Last week I went to see Rams, a film about a dispute between two sibling Icelandic sheep farmers. It was great.
Last night I went to see Grimsby, Sacha Baron Cohen's film about a lairy underclass northerner, Nobby Butcher, reunited with his long-lost brother who just happens to be a spy in trouble.
Variety is the spice of life, after all.
Grimsby has been very largely panned. "Witless rubbish", wrote one critic. "Cohen comes unstuck", wrote another. "Class libel", fulminated the New Statesman. The tone of the reviews has been that the film isn't funny and that anyway it's unfair to pick on the working class. Baron Cohen did not dare to film in Grimsby itself, and the residents of the preferred location, Tilbury, are apparently outraged that their town was chosen as a convenient Grimsby-alike.
Oh my.
Grimsby is not subtle. It is broad, crude, violent, uneven and about as hit and miss in its humour as Baron Cohen's northern accent. But boy did I laugh. It takes a particularly sensitive soul not to find funny the scene (is that even the right word?) in which the two brothers take refuge in an elephant's vagina - bad enough you might think - only to discover that a line of he-elephants are lining up to take advantage of her. The (half-empty) cinema was united in its helpless distress. Other scenes are similarly difficult to watch.
I guess if you are offended by the shameless (or more plausibly Shameless) lampooning of the Northern working class it must be hard to find Grimsby that funny. But I can't help feeling that the metropolitan sophisticates united in their disdain for Baron Cohen's film would pay quite a lot of money to avoid going anywhere like Grimsby, and as for mixing socially with the working class, well surely those are the people one moves to London to avoid, darling. There's something funny in itself about people whose disdain for the provincial proletariat is matched by their desperation to be seen defending it.
It's true that the film's McGuffin - a sub-SPECTRE cabal called Maelstrom is going to wipe out the world's underclass by releasing deadly toxins at the World Cup final only to be defeated by Nobby and his Grimsby mates - is perhaps just an excuse for satirising the squalor and fecundity of the protagonist's home life. But firstly there's a measure of truth in Baron Cohen's portrait, and secondly Nobby is likeable as well as feckless, and the scenes in and around his home have a liveliness and enthusiasm which are touching as well as funny.
I hope Baron Cohen makes a shed load of money out of Grimsby and that his critics disappear up their own fundamentals. Where it would be diverting to imagine them being assailed by a herd of elephants.
Monday 29 February 2016
Monday 22 February 2016
Emma Thompson, Goldman Sachs and the EU referendum
Five years ago I wrote a piece on here about the Alternative Vote referendum - remember that? - in which I noted that since John Cleese, Joanna Lumley, Eddie Izzard, Stephen Fry, Helena Bonham Carter and Colin Firth were in favour of AV it was likely to be a bad idea. In a raft of contexts since then I've noticed that if the Luvvies are in favour of something it's likely to be wrong, and, moreover, almost certain not to prevail. You name it, from press regulation to migration, Emma Thompson will weigh in on one side and sensible people on the other.
Wealthy entertainers live in a world where reality is viewed through a distant and self-serving gauze, often from the heights of Hampstead or Primrose Hill. Out of touch? Moi? Simpson's Law has subsequently proved a helpful guide through many a complex thicket.
But what's this? An EU referendum looms. Where do the Luvvies line up? Ms Thompson helpfully gets the ball rolling. It would be "madness" for Britain to leave, she intoned at a press conference in Berlin. Britain is "a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe . . . A cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island". Notice the unattractive way self-deprecation shades into self-hatred. Notice too the utter irrelevance of our weather and home-baking habits to the In/Out argument. This air-headed nonsense is a pretty good indicator of which way the Luvvies are going to go. Where Emma leads, others will surely follow.
All well and good, but Simpson's Law now faces perhaps its sternest test. For those of us looking for a steer, what are we to make of those on the Brexit side?
Here the form looks if anything even less appealing. Douglas Carswell. Nigel Farage. George Galloway. Ian Duncan Smith. Who wants to ally themselves with such a dismal roster? Matthew Parris wrote a great piece on this in the Spectator last week in which he compared those making the case for leaving the EU with those who argued for Rhodesian UDI in the 1960s. "Their argument was shot though with anger, resentment and bitter nostalgia", Parris wrote of Ian Smith and his friends, floating the idea that to some extent the side we take in an argument is a product of our personalities. Perhaps, Parris wrote, "arguments choose their protagonists, rather than the other way round". Perhaps to yield to the Out side is to acknowledge the bitterness which lurks within us all.
Over the weekend however the Leave campaign acquired two genuine figures of substance. Michael Gove did it for reasons of principle, I think, and Boris Johnson I'm pretty sure for reasons of personal interest. After all even if Remain wins, Cameron's successor is not going to be chosen by the electorate at large but by disaffected Tories. George Osborne and Theresa May could just have handed Johnson the leadership.
Two other protagonists to weigh up. Frank Field wants us to go. I have always loved Frank Field. He wrote, "The Government has failed to secure the key renegotiation requirement, namely that we should regain control of our borders".
On the Remain side, Goldman Sachs apparently want us to stay.
That's worth a new paragraph. Yes, Goldman Sachs. And Emma Thompson.
Wealthy entertainers live in a world where reality is viewed through a distant and self-serving gauze, often from the heights of Hampstead or Primrose Hill. Out of touch? Moi? Simpson's Law has subsequently proved a helpful guide through many a complex thicket.
But what's this? An EU referendum looms. Where do the Luvvies line up? Ms Thompson helpfully gets the ball rolling. It would be "madness" for Britain to leave, she intoned at a press conference in Berlin. Britain is "a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe . . . A cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island". Notice the unattractive way self-deprecation shades into self-hatred. Notice too the utter irrelevance of our weather and home-baking habits to the In/Out argument. This air-headed nonsense is a pretty good indicator of which way the Luvvies are going to go. Where Emma leads, others will surely follow.
All well and good, but Simpson's Law now faces perhaps its sternest test. For those of us looking for a steer, what are we to make of those on the Brexit side?
Here the form looks if anything even less appealing. Douglas Carswell. Nigel Farage. George Galloway. Ian Duncan Smith. Who wants to ally themselves with such a dismal roster? Matthew Parris wrote a great piece on this in the Spectator last week in which he compared those making the case for leaving the EU with those who argued for Rhodesian UDI in the 1960s. "Their argument was shot though with anger, resentment and bitter nostalgia", Parris wrote of Ian Smith and his friends, floating the idea that to some extent the side we take in an argument is a product of our personalities. Perhaps, Parris wrote, "arguments choose their protagonists, rather than the other way round". Perhaps to yield to the Out side is to acknowledge the bitterness which lurks within us all.
Over the weekend however the Leave campaign acquired two genuine figures of substance. Michael Gove did it for reasons of principle, I think, and Boris Johnson I'm pretty sure for reasons of personal interest. After all even if Remain wins, Cameron's successor is not going to be chosen by the electorate at large but by disaffected Tories. George Osborne and Theresa May could just have handed Johnson the leadership.
Two other protagonists to weigh up. Frank Field wants us to go. I have always loved Frank Field. He wrote, "The Government has failed to secure the key renegotiation requirement, namely that we should regain control of our borders".
On the Remain side, Goldman Sachs apparently want us to stay.
That's worth a new paragraph. Yes, Goldman Sachs. And Emma Thompson.
Thursday 11 February 2016
Jeremy Hunt, Junior Doctors and a slightly smaller prize
I have been observing the Junior Doctors' industrial dispute with the Government with interest. I am not expert on the detail, and cannot tell you what is the issue on which talks have foundered today (so seriously that Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, has now decided to impose a new contract). But I do know rather a lot of doctors socially - probably more than a dozen, if I stretched it - and here are a few things I've observed, or my friends have told me.
- "Junior doctors are absolutely no use". Thus spake an anaesthetist I know. "They just get in the way".
- "Junior doctors don't know anything. When I was training we basically lived in the hospital. That's how you learn. Now they're always wanting to get off home. No wonder they don't know anything". That one was from a consultant neurologist.
- A GP friend said to me, "The Blair Government made a big mistake with contracts. They told us we had to do things which we were doing anyway, and they offered to pay us extra if we did them. So we said OK, and they paid us a lot more for doing what we'd been doing already. We'd been struggling financially until then". This person, a good friend, put three children through public school and has a holiday house in the country.
- Ever Doctor that I know lives in a big house, with a big car outside (actually, most of them have two big cars outside).
- Every Doctor I know, notwithstanding recent changes, is sitting on a notional pension pot worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. To put it in context, if a Doctor retires on a pension of £48k (and that's the average) a pot of nearly £1,500,000 would be needed to fund it in the private sector. The average private sector pension pot? Rather under £40,000. The Doctor's pension pot doesn't in fact exist. The pension will be funded by working taxpayers.
- Every Doctor I know (and yes, they're mostly in their forties and fifties), is rather fond of expensive wine and goes on expensive holidays. I'll be going to a dinner tonight where the two doctors I'll be sitting with have recently gone skiing and ice climbing in Italy.
- Two of my neighbours, both Junior Doctors, are hoping to move to a house round the corner. The asking price? £750,000.
- Since 2010 public spending has been cut amongst many government departments, but the NHS has been ringfenced, and its budgets have actually been increased in real terms.
- A disproportionately large number of the BMA leadership are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party (if you doubt me, Google is always there for you).
Now for all I know Junior Doctors may be entirely deserving of more money and shorter working hours. It may be that if the Tories don't give them these things they will all decamp to New Zealand (and a doctor I met recently was doing just that). But on the face of it the facts would appear to be as follows:
- Junior Doctors of my friends' generation worked harder without complaint.
- Attempts to quantify what Doctors should do have to some degree had the effect of de-professionalising the profession. Junior Doctors used to work until the job was done because that devotion to duty meant that they learned more and they were more likely to get promoted. That may no longer be true to the same extent.
- Doctors have always struggled and suffered when they were young, and the reward was ease, status, promotion prospects, job security, affluence in middle age and a fantastic pension when you retired.
- The rewards for Doctors are way beyond the reach of the overwhelming majority of the ordinary people who pay for them.
- Every other corner of public service has suffered as, since 2010, the government has sought to get a grip on public expenditure. If it's right that the NHS should be exempt from those pressures as far as possible, it doesn't seem unreasonable for HMG to seek to make the service better and more efficient. Should Doctors be exempt from attempts to make the service better, and better value for money?
I make these observations aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, and raise these questions without knowing the answers. But when I look at the bright, shiny faces of the protesting Junior Doctors I don't see poor and downtrodden workers. They look to me instead like people who won a fairly substantial prize in the lottery of life, and who would rather see operations cancelled than that prize get even just slightly smaller.
- "Junior doctors are absolutely no use". Thus spake an anaesthetist I know. "They just get in the way".
- "Junior doctors don't know anything. When I was training we basically lived in the hospital. That's how you learn. Now they're always wanting to get off home. No wonder they don't know anything". That one was from a consultant neurologist.
- A GP friend said to me, "The Blair Government made a big mistake with contracts. They told us we had to do things which we were doing anyway, and they offered to pay us extra if we did them. So we said OK, and they paid us a lot more for doing what we'd been doing already. We'd been struggling financially until then". This person, a good friend, put three children through public school and has a holiday house in the country.
- Ever Doctor that I know lives in a big house, with a big car outside (actually, most of them have two big cars outside).
- Every Doctor I know, notwithstanding recent changes, is sitting on a notional pension pot worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. To put it in context, if a Doctor retires on a pension of £48k (and that's the average) a pot of nearly £1,500,000 would be needed to fund it in the private sector. The average private sector pension pot? Rather under £40,000. The Doctor's pension pot doesn't in fact exist. The pension will be funded by working taxpayers.
- Every Doctor I know (and yes, they're mostly in their forties and fifties), is rather fond of expensive wine and goes on expensive holidays. I'll be going to a dinner tonight where the two doctors I'll be sitting with have recently gone skiing and ice climbing in Italy.
- Two of my neighbours, both Junior Doctors, are hoping to move to a house round the corner. The asking price? £750,000.
- Since 2010 public spending has been cut amongst many government departments, but the NHS has been ringfenced, and its budgets have actually been increased in real terms.
- A disproportionately large number of the BMA leadership are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party (if you doubt me, Google is always there for you).
Now for all I know Junior Doctors may be entirely deserving of more money and shorter working hours. It may be that if the Tories don't give them these things they will all decamp to New Zealand (and a doctor I met recently was doing just that). But on the face of it the facts would appear to be as follows:
- Junior Doctors of my friends' generation worked harder without complaint.
- Attempts to quantify what Doctors should do have to some degree had the effect of de-professionalising the profession. Junior Doctors used to work until the job was done because that devotion to duty meant that they learned more and they were more likely to get promoted. That may no longer be true to the same extent.
- Doctors have always struggled and suffered when they were young, and the reward was ease, status, promotion prospects, job security, affluence in middle age and a fantastic pension when you retired.
- The rewards for Doctors are way beyond the reach of the overwhelming majority of the ordinary people who pay for them.
- Every other corner of public service has suffered as, since 2010, the government has sought to get a grip on public expenditure. If it's right that the NHS should be exempt from those pressures as far as possible, it doesn't seem unreasonable for HMG to seek to make the service better and more efficient. Should Doctors be exempt from attempts to make the service better, and better value for money?
I make these observations aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, and raise these questions without knowing the answers. But when I look at the bright, shiny faces of the protesting Junior Doctors I don't see poor and downtrodden workers. They look to me instead like people who won a fairly substantial prize in the lottery of life, and who would rather see operations cancelled than that prize get even just slightly smaller.
Friday 4 December 2015
Ten myths about Syrian intervention
Here are some common myths about the UK parliament's decision to bomb ISIL's positions in Syria:
1. It represents a major new departure for the UK.
No it doesn't. We are currently bombing ISIL in Iraq (at the invitation of the Iraqi government), and the UN has authorised member states to extend operations to the part of Syria occupied by them. ISIL do not recognise the Iraq/Syria border (they think all the land belongs to them) and in practice it no longer exists anyway.
2. Bombing will make no difference.
Yes it will. It may not make much difference, but that's not the same as no difference. US bombing in Iraq is credited with turning ISIL back only 50 miles away from Baghdad. The more states are involved, the more difficult life will be for ISIL on the ground.
3. No civilian casualties are occurring in Syria.
Yes they are. This is such a potent myth that Stop the War in fact never need to utter it. They merely say "innocent people will be killed", as if no innocent people are being killed at the moment. In fact innocent people are being killed by ISIL in numbers and in a manner which any decent person would find revolting. A more respectable argument goes "even though you may defeat ISIL, more innocent people would be killed in the process than ISIL would kill if left to their own devices". More respectable, but still I think likely to be wrong.
4. It is possible to have a foolproof plan for war.
No it isn't. Leaving aside von Moltke's commonplace "no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy", contemplate Churchill in 1939 - "Winston, are you sure we are right to support Poland? After all, you have no plan for the post-war settlement once Germany has been defeated!". It may be true there's no plan, but criticising the Government for lacking one is to make the assumption that a plan could be devised and then stuck to.
5. David Cameron described the opposition as terrorist sympathisers.
The Guardian alleged that Cameron said to Tory MPs "you should not be walking through the lobbies with Jeremy Corbyn and a bunch of terrorist sympathisers". This was treated by Labour and the SNP as an attack on them in general, and a good part of their early contributions to the Commons debate were preoccupied with attempts to get Cameron to apologise. But Cameron isn't alleged to have said that all the opposition were terrorist sympathisers; the highest gloss that can be put on his remarks is that they implied some of them were. And some of them are. Corbyn and John McDonnell's support for Hezbollah and the IRA are a matter of public record. Get over it, Labour, and enough with the faux outrage. Don't pretend you didn't know what these people were like when you elected them.
6. It will make the UK a terrorist target.
The UK is already a terrorist target. This won't make a bad situation any worse.
7. Hilary Benn's closing remarks showed what the real Labour party is like.
I watched Benn's speech and thought it a magnificent - if theatrical - display of moral authority. But he was only able to persuade about one fifth (one fifth!) of Labour MPs to vote with him. Despite the free vote, the overwhelming majority of the PLP voted with Jeremy Corbyn. And the PLP are meant to be the sensible wing of Labour! If Hilary Benn represented the party nowadays, it would be like a return to a golden era. But it's the foam-flecked finger-jabbers outside Parliament who represent the real Labour now. Hilary Benn is an outlier.
8. The choice for the UK is between one self-evidently good thing and one self-evidently bad.
No it isn't. War is a bad thing. People are killed, huge sums of money are wasted and over all hangs the Law of Unintended Consequences. But leaving ISIL free to go on the rampage across the Middle East is a bad thing as well. The choice is between two bad things. The grown-up response is to accept this and make an earnest decision to pick the least worst.
9. Only one side in this argument has moral authority.
Not true. Both sides wish to minimise suffering, and differ only in the best way of going about it.
10. Both sides have intellectual authority.
For all the praise MPs heaped on themselves for the great quality of the speeches, I didn't hear anyone make a persuasive case against bombing. The antis have unreasonable expectations of what is possible in the matter of pre-war planning, and are reluctant to face the terrible plight of people in Iraq and Syria under ISIL. They may not all be terrorist sympathisers, but their desperation to cling to the belief that the West is wrong at all times and their reluctance to defend the values which inform Western liberalism have impeded their intellectual honesty.
1. It represents a major new departure for the UK.
No it doesn't. We are currently bombing ISIL in Iraq (at the invitation of the Iraqi government), and the UN has authorised member states to extend operations to the part of Syria occupied by them. ISIL do not recognise the Iraq/Syria border (they think all the land belongs to them) and in practice it no longer exists anyway.
2. Bombing will make no difference.
Yes it will. It may not make much difference, but that's not the same as no difference. US bombing in Iraq is credited with turning ISIL back only 50 miles away from Baghdad. The more states are involved, the more difficult life will be for ISIL on the ground.
3. No civilian casualties are occurring in Syria.
Yes they are. This is such a potent myth that Stop the War in fact never need to utter it. They merely say "innocent people will be killed", as if no innocent people are being killed at the moment. In fact innocent people are being killed by ISIL in numbers and in a manner which any decent person would find revolting. A more respectable argument goes "even though you may defeat ISIL, more innocent people would be killed in the process than ISIL would kill if left to their own devices". More respectable, but still I think likely to be wrong.
4. It is possible to have a foolproof plan for war.
No it isn't. Leaving aside von Moltke's commonplace "no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy", contemplate Churchill in 1939 - "Winston, are you sure we are right to support Poland? After all, you have no plan for the post-war settlement once Germany has been defeated!". It may be true there's no plan, but criticising the Government for lacking one is to make the assumption that a plan could be devised and then stuck to.
5. David Cameron described the opposition as terrorist sympathisers.
The Guardian alleged that Cameron said to Tory MPs "you should not be walking through the lobbies with Jeremy Corbyn and a bunch of terrorist sympathisers". This was treated by Labour and the SNP as an attack on them in general, and a good part of their early contributions to the Commons debate were preoccupied with attempts to get Cameron to apologise. But Cameron isn't alleged to have said that all the opposition were terrorist sympathisers; the highest gloss that can be put on his remarks is that they implied some of them were. And some of them are. Corbyn and John McDonnell's support for Hezbollah and the IRA are a matter of public record. Get over it, Labour, and enough with the faux outrage. Don't pretend you didn't know what these people were like when you elected them.
6. It will make the UK a terrorist target.
The UK is already a terrorist target. This won't make a bad situation any worse.
7. Hilary Benn's closing remarks showed what the real Labour party is like.
I watched Benn's speech and thought it a magnificent - if theatrical - display of moral authority. But he was only able to persuade about one fifth (one fifth!) of Labour MPs to vote with him. Despite the free vote, the overwhelming majority of the PLP voted with Jeremy Corbyn. And the PLP are meant to be the sensible wing of Labour! If Hilary Benn represented the party nowadays, it would be like a return to a golden era. But it's the foam-flecked finger-jabbers outside Parliament who represent the real Labour now. Hilary Benn is an outlier.
8. The choice for the UK is between one self-evidently good thing and one self-evidently bad.
No it isn't. War is a bad thing. People are killed, huge sums of money are wasted and over all hangs the Law of Unintended Consequences. But leaving ISIL free to go on the rampage across the Middle East is a bad thing as well. The choice is between two bad things. The grown-up response is to accept this and make an earnest decision to pick the least worst.
9. Only one side in this argument has moral authority.
Not true. Both sides wish to minimise suffering, and differ only in the best way of going about it.
10. Both sides have intellectual authority.
For all the praise MPs heaped on themselves for the great quality of the speeches, I didn't hear anyone make a persuasive case against bombing. The antis have unreasonable expectations of what is possible in the matter of pre-war planning, and are reluctant to face the terrible plight of people in Iraq and Syria under ISIL. They may not all be terrorist sympathisers, but their desperation to cling to the belief that the West is wrong at all times and their reluctance to defend the values which inform Western liberalism have impeded their intellectual honesty.
Wednesday 2 December 2015
Adele, Edward Elgar and the decline of classical music.
How strong is support for classical music in Britain today? Here is some anecdotal evidence.
A colleague tells me that at the famous conservatoire he's involved with, only seven students are studying his (mainstream) woodwind instrument. That's seven across all years, including postgrad. Less than two per year.
Another colleague at the same conservatoire tells me that recently the Head of Composition was forced to accept four students he wanted to reject "just to make up the numbers".
A major symphony orchestra in one of Britain's biggest cities recently put on a concert whose centrepiece was a concerto by a well-known living composer. The hall was about one fifth full. 200 people paid, and 500 complimentary tickets were given away. Not all the people who got comps bothered to come.
In the last week of November Adele's new album sold 3.4 million copies. The #1 classical album (Yo Yo Ma's 60th birthday album) sold just 493.
I have written again and again on this blog about the reasons for the decline of classical music, and what might be done to combat it. Classical music has diverged every more widely from popular taste; concession to popularity is decried; accessible composers are marginalised; the repertoire has failed to renew itself; pop music has become elevated from a derided to a revered idiom; the acoustic instruments on which classical music relies have become supplanted by electronic ones; acoustic instruments are not novel and will never be novel again; digital signal processing has transformed electronic music; classical music has suffered a consequent loss of cultural prestige; the political case for arts subsidy has become harder to justify; the educational case for classical music has fallen victim to child-centred learning ("it's difficult, and they aren't interested in it"); the economic basis for classical music has been undermined as fewer people go to concerts (and those that do are getting older); fewer young people want to learn classical instruments, curtailing future audiences; fewer young people want to study at conservatoire level, realising that the chances of actually working in the profession are minimal; conservatoires find it harder to fill places so standards fall.
Meanwhile the Titanic continues to steam steadily for the iceberg as those with secure jobs in the industry carry on as if nothing was wrong and contemplate their pensions.
If you think it was ever thus and that I am just the Cheadle Cassandra (now there's a title) here's a comparison. Last Saturday I conducted the Halifax Symphony Orchestra in Elgar's 1st Symphony. In the twelve months after its premiere in 1908 it was performed nearly one hundred times to rapturous acclaim. What are the chances of something similar happening now?
Wednesday 21 October 2015
Seamus Milne, Lee Rigby and Oliver's Army
All the time we're finding out more about what Jeremy Corbyn's like.
Today comes the announcement that he's appointed Seamus Milne as his press officer. Milne, for the uninitiated, is the son of the former BBC Director General Alasdair Milne, educated at Winchester and Oxford, writes for the Guardian from what you might generously call a post-Stalinist position. You might sum his views up by saying that pretty much everything the West does is bad, and the things other people do are not as bad as the Western capitalist media makes out.
Life is too short and Milne too contemptible a figure to spend the whole morning listing his views, which range from the barmy to the unpleasant. But I would like to mention something he said about the death of Fusilier Lee Rigby, hacked to death a couple of years ago outside Woolwich barracks by two Muslim extremists.
"Rigby was a British soldier who had taken part in multiple combat operations in Afghanistan", wrote Milne in December 2013. "So the attack wasn't terrorism in the normal sense of an indiscriminate attack on civilians". He went on to write that there'd be a lot more of this sort of thing "unless pressure grows to halt the terror war abroad". Funnily enough, that's rather like something one of the killers said at the scene of the crime. "Leave our lands and you can live in peace".
But Milne is wrong, and here's why. In a democracy the army is merely the military wing of the state. We elect the government. They decide the foreign policy imperatives and, so far as this involves the use of force, the army then carries them out. In other words the army is neutral, and its soldiers not responsible for the direction of policy. If the next government has different foreign policy objectives, the army will carry those out too. So in this sense Rigby really was a civilian, a small mute actor carrying out the policy of a democratically elected government. The mistakes of British foreign policy were not his fault.
Of course Rigby's killers did not understand this. You could hardly expect them to. Islam does not sit easily alongside democracy. For many Muslims, laws are God-made, not man-made. But Milne's expensive education (PPE at Balliol, no less) should have equipped him to understand adequately the nature of Rigby's position and the difference between the British army and that of a military state.
No-one who follows Milne's writing could be surprised to find him implying that an act of such barbarism was as much the fault of the British government as two madmen, but I found it interesting that he should be willing to put on one side for the moment one of his other characteristic positions.
As you would expect from an old Leftie like Milne, the working class are always right (although of course sometimes prone to false-consciousness when they vote Tory or oppose immigration). Not apparently on this occasion. The fact that opportunities for modestly-educated young men like Lee Rigby are few and far between did not wash with Milne. It elicited no sympathy.
I was reminded of Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello. "You could be in Palestine / or over the border on the Chinese line / with the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne / But there's no danger / it's a professional career / and it could be arranged / just a word in Mr Churchill's ear".
Where has Milne's compassion for the working class gone? Absent without leave. Pity for Rigby has been forgotten in the excitement of an opportunity to prove, once more, that the West is fundamentally to blame for even the worst atrocities.
I did once think about writing a Threnody for Lee Rigby. But some pieces are just too painful to contemplate.
And now Seamus Milne is Jeremy Corbyn's press officer. By their fruits shall ye know them.
Today comes the announcement that he's appointed Seamus Milne as his press officer. Milne, for the uninitiated, is the son of the former BBC Director General Alasdair Milne, educated at Winchester and Oxford, writes for the Guardian from what you might generously call a post-Stalinist position. You might sum his views up by saying that pretty much everything the West does is bad, and the things other people do are not as bad as the Western capitalist media makes out.
Life is too short and Milne too contemptible a figure to spend the whole morning listing his views, which range from the barmy to the unpleasant. But I would like to mention something he said about the death of Fusilier Lee Rigby, hacked to death a couple of years ago outside Woolwich barracks by two Muslim extremists.
"Rigby was a British soldier who had taken part in multiple combat operations in Afghanistan", wrote Milne in December 2013. "So the attack wasn't terrorism in the normal sense of an indiscriminate attack on civilians". He went on to write that there'd be a lot more of this sort of thing "unless pressure grows to halt the terror war abroad". Funnily enough, that's rather like something one of the killers said at the scene of the crime. "Leave our lands and you can live in peace".
But Milne is wrong, and here's why. In a democracy the army is merely the military wing of the state. We elect the government. They decide the foreign policy imperatives and, so far as this involves the use of force, the army then carries them out. In other words the army is neutral, and its soldiers not responsible for the direction of policy. If the next government has different foreign policy objectives, the army will carry those out too. So in this sense Rigby really was a civilian, a small mute actor carrying out the policy of a democratically elected government. The mistakes of British foreign policy were not his fault.
Of course Rigby's killers did not understand this. You could hardly expect them to. Islam does not sit easily alongside democracy. For many Muslims, laws are God-made, not man-made. But Milne's expensive education (PPE at Balliol, no less) should have equipped him to understand adequately the nature of Rigby's position and the difference between the British army and that of a military state.
No-one who follows Milne's writing could be surprised to find him implying that an act of such barbarism was as much the fault of the British government as two madmen, but I found it interesting that he should be willing to put on one side for the moment one of his other characteristic positions.
As you would expect from an old Leftie like Milne, the working class are always right (although of course sometimes prone to false-consciousness when they vote Tory or oppose immigration). Not apparently on this occasion. The fact that opportunities for modestly-educated young men like Lee Rigby are few and far between did not wash with Milne. It elicited no sympathy.
I was reminded of Oliver's Army by Elvis Costello. "You could be in Palestine / or over the border on the Chinese line / with the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne / But there's no danger / it's a professional career / and it could be arranged / just a word in Mr Churchill's ear".
Where has Milne's compassion for the working class gone? Absent without leave. Pity for Rigby has been forgotten in the excitement of an opportunity to prove, once more, that the West is fundamentally to blame for even the worst atrocities.
I did once think about writing a Threnody for Lee Rigby. But some pieces are just too painful to contemplate.
And now Seamus Milne is Jeremy Corbyn's press officer. By their fruits shall ye know them.
Sunday 18 October 2015
Vaughan Williams' London Symphony, Modernism and Matthew Arnold
An interesting article by William Cook in The Spectator the other week records the influence on British public life of the "vast wave of Germanic immigration" that came here from the 1930s onwards, as tens of thousands fled Nazism's "violent, superstitious tyranny". You can read it online here.
Just to list a few of the names is to get a sense of their influence - Fritz Busch, Hans Keller, Stefan Zweig, Kurt Schwitters, Oskar Kokoschka, Emeric Pressburger, Karel Reisz, Gerard Hoffnung, Kurt Joos, Rudolf Laban, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Claus Moser, George Weidenfeld, Martin Esslin, Nikolaus Pevsner, Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Bing, Friedrich Hayek, Max Born, Karl Popper, Hans Eysenck, Eric Hobsbawm. Many were Jewish, but not all, and as Cook says, that "hardly mattered . . . They were champions of civilised enlightened values, rather than members of a certain religion, or a certain race".
I showed this article to my wife. She was inclined to dismiss it as a typical piece of Speccie Little Englandism. But in truth anyone familiar with the majority of the names in the above paragraph (I recognised them all apart from Kurt Joos (dance) and Max Born (mathematics)) would have to acknowledge that these were hugely influential people in 20th century Britain.
The story of how they achieved pre-eminence is one of one of amazing courage, persistence and resilience, although it's worth bearing in mind that "the English intelligentsia are Europeanized", as Orwell wrote: always ready to be critical of their own culture and cringe in the face of others. The emigres may often have been pushing at an open door.
Their story, writes Cook, "is usually told as a story with a happy ending, a triumph of progressive values over reactionary . . . But although Britain gained a great deal from this flood of foreign talent, you can't help feeling, looking back, that something was lost along the way. Before the war, British culture was much more staid, but more in tune with public opinion. Since 1945 our artistic institutions have become much more Middle European: avant-garde, conceptual and out of step with popular taste . . . modernism has become the new orthodoxy, but this Mitteleuropaische aesthetic has never really been accepted by the population as a whole . . . This is a legacy of the Hitler emigres, and the modernist movement they inspired."
"Even at the time", Cook continues, "some Britons feared this continental influx would change the nature of our island's cultural life". The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was invited to become a patron of a new Anglo-Austrian Music Society, formed by Austrian musicians who'd fled to Britain. He replied as follows. "The great thing that frightens me is that it will entirely devour the tender little flower of our English culture . . . We cannot swallow the strong meat of your culture. Our stomachs are not strong enough". I thought of this last week when I went to see the Halle play RVW's London Symphony.
As a child I loved the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending, but when I was a student in the 1980s his music was about as unfashionable as it was possible to be, its turgid pastoralism and naive parallel triads symptomatic of everything that seemed wrong with pre-war English music.
Times change though, and adults are more forgiving. Whereas, in the true Orwellian tradition, I once felt that Englishness was "slightly disgraceful" I have come round to the view that we are no worse that most countries in most things (and in some things a bit better) and this, pathetically you may feel, in turn has led me to look more kindly on the works of Vaughan Williams, Gerald Finzi and George Butterworth, to name but three composers. RVW in particular, like Elgar, seems to epitomise the nation in music, informing our sense of what England means in much the same way of our sense of the American is shaped by Bernstein and John Williams.
Even if the Tallis and The Lark are the best of RVW (and they are pieces I would now give my right arm to have written), I've since conducted the D major 5th Symphony and the London itself too. What pieces they are! The 5th was written during the war, but gives absolutely no sense of the violence and uncertainty which was the context of its creation. The London is a much earlier piece (1913) and the London Vaughan Williams was writing about had disappeared by the time the 5th was premiered thirty years later. Today of course he would find London still harder to recognise, with its core of the international super-rich living alongside a diaspora of the poor from Far East and Deep South, a city with the specific London qualities he captured all but effaced.
The symphony is still mightily affecting though, speaking eloquently of the full-on noise and bustle of the big city as well as the grandeur of its buildings and intimate silences of its smaller out-of-hours thoroughfares. Last Thursday the Halle did it true justice, and I found it heartening to see the German conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens looking thoroughly immersed in the music. Perhaps he will go home and tell his colleagues in the Berlin Phil how good it is. Have they ever performed it? I somehow doubt it. That's a shame, because the London is a thoroughly convincing piece of writing, and I think the finale works much better than any Tchaikovsky symphony (apart from the Pathetique), better even - lawks - than Mahler 5, whose endless note-spinning perambulations towards the chorale finale I endured on the way to the dry-cleaners the other day.
What happened to that "tender little flower" of English music then? It has surely been erased by the mighty bulldozer of modernism. I can't think of a single composer now who you might describe as typically English. I can't even claim it for myself. My own models have always been much more the Scandinavians Sibelius and Nielsen, even in pieces like Absence of Clouds, a recent thirty-minute work rooted in the Cumbrian weather and landscape.
Blaming Hitler's emigres for this rubbing out is perhaps a bit steep. Foreign mores have always been seductively attractive to the English, as Orwell noted. We would probably have embraced modernism in the end anyway. Fritz Bush and Hans Keller did not invent Birtwistle or Maxwell Davies. But William Cook is right, in music anyway, that something has been lost, and that its loss has been accompanied by a slow cutting adrift of public taste. In the end everyone in Britain who loves classical music will be the loser for this, and I suspect I'm not alone in hearing again Matthew Arnold's "melancholy long withdrawing roar".
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.
Just to list a few of the names is to get a sense of their influence - Fritz Busch, Hans Keller, Stefan Zweig, Kurt Schwitters, Oskar Kokoschka, Emeric Pressburger, Karel Reisz, Gerard Hoffnung, Kurt Joos, Rudolf Laban, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Claus Moser, George Weidenfeld, Martin Esslin, Nikolaus Pevsner, Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Bing, Friedrich Hayek, Max Born, Karl Popper, Hans Eysenck, Eric Hobsbawm. Many were Jewish, but not all, and as Cook says, that "hardly mattered . . . They were champions of civilised enlightened values, rather than members of a certain religion, or a certain race".
I showed this article to my wife. She was inclined to dismiss it as a typical piece of Speccie Little Englandism. But in truth anyone familiar with the majority of the names in the above paragraph (I recognised them all apart from Kurt Joos (dance) and Max Born (mathematics)) would have to acknowledge that these were hugely influential people in 20th century Britain.
The story of how they achieved pre-eminence is one of one of amazing courage, persistence and resilience, although it's worth bearing in mind that "the English intelligentsia are Europeanized", as Orwell wrote: always ready to be critical of their own culture and cringe in the face of others. The emigres may often have been pushing at an open door.
Their story, writes Cook, "is usually told as a story with a happy ending, a triumph of progressive values over reactionary . . . But although Britain gained a great deal from this flood of foreign talent, you can't help feeling, looking back, that something was lost along the way. Before the war, British culture was much more staid, but more in tune with public opinion. Since 1945 our artistic institutions have become much more Middle European: avant-garde, conceptual and out of step with popular taste . . . modernism has become the new orthodoxy, but this Mitteleuropaische aesthetic has never really been accepted by the population as a whole . . . This is a legacy of the Hitler emigres, and the modernist movement they inspired."
"Even at the time", Cook continues, "some Britons feared this continental influx would change the nature of our island's cultural life". The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was invited to become a patron of a new Anglo-Austrian Music Society, formed by Austrian musicians who'd fled to Britain. He replied as follows. "The great thing that frightens me is that it will entirely devour the tender little flower of our English culture . . . We cannot swallow the strong meat of your culture. Our stomachs are not strong enough". I thought of this last week when I went to see the Halle play RVW's London Symphony.
As a child I loved the Tallis Fantasia and The Lark Ascending, but when I was a student in the 1980s his music was about as unfashionable as it was possible to be, its turgid pastoralism and naive parallel triads symptomatic of everything that seemed wrong with pre-war English music.
Times change though, and adults are more forgiving. Whereas, in the true Orwellian tradition, I once felt that Englishness was "slightly disgraceful" I have come round to the view that we are no worse that most countries in most things (and in some things a bit better) and this, pathetically you may feel, in turn has led me to look more kindly on the works of Vaughan Williams, Gerald Finzi and George Butterworth, to name but three composers. RVW in particular, like Elgar, seems to epitomise the nation in music, informing our sense of what England means in much the same way of our sense of the American is shaped by Bernstein and John Williams.
Even if the Tallis and The Lark are the best of RVW (and they are pieces I would now give my right arm to have written), I've since conducted the D major 5th Symphony and the London itself too. What pieces they are! The 5th was written during the war, but gives absolutely no sense of the violence and uncertainty which was the context of its creation. The London is a much earlier piece (1913) and the London Vaughan Williams was writing about had disappeared by the time the 5th was premiered thirty years later. Today of course he would find London still harder to recognise, with its core of the international super-rich living alongside a diaspora of the poor from Far East and Deep South, a city with the specific London qualities he captured all but effaced.
The symphony is still mightily affecting though, speaking eloquently of the full-on noise and bustle of the big city as well as the grandeur of its buildings and intimate silences of its smaller out-of-hours thoroughfares. Last Thursday the Halle did it true justice, and I found it heartening to see the German conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens looking thoroughly immersed in the music. Perhaps he will go home and tell his colleagues in the Berlin Phil how good it is. Have they ever performed it? I somehow doubt it. That's a shame, because the London is a thoroughly convincing piece of writing, and I think the finale works much better than any Tchaikovsky symphony (apart from the Pathetique), better even - lawks - than Mahler 5, whose endless note-spinning perambulations towards the chorale finale I endured on the way to the dry-cleaners the other day.
What happened to that "tender little flower" of English music then? It has surely been erased by the mighty bulldozer of modernism. I can't think of a single composer now who you might describe as typically English. I can't even claim it for myself. My own models have always been much more the Scandinavians Sibelius and Nielsen, even in pieces like Absence of Clouds, a recent thirty-minute work rooted in the Cumbrian weather and landscape.
Blaming Hitler's emigres for this rubbing out is perhaps a bit steep. Foreign mores have always been seductively attractive to the English, as Orwell noted. We would probably have embraced modernism in the end anyway. Fritz Bush and Hans Keller did not invent Birtwistle or Maxwell Davies. But William Cook is right, in music anyway, that something has been lost, and that its loss has been accompanied by a slow cutting adrift of public taste. In the end everyone in Britain who loves classical music will be the loser for this, and I suspect I'm not alone in hearing again Matthew Arnold's "melancholy long withdrawing roar".
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.
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