is deeply unsatisfying,
because it leaves the existence of God unexplained …. A God capable of (fine-tuning
the universe in this way) would have to
be at least as improbable as the finely tuned combination of numbers itself,
and that’s very improbable indeed… It follows
that the theist’s answer has utterly failed to make any headway towards solving
the problem at hand”.
This is an interesting paragraph.
One, it’s fairly typical of Dawkins’ rhetorical style. The theist’s answer is “deeply unsatisfying” and has “utterly
failed”. Apparently being unsatisfying and having failed alone would not have been
enough. On the following page Dawkins
describes the theistic response as not just an “evasion”, but an evasion “of
stupendous proportions”, and not just a restatement of the problem but a “grotesque” amplification of it. There are many other instances of this sort
of hyperbole, rather as if Dawkins felt he hadn't quite been persuasive enough and needed to stick in a few more adjectives.
Secondly, for Dawkins, the existence or otherwise of God is a “problem” which needs to be solved. Reading the book I found sometimes found
myself wondering, Could Dawkins not just relax a bit? On p.155 he writes, “To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown which is responsible
for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the
universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total
abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation”. Responsibility? Really?
Why? And instead of finding an
explanation, couldn’t we just make one up?
I'll return to this idea of making things up later, because it has a bearing on what all of us, but particularly artists, do.
Thirdly and more pertinently, Dawkins seems to be suggesting that
there can be no God because “a God
capable of (fine-tuning the universe in this way) would have to be at least as improbable as the finely tuned
combination of numbers itself”.
But this is a shoddy argument. It doesn't follow that something even more improbable than the extraordinary
improbability of the universe must be impossible merely on the grounds of that extra bit of improbability. After all, if the extraordinarily improbable
universe exists, why should we baulk at the extra bit of improbability that God
– according to Dawkins – would require?
Fourthly, the universe is a physical phenomenon, and in these
pages Dawkins is assuming that religious people believe it was physically created
by a physically capable God. But whilst
some undoubtedly do, many religious people don’t believe in the designer
hypothesis at all (another example of the structural defect in the book I
referred to at the start). Even many
Church-going Bible-reading Christians don’t believe that God designed and
created the universe and everything in it.
But Dawkins makes an even more fundamental mistake. On p.158 he writes of the universe, “the designer hypothesis immediately raises
the larger problem of who designed the designer.” Well perhaps, but only if the designer were a
physical entity.
The universe and the
living creatures within it are physical things, and the processes of
coming-into-being Dawkins describes are physical processes. If the designer were not a physical entity
but instead a universal being as many religious people believe (whatever that might be), he (she/it) wouldn’t
have needed designing.
A universal being
doesn’t have a beginning or end.
He/she/it just is. Sure, most
Christians believe that God is capable of making himself flesh, and did so in
Jesus’ case; but they don’t believe God has breakfast. They believe instead that God is everywhere
and all around us, always has been, always will be. They believe God is in the room with
them.
This may be a laughably vague belief, but it isn't refuted by the
(mistaken) assumption Dawkins makes. If
you don't believe that God takes a physical form, a demonstration that God has
failed to accord with the laws concerning physical creation is irrelevant.
Thus far, Dawkins isn't coming across as the hot-shot ratiocinator. More on his failings later on in the Autumn.
Patronising the Paralympics
I watch sport to see other people doing things I can't do, so although I am not against the Paralympics I'm not specially for them either. The media is however having a Paralympic love-in, thus giving the lie (in case you doubted it) to the idea that there is value-free news. For the last fortnight or so there has been coverage of plucky Brits and plucky people generally, which is fair enough except it begs the question whether the spectacle of them competing against each other is one worth watching. It may or may not be, but it would be nice to think that there was room for the view that it wasn't.
In case this seems a nasty way of looking at things, consider that in the run up to the Olympics the media gorged itself on stories of G4S's incompetence, legacy disputes, marketing crackdowns, unsold tickets, corporate graft, incompetent bus drivers and so on. Where are those stories now?
This is the dog that didn't bark. The stories are not there because journalists and their editors have decided the Paralympics are good and, let's be honest, it would not be politically correct to publish or broadcast anything which cast aspersions on them.
Good luck to the athletes - you are brave and driven beyond anything I could accomplish. But you are all being thoroughly patronised. That might be better than being abused, but I doubt somehow it's what you would want.
I told my daughter that I watched sport to see people doing things I couldn't do. She said, "So you think you could win the Paralympic 100 metres?"
The realisation that I would be left standing by a double-amputee was a sobering one.
"Er, no", I said.
Perhaps I will watch a bit after all.
In case this seems a nasty way of looking at things, consider that in the run up to the Olympics the media gorged itself on stories of G4S's incompetence, legacy disputes, marketing crackdowns, unsold tickets, corporate graft, incompetent bus drivers and so on. Where are those stories now?
This is the dog that didn't bark. The stories are not there because journalists and their editors have decided the Paralympics are good and, let's be honest, it would not be politically correct to publish or broadcast anything which cast aspersions on them.
Good luck to the athletes - you are brave and driven beyond anything I could accomplish. But you are all being thoroughly patronised. That might be better than being abused, but I doubt somehow it's what you would want.
I told my daughter that I watched sport to see people doing things I couldn't do. She said, "So you think you could win the Paralympic 100 metres?"
The realisation that I would be left standing by a double-amputee was a sobering one.
"Er, no", I said.
Perhaps I will watch a bit after all.
Wednesday 29 August 2012
What George Osborne should really be doing
I have for a couple of years been arguing that George Osborne's economic policy might not be such a failure as his critics suggest. Asking whether the economy is growing might not be the right question when countries are foundering across Europe but Britain can borrow at rock-bottom rates. But I have always said that Osborne's position will get a lot more difficult if he doesn't bring the deficit down.
From memory, 2011-12's deficit was about 126 billion, down from about 136 billion in 2010-11 (In Labour's last year in office the shortfall was nearer 150 billion). A couple of months' recent figures however show significantly higher borrowing than the Chancellor planned, raising the spectre that the 2012-13 deficit might start pushing back up again. Of course what's important is the inflation-adjusted figure rather than the nominal one, or perhaps better still the deficit as a percentage of GDP. But whichever way you look at it Osborne is sailing close to the wind, and the bond markets will take a dim view if it turns out his tenuous grip on the deficit is slipping.
Given circumstances in the Eurozone I can't see any British chancellor having a hope in hell of getting the economy to grow at the moment, but having flayed Osborne's critics, notably the clueless Aditya Chakrabortty, for failing to set out a coherent alternative strategy, here, at absolutely no cost, are my top tips for things an imaginative Chancellor could do to - I was going to write make things better, but let's restrict ourselves to not making things worse than they would have been otherwise.
1. The much vaunted infrastructure projects. The difficulty with using QE as helicopter money to shower on individuals is that they tend to spend it on imports. Better use it to fund big projects that will help us in the future. I don't much like the Heathrow Third Runway or new roads, but I quite fancy the Severn Barrage. We are going to be woefully short of electricity generating capacity in the near future, and Blair should have been doing something about it in the Noughties instead of blathering on about Cool Britannia. New nuclear power stations, preferably thorium-powered, wouldn't go amiss either. If we still had anyone who knew how to build them.
2. State run mortgage bank. No, not like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (mortgage guarantee schemes thoroughly abused by commercial lenders), but a bank to allow existing mortgage holders to transfer at low rates of interest. If the bank (we could call it RBS) were funded by means of QE, the Government would get the interest paid on the loans, and commercial lenders would have to do something else with their money to get a return - lend it to small businesses, perhaps.
3. The nuclear option. QE has been used thus far as a bond-buying scheme, with old bonds bought up by the Bank of England. In theory that means HMG has to pay the BoE the coupon, or interest, on those bonds, and repay the capital sum when it falls due. I'm guessing that's happening in practice too, only because if it weren't I'm sure we'd have been told about it. But if it is, why is it? The BoE dances to the Government's tune. Or it should be doing. Why can't it just tear up the bond and say, "Well we'll forget about that"? That way the BoE could use QE quietly to buy up debt from banks and pension funds and just as quietly cancel it. It wouldn't do much to cure the deficit (though it would reduce the burden of interest HMG pays daily in millions); it would however reduce the enormous debts HMG is currently amassing. You issue debt, the central bank buys it using QE then quietly cancels it. There must be a problem with this, but I can't see it. City types should feel free to write in and note their objections.
As for what Osborne shouldn't be doing, I can only think of one thing.
1. Borrow money and pump it into the economy. Consider. The Bank of England has over the last couple of years created about £375 billion by way of QE. Now undoubtedly things would have been even worse if it hadn't, but even this enormous sum has not been sufficient to keep us out of recession. Our current annual deficit is about £125 billion. So even if HMG succeeded in borrowing double its current deficit (and we'll come to the size of that if in a moment), it would still be only half way to getting hold of the £375 billion that made no perceptable difference when it was bandied about by the BoE. But actually there is no chance whatsoever of HMG succeeding in borrowing an additional £125 billion from the gilt markets (over and above the £125 billion or thereabouts it's likely to be borrowing anyway this year). The markets would think the Chancellor had gone crazy. Interest rates would go up. The ratings agencies would downgrade the UK several notches. Funds would be available if at all only at astronomic rates. In a nutshell then, there is no sum the Chancellor can borrow big enough to do anything other than give a barely perceptable nudge to the UK economy. The Balls and Chakraborttys of this world are guilty of a category error. They think there is always a simple and painless solution to a problem. Sometimes there is, but this isn't one of those times or one of those problems.
From memory, 2011-12's deficit was about 126 billion, down from about 136 billion in 2010-11 (In Labour's last year in office the shortfall was nearer 150 billion). A couple of months' recent figures however show significantly higher borrowing than the Chancellor planned, raising the spectre that the 2012-13 deficit might start pushing back up again. Of course what's important is the inflation-adjusted figure rather than the nominal one, or perhaps better still the deficit as a percentage of GDP. But whichever way you look at it Osborne is sailing close to the wind, and the bond markets will take a dim view if it turns out his tenuous grip on the deficit is slipping.
Given circumstances in the Eurozone I can't see any British chancellor having a hope in hell of getting the economy to grow at the moment, but having flayed Osborne's critics, notably the clueless Aditya Chakrabortty, for failing to set out a coherent alternative strategy, here, at absolutely no cost, are my top tips for things an imaginative Chancellor could do to - I was going to write make things better, but let's restrict ourselves to not making things worse than they would have been otherwise.
1. The much vaunted infrastructure projects. The difficulty with using QE as helicopter money to shower on individuals is that they tend to spend it on imports. Better use it to fund big projects that will help us in the future. I don't much like the Heathrow Third Runway or new roads, but I quite fancy the Severn Barrage. We are going to be woefully short of electricity generating capacity in the near future, and Blair should have been doing something about it in the Noughties instead of blathering on about Cool Britannia. New nuclear power stations, preferably thorium-powered, wouldn't go amiss either. If we still had anyone who knew how to build them.
2. State run mortgage bank. No, not like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (mortgage guarantee schemes thoroughly abused by commercial lenders), but a bank to allow existing mortgage holders to transfer at low rates of interest. If the bank (we could call it RBS) were funded by means of QE, the Government would get the interest paid on the loans, and commercial lenders would have to do something else with their money to get a return - lend it to small businesses, perhaps.
3. The nuclear option. QE has been used thus far as a bond-buying scheme, with old bonds bought up by the Bank of England. In theory that means HMG has to pay the BoE the coupon, or interest, on those bonds, and repay the capital sum when it falls due. I'm guessing that's happening in practice too, only because if it weren't I'm sure we'd have been told about it. But if it is, why is it? The BoE dances to the Government's tune. Or it should be doing. Why can't it just tear up the bond and say, "Well we'll forget about that"? That way the BoE could use QE quietly to buy up debt from banks and pension funds and just as quietly cancel it. It wouldn't do much to cure the deficit (though it would reduce the burden of interest HMG pays daily in millions); it would however reduce the enormous debts HMG is currently amassing. You issue debt, the central bank buys it using QE then quietly cancels it. There must be a problem with this, but I can't see it. City types should feel free to write in and note their objections.
As for what Osborne shouldn't be doing, I can only think of one thing.
1. Borrow money and pump it into the economy. Consider. The Bank of England has over the last couple of years created about £375 billion by way of QE. Now undoubtedly things would have been even worse if it hadn't, but even this enormous sum has not been sufficient to keep us out of recession. Our current annual deficit is about £125 billion. So even if HMG succeeded in borrowing double its current deficit (and we'll come to the size of that if in a moment), it would still be only half way to getting hold of the £375 billion that made no perceptable difference when it was bandied about by the BoE. But actually there is no chance whatsoever of HMG succeeding in borrowing an additional £125 billion from the gilt markets (over and above the £125 billion or thereabouts it's likely to be borrowing anyway this year). The markets would think the Chancellor had gone crazy. Interest rates would go up. The ratings agencies would downgrade the UK several notches. Funds would be available if at all only at astronomic rates. In a nutshell then, there is no sum the Chancellor can borrow big enough to do anything other than give a barely perceptable nudge to the UK economy. The Balls and Chakraborttys of this world are guilty of a category error. They think there is always a simple and painless solution to a problem. Sometimes there is, but this isn't one of those times or one of those problems.
Kevin Pietersen's tattoos
At the time of writing this, England's attempt to score 340-odd in the fourth innings to beat South Africa and thus retain their status as the world's No. 1 Test nation is foundering under the pressure of both the Proteas' bowling and the stress inherent in chasing such a large total. England might have had a bit more chance had Kevin Pietersen been playing, but KP, as he likes to be known, has been dropped following revelations that he had texted derogatory comments about his team-mates to his fellow South Africans.
To remind non-cricketers, Pietersen is a South African. But he's playing for England. How has that come about? Because the ECB's rules allow naturalisation after four years' residence. This is an aspect of the game's laws that has allowed a number of overseas cricketers, most recently Pietersen, Jonathan Trott and Craig Kieswetter, to turn out for England despite, in some cases, having represented their own countries at junior level. South Africans have been particularly adept at shape-shifting in this way, firstly because for years the apartheid boycott kept their country out of international sport, latterly because the quota system has seen some of their most talented cricketers kept out of the international side in favour of non-whites.
My sympathy for them is limited. Pietersen is an unattractively egotistical goon who has simply followed his ambition, which was to stride the big stage. He has often been colossal, but although he had three lions tattooed on his shoulder, his loyalty to England is skin deep. Why should we be so surprised to find that, come the crunch, his loyalties are not to his team mates but his fellow countrymen? That is actually as it should be. The whole point of international sport is that it should take place between the people of one country and another.
But that begs the question, what does "of one country" mean? My personal preference would be for a birth qualification, but if it has to be residence then four years is way too short. The ECB has recently recognised this and upped it to seven. But that still means that a South African could represent his country at U-15 level and then play for England at 22. Not good enough.
Monty Panesar, a Sikh from Luton, is English through and through. So is Ravi Bopara and so was Mark Ramprakash. But Pietersen, Kieswetter and Trott are South Africans and, wherever they live, should be playing for South Africa. The present arrangements mock the rationale, such as it is, for competitive sport between nations (incidentally, Rugby Union is just as guilty of this too).
It's not often that I agree with Peter Oborne, but the journalist said that he would rather watch a proper England team lose than one stuffed with opportunists and mercenaries win. This fact will be of little interest to the ECB. But perhaps more pertinently, I'd be more likely to pay to go and watch a team full of Englishmen, no matter whether they won or lost.
To remind non-cricketers, Pietersen is a South African. But he's playing for England. How has that come about? Because the ECB's rules allow naturalisation after four years' residence. This is an aspect of the game's laws that has allowed a number of overseas cricketers, most recently Pietersen, Jonathan Trott and Craig Kieswetter, to turn out for England despite, in some cases, having represented their own countries at junior level. South Africans have been particularly adept at shape-shifting in this way, firstly because for years the apartheid boycott kept their country out of international sport, latterly because the quota system has seen some of their most talented cricketers kept out of the international side in favour of non-whites.
My sympathy for them is limited. Pietersen is an unattractively egotistical goon who has simply followed his ambition, which was to stride the big stage. He has often been colossal, but although he had three lions tattooed on his shoulder, his loyalty to England is skin deep. Why should we be so surprised to find that, come the crunch, his loyalties are not to his team mates but his fellow countrymen? That is actually as it should be. The whole point of international sport is that it should take place between the people of one country and another.
But that begs the question, what does "of one country" mean? My personal preference would be for a birth qualification, but if it has to be residence then four years is way too short. The ECB has recently recognised this and upped it to seven. But that still means that a South African could represent his country at U-15 level and then play for England at 22. Not good enough.
Monty Panesar, a Sikh from Luton, is English through and through. So is Ravi Bopara and so was Mark Ramprakash. But Pietersen, Kieswetter and Trott are South Africans and, wherever they live, should be playing for South Africa. The present arrangements mock the rationale, such as it is, for competitive sport between nations (incidentally, Rugby Union is just as guilty of this too).
It's not often that I agree with Peter Oborne, but the journalist said that he would rather watch a proper England team lose than one stuffed with opportunists and mercenaries win. This fact will be of little interest to the ECB. But perhaps more pertinently, I'd be more likely to pay to go and watch a team full of Englishmen, no matter whether they won or lost.
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