I can remember the moment when it first occurred to me that I could be a professional conductor. I was round at a friend's. His Mum was a music teacher and we were listening to some music, or perhaps watching it on TV. I suddenly thought, "I could do this", for I knew instinctively that I was musical enough, personable enough, confident, eloquent and manipulative enough to stand on the box telling other people what to do and basking in the attention.
I also thought, "Oh bugger", because I was about 20 and had just started a Law degree.
As it happened, about the same time I began writing classical music seriously, and, thanks to a startling piece of good fortune, managed in my mid-20s to get a second grant to study composition with John Tavener at what was then Trinity College of Music. Swiftly I got my second study (piano) changed to conducting, and spent my last three years at College putting on concerts with other students. I liked it and was quite good at it; at any rate I won the College's conducting prize twice.
However by this time I thought conducting a second rate profession in comparison to composition, and when College finished I knew I wouldn't have the time (or money) to carry on. I was living in London, scratching a living with temp jobs. My parents showed no sign of wanting to pay for post-grad study, which was perhaps not surprising since by this stage I'd been a full-time student for seven years. In truth, I had little appetite for it either - I was going to be a composer, and the world was there to be conquered.
Trinity had no kind of programme for trying to ease its most promising graduates into the profession (unlike the RNCM, which does pretty well now), but right at the end of my time at Trinity my conducting teacher, Bernard Keeffe, had made what now seems a very generous offer. "A choir of which I am President", he said, "needs a new conductor. They have a concert next week. If you would like to come along I'll introduce you to the Chairman". But I didn't want to be a choral conductor, I thought, and went out with my girlfriend instead.
I regret this not so much for the loss of opportunity it undoubtedly represented (which if modest was real - who knows where it might have led?), but because of the snub to Bernard (a man from whom I learned at least as much about music as from Tavener). It's true that we hadn't always seen eye to eye, but if anything that made his expression of faith in me all the more generous. He deserved better.
So that was that with conducting, for fifteen years, until 2003 when, thanks to the indisposition of a friend, I got the chance to take a rehearsal with an amateur orchestra in Manchester. On the basis of that rehearsal they gave me a concert, and on the basis of that concert made me Music Director. And so I began conducting orchestras again.
During the decade that has followed I've sometimes wondered whether I might make it into the profession. I've often conducted orchestras some of whose players have been paid, or some of whom have been ex-pros. I am usually paid myself (although I would willingly conduct a good orchestra for nothing). But I've never conducted a salaried professional orchestra, and I've always wanted to, partly to find out whether I was good enough, partly because the better the players the more you can get into the really interesting stuff (as opposed to fixing the stuff which keeps going wrong) and partly because the money would stop my wife telling me to go and get a proper job.
It hasn't been a burning issue, but I hear so many stories from musician friends about incompetent, underprepared or downright nasty conductors who are out there (Getting work! Having agents! Earning good money!) that you can't help but think - why not me?
The answer to that of course is that, like most glamour professions, conducting is way oversubscribed. You are competing against people who always knew this was what they wanted to do, who were better looking, better resourced, better connected and possibly even harder working and more talented than you are. On the whole those are the kind of people who are going to get on, not composers who started conducting as a side-line in their early forties (and who now increasingly resemble Frank Dobson, the former Labour member for Holborn and St Pancras).
I sometimes think it's possible that I'll be asked to conduct a professional orchestra in one of my own pieces, and that, beguiled by my cheery attitude and insistence on short rehearsals, I'll be invited back to do a tour of Belorussia where we'll do Brahms 4 a dozen times in two weeks. But it hasn't happened. And until last year I minded. Slightly.
Then in 2015 I went to see the BBC Phil play at the Bridgewater in Mancester. The repertoire was Beatrice and Benedict, the Brahms fiddle concerto, La Valse and Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements. I found myself thinking, I could conduct all these pieces, but it's a big programme. And God I'd have been bricking it the night before. I mean, all those time changes. The players won't know some of it all that well. They'll be depending on me. What if I go wrong? One mistake and we're all fucked. And that's just the Stravinsky. La Valse isn't easy. Neither is the Berlioz. And the Brahms concerto - well, you never know what soloists are going to do.
So while I knew I could do it all, I knew that it would have been a major undertaking. Yet the BBC Phil's conductor, a young Frenchman, made it look easy. He stood there, an elegant mess of beguiling dark curls, one hand on the rail, smiling at the orchestra, hardly looking at the score, a picture of the art which conceals art.
For I knew how much work it would have cost him to master such a programme so thoroughly. Hours and hours of labour - reading, learning and marking up the scores. Learning it not so that it would go right, but so that it could not possibly go wrong. And I thought, I do not have time to do this. Not and compose as well. And, knowing me, I would have found the job of learning the Stravinsky a terrible drudge. For I do not like Stravinsky much, finding a lot of his music devoted mostly to showing the listener how clever the composer is. And I am not very good at doing things I don't like.
As a conductor of amateur orchestras, some of which are pretty good, I can by and large choose the music I conduct. Moreover I get loads of rehearsal time. Over the years I've conducted all the greats. Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen - and quite a lot of my own music as well. Conducting has given me a mechanic's view into the engine of some of the greatest pieces of art Western civilisation has ever devised. What a privilege. When I look back at my early orchestral pieces I don't shudder at their incompetence: they're surprisingly good considering I knew next to nothing about how to write for orchestra. But conducting has made me far, far better at it.
I have also learned a good deal about myself. Before I became a conductor I was always one of the people who sat at the back of the room trying to be funny (sometimes) and clever (less often). Conducting forced me to take responsibility. I haven't enjoyed that part of it, but it's the flip side of being in charge. It still astonishes me that, often after many years working together, there are musicians who are not just willing to tolerate me but who appear to actually like me. How could that have happened? Finally it also taught me the limits of ambition. It turned out that actually I didn't want to be a professional conductor after all.
Of course I'm aware that the mind eventually finds ways of accommodating the unpalatable (perhaps even death, in due course), and that this could merely be some mid-life ex post facto rationalisation. But all the same I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones You Can't Always Get What You Want. For Jagger / Richards continued "But if you try sometimes / you might just find / you get what you need".
Wednesday 31 August 2016
Monday 22 August 2016
Orwell's statue and the BBC
The other day I learned that Westminster City Council has given planning permission for a bronze statue of George Orwell to be placed outside New Broadcasting House. The BBC has welcomed this, although the initiative didn't come from them and has in fact been paid for by private subscription.
A rousing two and a half cheers. Orwell is clearly the greatest Left wing British writer, and one of the greatest British Left wing thinkers. Whatever his shortcomings as a novelist (personally I think he's a much better essayist), 1984 and Animal Farm were books which changed the world. Very few writers can say they've done that. These two books helped destroy the intellectual case for Communism and were, it's often forgotten, works which required great moral courage to write, given that the author was swimming against a flood tide of pro-Soviet consensus amongst his friends, colleagues and political class generally.
I like to think that, had he lived, a man as fearless and scrupulous as Orwell would have tempered his Leftism in the face of the way the world changed after the 39-45 war. As Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?" In Orwell's absence, the rest of us must look at the example of his method and try and live up to it.
But back to the BBC, where Orwell worked for two years during the war. The inscription behind his statue is to be, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear".
Worryingly, this is a principle which I would guess is more controversial and less widely accepted now than at any time since Orwell's death, not least at the BBC itself. For the Corporation itself has a less than noble record of not listening to things it doesn't want to hear.
I'm thinking of immigration, where the BBC has repeatedly had to concede (In its own 2007 report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, and five years later in the Stuart Prebble report of 2013 for the BBC Trust) that it ignored the concerns of the general public.
Then there's Brexit, where the editorial staff seemed to have no idea that there were people beyond West London who might not actually benefit from EU membership; the look of shock on reporters' faces when the result came in spoke volumes for the collision they had just endured with the views of ordinary people.
So I would have thought another quote from Orwell might be more apposite behind his statue. How about this from The Lion and the Unicorn?
"Underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia - their severance from the common culture of the country".
Or maybe a gloss on the original quote -
"If public service broadcasting means anything at all, it means listening to the people even when you don't want to hear what they're saying".
A rousing two and a half cheers. Orwell is clearly the greatest Left wing British writer, and one of the greatest British Left wing thinkers. Whatever his shortcomings as a novelist (personally I think he's a much better essayist), 1984 and Animal Farm were books which changed the world. Very few writers can say they've done that. These two books helped destroy the intellectual case for Communism and were, it's often forgotten, works which required great moral courage to write, given that the author was swimming against a flood tide of pro-Soviet consensus amongst his friends, colleagues and political class generally.
I like to think that, had he lived, a man as fearless and scrupulous as Orwell would have tempered his Leftism in the face of the way the world changed after the 39-45 war. As Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?" In Orwell's absence, the rest of us must look at the example of his method and try and live up to it.
But back to the BBC, where Orwell worked for two years during the war. The inscription behind his statue is to be, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear".
Worryingly, this is a principle which I would guess is more controversial and less widely accepted now than at any time since Orwell's death, not least at the BBC itself. For the Corporation itself has a less than noble record of not listening to things it doesn't want to hear.
I'm thinking of immigration, where the BBC has repeatedly had to concede (In its own 2007 report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, and five years later in the Stuart Prebble report of 2013 for the BBC Trust) that it ignored the concerns of the general public.
Then there's Brexit, where the editorial staff seemed to have no idea that there were people beyond West London who might not actually benefit from EU membership; the look of shock on reporters' faces when the result came in spoke volumes for the collision they had just endured with the views of ordinary people.
So I would have thought another quote from Orwell might be more apposite behind his statue. How about this from The Lion and the Unicorn?
"Underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia - their severance from the common culture of the country".
Or maybe a gloss on the original quote -
"If public service broadcasting means anything at all, it means listening to the people even when you don't want to hear what they're saying".
Monday 25 July 2016
Brexit reflections #11 - the emergency brake redux
Yesterday the papers reported a startling fact. "UK officials" had, as the Guardian put it, confirmed that an emergency brake on immigration was "on the table" in Brexit talks.
Most of the comment which followed this story (unspecific as to who "UK officials" might have been, but nevertheless so widely printed that you'd think it had some basis in fact) concerned the outrage of Tory MPs hostile to immigration. They had not, they fulminated, fought for so long for Brexit only to have one of its principal charms taken away at the moment of victory.
I guess you can see their point; but for me the really astonishing facet of this story, assuming it to be broadly true, lay elsewhere.
David Cameron went to Brussels to ask for concessions which would enable him to sell Remain to the British. He went to see Angela Merkel, we are told, and asked for an emergency brake on immigration. Nein, said Frau Merkel. Not a chance. Cameron had to make do with minor concessions on benefits for migrants, which by the time of the Referendum hadn't been agreed by other EU countries (and would in any case have been dependent on their unanimous agreement). Britain duly voted to Leave.
So this is where we are. A variation on the principle of free movement which Cameron was refused in the months before the Referendum now suddenly appears to be possible, and may be combined with continued access to the single market now we have voted Leave.
Wow.
If you assume it's true that other EU countries were mostly dismayed by the Brexit vote and would, whatever their reservations about Britain, have largely preferred us to stay, what are we to infer from this extraordinary volte face?
It must be agonising for EUrophiles to contemplate the effect this concession might have had if it been made, say, at the beginning of June. David Cameron would have been able to say, "Look! At last we have some means of stopping this unending flow of migrants. 330,000 net last year. A group of people roughly the size of Bristol. At last we'll be able to start bringing that figure down". A lot of people would have voted differently. The Referendum result would probably have different.
For EUrosceptics this change of heart prompts at the very least a grim shake of the head. For does it not show the staggering incompetence of the EU leadership? Migration might have been the most important issue in the Referendum, but an emergency brake, a sign that the tide might begin to slow, could have had a huge impact on the result. You'd have to imagine that EU leaders are kicking themselves.
What does this extraordinary mistake make Merkel, Juncker, Schwarz and Hollande et al look like?
Well here's a few things. Proud, inflexible, ill-informed (what were their UK diplomats doing?), unimaginative and doctrinaire for starters.
What absolutely crap leadership.
Aha, say the old Brexit hands. We told you that's what they were like.
Most of the comment which followed this story (unspecific as to who "UK officials" might have been, but nevertheless so widely printed that you'd think it had some basis in fact) concerned the outrage of Tory MPs hostile to immigration. They had not, they fulminated, fought for so long for Brexit only to have one of its principal charms taken away at the moment of victory.
I guess you can see their point; but for me the really astonishing facet of this story, assuming it to be broadly true, lay elsewhere.
David Cameron went to Brussels to ask for concessions which would enable him to sell Remain to the British. He went to see Angela Merkel, we are told, and asked for an emergency brake on immigration. Nein, said Frau Merkel. Not a chance. Cameron had to make do with minor concessions on benefits for migrants, which by the time of the Referendum hadn't been agreed by other EU countries (and would in any case have been dependent on their unanimous agreement). Britain duly voted to Leave.
So this is where we are. A variation on the principle of free movement which Cameron was refused in the months before the Referendum now suddenly appears to be possible, and may be combined with continued access to the single market now we have voted Leave.
Wow.
If you assume it's true that other EU countries were mostly dismayed by the Brexit vote and would, whatever their reservations about Britain, have largely preferred us to stay, what are we to infer from this extraordinary volte face?
It must be agonising for EUrophiles to contemplate the effect this concession might have had if it been made, say, at the beginning of June. David Cameron would have been able to say, "Look! At last we have some means of stopping this unending flow of migrants. 330,000 net last year. A group of people roughly the size of Bristol. At last we'll be able to start bringing that figure down". A lot of people would have voted differently. The Referendum result would probably have different.
For EUrosceptics this change of heart prompts at the very least a grim shake of the head. For does it not show the staggering incompetence of the EU leadership? Migration might have been the most important issue in the Referendum, but an emergency brake, a sign that the tide might begin to slow, could have had a huge impact on the result. You'd have to imagine that EU leaders are kicking themselves.
What does this extraordinary mistake make Merkel, Juncker, Schwarz and Hollande et al look like?
Well here's a few things. Proud, inflexible, ill-informed (what were their UK diplomats doing?), unimaginative and doctrinaire for starters.
What absolutely crap leadership.
Aha, say the old Brexit hands. We told you that's what they were like.
Wednesday 13 July 2016
Labour's troubles are even worse than we think
On a heady morning in May 1997, dazed from lack of sleep, I made my way to work up the Essex Road, Islington on the top deck of a No.73 bus. It may well not have been the morning after Tony Blair's landslide election victory, but might have been the morning after that: for I was reading a column in the Guardian - of course - by Hugo Young, reflecting on Labour's historic triumph.
At the time Young, now long dead, was the Graun's big shot columnist. I wish I could remember his exact words, but their thrust was plain. The Tories, he wrote, are now finished. Forever.
Even then, euphoric at Blair's victory, I remember thinking, "Oh come on. Life's not like that. Nor is politics".
As I write this Theresa May is about to be installed as PM after a mercifully truncated leadership campaign and the Tories are the only plausible governing party in Britain. Young was wrong. Tory exile from power lasted a mere 13 years.
On the other hand Labour's NEC met last night to establish whether its leader Jeremy Corbyn, hated by the majority of his parliamentary colleagues, needed their support to get on the ballot paper to contest Angela Eagle's leadership challenge. The NEC decided Corbyn could run as of right. This morning it appears that Owen Smith MP has thrown his hat in the ring too, an act of incomprehensible political self-harm.
Labour has been virtually wiped out in Scotland. The EU referendum result appears to confirm what the 2015 election suggested - that the party is now losing its core support in the north and midlands to UKIP. So is Labour finished?
In 1997 the Tories had merely lost an election. Labour's position is far, far worse. But actually I think it's even worse than the most of the party realises.
For me the overarching lesson of the 2008 crash was that our economy had been dependent for too long on borrowing, both public and private. Labour briefly ran a surplus inherited from the Tories, but in about 2001 Gordon Brown began to spend. Even while the economy was growing, he ran a counter-cyclical counter-Keynesian spending splurge. Public spending nearly doubled under Blair/Brown. The bankers assisted Brown mightily by lending to any Tom, Dick or Harry with a job. The economy boomed, and private debt levels rocketed.
Now the bankers must take their share of the blame, but people forget to ask what would have happened if they had behaved responsibly. Answer - the boom would have come to a halt even sooner. The 2008 crash distracts by its apocalyptic nature from the underlying reality, which is that our standard of living - as private individuals and as consumers of public services - had been kept artificially high by borrowing from future income streams. As Frank Field wrote long before 2008 (I paraphrase), "In future, public services will have to be provided for less money, not more". After George Osborne became chancellor his much vaunted austerity succeeded only in halving Britain's deficit. In other words, we are merely racking up debt at half the rate we were doing when he became Chancellor in 2010. We are borrowing about £1.5 billion every week just to stay afloat.
The gap between our ability to pay for our standard of living and our ability to fund it has widened, as globalisation has sent manufacturing jobs abroad and growing longevity has increased strain on pensions and the NHS. The days of Gordon Brown's lavish spending increases are gone. I suggest they will never come back. You can argue whether that's a good or bad thing till you're blue in the face, but it would be pointless because even if you would like them to return, the money is not there.
I think Labour supporters are divided into roughly three groups. The smallest group contains people like Frank Field and Maurice Glasman who recognise the financial realities. The largest group thinks 2008 was largely the bankers' fault and that without the crash we'd still be tootling on as before (but this group, in which I'd include the overwhelming majority of the PLP, is slightly at a loss as to how to improve on Tory solutions). The last group includes the hard left entryists of the Corbynite persuasion. They think there's a magic button which can be pressed - spending, printing, borrowing, taxing the rich - which will get the state's coffers filling again. They are fantasists of course, but the certainty and simplicity of their prescription, its la-la-not-listening to the harsh realities of economic and social circumstance explains its appeal to a growing of Labour supporters. Hence Corbyn and his Momentum chums.
Labour's problems are worse than it realises because even if this last group can be seen off - and events of the last few weeks make that seem a slim hope - the others have no intellectually defensible or practical answers to the problems facing Britain. You may hate the Tories all you like, but their policy of bearing down on public spending and trying to encourage business to generate the taxes which will make Britain's public finances sustainable has at least the merit of coherence (it also, coincidentally, chimes with our own experiences as citizens in trying to run our own lives). When you add together that - in contrast to Labour's mediocre offerings - they have a new leader with a long history of performing competently in one of the great offices of state, it's difficult to see how Labour are going to claw their way back into contention.
At this stage the proposition that Labour are in deep trouble seems like a woeful underestimation of their problems. Unlike Hugo Young I wouldn't risk saying Labour is finished as a party. In politics things change of course. But I think they'll have to change quite a lot before Labour can form a government again.
At the time Young, now long dead, was the Graun's big shot columnist. I wish I could remember his exact words, but their thrust was plain. The Tories, he wrote, are now finished. Forever.
Even then, euphoric at Blair's victory, I remember thinking, "Oh come on. Life's not like that. Nor is politics".
As I write this Theresa May is about to be installed as PM after a mercifully truncated leadership campaign and the Tories are the only plausible governing party in Britain. Young was wrong. Tory exile from power lasted a mere 13 years.
On the other hand Labour's NEC met last night to establish whether its leader Jeremy Corbyn, hated by the majority of his parliamentary colleagues, needed their support to get on the ballot paper to contest Angela Eagle's leadership challenge. The NEC decided Corbyn could run as of right. This morning it appears that Owen Smith MP has thrown his hat in the ring too, an act of incomprehensible political self-harm.
Labour has been virtually wiped out in Scotland. The EU referendum result appears to confirm what the 2015 election suggested - that the party is now losing its core support in the north and midlands to UKIP. So is Labour finished?
In 1997 the Tories had merely lost an election. Labour's position is far, far worse. But actually I think it's even worse than the most of the party realises.
For me the overarching lesson of the 2008 crash was that our economy had been dependent for too long on borrowing, both public and private. Labour briefly ran a surplus inherited from the Tories, but in about 2001 Gordon Brown began to spend. Even while the economy was growing, he ran a counter-cyclical counter-Keynesian spending splurge. Public spending nearly doubled under Blair/Brown. The bankers assisted Brown mightily by lending to any Tom, Dick or Harry with a job. The economy boomed, and private debt levels rocketed.
Now the bankers must take their share of the blame, but people forget to ask what would have happened if they had behaved responsibly. Answer - the boom would have come to a halt even sooner. The 2008 crash distracts by its apocalyptic nature from the underlying reality, which is that our standard of living - as private individuals and as consumers of public services - had been kept artificially high by borrowing from future income streams. As Frank Field wrote long before 2008 (I paraphrase), "In future, public services will have to be provided for less money, not more". After George Osborne became chancellor his much vaunted austerity succeeded only in halving Britain's deficit. In other words, we are merely racking up debt at half the rate we were doing when he became Chancellor in 2010. We are borrowing about £1.5 billion every week just to stay afloat.
The gap between our ability to pay for our standard of living and our ability to fund it has widened, as globalisation has sent manufacturing jobs abroad and growing longevity has increased strain on pensions and the NHS. The days of Gordon Brown's lavish spending increases are gone. I suggest they will never come back. You can argue whether that's a good or bad thing till you're blue in the face, but it would be pointless because even if you would like them to return, the money is not there.
I think Labour supporters are divided into roughly three groups. The smallest group contains people like Frank Field and Maurice Glasman who recognise the financial realities. The largest group thinks 2008 was largely the bankers' fault and that without the crash we'd still be tootling on as before (but this group, in which I'd include the overwhelming majority of the PLP, is slightly at a loss as to how to improve on Tory solutions). The last group includes the hard left entryists of the Corbynite persuasion. They think there's a magic button which can be pressed - spending, printing, borrowing, taxing the rich - which will get the state's coffers filling again. They are fantasists of course, but the certainty and simplicity of their prescription, its la-la-not-listening to the harsh realities of economic and social circumstance explains its appeal to a growing of Labour supporters. Hence Corbyn and his Momentum chums.
Labour's problems are worse than it realises because even if this last group can be seen off - and events of the last few weeks make that seem a slim hope - the others have no intellectually defensible or practical answers to the problems facing Britain. You may hate the Tories all you like, but their policy of bearing down on public spending and trying to encourage business to generate the taxes which will make Britain's public finances sustainable has at least the merit of coherence (it also, coincidentally, chimes with our own experiences as citizens in trying to run our own lives). When you add together that - in contrast to Labour's mediocre offerings - they have a new leader with a long history of performing competently in one of the great offices of state, it's difficult to see how Labour are going to claw their way back into contention.
At this stage the proposition that Labour are in deep trouble seems like a woeful underestimation of their problems. Unlike Hugo Young I wouldn't risk saying Labour is finished as a party. In politics things change of course. But I think they'll have to change quite a lot before Labour can form a government again.
Monday 11 July 2016
Brexit reflections #10 - Professor Vernon Bogdanor; getting the cold shoulder
I don't think there's ever been a political issue which has divided us more. I live in a divided household. Since the referendum a number of social events have had to take place without me (it was felt that Remainer friends needed a good cry and it was best this take place without my provocative presence). Although my wife, two and a half weeks in, is showing signs of forgiving me for disagreeing with her, I have been given the cold shoulder by people I thought were my friends.
One such sent round an email. It read as follows -
"I know you might be sick of it, but this is a really important moment in our country's history. Please think about this, it is like a second chance to vote".
There followed a link to a petition to stop Article 50 being invoked.
"Now we have a chance to show the rest of Europe and parliament what we really want. Sign this petition if you want to stop Brexit."
Goodness, I thought; and there was me thinking we'd already had a chance to vote on Brexit. In the Referendum.
Something else struck me. This "second chance to vote" was only open to Remainers. That's a stroke of genius, I thought. That's the way to defeat the Leave supporters. Deny them the franchise!
My friend went on, "There is some confusion about the referendum result and what it means."
Actually Leave won by a small but clear majority. Or did they?
"Only 37% of the British electorate put a cross in the Leave box on 23rd June. The 52/48% split was not the percentage of the British electorate but the percentage of the turnout on that day. So Brexit is not the will of the people. Since then many Leave voters have changed their mind. So the figure of 37% voting for Leave is even less now . . . the majority of the British people do not want this."
But hang on. If only 37% of the British electorate voted Leave, mustn't the percentage who voted Remain have been even smaller? Something like 34%?
Who is to say that the people that didn't vote were all Remainers? Or all Leavers for that matter? Or split along the lines of those that did vote? Or split some other way? Isn't the point about public votes that they give an opportunity for those who care enough to make their opinion clear? And don't they entitle politicians to disregard the views of those that can't be bothered to turn out?
"Parliament has no mandate to vote for Brexit. If it does so it will be against the wishes of the people and undemocratic. So, to make it absolutely clear to parliament that the majority of the British people don't want to leave please sign this. Please don't think it is a lost cause, because it isn't. It is more important than the vote you made on 23rd June in many ways. It is a chance to get this country back on an even keel, to right the terrible mistakes that were made, which several of the politicians who were campaigning for Brexit now admit were wrong. People who want to remain are in the majority. Let's show really clearly that we are not going to let democracy be manipulated any more".
Oh Jesus. "More important than the vote you made on 23rd June in many ways". Give me strength.
How do we know what the "wishes of the people" are? Or what the majority of "the British people" want? We could ask them! And conveniently we just did! In a national Referendum with polling stations and a proper voter registration system!
They voted Leave.
To be fair my friend is correct about one thing. The Referendum result is not mandatory but advisory. Parliament doesn't have to go along with it. Most MPs are Remainers.
What would be the effect of ignoring the result? I don't know what disenchanted Leavers would do, but if you accept that we, the much-invoked British people, voted Leave because it offered an opportunity for the poorest to protest about their effective disenfranchisement on one of the issues about which they feel most strongly, it's not difficult to imagine the impact on faith in democracy.
At this stage we still don't know who's going to win the Tory leadership contest, or whether there'll be a snap General Election, but it's not hard to imagine the electoral consequences for any political party which ran on a pledge to ignore the Referendum result. UKIP got nearly 4 million votes in the last election. More than 17 million people voted Leave. It's not hard to see how UKIP could eat into the Labour vote in the north, or, at a time when outright parliamentary majorities are hard to come by, hold the balance of power in a coalition. I doubt my friend wants to see that any more than I do.
The other thing which struck me when I read her email related not so much to its content, but to the fact of its having been sent at all. Reading the names of the other people to whom it had been circulated I couldn't help notice that she had left out acquaintances in common whom she must have known would be Leavers. Sadly, she had thought I must be one of the Nice People who would have voted Remain. She had made an assumption about me which took my breath away.
This presented me with a dilemma. Should I ignore her email and resolve not to mention the subject next time we met? Or should I respond, pointing out politely the flaws and dangers in her argument? In the end I did neither. I wrote as follows -
"I know you'll think less of me for this, but I'm afraid I'm one of the people who voted Leave.
I guess I should be flattered by our assumption that I must have been one of the nice Remainers, but I'm not.
I could have just not responded at all, but I felt that in the interests of friendship (and I have a very high regard for you) it was best to be candid. For what it's worth my wife voted Remain and is very cross with me.
I'd be happy to explain why I voted the way I did, not to try and persuade you that you're wrong, but to advance the idea that there is a case for Leave which a reasonably intelligent and well-informed person could find decent and plausible. But I understand it may well be too late for that!
With love as always,
Nick"
That was last week. So far there's been no reply.
Should my friend stumble across this blog I would like to refer her to a letter from Professor Vernon Bogdanor of Kings College London, who wrote to the Times recently -
". . . Yet (Leave voters) are now told by academics, lawyers and others that the outcome of the referendum should be ignored on the ground that, as the former Bishop of Durham suggests, they were not voting on the EU at all but on "longstanding social grievances". Others also have suggested that Leave voters did not know what they were doing, or were bigoted (though bigotry in the form of antisemitism is more likely to be found among university students or on the Labour left that in the pubs of Sunderland or Hartlepool).
The arguments against accepting the legitimacy of the outcome of the referendum are similar to those used in the 19th century against extending the franchise. Were they to succeed, the poorer members of the community might well begin to ask whether democracy has anything at all to offer them; and that would indeed be a very dangerous development".
Bang on. And by the way, Professor Bogdanor voted Remain.
One such sent round an email. It read as follows -
"I know you might be sick of it, but this is a really important moment in our country's history. Please think about this, it is like a second chance to vote".
There followed a link to a petition to stop Article 50 being invoked.
"Now we have a chance to show the rest of Europe and parliament what we really want. Sign this petition if you want to stop Brexit."
Goodness, I thought; and there was me thinking we'd already had a chance to vote on Brexit. In the Referendum.
Something else struck me. This "second chance to vote" was only open to Remainers. That's a stroke of genius, I thought. That's the way to defeat the Leave supporters. Deny them the franchise!
My friend went on, "There is some confusion about the referendum result and what it means."
Actually Leave won by a small but clear majority. Or did they?
"Only 37% of the British electorate put a cross in the Leave box on 23rd June. The 52/48% split was not the percentage of the British electorate but the percentage of the turnout on that day. So Brexit is not the will of the people. Since then many Leave voters have changed their mind. So the figure of 37% voting for Leave is even less now . . . the majority of the British people do not want this."
But hang on. If only 37% of the British electorate voted Leave, mustn't the percentage who voted Remain have been even smaller? Something like 34%?
Who is to say that the people that didn't vote were all Remainers? Or all Leavers for that matter? Or split along the lines of those that did vote? Or split some other way? Isn't the point about public votes that they give an opportunity for those who care enough to make their opinion clear? And don't they entitle politicians to disregard the views of those that can't be bothered to turn out?
"Parliament has no mandate to vote for Brexit. If it does so it will be against the wishes of the people and undemocratic. So, to make it absolutely clear to parliament that the majority of the British people don't want to leave please sign this. Please don't think it is a lost cause, because it isn't. It is more important than the vote you made on 23rd June in many ways. It is a chance to get this country back on an even keel, to right the terrible mistakes that were made, which several of the politicians who were campaigning for Brexit now admit were wrong. People who want to remain are in the majority. Let's show really clearly that we are not going to let democracy be manipulated any more".
Oh Jesus. "More important than the vote you made on 23rd June in many ways". Give me strength.
How do we know what the "wishes of the people" are? Or what the majority of "the British people" want? We could ask them! And conveniently we just did! In a national Referendum with polling stations and a proper voter registration system!
They voted Leave.
To be fair my friend is correct about one thing. The Referendum result is not mandatory but advisory. Parliament doesn't have to go along with it. Most MPs are Remainers.
What would be the effect of ignoring the result? I don't know what disenchanted Leavers would do, but if you accept that we, the much-invoked British people, voted Leave because it offered an opportunity for the poorest to protest about their effective disenfranchisement on one of the issues about which they feel most strongly, it's not difficult to imagine the impact on faith in democracy.
At this stage we still don't know who's going to win the Tory leadership contest, or whether there'll be a snap General Election, but it's not hard to imagine the electoral consequences for any political party which ran on a pledge to ignore the Referendum result. UKIP got nearly 4 million votes in the last election. More than 17 million people voted Leave. It's not hard to see how UKIP could eat into the Labour vote in the north, or, at a time when outright parliamentary majorities are hard to come by, hold the balance of power in a coalition. I doubt my friend wants to see that any more than I do.
The other thing which struck me when I read her email related not so much to its content, but to the fact of its having been sent at all. Reading the names of the other people to whom it had been circulated I couldn't help notice that she had left out acquaintances in common whom she must have known would be Leavers. Sadly, she had thought I must be one of the Nice People who would have voted Remain. She had made an assumption about me which took my breath away.
This presented me with a dilemma. Should I ignore her email and resolve not to mention the subject next time we met? Or should I respond, pointing out politely the flaws and dangers in her argument? In the end I did neither. I wrote as follows -
"I know you'll think less of me for this, but I'm afraid I'm one of the people who voted Leave.
I guess I should be flattered by our assumption that I must have been one of the nice Remainers, but I'm not.
I could have just not responded at all, but I felt that in the interests of friendship (and I have a very high regard for you) it was best to be candid. For what it's worth my wife voted Remain and is very cross with me.
I'd be happy to explain why I voted the way I did, not to try and persuade you that you're wrong, but to advance the idea that there is a case for Leave which a reasonably intelligent and well-informed person could find decent and plausible. But I understand it may well be too late for that!
With love as always,
Nick"
That was last week. So far there's been no reply.
Should my friend stumble across this blog I would like to refer her to a letter from Professor Vernon Bogdanor of Kings College London, who wrote to the Times recently -
". . . Yet (Leave voters) are now told by academics, lawyers and others that the outcome of the referendum should be ignored on the ground that, as the former Bishop of Durham suggests, they were not voting on the EU at all but on "longstanding social grievances". Others also have suggested that Leave voters did not know what they were doing, or were bigoted (though bigotry in the form of antisemitism is more likely to be found among university students or on the Labour left that in the pubs of Sunderland or Hartlepool).
The arguments against accepting the legitimacy of the outcome of the referendum are similar to those used in the 19th century against extending the franchise. Were they to succeed, the poorer members of the community might well begin to ask whether democracy has anything at all to offer them; and that would indeed be a very dangerous development".
Bang on. And by the way, Professor Bogdanor voted Remain.
Thursday 7 July 2016
The Chilcot Report - counterfactuals and illegality
Like you, dear reader, I haven't read Chilcot; just the words of those who haven't read it either, or only part of it. But I think we get the gist.
Blair probably committed himself too early; the intelligence on WMD was not wholly watertight; our troops didn't always have the right gear; there was no adequate plan for afterwards; military action should have been a last resort; hundreds of thousands of people died; ISIL rose out of the ashes.
And yet there are counterarguments.
Even if Blair did make a personal decision months in advance, Parliament was free to overrule him. It did not.
The intelligence on WMD may have been flawed (although Chilcot clears Blair of the sexing up allegation), but even so we all believed Saddam had such weapons because we knew he'd gassed the Kurds and because he had obstructed the UN weapons inspectors at every turn. The circumstantial evidence for WMD was overwhelming.
As for the absence of an adequate plan, we were going into coalition with a much larger ally, the United States. Diplomats and soldiers suggest we tried to influence the US approach (itself riven by factionalism) but were often rebuffed. And what plan could conceivably cover every eventuality on the ground?
At the time he was trying to prevent war, Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, said that completing his work would take "not weeks, but months". Given that Saddam's cooperation had only been secured by massing forces on Iraq's borders, how long did Chilcot suggest we should have paid for our armies to remain there?
It's true that many of ISIL's early leaders served time in post-invasion prison camps, but, aside from the generality that removing Saddam was likely to take the lid off the sectarian pot, no-one predicted the rise of ISIL, a phenomenon which owes its emergence as much as anything to the Arab spring revolution in Syria.
In the 13 years since the invasion Iraqbodycount.org has counted about 160,000 violent civilian deaths. That's a little over 10,000 a year. Iraq is still a violent place, but not remotely comparable to the scale of the Saddam Hussein years.
It's worth briefly examining the scale of those casualties. Saddam engaged in repeated assaults on his own people and took Iraq into a disastrous war with Iran. He is thought to have killed about 180,000 people in the 1988 Al Anfal campaign alone. In the 1991 uprising estimates of Kurdish and Shia deaths range between 100,00 and in excess of 200,000. The Iran-Iraq war killed half a million soldiers and, according to one source I found, an equivalent number of civilians. And then we have the constant attrition rate the maintenance of a tyrannical state involves - the torture chambers, the summary executions, the disappearances, the use of chemical weapons at Hallabja. Mass graves are still being found.
Fewer people are dying post invasion, perhaps by as much as a factor of ten.
Chilcot is guilty of the counsel of perfection. His inquiry took seven years to mull over decisions which the Blair government had weeks, days and sometimes hours to consider. Chilcot found that sometimes things didn't go according to plan. Well blow me down! Who could have predicted that?
Moreover Chilcot was given the job of making sense of what happened, not with considering what would have happened otherwise. If the invasion hadn't taken place Saddam Hussein would still have been in power today. Or one of his sons, or some other Ba'ath party hard-man. This prospect reminds me of Orwell's famous image: "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever"
Without the invasion Iraqis would have been denied an opportunity to remake their country. They may have messed it up, but that isn't all our fault.
If the anti-war faction had not taken such a stranglehold on Western political life we might have intervened in Syria. As it was, stymied by Ed Miliband's Labour party, David Cameron lost a Commons vote, Barack Obama forgot his "red lines" and President Assad stayed in power. In Syria the militants stepped into the vacuum and thus ISIL was born.
Chilcot is a luxuriant wallow in hindsight. Shame it didn't look forward and consider the counterfactual a bit more. Its effect is to indulge the fantasy that it's possible to make the world a better place without mistakes, expense or anyone dying.
The reality about liberal intervention is that it's messy, expensive, difficult and time-consuming. It's impossible to plan for every eventuality, and if you think a bomb-proof plan is conceivable you're going to be disappointed. Every time. And yet intervention sometimes works. It worked in Kosovo and in Sierra Leone. If you think it didn't work in Iraq, Google "Iraqi media after Saddam".
In contrast, non-intervention always fails. Why? Because it merely gives bad people like Saddam Hussein or President Assad (or ISIL) space to do whatever they like. The disappointing thing about Chilcot for me is not that he was critical of Blair, but that his criticism will merely reinforce the tendency, already becoming ingrained in Western political life, to isolationism. Unless you want to be vilified like Tony Blair, don't send your troops overseas. Ever.
PS Those of us who think that Blair probably did the best he could under difficult circumstances have been dogged for years by the foolish assertion that Iraq was an "illegal" war. I'm pleased to see that Chilcot knocks this on the head. Not by confirming the war was legal (how would he know?); but by pointing out that no-one knows whether it was or not. The only way to establish this would be to go to Court. It's amazing how many lavishly backed Blair-haters have baulked at this, considering how confident they are in their view. When even international lawyers don't agree on the issue, I think we should be sceptical of pronouncements by those whose closest brush with the law will be contesting a parking ticket.
Blair probably committed himself too early; the intelligence on WMD was not wholly watertight; our troops didn't always have the right gear; there was no adequate plan for afterwards; military action should have been a last resort; hundreds of thousands of people died; ISIL rose out of the ashes.
And yet there are counterarguments.
Even if Blair did make a personal decision months in advance, Parliament was free to overrule him. It did not.
The intelligence on WMD may have been flawed (although Chilcot clears Blair of the sexing up allegation), but even so we all believed Saddam had such weapons because we knew he'd gassed the Kurds and because he had obstructed the UN weapons inspectors at every turn. The circumstantial evidence for WMD was overwhelming.
As for the absence of an adequate plan, we were going into coalition with a much larger ally, the United States. Diplomats and soldiers suggest we tried to influence the US approach (itself riven by factionalism) but were often rebuffed. And what plan could conceivably cover every eventuality on the ground?
At the time he was trying to prevent war, Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, said that completing his work would take "not weeks, but months". Given that Saddam's cooperation had only been secured by massing forces on Iraq's borders, how long did Chilcot suggest we should have paid for our armies to remain there?
It's true that many of ISIL's early leaders served time in post-invasion prison camps, but, aside from the generality that removing Saddam was likely to take the lid off the sectarian pot, no-one predicted the rise of ISIL, a phenomenon which owes its emergence as much as anything to the Arab spring revolution in Syria.
In the 13 years since the invasion Iraqbodycount.org has counted about 160,000 violent civilian deaths. That's a little over 10,000 a year. Iraq is still a violent place, but not remotely comparable to the scale of the Saddam Hussein years.
It's worth briefly examining the scale of those casualties. Saddam engaged in repeated assaults on his own people and took Iraq into a disastrous war with Iran. He is thought to have killed about 180,000 people in the 1988 Al Anfal campaign alone. In the 1991 uprising estimates of Kurdish and Shia deaths range between 100,00 and in excess of 200,000. The Iran-Iraq war killed half a million soldiers and, according to one source I found, an equivalent number of civilians. And then we have the constant attrition rate the maintenance of a tyrannical state involves - the torture chambers, the summary executions, the disappearances, the use of chemical weapons at Hallabja. Mass graves are still being found.
Fewer people are dying post invasion, perhaps by as much as a factor of ten.
Chilcot is guilty of the counsel of perfection. His inquiry took seven years to mull over decisions which the Blair government had weeks, days and sometimes hours to consider. Chilcot found that sometimes things didn't go according to plan. Well blow me down! Who could have predicted that?
Moreover Chilcot was given the job of making sense of what happened, not with considering what would have happened otherwise. If the invasion hadn't taken place Saddam Hussein would still have been in power today. Or one of his sons, or some other Ba'ath party hard-man. This prospect reminds me of Orwell's famous image: "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever"
Without the invasion Iraqis would have been denied an opportunity to remake their country. They may have messed it up, but that isn't all our fault.
If the anti-war faction had not taken such a stranglehold on Western political life we might have intervened in Syria. As it was, stymied by Ed Miliband's Labour party, David Cameron lost a Commons vote, Barack Obama forgot his "red lines" and President Assad stayed in power. In Syria the militants stepped into the vacuum and thus ISIL was born.
Chilcot is a luxuriant wallow in hindsight. Shame it didn't look forward and consider the counterfactual a bit more. Its effect is to indulge the fantasy that it's possible to make the world a better place without mistakes, expense or anyone dying.
The reality about liberal intervention is that it's messy, expensive, difficult and time-consuming. It's impossible to plan for every eventuality, and if you think a bomb-proof plan is conceivable you're going to be disappointed. Every time. And yet intervention sometimes works. It worked in Kosovo and in Sierra Leone. If you think it didn't work in Iraq, Google "Iraqi media after Saddam".
In contrast, non-intervention always fails. Why? Because it merely gives bad people like Saddam Hussein or President Assad (or ISIL) space to do whatever they like. The disappointing thing about Chilcot for me is not that he was critical of Blair, but that his criticism will merely reinforce the tendency, already becoming ingrained in Western political life, to isolationism. Unless you want to be vilified like Tony Blair, don't send your troops overseas. Ever.
PS Those of us who think that Blair probably did the best he could under difficult circumstances have been dogged for years by the foolish assertion that Iraq was an "illegal" war. I'm pleased to see that Chilcot knocks this on the head. Not by confirming the war was legal (how would he know?); but by pointing out that no-one knows whether it was or not. The only way to establish this would be to go to Court. It's amazing how many lavishly backed Blair-haters have baulked at this, considering how confident they are in their view. When even international lawyers don't agree on the issue, I think we should be sceptical of pronouncements by those whose closest brush with the law will be contesting a parking ticket.
Wednesday 29 June 2016
Brexit reflections #9 - Farewell to Scotland?
Amongst all the unpredictable consequences of last Friday's Brexit vote (and the momentous events of the long weekend - Cameron's resignation, the collapse of Corbyn's shadow cabinet), one which struck me most was the size of the majority for Remain in Scotland. Given that the SNP's manifesto promised a 2nd Independence referendum it was no surprise that Nicola Sturgeon almost immediately said that Holyrood would begin the legislative preparations for such a referendum to take place.
I voted Leave after a lot of thought and with a heavy heart; I also think the Union is a better arrangement than the alternatives; so I'm dismayed at this turn of events. "I told you so", say some Scottish Unionist commentators (without actually saying how they could have been so sure what would happen).
So is disaster upon us? Or are the any reasons to be cheerful? Well yes, I think there are.
1. Although the result was 60% Remain / 40% Leave, no-one knows how those votes break down. Were the Remainers all pro-Independence? If so, Ms Sturgeon would have good reason to go the country again. On the other hand the evidence suggests that it was the more affluent who tended to vote Remain; the same sector of Scottish society that shunned Independence in other words. This could be good news for the SNP if it means former Unionist voters would switch to Yes out of sheer disgust at the prospect of leaving the EU. The problem is that Sturgeon doesn't know.
Moreover a vote to stay in the EU is not the same as a vote to rejoin once out. And the desire to stay in the EU may not be as powerful an urge as that to stay within the Union. Also the majority of Scots voted for the UK to remain in the EU, not Scotland to remain in it. Then there's turnout - lower in Scotland than average, at 67% rather than 72% across the whole of the UK. Turn-out in the Indy referendum was about 85%.
A lot of unknowables here.
2. The economic arguments which are thought to have defeated the SNP in 2014 are if anything even more difficult to overcome now. The SNP's economic case was based then on heroic assumptions about the price of oil. But that price has now dipped still further. Moreover the economics are more widely understood, partly thanks to the work of Kevin Hague and his Chokkablog. Scotland would face a deficit increase of about £1700 per person immediately it left the UK. It will be hard to explain to the Scottish electorate why they should embrace something which looks economically even worse than it did at the last referendum.
3. Scotland would have to pay a financial contribution to the EU. It might have to join the Euro. It would, post Indy, have the largest deficit in Europe, many times the permitted level for joining the EU (remember that it was fiddling the figures, with the assistance of the Remain-supporting Goldman Sachs, which led to Greece's ill-fated admittance). Depending on the outcome of Brexit negotiations Scotland could find itself on the wrong side of a tariff barrier from a country with which it does the overwhelming majority of its business (four times that with the EU). There would have to be a hard border, with fencing. In order to regain their right to work in Paris, Munich and Madrid, Scots would have to give up their collective right to work in London, Manchester and Belfast.
4. Timing could be a key issue. Westminster may not be able to stop Indyref 2.0, but it could plausibly have a big say on when it happens. And timing could be crucial, for example if it looks as if HMG will be able to cobble together a deal on reasonable terms. Moreover the longer the party are in office the more likely the Scottish electorate is to shrug off its rather bizarre infatuation with the SNP.
5. I never wish to see another referendum. And down here we've had only one. I can't imagine Scots would look kindly on a party which inflicted on it a third in five years.
Ms Sturgeon is unlikely to call a referendum unless she is absolutely sure she can win. I wonder whether she is already regretting her gung-ho response on Friday morning. The next few weeks' opinion polls will be interesting.
I voted Leave after a lot of thought and with a heavy heart; I also think the Union is a better arrangement than the alternatives; so I'm dismayed at this turn of events. "I told you so", say some Scottish Unionist commentators (without actually saying how they could have been so sure what would happen).
So is disaster upon us? Or are the any reasons to be cheerful? Well yes, I think there are.
1. Although the result was 60% Remain / 40% Leave, no-one knows how those votes break down. Were the Remainers all pro-Independence? If so, Ms Sturgeon would have good reason to go the country again. On the other hand the evidence suggests that it was the more affluent who tended to vote Remain; the same sector of Scottish society that shunned Independence in other words. This could be good news for the SNP if it means former Unionist voters would switch to Yes out of sheer disgust at the prospect of leaving the EU. The problem is that Sturgeon doesn't know.
Moreover a vote to stay in the EU is not the same as a vote to rejoin once out. And the desire to stay in the EU may not be as powerful an urge as that to stay within the Union. Also the majority of Scots voted for the UK to remain in the EU, not Scotland to remain in it. Then there's turnout - lower in Scotland than average, at 67% rather than 72% across the whole of the UK. Turn-out in the Indy referendum was about 85%.
A lot of unknowables here.
2. The economic arguments which are thought to have defeated the SNP in 2014 are if anything even more difficult to overcome now. The SNP's economic case was based then on heroic assumptions about the price of oil. But that price has now dipped still further. Moreover the economics are more widely understood, partly thanks to the work of Kevin Hague and his Chokkablog. Scotland would face a deficit increase of about £1700 per person immediately it left the UK. It will be hard to explain to the Scottish electorate why they should embrace something which looks economically even worse than it did at the last referendum.
3. Scotland would have to pay a financial contribution to the EU. It might have to join the Euro. It would, post Indy, have the largest deficit in Europe, many times the permitted level for joining the EU (remember that it was fiddling the figures, with the assistance of the Remain-supporting Goldman Sachs, which led to Greece's ill-fated admittance). Depending on the outcome of Brexit negotiations Scotland could find itself on the wrong side of a tariff barrier from a country with which it does the overwhelming majority of its business (four times that with the EU). There would have to be a hard border, with fencing. In order to regain their right to work in Paris, Munich and Madrid, Scots would have to give up their collective right to work in London, Manchester and Belfast.
4. Timing could be a key issue. Westminster may not be able to stop Indyref 2.0, but it could plausibly have a big say on when it happens. And timing could be crucial, for example if it looks as if HMG will be able to cobble together a deal on reasonable terms. Moreover the longer the party are in office the more likely the Scottish electorate is to shrug off its rather bizarre infatuation with the SNP.
5. I never wish to see another referendum. And down here we've had only one. I can't imagine Scots would look kindly on a party which inflicted on it a third in five years.
Ms Sturgeon is unlikely to call a referendum unless she is absolutely sure she can win. I wonder whether she is already regretting her gung-ho response on Friday morning. The next few weeks' opinion polls will be interesting.
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