Last week a great musician passed away, a man who brought pleasure to millions and had an incalculable influence on 20th century culture.
But that's enough about George Martin. What about Peter Maxwell Davies?
Opposite my parents in Manchester lived a girl who went to the Northern College of Music (as it then was). She later played the viola in the Halle. My mum remembers a young man coming round to her house. That was Max. I never saw him.
Twenty years later Maxwell Davies had become Britain's pre-eminent composer, along with Harrison Birtwhistle. In the year before I went to Trinity to study with John Tavener I remember borrowing Maxwell Davies' first symphony - both score and vinyl - from a library, and struggling desperately to extract any pleasure or enlightenment from the experience. Faced with such incomprehensibility it is common to cringe; I'm rather proud that I thought instead, "Christ this is a load of shit".
A year or so later the RCM put on a performance of Maxwell Davies' A Mirror of Whitening Light at which the composer rehearsed the chamber group and discussed the piece. I was in the audience. At one point he had written something for the first violin which was actually off the instrument's register. "Here", he twinkled, "the player has to imagine the right notes even when he is actually unable to play them".
Adding to the faint but palpable atmosphere of bullshit in the room, he revealed that the piece's material was derived from the musical equivalent of a magic square, in which notes were laid out on a grid and the composer could choose which direction around the grid to travel. I remember thinking, "But since the listener can't hear that this process is going on, the point is what exactly? So that the composer doesn't have to think up any notes himself?"
Afterwards Tavener and I discussed this gloomily. He commented, "It's a beautiful title. But what's the point of writing the piece when the title's so descriptive?" John was unimpressed by Maxwell Davies. Around the same time I went to a performance of the 3rd Symphony, which Kent Nagano conducted from memory. I found it turgid.
To be fair, a number of the Orcadian exile's middle period pieces are quite likable (although Elliott Carter does something similar much better). I always thought Maxwell Davies had a good ear for texture which the spare writing for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra concertos brought out. And I was at the first British performance of the 5th Symphony (under Simon Rattle); it was mightily impressive.
In his later years Maxwell Davies's star faded somewhat. The people who run classical music discovered Mark Turnage and then Thomas Ades. Maxwell Davies was apparently up north carrying on doing what he'd been doing in previous decades. Then a couple of revelations. First I heard his Orkney Wedding With Sunrise. It was a dreadful piece of Brigadoonery. And then on the radio, Farewell to Stromness, a solo piano piece which attempted the trad style. It was even worse: plodding, dreary, lumpen, unimaginative and - perhaps worst of all - incompetent.
Like many a modernist (although, to give him credit, not the recently deceased and unrepentant Pierre Boulez), Maxwell Davies suddenly appeared to grasp late in life that he had written almost nothing that anyone would want to listen to twice, and was flailing around to rectify the situation before the Reaper called. So far so unsurprising. What I found horrifying was the revelation that here was someone who couldn't even do the simple things properly. Was Maxwell Davies a fraud all along?
Well not necessarily. Any competent trad musician would have been able to write a much better piece than Maxwell Davies's faux-Jockery; but they couldn't have put together his 5th Symphony. I contend however that a really good classical composer should be able to do both. Everything, in fact. Davies couldn't.
(Incidentally I came upon a performance of the 7th Symphony last year without knowing who it was by, and my first thought was "This bloke has no idea how to write for orchestra". It was a further foray into a kind of late Romanticism, and I found it wretched. The discovery that it was by Maxwell Davies wasn't a surprise - it fitted the narrative of someone belatedly discovering that out there is something called an audience, but running out of time to learn the technical skill required to write the kind of music which might connect with it).
It will surprise readers to discover that I don't think Maxwell Davies was a bad composer. Not so much bad as typical. My friends have heard repeatedly the thesis that most composers outside the first rank only write half a dozen really good pieces. That's likely to be as true of Maxwell Davies as anyone else. If you put Bach, Beethoven, Mozart et al in the first rank however, and people like Sibelius or Mahler in the second, where does that leave Davies? In the third row with people like Percy Grainger? I would have said not. Music lasts because the quality of the invention, and because people want to listen to it. No doubt Davies will be all over Radio 3 for a few days, but the test of durability is a cold and ruthless one which I think his music is likely to fail. Ironically the pieces most likely to survive are ones - like Orkney Wedding - which reveal the limits of his talent most starkly.
Davies was lucky to have been working in the years after the second world war during which to be Northern and working class appealed to the inverted snobbery of the time. He was lucky to be a modernist in a period when modernism was the height of fashion, and - for that reason - to attract the patronage of William Glock at the BBC. He was also lucky to be living in a period when his sexuality was no longer the personal millstone and professional block it might have been only a few decades previously (perhaps the reverse in fact). But above all he was lucky to have made a long career out of a very modest talent.
Tuesday 15 March 2016
Tuesday 1 March 2016
Brexit reflections #1 - freedom of movement
"But freedom of movement - which, let's not kid ourselves, is the throbbing heart of the EU issue - doesn't benefit everyone equally. If, for example, Romanian citizens who earn four or five times less than British workers are allowed unfettered access to our jobs market, people lose out. But who cares: they're already poor."
So writes Janice Turner in today's Times, under the headline Confessions of a lonely, left-wing Brexiteer. I agree with almost every word of it. Ms Turner continues:
"In Ben Judah's startling book This Is London, he describes the British builders who once earned £15 an hour but, after waves of migration, are down to £7. He notes the minimum wage is a fiction when Romanian labourers stand outside Wickes in Barking at 6 a.m. beating each other down to get a day's work, just like dockers in the pre-unionised 1930s."
"In broken northern industrial towns, companies such as Next, Sports Direct and Amazon, not content with an already cheap local workforce, prefer to recruit migrants via employment agencies because they have fewer rights. They, along with Lincolnshire's agricultural towns, will vote overwhelmingly to leave the EU and not because they are stupid. A 2015 Bank of England study showed net migration has driven down pay for the lowest paid. Across the economy, although employment is high, wages have stagnated because the pool of labour is almost infinite . . . The well-off transcend community so care nothing for cohesion. They remain untouched by culture clash, overcrowding or fights for limited resources. Yet they condemn those affected - if they dare to complain - as bigots. . . . we will need 880,000 more school places by 2023, 113,000 in London alone. As for housing, the ONS reckons we need an extra 68,000 homes a year just to accommodate net migration assumptions. Is that okay? How will Europhiles tackle this? And can we at least discuss - honestly for once - if this is the society we want."
I can't remember having read such a vivid exposition of the consequences of unlimited migration by anyone in the media, let alone a Left winger like Ms Turner. Just today I heard the dear old BBC deliver a lengthy report about the school places shortage without once mentioning migration. Yes, we'd rather avert our eyes than have our comfortable assumptions exposed to reality. And yet the points Ms Turner makes are blindingly obvious to anyone who cares to use their eyes and ears. Astonishingly, the British liberal middle-classes (and I should know, I'm one of them) prefer to display their virtue by approving the EU's free movement of people rather than condemning its effect on the British-born underclass, many of them with brown and black skins.
None of this necessarily means we should vote to leave the EU. Personally I haven't made up my mind, and I'm concerned about what might happen to our economy if we did. But God knows a withdrawal from the drip feed of Turner's "almost infinite" pool of labour would begin to reverse the inequality it has caused.
Freedom of movement - an unassailable shibboleth of the Remainers - was a principle agreed to forty years ago by a British electorate which is now largely dead. At the time the EU had only half a dozen member countries, all of them enjoying similar levels of prosperity. Now there are nearly thirty members, some of which are dirt poor courtesy of the wrecking ball that is the Euro. Very significant proportions of those countries now have the incentive to try their luck in one of the only EU countries whose economy is growing. Circumstances have changed utterly since the day Britain signed up.
It's not just that unrestricted migration is damaging the life chances of Britain's underclass. Our inability to change the migration rules is undermining trust in politics and politicians. How can we respect our representatives when, on the issue which time and time again the public names first or second on their list of concerns, the EU freedom of movement rules prevent meaningful change?
So writes Janice Turner in today's Times, under the headline Confessions of a lonely, left-wing Brexiteer. I agree with almost every word of it. Ms Turner continues:
"In Ben Judah's startling book This Is London, he describes the British builders who once earned £15 an hour but, after waves of migration, are down to £7. He notes the minimum wage is a fiction when Romanian labourers stand outside Wickes in Barking at 6 a.m. beating each other down to get a day's work, just like dockers in the pre-unionised 1930s."
"In broken northern industrial towns, companies such as Next, Sports Direct and Amazon, not content with an already cheap local workforce, prefer to recruit migrants via employment agencies because they have fewer rights. They, along with Lincolnshire's agricultural towns, will vote overwhelmingly to leave the EU and not because they are stupid. A 2015 Bank of England study showed net migration has driven down pay for the lowest paid. Across the economy, although employment is high, wages have stagnated because the pool of labour is almost infinite . . . The well-off transcend community so care nothing for cohesion. They remain untouched by culture clash, overcrowding or fights for limited resources. Yet they condemn those affected - if they dare to complain - as bigots. . . . we will need 880,000 more school places by 2023, 113,000 in London alone. As for housing, the ONS reckons we need an extra 68,000 homes a year just to accommodate net migration assumptions. Is that okay? How will Europhiles tackle this? And can we at least discuss - honestly for once - if this is the society we want."
I can't remember having read such a vivid exposition of the consequences of unlimited migration by anyone in the media, let alone a Left winger like Ms Turner. Just today I heard the dear old BBC deliver a lengthy report about the school places shortage without once mentioning migration. Yes, we'd rather avert our eyes than have our comfortable assumptions exposed to reality. And yet the points Ms Turner makes are blindingly obvious to anyone who cares to use their eyes and ears. Astonishingly, the British liberal middle-classes (and I should know, I'm one of them) prefer to display their virtue by approving the EU's free movement of people rather than condemning its effect on the British-born underclass, many of them with brown and black skins.
None of this necessarily means we should vote to leave the EU. Personally I haven't made up my mind, and I'm concerned about what might happen to our economy if we did. But God knows a withdrawal from the drip feed of Turner's "almost infinite" pool of labour would begin to reverse the inequality it has caused.
Freedom of movement - an unassailable shibboleth of the Remainers - was a principle agreed to forty years ago by a British electorate which is now largely dead. At the time the EU had only half a dozen member countries, all of them enjoying similar levels of prosperity. Now there are nearly thirty members, some of which are dirt poor courtesy of the wrecking ball that is the Euro. Very significant proportions of those countries now have the incentive to try their luck in one of the only EU countries whose economy is growing. Circumstances have changed utterly since the day Britain signed up.
It's not just that unrestricted migration is damaging the life chances of Britain's underclass. Our inability to change the migration rules is undermining trust in politics and politicians. How can we respect our representatives when, on the issue which time and time again the public names first or second on their list of concerns, the EU freedom of movement rules prevent meaningful change?
Monday 29 February 2016
It's Grimsby up north
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.
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 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?
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