Mark Elder and Nigel Kennedy lock horns

In August the Graun ran an interview with Nigel Kennedy, in which the "bad boy" violinist apparently said, "I think conductors are completely over-rated . . .  because if you love music, why not play it?  Why wave around and get off on some ego shit?  I don't think the audience give a shit about the conductor . . . no one normal understands what the conductor does.  No one knows what they do!  They just wave their arms out of time."

Fast forward to October, when the paper printed a short Q & A with Sir Mark Elder, in which the Halle's MD was quoted as saying, "(Kennedy) and I have given wonderful performances together, and yet there he was saying we're all a load of wankers, and that nobody knows what we're there for".

The notion that no-one knows what the conductor does is widespread. Conductors don't after all make any sound during performances (apart from a little grunting from time to time), and it must seem to the general public like a rather inexplicable profession. But conductors do do something. Several things. Here are some of them.

In an orchestra someone needs to take a broad view of the tempo and shape of a work, and in rehearsal it's useful to have someone involved but not playing to identify problems that need to be fixed. Conductors control the speed of the music (otherwise which of the players would decide?), and with their hands help provide information about dynamics, articulation, balance and phrasing. Anyone who thinks that what conductors do with their hands makes no difference has not tried it. Von Karajan used to say that by varying his upbeat he could make the strings, or woodwind, or brass, play early in a tutti chord, and although I probably couldn't do that I have enough experience to be pretty sure that it's true. The players often say they don't watch (and certainly listening is just as important), but it's funny how you can get them to play the same passage differently by beating in a different way.  

So conductors are useful in performances and vital in rehearsal. But are they "a load of wankers" just the same? Well quite possibly. This is where I disagree with Elder.  It's quite possible to conduct great performances and be a plonker at the same time. It's not only possible, but likely that plonkers are going to be over-represented in the stick-waving business, given that it tends to attract people who like standing on a box, talking down to others, making their own separate entrance and getting an extra round of applause from the audience. I should know.

Next, Kennedy will be telling us that policemen are more than averagely likely to enjoy hitting people with sticks, or that footballers quite like playing football. Who knew?

I actually think that orchestral players expect the conductor to be a bit of a divvy. Inevitably some of them are. It's tempting to play up to this expectation actually, because often one's own real personality is just not adequate to the task of rehearsing an orchestra for three hours at a stretch. One becomes larger than life. I once had a piece performed by a conductor who wore an embroidered waistcoat. In the rehearsals. I actually didn't think he was a plonker. He was just doing what the players expected him to do.

But Kennedy is also wrong if he imagines that only conductors can be idiots, and in this regard he betrays a lack of self-awareness which is fatal to his argument. It's quite possible for a soloist to be a plonker as well.

You may well think that only someone with a very narrow set of interests could possibly be sufficiently driven to acquire the technical skill to make an international career as, for example, a violin soloist. You might find a person like that adopting a succession of eccentric hair styles and outfits in an attempt to make themselves seem more interesting. Such a person might be tempted to adopt a "mockney" accent to disguise their middle-class background, and try a foray into other musical styles for which they had only a modest aptitude; jazz for example.

I leave it to you to decide whether this photograph depicts such a person.

National security - back to the steam age

I can't have been the only person to notice that if you hack into the private communications of the government, you face jail; whereas if the government hacks into your private communications that's perfectly OK.

I don't generally have much time for attention seekers like Bradley Manning, but it does seem curious that getting unauthorised access to, for example, the US National Security Agency's records, is punishable with a long prison sentence (or in Edward Snowden's case, years of exile; or in the case of one British hacker a long struggle against extradition); whereas if the US National Security Agency hacks into your emails or phone calls, be you a private individual or a friendly foreign leader like Angela Merkel, that's just the kind of routine stuff the state does every day.

There are arguments which go some way to explain this strange disparity of outcome, but nevertheless it's striking that the state can do whatever it likes, whereas we can't.

Orwell's vision of a telescreen in every room, watching us while we watch it, is becoming truer by the day.

If I were a terrorist of any kind, I'd be doing my plotting by Royal Mail.  It's easy and cheap to set up computer systems which monitor email and search for keywords - "terrorist" and "plotter" for example (and it's a big hi to all the good people at GCHQ!) - but it's time consuming and expensive to steam open envelopes in a back room of a sorting office.

Bullies - Grant Shapps and the BBC

The Tory party chairman Grant Shapps is in the news again, this time for an interview in the Sunday Telegraph in which he says, in terms, that if the BBC wants the licence fee renewing it had better get its act together.  The BBC, says Shapps, suffers from a culture of secrecy, doesn't look after our pennies well enough, and has a left-of-centre bias.

It is no longer controversial to say that the BBC was biased.  Successive internal reports, by John Bridcut amongst others, suggest the Corporation has had an institutionally liberal outlook on matters such as immigration, although the reports are always careful to stress that this is how things used to be.

The reports also use the word "liberal", not "left wing".  I think this is because to admit it had ever been left-of-centre would be an utter disaster for the BBC; anyway, "liberal" has a nice cuddly feel, doesn't it?  Who could feel threatened by liberalism?

Actually if you consider what the obverse of a "liberal" bias would be, the answer is, as I've observed here before, a "conservative" one.  As so often with officialdom, words are chosen to obscure meaning rather than to communicate it.

The thought that the BBC might have had a bias that was the opposite of "conservative" is not quite so comforting for people that value its place in British society.

Not surprisingly the Guardian wades into the debate this morning, accusing Shapps of being a bully and comparing him unfavourably with Norman Tebbit.  Coming from the Graun that's abuse indeed.  And you can see their point.  The idea of a political party trying to get the state broadcaster to run a more sympathetic agenda sounds uncomfortably like Eastern Europe pre-1990.  The paper's leader finishes, " . . a fair and informed national broadcaster matters far more to Britain than a here-today, gone tomorrow partisan politician".

A fine declaration, but one which does rather beg the question, is the BBC's coverage actually fair?  I'm not going to address this now because I don't think it sheds much light on the Shapps controversy. You might find it striking that whilst there is no shortage of ex-BBC staff willing to say that the Corporation is on the whole a left of centre organisation, there have been none, and I mean none, who have come forward with the opposite view.  You might also have noticed that it's a while since any Labour politician complained about the BBC being a Rightist organisation.  But for the moment that's all beside the point.

What might legitimise Shapps' complaint is a consideration of who decides what constitutes "fairness".  The BBC mandarins would probably say it's for them to decide, and I wish them luck with that difficult job.  But the BBC relies on public consent for its continued existence, and it matters a great deal to the Corporation if a significant proportion of the public think it is biased.

Shapps is worth taking seriously not because he is an MP or Government minister (he is neither), but because he represents a much broader constituency up and down the country which thinks that over decades the BBC has got things wrong and is still getting them wrong now.  Failure to heed this constituency undermines the case for the licence fee and jeopardises the BBC's continued existence.

Larry Elliott taxes the rich a bit more - again

The most economically literate journalist the Guardian has - and it's not saying much - is Larry Elliott.  This morning he weighs into the debate about taxing the rich.  I wrote a couple of weeks ago ("Labour's missing billions and the privileged few") about the problems inherent in this.  Elliott unwittingly confirms my conclusion - which was that increasing top rates of tax for high earners won't solve our fiscal problems.

He reports the conclusions of an IMF report which suggests that the rich, particularly in the US, might be undertaxed, quoting the following passage: "The implied revenue gain if top rates on only the top 1% were returned to their levels in the 1980s averages about 0.25% of GDP, but the gain could in some cases . . . be more significant".

"Applying the IMF's formula to Britain", writes Elliott, "would mean that the exchequer would raise an additional £4bn from taxing top earners".  If the IMF are right (although, as my "Labour's missing billions" post pointed out, an HMRC report from 2012 suggests that putting up top tax rates to 50% might actually have lost the Exchequer money rather than raised any extra), "applying the IMF's formula to Britain would mean that the exchequer would raise an additional £4bn from taxing top earners, since 1% of national output is about £15bn".

In case you think this is a large sum of money, it isn't.  Even Elliott admits "This is not exactly a fortune". What he doesn't tell Guardian readers (assuming any of them actually read the economics page) is just how small a sum it is.  The UK has to borrow £4bn on the money markets about every ten days just to keep going.

So when you've taxed the rich a bit more, then what?

The idea that the massive gap between what it takes to run Britain (as currently constituted) and the nation's income can be filled by taxing the rich more is the political equivalent of one of those 19th century quack cures like Ward's Drop.  People want to believe it will work, but they don't want to know too much detail in case the detail reveals that it won't.  That's why Elliott left "This is not exactly a fortune" to his last para and didn't enlarge on the consequences.  He could for example have pointed out that even raising an extra £4bn still left a further £116bn unfunded at current deficit levels.

The maths imply only four choices for us.  One, tax everyone a lot more, and not just the rich.  Two, cut spending.  Three, a combination of one and two.  Or four, go bust.

Wilshere for England

The other day I watched from the Old Trafford stands as, late in a game against Liverpool, David Moyes brought on a late substitute, the young Belgian winger Adnan Janujaz.  A slight stick-like figure, uncannily similar in shape to the young Ryan Giggs, Janujaz received the ball wide on the right, faced the defenders in front of him with a wiggle of the hands as if to say, "Come and get it if you can", shaped left and right, then with a shift of his hips left them all standing.  He might be a wunderkind - it's too early to say - but he looks at the very least a good prospect.

And he might just play for England.

How can this be? Janujaz was born in Belgium, but could also play for Albania via his parents or Kosovo (if they had a senior team: they don't).  He turned Belgium down when offered, and has said he would prefer to play for Albania.  But Roy Hodgson has said the FA are monitoring Janujaz with a view to calling him up to play for England in due course, taking advantage of a 5 year residency rule - news which caused the Arsenal and England midfielder Jack Wilshere to comment a few days ago, "The only people who should play for England are English people . . . If you live in England for five years it doesn't make you English. . . If I went to Spain and lived there for five years I'm not going to play for Spain".

Wilshere is largely right (though I suspect that the unlikelihood of his playing for Spain rests less on personal preference and more on not being good enough to attract a Spanish domestic club in the first place).  But of course the key is, who exactly are English people?  Janujaz, who has been at Man U for two years, hardly qualifies.  But what about other British sporting greats?

Mo Farah came to England when he was 8.  That seems fair enough. Kevin Pietersen didn't come to Britain till he was 19, and opted to play for England to avoid the racial quota system in his own country. He's South African.  So are Jonathan Trott, who came here aged 20, and Craig Kieswetter.  Chris Froome has raced under a British licence on the basis of his father's nationality but otherwise has almost no personal links with the UK.  Bradley Wiggins on the other hand, though born in Belgium, went to school in North London.

Why is any of this important?  Because international sportsmen represent their country.  When England run out onto the pitch we want to know that however rubbish they may be they are nevertheless a product of the same climate, language, diet, geography and culture as we are.  Otherwise we can't identify with them. Simple as that.  Even though Monty Panesar wears a turban and has a brown skin, he's very obviously much more English (ie, bad at fielding) than KP, who frankly I wouldn't have in my house.

In an attempt to refute Jack Wilshere the journalist Paul Hayward, writing in the Torygraph this morning, cites the examples of Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis, who, startlingly, is apparently "mixed race".  Who knew?  But as we've seen Farah came here when he was 8, and as for Ennis, she was born in Sheffield and no-one gives a bugger about race any more (at least not in sport, a results based business): truly I have never, not once in many years spent haunting football terraces, ever heard anyone say, "So and so shouldn't play for England because he's black".  Never.  So in a way it is heartening to see that Wilshere has reservations about Janujaz, who looks white to me, because he is not English.  

You don't have to be born in England to be English.  But having grown up here certainly helps.

Lady Chatterley, the Y-word and creeping censorship

I don't remember much of the 1960s (because I was too young, not because I was off my face all the time), but I know that until 1968 theatre productions in the UK were regulated by the Lord Chamberlain's office. That's to say, if you wanted to put on a play, you had to get a licence.  This seems extraordinary now, but it's all of a piece when you consider that Penguin books were prosecuted for publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover as recently as 1960.

How freedom of speech has come on! Now you can say - or show - pretty much anything you like.  Hard core pornography is available at the touch of a button, and Channel 4 puts on a show called Sex Box which, apparently, features couples having it off and then talking candidly about it on screen.

Oh that D H Lawrence should have lived to see this hour!  Oh Mariella Frostrup that your career should come to this!

Well not so fast.  I wonder whether in fact we have not reached the high watermark of liberty, and whether the tide is now ebbing.  It was depressing to read that at the weekend a Spurs fan was arrested for being one of thousands of Spurs fans shouting the word "yid" at White Hart Lane.  As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the Y-word is not a racist slur, and in the football context it is not even anti-Semitic. Now a yobbo from Kent gets prosecuted for posting on Facebook a picture of a burning poppy captioned with the words, "Take that you squadey (sic) c---ts".  Now UKIP's crappy Godfrey Bloom gets booted out of the party because the media wilfully misunderstands his use of the word "slut" and Nigel Farage won't stand up for him.

We live increasingly in a world where you cannot say what you like, or at least not if you say something the chattering classes (people like me, in other words) find unacceptable.  The sad irony is that advances in freedom of speech were driven by the Liberal Left - the Conservatives lost that argument comprehensively around the time prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffiths-Jones asked the Chatterley jury, "Is this a book you would want your children or servants to read?" - but it is the Liberal Left which is leading the charge back to censorship. It sometimes seems to me that there is a range of opinions which it is legitimate to hold, and within that range you can say what you like.  But should you stray outside, woe betide you.

Too many people in Britain fail to understand that there is no right not to be offended.  And that true freedom of speech involves other people being able to say things you really don't like.  That's a freedom worth having because it gives you the right to say things they don't like either.  That the decline from this ideal should be driven by the same political group that was instrumental in giving it to us in the first place I find desperately sad.

P.S. A couple of days ago at the LSE freshers week two students from the University's Atheist Secularist and Humanist Society were told to cover up "Jesus and Mo" T-shirts (you can read the satirical online cartoon here), on the basis that they were "offensive" and might be considered "harassment".  Yes, that's right.  The LSE founded by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, forefront of 60s student radicalism, telling a pair of students what they can and can't wear. The wearing down of freedom of expression goes on and on.

Life cycles

A couple of weeks ago some toerag broke into our garage and stole the family bike.  Eventually its loss began to be felt and I was sent to Halfords to buy another one.

Having dashed his hopes of selling me a £1,000 model, the young sales assistant and I fell to discussing the cheapest and second cheapest instead.  Pressed about the difference, he said, "Well this one's got 21 gears, whereas that one's only got 18".  I had to laugh.  "When I was your age", I said, "we had Sturmey and Archer three-speed and thought we were lucky", shocked to find myself sounding, and not for the first time, exactly like one of the Four Yorkshiremen.

The shop assistant wouldn't have been thinking this, because he was far too young to know who the Four Yorkshiremen were.

The other day my son went away to University.  I don't remember much about my first experience of going away to school, aged 11, except there were many moments when having to hold it together was almost overwhelming; and some when it actually was.  But I do remember going away to University, less traumatic for the experience of boarding school, and I am therefore all the more bemused to be in the same situation thirty five years later, except this time playing the role of Father instead of Son.

Truly I have become my Dad.

What to make of this?  Life is not exactly a circle.  If it were, I'd be the Son still.  Perhaps more like a shallow spiral, where, having come all the way round, you find yourself tantalisingly close, unreachably close, to where you were decades previously.

No doubt these thoughts, perhaps true, are cliches.  But being cliches none the less true.