Nicholas Simpson

hockney v hirst - good and bad?

2012-01-19T00:54:00.000-08:00

Reviews in the Guardian and Torygraph this morning of the David Hockney and Damien Hirst exhibitions running in London, at least one of which I would dearly love to see: since photographs of Hockney's landscapes started appearing in the papers a few years ago I have been beguiled by their generosity and proper reverence for the natural world.

Martin Kettle in the revamped Grauniad writes movingly in praise of Hockney, and thinks that the painter expresses and addresses "the kind of people and country that he and we wish we were . . . when Hockney takes a pop at Hirst, I, for one, will cheer, because he is taking a pop at the kind of country we have become, in which attitude is more important than morality, price trumps value, and in which to shock and make a name is privileged over doing something lovely or true . . . " Kettle writes that Hockney's work has "the sensibility and the feeling, even the moral feeling, which is missing from so much that is merely fashionable . . . The modernists, like the conceptualists today, believed that the past had nothing to teach them and the rules all had to change. They were utterly wrong".

It's very rare that someone in the Graun writes something I agree with wholeheartedly. Kettle's words remind me slightly of an interview with Nicholas Maw in which the composer, when taxed with his failure to follow the groundrules of modernism, said that he believed that he was the inheritor of a tradition, and he didn't want to stray too far from it. My sentiments exactly.

Over in the Torygraph Peter Oborne, an opinion farmer so splenetic that he makes me look positively restrained, also thinks he can detect something in the Hockney and Hirst exhibitions that tells us something about the state of the nation, as well as about aesthetics. Hockney's art, writes Oborne, "is accessible, which is why he is loved by ordinary people. He loves them back. At the artist’s request, his canvasses have been hung high on the wall of the gallery so that more people can see them. Hockney understands, in a way that the arts establishment abhors, that art does not belong to an informed elite. . . [Hirst's spot paintings on the other hand] are abstract and universal, lack humanity and have zero reference to time or place: his exhibition is being shown simultaneously at 11 galleries around the world. Skill is not required: no late nights at life class for Hirst, who gained an E grade at art A-level and scarcely knows how to draw. . . Hence the need for experts to explain to a baffled public why Hirst matters: the arts establishment love him so much because he gives them a priestly role. . . "

But it isn't just the arts establishment that is a fraud on the people, apparently - "Progressive ideas are being exploded, Conservative ones are coming back. This affects every aspect of our national life, not just politics. David Hockney did not return to Britain after a long stay in the United States because he had been told that David Cameron would be the next British prime minister, but his arrival here nevertheless says something very important about the national direction of travel. Appearance and reality are no longer identical. Good and bad are no longer indistinguishable . . . Britain is moving back towards a world with solid, enduring values in which, for the first time in many years, public figures can make confident judgments about truth, beauty and morality. It is a world in which David Hockney OM has an honoured place as the greatest artist of his age."

Now I have a soft spot for Hirst, who comes across as a surprisingly unaffected and unpretentious artist in person, and I feel Oborne is probably protesting slightly too much if he thinks Hockney's resurgence is attributable to a sea-change in aesthetic and political values. But the phrase that really grates is "Good and bad are no longer indistinguishable". Philosophers have argued for millenia whether it was possible to distinguish between moral good and bad, and, so far as I have been able to keep up with the debate, have come to no particular conclusion.

In aesthetics it is far easier. It is not possible to state whether one piece of art is good and another bad, because we can only do so by reference to aesthetic criteria - balance, subtlety of form, pithiness, clarity and so on. Even if we could agree on a complete list of such criteria, how would we begin to address the knotty question to what extent a piece of art satisfied one or other of them? And even if we could do that, how would we agree which of the criteria were the most important? What if one work had subtle form, but went on a bit? Or another were concise but a bit obvious in its construction?

I sometimes think the comparison with athletics (yes, athletics, not aesthetics) is instructive. You measure the best hundred-metre runner by lining up the athletes, firing the gun, and handing the garland to the person who gets to the tape first. In art however you aren't even inviting the artists to the starting line. You are saying, "Well you could begin at the starting line, but not necessarily; you could start by the long jump pit; and you don't have to run - you could walk, hop, crawl. In fact you don't even have to come to the Olympic stadium at all. You could just sit at home and watch Richard and Judy". That is how hard it is to measure one piece of art against another. You might just as well try and argue that one kind of cheese is "better" than another. It's a waste of time.

If there are no objective criteria there can be no objective evaluation. Ultimately one's instinctive feeling - that you either like something or you don't - turns out to be vindicated by an examination of the tools which criticism offers for the job. They are inadequate ones. Oborne is wrong about aesthetic good and bad. I liked him more when he was on Newsnight shouting at EU commissars; and I didn't like him much then.

I said at the top of this piece that the Guardian had been revamped, and so it has, with the sports section being lumped in with the main bit of the paper, and other changes in layout which I haven't quite come to terms with yet. This revamp is in the name of cost-cutting, and in a way it tells us more about the state of the nation than Oborne's beloved Hockney exhibition.

The Guardian, losing money hand over fist, has woken up to the fact that its own finances need putting in order, just about the same time that its editorial team - Kettle is I think chief leader writer - is grasping slowly that in the long run there is no alternative for a nation to living within its means. The Graun's readership is way behind on this still, and whenever Kettle writes a piece which shows some signs of an acquaintance with economic reality, the cries of "betrayal" on the following day's letters page are long and strident.

Oborne's sea-change really will have come about when the tone changes to glum acceptance. At the moment we're still in anger and denial.

Alex Salmond gets my groat

2012-01-17T01:48:00.000-08:00

A sign this morning that the more we stop talking about the process of the Scottish independence referendum and the more we start talking about the substance, the harder it will get for the Nationalists to make their case. The unionist side, on which I broadly find myself, has some reasonably heavy hitters in Alastair Darling and Malcolm Rifkind, and now the Torygraph reports them saying something I've been thinking for a while now.

Alex Salmond used to say the Scots would join the Euro. For a time this was a sellable proposition, but as recent events have made this less and less credible, Salmond has reverted to saying a newly independent Scotland would keep the pound.

Fine. Let's assume Westminster agrees (although it might not). Now, who will be your central bank, Alex? Would it be the Bank of England, by any chance? And when that Bank sets interest rates, will it set them according to economic data from the UK as presently constituted, or will it just take data from England, Wales and Northern Ireland?

That's a no brainer: there is no way that a post-independence Bank of England will be taking account of what's happening in Scotland. For one thing, it would be politically unacceptable in England. No, after independence, if Scotland keeps the pound, it will have interest rates determined by the Bank of England, ignoring conditions in Scotland. That means that even if Scotland doesn't have the wrong base rate from day one, it'll have the wrong rate pretty soon after. Given that England tends to have stronger growth, in practical terms it means Scotland is likely to have base rates that are too high, strangling its economy.

And if Scotland were to join the Euro, what then? For the forseeable future it's a fair bet that national budgets of Eurozone countries will have to be vetted by Brussels. What kind of independence is it which exchanges the pooling of economic sovereignty with the rest of the UK for pooled sovereignty with twenty-odd other countries across a cold stretch of sea? Countries moreover with whom one has none of the ties of geography, language, culture, history and personal affection that bind, however loosely, the UK?

No, for the Jocks it'll be the Groat, or nothing.

Diane Abbott makes the news

2012-01-05T05:56:00.000-08:00

At the gym today, pounding away in preparation for another mountaineering trip that will probably be lost to the weather, I learned that Diane Abbott has tweeted that "white people love playing divide and rule". It was the lead item on Sky News, although over on the BBC it didn't figure until later on. Make of that what you will.

Although I don't like much being lumped in with a group of people who, apparently, love playing divide and rule (I'm racking my brains for evidence of that kind of behaviour) I guess that's small beer in comparison with the sort of stereotyping black people have to put up with, and on the whole I rather like Diane Abbott. I agree with virtually none of her views, as far as those are available to the public, but I like people who say what they think, even if it sometimes means they say stupid things like this, and I don't share the widespread perception that she is a hypocrite for sending her son to an expensive public school. If I had a black or mixed race son I'd want to keep him well away from the kind of culture which affects an awful lot of young black men in Britain.

Please excuse the stereotyping there, Diane.

When the BBC did get round to reporting the story about ten minutes in to its lunchtime bulletin, its reporter rather let the side down, I felt, by describing Abbott's explanation for her tweet - that she was referring to 19th century colonialism - as "bizarre". I am quite capable of making up my mind whether Abbott's explanation is rational or barking mad without any help from you, madam.

There may be no such thing as objective reporting, but need it be quite so obvious?

stephen lawrence - institutionally rubbish #3

2012-01-04T01:04:00.000-08:00

This blog has long argued that the most significant inference to draw from the Stephen Lawrence murder is that the police are quite often incompetent. The Macpherson inquiry found differently - it said that the police were institutionally racist.

Following the conviction of Messrs Dobson and Norris yesterday for Lawrence's murder, Dr Richard Stone, one of the inquiry's members, is quoted as follows in the Guardian this morning: "We couldn't believe the police investigated murders in general as they had done with the Stephen Lawrence case .... insufficient evidence was presented to us to draw the conclusion that it might have been corruption so we were left with one other possibility, that it had to be racism".

It's the first sentence which stands out for me. I saw first hand how the police did their investigations when I was a lawyer, and I find it only too easy to believe that they messed up not just the Lawrence case but many others as well. I've previously cited the Michael Barrymore swimming pool death as evidence of their incompetence. So far as I can gather, the Macpherson inquiry did not look at any other murder investigations, with or without a racial element, to see how well they were conducted.

Doreen Lawrence said yesterday "Had the police done their job properly, I would have spent the last 18 years grieving for my son rather than fighting to get his killers to court". That hits the nail on the head. I thought Mrs Lawrence behaved with a dignity, poise and restraint that were very characteristically British. Go on, laugh if you like. But black people being British is rather the point, isn't it?

Julian Barnes and the Diminishing of the English Novel

2011-12-23T10:51:00.000-08:00

Engaged in a session of Dad's-taxiing the other night, I nearly heard Julian Barnes in the radio talking about the Booker prize. Actually I did hear a little of it; Barnes spoke of his anticipation with a childishness eagerness at odds with his reputation as a serious writer. I couldn't help but think that he'd have sounded rather different if he'd lost. Perhaps that's a given. Then my journey came to an end and I missed whatever momentous stuff followed.

In keeping with my new found status as person up-to-speed with modern literature (see posts passim) I have read The Sense of an Ending, Barnes' winning novel. Tony, a man of middle years, divorced, seeing old age approaching, recounts his friendship as a young adult with Adrian, and with Veronica, his first serious girlfriend (NB Spoilers coming). He and Veronica split, and Adrian writes to ask Tony if he'd mind if the two of them got together. Tony remembers replying facetiously; but it then turns out, many years later, that Tony wrote a rather different letter, and we are invited to believe that this led to a series of awful consequences for which the elderly Veronica cannot forgive him.

I found myself uttering a series of increasingly exasperated Paxman-like "Oh for God's sakes!" as the faintly melodramatic denouement of Barnes' book unfolded. For it to be effective - and for the novel to work - we have to accept that Tony's letter led to those awful consequences, whereas in fact a moment's reflection would convince us that they would probably have happened anyway; we would have to accept that Veronica, a clever woman, was incapable of perceiving this; and we would have to accept that Tony, himself a clever person, rather than meekly accepting his guilt, would not have the wit to utter a rather tart "Get over yourself" to Veronica and get on with his retirement. Moreover since what Hitchcock used to call the McGuffin of the story is that we all create our own histories, blurring the past, it seems strange that this should happen to everyone in the story apart from Veronica, for whom the reverses of the 1970s appear to be as painful as when they were fresh. If we as readers find any one of these things implausible (and I found all three so) the novel collapses.

Once more I found myself saying exasperatedly to my friends in the Males from Hale, a book group, "But people just don't behave like that!" I find myself increasingly hamstrung by the divergence of some art from observed behaviour. We watched Atonement the other day at home, and I was reminded anew of my exasperation with Ian McEwan's novel. You have to believe that the Keira Knightley character, caught in flagranto with the gardener's son by her sister, would have said nothing when the sister denounces him to the police, another guest having been sexually assaulted in the grounds. Yes, McEwan really thinks we will meekly accept that the Knightley character would rather have watched her lover go to prison than stand up for him. Oh, and that the victim of the assault in the grounds will one day marry her attacker. Folks is strange, but not that strange. "It's only a film", says my wife. "It's just not a very good film", I reply. Or novel, for that matter. Both Barnes and McEwan write beautifully; but no amount of beautiful writing can camouflage an unbelievable plot.

One advantage of magical realism is that it matters slightly less whether authors get this kind of thing right. When normal rules of physics and taxonomy cease to apply, one is inclined to be a bit more forgiving of aberrations of human psychology. I have also been reading Ali Smith's The Accidental, in which Amber, a woman, unbelievable in naturalistic terms, intervenes in the lives of a seriously dysfunctional family, with dramatic effect. We accept that it's not naturalistic and accept what Smith tells us. Smith makes Barnes' book feel plodding, and McEwan look like a navel gazing coin polisher. She has more talent in her little finger than either of them.

Of course the disadvantage of magical realism is that it makes us all the more aware that we are being manipulated by the author, and that it's the author's decision to make the characters move in a particular way. Good novels make it seem inevitable that, say, Sidney Carton should give up his life for his double, and it's only if we stand back and think about it that we realise Dickens could have done it differently. When Alan Breck gambles away his money in Kidnapped we are blissfully unaware that it is Stevenson who is making it happen. It seems to happen because that's what Alan Breck is like. It's the fact that we don't think about the alternatives when we're reading that gives a good naturalistic novel its peculiar force. It seems to me as a non-novelist that that's too important a quality to throw away.

Although Smith's book was wonderful, I found myself thinking afterwards about its ethos. Thanks to the wonderful Amber's intervention in The Accidental, the four members of the family are liberated from their various unhappinesses; or rather all are bar the truly unpleasant father, Michael. In particular the mother, Eve, embarks on a liberating journey in America while the others remain at home.

I would be willing to bet that Smith, Scottish and a lesbian, is of the bien-pensant Left. In case we had failed to work out how horrid Michael is, we are told quite early on that he supported the Iraq war. How ghastly! And yet the tone of the book is one in which the pursuit of personal freedom leads to fulfilment. I find this a surprisingly right-wing, even libertarian, outlook. One of the reasons so many of us lead lives which, from the outside, appear no doubt stultifying and conventional is that association with others (spouses and children in particular, but other people too) brings with it responsibilities which require that one's own personal freedom is constrained. In The Accidental Eve's Thelma and Louise-like Odyssey is described in some detail; the effect on her children, abandoned in London with their asshole father, is glossed over. Everything we know about these dysfunctional kids tells us that they will be lost without their mother. But Smith more or less ignores that. After all, gritting your teeth and getting on with family life doesn't make much of a story, does it?

It turns out that I'm not the only one who didn't think the Booker winning novel was up to much. Geoff Dyer has written a withering review of it in the New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/books/review/julian-barnes-and-the-diminishing-of-the-english-novel.html). Dyer's objection was that it was kind of OK, but no more. I think that the English novel is big enough to withstand being diminished by Barnes, and by McEwan and Smith. But I do wish they'd write with a bit less polish and a bit more plausibility.

"Pourquoi nous?", demandent les Francaises.

2011-12-15T04:15:00.000-08:00

Apologies for prolixity this morning, and for the clumsy French, but Euro news is coming thick and fast.

Here's the head of the Bank of France and European Central Bank policymaker Christian Noyer, bleating about the rumoured imminent ratings downgrade for France: "The downgrade does not appear to me to be justified when considering economic fundamentals. Otherwise, they should start by downgrading Britain which has more deficits, as much debt, more inflation, less growth than us and where credit is slumping."

These people just don't get it. M. Noyer, even a layman like me can see that you have ignored the most fundamental of economic fundamentals.

Britain's economy may have the defects you describe; but its government has shown a willingness to get its spending under control. Has France? No. It has merely put up a couple of taxes.

Britain has its own central bank, its own currency, and can set its own interest rate. Rates here have been at 0.5% for years. ECB rates are way above this, and the Bank (for which you work M Noyer) actually put rates up after the crisis broke.

Because Britain has its own central bank, it can print money when it likes. Can France? No. France is stuffed because it signed up to monetary union.

France would love to have Britain's control over its own currency and start the printing presses rolling; in fact its President has been trying unsuccessfully to bring that about for months. It can't because its larger, more powerful and harder working neighbour, Germany, won't allow it to.

Now do you understand why Britain is borrowing at just over 2% and France is threatened with losing its AAA rating?

Someone once complained that this blog seemed quite angry quite a lot of the time. If that's so, it's a deplorable fault. But no apologies for the above.

Borg triumphs for Sweden again

2011-12-15T00:37:00.000-08:00

Apologies to tennis fans, but Sweden's Anders Borg has been named EU Finance Minister of the year. I learned this piece of earth shattering news last night on the way home from an orchestral meeting. Mr Borg was interviewed on The World Tonight on the day Britain's unemployment figures reached their worst level for Lord knows how many years.

What, Robin Lustig, asked him, was Sweden's secret? How come Sweden's unemployment levels were so benign in comparison with Britain's? Ah, said Mr Borg, that's because we were more careful with our spending. We ran a surplus in 2006 and 2007, so that when the crisis came we could put that money into our economy.

Somewhere, I fancy, the corpse of JM Keynes gave a twitch, and in his long sleep the great man dreamed that someone in the world of the living had finally listened to him.

Lustig persisted. Did Mr Borg think that Britain was right to be cutting its deficit? Yes, said Borg. When the deficit is so bad you have no alternative. But what, Lustig went on, his desperation now becoming palpable, was Sweden's experience when it tackled its spending? Was Britain right to be cutting so fast? Yes, said Borg. We found in Sweden that it was helpful to front-load the spending cuts.

So there you have it. Someone who thinks George Osborne has got it about right.

Oh, and it turns out that Sweden isn't going to sign last weekend's Euro treaty either. Not without some changes. We are not alone!

Alex Salmond, Euroland and the Groat.

2011-12-14T01:33:00.000-08:00

I watched Newsnight last night, mindful of wails from the Torygraph about the BBC's pro-EU bias. From the point of view of someone essentially well disposed to the EU but sceptical about the single currency, I found it pretty disappointing.

As usual with these matters, it's very hard to put your finger on bias, because the presenters never come out and say, "Well I think . . . .". Bias is something you have to infer from the questions that are asked, from those that aren't asked, from the tone of the interviewer (in this case Emily Maitlis), and from the attitudes and assumptions that underly the programme. It was this last which I found striking. Maitlis's questions, presumably scripted by her and her producer, seemed to assume that David Cameron had lost something fundamental by not signing up to a really important treaty which has a good chance of saving the Euro.

But a 6th Form economics student could tell you that the Treaty has no chance whatever of doing that. It contains fiscal rules which will not be obeyed, attempts to impose austerity measures which will make even less likely that countries will be able to grow their way out of trouble (and which there are now some signs that electorates of individual countries won't accept), makes no provision for transfers between rich and poor regions of the EU and does nothing to make the ECB a lender of last resort.

The failure to grasp this context coloured Maitlis's questions, both to the solitary Tory MP and the European politicians on the programme. She didn't ask the Eurocrats any questions about utility of the treaty, and when they accused Britain of acting selfishly she didn't point out that Britain is not in the Euro, or that in any event the Germans are effectively holding the whole continent to ransom by refusing to allow the ECB to print money. Now there's self-interest for you. Where was the question to the Dutch MEP about the transfer of Holland's surpluses to the struggling south? The EU apparently always makes good, gradualist decisions, whereas Maitlis's questions to the hapless Tory were tinged with what sounded like real anger at Cameron's impulsive mistake.

As a BBC lover I found it made uncomfortable viewing. You don't need to be a genius to see that, whatever Cameron may have got wrong, the Eurozone leaders are in a different class of incompetence altogether.

In the Autumn the EU tried to impose a haircut on Greek bond investors. "No", cried economics geeks (including me): "If you do that to Greece, that'll just push bond yields up for bigger countries like Italy". And thus it came to pass. So what does the Group of 26 promise now? That in future there will be no more haircuts for bond investors. The words "stable door" and "horse" spring to mind. But the idea that the gilt markets will believe a promise, enshrined in an EU treaty or not, that there is no chance of them losing any of their money in a future default, is laughable.

We are dealing with a group of people, mostly unelected, incapable of understanding that if you impose losses on the bond markets it might make them wary of investing in other insolvent countries, but, that having come comprehensively to pass, capable of believing that a promise that it'll never happen again will make bond investors come running back waving their hands in the air like guests at a Happy Clappy wedding.

What does any of this have to do with Alex Salmond? Well, for a long time the SNP's policy was to join the Eurozone. That's a policy which has looked more and more difficult to justify as the imbalances thrown up by the one-size fits all interest policy have brought first Ireland, then Greece and now Italy and Spain into the maelstrom. And so it comes as no surprise to find Salmond saying, on the Today programme this morning, that post-independence the SNP will "keep the pound" until conditions are right for Euro membership. "Keep the pound"? That's big of him.

I have always thought the currency issue might be the Nats' achilles heel, and strains in the Eurozone have now brought the problem to the surface. If the Scots become independent, that means independence from the Bank of England. No doubt some accommodation could be reached about ownership of the actual notes and coins in circulation. But the Bank of England sets interest rates for all the UK. Post independence it will not be setting rates for Scotland. Or rather, it will not be taking into account the Scots economy when it sets rates. I'd be willing to bet that won't happen because some English Tory MPs will make sure it doesn't. If Scotland uses the pound for any length of time (and there will be a strong feeling in England that it shouldn't), it will be on England's terms. And that will mean interest rates suitable for England and the rest of the UK, not Scotland. In practical terms that probably means a rate that is too high for Scotland, and which will quickly strangle the Scottish economy.

Salmond had better hope that the Euro is still surviving in workable form when independence day dawns. Because Scotland could fairly quickly be setting up its own currency. How about the Groat?

PS - A couple of headlines, one on Radio 5 and one on Radio 4, two days apart, both pretty much identical - "David Cameron has vetoed a treaty to stabilise the Euro" was the gist - and both thoroughly misleading. Cameron has not prevented a treaty taking place. He has used his veto to prevent Britain having to sign it. The treaty is set to be signed next March by 26 other countries. Secondly the treaty has as much chance of stabilising the Euro as I have of conducting the Berlin Phil. Hours before the time of the second headline - last night - Italian 10 year bonds had reached record levels. Some stabilisation.

Eurogeddon in slow motion

2011-12-11T07:19:00.000-08:00

So David Cameron has wielded the handbag and, according to whom you believe, given Merkozy a biff on the nose, or missed by a mile and ended up striking himself on the ear.

This blog is faintly sympathetic to Cameron. As per previous posts, the Euro crisis can, I think, only be averted, even in the medium term, by a combination of fiscal union and a massive injection of funds, this money to come from either the Germans coughing up themselves or permitting the ECB to act as a lender of last resort. Obviously the Germans don't want to do this, but I have had a bet with a friend that they will crack in the end. I think it will happen because the markets will get more and more nervous of lending to countries and Berlin will be faced with the choice of seeing its beloved Eurozone break up or agreeing to set the printing presses rolling.

In this context the weekend's summit seems like an increasingly desperate attempt to reach a solution which defers that German decision. The idea that there will be strict rules in place - rules which will be actually enforced - to make countries restrict their borrowing strikes me as preposterous. I remember the Stability and Growth Pact, which was broken with impunity by France and Germany among others. You can hardly see fines being imposed under a regime of Qualified Majority Voting. Countries will let each other off. I doubt very much that the markets will take this seriously for long.

I am also staggered that European leaders are apparently so eager to subscribe to a system which subjects their budgets to EU scrutiny and approval. What makes them think that their electorates will put up with that? And do they not think it might be an idea to ask them first? When this kind of thing goes through on the nod you know that politicians have lost the plot.

But should we have signed up to it anyway? Clarion voices are telling us that we should. We need to have a voice at the discussions, they say. But getting our views heard is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end. The end is getting policies which are good for us. Cameron found himself in the unenviable position of having to decide whether to avail himself of the means (being able to take part in the decision making process) even though it meant swallowing policies which he believed were bad. His decision not to do so doesn't seem on the face of it unreasonable. His critics have mistaken having a voice as an end in itself. It isn't. The true goal lies elsewhere.

Another friend has sent me an email reading, "Rejoice! Rejoice! We're on our way out of Europe!" I think she's being a bit premature. Some of the Euro leaders hate us because we said the single currency wouldn't work, and we were right. Some of them are jumping up and down because Cameron refused to go along with their hollow and temporizing attempt to paper over the cracks in their grand project. But that'll pass. I'd be willing to have another bet: that in chancellories across Europe apparatchiks will soon be saying to one another, "Actually, it's a shame that we couldn't keep the Brits onside". I don't believe Merkozy or their associates ever actually believed that we would refuse to sign up; and they were unprepared when Cameron did just that.

Watching Eurogeddon unfold is like I imagine watching a train crash in slow motion. It is terrible, terrifying and fascinating in turn.

PS - As of 16th Dec it turns out that Hungary and the Czech Republic are having doubts about signing up too: annoyingly for Merkozy they are dubious about giving up autonomy over tax. And the Irish think they may have to have a referendum. Moreover, British officials are apparently to be invited to further discussions on the treaty early next year. So maybe we are not so alone after all.

Oh no not more Jeremy Clarkson

2011-12-05T01:53:00.000-08:00

Once more into the breach, dear friends, and let's appal the bien-pensant with our funny remarks about homosexuals, foreigners and trades-unionists. Yes, it's Jeremy Clarkson, doing what he does best (his talent in other directions, to be clear, being modest).

Actually I have some sympathy with Clarkson. He was clearly trying, not very successfully, to be funny; in fact, as I've written here before, that is Clarkson's biggest problem. As his defenders have pointed out, there has been over the years a good deal more left-wing near-the-knuckle humour on TV than the reverse. It's actually quite hard to think of a right-wing comic who has got anywhere near TV recently. Bernard Manning? Jim Davidson? But just because the likes of Ben Elton were funnier (oh go on, a bit funnier) doesn't mean that Clarkson was wrong to make his attempted joke. As I weary of saying, it's much better that people are able to say appalling things than not. If you doubt this, just Google the responses of the po-faced anti-free speech Trades Unionists condemning him. Watch them and ask, who do you prefer, the rumbustious scatter-gun Poujadism of the former motoring correspondent enfant-terrible or the tight-arsed dreariness of the union apparatchiks? If the latter, I fear for you.

Anyway, about the strikes. Good or bad? As someone who quite likes the markets (with some reservations) I applaud - as surely Clarkson would - that people have the right to withdraw their labour if they like. I do slightly wonder though whether they are wise. How many people in the private sector have lost their jobs in the last five years? How many people in the public sector have lost theirs? I'd be willing to bet that private sector casualties outnumber public by ten to one, minimum. Free movement of labour means that public sector workers are free to try and get a private sector job if they like. I don't think many of them are risking it. If I was a public sector worker I'd be hunkering down and watching the cold winds blowing outside my windows with a certain amount of relief.

This sense of the wider economic context isn't one I saw widely replicated amongst the strikers. A wonder if any of them will have changed their minds after watching Robert Peston's How the West was Broke last night. My wife, for whom matters economical matter rather less than they do for me, asked afterwards, "How did this happen without anyone noticing it?" Modesty prevented me from drawing her attention to the following, written in February 2007, eighteen months before the Credit Crunch struck: "We have enjoyed a decade of economic good times built on both government and citizens spending money they did not have. . . We may well find that the trad Keynesian way out of recession is unavailable because the Government borrowed too much during the good times." Or this, from April 2006: ". . .the spending there's been in the last decade has partly been of borrowed money, by consumer and government alike. So for things to carry on it looks as if we'll have to keep on borrowing. How long can that carry on? IMO not much longer. . . it looks as if further spending growth might be difficult. That's why the end of the decade looks dodgy to me. . . Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the Keynesian idea was that you borrowed during the downswing of the business cycle and paid it back during the upswing. Seems to me that we (meaning HMG and consumers) have borrowed during the upswing (HMG to put money into public services, consumers to buy Chinese imports), and I wonder where growth will come from now it looks as if the pendulum might be going back the other way."

Some of the most telling footage in Peston's programme was the grainy newsreel stuff of Mrs Thatcher, and the mass walkouts at UK car plants like Longbridge. I remember my Dad saying at the time, "They're pricing themselves out of jobs". How right he was. But it seems to me futile to blame either management or unions. Both sides were swimming against a tide which would have washed British manufacturing industry away in the end no matter what we did.

Peston did a pretty good job of explaining how the East lent money to the West to enable it to carry on buying its products. I thought a couple of things were missing. The first was that if Gordon Brown hadn't run a deficit from 2001 onwards (when Britain was 8 years into the longest period of economic growth in its history), we would have been at least a couple of hundred billion better off when recession came, and better able to fight off the downturn without recourse to the markets. But maybe that was too party political. The truth sometimes is. The second was that all the bankers catastrophic risk-taking did was to postpone the point at which the party came to an end. It would have finished anyway at some point, with the consequences for our living standards which we're all going to have to deal with for the forseeable future.

I have strayed some distance from Jeremy Clarkson. Perhaps that's the best place to be.

How I wrote Playing Bogart

2011-12-01T03:41:00.000-08:00

A friend emails with a link to this blog - http://louderthanwar.com/blogs/top-12-underground-records-i-wish-i-had-released. As the title would suggest, the writer, record producer Dave Parsons, has named Playing Bogart by 23 Jewels as no.9 on his list of top 12 underground records. Reader, I wrote that song and released that record. Over thirty years ago. Only a thousand copies were ever made, and they regularly appear on Ebay now, going for £50 plus (I don't have one personally).

How did this happen? And why?

I left school in 1977, just as punk was kicking off, and in my gap year, whilst other people were doing useful and interesting things, got a job in WH Smith's storeroom and joined a band, Idiot Rouge (Yes, I know; terrible name). In the course of that year we must have done 50 gigs round the North West - Liverpool, Manchester of course, Sheffield, Stoke. Through them I met Clive Gregson, singer of the pub rock band Any Trouble, and my memories of that year are of endless journeys with The Trubs, as we called them, in unreliable vans to far flung venues where we or they, or both, would play to three men and a dog for thirty quid; that and laughing quite a lot.

I also wrote a song called Playing Bogart. I was living with my parents; I was due to start a law degree at the end of 1978; I didn't want to be a lawyer; I wanted to be a pop star (more accurately a famous guitarist/songwriter of the brooding Tom Verlaine type); I didn't have a girlfriend; I was probably quite lonely. I remembered going into Manchester for the WH Smith works do around Christmas 1977, and looking at all the traffic, and the people going out, feeling like an outsider, contemplating the area where romance meets disillusionment from the windows of the 101 bus. I was a bit young to feel like this, but I'd been feeling like it for years and I suppose part of me still does.

Playing Bogart was one of the more popular items in Idiot Rouge's set, and when I left for University and our drummer, John Doyle, quit to join Magazine, the rump of the band, now called the Cheaters, carried on playing it for a while. At Nottingham I met some other musicians, Geoff Powers, Mark Buckle and Simon Harris, and we had a band called Sneak and the Previews (yes, I know; terrible name). It didn't take me long to get fed up of Simon Harris, no doubt more my problem than his, but without him there was only the rump of a band and Mark Buckle, not happy with my hissy fit, declined further involvement for a while. Meanwhile all around Britain bands were making their own records on a shoestring and I was desperate to be involved in this resurgence. I therefore hatched the plan of recording Playing Bogart and another song, You Don't Know Me, and releasing the resulting single myself.

There had to be other musicians involved, so I got together Geoff Powers, Paddy Russell, a bass playing friend from school, and a guitarist I knew from Manchester, Neil Roberts, who was now at Nottingham too. We all met up in Manchester at my parents house. The band photo was taken on the staircase as my Mum called us down for tea. I had positioned my Grandfather's Zeiss Ikon bellows camera on the stairs to that I was in full view, trying to look as much like Tom Verlaine as possible, and the others could be seen by means of carefully positioned mirrors. I taught Paddy the songs the night before the session. He had never heard them before, and in fact never played with the band again. I had decided we would be called 23 Jewels. It was something written on the face of my watch.

The recording was chaotic. Nowadays the average PC has far more sophisticated recording equipment in it than did Pennine Studios, Oldham in 1978, and underground records are no longer made in the same tearing hurry. But we had paid for the studio time between us, and the first rule of recording on a budget was Be Prepared. Or to be more accurate, Be Well Rehearsed. We were not. Notwithstanding that, the only real hitch came when we were trying to record Neil's guitar breaks at the end of Bogart. Neil was a great player, someone who came at the instrument from the angle of his heroes, guitarists like Jan Akkerman and Larry Carlton, rather than the basic thrashing fashionable at the time. As Clive Gregson, who produced the record, said, Neil always played as if he was just about to do something amazing; and sometimes he did. But he had not worked out what he was going to do, and faced with having to do something now, he was badly affected by nerves. In the end I played the first break, and for the fade out we actually put two of his solos together, one on top of the other, and it worked fine.

About the process of getting the records mastered and pressed I remember almost nothing. I do remember that Geoff, the drummer, and I hired a car and drove to London to collect them. At one point we found ourselves driving down Regent St. It was the first time I'd been to London, and finding myself somewhere familiar from all sorts of fiction was a thrill; within five years I was living there. Afterwards we took a box to Rough Trade records on Portobello road. Geoff Travis, the proprietor, listened to the record gravely and bought a hundred from us on the spot. We couldn't believe our luck. Later I sent the record to John Peel and to the NME. God love us, Peel actually played it, not once but several times; and Tom Robinson made it single of the week in the paper.

Clearly it was only a matter of time before the record companies came knocking, we felt. We would obviously show our disdain for the majors before perhaps signing for one of the trendier minor labels. But in fact that didn't happen. 23 Jewels, now with Mark Buckle back on bass, did the rounds in Nottingham and further afield through 1979 and for a couple of years afterwards, but the big time never came. Astonishingly, we were a cult band, although at the time it felt as if we were just not very popular. On the Youtube Playing Bogart page someone has kindly written "The finest, most unique sounding band to come out of Nottingham". Unfortunately not many people said that kind of thing at the time, and anyway we never did really emerge from Nottingham. Things might have been different if we'd been from Manchester or Sheffield.

After a while Playing Bogart was quietly dropped from the band's set list: I didn't like playing it because it was too poppy. Our friends Any Trouble recorded it on their first album. At the end of 1982 I moved to London in pursuit of a girl, and fame and fortune. My own interests were shifting slowly but irreversibly towards classical music, and by the end of '84 I was at Music College doing composition.

So how does it feel to see this record, made on a whim by a bunch of 20 year olds in the sketchiest of circumstances, praised to the skies? Do I mind that other stuff I've done subsequently has made only a fraction of the impression? Well, no, not really. I think it is a good song, and the recording, no matter how crude, captures a performance that, as Tom Robinson said at the time, has an enthusiasm and passion that cannot be faked.

Do I mind that I didn't become a famous guitarist/songwriter in the Tom Verlaine mould as per my aspirations then? No, not much. I am happy to be doing what I'm doing now, and aware of how lucky I am in so nearly all aspects of my life that it would seem churlish to complain about any of them. We are in any event the sum of our experiences. Who is to say that if that had been different, the other things would have been just as good? Still, it's quietly pleasing to see the song remembered in Dave Roberts' top 12 (even if it is only at number 9).

To finish, I recommend that you listen to the Trubs's own version of the tune here and watch the hilarious video which goes with it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95KYEoheL1E

Messing with the German Requiem

2011-11-30T00:58:00.001-08:00

A marathon day on Sunday, conducting the Athenean Ensemble in the morning in Didsbury and then off in the afternoon to help out with the Manchester Bach Choir's German Requiem. I was forcibly reminded of the joy of live music, both because of the packed house for the morning concert, an event put on and enjoyed by people who care passionately about classical music, and because of the things that went wrong over the course of the day.

Even the greatest musicians make mistakes. That is part of the pressure of having to get it right now. The pianist John Lill, a man who is said to have memorised Beethoven's piano sonatas by the age of 12, once went off into the wrong key in the Emperor Concerto. A friend recalls playing 2nd Bass Clarinet in the Rite with the BBC Phil and being horrified when the 1st player began a complex duet passage a bar early - should he follow suit and spare his colleague the humiliation, or join in and risk chaos elsewhere in the orchestra? Players are quite good at covering up these things: another friend was playing in a scratch professional orchestra at a concert featuring the tenor Alfie Boe. Mr Boe came in not one but four bars early. His accompanists seamlessly and undetectably advanced four bars to cover him.

I personally never mind too much when new things go wrong in concerts - it's the old mistakes that piss me off. So when on Saturday one section of the Athenean unaccountably missed a cue at the beginning of the Clementi symphony, that seemed just part of the unpredictable thrill of the event. You can bet no-one in the audience noticed.

I said I had gone to "help out" with the Brahms German Requiem, but I'm not sure how much help I really was. "We're short of tenors, can you come and help?" is an appeal to charity which might well have been met with, "Unfortunately I am not a tenor". But this would be to ape the scene in the Clouseau film where Peter Sellers goes into a bar and is growled at by the dog in the corner. "Does your duurg bite?", enquires Sellers of the landlord. "No", replies the landlord. The dog duly comes over and bites Sellers on the ankle. "I thought you said your duurg did not bite", complains Sellers. "That's not my dog", the landlord replies.

So although I am not a tenor, I went anyway. Now there are tenor parts and there are tenor parts. Some lie mostly in the middle of the stave with the occasional foray into the upper regions. These I can manage, because during an average day I can sing several top Gs, and once, recording a jingle for a radio advert (for a housebuilding company, since you ask), managed a top A. But the Brahms Requiem is unforgivingly high, with top As aplenty, and at least once, a top B flat; I seemed to spend three hours of the afternoon and two hours of the evening shouting, increasingly hoarsely.

However bad this was, the nadir of my contribution was reached in the second fugue, where a storm of confusing information comes your way: the pitches, awkward and non-intuitive, the rhythms, irregular and non-intuitive, the register, generally out of my reach, and lastly, the language, German. I had managed this alright in the afternoon, but now, head buried in part, resolved to go for it fearlessly, bellowing my way through for two minutes, aware that it wasn't quite going as well as previously but determined to see things through to the end like a musical George Osborne. When finally the smoke cleared and the last entry had been dealt with, I looked up. The conductor was regarding his charges with an attitude of mild rebuke. I had been a crotchet out with him throughout. No wonder it didn't sound quite right.

My wife says I have been slow to admit responsibility for this. I think that's unfair. The problem is that in music no-one quite knows what's happened. The process is mysterious, and that is part of the attraction. Some performances, note perfect, are wooden. Some have flaws but come to life in a way you cannot predict. That is why the Athenean's leader told me that she found herself on the verge of tears during Siegfried Idyll on Saturday morning; and telling me about it three days later she had to wipe her eyes again. As for things going wrong, you could call in the crash investigators like they do for a motorway pile up, and still be unsure of the cause of the musical accident.

So it might have been just me that was out.

On the other hand, I could have been note perfect. Perhaps everyone else got it wrong.

Valuing Aditya Chakrabortty

2011-11-22T00:20:00.000-08:00

"Last week", writes Aditya Chakrabortty in the Grauniad, "you, me and every other taxpayer in Britain each handed £13 to the billionaire Richard Branson". Funnily enough I heard one of Chakrabortty's colleagues, John Harris, say exactly the same thing on Any Questions last Saturday. Now I am no fan of Branson, who is just a capitalist like any other, but this is wrong. Actually it's more than wrong, it's revealingly wrong.

Chakrabortty gets his figure by taking the amount of money the Government put into Northern Rock, subtracting the amount by the figure Branson paid for it and dividing the result by the number of taxpayers. Now he clearly isn't saying that we really paid £13 each to Virgin. What he's saying is that we've given something to Virgin which is worth £13 more per taxpayer than Branson has actually paid.

Chakrabortty's mistake lies in the assumption that Northern Rock is worth now what the UK government paid for it in 2008, and that mistake in turn lies in a misunderstanding of what value is.

When my mother in law watches the Antiques Roadshow and some becoiffed smoothie tells a gasping matron that her 18th century heirloom might be worth £20,000, what he means is that somebody would probably be prepared to pay that sum at auction. That's the best way of attributing value: the figure someone else is prepared to pay for a thing. In fact it's the only way of attributing value.

Now turn to Northern Rock. The Government has been trying to sell it for some time, but no one else was willing to pay more than Virgin. The sum beardie paid represents its value now. Moreover the value the Government paid for Northern Rock did not just represent its status as a bank in trouble. Its value was increased drastically because if the Government hadn't bought it the knock-on effects in the UK's banking system would have been profound and severe. So Chakrabortty is attributing a false value to Northern Rock, not only because in the real world no-one was prepared to pay any more than Branson; but also because what the Government was paying for was the continued survival of the UK's banking system. And before you say, well we'd be better off without that, ask yourself how much rice and pasta you have stored in your cellar. Because if the cashpoints run out, you won't be buying any for a while.

Chakrabortty could have argued that George Osborne should have waited longer; that in a few years we'd have got more for it; that Osborne should have sought to remutualise the bank. But no. He chose instead to say that the taxpayer has given money to Richard Branson. Which is not true.

Who is Aditya Chakrabortty? He is chief economics leader writer for the Guardian. But he doesn't know what value is. Go figure.

Occupy should stay

2011-11-18T00:59:00.000-08:00

Saw a debate on Newsnight last night between a flame-haired activist type (whose name now escapes me), and a former Goldman Sachs banker (ditto). This was in the wake of the Occupy Wall St protests being removed in New York.

The course of this debate, mediated by Emily Maitlis, was predictable enough; the Activist articulately incandescent, the Banker moderate and a bit apologetic despite the activist's attempts to interrupt. Where it got really interesting however was the point at which the Banker said, the real reason for the crisis is Socialism (gasps from Maitlis and the Activist), which is to say that governments all around the world - Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Greece - had spent too much money, not daring to tell their electorates that this spending was unaffordable.

Now personally I don't remember George W Bush's government being terribly socialist - and Dubya was an intemperate spender - but nevertheless the broader point is probably true. Governments did live on borrowed money, and they did lack the political courage to balance their budgets - after all, things were going so well, weren't they?

This infuriated the Activist, by now almost beside herself. How dare a rich banker blame the governments that had tried to protect the interests of ordinary working people? I can see that, from her shoes, hearing this kind of stuff from a besuited fat cat must have been annoying. In times of austerity, it's galling to see some people utterly unaffected. But the facts rather bear the Banker out.

In Britain, a Labour government (which I voted for) consistently ran a deficit from about 2001 onwards. Labour supporters loved the Government's economic success. We enjoyed the tax take coming from the City of London's profits, deregulated by Gordon Brown. We were not only running the economy better than the Tories, but we were rebuilding Britain's social infrastructure. And yet when recession came the cupboard was bare, and, as I have noted many times here, the Government had no choice but to go to the markets to keep the economy afloat. That we are now so dependent on the gilt markets is not their fault, but ours.

The problem for the activist and other people like her is that no amount of taxing the rich or well-paid will fill the holes in Western budgets. There just aren't enough rich people. There are many, many more middle-income earners. So while basic considerations of fairness might indicate higher taxes for the affluent, in fact doing so is gesture politics. The reality is that we were all deluded into believing that the consumer paradise would last forever, and in future we are all going to have lower standards of living.

And what alternative plans do the Activist and others like her in the Occupy movement have? What do they want?, Emily Maitlis asked. For the first time the Activist looked flustered. If I could have worked out what her answer meant I would record it here. But the best paraphrase I can supply is, None.

I have some sympathy with the Occupy movements. It was never fair in the good times for CEOs to get billions while their immigrant cleaners got peanuts (and paid tax at a higher rate), and it's even less so now. CEOs are too close to the people who decide what their remuneration should be, and shareholders have too little influence over the process. I have a few shares here and there, and a couple of times a year I get a letter telling me I've earned a £17.50 dividend. No one has ever told me, "And by the way, if we hadn't been paying the CEO 9 million, you'd have had £175.00 instead". What's needed to curb the City's excesses is greater transparency over the pay process and better regulation than the botch job put in place by Gordon Brown.

But there is a broader point. I also have grave doubts about the eternal-growth project upon which our prosperity is said to depend. Growth will come in future in the markets with growing populations, perhaps India in particular. But if the population is going to carry on growing and we are all going to get more affluent, more and more resources will be used up and more and more of the planet will be despoiled. My principal objection to Wall St and The City is not that its occupants are greedy or unprincipled, but that they are part of a system to which we are all bound and which is probably not sustainable.

So actually the Occupy movement needs to do some hard thinking. What does it want, and what would a future without growth look like? How could it be made to work fairly? The authorities in New York and London should not be kicking the protestors out. It should be making them stay there until they can think of some coherent solutions.

M Barnier and the ratings agencies

2011-11-16T00:36:00.000-08:00

At the end of October I wrote about a report that one Michel Barnier, EU internal market commissioner, had proposed - idiotically in my view - that "Credit rating agencies could be banned from downgrading countries in the eurozone's bailout scheme ..." The Grauniad's piece continued, "Presenting his proposals to reform trading in financial derivatives on Thursday, Barnier suggested the ban could be extended to downgrades of countries negotiating to join the bailout."

So far, so financially illiterate. The ratings agencies are merely the messengers. It isn't their fault that so many countries have borrowed too much money.

Now what's this in the Torygraph this morning? " ....the outspoken commissioner [Barnier] was forced to concede on his controversial proposals to introduce a temporary ban on sovereign debt ratings under bailout circumstances. Until the last moment, Mr Barnier had insisted the new proposals would include some form of a ban. But after meeting fellow commissioners, Mr Barnier acknowledged no final agreement had been reached, adding a proposal could be reintroduced later."

Commonsense breaks out in EU. I need to sit down and rest a while.

Muslims against Crusades - a liberal speaks

2011-11-15T00:59:00.000-08:00

Why oh why did the Government feel it had to ban Muslims against Crusades last week?

Leaving aside the ease with which the ban can be circumvented (change of name being an inconvenience for the Islamists perhaps only to the extent that it necessitates fresh website design), banning an organisation because of what its members think is inherently bad.

Banning Muslims against Crusades will not alter the way its members feel. What kind of democracy is it where the majority can make illegal being a member of any group it feels is beyond the pale? It may seem OK if you don't like the people on the receiving end (and I revile the poppy-burners as much as anyone), but what if it's your group that's getting the ban?

The intellectual stimulus behind this anti-democratic move seems to me to date from Mrs Thatcher's decision to ban the broadcast of IRA leaders' voices. We were reminded of how ridiculous this was every time the actors reading transcripts of their words appeared on News at Ten. Muslims against Crusades are entitled to their views. I find them offensive, but that's the price I pay for my right to be offensive too. Prosecute them for what they do, not what they say or what organisation they belong to.

Gosh. I have come over all liberal. And about Islamists to boot.

Dr Doom redux.

2011-11-09T04:20:00.000-08:00

Lo and behold the very next day Italian debt goes above 7%. What I'd like to know is, when does Italy next have to go to the markets? To be clear, the 7% is the figure at which existing debt is changing hands, and whilst that doesn't affect Italy directly, it does give an indication of the price the country will have to stump up next time it wants to roll over some of its old stock. In Britain these things are handled by the Debt Management Office; whatever its Italian equivalent, I wouldn't mind having a look in their diary. That will be an interesting day.

Megan Greene, colleague of Dr Doom, Nouriel Roubini, was kind enough to email a response to yesterday's post. Basically we agree. She thinks that either the ECB will have to step in, or alternatively create fiscal union, double quick. But that's if the object is to save the Euro; she writes, "I don't think that should be the end goal". I don't think that can be the end goal.

In reply to Ms Greene I offered to give Dr Doom a few tips, just in case he feels his sooth-saying has lost its edge.

PS According to the Torygraph the next Italian bond auction is tomorrow. Oh dear.

Dr Doom and William Hill

2011-11-08T01:49:00.000-08:00

Italy is in trouble. Just how much trouble may be inferred from the fact that the interest it must pay on bonds is nudging 7%, and this when it is running into a two-year period during which it must roll over about a quarter of its vast debts. 7% was the magic figure which tipped Greece, Ireland and Portugal into bail-out territory. But these were relatively small economies whereas Italy's is much much bigger, far to big to rescue with the Eurozone's pifflingly small 400 billion euro bail out fund. Attempts to leverage the fund with input from the BRICS countries have come to nothing; somewhere in a departure lounge or munching airline food, Christine Lagarde is roaming the world trying to find countries whose citizens don't have a state pension at all willing to pay into a fund to help those whose populations can retire at 55. Good luck with that, Christine.

Now here's Megan Greene, a colleague of Dr. Doom, Nouriel Roubini, on the Today programme telling it like it is. "I think there are only two possible ends to this crisis. One is the ECB stepping in, providing massive amounts of credit easing. The other is fiscal union. It would be illegal for the ECB to become the lender of last resort. If it were to happen, someone would take it to court and win that case. Germany just wouldn't allow the ECB to start printing money."

Ms Greene undoubtedly knows a great deal more about economics than I do, but I think she is wrong about this. There are three possible ends, not two.

The ECB could step in, start printing money and use it to buy Italian bonds, but as she says that's unlikely for political and legal reasons; it's also true that fiscal union (of which an interventionist ECB would be a fundamental part) would be necessary to make monetary union work, and might actually do so. But fiscal union would be a seismic shift in the way the Eurozone operates; it would need negotiation, consensus and ratification by national parliaments. Even if these things were forthcoming, and even if the leadership so far glaringly absent from this debacle were miraculously to appear, they would take time to arrange. But the bond markets won't wait.

That's where my third possibility comes in. A third way it could end would be by the Euro collapsing. At this stage that seems to me to be most likely. William Hills are apparently offering 2/1, or thereabouts, that Greece will have left the Euro by the end of 2012. These would have struck me as generous odds even if the bet had specified the end of 2011. I can't see any way in which Greece will still be in the Euro by the end of 2012. This has got to be worth £50 of anyone's money.

Birtwhistle, Beethoven and John Adams

2011-11-06T07:07:00.000-08:00

I found myself thinking about Harrison Birtwhistle last night. I'll explain why in a minute. I had gone to the Bridgewater to hear the Halle play John Adams' Harmonium, a piece I'd never heard before, although it's over thirty years old now. Harmonium is a long three-movement setting of John Donne and Emily Dickinson for choir and large orchestra, and opens the way it means to go on with the voices ululating gently and the instruments pulsing in and out. I liked it, although not as much as my wife and another (female) friend did. One of them enquired of Adams, "Is he still alive?", as if she intended to fly straight out to California and offer to have the composer's babies.

Even in the States, where there's more of a tradition of user friendly classical music, writing such a defiantly tonal piece in 1980 required some courage; in Britain it would have been an act of profound radicalism; at that time only John Tavener, with whom I was shortly to begin studying, was doing anything remotely similar. I wished I had heard it as a student: my own path back to tonality would have been so much easier to tread.

Someone involved with writing music inevitably finds responding to an unfamiliar work more problematic than a lay listener: you always bring a critical ear. Like many pieces written for a big orchestra, Harmonium does not (for me) let enough silence in; silence is like the white paper a watercolourist leaves blank to let the light shine through. Composers with a lot of instruments on the page are very reluctant to have them doing nothing. You generally couldn't hear the words; and although that might have been the Halle choir's fault, I think it was probably Adams'. The piece was perhaps a bit more boring than it needed to be. I went to sleep twice in it, woken each time by the music - which tended to linger on a pedal point for long periods - shifting to a new plane.

The other piece in the concert was the Eroica. I found it striking that Beethoven's harmonic language - an almost childishly simple conflation of triads and diminished sevenths - nevertheless enabled him to create a structure that was not only engaging, dramatic and touching (all things true of Adams's piece too) but also of granitic strength and cohesiveness. The ideas were worked through; when they were exhausted the piece finished and it felt right that it was doing so. The movements of Harmonium, by contrast, rather petered out. Like a badly performed Bruckner symphony, you didn't feel it ended because it had to; the movements could have been shorter or longer without the listener feeling particularly surprised. Whatever else he had done - and how the original audience must have been relieved to find a piece of contemporary music so ravishingly beautiful - Adams certainly hadn't found a way of making his tonal language an instrument of structure. Does it matter? Maybe not. My tastes lie in that direction though, and I think it can be done, even on the langourously slow-developing harmonic steppes of American minimalism.

But back to Harrison Birtwhistle. I thought of him because it struck me that our most celebrated composer is one whose music is broadly disliked by the public, to the exent that venues secretly give tickets away to make attendance figures look better, whereas the American way (without public subsidy) has produced a composer like Adams, who fills concert halls and whose music is broadly loved. What an indictment of the British way of art.

Iraq and the Arab Spring

2011-10-24T00:52:00.000-07:00

Libya finally announces it is free from the dread hand of Colonel Gaddafi. Tunisia holds its first elections. President Obama announces the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. It's a momentous morning.

I have been wondering what would happen in the commentariat when events of the Arab Spring began to be digested. Someone would look back at the Iraq invasion and try to fit it in to subsequent events. Assiduous readers of this blog will know that I supported the invasion (I believe that it was my support which finally persuaded Blair and Bush to go ahead; Dick Cheney had been particularly hesitant until he found out I was onside), not because I thought it was a good thing - it was self-evidently bad - but because I thought it might be marginally less bad than leaving Saddam Hussein in place.

Anyway, here's Jonathan Steele in this morning's Graun (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/23/us-withdrawal-iraq-defeat-bush-neocons?commentpage=last#end-of-comments) with his take on events. As you'll see, Steele complains that, far from Iraq's fledgling democracy inspiring other North African states, it might actually have put them off. "The instability and bloodshed which the US unleashed in Iraq were the example that Arabs sought to avoid, not emulate", he writes.

Yes, I too had noticed that Libya's awakening was achieved without any bloodshed whatsoever. And things are going well in Syria, where, in the absence of an armed insurrection, President Assad remains in power.

Steele's other complaint is that Iraq's transition to a democracy has given Iran more influence than it had when Saddam was in charge.

I wish he would step off the fence and be a bit less coy. Are we to infer that because Iran now has more influence, things were better during Saddam's era? And if so, better for whom?

We can abuse Blair, Bush, Cheney and Halliburton all we like, but surely the six million dollar question for Iraqis is, Did the invasion make things better for them in the medium and long term?

A clue to the answer lies in Steele's own article. He writes, ". . . when the Arab spring dawned, the Iraqi government found itself on the defensive as demonstrators took to the streets of Baghdad and Basra to protest against Maliki's authoritarianism and his government's US-supported clampdown on trade union activity".

Does anyone remember how street protests or trades unions fared under Saddam? My recollection is that there wasn't much of either. People were too terrified. Does anyone remember Saddam's government being "on the defensive" against its own people? My recollection is that there wasn't a government as such (the word implying something a bit more that a collection of stooges or family members dripping with medals). And for a government to be on the defensive, it must be capable of being attacked. But when Saddam was in power the "government" couldn't be "attacked" because there was no process by which to attack it. There were no elections, and to take part in a public demonstration was to invite one's own death.

To state these things explicitly in reverse, in Iraq there is a government, and an elected government at that. It is imperfect (so is ours), but the government can be "attacked" by public demonstrations or by the electoral process. Are these not gains worthy of some comment by Steele?

Apparently not. Steele has nothing to say about the way in which these things have only become possible because of the 2003 invasion; he only speaks of their current imperfections. If Bush and Blair had done what Steele and his fellow-travellers wanted, Saddam would still have been in power in Iraq. No doubt it possible to construct an argument that things were better then. I would like to see it attempted. But Steele does not even try. Funny that.

Get Gaddafi off the front page

2011-10-21T00:56:00.000-07:00

Amidst all the hoo-ha about Colonel Gaddafi's death, the papers are missing today's big story. It is that M. Sarkozy and Frau Merkel are so far apart on a package to rescue the Euro that the announcement of decisions taken at the weekend's big German-French summit has had to be postponed to next Wednesday. Basically, the Germans don't want the EFSF to be leveraged in the way the French would like.

What the Germans are playing at I have no idea. Mrs Merkel must know that the EFSF, at 424 billion (I don't have a Euro sign on my QWERTY), is nowhere near big enough, and that some way must be found to increase it. Whether the ways proposed will work (making the EFSF guarantor of the first 20% of losses is unlikely to satisfy bond purchasers numerate enough to wonder what might happen to the remaining 80% of their money) is another matter.

As if to confirm the tenuous grasp on reality held by European leaders, the Grauniad this morning reports one Michel Barnier, EU internal market commissioner, as saying "Credit rating agencies could be banned from downgrading countries in the eurozone's bailout scheme . . . " The report goes on, "Presenting his proposals to reform trading in financial derivatives on Thursday, Barnier suggested the ban could be extended to downgrades of countries negotiating to join the bailout."

Now no-one much likes the credit ratings agencies (although I don't remember people complaining about them when they were giving the go ahead for the West's enormous borrowing spree), but this is shooting the messenger. All the ratings agencies do is provide the financial markets with information. They are agents of transparency. What would M. Barnier prefer? That bond investors make decisions on rumour or innuendo instead? Does he really think that in a climate where the default position of investors is that a country might not be able to pay its bills, reducing the amount of information available will help to lower bond yields and make it easier for cash-strapped governments? I find it hard to believe, but apparently he does.

This is pretty symptomatic of the way the EU has handled this crisis. The facts are inconvenient? Ignore them. Actually no. Better still. Stop their publication.

Dale Farm and the rule of law

2011-10-19T00:43:00.000-07:00

Ugly scenes this morning as the bailiffs and police break down barricades at Dale Farm. I have some sympathy with the occupants, particularly the children: whoever's fault this is, it's not theirs.

And yet the thing which keeps nagging me is the occupants' attitude to the law. They have used the courts to prevaricate and delay the inevitable for years. Each time the courts have ruled in their favour, the residents have expected Basildon Council to respect the judgment, and Basildon have complied, jumping through the legal hoops set for them at vast expense to Council Tax payers.

But when the courts have ruled for Basildon do the occupants comply? No. They barricade themselves in and threaten violence, making necessary this morning's militaristic-looking adventure. The residents can't have their cake and eat it. If Basildon Council had regarded the law in the same way as the residents, the bulldozers would have been into Dale Farm years ago.

The SNP, the NHS and the elderly

2011-10-14T00:56:00.001-07:00

I've written before about the NHS's shameful treatment of the elderly (http://nicksimpsonmusic.blogspot.com/2011/05/coming-soon-serbia.html), and it came as a depressing no-surprise to find the Care Quality Commission reporting yesterday that of 100 hospitals it inspected recently, only 45% were providing proper service to elderly patients, and 20% were so bad that they were actually breaking the law.

I'm not going to waste time thinking of terms adequate to excoriate those responsible for this situation. Obviously individual callousness and inhumanity plays a part, but so also do overtraining (nurses with degrees, so the theory goes, are not overly keen to wipe up excrement), overwork and lack of money.

There is a connection between this story and another in the papers today. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, has appalled campaigners concerned about British obesity levels by urging people to eat less and by trying to persuade manufacturers to cut calorie levels in food. Why is this so bad? Because, as Jamie Oliver says, manufacturers won't do it, and everyone already knows we should eat more healthily and exercise more.

About 60% of British adults and 30% of children are obese or overweight. Obese people get ill more and are more likely to end up in hospital. More pressure on hospitals means more work for nurses and more money spent treating people who, frankly, don't have to be there. All of which means worse treatment for other patients; including the elderly.

The Tories, sadly, seem reluctant to do anything which might offend their friends in big business. Lansley has fallen into the error of thinking that a laudable Tory idea ("people should take responsibility for their own actions") can be taken in isolation; whereas in this instance people failing to take responsibility means a drain on NHS resources, with consequences which are only too obvious.

Alcohol abuse probably costs the state even more than obesity, which is why the Scots have proposed a minimum price on drink.

When you find yourself yearning to be governed by the SNP, something somewhere has gone badly wrong.

One long right wing rant

2011-10-13T02:29:00.000-07:00

The other day a young acquaintance, messing around with friends, said, "Of course, Hitler didn't really go far enough".

My wife and I were appalled. This person is not the first 16 year old to say something stupid to shock an audience, and won't be the last; he is in truth impeccably liberal in all his views. But I told him that he could get into serious trouble at school if he were overheard coming out with that sort of thing; and as I was speaking I found myself realising that this was actually true. Is that a good thing?

Of course, as well as getting into trouble he ran the risk of offending other people; but I find I mind this less. There isn't any right not to be offended: in a free society people should be able to say that Hitler didn't go far enough without official sanction. The proper sanction is that right-thinking people shun and avoid someone with such poisonous views.

When this exchange was over, my wife told me that a colleague of hers had looked at this blog and said it was "one long right-wing rant"; I could, she said, suffer professionally by expressing opinions openly in a field which is on the whole left rather than right of centre. This may well be true. Whilst conservatives (and I can't really as a Frank Field fan be called a Conservative) regard Lefties as nice but ultimately deluded, the Left sees the Tories as the Nasty Party. It's a shame. Most people interested in politics want the best for society. There aren't many Pol Pots or Stalins. Or Hitlers for that matter.

Recognising that someday I may miss out on a gig because someone doesn't like my politics, it would be tempting to say Adieu to blogging and get on with some work. But I find I can't. And for a reason that is uncharacteristically pretentious.

I am an artist. And artists do not trim.

Ed Balls - cake eater

2011-10-13T00:58:00.000-07:00

Hearing the dismal jobless figures on the news yesterday, I was struck by a fresh irony about Labour's calls for a growth policy.

Labour only discovered Keynes when it was too late to do the hard part, when it was too late to put money aside against a rainy day. Labour's policy was, essentially, borrow during the good times, and when the bad times come, borrow even more. In case you doubt me, Labour ran a deficit from about 2001 to 2010, and continues to advocate more borrowing now. Whatever else that is, it's not Keynesian. My admiration for Frank Field - my Favourite Living Politician: charisma-free but scrupulous, far-sighted, and with an intellectual fearlessness Orwell would have admired - went up a further notch yesterday when I heard him say that Labour got the economy wrong, and should apologise, unreservedly, for its misdoings in office.

What's this got to with Labour's growth policy? Well, the Government says, not unreasonably, that it can't pump prime the economy with a Keynesian stimulus because that could only be done by more borrowing; and it would be dangerous to increase borrowing in the febrile atmosphere where countries have been driven by this very course to the brink of default. Only this morning the Torygraph reports James Carrick, economist at Legal & General Investment Management, as saying stimulus spending of the type Balls and Miliband are calling for would help lift growth but hasten a downgrade of Britain's credit rating.

The irony is that if Labour had been reading Keynes in the 2000s, if they had improved Britain's fiscal position, the Government could have done what Ed Miliband is demanding now. In fact it would have been irresponsible for the Government not to do what Labour wants.

It is Labour's failure to act like proper Keynesians when in office which has made it so difficult for the Government to act like Keynesians now. If I were George Osbourne I'd be pretty p'd off at being lectured by Ed Balls, former Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Ed Balls is urging Osborne to eat the cake which he and his former mentor consumed long, long ago.

Steve Jobs - a Luddite speaks

2011-10-07T00:28:00.001-07:00

I am writing this as the proud owner of a new phone. For too long, to the genuine embarrassment of my family, I have carted about the five-year old cast-off my daughter had for her 11th birthday. How could anything so relatively new look so old already? Attempting to get it to charge, or looking bemusedly at incoming texts apparently sent three days ago, always reminded me of the moment in Star Wars when Han Solo, unable to get his space ship to start, thumps vigorously on the dash board - cue the lights coming on and the engines firing up.

My wondrous new gadget, an iPhone knock-off with its GPS, email, camera and no doubt all manner of other devices calculated to make the jaw drop, would not have happened, or at least not so soon, without Steve Jobs, finally overcome by cancer yesterday after a long struggle.

Would we have been worse off without stuff like the iPhone? Without the computers which I'm using to write this and you to read it? There's an easy way to tell. Just think back to what it was like beforehand. I don't remember the pre-digital age being so bad. We got by with books, maps and landlines. We certainly weren't tempted to waste time blogging when there was ironing to be done and music to write.

Jobs' iPhone and iPad are things of beauty and ingenuity, but perhaps we didn't really need them. If Apple and Pixar aren't enough to satisfy you as to Jobs' worth, hunt out his Commencement Address to Stanford Students. I heard parts of it on the radio and it makes moving listening. There's a transcription here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/09/steve-jobs-stanford-commencement-address. This speech alone makes Jobs quite a man.

The Nasty Party and the Euro

2011-10-04T01:18:00.001-07:00

One consequence of my lurch towards the clutches of The Nasty Party has been the process of getting to know the columnists of the Torygraph as well as I do those of the Grauniad. For while the Graun has those hand-wringing numpties Freedland, Toynbee and Kettle, a dismal roster redeemed only partly by the brilliance and common sense of Deborah Orr, the Telegraph has its own parade of usual suspects, foam-flecked and angry where their Left of centre counterparts are anguished.

You wouldn't expect them to be angry, not when their party is in power; but they are. Partly of course this is because the Tories, constrained by the Lib Dems and by Cameron's desire to appeal to the centre ground, are nothing like Tory enough for them. But I have detected a new note of anger and impatience in recent days, about the EU.

To the extent that the debacle over the Euro has vindicated the Eurosceptic right, and revealed the architects of the single currency (and their cheerleaders in Britain) as arrogant and foolish, some of this anger is justified. But The Tory Pundits aren't satisfied with being right. They know they have been vindicated, and so, I think, would any impartial and fair minded person; they said monetary union wouldn't work without fiscal union, and by golly it hasn't. But why, they want to know, isn't there any blood on the carpet? Why hasn't Greece defaulted yet? Why hasn't the Eurozone gone up in flames? Why isn't there any concrete proof of failure?

Because, it seems to me, it never pays to underestimate the capacity of European leaders, both at domestic and EU level, to do things their electorates don't want.

Very few people get to the top in European politics by being Eurosceptic. Even domestic leaders like Merkel and Sarkozy have got there by subscribing to the consensus rather than opposing it. These people are not going to give up on the Euro, or on Greece's membership of it, without a heroic struggle. If that has to involve signing away billions of taxpayers' money, so be it. The German parliament's ratification of the July 20 plan to pump money into the EFSF was hailed as a triumph, even though it was opposed by the majority of Germans and, by common consent, won't be enough. Now the Eurocrats are reported to be looking for ways to leverage the fund (by which they mean use the fund as security to borrow yet more money), again in the face of the opposition by their electorates. Belatedly, EU leaders are looking for ways to foster greater fiscal union. Their electorates probably don't want it, and it certainly isn't provided for in EU treaties. But their leaders will do it if they can.

Will any of this keep Greece in the Euro? Probably not. Monetary union without fiscal union was bound to lead to fatal imbalances; the EU set it up anyway. Greece didn't meet the criteria for entry into the Euro; she was allowed in nonetheless. The Greeks haven't met the conditions required to get the next tranche of their bail-out money; but you can bet that the EU will give it to them anyway.

This willingness to trim and shuffle to evade the demands of the moment tells you all you need to know about the way the Eurozone was set up and why it is in its present crisis. It is also why The Tory Pundits may have to wait a bit longer for their pound of flesh.

Lies, Damned Lies and Ed Balls

2011-09-27T02:24:00.000-07:00

Gordon Brown is the most dishonest politician I can remember.

I am not going to defend this controversial view here - Jeffrey Archer? Jonathan Aitken anyone? - merely show that Brown's Mini-Me, Ed Balls is running his mentor very close.

In his Labour party conference speech yesterday Balls made some very public confessions. Labour had made mistakes - the 75p pension rise; immigration (hallelujah); failure of bank regulation (another No Shit Sherlock moment). But we should always be wary of politicians who apologise. Their commonest deception exploits the public's inability to distinguish "sorry that" from "sorry for". Saying "I am sorry that your economy is wrecked" is not quite the same thing as saying "I am sorry for wrecking your economy".

A more subtle ploy is to make a list of errors in the hope that the public will think that it is complete, tactfully forgetting other matters in the hope that we do too. To be fair to Balls, he has a novel variation on this one. His list of errors is followed by a ringing declaration of something he is not going to apologise for: "Don't let anyone tell you", he blustered, "that a Labour government was profligate with public money, when we went into the crisis with lower national debt than we inherited in 1997". So even though we got these things wrong, here is one thing we definitely got right, and don't you dare tell us otherwise!

But Balls is not comparing like with like. When Labour came into office in 1997, Britain was only five years out of the 1990-1992 recession. You would expect the public finances to be in bad shape. By 2008 we hadn't had a recession for sixteen years. In fact, as I weary of writing, the period 1993 - 2008 was the longest consistent period of economic growth in British history. You would expect the government to be sitting on a pile of cash. It wasn't. Gordon Brown had spent it all, and was running a substantial deficit.

Does Balls know this? Of course he does. And like his mentor, his pants are well and truly on fire.

Pierre Boulez, great Wagner conductor

2011-09-26T03:18:00.000-07:00

Listening to Start the Week this morning I was reminded what a great Wagner conductor Pierre Boulez was.

One of Andrew Marr's guests on the programme had written a book on Wagner and Verdi, and another was long-time Boulez associate the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, so the subject naturally came up in conversation. Aimard was there to plug his forthcoming festival, Liszt and Boulez - Composers of the Future, taking place on the South Bank in the next few days.

What depths of irony lie in that title. Liszt was without doubt a great musician, and a great pianist. But he was not a great composer, and neatly exemplifies my long held view that talent will only get you so far in composition. Liszt is famous not because the public likes his music, but because he was a vastly talented pianist who wrote music which pianists enjoy playing. That is not the same thing.

My favourite Liszt story concerns the visit paid to him by Edvard Grieg. At the time Liszt was one of the most famous musicians in the world, and Grieg very much the young supplicant. As they played through the last movement of the Norwegian's Piano Concerto, reaching the grand tutti where the spacious A major theme is heard for the final time, subtly altered from its first appearance, Liszt cried out approvingly, "Of course! The G sharp this time!", thereby conferring the magisterial weight of his approval on Grieg's effort.

And yet Grieg's Concerto, although far from being his best work, is worth all of Liszt's compositions put together. Grieg was no intellectual, but he was a real composer, as distinct from someone who knew how to compose but not why. His music has artless tenderness and grace, with a melodic gift Liszt could only have dreamed of. It will live as long as there are people to listen. Yet whilst it is impossible to imagine the South Bank having a Grieg festival - the opportunity was passed up in 2007 on the centenary of his death - Liszt is, apparently, a Composer of the Future.

This seems unlikely in both major senses. Firstly Liszt was not a terribly influential composer. Secondly if Liszt had been going to take a grip on the public imagination you might have thought that would have happened by now. But it hasn't, and I wouldn't waste a tenner betting that it will in the next fifty years.

What then about Boulez? Another of Andrew Marr's guests was Simon Jenkins, who bravely voiced the opinion that he didn't much take to the Frenchman's music - it reminded him, he said, of the brutalist architecture of the 1960s. Interestingly Jenkins, not a man given to displays of public humility, made this confession in apologetic terms. But why? I don't like Liszt, or Saint-Saens, or for that matter Phil Collins, Kasabian, Dido and a hundred other mediocrities. It's nothing to apologise for.

When Aimard was asked to describe Boulez, I knew, in the pause which followed, what he was going to say. An intellectual, replied Aimard. But if Boulez is an intellectual, I'm a banana. An intellectual is someone brainier than the rest of us who thinks rarified thoughts and reaches the right conclusion. But Boulez reached the wrong conclusion. He thought that the rigorous systems of total serialism would make "better" music (whatever that means); moreover he poured buckets of personal vitriol over those who disagreed with him, and used his own personal power to dominate the institutions of French music - and the aesthetics of modern music generally - for half a century. That a man as forthright as Jenkins should feel obliged to apologise for disliking Boulez's music is a measure of the extraordinary cultural cringe that he and his disciples have succeeded in imposing on intelligent people who like music. Hilariously, Alex Ross (in The Rest is Noise) has Boulez responding to a question about why so few major works of the fifties and sixties had become repertory pieces by saying, "Well, perhaps we did not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener". No shit, Sherlock. I'm not even sure that Ross understands how funny this remark is.

Boulez might be better described as a Composer of the Present, in the sense that he has made a pretty good career out of ruthlessly aggressive obscurantism, exploiting the gullibility and pretentiousness of the French political classes to fund and promulgate his own work, and his view of what other people's work should be like. This view, based on the modern age's desire to incorporate the technical language of science into something - composition - which is palpably unscientific (there is after all no scientific explanation why Grieg has the x factor and Liszt does not), has caused immense damage to the cause of classical music and kept bums off seats in concert halls across the western world.

Boulez will be lucky if his music lasts as long as Liszt's. Certainly only a statistically insignificant proportion of people like it now. If he is a composer of the future, classical music is in big trouble. His tragedy, if such a successful and lucrative career can be thus described, is that he had the talent to do great things.

Perhaps he should have stuck to conducting Wagner.

Richard Murphy and the 50p tax rate

2011-09-14T00:46:00.000-07:00

So it turns out, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, that the 50p tax rate is costing the Treasury money. "Up to £500 million a year", according to an article on the Torygraph website this morning.

Given that we all know the IFS is as infallible as the Pope, it'll be interesting whether this revives last week's debate on the subject, and what the Martin Luther of the bash-the-rich campaign, Richard Murphy, has to say on the subject. Actually, beyond the headlines, Paul Johnson,director of the IFS sounds a bit less certain. He's quoted as saying, “It looks like the 50p rate may be too high and that it is possible it will reduce tax revenues." Hmmn. "Up to £500 million", "looks like", "possible it will reduce". We're not quite there yet.

I have followed this subject with interest ever since I discovered that a close family member pays a small amount of tax at the 50p rate. It's a salutary experience, discovering that the Government is taking half your marginal income. For some reason, whenever the BBC wants to get two people to go head to head, it wheels out Richard Murphy, director of Tax Research LLP, an articulate, passionate and well-informed maker of the case for higher taxation, and some Chicago-school back woodsman like Patrick Minford, from whose gabble it swiftly appears he made up his mind that lower taxes were a good thing back in 1946 and hasn't thought about it for longer than two minutes since.

That may be just a coincidence. In these debates the presenters always talk about "taxing the rich", as if the term were not itself loaded. Although I know quite a lot of people who undoubtedly pay tax at the highest rate, I wouldn't describe them as "rich". For me, the rich are people born with a silver spoon in their mouths sitting on their backsides in a country retreat, whose children are rah-rahing all the way to Klosters. The people I know merely have good jobs. That's not the same thing. The true rich tend not to have jobs at all. Moreover, none of the those people got where they are because of daddy's largesse. They got it by working really hard for the last thirty years. So when I hear people talk about "taxing the rich more", I have to give myself a nudge: they're really talking about taxing more the hardest-working. It doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Of course, when a country is broke, as we are, the Government needs every penny it can get. You can hardly blame it for taxing people who, if not actually "rich", at least have a fair bit of wine in the cellar. So does the 50% rate bring in more tax or doesn't it? Obviously I personally have no idea. I know of course about the Laffer curve, which postulates that there must come a point at which raising taxes brings in less revenue not more. But leaving aside the view of the IFS, reputed to be a thoroughly scrupulous organisation, I have sometimes thought that the way that Richard Murphy conducts himself in argument suggests that he might secretly hold the opposite to his publicly stated view.

Murphy always dismisses the idea that people might leave the country because of tax rises. His position is that quite a lot of people say they will leave, but he hasn't been able to find any evidence that any of them do. Now this begs the question, how hard have you looked? Which invites the possibility that some people may be leaving but Murphy doesn't know about them. Certainly when the Thatcher government cut marginal rates from close to 90%, a number of high earners returned to the UK, Michael Caine and Phil Collins among them (was this a good thing: discuss).

But more interesting is the stuff Murphy doesn't mention. One is that the truly rich, reluctant to up sticks themselves, might nevertheless move their assets somewhere else. That does not require removal men. It takes a couple of phone calls. Another is that a marginal tax rate hike from 40 to 50% provides people with a massive incentive to people who have never bothered with tax avoidance measures to start bothering now. Furthermore avoidance measures which didn't make economic sense two years ago can suddenly become viable when tax on marginal income has effectively increased by 25%.

I have never heard Richard Murphy acknowledge these factors.

A close family member reports in the following terms. "A couple of months ago we went on a routine visit to the accountant. He told us that as a result of the tax rise it now made economic sense to formalise the ad hoc work I did to support my partner's business. I would have to pay tax myself, of course, but at a much lower rate. The result of this was that the Revenue would now get about £3000 less tax from us than when the marginal rate was 40%. As far as we were concerned, the tax rise had cost the Revenue money".

This is tax avoidance, and perfectly legal. It turns out that Mr Murphy has been doing some avoidance of his own. Blogger Tim Worstall appears to be suggesting here - http://timworstall.com/2010/08/24/in-which-we-are-challenged-by-richard-murphy/ - that Murphy has gone further, in particular that he set up a company and paid himself and his wife equal dividends, even though his wife did little work. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but the blog is well worth a read and includes Murphy's response.

Stop press: Although I don't do Twitter, I understand Murphy's tweeted response to the IFS report is that the 50% tax rate must be working, or else no one would want to get rid of it. A superficially impressive point. If, thinking back to the Laffer curve, the marginal rate were 99% and people wanted to get rid of it, would Murphy still be saying that the rate must be working? No. That people want to get rid of a tax is no guide either way to its effectiveness.

Proust and the rioters

2011-08-23T11:43:00.000-07:00

During the extensive period in which I attempted to cut an intellectual figure by reading books none of my friends had, I spent the best part of two years labouring away at the literary marathon that is Proust's A La Recherche. For those who've never bothered, there are occasional flashes of brilliance, but many, many tedious pages describing what this or that member of an imaginary Parisian aristocracy might have meant when they glanced across the Duchess de Guermantes' drawing room. Yadda yadda yadda.

For those seeking the long roman a fleuve, Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence is shorter, funnier and equips those temperamentally suited to its stoic outlook with a mental armoury for dealing with the more unpleasant characteristics exhibited by people in pursuit of power. It's also British.

However Proust is so exhaustive in his examination of, well, just about everything, that for a long time afterwards all other writers seemed pretty superficial. And the enforced abstinence from reading anything else had the effect of cutting me off from new novels, an intermission from which I have never really caught up.

I mention this because the post-Proust out-of-touch feeling is tenuously analogous to the one experienced when you go on holiday and come back to find that in your absence the world has changed. In August quite a lot of people came out onto the streets and rioted; or rather rioted, looted and burned. Viewed on TV from the remote north of Scotland it looked rather weird and threatening ("Look", we cried, baffled, "there's the Arndale Centre. And it's on fire!"). The political and social environment doesn't seem quite the same as it did when we went away at the end of July, and it's irrationally annoying that its changed without our consent. Irrationally because if we'd been here it would have happened anyway.

What to make of the rioters' behaviour? Obviously looters are primarily a law and order problem rather than a political one, but it doesn't seem a complete waste of time to try and work out why they looted, if only to formulate ways of minimising the possibility of it happening again and to see what it might say about British society.

Are these people bad? Perhaps some of them; if they all are, we certainly have a lot of bad people in this country. But when I was a criminal lawyer I only came across one or two truly wicked people; the rest were stupid, feckless, greedy, desperate for drugs or drunk; or indeed any combination of the preceding. Given that even those of us that don't riot probably answer some of those descriptions some of the time, having those qualities clearly isn't enough to make you smash a window and nick trainers from JD Sports.

Much has been made of the revelation that four fifths of those arrested were known to the police in one way or other, and that most of them came from poor areas. I don't think this signifies. We shouldn't be surprised that most people committing criminal offences exhibit a habit of criminal behaviour; nor does the fact that most of them don't seem to have had much money mean that they stole and burned because they were poor. The riots were apparently organised by people who owned Blackberrys, which are expensive, and perhaps that's a clue. Perhaps they should have spent their Blackberry money on more useful things. But when you haven't got much money, spending a lot of it on something high-status but unnecessary might be a classic sign that you are going to do plenty of other stupid things as well. It's possible that the rioters who were out of work ended up out of work for the same reasons they ended up in trouble with the police, namely that they were stupid, feckless or drunk, as per the previous paragraph; in other words, their low socio-economic status and their criminality might both be effects of another cause.

If it's hard working out what makes people behave like this, what could we do that might minimise the risk of them doing it again?

I heard several rioters, or people sympathetic to them, complaining that "the Poles had taken all the jobs". Some of the complainants would evidently have had difficulty holding down a job till lunchtime on day one, since by then they would either have nicked something or told the boss to Eff Off. But they surely have a point. Surely some of the rioters would have stayed at home if they'd had jobs to go to, or prospects of a job. Unfortunately in 2004, when eight new countries joined the EU, the then Labour government allowed free entry of their citizens into the UK. By 2006 a BBC news report I found in a ten-second search said that the best part of 600,000 Eastern Europeans had come to Britain.

At that time the intellectually fearless Labour MP Frank Field, reported as saying that the number of migrants was "unmanageable and made it increasingly difficult for local people to get jobs", was a lone voice of dissent. Happily there is now much wider agreement that this open door policy kept wages down at the bottom end and made it much harder for British people (whether white, black, brown or any variant on the same) to get off the sofa and into work. In an economic boom, the last government missed a golden opportunity to shift a whole section of society into jobs, importing instead a labour force from overseas. As I weary of telling people, the Government's own figures tell us that over 50% of new jobs created in the period 1997 to 2008 went to people born abroad.

Saying that we shouldn't have started from here doesn't help solve our present problems, but you would hope that next time we get some economic growth (assuming we ever do), the Government of the day might try a little harder to make sure jobs go to the British.

All this assumes that jobs and the economic growth which creates them are a good thing; but surely another reason for looting is that our society is predicated on the seductiveness of shopping; people who can't shop, or can't shop much, feel entitled to loot. Blessed with more money than most people (although less desire to buy things than most), I am ill-placed to lecture others about the fatuity of this fetish. But buying things, and having things, is essentially shallow. It's doing things which is interesting. In this, if nothing else, I have some sympathy with the looters. Shorn of the ability to do something which society tells them is both their entitlement and the ultimate good, they have nothing to fall back on.

Of course, shopping and eternal growth are not just shallow. They're unsustainable. They can only be created by increased use of resources. And we are using far too much already. The world needs fewer people, and so does Britain. Ultimately we are going to have to work out how to set up a just society with fewer people and less growth.

We could start doing this by stopping paying people to have large families. As recent economic events have demonstrated with ruthless starkness, we cannot afford our current public spending. My favourite measure to reverse this trend is to restrict future child benefit payments to the first two children. Lots of people who don't work and have never worked, who aren't in a stable relationship and haven't ever seriously tried to maintain one, are being paid by the state to have children. Their children are disproportionately unlikely to work, disproportionately unlikely to form stable relationships, and, yes, disproportionately likely to take part in riots. Why subsidise them?

The liberal answer to this is to say, "Because they will have more than two children anyway, and those children will be brought up in even greater poverty". To which I would say, "Some of them will have more than two children, but not all, and perhaps quite a lot fewer. Moreover the parents who do have large families without being able to afford them might start to take greater responsibility for their decisions." Incidentally, no-one with enough to eat, a roof over their heads and access to free health care and education can truly be described as living in"poverty", and anyone who suggests otherwise is jumping up and down on language with heavy boots, as well as insulting the huge numbers of people around the world who will never own a Blackberry.

Thus the liberal's dilemma in a nutshell. You make a provision to help people who get into trouble; but as decades pass getting into trouble becomes more acceptable and more people do it. The liberal then asks for more and more provision to help them. The conservative says, No, you must allow people to take more responsibility for their actions, because then they will behave better. The liberal cries, But the children will suffer. So be it, says the conservative. It's an unattractive position, but not necessarily wrong.

Which brings me finally to absent fathers. It doesn't do young men any good to be brought up in families without a father. This isn't to say that it isn't possible. Just that young boys are surrounded by role models - footballers, pop stars, video games - which give them no clues whatsoever in how an ordinary adult man might live with dignity and self-worth. My Dad was a paragon - didn't get drunk, didn't womanise, didn't hit my Mum, held down a job he didn't like much - but even with his example I still find those things hard to do. Men who disappear as soon as there's a nappy to be changed aren't subject to any effective social censure. We wring our hands and say what a shame it is.

The solution to this problem is beyond one blog, beyond one person, and possibly beyond the reach of us all.

A postscript. This morning I read in the paper that, amongst others I have never heard of, a novel by one Patrick de Witt has made the Booker shortlist. Amazingly, I have read it already. My wife bought it for me when we were going on holiday. It's an engaging dead-pan Western called The Sisters Brothers. It has taken me twenty years, but once more I am, if not ahead of the race, at least running on the same lap as the leaders.

Or rather my wife is.

Norrington, Mahler and vibrato

2011-07-25T12:38:00.000-07:00

As recorded elsewhere in this blog, the only thing I miss about not living in London any more is The Proms. During the season I still listen to bits of it; last night as the washing up was coming to an end, we switched the radio on. It was clearly Mahler 9, about ten minutes into the first movement. I used to really like it.

"Bit of a thin string tone", I said to S. "Wonder who's playing?"

A few minutes later a suspicion began to dawn.

"I bet it's Norrington and the Stuttgart orchestra. Where's the paper?"

The cat was sitting on it, as he does on just about any useful bit of paper, and looked most aggrieved to be moved.

"What did I say? It's Norrington and his no-vibrato wonders".

"I've been telling you that for the last two minutes", S said. "I heard a trailer for it earlier on".

"Did you?", I said, aware only that she had been talking and, excited about the possibility of being right about something, I had been ignoring her.

Either I was very lucky, or Sir Roger has contrived a sound for his orchestra which renders it utterly distinctive. I personally don't like it. I heard him playing Elgar a while back, and it felt as natural as wearing socks in the bath. But hats off to him. No vibrato is Norrington's USP, and he has made a career out of it, firstly with the classics, then on to Brahms and now, inevitably, Elgar and Mahler.

I don't like Norrington's conducting, but I have to acknowledge that he is very good at it. In comparison with some stick-wavers, Norrington's movements impart useful information about speed, volume, phrasing and articulation (compare him to some other toilers in the field: "How on earth do you cope when X is conducting?", I asked a friend in the Halle. "Oh we just don't watch when we have him", she said).

But back to vibrato. I have never studied the history of string playing, and I am not in a position to say that Sir Roger, who undoubtedly has, is wrong to get his orchestra to leave the vibrato out; only that I don't like the results. I have my own theory as to why vibrato was introduced, based on absolutely zero research but instead on quite a bit of playing experience, a theory which explains why playing the Romantics without it leaves me - and it must be said most other people - cold.

In the high Baroque we find that instrumental music is largely contrapuntal. That's to say that rather than music having a tune and accompaniment, it tends to be all tunes, or at least mostly tunes, woven together like a plait. Now if you have the tune, you can do phrasing. By phrasing a musician means altering the volume and weight of a melodic line to impart musical direction: the feeling that the line is going somewhere, and having got there, is going away again. Most phrases have a point of weight towards and away from which they move. To take the opening line of God Save the Queen as an example, the weight there would be on the first syllable of gracious; gracious in fact. Interestingly, if you were to speak the line aloud, the stress would be on Queen; but Haydn's tune imposes musical obligations strong enough to override natural speech rhythms. That's why the Messiah aria And We Like Sheep makes me laugh every time I hear it.

Now if you play a line without phrasing or vibrato it doesn't just sound "thin", the usual complaint about vibrato-less playing, it also sounds static. I think that if players didn't use vibrato until about a hundred years ago (the Norrington view, although many people disagree, feeling that the conductor has read his sources selectively), they must have had to work much harder at phrasing, because that was what made their music come alive. I think that in the pre-vibrato era, melodic lines were always either growing or waning.

How would the players have done this? By varying the speed and pressure of the bow. Volume is, to put it crudely, a coefficient of these two things. The harder you press the bow down (and the quicker you move it) the greater the volume produced. So in baroque music, where most people have a melodic line most of the time, the players look instinctively - and this can even be done sight-reading - for the high or low point in the line and aim for it.

Now as the 18th century matures and passes into the 19th, musical textures change. If there is a tune at all, it is more likely to be a tune with an accompaniment, that's to say a figuration, static or mobile, which provides chordal support for the melodic line. As a player with one of these supporting lines, it is much harder to know where the weight in the phrase (which you are not yourself playing) should lie. This is the crux of the difficulty, and in my view it's where vibrato comes from. Playing these passages, lacking on the face of it obvious opportunities for phrasing, imposes the need for animating them. Hence vibrato. Because if you do use vibrato, you don't have to work anything like as hard with the phrasing. Your line sounds pleasing even when it is static.

I didn't just find the Stuttgart orchestra's tone thin in Mahler; it also lacked direction (the problem was even worse with Elgar because the players didn't know the piece well). It isn't enough just to get rid of vibrato - you also have to re-educate the players in the necessity of phrasing with the bow. And in this late Romantic repertoire that means putting shape on every bar of the music, no matter how static the individual part.

Of course, this is all speculation. I am not a musical academic and I can't prove it. But here are a couple of bits of circumstantial evidence. The first is that in order to produce this ever waxing / waning tone, you need to move the bow quicker, which means you run out of bow sooner. That means fewer slurs for the players and much more bowing as-it-comes. Now look at old fiddle parts. There isn't much in the way of bowing. It looks as if slurs, where many notes are gathered together in one bow, start to arrive en masse when players discover that vibrato enables them to utilise a slower bow speed and that fewer bow changes are necessary.

Recently I found myself bowing a Handel Concerto Grosso from a 19th century edition for a performance without vibrato. The thing I did most was cross out slurs and write in hairpins, trying to get living players to do what their 18th century forebears would have done instinctively.

I'm not against no-vibrato performances in the right period. I love the English Concert's performances of Haydn symphonies. But it isn't enough to think that getting rid of vibrato alone is a good musical solution. What would be really interesting would be to see how a Baroque group managed with some romantic repertoire. What would the English Concert make of Elgar's Serenade for Strings?

The Norrington concert got five stars in the Guardian. Martin Kettle, the reviewer, described it as "quite simply, one of the most important symphonic concerts in a very long time", a statement in which pomposity jostles with hyperbole for the upper hand.

Kettle likes music a lot, but he is the chief leader writer, not an arts critic, and his musical qualifications are, so far as I know, approximately zero.

On the whole people should stick to their field of expertise. I have no current plans to pass judgement on the efforts of participants in the Tour de France, even though forty years ago I passed my cycling proficiency test.

Steve Coogan and Princess Diana - a discussion

2011-07-12T03:27:00.000-07:00

The stats counter on this site tells me that there's nothing like putting a celebrity's name at the top of a page to attract readers, and my all-time most popular post thus far, in an admittedly uncompetitive field, has been Steve Coogan and the Mexicans, musings on the comedian's excoriation of Top Gear for racism in the light of his own contribution to Mexico's drug-addled woes.

So if there's water in the well, let's go there again.

Coogan was on Newsnight the other night laying into a hapless tabloid journalist over the News of the World phone-hacking saga. Emily Maitlis did her (incompetent) best from stopping Coogan talking over the hack, but there was no holding him. "Morally bankrupt", was the comedian's repeated cry, as if repetition trumped all argument.

Before I deal with get this, a digression in the direction of Princess Diana. Not being one of those stricken by the bizarre wailing and gnashing of teeth when the Princess died, I found it curious even then how the thousands lining the Mall and gushing out their feelings in the book of condolences did not see their own complicity in their idol's death. For Diana's car crashed because the paparazzi were chasing it; the paparazzi chased it because they knew that newspapers would pay handsomely for their photos; and the papers were prepared to pay because a large section of the public, the same by and large gripped by the Princess's death, were willing to buy newspapers with her picture in.

There is something here analogous with the Coogan situation. The press is interested in what Steve Coogan does because they know his fans will buy newspapers featuring stories about him; and this is the element missing when Coogan goes on Newsnight to shout at some tabloid cockroach. Coogan is rich and feted because people will pay to watch his work; because they like his work they want to read stories about him; because people want to read stories about people like Coogan, the tabloids seek stories out (or make them up) and print them. Just like Princess Diana, Coogan is in a tri-partite dance with the press and the public which pays his wages. Viewed from this angle, the press are not the simple villains Coogan thinks, merely the mediators between him and us.

Coogan ought to know by now that in showbiz you cannot have riches without fame, and you cannot have fame without public interest in your private life. When he goes on Newsnight and accuses the red tops of printing stories about him "just because it sells newspapers", he thinks he is making an accusation about the press; instead he is just stating the reality of his relationship with them and with the public.

He's entitled to try and manage this relationship to his own advantage (Diana did when it suited her), but he is not entitled to do as he did on Newsnight and accuse the hapless hack of "moral bankruptcy". Actually Coogan has elected to join a dance all of whose participants - celebs, press and public - are compromised.

My knowledge of what it's like to be famous is less than zero, but I imagine it helps if you don't cheat on your wife with a pair of hookers, or spend a fortnight in a hotel room with Courtney Love shoving ounces of Mexico's finest up your nose. Perhaps next time temptation calls, Steve, you could try staying in with a good book. See if the tabloids want to print that.

And when someone offers you a few million quid to appear in Night at the Museum Parts 1 and 2, you might read the name on the cheque first. Apparently the films were produced by Twentieth Century Fox (prop. one R Murdoch). But obviously you didn't know that when you agreed to appear in them. Because if you had known, you would have turned the money down, wouldn't you?

Full steam ahead, Captain Brown!

2011-07-05T02:33:00.001-07:00

I discovered the other day that the Guardian archives blog posts on its CommentIsFree website. Now as someone who has spent an excessive amount of time bashing the qwerty keyboard on CommentIsFree, arguing the toss with three or four other wastrels, I was curious to revisit Time Wasting: The Early Days to see just how bilious was the colour of my bile way back in 2007. One post caught my eye. It was in response to a Guardian leader in February that year on the spending choices facing Gordon Brown's government, ending thus:

The chancellor can also take comfort from less-reported aspects of yesterday's report, which underlined just how impressive his record has been. The books are in better shape than they were in 1997 - an achievement that stands out for having been delivered in tandem with the extra resources for health, education and alleviating poverty. Mr Brown's credibility has suffered from his bending of the yardsticks by which his performance is measured. But the underlying purpose of these fiscal rules is to avoid things spinning out of control, and he continues to avoid that. Yesterday's report concludes that the track Mr Brown is following can be sustained economically - if not in terms of public services - without tax rates going up.

Yes, in the light of subsequent events it does read rather like an interim report from the Captain of a certain well-known ocean liner, just before the iceberg strikes. I am rather proud of my response, which read as follows:

So "The books are in better shape than they were in 1997" are they? I seem to remember the Tories delivered Brown a fairly hefty public account surplus when he arrived in office (this is actually wrong); and where are we now? A deficit of £35 billion or thereabouts, that's where. Only in cloud cuckoo land are the books in better shape.

"Yesterday's report concludes that the track Mr Brown is following can be sustained economically - if not in terms of public services - without tax rates going up." But public services are the whole point, aren't they? It's a bit like saying "the Titanic is doing fine, except in terms of floating".

We have enjoyed a decade of economic good times built on both government and citizens spending money they did not have. We now learn that the government can't afford its spending plans without either raising taxes or cutting spending, both of which will reduce economic activity and risk recession. We may well find that the trad Keynesian way out of recession is unavailable because the Government borrowed too much during the good times. And let's not forget that current Government provision is looking inadequate in areas other than health and education - the armed forces, prisons and care for the elderly spring to mind.

The Brown Boom will end in tears.

You read it there first, 18 months before the credit crunch.

Or at least three or four of you did.

Fudging the Dilnot report

2011-07-05T00:35:00.000-07:00

So Andrew Dilnot thinks that the elderly and incapable with assets of over £100,000 should pay £35,000 towards their long-term care. Speaking as someone with, at the moment anyway, a bit more than that in the way of assets, I suppose I should be pleased. If I had no more than £135,000 I'd be a bit hacked off - why, I'd be asking, should I be taxed at 25% when someone with more money would pay a lower rate?

Something strange is going on here. We all happily pay taxes so the NHS can provide cancer treatment that we may not need ourselves. I think we would all do the same to provide long term care for others, even though the clammy fingers of dementia and incontinence might never close around our own necks. But instead Dilnot has come up with a system, however much better than the disgraceful existing one, where the unlucky individual pays directly (unless of course he has been too feckless or unfortunate to build up any assets, in which case he pays nothing), and then when the limit is reached the state takes over. This has all the hallmarks of a compromise; and if it looks like a compromise and walks like a compromise, it's probably a fudge.

I'm with Dilnot in that we need a system that spreads the load widely across society, so everyone contributes according to their means. Fortunately we have just such a system in place already. It's called taxation. Funnily enough a report commissioned by Tony Blair over a decade ago came to just this conclusion. That Blair shelved the idea in a time of plenty (preferring to spend money instead on diversity co-ordinators, street football facilitators and the war in Iraq) should tell us a lot about the chances of this approach being adopted by the Cameron government today, and perhaps also about the process which informed the Dilnot approach: after all, why recommend the simple and logical solution that HMG has recently rejected when you can adopt a complex and untried one that costs the Government less, taking the money instead from people who were naive enough to acquire modest savings?

It seems to me that there are two things to infer from this, one obvious, the other not. The less obvious one is that we are now entering the debatable lands where public spending priorities, previously taken for granted, compete with each other for favour. And that existing commitments, however unappealing, are more likely to survive than new ones, however meritorious, are to be taken on.

The other point is that if you have built up an asset, the Government will come for you. In the end. If it doesn't happen after the Dilnot report, it will happen eventually. New Labour left Britain borderline broke, and if you've got some money, the Government will be looking for ways to take it off you.

BBC sees the Light

2011-06-25T05:23:00.000-07:00

Just as Glastonbury is getting under way, the BBC is having a light music moment, the Light Fantastic, I think it's called, and on Saturday Radio 3 ran a discussion on the subject with Petroc Trelawney, Anne Dudley, the estimable John Wilson and one or two other worthies.

There is a poignant connection between these two phenomena.

I have to declare a lack of interest here, because light music is not my thing. On the other hand, since I started conducting amateur orchestras five or six years ago I've had to perform a fair bit of it, something I did with a certain sniffiness at first, then with a degree of grudging admiration and latterly almost with enthusiasm (I am trying to stop it going any further).

Often with discussions like this one the really interesting thing is not what's said, but what the broadcasters leave out. This was a rare occasion however where the issue you think they aren't going to touch on at all is not just included, but actually given a full five minutes of full-frontal, that issue here being the extent of the BBC's own involvement in light music's decline.

Now obviously there are many reasons for the decline, economics being one of them, technology being another, the rise of pop culture another still. But undoubtedly the BBC played its part, setting up Radios 2 and 3 without dealing adequately with how light music was going to be catered for. Light music was pushed into the margins on Radio 2, and in the Glock-era it was ridiculous to imagine that Radio 3 was going to be playing any Haydn Wood when it couldn't bring itself to love Robert Simpson. There are apparently numerous anguished memos written by a BBC bigwig to Radio 3 wondering why so little light music was getting played. One might as well ask why bears were defecating in the woods.

Hats off to the BBC for allowing these heretical views to be heard. My son, who was in the kitchen whilst I was listening to this self-flagellation, said, "You can't imagine Sky doing that".

Several other things stood out for me. One was the often-told story of Ernest Tomlinson, furious at the BBC proposing to clear out its light music library, an act of musical Stalinism if ever there was one, offering the use of a barn on his Lancashire farm in which the thousands of orchestral sets could be stored. Tomlinson, a very fine composer, set up a library of light music, still going today, which did much to preserve music which would otherwise have been lost. He is said to have come upon a skip full of parts outside the London Palladium and hired a van on the spot to save them from destruction. A friend tells me that MGM destroyed its sheet music library in Hollywood - to build a car park. Yes, a car park.

The other stand-out was Anne Dudley recounting her experience at Music College of finding the composition department dominated by the avant garde (as most music departments in most conservatoires were and still are), and being bemused to find Eric Coates regarded as a joke figure rather than a serious musician. This is an experience I had too, although I was lucky to have lessons with John Tavener, who stood firmly outside the mainstream, a place I have stood myself ever since.

The widespread assumption, shared by the programme, that light music is a different genre to classical music, or at best a sub-genre, isn't really accurate in my view. Lots of classical composers - Mozart, Elgar, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and many others - have written light music (by which I mean music which sets out to entertain), and this should give us a clue that there is a bigger and broader question hanging in the air here, about the approachability of light music, and the extent to which it that quality has been lost from classical music generally in the last century.

To put the question the other way round, to what extent is it legitimate for a classical composer to set out not to entertain? Two things seem obvious to me. One, that all music (indeed perhaps all art) should be entertaining (I use that word in a very wide sense, as I'll explain in a minute). The other is that a lot of music is being written, indeed has been written in the last century or so, which has no intention of entertaining whatsoever. Indeed, if you ask its composers and performers, many would scorn the idea of doing anything so base as to give their audiences a good time. For me, entertaining means many things - stimulating, challenging yes, but also soothing and consoling. The point about art is that it is a mediation of human experience, not the experience itself (the most horrifying opera I've ever seen is Idomeneo, a terrible story mediated by music of unsurpassed luminosity and grace).

Ultimately it is easy to regret the decline of light music, because it is readily, though I think inaccurately, rendered as a separate genre whose exponents were once famous and who, amongst musicians at least, are still household names. What is much less easy, because it is harder to identify them, is to lament the obscurity of all the composers at the more serious end of the classical spectrum who did not disdain their audiences, and who wrote music that was approachable, that sought to entertain in the very broadest sense, and who were pushed into obscurity by the same institutional forces (the conservatoires, the universities, the broadcasters) that did for so-called light music.

Why is the fate of these individuals important? Because on the whole the public is not interested in avant-garde music, and, particularly in a time of austerity, the public subsidy which keeps the infrastructure of classical music going is harder to justify when so much of its output is devoted to pushing a kind of music which, statistically speaking, almost no-one likes. Less money for classical music does not just mean fewer performances of Boulez and Berio. It also means less Berlioz and Brahms.

Ultimately, those of us who love classical music have to find new repertoire which can enthuse the public. Otherwise classical music will become increasingly marginalised in schools, in the public imagination and in public spending priorities. At the moment it doesn't seem to me that anyone is trying to reverse this trend.

Traditionally the middle-class turn to classical music in middle-age. The weekend of the Light Fantastic however, many of my middle-class middle-aged friends have gone off to Glastonbury.

dos and don'ts for young soloists

2011-06-21T04:25:00.000-07:00

I've been fortunate enough to do many concertos with student soloists, always an interesting experience. Here is the sum total of my wisdom in DO and DON'T form.

DO try and know your speeds beforehand. Most inexperienced soloists have spent much more time playing on their own or with a pianist than with an orchestra, and don’t realise that, even with the Classical repertoire, there is a great deal of subconscious tempo variation. In other words, you will play some passages quicker or slower than others without being aware of it. It helps enormously if you can tell the conductor which ones these are beforehand. This doesn’t just save time in rehearsal, it also gives the conductor time to work out how, for example, to get back into the main tempo when your more relaxed second subject has finished. It’s worth practising with a metronome, not because you are expected to play metronomically but because it enables you to judge where you want to push the speed on and where you want to relax.

DON’T watch the conductor too much. He will generally be beating slightly ahead of the orchestra, so if you try and keep up with him the music will get faster. As a rule the orchestra and conductor’s job is to keep up with you, not vice versa. It is sometimes the case that your passage-work is so fast that you have to follow the orchestra instead: one example is in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto first movement just after the cadenza, where the soloist plays arpeggio semi-quavers over the recapitulated first subject: listen and play with them. There are many other examples in the standard repertoire.

DON’T be afraid to ask for things to be done differently. The orchestra is there to serve you. There are ways of doing this however. Don’t say to the orchestra directly, “Can you do it this way instead?” The conductor has probably spent some time with the orchestra, in good faith, getting the orchestra to do it the way you don’t like. Ask the conductor. “Would it be possible for the woodwind to ....." Nine times out of ten the conductor will be pleased to oblige. There may also be good reasons why the conductor has done it his way, reasons you aren’t aware of, and you don’t want to end up in a situation where the conductor is saying to the orchestra, “No, don’t do that. Do it the way I originally asked you”.

DON’T be nervous. You are probably the best player in the room, and the orchestra will think you are wonderful.

DON’T be arrogant either. The orchestra might not be as good at their instruments as you are at yours (although sometimes some of them will be), but the likelihood is that they will be vastly more experienced musicians who have seen young prodigies come and go. Send the conductor a card afterwards. Do you want another gig or don’t you?

DON’T play without the music unless you are 100% sure you can do it. You don’t want to ruin your opportunity for want of a music stand.

DON’T do things differently in the concert from the way you did them in rehearsal. As Beecham said, an orchestra is not a piece of elastic. It cannot instantly accommodate your interpretative whims.

DO enjoy it. It might not happen again often, for a while, at all. Make the most of it!

Ed Balls goes Greek

2011-06-17T06:54:00.000-07:00

Amidst dramatic scenes across the country, riot police clash with protestors demonstrating against austerity measures. This is Greece of course, not the UK, and I am not going to give a hostage to fortune by claiming that where Greece leads, we will inexorably follow.

Here is a prediction however. It is that the EU bail-out, even if it goes ahead, will fail (I said this about the first bail-out, but that prediction was made in private and doesn't count; I do however feel emboldened to go public on this one). It will fail because the austerity measures necessary for it to work will be intolerable to the Greek people. Even if the country is far enough away from the centre of the whirlpool for the measures to work (and it may well not be), the Greeks themselves won't put up with them. They'll bring down the government, or force the government to default, wholly or in part.

It's interesting to consider how the EU got into this situation, and what that says about what kind of institution it is. For those countries signing up to monetary union, there was a cap on how much money it was permissible to borrow. Many countries breached it, but the EU did nothing, or at least nothing concrete - letters were written; knuckles were rapped. No mechanism existed for penalising countries for breaking the rules. It could scarcely have been otherwise, because no electorate would have permitted its government to sign up to a currency where control of its own borrowing (and therefore its economy) was effectively handed over to an unelected Central Bank in another country hundreds of miles away. Handing over control of interest rates was bad enough, but this would have been politically unsellable.

So enthusiasts for the Euro set in place a project that was bound to fail sooner or later, because one of its members was bound to borrow too much, and would be unable to escape from its position by devaluing its currency. That's now happened to Greece, with other countries sliding towards a similar position.

In other words, faced between setting up a system which would inevitably fail, or not setting up monetary union at all, Eurocrats opted for the former. I am not viscerally anti-EU, but this looks like madness. Ironically Britain too received strictures from the EU for its borrowing even though we were not in the Euro at all. For such institutions reality doesn't matter - it is the outward appearance that counts.

Which brings me to Ed Balls's latest suggestion, namely that the UK Government cuts VAT by 5% or so to kick-start the economy. I don't know how much this would cost in lost revenue, but it would be in the region of billions. Where would that money come from? The money markets. Yes, that's correct. Balls is suggesting that in order to get the deficit down, we put the deficit up.

Perhaps I am slow, but I do not understand how this can work. It seems particularly counterintuitive when you consider that the first thing that would happen is that our borrowing costs would go up; that is, we'd not only have to pay interest on the extra money we'd borrowed, but we'd have to pay more interest on money we were going to borrow anyway, because the gilt markets would be worried that we had changed our minds about getting the deficit down.

This scheme of Balls', which incidentally he didn't think to clear with Ed Miliband first, reminds me somewhat of Milo Minderbender in Catch 22, buying eggs for 4 cents in one place and selling them at a profit for 2 cents somewhere else. It took me a while to realise that this was satire on Joseph Heller's part (I was young), and of course satire can't have been Balls' intention. I think his aim instead is to appeal to the vast majority of people in Britain who aren't interested in economics and don't have the faintest idea of how it works. His aim is to deceive.

I don't know what will happen to George Osborne's plan; no-one does. I've written previously on Osborne's gamble being, if anything a rather smaller gamble than the one proposed by Labour (just keep and borrowing and hope for the best). Interestingly, the gilt markets, gifted with no more clairvoyance than anyone else but at least removed utterly from the taint of political bias, seem to think Osborne is doing the right thing. We know this because the UK is paying very low rates on its borrowing. If the markets thought we were not going to get any growth, and the deficit never come down, we would be paying sky-high rates.

I sometimes think that with Osborne at the helm HMS Great Britain is sailing slowly in a fog, knowing that there are rocks somewhere but not knowing exactly where. Ed Balls, on the other hand, appears to know exactly where the rocks are. They are in the direction of Greece, and he is proposing that we sail that way full steam ahead.

slut-walking comes to Britain

2011-06-13T01:19:00.000-07:00

When America sneezes, the UK catches a cold; and when young American women take to the streets in their scanties to protest against some ill-chosen words by a Canadian policeman, it's not going to be long before young Britons start doing it too. Cue slut-walking demonstrations the length and breadth of the nation.

Since my ruminations on this subject a few weeks ago, I've been musing not just on the practical aspect of the furore (why it should be so unreasonable to suggest, in a world in which they have never been totally safe and never will be, that women might want to take steps which will make them safer), but on why women might want to dress in a sexually provocative way in public at all.

For millenia, attractive young women have used male/female inequality of desire - the only inequality that works in their favour - to advance their cause personally and economically. I get that. But why flaunt it in public? At the very worst, provocatively dressed women risk attack. Further down the scale of seriousness, they risk harassment in the street. They risk harassment in clubs and bars from men tripping over their own tongues. They get attention of men who are only interested in them for sex, and they are treated less seriously at work by men who can't disengage their libidos. In fact, for every man they might want to attract, there will be 99 whose attentions they cannot possibly want (including mine). What is in it for women?

I have been married long enough to know that women often dress to impress other women rather than to attract men, and I'm aware that a single woman wants to look attractive, but it genuinely baffles me as to why anyone would want the inconvenience of teetering along the high-street in a microdress, risking hypothermia as well as the ills detailed above. I also find it rather annoying. A picture in the paper yesterday showed a woman in fishnets and heels carrying a sign saying, "You can't touch this". Fair enough, I know I can't touch it. In which case, I want to shout, why make me want to touch it?

Women, the slut-walkers say, only want the right to express their sexuality. Leaving aside their confusion as to the meaning of the word, why on earth would they want to express it? We all know that most women like men, and vice versa. Why go on about it? (Thank God we men don't find the need to express our sexuality. I shudder to think what a male slut-walking march would look like, but my suggested name for it - gut-walking - might be an unpleasant clue).

The most hilarious people in the slut-marches are the earnest looking young men hanging around in the back of the photos. For all their right-on beardiness you just know that part of them is thinking, "Phwooar! Look at the enbonpoint on that! You would wouldn't you? Eh? Eh?" Surely some of them are fifth columnists, perhaps police informers along the lines of the chaps who infiltrated the environmental movement; but I guarantee that every heterosexual one of them is enjoying the view immensely. There are probably men taking a Wedding Crashers approach, marching to see if any of the participants wishes to express their sexuality in private afterwards. It says a lot about naivety of the slut-walkers that they allow men anywhere near them.

If I were a slut-walker I'd be thinking to myself, "Hang on. How is it that my view of how I should behave is shared by Hugh Hefner, Paul Raymond, Richard Desmond and Jeremy Clarkson?" (a list to which, being as prone to provocation as the next man, they might have added Nick Simpson).

It seems to me a very poor sort of feminism whose definition of edifying female conduct involves dressing in a way which appeals to mens' most basic instincts. The best place for dressing provocatively is behind closed-doors.

Coming soon - Serbia

2011-05-27T01:32:00.001-07:00

The news of the arrest of Ratko Mladic pushed everything else to the bottom of the news agenda yesterday. Mladic, the Serbian general allegedly responsible from the Srebrenica massacre, has been on the run for the best part of ten years, although like Osama he doesn't actually seem to have been doing much running - complicity of the Serbian authorities seems to have facilitated a quiet life in a rural village. All that changed with the visit of a Brussels commissioner, bearing the news that the failure to apprehend Mladic was having a negative effect on Serbia's campaign to join the EU. Lo and behold, Mladic is caught, and the path to the EU is wide open.

Overshadowed by this was a report into conditions in state-run institutions that made my hair stand on end. Inmates, it appears, were left hungry and thirsty, and sat for hours in pools of their own urine and faeces. Where did these outrages take place? Abu Ghraib? Guantanamo Bay? No. In British hospitals. To be exact, in Alexandra Hospital in Redditch, at Ipswich Hospital, and in the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead. And to be fair, the report, by NHS watchdog the Quality Care Commission, did not mention the bit about urine and faeces. It said, "While the reports document many examples of people being treated with respect and given personalised, attentive care, some tell a bleak story of people not being helped to eat and drink, with their care needs not assessed and their dignity not respected". The faeculent matter came via a Radio 5 phone in on the subject, to which I listened whilst bowing parts for a concert in June. It made chilling listening.

The overall picture is bleak and scandalous. It also accords with a vignette observed whilst in the Homerton Hospital in London nearly fifteen years ago. An elderly patient, perhaps slightly demented, was in the bed opposite me. He had been badgering a nurse in a semi-coherent way about something trivial. She took exception to this, and took away his meal, saying, "And you won't be getting this back till you learn some manners".

No-one did anything. I didn't do anything. I thought, "Well he is a stupid old git". But I was wrong. She took away his food, and didn't bring it back.

I can't help feeling that if British soldiers had done these kind of things abroad, we would all be jumping up and down about it. But if British nurses do it to old people in Britain, it goes way down the news agenda. I searched in vain for mention of it in the Guardian this morning.

Two other reports were pushed out of the headlines by Mladic yesterday. One suggested that 20% of working graduates are now in non-graduate employment. Another that net immigration to the UK has reached an all-time high, with many Polish workers returning to Britain after finding that things at home aren't so rosy either. Given that a recent Department of Work and Pensions report (19 May) recorded that in the previous 3 months 81% of new jobs went to people born outside the UK, it will be interesting to see whether the government signs up to a similar open-door policy when the Serbs finally get the EU green light. Personally I wouldn't bet against it.

First Strass-Kahn, now Ken Clarke

2011-05-19T02:21:00.001-07:00

For those whose patience with my postings about sexual politics is wearing thin, be assured that this is about journalism. Even though it begins with rape. Really.

So Ken Clarke thinks some rapes are more serious than others. Or perhaps not, depending on which of his interviews yesterday you read. And now he is in trouble.

First, Mr Clarke is right. Some rapes are more serious than others. If a sixteen-year old has consenting sex with his fifteen-year old girlfriend, that's rape, and it's a less serious than a rape in which a woman walking home at night is dragged into bushes and attacked by a gang. It's to reflect this divergence in seriousness that guidelines equip judges with such a wide range of sentences.

For what it's worth, I think Clarke was rattled by his interviewer, Victoria Derbyshire, because his new plan to give convicted rapists 50% sentence discount on an early plea could, Derbyshire pointed out, result in some rapists serving as little as 15 months.

Clarke's appeal is that he sounds like a real person, unlike most politicians, who seem to have been produced in a factory specialising in unattractive, evasive, bland middle-aged white men. Here however he sounded like a real person who had not thought the issue through properly, or at least not read his brief. And he was flustered.

But how did the BBC react? Well, I listened to a lot of news coverage from lunchtime until the early evening, and the part of the story which excited them, on Radio 5, Radio 4 and on TV, was the bit about some rapes being more serious than others. The real meat, the admission that what is essentially a cost cutting exercise might lead to convicted rapists being on the streets after not much more than a year, featured only in re-runs of Derbyshire's initial interview.

By late afternoon, when Clarke had attempted to clarify his comments, the news headlines were leading with "Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke has apologised for appearing to suggest that some rape cases were more serious than others". I heard this line again and again, and it is worth a bit of deconstruction.

In the first place, Clarke didn't apologise. Secondly, in none of his interviews did he withdraw from his original position. Thirdly, the BBC's use of the word "appearing" is a time-honoured formula used when the Broadcaster doesn't quite want to commit itself to a particular allegation. "Wayne Rooney appeared to strike the Tottenham defender" might be a characteristic use of the word, even though millions of TV viewers have seen the spud-faced nipper give Jamie Carragher an elbow in the face en passant. But Clarke did not just appear to say the controversial words; he did say them, and the BBC kept playing the tape of him saying them over and over again.

But lastly, "Kenneth Clarke has apologised for appearing to suggest that some rape cases were more serious than others" carries with it, however faintly, two assumptions. One is that Clarke had done something wrong and that an apology was called for; the other, more seriously, that Clarke's original statement - that some rapes were more serious than others - was wrong. This is a subtle point, but it must be right, because otherwise the Corporation would have been reporting that Clarke had apologised when he didn't have to, for having done something right; and that would have been the story instead.

Now of course, when a politician loses the plot slightly on your network, you are going to push the boat out on it, particularly on a slow news day. The BBC could hardly be blamed for that. But as this story kept growing - Ed Miliband in the Commons calling for Clarke to be sacked - I kept wondering, "When are they going to get a lawyer on to find out whether he's right or not?" And the answer was that the BBC had plenty of time for political correspondents, and for politicians of both right and left, but none whatsoever for anyone who might have been able to tell them whether the law really did treat some rapes as more serious than others.

In other words, the BBC extracted a telling admission from the Justice Secretary, ignored it, ran a story instead about another assertion he had made, took no steps to find out whether it was true, reported him as apologising when he had not, and made assumptions about his statement which an elementary check would have revealed were wrong.

Although at the time I engaged in a death-struggle to get out of the profession, I am quite proud that, before I became a not-quite award-winning composer and conductor, I was once a lawyer. If nothing else, it has equipped me with the priceless realisation that, since the media is almost invariably wrong when it pontificates in this field, it is likely to be wrong in most others as well.

Start, fellow-citizens, from the assumption that the media is populated by people who are less intelligent, less scrupulous and less well-informed than you are, and the path to enlightenment is yours.

Lady Gaga and the slut walkers

2011-05-16T01:25:00.000-07:00

Let's assume that I've made a pie, and I stick it on the window sill to cool. Some nefarious so-and-so comes along and pinches it. Now, it's wrong to steal, and the thief shouldn't have done it, but I also am an idiot for leaving it outside.

What has this to do with the Canadian police officer who said that women should "avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised"? This man has unsurprisingly been taking some flak for his remarks, thus reigniting an issue that has been filling column inches about once a decade for the last thirty years or so and provoking "slut-walking" demonstrations across America.

Let me explain about the pies. There are two separate issues here - one is the conduct of the pie thief, the other the conduct of the baker. Calling the baker foolish is not to diminish the maleficence of the thief; and neither is counselling bakers to cool their pies out of reach giving thieves licence to roam freely.

Applying that logic to the slut-walkers, women should of course be able to wear whatever they like in public without being molested or attacked; men who attack them are doing something wrong. On the other hand women are inevitably more likely to be attacked if they dress provocatively, and you might think it was uncontroversial for the police officer to suggest they could minimise that risk.

The organiser of a "slut-walk" in Boston, Mass., 20 year old Siobhan Connors explained to the Associated Press, "The event is in protest of a culture that we think is too permissive when it comes to rape and sexual assault. It's to bring awareness to the shame and degradation women still face for expressing their sexuality... essentially for behaving in a healthy and sexual way".

Ms Connors doesn't get it, and aged 20 could perhaps could hardly be expected to. Sex is mens' achilles heel - it flicks a switch that bypasses our brains and diverts our energies, well, elsewhere. We see the signs that nature or nurture have implanted in us, and from then on we really are thinking about only one thing. Thinking may not actually be the right word. For millenia this weakness has acted as a cruel double-edged sword. While women have youth and beauty, the world is theirs to command. Women who exploit it draw men towards them, and some of that attention will be unwelcome. When those attractions have gone, society pushes women to the margins. Most women, the unlucky majority, do not make it beyond the margins in the first place.

That is the cruel law of sexual attraction, and most women who have lived a little longer than Ms Connors understand it only too well. Rather than criticising the policeman, Ms Connors should be saying, "Fine, let's be aware that showing a bit of leg could get us into trouble, but now let's make sure that our streets are properly policed and that sexual assaults - which happen to people modestly dressed too - are properly investigated and prosecuted."

Last night I watched with my daughters bits of Radio 1's big weekend (in Carlisle - someone at the BBC has a sense of humour). The headline act was Lady Gaga. The New York chanteuse did three or four anonymous Euro-disco numbers in rubber leggings; an incongruous trumpet solo followed while she changed costume, emerging in a rubber mini-dress and fishnets to sing an incongruous jazzy torch song (surprisingly well); she went to the piano (an instrument with which she showed prior acquaintance, even while standing on it in her spike heels) and sang something slow and passionate; she went off stage and emerged in a rubber crop top and hot pants with a crucifix on the front. More disco. We yawned, switched off and went to bed.

There was less sexual content to the material than I'd thought there would be. The fetish stylings were an add on. Ms Gaga came across as a Madonna for the new century, only more talented and more vulnerable (she threw herself into it with an uncontrolled passion which is unfakeable). But Gaga knows that sex sells, and of course I wondered what my daughters made of it and whether they should be watching at all. But the reality is that this stuff is out there on the internet, and short of shutting them in the house without computers and TV, there is nothing you can do to stop them watching it, or stop them coming to the conclusion that this is how women should be.

I think of myself as a feminist (my wife laughs a bitter laugh when I say it), but I sometimes think that all sexual liberation has done for women is to free them to be more like the way men would like them to be.

The slut-walkers of America, parading along in their bra and knickers, are marching to a man's tune that apparently they can't hear.

Setting Scotland free

2011-05-12T07:47:00.000-07:00

So in the next five years there will be a referendum on Scottish independence. Leaving aside the many other interesting aspects of this event (what form should the referendum take? what sort of majority should be required? should other British people have a say? what currency willScotland use? what will happen to the union flag?), I have been musing over some figures.

Estimates of the post independence loss to Scotland in terms of revenue vary between about £10 - 20 billion per annum. Let's take the low estimate of £10 billion, and apply that to the 2.5 million Scottish taxpayers. If Scotland had to make up its revenue loss by increasing taxes, the average taxpayer would be £4000 worse off every year. Of course this doesn't take into account corporate taxes, but you get the picture. Given that imposition of that kind of increase is politically impossible, and would in any event send the economy into a nosedive, it looks as if Scotland would have to impose draconian spending cuts that would make George Osborne's current efforts look feeble (and would in any event take demand out of the economy and strangle economic growth). Of course Alex Salmond would have an answer to this. I'm not sure what it would be, but Salmond is an impressive politician who rivals Ed Balls in his ability to make the best of a dubious case.

I suspect that independence would in the long run make Scotland a lot poorer economically, and that, far from the socialist paradise some Scots imagine would ensue if only they could get rid ofWestminster's shackles, Scotland would actually become a more right wing country than it is now. Scottish taxpayers would realise that the public services on which so much of the country depends were only affordable at very much higher levels of taxation. They would start to ask where the money was going (it being only too apparent to them from where it was coming). Conversely, Englandwould I think become less right-wing for the obvious converse reasons.

If enough Scots want independence, of course they should have it. There is a strong streak of sentimentality about nationalism everywhere, in which myths are burnished at the expense of inconvenient facts. Not many Scots know that more of their countrymen fought with the Hanoverians than with the Jacobites at Culloden, or that Bonnie Prince Charlie's mother was a Polish countess, or that his first language was Italian and that he spoke neither Gaelic nor English. I wonder whether this sentimentality is blinding Scots to economic realities too. Freedom from the tax generating engine which is the South East of England (and which keeps us Mancunians going too) may well be a chilly kind of freedom.

Edward Elgar and the significance of talent

2011-05-09T02:18:00.001-07:00

The first two qualities a great composer needs are talent and technique; the first you either have or you don't, the second you can learn. But these two aren't enough - otherwise Saint-Saens and Glazunov would have been great composers, along with a host of other journeymen you've never heard of (and any musical biography like Michael Kennedy's Portrait of Elgar, which I've just finished, will mention in passing a host of half-forgotten names).

The third quality in this non-exhaustive list is the ability to write memorable and distinctive material - it's the quality of the invention, stupid. But there is a fourth quality which is equally a sine qua non, and it's a hard one to articulate. You have to have the right kind of personality; because ultimately its the kind of person you are that limits what you can achieve. Beethoven, for example, exhibits himself as someone with a vast emotional and intellectual range, passionate about humanity, nature and God, with a variety and range of output to match. This is also true of Mozart and Brahms. For other composers the situation is more complex. Mahler's range is much narrower, in my view, perhaps pithily summed up by the sentence, "I'm dying". This is also true of Shostakovitch ("Stalin was horrid to me") and a host of smaller figures. It seems to me that the true measure of the classical greats is not that they had so much talent, but that they had so much to say. When in the 30s Sibelius felt he had nothing more, he stopped writing. Nielsen died, but I suspect had a lot more to give. Berlioz could have gone on forever.

What about Elgar? The Worcester genius has, like Vaughan Williams, been criticised for nostalgia, but I think this is unfair. The Lark Ascending isn't about a dead bird after all, and Elgar wasn't mourning the disappearance of the pre-1914 world - much of his best work dates from before the war, Enigma from 1899, for example. But undoubtedly Elgar was a bit of a professional whinger. He whinged about his low social status, about the indifference of the British public, about the meanness of his publishers, the poor standard of performance he had to endure and about his health. He complained about America (when he was engaged on sell-out tours there to conduct his own music). He complained when a lesser-known composer's work was given equal rehearsal time to his own. He walked out of a dinner because the organisers forgot about his Order of Merit and put him on the wrong table. He was constantly threatening to give up music because of its indifferent reception (and this was a man given a knighthood and befriended by the King). Elgar's first symphony was given over one hundred performances in the year after its premiere; but that still didn't stem the litany of complaint.

These characteristics should, and do, tell us quite a lot about Elgar the composer. He is very very good at complaining, musically, and if one had to generalise about the tone of his work it would probably be fair to say that it laments that things are not as they should be. To be fair, this lament is often couched in music of the utmost beauty, subtlety and radiance; but there is quite a high proportion of lamenting going on. When you sit down to listen to a piece by Elgar it is rare to be surprised by the tone. This explains both the appeal of his music and the limitations of that appeal, and that's why my favourite Elgar pieces are the Introduction and Allegro (simple, artless, energetic, poignant, and as Kennedy says, amongst the best half-dozen string pieces ever written), and the Cello Concerto. The Concerto in particular, a late work given a poor first performance and slow to make its way into the repertoire, is a masterpiece, sui generis, unique in form, economical in proportions, terse, and balanced perfectly between haunted emotionalism and rumbustious high spirits. If there is a work which better demonstrates how to orchestrate a concertante piece I don't know of it - there is only one tutti (the last few bars), yet there is plenty for the orchestra to do; the instrumental writing is full of colour and variety, yet the soloist can always be heard. There is no wallowing in the emotion, and the music is for once with Elgar entirely devoid of sentimentality (for any artist a quality as seductively fatal as heroin).

If these pieces are the best of Elgar, it is partly because they contrast with the less-good, of which the worst is perhaps The Music Makers, a setting of Arthur O'Shaughnessy's Ode by turns self-pitying and self-indulgent. I once played the fiddle in a performance of The Music Makers at the Barbican. Ted Heath was in the audience; I hope he enjoyed it more than I did. As Kennedy and others have pointed out, it's not Elgar's fault that the poem is so bad. It is however Elgar's fault that he chose to set it, and it is entirely in keeping with what we know about Elgar's personality that he thought the poem good.

For Elgar had another quality beyond the ones I've mentioned above. He thought (correctly) that he was a much better composer than most of his contemporaries; he was unrepentant about this, and unashamed about expressing it publicly; his musical personality was to a significant extent based around the failure, real and imaginary, of Britain and the rest of the musical world to give his talent its due. In fact the overwhelming majority of people sufficiently driven to call themselves composers would have given their right arm to have had a career like Elgar's, and his failure to realise this marks a failure to understand the world as it really is. And it is an artist's capacity for understanding of the world which is the ultimate test. A sense of personal entitlement can be a spur to effort, but carried too far into a composer's work it is limiting, and I personally think it limited Elgar.

That Beethoven, to give only one example, was a greater man may be seen not only from his refusal to bow down before the onset of deafness (an infinitely greater trial than anything Elgar had to put up with), but also the refusal to allow his affliction to dominate his work. Rather than greater raw talent or technique, it's the personality which this ability to rise above one's circumstances exemplifies that makes Beethoven a greater composer.

2nd past the post redux

2011-05-09T01:58:00.000-07:00

Amidst all the excitement of the last few days - elections, United beating Chelsea, a terrible fire in one of my favourite places in Scotland - one rather surprising thing stands out. It is that of the four hundred odd voting areas in the UK only ten voted for AV.

I hoped AV would be rejected, and thought it probably would be, but this is a staggering statistic. Just as interesting is the location of these ten places. There is a rather beautiful map with the information on the Graun's website here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/may/06/av-referendum-results-map. And yes, those places are exactly where you would have thought they would be. Hackney, Camden, Lambeth, Islington, Haringey, Southwark, Glasgow Kelvin, Edinburgh Central, Oxford and Cambridge; in other words the places occupied by the highest density of Britain's great and good.

There are a number of ways of looking at this. One is that the great and the good are the best educated and most intelligent, which means that the lumpen majority (including me) is likely to have been wrong about AV.

Another is that the great and good are prone to wanting to change something for change's sake, and that, before signing up for it, the rest of us prefer to be convinced that a change will make things better.

Martyrdom - but not yet

2011-05-03T00:59:00.001-07:00

I couldn't help thinking, on this sunny post-Osama bin Laden morning, that while ol' towel-head was a great enthusiast for martyrdom, this enthusiasm did not extend to getting in harm's way himself.

To be exact, for ten years after 9/11 he did his utmost to avoid confrontation with the Americans, conveniently keeping his own skin intact and thereby exhibiting an endearingly human, if somewhat hypocritical, desire to remain alive whilst urging others to get to heaven a.s.a.p. via the bomb-vest method.

Perhaps having four wives (and with power to add), Osama felt that he was already getting his fair share of virgins here on earth. Why the hurry to go upstairs?

Royal Wedding fever

2011-04-28T00:52:00.000-07:00

Continuing its tradition of fearlessly tackling any subject, no matter how weighty, this blog now turns its attention to the Royal Wedding.

On 29th July 1981, the day Charles and Diana married, I was on holiday in Scotland. In the morning I went into Lochinver to send a postcard to a girl I was seeing. Sadly, I can still remember the card: two caricature Scotsmen looking up at a wall-mounted stag's head - "Did you get him in the Trossachs?", says one; "Nooo", the other replies, "right between the eyes".

It may well be that the uncanny ability to remember trivial information of this type was the kind of characteristic which led to her dumping me immediately on my return.

(My successor in the post was one of our lecturers in the Law department of Nottingham University; no doubt I'd have had to report him to the authorities for kiddy-fiddling in our more responsible times, but then I merely satisfied myself with running him out in the next staff-student cricket match. If you're reading, Louise, no hard feelings.)

Marriage was far from my mind then, and while my friends spent the day in the Culag Hotel watching Charles and Diana's big day, I went fishing. I felt a certain sniffy contempt for the Royal family.

Times change. I have now been married for nearly twenty years, and I quite like the monarchy. No doubt this is partly attributable to the rightward-sweeping tide that pulls most middle-aged people with it. My calculation is that Charles is an intelligent and cultured man, that his probable successor looks as if he is shaping up reasonably well, that the monarchy probably brings in at least the cost of the Civil List by way of tourist revenue, and that if we had an elected President instead we would be more likely to get a Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson applying than a Vaclav Havel or Nelson Mandela. If it's not obviously broken, don't try and fix it.

As for weddings, they are symbolic occasions in which, against all the evidence, two people embark on a journey (oh Lord, how I hoped I would never use that expression), a gamble if you prefer, one with emotional, financial and existential stakes, without any idea of the outcome. Weddings have about them the same atmosphere that must linger at the dockside when someone sets out to sail around the world, or at the airport departure lounge when mountaineers go off to try their hand at Everest: excitement mingled with trepidation.

I find weddings poignant events now. Thoughtful protagonists know that they cannot possibly know what the journey will be like; we observers, battle-scarred veterans of the institution, know that there is a further layer of almost Rumsfeldian ignorance beyond the grasp of the bride and groom. These people are innocents, signing up for something, good and bad, of whose reality they can have almost no conception. A Royal wedding carries the additional charge that the couple will form part of the distant cultural and political backdrop of British lives for decades to come; it pains me to adopt such an egregious cliche, but now I see why journalists write about "history being made".

So good luck to William and Kate. They will need it. My daughters will be glued to the TV tomorrow. I might go fishing.

trusting the John Muir Trust

2011-04-26T01:58:00.000-07:00

"I told you so" are said to be the most unattractive four words in the English language. You might want to bear them in mind however when you read the following.

The John Muir Trust is an environmental charity whose name honours the pioneer emigre Scot instrumental in persuading the US government to found the Yosemite National Park, and whose writings found the intellectual cornerstone of the wilderness movement. I am not one of the original few - the JMT was founded in 1983 - but since I joined membership has more than doubled, and I've seen the Trust develop from humble beginnings into a slick and professional charity. The JMT has bought up a number of estates in Scotland (Knoydart, Sandwood Bay, bits of Skye and Ben Nevis) and works to restore woodland to what is, for all its bareness, a landscape thoroughly ravaged by man.

A few years ago the JMT sent out a glossy circular appealing for money to - ostensibly - buy the Glencanisp Estate in Sutherland, then being sold by its owners, the wealthy Vestey family, beef barons and vendors of the infamous Vesta dried dinners so familiar from youthful camping trips. I have known the area for more than forty years and the idea of the JMT getting its hands on the Estate had a powerful appeal. However when you read the leaflet carefully, two things became apparent. Firstly, that the Trust had already parted with the money and was looking to refill its coffers, and secondly, that the Trust was not going to be the owner after all. The Estate had been bought by a local community foundation, and all the JMT would be getting was a seat on the foundation board.

I wrote to the Trust's then director, Nigel Hawkins, pointing out that since the JMT's relationship with its members was based on trust, it might have been better to be more open about why it was asking for money; that the JMT had taken a decision to put a lot of money into the Assynt Foundation without asking its own members; and that the JMT was making an assumption about the future conduct of the Foundation which might well turn out to be wrong. That is to say, the Vestey family, whilst not doing anything noticeable to restore the land to pristine condition, had at least not done anything to make it worse, whereas the Foundation was set up to act in the interests of local people, and their interests - jobs, amenities - might well turn out to conflict with those of this magnificent hundred thousand acre wilderness. A seat on the board could only offer advice and influence - things which could be ignored and overruled. A new private owner might well serve the interests of the landscape - which is irreplaceable - better.

To his credit, Mr Hawkins wrote back. His letter was emollient and reassuring, but ultimately unpersuasive. I still disagreed with the way the Trust had behaved, but there wasn't actually much else I could do. I can't say for sure when this correspondence took place, and I regret now that I don't have either my email or Hawkins's reply. Hawkins has now stepped down as director.

Every now and then JMT sends out copies of its Journal. In the most recent, something caught my eye.

"As (JMT and the Assynt Foundation) admit, it is a partnership that has not always run entirely smoothly, with differences of opinion on some of the Foundation's more commercially-minded plans for economic development. This led to the John Muir Trust stepping away from its seat on the Board of Directors."

Well who would have thought that might happen?

See first para for details.

Wishbone Ash not what they used to be shock

2011-04-24T02:56:00.000-07:00

A post in the Graun's Notes and Queries section the other day about a "forgotten prog rock masterpiece", Wishbone Ash's 1972 album Argus, brought in the predictable replies from nostalgic hippies and took me back to the days when I sat in my study at school, loon pants at the ready, nodding appreciatively at the opening chords of Throw Down the Sword.

I searched for Argus on Spotify and was indulging in some Proustian moments when my son came in. "God, Dad", he said, "is this the kind of crap you had to listen to in the prog era?"

For the uninitiated (and like most initiations, this is one you probably don't really want to have), Wishbone Ash were a guitar-based four-piece from Torquay, and Argus was a sort of concept-album (a term which should have the cautious heading for the hills at top speed), on whose cover a helmeted centurion type figure wearing a cape looks out over a misty landscape, probably somewhere near Basingstoke. I never owned a copy, but it was ubiquitous amongst the record collections of my friends, and I can still hum bits of it now. Wishbone Ash did quite good business in the mid-70s, but were fading already when 1976 came and punk swept prog rock away.

In considering the pitfalls of nostalgia, you have to remember not just how bad a lot of the music of your youth now seems, but how bad a lot of it seemed even at the time. Whilst liking Argus quite a bit, I also knew that it was pretty naff. For one thing, the idea of a collection of rock songs that might have been sung around the campfire by Dark Ages warriors (had they only been possessed of Marshall amplifiers, a Gibson Flying V guitar and an electricity supply) required some suspension of disbelief. For another, although Wishbone Ash wrote some reasonable tunes, the band's lyrics are up there with Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak - "Tonight there's going to be a jailbreak / Somewhere in this town" (perhaps at the jail, chaps?) - teetering atop the pinnacle of bad songwriting.

"I thought I had a girl", sang bassist Martin Turner on Blowin' Free, their heads-down rock-a-boogie crowd pleaser. "I know / because I seen her". Pretty conclusive evidence, you may think. And elsewhere, "There were times when I stood at death's own door / only hoping for an answer", a piece of existential reportage that stood in sharp contrast to my own moments of teenage-angst, times when I stood waiting in the rain for the bus into Pontefract on a Saturday afternoon. "And there's a time", burbled Turner on Time Was, "waking up / and feeling down / it's when you have to pick your feet / up from the ground". Well I guess the libretto of Der Ring des Nibelungen has some less than starry moments.

Was anything good about Wishbone Ash? If like me you think the sound of the electric guitar played pretty loud is one of humanity's more compelling musical creations, the band provided a fairly hefty dose. Andy Powell, of the Gibson Flying V, was a competent riff-meister of the thousand-notes-per-minute variety. Throw Down the Sword, for all its portentous folly, opened with an ominous minor key ostinato over a snare-drum roll, and morphed into a stirring threnody that exalted at the same time as making your own life seem utterly mundane by comparison (a bit like Mahler then). Leaf and Stream had a beautiful pastoral lilt, borne along by the glowing tone of Ted Turner's back-pickup Strat. Warrior was a defiant stomp, which you could just about imagine being shouted out by hairy-arsed Saxons, huddled in a muddy round house looking out at the rain. Listen to the opening of Sometime World - the similarity to Television's classic Marquee Moon, a record of stratospherically higher stature, is uncanny.

Wishbone Ash are still going; or rather, there appear, curiously, to be two versions of the band going - one led by Martin Turner and one by Andy Powell. And they have both been playing Argus live, in its entirety. It must be a funny life, a bit like being a musical Ancient Mariner, keeping on playing half a dozen songs that briefly made you famous nearly forty years ago.

My son has been born too late. Aged 16, he yearns to be growing up in 1977 during punk's brief hey-day: a couple of weeks ago he went with friends to see Stiff Little Fingers, a band I saw play in Nottingham over thirty years ago, but who are still apparently doing the rounds, paying the mortgage. He is dissatisfied with pop music now. "It almost seems", he said, "as if it's like it was before punk, and we're just waiting now for punk to come and sweep it all away".

There's a moral here, but I'm not sure what it is. Listening to something that was new thirty years ago is a funny way of coping with the staleness of now. And if something comes to sweep it all away, it won't be punk, because that's already happened.

And even if it is swept away, don't imagine that's the end - it might well come creeping back one day, a bit older and fatter, playing live somewhere at a medium-sized venue near you.

More red noses

2011-04-07T01:08:00.000-07:00

Policy madness has spread from Red Nose Day to the Coalition government. Hot on the heels of Comic Relief's wilful blind-eye turned to the damage done to Kenyan health-care by the country's doctors' exodus abroad - to the UK, amongst other places - comes news that David Cameron has given a couple of hundred million quid to Pakistan for new schools.

The obvious question here is whether the government should be giving money for schools to another country at a time when it is making cutbacks in its own education programme; Cameron would perhaps say that he needed to mend fences after his remarks to the effect that Pakistan has faced both ways when it comes to terrorism (a statement as undiplomatic as it was true); he might also point out that educating young Pakistanis away from the madrassas might lessen the chances of their turning to extremism (although our home-grown terrorists seem to be thriving amidst the further educational opportunities provided by Britain's universities); whatever, I doubt that a cost-benefit analysis has been done.

The other less obvious point relates to my recent Comic Relief post. A Pakistani MP I heard interviewed on the radio defended Cameron's gift, as you might expect. The interviewer, Aasma Mir, pressed the MP on why Pakistan couldn't pay for schools itself - after all it was a country with a lot of very rich people, in which corruption was rife and tax evasion routine; Mir might have added that it was a country which could afford a nuclear weapons programme. The MP blustered. What, Mir, asked, was Pakistan's top rate of tax? Amidst more bluster came the answer: 35%.

So there you have it. Britain, a country with a marginal tax rate of 50%, presently cutting its education programme, is funding schools in Pakistan, a country with a marginal rate of 35%.

Just as it might be better for the UK to train its own doctors and encourage Kenyans to practice medicine at home, perhaps it might be better for the UK to show Pakistan how to set up a functioning tax system.

effing Ferguson

2011-04-04T02:56:00.000-07:00

Wayne Rooney's "foul-mouthed" (copyright tabloids everywhere) outburst to Sky's cameras on Saturday was no doubt wrong and reprehensible. Despite my Man U sympathies I have never found Rooney a likeable character - typical Scouser actually, were it not for the fact that he has never to my knowledge ever said anything remotely charming or funny.

Inevitably the press are calling for his public evisceration. But who should do the punishing? The FA? The Premier League? Hardly. Bad language is used daily in professional football to, about and in front of referees, by both players and fans alike. As with many other aspects of a game in which cheating is rife, the authorities know perfectly well what is wrong and do absolutely nothing to prevent it. For them to punish Rooney would be the grossest hypocrisy. For all its ritualised violence, rugby does the discipline job much better.

Meanwhile, United march on towards a record 19th title. On Saturday their comeback had the mark of champions; their closest rivals Arsenal on the other hand, away at Blackburn, played like eunuchs. If Ferguson's team is successful again, he will truly have fulfilled the promise, made all those years ago, to "knock Liverpool off their perch".

OK, what he actually said was, "knock Liverpool off their fucking perch". So perhaps Ferguson isn't the man to punish Rooney either.

the schlock of the new

2011-04-04T01:17:00.000-07:00

Two recent visits to the Opera - one Opera North, the other at the RNCM - have had me thinking about novelty in art. Samuel Barber's Vanessa is a late-romantic melodrama in which the eponymous heroine, having waited twenty years for her lover to return, finds herself competing with her niece for the attentions of his son. Mieczyslaw Weinberg's The Portrait, on the other hand, concerns a struggling artist who compromises himself for fame and fortune, with disastrous results; Weinberg, a friend of Shostakovitch, is enjoying a resurgence, although on the face of it it's hard to see why - his opera I thought badly structured and paced, the music of uneven quality.

The two pieces had one thing firmly in common. They both sounded dated. Of course the Barber, first produced in the early 50s, was firmly out of step even at the time - a lush mixture of Strauss and Berg, with even some Puccinian flourishes at the emotional climaxes. But the Weinberg, much more aggressive and modernist in tone, had suffered just as much: I found myself thinking, "Ah yes. This kind of musical language", and without much pleasure.

The BBC producer John Walters once said that he ceased to be working class the first time he tasted an avocado. Thus the transforming power of novelty. But what did Walters think the second time he tasted one? Or the third? There's an old story of an 18th century gent showing a friend round his newly landscaped grounds. "The theme of my garden, sir," he says, "is one of surprise". His friend, a wag, replies, "But what, sir, is the theme the second time one walks around it?"

For the new is only new once. When it is no longer new, we are left with a thing's inherent qualities, be they avocado or opera. I didn't enjoy the Weinberg much. Once I might have been knocked backwards by its novel savagery. But now the music-loving public has heard a fair bit of this stuff. Shostakovitch did it better (and even Shostakovitch wrote some dross). The Barber, for all the muddiness of its plotting, I enjoyed a lot more. For my taste, it is over written and over-orchestrated, but Barber has a compassion for his characters (which I am afraid I find hard to detect in Britten) and an ability to write memorable music which suits their predicament. I can still hum some of the tunes 36 hours later.

Bernard Keeffe, my old conducting teacher, used to say that what makes music last is the quality of the invention. Whilst this is undoubtedly true, I prefer a more utilitarian explanation. Music lasts if people will keep on paying to hear it. Newness and originality are not on their own enough. On this score, dated or not, Barber's music will survive; but Weinberg should enjoy his day in the sun.

myth busting #4

2011-03-29T00:51:00.000-07:00

It's time we had another one of these.

The Coalition is taking a reckless gamble with the economy.

Like many myths, today's contains an element of truth; but it is an incomplete part of a larger picture, and the larger picture renders it misleading.

Yes, cutting spending at a time when the economy is emerging from recession is a gamble. To be clear, the coalition risks a double-dip recession if taking demand out of the economy makes it start shrinking again. But what about the alternative? Labour's policy - smaller cuts, and slower - involves a different kind of gamble, namely that the gilt markets will be sufficiently convinced that we're serious about reducing the deficit to carry on lending us the money, at rates we can afford, or at all.

There are two reasons for thinking that the Coalition's gamble is in fact much less reckless than Labour's. The first is that the consequences of losing the gamble are much worse if we don't cut fast enough. Losing the confidence of the gilt markets will either drive us into the arms of the IMF, in which case you will see cuts which make Osborne's efforts resemble the proverbial vicarage tea party, or, worse, will force the UK to default on its debts: if that happens we will be living within our means not in four years or ten, but now, today. Because no-one will lend to us any more. Then the money truly will have run out.

But it's not just that the consequences of Labour's gamble failing are worse. The mechanism on which they are gambling is so much more febrile. For Labour proposes gambling on the patience of the gilt markets. A market is a human construct, dependent on human qualities, ruled by greed at the top and fear at the bottom. A market can change its mind twice in the same afternoon. And in this case it is a market that was making anxious noises about Britain's credit rating more than a year ago.

The coalition on the other hand is gambling on something slow moving and to some extent quantifiable, namely the ability of the economy to grow its way out of recession at the same time as a certain amount of demand is being withdrawn in spending cuts. It's not just that this is a more impersonal mechanism than the excitable gilt market: it is also a mechanism that can to some extent be measured and tweaked as it operates - by altering tax rates for example or, in a last resort, by more quantatitive easing.

Although I have no idea whether George Osborne has got it right, or whether we'd be better off in the hands of Ed "no cuts are necessary" Balls, for these reasons, given the choice of where to put my money, I'd bet the farm on the Coalition any day.

Economics is not an exact science. As Irwin Stelzer said, "Decimal points were invented to show that economic forecasters have a sense of humour". So whatever we do now is a gamble.

institutionally rubbish #2

2011-03-25T01:27:00.000-07:00

A lot of hot air in the paper yesterday marking the 10th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence's death at the hands of racist thugs. Was the Met Police force still "institutionally racist", as the Macpherson report had it?

In a former life I used to be a solicitor in East London, working with largely black clients, in and out of its police stations in the early hours of the morning, dealing with mostly white police officers. Yes, many of them were racist; but that was not because the institution was racist - in fact it had tried strenously at management level to do the right thing - it was because Met police officers tended to come from lower middle or working class backgrounds, often outside London, and thus tended to be from the social class most likely to be overtly racist and to have least personal experience of living and working alongside black people. Moreover, because the areas in which they worked were largely black, most of the criminals were black too. So it's not hard to see how the black = criminal equation grew up in the minds of these officers. Not that that's any excuse, mind.

I thought of this today because an independent report has looked into the death of Stuart Lubbock in Michael Barrymore's swimming pool. And guess what? It says that the police failed to secure the site and failed to secure crucial items which might have been used to assault Lubbock and which later "disappeared". In all, six complaints by Lubbock's father were upheld.

For anyone used to seeing the way the police work from the inside, the real lesson of both these cases is that the police are very often mediocre at what they do. The Met were probably never institutionally racist, but they were certainly institutionally rubbish.

PS This post was originally put up in February 2009. I've posted it again in its entirety because of news yesterday that the Met have had to apologise for failing to nick the rapist and robber Delroy Grant, aka the Night Stalker, on one of many previous opportunities. After the most egregious lapse - witness sees Grant's car leaving crime scene, Grant's wife confirms that it's his, lead then not followed up - Grant is estimated to have committed over 140 further offences.

Red noses all round

2011-03-22T06:22:00.000-07:00

Like most people, I have deeply equivocal feelings about giving to beggars. Fork out, and you're funding someone's drug habit; keep your hands in your pockets and you're off to hell via the entrance marked "Scrooge". So it was that last Friday I sat down with my children to watch Children in Need with the usual sensation of unease.

In between the segments where celebs were mildly / very / not at all funny, simultaneously soothing their consciences and boosting their careers (the apotheosis of the win/win situation), were heart-rending films of terribly poor people, mostly in Kenya, living in shocking circumstances. David Tennant reported from a hospital where one young doctor, bespectacled and earnest, laboured in inadequate conditions to treat a never-ending stream of anxious parents bearing glassy-eyed infants, most in the final toils of malarial infection. "Give a fiver", said Tennant. "Give a tenner. Buy mosquito nets. Buy malaria testing kits".

Graham Greene once said that every artist's heart contains a sliver of ice, and, aware of the perhaps justified emotional manipulation going on, I said aloud, "Where are all the old Kenyan doctors? Why is it you only see the young ones in these programmes?" And then amidst a horrified silence, "Probably working in the NHS, that's where".

When I repeated this remark around the dinner-table with friends the following night there was an audible intake of breath. I had no idea whether it was true or not, which was clearly reckless. But I do now. If you google "kenyan doctors in uk" the first thing that comes up is an article published on the Bio Med Central website by some World Health Organisation academics, which confirms extensive migration of Kenyan doctors, not just to the UK, where about 70 seem to be working, but to other western countries as well.

"Our study", says the conclusion, "estimated the economic loss incurred by Kenya as a result of emigration of one doctor to be about US$ 517,931 and one nurse to be US$ 338,868. However, we suspect that the magnitude of the socioeconomic loss due to brain drain is likely to be even larger than our estimates.... Developed countries continue to deprive Kenya of millions of dollars worth of invaluable investments made in the production of health workers.... Economic arguments notwithstanding, ultimately the price of emigration of human resources for health from Kenya to developed nations is paid in unnecessary debility, morbidity, human suffering and premature death among Kenyan people. This unacceptable situation should be urgently reversed..."

No kidding.

African poverty is attributable to a variety of political factors, including past and present interference by the West, the lack of effective democratic institutions, the lack of fair trade, and a widespread culture of corruption. It is arguable that giving money on Red Nose Day does no more than spread a small quantity of sticking plaster over the gaping wounds.

The people from Comic Relief would no doubt say, "Fair enough; but we are putting the politics on one side; we aren't interested in that bit of it; we are only interested in helping individuals whose plight is desperate". To which I would say, "OK, but by applying the sticking plaster you are helping to sustain a fiction, which is that Africa's problems can be made alright if we in the West give a tenner here and there. But that is untrue. At root, Africa's problems are political. Migration of skilled medical staff is a political issue. How can you ignore it when it's right under your noses? In your own flipping film?"

It may be a small point amidst the general misery, but as far as I know there is no shortage of British people who would quite like to be doctors. Why then do we have to import them?

Towards the end of the evening we gave Comic Relief £50. Better to be a mug than be mean. But I still feel a mug.

walton #1

2011-03-14T01:54:00.000-07:00

The Irish composer conductor Hamilton Harty would have been surprised to discover that, 70 years after his death, he is best remembered not for his own pieces, but for an arrangement he made of bits of Handel's Water Music. The original suites are long, fragmentary and scored for a small orchestra of string section plus a few winds and brass, so Harty made an arrangement of his favourite bits for full symphony orchestra (minus trombones) lasting 16 minutes. It suited professional orchestras of the day, short, full of good tunes, and is still often played now; in fact we performed it at Halifax last night.

Another minor claim to fame of Harty's is that in the mid-thirties he gave the first performance of William Walton's Symphony No 1. Actually Harty gave, paradoxically, two first performances, one with the LSO of the first three movements, when Walton had struggled for the inspiration needed to complete the work, and the second with the Halle when he had finished the job. At Halifax we were unaware of the Harty connection when programming both the Handel and Walton for last night's concert.

There was another poignant connection for me - HSO's first trombonist, Frank Mathison, played bass trombone on the record of Walton 1 I had as a teenager, played by the LSO under Previn. I liked the piece then, for its grim Sibelian severity, swept aside by the exuberant finale, but hadn't heard it for years - it isn't often played - and was curious to rediscover it; and to rediscover whether I liked it.

On the whole, no.

The musical world of the 1930s was a divided one. From Europe, and from Vienna in particular, came new sounds and structures which alienated as many as they attracted. For the Anglo-Saxon wing (remember that America is now an important part of this equation) there was one composer who stood as an antidote to the new cacophony - Sibelius. By any standards the Finn was a great composer, and, vitally, he showed it was still possible to write great music in C major. In Britain critics and composers looked to Sibelius for inspiration. The final chapter of Constant Lambert's wonderful book Music Ho!, published in 1934, is entitled Sibelius and the music of the future; as late as 1944 Vaughan Williams dedicated the 5th Symphony to Sibelius. Until Benjamin Britten's star burst onto the London musical scene in the late 30s, British music-making set its face against developments in Central Europe, and looked north.

If it's not surprising that the young Walton, embarking on his first symphony, should look to Sibelius for his model, it is surprising that he should borrow so wholeheartedly. It's not just the long pedal points, the harmonic tics (for example the major chord IV in minor key passages) or the brass chords emerging from the orchestral texture to end up dominating it; Walton steals whole melodic ideas, from the Lemminkainen Legends amongst others, but most egregiously from the Fourth Symphony (a tune in tritones in the scherzo, but also the unison string notes which close the Fourth's slow movement, and which Walton uses to open and close his own slow movement: so slavish is the copying that Walton even uses the same pitch, C sharp).

Does any of this matter? Perhaps not - there's a lot of Haydn in Mozart, for example, and a lot of Beethoven in Brahms. But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, can anyone say they really enjoy hearing one person flatter another? The imitation is so sincere, particularly in the first movement, that Walton's own musical personality is very largely effaced, emerging strongly again only in the finale. Moreover, it is only Sibelius's outward manner that Walton is aping. He shows no taste for or understanding of the truly distinctive features of the Finnish master's style, nothing of his economy, or capacity for transforming and connecting musical ideas. Instead we get big brassy fanfares and interminable ostinati, taken from Sibelius and fed steroids, but without any understanding that in Sibelius these are merely external manifestations of a process, not the process itself.

I have conducted some Bruckner, a composer notorious for rambling and semi-coherent structures, and felt that by the time the concert arrived I had got to grips with the direction of the music. With Walton 1 I was no wiser after weeks of rehearsal - particularly in the first and second movements.

There are four problems. The first is that Walton does not know how to write a climax; or rather he does not know how to use a climax. By definition, a climax is a point set apart from surrounding events; by definition these surrounding events must be of a different character. In music you show these differences by technical means - contrasts of volume and orchestration, for example - and by the character of the music itself. But Walton bangs on, particularly at the end of the first movement, with almost permanent orchestral tutti, the high points emerging rather like Dartmoor tors, pimples on a drab landscape, rather than mighty alps, amidst a musical affect of near-continuous angst. The effect is wearing.

Secondly, at nigh-on forty five minutes the symphony is simply too long. Again, the first and second movements are the chief culprits. At the start of the piece Walton says nothing after the first ten minutes that he hasn't said already in the first ten minutes. So why carry on? The scherzo, a dancing gremlin of a movement, does its stop-start, bang-crash, pp / ff business (very much derived from the scherzo of Sibelius 1) for five minutes or so; and then just carries on doing the same thing for a few minutes more. There is no emotional or psychological conclusion or development towards the end - for all its jittery jumpiness, after a while it is just boring.

Thirdly - and this is perhaps another aspect of the same fault - Walton has no idea how to do pacing, that most elusive of the musical arts; in other words how quickly to make the music move on from one passage or area of feeling to another, the instinctive dramatic grasp of when the listener will have heard enough of a particular section and want to continue to the next, when to make the music stop, when to make the flow continuous so the listener is caught up in its momentum. In part this is because the first three movements of the symphony always inhabit pretty much the same area of feeling; so how can he move on when the music is largely always saying the same thing? But within this continuous mood there are differing areas of tempo, and the first movement spends too much of the middle five minutes marooned in a tasteful angst-ridden torpor; the pace quickens for a couple of pages, then - and my heart sank every time we played it - back comes the second subject, slower, a wide-intervalled tune, usually in the horns - and at a stroke the momentum is gone again.

Lastly, orchestration. There is a moment, towards the end of the scherzo, where Walton has made up his mind that, having said all he has to say in this movement, he is going to say a bit more of it anyway; here a simple rhythmic idea is bounced between the woodwind and the strings. The ear greets this easy juxtaposition with a sigh of relief. For once Walton has written a simple open texture, devoid of doubled melodic lines, without complex divisi strings, without rampaging brass. But this is a rare moment, for I have never conducted a piece so over-orchestrated, so determined to be complex when being too simple would have been better (and to be sometimes simple and sometimes complex would have been better still). There are reams and reams of notes in this symphony which could simply have been erased. No one seems to have told Walton that sometimes it is better to withhold - because by witholding something its reintroduction is itself an effective musical ploy. If you want a climax, work out where that climax is going to be, then distribute your musical forces so that they have maximum impact at the moments when you need them; then start taking them away again.

All of which brings us back to Hamilton Harty. His Water Music arrangement is wildly anachronistic in this day and age; it bears little relation to Handel's original, and even given the early 20th century full-orchestra premise, there are some bizarre moments capable of making the modern musician gape with appalled wonder. And yet here was a man who knew how the orchestra works, and understood the psychology of the listener. The textures are spare and clear; the different orchestral groups are used for contrast rather than relentlessly mixed. The trumpets are cunningly held back to the last movement so their introduction comes as a thrilling fillip. You might even call the orchestration Sibelian. No wonder people still want to play it.

As for Walton, for all its pacing problems, in the last movement the composer does at last cast off his Sibelian shackles, with some glorious brass writing, a few poignant pages of tenderness amid the mayhem, and an over-the-top conclusion complete with ringing tam tam and cymbals.

Perhaps after the first first performance Hamilton Harty had a word with him.

liberal intervention in Libya

2011-03-07T02:49:00.000-08:00

Until recently it had all gone rather quiet on the liberal intervention front. True, our gallant lads were still coming home in body bags from Afghanistan, but the issue of what we're doing there hasn't cropped up in any saloon bar conversation I've heard; Iraq rumbles on with occasional reports of a car bombing here, a victory for democracy there; Kosovo has gone quiet; can anyone remember exactly what we did in Somalia? Was it Somalia?

But now comes the Jasmine Revolution. In North Africa, governments have been swept from power in Tunisia and Egypt, and rebels in Libya have decided that they might as well have a go too. Of course in Tunisia and Egypt it was easy for the West - those in charge had just enough grip on reality to realise the game was up. Not so in Libya however, where Gaddafi is clearly mad enough (and then some) to imagine that the people against him are drug fiends or Al Qaeda stooges. Gaddafi is fighting back. So what should the West do?

I am posting this at a time when it's far from clear what the outcome will be (it seems more honourable than waiting to see who wins, and then deciding what you think). It's been fascinating to read the British papers in the last couple of weeks. The Left, adhering to its view that intervention in Iraq was a disaster, is on the whole against it in Libya, but is enjoying a bit of hand-wringing over what Gaddafi will do to his opponents if the coup fails. The Right has never had much time for arabs, and is sceptical about the equation arabs + islam + democracy = happiness. Moreover, they say, we couldn't afford to do anything even if we wanted to - we don't have the money, and defence cuts together with our other commitments (see Afghanistan above) mean that we don't have the manpower or materiel. Best let Johnny Foreigner get on with it.

A plague on both their houses. There is something we could do, if not on our own then with other nations. We could enforce a no-fly zone over the east of Libya, which would prevent Gaddafi's air force bombing his own citizens, or bombing the ammunition dumps which might provide his citizens with the means of overcoming him. We could even, if we wanted, bomb the living daylights out of Gaddafi's bits of Tripoli. After all, it worked with Slobodan Milosevic. We could in other words decide that this is the tipping point for Gaddafi, and with one or two firm shoves consign him to the dustbin of history.

But we probably won't. Why? Firstly, because the Americans don't want to get involved: President Obama talks the talk of freedom, but is less interested in walking the walk required to get there. Secondly, because getting involved would require competence and resolve from Messrs. Cameron and Hague, who have, on the contrary exhibited all the resolution of Hamlet's jellyfish siblings. They floated the idea of a no-fly zone in public, but were firmly slapped down by the US and have gone quiet since. Thirdly, the UN would never sanction it.

As well as the financial, legal and diplomatic considerations, there's something else. After Bush and Blair sanctioned the invasion of Iraq, they faced a tsunami of criticism, ranging from electoral hostility to threats of war crimes prosecution via serial public inquiries, criticism from people who were less interested in the opportunity for democracy the invasion presented to Iraqis and more interested in getting after political leaders they disliked. If you were leader of a Western country now, would you want that kind of hassle? 24 hour police guard? Indefinite trip to the Hague ten years down the line? I know I wouldn't.

So if Western countries are physically exhausted by the financial, legal and diplomatic fall-out from Iraq, they are also facing a kind of moral exhaustion. Our politicians would rather do nothing than get involved; and that is because we too are happy for them to do nothing. I hope Col Gaddafi doesn't win. But I fear he might.

PS The BBC's lunchtime news reported that rebels have retreated from the town of Bin Jawad and have fallen back on the oil terminal of Ras Lanuf. John Simpson has reported that "There has been quite a lot of bombardment here over the past couple of hours". Good old Libyan air force. The BBC's website now reports that rebels are now "fleeing" Ras Lanuf as well.

PPS Events have rather moved on since I wrote this post, and having made the schoolboy error of predicting what was going to happen in excessively concrete terms, I am now going to wait until the dust settles a bit before writing about how wrong I was.

AV - 2nd past the post?

2011-02-16T00:56:00.000-08:00

And so the juggernaut gets under way. On 5 May Britain will vote whether to adopt AV for Westminster elections. As ever, a certain drowsy numbness pains my sense (Keats? Can't bother to look it up, I'm afraid) when confronted with the need to master this kind of issue. How much time d'you have to put in before you can justify making the trek to the polling station? How is it the intellectual faculties required can still be demanded of the middle-aged, faculties last given a gallop at the towering fence marked "quadratic equations", and ever since then immured in a darkened stable?

OK. I confess. I actually have thought about AV a bit, and here is my gift to the No campaign.

If AV means anything, it means that the candidate with the second largest number of 1st preference votes can win. This happens because if the "winner" gets less than 50%, 2nd preference votes are taken into account as well. And they are given the same weight as 1st preferences.

Why does this matter? Because the likelihood is that people will have put a cross by their 1st preference candidate with a great deal more enthusiasm than for their 2nd preference candidate. To put it another way, why should my vote for the candidate I really wanted to win count for no more than your vote for the candidate you could just about tolerate?

In some cases 3rd, 4th and 5th preferences will be taken into account too. Here it's even worse. Here my 4th preference vote for a candidate I wouldn't touch with a bargepole counts just as much as yours for the candidate you really wanted.

There are a number of other arguments against AV. The counting arrangements will be more expensive. The results will be more susceptible to delay. The Lib Dems will probably do better and a hung parliament will be more likely. Of these, the possibility of not liking the result seems to be the weakest. But the strongest is the sheer unfairness of the process set out above.

Enthusiasts for AV say that the public is crying out for electoral change, and that it's necessary for rejuvenating faith in the political process. Really? Seems to me that what destroys faith in politics is politicians relying on spin, refusing to give straight answers, fiddling their expenses, saying one thing in opposition and doing another in office, preferring lies the public will swallow to hard truths, and putting short term electoral gain ahead of long term benefit to the UK. These are the things destroying faith in politics, not the electoral system.

Still confused? OK. Here's a much easier test. Which side are the Luvvies on? You can save yourself a lot of effort in these situations by simply voting against the people with most Luvvies on board. Because they are almost certainly wrong.

The No to AV campaign have a mixture of politicians from Right and Left, but no one beautiful.

But the Yes campaign! John Cleese, Joanna Lumley, Eddie Izzard and Stephen Fry! And Helena Bonham Carter! And Colin Firth!

That clinches it. AV = 2nd past the post. You read it here first.

Steve Coogan and the Mexicans

2011-02-06T10:34:00.000-08:00

"Court bans man with low IQ from having sex", read the headline on the Torygraph's website.

Afraid of what this might portend for my marriage, I clicked instead on a story about the Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond, who had uttered the following on a recent show: "Mexican cars", said the Hamster, "are just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight, leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus, with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat".

This laboured piece of invective has provoked an angry reaction from, amongst others, the comedian Steve Coogan. Writing in the Observer, Coogan laid into this "casual racism" and lambasted the BBC as "pitiful" for defending it.

Lacking the required interest in cars, I am not a Top Gear fan; but there is something wrong here and it is not necessarily Richard Hammond.

Firstly, is it racist to say what he did about Mexicans? The overwhelming majority of people in Britain - and in particular those who inhabit media-land - have long got over the idea that a person with a certain skin colour or width of nose is going to have certain behavioural characteristics (penchant for ponchos, perhaps). So it seems unlikely to me that Hammond was making a racial point; I'd be willing to bet that some of his best friends are black. Much more likely that Hammond was making a cultural one; and it doesn't seem to me wrong to criticise or lampoon someone else's culture. In parts of Muslim North Africa, for example, forced clitirodectomy of young girls is compulsory. If we are free to deplore this choice cultural practice, surely we should be free to criticise any other?

In his Observer article Steve Coogan unwittingly acknowledges this. He cites the BBC apology to the Mexican ambassador, which compared Hammond's remarks with "the more benign rivalry that exists between European nations (ah, those arrogant French, over-organised Germans)", and deplores it for "neatly sidestepp(ing) one hugely important fact – ethnicity. All the examples it uses to legitimise this hateful rubbish are relatively prosperous countries full of white people."

But Coogan has driven coach and horses through his own argument. If he can accept that remarks about white people might have been legitimate comments on a country's culture, why does he automatically assume that similar comments about the inhabitants of Mexico must be racist? Would it have been OK to poke fun at the food and clothing of white Mexicans? And if so, what difference does skin colour make? It begins to look as if it is Coogan who is making race matter here, not Hammond or the BBC.

To be clear, I'm sure Hammond's remarks were offensive. And? There is no right not to be offended. Moreover, in a properly functioning democratic society, the freedom to criticise or make fun of someone else's habits, is not just desirable but essential. That's how we stop, say, forced clitirodectomy happening here. On this occasion Top Gear's biggest crime was just not being very funny.

Sure, the programme is often crass and pleased with itself, but for every Top Gear there are hundreds of TV shows which are so bland that, far from holding the ring fairly between competing opinions, they actively promote a PC view of the world which is of itself an opinion. In this context Top Gear strikes a rare note of authenticity and freedom. That's why so many people like it.

A final note about Steve Coogan. Mexico is mired in corruption, lawlessness and violence because of the activities of the drug cartels. These cartels thrive and prosper because Mexico is the main conduit for illegal drugs into the USA over the border to the North. No doubt many imported drugs are taken by deadbeats, seeking to inject some excitement into their mean existence. But many are also taken by celebrities like Mr Coogan, seeking to inject some excitement into, er, their pampered and self-indulgent lives.

I said like Mr Coogan, but actually I meant including Mr Coogan. For if you google "Steve Coogan cocaine" you will find a variety of news stories (including some on his own website) detailing the great man's use of the drug. These range from hotel room sessions with lapdancers to binges with Hollywood actor Owen Wilson. Even Courtney Love, veteran of a relationship with Kurt Cobain (found dead with grammes of heroin to hand) feels moved to tell a magazine, "I tried to warn Owen (about Coogan). I tried to warn his friends. I hope from the bottom of my heart that Owen stays the hell away from that guy".

In doing his bit to ensure there's plenty of demand for the drug cartels' wares, Coogan is in no position to pontificate about doing right by Mexicans. Comically unaware of the abyss of hypocrisy yawning beneath him, he writes in the Observer, "I can tell you from my own experience, living in the US, Mexicans work themselves to the bone doing all the dirty thankless jobs that the white middle-class natives won't do." Like polishing the glass tables after you've been snorting off them, Steve?

"Court bans man with low IQ from having sex", read the Telegraph headline. If I were Coogan I'd be looking over my shoulder.

yet more sexism in the workplace ....

2011-01-27T01:19:00.000-08:00

I'm not at all surprised that football pundit Andy Gray was sacked for inviting a female colleague, Charlotte Jackson, to stick her hand down his trousers to adjust his microphone. My sympathy for him is limited. So is my sympathy for Ms Jackson. Did she get the job because she knew lots about football? Or could it have been because she was blonde and sexy?

No-one deserves to be spoken to like Andy Gray spoke to Charlotte Jackson; but perhaps she has less right to complain than she would have if she hadn't accepted substantial sums of money for appearing thus to readers of Loaded magazine:

Actually Ms Jackson hasn't complained at all, which is greatly to her credit. Perhaps she senses the weakness of her position.

But what about Richard Keys? All of his published utterances make him sound like a very unattractive personality. And yet. Being sexist is one of life's opinion options. It certainly isn't confined to Mr Keys, and it isn't confined to men either - has anyone watched Loose Women recently? And just as I am appalled at Gray and Keys's sexism, I have absolutely no doubt that I have opinions which a lot of other people find offensive. Should I lose my job for uttering them?

Being a grown up means being willing to mix with other people you don't agree with and don't like. That's true for anyone whose work and leisure activities bring them into contact with others. Seeing the self-righteous monstering inflicted on Mr Keys by the media generally and by Jane Martinson and Tanya Gold in particular in this morning's Guardian, the faintest stirrings of sympathy for Keys and dislike for those standing over him administering the kicking begin to arise.

Here's Jane Martinson -

If these remarks go some way towards changing behind-closed-doors behaviour, we can all claim a victory.

And here's Gold -

It will no longer be possible to casually spout your prejudice at work and feel secure.

Yes, Gold thinks that's a good thing. And Martinson wants your behind-closed-doors behaviour to change. If she doesn't like what she thinks you're doing.

The line between doing what Gray did and doing what Keys did is a fine one; but it's there, just. One person's prejudice is another person's opinion. And the day when having the "wrong" opinions gets you the sack is a bad day, not a good one.

lucky Miriam O'Reilly

2011-01-12T01:17:00.000-08:00

So Miriam O'Reilly won her case against the BBC for age discrimination. Good for her. Obviously it's wrong for people in her sort of job to be sacked for being too old.

But was that really why she was sacked? I found myself thinking this morning about good old Robin Day. The bow-tied curmudgeon got into a lot of hot water once for suggesting that Anna Ford, pulchritudinous 70s newsreader, had only got her job because men wanted to sleep with her. The spirit of the age was against Day, and he was duly shouted down, but I suspect that he was right.

That's not to say that Ms Ford was incompetent; far from it. But perhaps she got the job because, of all the outstanding candidates for it, she was the sexiest. And this is TV after all. Perish the thought, it might even be the case that one of the other applicants - someone else a bit less heavenly looking - could have done it better.

What's this got to do with Miriam O'Reilly? I have never watched Countryfile (although my wife, an insomniac, tells me that she was a dreary and hectoring presenter on Farming Today), but judging from the pictures in the paper this morning, she must once have been a bit of a looker. And the thought did cross my mind that perhaps a few years ago Ms O'Reilly got the job rather than anyone else because she was nice-looking; and that complaining about losing it when she was no longer quite so nice-looking might be a bit rich.

This morning Ms O'Reilly will be coasting downhill with the wind of bien-pensant opinion in her sails and a few extra quid in the bank; but I think she lived by the sword and died by it. Lucky Ms O'Reilly.

Paying for Mr Pappano

2010-12-16T00:36:00.001-08:00

In the wake of Arts Council cuts, it was no surprise to read press reports the other day that the BBC is willing to talk to other beleaguered arts bodies about orchestral funding. Whilst inherently sympathetic to their plight, I was reminded of another story last week about the salary earned by Antonio Pappano, MD at Covent Garden. I forget the exact figure commanded by Mr Pappano, but the sum which has stuck in my mind is £690,000. Now Pappano is no doubt a fine musician, but is he really worth the best part of £700k? To put it another way, could another musician, perhaps equally fine, have been found to do the job for, oh I don't know, £500k? £300k? Might not Pappano himself have been prepared to do the job for a lower sum?

For my work on the day of a concert an amateur orchestra generally pays me about £250 (yes, that's £250, not£250k). I am not suggesting that I could do as good a job as Mr Pappano (although I'd be willing to give it a shot), but one thing I have learned since I started conducting is that there are, even in amateur music circles, an awful lot of very fine conductors out there. And that's just in NW England. The idea that there is only a small group of people in the world who are capable of leading a top opera company (or a professional symphony orchestra, whose conductors are paid comparable sums), and that salaries like Mr Pappano's have to be awarded to secure their services, is pure tosh. The reality is that in every country there are dozens and dozens of terrific musicians who would do the job for less. Some of them would do it for next to nothing. If I did not have to eat, I would organise, rehearse and conduct great music free of charge. In fact if I had to, I would crawl over broken glass to do it. The experience is its own reward.

Why does any of this matter? Surely it's up to the ROH to decide how much it pays its Music Director? Well no. Firstly, Pappano's salary is obscene when compared with the wages of the players, which will be less than a tenth of the amount (extras at one of Manchester's professional orchestras are paid about £100 per day, and I believe it's among the most generous). Secondly, there's something rather horrible about anyone earning this kind of money when many ordinary people, who couldn't afford to go to the Royal Opera even during the good times, are losing their jobs.

And thirdly, the ROH receives public money. Yes, you and I are paying taxes in order to help the Royal Opera pay Mr Pappano £690k p.a. That makes me feel quite bad.

Should any organisation which has so little idea how to run a tight financial ship that it pays its chief the best part of a million quid a year really be getting a penny from the public purse?

in the shadow of the wizard

2010-11-08T01:31:00.000-08:00

During the interval of a concert on Saturday, my mother came across a crusty old battleaxe she knows from her weekly French class. This lady, starchy, faintly condescending, played the fiddle professionally in various London orchestras thirty or forty years ago. They agreed that it was a fine concert - they'd just heard a performance of Mozart's magisterial Sinfonia Concertante in E flat K364 by the Athenean Ensemble - and after praising the soloists, Jonathan Martindale and Lucy Nolan, my mother's friend singled out the conductor, who had apparently done a fine job too. For Mum, fifty odd years of disappointment fell away in a moment, all the effort and sacrifice of parenthood made worthwhile by the open goal now facing her. "Actually, he's my son", she said.

I have conducted the Sinfonia Concertante once before, in a half-empty Victoria Theatre in Halifax. But here in Didsbury every seat in the church was taken, and there were people standing at the back; at the end, a kind of roar went up from the audience, the sort of response you very rarely get at a classical concert, and one I don't think I've ever heard whilst conducting (and I've done some rabble rousing stuff, from Bruckner to John Williams and back via the Dambusters March). What an exceptional piece K.364 is, and what a privilege for me, Lucy, Jonathan and the players, to walk, for the half an hour it took to play it, in the long shadow of the Salzburg wizard.

Caliban's Day

2010-10-11T01:29:00.000-07:00

The biggest belly laugh in the production of Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art comes when Humphrey Carpenter, arriving to interview W.H. Auden, is mistaken by the elderly poet for a rent boy. "But I'm from the BBC", expostulates Carpenter, to general hilarity. That this sub-Terry and June bit of knockabout should be the funniest line says a good deal about the standard of the rest of Bennett's play.

Of course, technically it isn't his play, but a play which one of Bennett's characters has written entitled Caliban's Day, which we see being rehearsed backstage at the National Theatre. The dried-up Auden, a randy, unwashed intellectual bully, is visited by Benjamin Britten, an old friend from the 1930s, and in the core of the inner play the pair of them muse on art and sex (to no great effect, I thought, but that's not the point of this post). The Caliban referred to is the rent boy, who (once we gratefully realise is not going to be fellated by Auden onstage) acts as an antidote to the clipped vowels and middlebrow intellectualising of Bennett's protagonists.

Bennett wants us to like Auden - funny, rumbustious, unrepentant - and so he has to make us tolerate his use of male prostitutes. So the rent boy is not a damaged individual, a victim of childhood sexual abuse or a drug addict. He isn't even a boy. No, he's a jolly outgoing charmer in his twenties who just loves to service eminent washed-up poets whose trousers smell of urine.

I found this male version of the old tart-with-a-heart lie both creepy and repellent.

What did the critics make of it? The man from the Times wrote that Bennett's depiction of the rent boy was " an unconvincing shovelling of A Sympathetic Member of the Working Classes into these cosy proceedings, to make some point about inequality, social injustice and so forth. It’s all as woolly as a Marks & Spencer cardie." But he still gave it four stars.

My wife's theory, that Bennett is a national treasure and therefore immune to criticism, was borne out by the Telegraph - "Alan Bennett, that most cherished of national treasures, is now 75", began its five star review. The Guardian didn't mention the rent boy at all: Michael Billington gave it four stars.

I was at school with someone who ended up as a rent boy. More typical than Bennett's evasion, he was a sad individual who died of Aids before he was 30.

myth-busting # 3

2010-10-06T02:52:00.000-07:00

Although posting twice in two days risks giving the impression that I don't have enough work to do, I can't resist debunking an argument heard a few times recently, and that I suspect we're going to hear a lot more of as the cuts bite.

Here's a correspondent in the paper, one Lynne Alderson, pointing to research from France showing that that the 2009 Picasso exhibition in Aix-en-Provence "earned 62m euros of additional income for the town" against a measly investment of only 6m. So the government "should look to the long-term financial benefits of spending in the arts".

I'm as well-disposed to arts funding as the next person, but this just won't do. For starters, what would have happened to that 62m if it hadn't been spent in Aix? Would it have been kept under the mattresses of hundreds of middle-class culture-loving households the length and breadth of France? Would the bien-pensant have said to themselves, "We were going to spend this money, but because that Picasso exhibition didn't go ahead, we're now going to keep it stashed away"? Of course not. They'd have stuck it in the bank, invested it, or spent it somewhere else. So the money might not have gone to Aix, but it would have gone somewhere and someone would have made use of it.

But there's more. What if instead of spending the money on a Picasso exhibition the French government had spent it instead on, oh I don't know, something like tax breaks for Research and Development in industry? Now that wouldn't just have sucked in money from French consumers, it would ultimately have brought in money from overseas via exports.

So whilst Paris not spending 6m Euros at all would probably still have brought a 62m Euro benefit to the economy, spending 6m on something not related to the arts might have brought in a still greater benefit.

Those of us with an artistic interest to declare are not famously good with numbers: "bean-counters", we sneer at the accountants, satisfied that if they know the price of everything, we alone know its true value. Yet all the above is flippin' obvious to anyone bright enough to tie their own shoelaces, and its truly depressing to see that there are still people reliant on slip-ons and velcro amongst both the Guardian's readership and the people that edit the paper.

Not ..... not .... NOT ACACIA AVENUE!

2010-10-06T00:43:00.000-07:00

"Osborne's benefit reforms will force thousands into ....", began a Guardian headline wail yesterday. Into what, I wondered - poverty? Prostitution? Voting Tory?

Well no. It appears that changes to housing benefit rules might make some people move out of inner cities and into - cue sharp intake of breath - the suburbs.

I know. I know. The poor dears. Flood, famine, pestilence are bad; but the suburbs? Is there no limit to the beastliness of these ravening deficit-cutters?

Truly there is one destination the metropolitan media elite fears more than Gin Lane, Death Row and the good-intention-paved Road to Hell combined.

For the love of God please spare them from Acacia Avenue.

myth-busting # 2

2010-09-22T02:50:00.000-07:00

Continuing my credit-crunch guide.

2. The best way to shrink a deficit is to have people in work paying taxes.

I found this gem in an article by Jonathan Freedland in this morning's Grauniad.

It sounds plausible until you think about it. If Freedland is right and HMG spends a million on wages, the taxes it recovers and the benefits it saves will come to more than a million. So the Government should be increasing public spending rather than cutting it.

According to Freedland's logic, the more people the Government employs, the less money it will need to spend.

If only Governments the world over could grasp this simple principle, no economy need fall into recession ever again, and no Government would ever have to run a deficit.

A poster on CiF destroyed Freedland's position more pithily than I could. He wrote, "Not if their salaries are being paid from money the government has borrowed".

brassed orf

2010-09-13T06:31:00.000-07:00

Retaining an endearing capacity to surprise after nearly 20 years in the post, my wife - born Hampshire, educated Portsmouth, Oxford and Bar School, London - has recently exhibited a passionate enthusiasm for brass bands. On Saturday I volunteered to go with her to the Bridgewater for a Brass Band Gala Concert featuring Brighouse and Rastrick, Black Dyke and Fodens (Q - What is the difference between between a Concert and a Gala Concert? No, I don't know either).

Some miscellaneous impressions from a neophyte:

1. The audience was even older than the average Halle audience.

2. Judging by the repertoire, you could be forgiven for thinking that modernism had never happened. On the downside this meant that some of the repertoire was woefully unambitious and footling. On the upside, the amount of new repertoire, enthusiastically played and greeted, showed that Brass Band culture is alive and well, unashamedly directed at the enjoyment of both players and audience, and entirely free from the stifling intellectual navel-gazing that acts as a thick layer of cobweb around modern classical music. In particular, Peter Graham, Professor at Salford, has evidently written some very skilful and breathtakingly exciting band music.

3. The actual sound of the ensemble is surprisingly mellow, at least to those of us used to wincing as orchestral brass comes crashing boisterously into the room. I'd attribute this to the preponderance of tubas, both large and small: a rounded and almost woolly timbre, comforting as hot cocoa.

4. The only bandsman/woman not wearing a lurid military tunic was a percussionist with Brighouse & Rastrick, who turns out to be one Minesh Patel, a percussion teacher resident in Leicester. What a player Mr Patel was, but could the chaps (all chaps in B&R) not club together to buy him the proper outfit? But perhaps Patel needed his arms unencumbered for his unrestrained and witheringly accurate assaults on the xylophone.

5. My tastes must be getting lower and lower - a favourite moment was an arrangement of a Mario Lanza tune. "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is", wrote Noel Coward.

6. Judging by the hairdo of Aussie conductor David King, the mullet has not yet become taboo down-under. And please don't tell me he was wearing it ironically. Or, worse still, that it's making a come-back.

A right load of Kok?

2010-09-06T01:50:00.001-07:00

Another interesting night at the Proms, with Rattle and the Berlin Phil's Viennese evening. No, not Strauss and Lehar, but Wagner, Strauss R, and the Second Viennese School.

First, you can knock Rattle for some of the musical decisions he makes, but not his means of executing them - every gesture considered and to the point, even in the more complex stuff. Valery Gergiev please note: enough with your gurning and flailing already.

As for the repertoire, I am afraid that I am no friend to the Second Viennese School. Music is meant to be enjoyed, not admired, and I just don't like listening to this music enough. I can see that it's very well done for what it is (and Berg in particular was clearly a supremely talented musician); I imagine it would be fun to conduct, and perhaps fun to play. But to listen to I find it ugly, restless and cold.

Schoenberg and his disciples would no doubt have told you they were broadening music's expressive range, and in some of Berg's work that's true (the Violin Concerto; but I can't think of anything else). What they were really doing, however, was chucking the baby out with the bathwater - there's more emotional and psychological contrast in Mozart's simple major and minor triads than than in this music. By excluding tonality more or less completely (and later on by excluding regular rhythm), it painted itself into a very small corner indeed.

Some of the quieter episodes have a kind of chilly beauty, but aside from this what else is there to enjoy? The routine crunching dissonances? Not for me. There is a desperate narrowness of affect; I find the music lacks breadth and contrast, the ability to present the listener with a variety of emotional and psychological landscapes. Even in these early pieces serialism's tell-tale constriction was there - already the reliance on timbre as a means of imparting life and contrast. But timbre is not enough as a constructive device, and there is a meandering quality to the music that I think due to lack of harmonic direction. Harmony without poles lacks magnetism; hence the reliance of legions of 20th Century composers on texture to get them to the finishing line. Hence the ever expanding orchestras and esoteric instruments.

I've always felt too that there was little mileage in the argument that this music was a necessary response to the political times. After all, war, famine and pestilence were not new things; they have always ravaged Europe. And modernism had reared its head in the form of Mahler's Ninth Symphony and Strauss's Elektra long before the Archduke Ferdinand was shot. It was a period in which composers were finding Romanticism unsatisfactory, and looking for other means of expression: Sibelius had already used a simpler, subtler style in his 3rd Symphony (1907); the darkness of his 4th (1911) is attributed to a diagnosis of throat cancer rather than fears of war. Strauss himself put expressionism behind him with Rosenkavalier (1911), and never went back.

No, the truth is surely that the human desire for novelty in the context of what looked like a worn-out idiom was as much responsible for Berg and Webern's experimentation as anything going on in the fields of Flanders; that and a desire to scandalize the conservative Viennese bourgeousie (surely the dreariest of motivations any artist can experience).

Whatever musicologists might say, there is no prescribed correct response to the times you live in. Each of us is free to respond in the way we like. The American critic Joe Queenan once wrote that he had personally responded to the threat of nuclear annihalation by listening to more Bach. I'm with Queenan on this.

In a way the most instructive thing associated with the evening (apart from the sublime Prelude to Act I of Parsifal, which sent me scurrying to the internet to look out the score), was the interview Rattle gave to the BBC in the afternoon. In it he recounted Felix Kok's story (Kok was for many years CBSO leader under Rattle) of turning up one day in 1948 to an orchestral rehearsal in, I think, the Kingsway Hall, London. The players had no idea what they were going to play or with whom. Then the door opened and in walked Wilhelm Furtwangler and Kirsten Flagstad. The music on the stand seemed to consist of four short orchestral pieces. There was no title, and no composer's name on the handwritten parts. However Kok said that as they began to play and Ms Flagstad to sing, they knew they were in the presence of greatness; and as millions of ordinary people have since discovered, the music was by Richard Strauss, and now bears the title Four Last Songs.

emotional tourism

2010-09-03T03:33:00.000-07:00

Writing in today's Guardian, Martin Kettle bangs the drum for Rattle conducting Mahler 1 at the Proms tonight, thus calling to mind Frederick Delius's famous quote. "Now it is Sibelius", wrote Delius - this was in the 30s, I think - "and when they are tired of him it will be Mahler or Bruckner".

And lo it has come to pass. Why Mahler now? My answer would be that we live in an age of rampant individualism, and what Mahler serves up is a brilliantly realised justification of the self, with all its inward-looking narcissism. He offers listeners the sense that their lives are full of passion, drama, heroism, struggle and grief. But this is a partial truth at best, a distortion at worst. Most of life involves more quotidien activities like going round the supermarket, washing up, making sure your children have done their homework. Opportunities for glory and heartbreak are, perhaps fortunately, relatively few and far between for most of us.

Our lives are not like Mahler imagines them, and to sit and listen to one of his symphonies is to experience a form of emotional tourism. It makes us feel more important, but that shouldn't blind us to the essential falseness of the experience. I wouldn't quite go along with Aaron Copland, who compared listening to Mahler to watching a very great actor walking along the street pretending to be a great composer, but do I see what he was getting at.

This is not to say that Mahler was not an outstanding musician, nor that the 6th Symphony is not a perfectly realised piece, nor that he was a very great orchestrator (but parts of Das Lied are horribly overscored and in general Mahler leaves no pudding under-egged). It merely means that judged by the very highest standards, in contrast to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms or the Salzburg Wizard, what Mahler is saying panders to an unattractively self-centred aspect of humanity which currently dominates western cultural traditions. The essential hollowness of Mahler's vision is embarrassingly clear in the finale of the 7th (even, I would say, in the finale of the 5th). Only a virtuoso conductor can make Nos. 2 and 8 sound anything but rambling and incoherent. Virtually all of his symphonies could have been half an hour shorter without being any worse.

Sibelius has much more to say about the relationship between man and nature; he also has the gift of writing profound and subtle light music, which Mahler (and virtually everybody else) lacks. The Dane Carl Nielsen has much more to say about what it means to be a person, and how to live your life with courage and dignity. He also said it a lot more pithily, and having said it, shut up about it.

None of which means that I won't be listening tonight. It merely means that I'll be switching over every now and again to watch England -v- Bulgaria on ITV. Now that promises to be an emotional roller-coaster.

breakfast surprise

2010-06-11T04:29:00.000-07:00

I nearly choked on my cornflakes this morning when I read this (try and guess the author):

"There is nothing progressive about a government who (sic) consistently spend more than they can raise in taxation, and certainly nothing progressive that endows generations to come with the liabilities incurred by the current generation. There will need to be significant cuts in public expenditure, but there is considerable waste in public expenditure."

Any ideas? Some Tory hawk? Lord Tebbit? Roger Scruton?

Er, no. It's Lord Myners, former Labour minister. The quote concludes - " I have seen that (waste) in my own experience as a minister".

Remember him saying anything like that when he was in office?

No, I don't either.

myth-busting # 1

2010-06-09T02:39:00.000-07:00

Credit crunch myths - a guide for the Left.

1. "It was all the bankers' fault".

Because after all, no-one could have possibly predicted that when left to their own devices bankers would go for short-term gain and self-enrichment ahead of economic stability, could they? What next? Bears defecating in the woods? And the Government had no idea whatsoever that the City was parcelling up mortgage obligations and selling them on the open market; it had no idea that high-street lenders were offering 125% loan-to-value on houses, or that with so-called Lie To Buy (oh OK, Self-Certification) mortgages you could write any income you liked on the application form and no one would ever check whether it was true or not.

I'm wearied by my own irony - of course HMG knew about all these things; and did nothing about them. Why? Because the going was good, that's why. The City was booming, the High Street was thronged with shoppers, unemployment was low, house prices were buoyant (removed by one G Brown from the measure used by the Bank of England to target inflation), tax revenues were flooding into the Treasury coffers and then out again into the public sector. What was not to like? After all, the Chancellor told us he had put an end to Tory boom and bust. Where could bust possibly come from?

The Government rode the wave of debt like a surfer who can't believe there are rocks ahead. But rocks there were, and when the economy hit them Brown discovered a new variant on Keynes - borrow when the good times are rolling, and when the bad times come, borrow even more. And so the debt piles up, or at least it does as long as the gilt markets will carry on lending to us.

All the bankers fault. Yeah right.

nostalgia not what it used to be shock

2010-06-09T02:07:00.000-07:00

I should have known when, a couple of years ago, there was a minor kerfuffle in the media about the thirtieth anniversary of punk - the features, the documentaries, the grizzled veterans, the ubiquity of Billy Bragg - that following hard on its heels would come the New Romantics. And here they are: a dramatisation of Boy George - the early years - on TV; the reformation (no, not that one) of Duran Duran (or is it Spandau Ballet? Or both?) - anyway, the reunion tours, the features, the documentaries, the ubiquity of some style guru or other. And so wearyingly on.

I have an interest to declare here, because I was a punk before you were a punk (perhaps: at least I was a punk after seeing the Stranglers play at the Doncaster Gaumont on June 16th 1977, a date that must have changed my life because I've remembered it for all this time). And after the stripped-down truth-seeking rawness of the best that punk had to offer, the mincing synthesisers (Ooh Vienna!), awful clothing, awful haircuts and vacuous partying of the New Romantics signalled less of a new dawn than a return to the proggish self-indulgence of the 70s. Plus ca change.

Other people's nostalgia is usually less attractive than your own, but my dislike of this latest outbreak is tempered by a chastening recollection. My generation, in its forties and fifties, in power in TV, in the newspapers and in politics, looks back fondly on its funny clothes, its hairstyles, the drugs it took and the music it listened to. What did my parents look back on in their flabby nostalgia for their own glory years? The austerity of the war and the struggle against Hitler.

Ignoring the critics

2010-01-26T02:07:00.001-08:00

I am not the greatest fan of the Scottish composer James Macmillan - in my view he is a thoroughly worthwhile composer who is probably slightly over-performed - but a review by Andrew Clements of his trumpet concerto in this morning's Graun made my hackles rise. Clements wrote "(The soloist's) virtuosity was unfailingly impressive, MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch as depressing as ever".

It's worth pausing for a moment to savour the use of language here. Note that Clements doesn't say, "MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch was as depressing as ever". No. The was is in the previous clause praising the soloist, and we the readers carry it by inference into the criticism which follows.

Why so shy Andrew? Surely you don't lack the cojones to come right out with it?

Note also that MacMillan's bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch are taken as a given. Clements has no room to persuade us that MacMillan's music features such qualities, preferring to record his own reaction at finding those things.

As ever with criticism, this is opinion masquerading as objectivity. After all, one person's bombast is another's grandeur, and my kitsch may well be your expressiveness.

But these are run of the mill objections to art criticism, I hear you say. Fair enough. Yet what irked me about Clements's snide little put-down was not the inherent weaknesses of the shabby trade it reveals, but the sheer lack of manners and class. Whatever else you can say about MacMillan, it seems pretty certain that he is ten times the musician Andrew Clements is. Does the critic not feel even moderately embarrassed to find himself excoriating in print someone who has forgotten more about the composer's trade then he himself will ever know?

Sibelius once said, "Ignore the critics. No statue was ever erected to a critic."

If only it were so easy.

Thierry Henry and Climate Change

2009-11-24T02:25:00.001-08:00

Climate change deniers the world over will have been delighted by the mass hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. What a can of worms they reveal.

Details are all over the web, but in summary they destroy the credibility of a leading climate change Cassandra, Professor Phil Jones. They reveal him in turn to be conspiring to suppress papers by climate change sceptics ("Kevin and I will keep them out somehow", he writes), conspiring to marginalise a journal which had published papers by sceptics ("I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor"), trying to downplay the extent of the Mediaeval Warm Period on the basis of a "gut feeling, no science", threatening to resist Freedom of Information requests to reveal data even to the extent of destroying it, and proposing a "trick" to substitute one set of data for another in a publication. More extraordinary still they show him corresponding with a colleague baffled at absence of recent warming ("The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't... ").

So should we stop worrying? Probably not. The people revealed by these leaks to be manipulative anti-scientists are not the only ones working in the field. They are merely some of the most influential. I do realise that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I was in the Alps in the summer and I saw with my own eyes how the glaciers were retreating.

But hasn't the climate always changed? Didn't we have glaciers in Scotland at the end of the 19th Century? Hasn't humanity has always managed to adapt, hating change at the same time as being really good at dealing with it? And though the science is persuasive, can we really be sure that humanity is actually responsible for global warming? What if it's just nature? And shouldn't we be worrying about the next ice age instead?

On the whole I, like Professor Jones, would rather keep the Climate Change gravy train going. Not because my department's funding and my reputation depends on it, but because it offers the best hope of getting out of the ludicrous cycle of consumption and over-population which besets Western society, wrecking natural habitats and turning us all into mall-zombies.

But when that arch clown George Monbiot apologises in the Guardian today for misleading his readers, revealing himself unexpectedly to be a bigger man by far than Thierry Henry, the handball cheat whose manual assist got France into the World Cup finals and kept the Irish out, you know that something truly extraordinary has happened.

Houllebeq's "Atomised" (2)

2009-11-11T01:08:00.000-08:00

Attentive readers (if there are any) of this blog may recall a piece back in May on Michel Houllebeq's novel Atomised. It tells, I wrote at the time, "the miserable life stories of two French half brothers Bruno and Michel, abandoned by their hippy mother in childhood. Bruno turns out an inadequate sex pest; Michel an unfeeling scientist. The West, Houellebecq tell us, has given itself over to a cult of individualism. The more selfishly we behave, the more unhappy we are." I agreed with much of Houllebeq's analysis, whilst disliking his book thoroughly, finding it badly written and boring.

Now what's this in today's Guardian? A Comment piece which contains the following - "But just because big government has helped atomise (my italics) our society, it doesn't follow that smaller government would automatically bring us together again". And later, "The big government approach has spawned multiple perverse incentives that either discourage responsibility or actively encourage irresponsibility. The paradox at the heart of big government is that by taking power and responsibility away from the individual, it has only served to individuate them (great verb, individuate). What is seen in principle as an act of social solidarity has in practice led to the greatest atomisation of our society."

Has the Graun taken to commissioning op-ed pieces from reclusive French writers now resident in Ireland? Er, no. This was by David Cameron.

I guess the disparagement of big government would be the give-away.

He goes on, "The once natural bonds that existed between people - of duty and responsibility - have been replaced by the synthetic bonds of the state - regulation and beauracracy." Spot on.

So now we know: the Tory leader has been reading Atomised. Is this a good thing? Probably: after Messrs. Thatcher and Major, whose tastes ranged from Milton Friedman all the way to Jeffrey Archer and the cricket scores, any fiction-reading Tory leader would be progress. Can he fix Broken Britain? Probably not. But identifying what's wrong might be the first step.

The BNP on Question Time redux

2009-10-27T03:36:00.000-07:00

Apologies for revisiting a story that already feels like stale buns.

As predicted, Nick Griffin was less than impressive on Question Time. He isn't a bright bloke, but I suppose it shouldn't come as any surprise that a party of meat-heads can't find anyone better. You would have thought however that in the absence of brains, the BNP could at least come up with someone with a bit of charisma. Think of Wodehouse's Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts: now there was a man to make the average arts graduate quail.

What garment should Griffin endorse? There is something of a fascist John Major about him, and I favour a variant on the underwear theme. The Black Y-Fronts has a certain ring to it.

After the show was broadcast Griffin made a complaint against the BBC, saying he felt as if he had been attacked by a lynch mob. Since he's admitted to having shared a platform with a Ku Klux Klan leader, this might not have been the most tactful way of expressing himself. Although I suppose intimates of the Klan ought to know if anyone does what a lynch mob is like.

I found it heartening the other day to hear Rio Ferdinand telling all and sundry that Griffin had the right to be heard. You can tell the depths of folly the liberal no-platform lobby has plumbed when a fading Manchester United central defender has a better grasp of the issues than Oxbridge-educated Guardianistas.

The BNP on Question Time

2009-10-22T01:35:00.000-07:00

OK. Disclaimer time. I am not a BNP supporter and I would never vote for them.

Now that's out of the way, what to make of the furore surrounding Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time tonight?

Well, first I have been absolutely baffled by the people who say he shouldn't be given the platform. Really? Don't they understand what democracy's about? It isn't a spectator sport. It's something everyone can have a go at; otherwise it's not democracy at all. Mrs Thatcher made a similar mistake when she banned the IRA from the airwaves. So hats off to the BBC for giving Griffin an appearance - a refreshing display of moral courage from Mark Thompson.

I believe Griffin will be condemned out of his own mouth. I once heard him interviewed on Radio 5, and for a Cambridge graduate he was woefully ineffectual. I find his assertion that you can't be black and British repellent, but also perplexing. I really don't understand how you can say that someone born and raised here can't be British just because they have a brown skin. I am a bit old school on this - for me Kevin Pietersen shouldn't be playing cricket for England: living here for a few years doesn't count. On the other hand Monty Panesar is as English as buttered toast, and it's irrelevant that he's a Sikh. He's a Luton boy through and through.

The Guardian has been full of hand-wringing nonsense about Griffin in recent weeks. Its leader writers settled for opposition to his Question Time appearance, illustrating that one of the seductive tendencies of extremism is to make otherwise reasonable people into idiots. Gary Younge, writing in today's paper, urges that the solution to racism might be, er, anti-racism. I'm afraid I have no idea at all what this means.

The reality is that the BNP is thriving because it is the only political party which opposes immigration. Its leadership and supporters may well be racist, but I suspect most of the people who vote for it aren't. There is a case to be made against immigration on grounds of economics, the environment and cultural cohesion, and yet public discussion of the issue has been as thoroughly vetoed by today's polite society as discussion of prostitution was vetoed in the Victorian drawing room. There's an interesting article here (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/6400553/Cowardice-on-immigration-has-allowed-the-BNP-to-flourish.html) by Frank Field and Nicholas Soames of the Parliamentary cross-party Balanced Migration group which makes exactly this point.

Incidentally the BBC reported the Office for National Statistics' quite extraordinary prediction yesterday of a population increase to 70 million in the near future as largely attributable to "migration". I suppose we should be grateful the prediction was reported at all, but it's precisely because of this kind of mealy-mouthed attempt to avoid drawing attention to the consequences of unrestricted immigration that the BNP are on Question Time tonight.

Barry Manilow and the decline of classical music

2009-10-16T02:51:00.000-07:00

A couple of recent conversations, both with educationalists, have filled me with gloom about the future of classical music in the UK. The distinct impression gleaned from both is of the slow death of classical instrumental teaching in schools. "My school used to have half a dozen outstanding musicians at any one time", one said to me. "But now they all want to do electric guitar or drums". Another lamented the death of the local youth orchestra. "They lost the endangered instruments first, oboes and bassoons, and then they just didn't have enough players and had to shut it down". What, I asked, was the prospect of finding a good local young soloist to do a concerto? Much shaking of heads. "You might find someone, perhaps in one of the private schools. But I'd have to put out feelers. I can't think of anyone off hand." This autumn a local University renowned for its music department, one told me, had no string players in its new intake of students.

It is a cliche that things are not what they used to be, one widely mocked because we all know that things have a tendency to remain exactly the same; but let me record one way things truly were different in the 1970s. I had violin lessons till I was 17, but hardly had I got into double figures when I realised that girls had an irrational weakness for boys who could play the electric guitar. So the violin was a chore (enjoyed playing, hated practising), whereas the guitar was a pleasure to be indulged whenever there was a free moment. The school had a visiting guitar teacher, but the kids who had lessons were universally useless at rock and roll. That's because you cannot teach someone to play it. You have to work it out for yourself. Classical music requires technique, and if you can acquire one it will take you almost to the highest level, where only the last few percentage points of musicality marks the difference between Alfred Brendel and a journeyman. But rock and roll is not like that. In a discipline which prizes above all else the ability to improvise, every player has to find their own way: after all, the great masters of the electric guitar, from Hendrix to Richard Thompson to Tom Verlaine, have styles so divergent they might be playing different instruments.

Not only were lessons useless, but they were given by adults. Pop music was ours, the music of the young, and we would no more have let them teach us about it than they would have known how. You may say that the slow death of classical music (if that's what it is) is just a natural consequence of an art form's obsolescence. Perhaps. But is not that also true of pop music? Is it not the case that when a medium is taught in schools, when there are exams you can take in it, when Phd students pore over the lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon, the medium's time is up? When my children know more about the Beatles and AC/DC than I do, when the latest in electro-pop (Lady Gaga, La Roux) is just the 80s revisited, when pop is condemned to rehash the cultural stylings of its heyday for a new generation, when the X-Factor churns out singing strippers who would make perfectly capable cruise-ship chanteuses in another life, isn't that the sound of a dead horse being flogged? When will the new punk come to sweep it all away? And if it does, will it just be a re-hash of the old?

Kids do not need adults to tell them about pop. They will spend their youth discovering it and making it for themselves. But they do need adults to tell them about classical music. Why? Well, because although it's amongst the greatest art the West has ever produced, because although once discovered it is an emotional and psychological resource for life, most kids won't find it on their own: they are put off by the language and the lack of surface glamour which most pop music strives assiduously to cultivate. There are other reasons for the decline of classical music in Britain, but a woeful blindness on the part of educationalists must take its share of the blame. I have heard teachers say in all seriousness, "We're glad we don't have to teach classical music at GCSE any more: it helps with inclusivity. Now we're doing keyboard and karaoke more kids want to get involved". It is with difficulty have I restrained myself from shouting, "Take that, you smug bastard", whilst beating them with a riding crop. Would they make the same argument about Shakespeare? Can you imagine someone saying, "We don't bother with Macbeth or Hamlet any more, because the kids don't want to get involved. We let them do Harry Potter or Garth Nix instead"? And yet that is effectively the place we have reached. A generation of teachers who were themselves taught little about classical music is now responsible for teaching a new generation of children. We have sown the wind, and are reaping the whirlwind.

My remedy? How long have we got. I would start, and it would only be a start, at the very bottom, in primary school. Every classroom has a CD player already. Make teachers play classical music every day while the kids are doing reading or drawing. This already happens in my youngest daughter's school. Play the Brandenburgs. Some Handel. Start them off slow. Get the language into their heads. That would do to get them going.

Unfortunately my daughter's teacher is a Barry Manilow fan. She now knows the words to Copacabana by heart; but when I conduct Beethoven's 5th tomorrow night I know my wife will struggle to persuade her to come.

Alan Green at the Proms

2009-09-10T01:43:00.000-07:00

As the umpteenth Proms season grinds its way to a close, I find guiltily that yet again I have failed to listen to more than a fraction of the concerts. There are several reasons for this. The pressures of family life. Being away on holiday. Not liking some of the programmes. And, it must be admitted, reluctance to face the sobering reality, experienced annually by the vast majority of British composers, that one's own music does not feature. Again. This chilling douche makes the Proms as much a horse-syringe sized injection of humility as a great music festival. Attendance can be as painful as it is enjoyable.

The Proms and I go way back. As a student I queued for hours outside the Albert Hall to hear Rattle conduct Mahler, or Elder with the NYO doing bits of Valkyrie with Gwyneth Jones as Brunnhilde (quite the loudest singer I have ever heard). It was there that a performance of Nielsen's fifth left me speechless for a full ten minutes. And after the concerts we'd literally run down the street to the Queen's Arms to get two pints in and somewhere to sit before the crush of listeners and orchestral players arrived, arguing the toss about the music we'd just heard. Later, when I was working near Chancery Lane, I'd get the Tube to Marble Arch and walk across Hyde Park in the evening sunshine to meet my wife outside. It was a thoroughly civilised and invigorating thing to do, and now, ten years after having left London, it is still the only thing I miss about living there.

Notwithstanding all the concerts missed this year, there were still some great performances. Maris Yanssons doing Sibelius 1 with the flair and conviction of a great conductor at the top of his game. The Lebecq sisters playing the Poulenc Double. And has there been a more arch performer since Liberace than the uber-charismatic Lang Lang? For all his eye-rolling and gurning at the piano, he made the Chopin F minor concerto look really easy, and played with all the grace and finesse you could ask for.

To the downside, I didn't like any of the newer stuff. I caught bits of a Xenakis piece which sounded truly dreary, and there was something by Louis Andriessen which did nothing very much before lumbering and stumbling to the finishing line. Did Roger Wright really have to commission Goldie, the former electronica luminary, a man who does not even read music, to write an orchestral piece?

And the BBC TV coverage was infuriating. Yes, no-one else would do this - and thank God for the BBC generally - but did the pundits have to be so bland? Not all performances were great, and neither was all the music. Strauss's Alpinesinfonie is a monstrosity. The English singers in the otherwise wonderful John Wilson prom were wooden and lacklustre. The programme of the Gustav Mahler youth orchestra concert was a turgid fin-de-siecle Viennese-fest in which the lightest item was the Kindertotenlieder and rows of empty seats were clearly visible behind the presenter. You wouldn't know any of this from the coverage, because in this the best of all possible worlds everything was great, the audiences loved it all and classical music was in rude health.

Does it have to be like this? I was reminded by contrast of the BBC's football commentries, and in particular of Alan Green, a fearless Ulsterman who tells it like it is. The BBC no doubt pays him handsomely for his efforts, and pays handsomely for the right to broadcast those efforts to us. But Green couldn't care less. "This game", he'll tell listeners, "is rubbish. The standard of football has been woeful. I'm doing my best to stay awake, and thank goodness it's nearly half time".

Why can't we have that kind of punditry at the Proms? You may object that Alan Green knows nothing about classical music. Possibly not. But that didn't seem to harm Goldie's prospects.

Dino Powell

2009-07-31T02:02:00.000-07:00

Every now and again, sitting in the cinema as the final credits roll, I see that the music for the film I've been watching was by John Powell. It happened to me yesterday when I took my youngest daughter to the cinema. Seeing John's name makes me smile because twenty years ago I was at College with him. A small bloke, handsome in a slightly chubby way, he had the most dazzling white teeth: if there was ever a Brit who didn't need his teeth fixed to make it in Hollywood, Powell was the man. He displayed no outstanding talent for composition, but worked hard in the Trinity recording studio, was easy to get along with, and was quite good at just about everything.

How did he get into films? It must have helped that he was close friends with Gavin Greenaway, son of Roger "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" Greenaway, a luminary in the world of advertising jingles. And Hans Zimmer famously got Powell the job of scoring his first movie, the John Woo action thriller Face/Off starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. But you don't get a second job by doing the first one badly, and I think John deserves his success. He can do a bit of Holst, a bit of Strauss, some Copland, some electronica. In fact, as he demonstrated at College, Powell can do just about everything quite well.

Sometimes when I'm sitting there I think, "Should I be feeling envious that he writes film scores that are heard all over the world, whereas I'm just a moderately successful classical composer and conductor of amateur orchestras?" On the whole, no. John must be rich; he lives in sunny L.A. But I've got drink in the house and money in the bank too, and I quite like it here in rainy Manchester.

But there is one thing I envy him. Composing is an isolating and isolated business. Sometimes you get asked to write pieces, but a lot of the time you write something just because you want to, not knowing for certain whether you'll be able to persuade anyone to put it on. John, on the other hand, must feel loved when he gets the phone call. It may not be real love, but it's pretty close and it must make him feel pretty good.

Would I like it if someone rang me up and said, "We're willing to pay you a lot of money to write some music which will be heard by millions of people all over the world"? Yes, I think I would. But - and this is where John Powell and I part company - I might not like it quite so much if the music I had to write was the soundtrack for Ice Age 3 - Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Whingeing Aussies

2009-07-13T05:35:00.000-07:00

When I came home for an hour on Saturday between rehearsing Bruckner's 4th Symphony in the afternoon and performing it in the evening, I'd intended to rest. But the Test Match had reached such pitch of tension that I had to sit and listen to the denouement instead. After being outplayed comprehensively, England managed to hang on for the draw; needing to take only one more wicket to win, the Aussies simply ran out of time .

Amidst scenes of great drama, two things left a sour taste in the mouth. The first was the time-wasting of the England physio and 12th man, making spurious visits to the middle to use up a few precious minutes. The second was that the Aussie captain Ricky Ponting should have chosen to complain about it.

What a hypocrite! Firstly, he would have done exactly the same. Secondly, when did the Australians sign up to the Corinthian ideal? Or did I miss something?

No, for the men who invented sledging, the moral high ground is a long way up and far, far away, lost in the clouds and unattainable by those in the baggy green caps.

Celebrity Composers

2009-07-11T05:09:00.001-07:00

It was perhaps predictable that, after posting a month or so ago about the forthcoming performance of Rufus Wainwright's opera Prima Donna at the Manchester International Festival, my wife would buy a pair of tickets and insist we go. "I'll be miserable", I protested. "Either it'll be brilliant, in which case I'll be jealous, or it'll be dreadful, in which case I'll be furious". But my objections were in vain, and off we went last night to the packed Palace Theatre.

Actually Prima Donna was neither brilliant nor dreadful, and I was neither jealous or angry. Wainwright is clearly a very talented guy, and about a quarter of the opera worked really well. OK, a lot of it sounds like Puccini, but perhaps better so than Birtwhistle, and there is after all a lot of Haydn in Mozart. A lot of other bits reminded me of no-one at all.

As for the remaining three quarters, the word which sprang to mind was amateurish. Wainwright cannot write a climax and does not know how to make the music move forward. He doesn't always know how to write music which underscores and amplifies the (fairly melodramatic) story, often serving up the bland at what should be the most gripping moments (the suspended dominant chord when the heroine may or may not be about to chuck herself from the window ledge perhaps the most memorably dreary example). Some of his writing for voices is leaden and unsympathetic (just because tenors can sing high doesn't mean you have to make them sing high all the time). It came as no surprise to read in the score that Wainwright had needed the assistance of an "orchestration assistant". I read this as meaning, "Rufus doesn't know how to score for orchestra, so we'll get a guy in who does".

The truly depressing thing about Prima Donna is not that it is no good at all, but that all these superbly professional people - the singers, designers, producers and orchestra all aquit themselves honourably - had been put at vast expense at the service of someone who is essentially an inexperienced amateur. Why? Because Wainwright is famous; the fact that he is famous for doing something else does not seem to have bothered the people who commissioned his piece. This is exactly the same mistake as that made routinely by the chairmen of football clubs, who appoint managers thinking that because they were good at football they must also be good at management. Bobby Charlton, John Barnes, Paul Gascoigne and many others tried it and failed. The best managers in the English league on the other hand in the last few years - Fergie, Mourinho and Wenger - were all average or worse as players. The gifted player like Mark Hughes who makes a good manager is an exception.

So now as well as celebrity managers we have celebrity composers. Is Leona Lewis writing an opera? Not so far as I know. But her agent should get onto it as soon as possible, because I'm sure that the organisers of some arts festival somewhere would like to hear from her. I am available if she needs an orchestration assistant.

The Quality of the Invention, stupid

2009-05-21T01:06:00.000-07:00

Three things recently have conspired to remind me of the great John Williams, composer - I almost said "film composer" - extraordinaire.

Firstly, the Halifax Symphony Orchestra blasted its way through a Star Wars medley last Saturday, a performance it was a privelidge to conduct, with the brass section on coruscating form (by the way, in the eyes of the Courier's reviewer I was "lively" this time - does she read my blog? Is she teasing me?).

Secondly, I've been reading Alex Ross's (otherwise excellent) history of 20th c. music The Rest is Noise, in which nonentities such as Varese get a dozen references but Williams is missing altogether.

Thirdly, I went to see the new Star Trek movie the other night, and found it pretty much like Star Wars only with mediocre music; which made it a pretty mediocre experience.

Why should John Williams feature in Ross's book? After all he's not a classical composer. Wrong. Actually Williams has written quite a bit of concert music, including concertos for violin, clarinet and cello (this last for Yo Yo Ma). But that's not quite the point. Ross finds space for several Hollywood composers of the 30s and 40s, forced out of Europe by the rise of Nazism. Why not space for one Hollywood composer of the 80s and 90s forced out of the concert hall by the rise of Serialism?

For all the debt Williams owes to Shostakovitch and Prokofiev (isn't there a good deal of Beethoven in Brahms?), he has one priceless quality afforded only to the very, very lucky. A gift for memorable harmony and melody. And what makes music last is not its originality, the sublety of its construction or the superficial allure of its intellectual foundations: it is the quality of the invention.

That's why Williams's is a greater composer than Varese, and why his music will still be played when Varese is long forgotten.

britten's national opera?

2009-05-12T01:32:00.001-07:00

I was reminded yesterday of an uncomfortable fact by a gushing review in the Grauniad of a new ENO production .

I don't like Peter Grimes.

This is close to heresy for a British musician, and I apologise for transgressing.

To be clear, I love the Four Sea Interludes, so it's not the music that's the problem. It's the story. To understand Grimes it helps to grasp that Britten and Pears were interested in George Crabbe's poem because its protagonist was an outsider in his community, The Borough, in much the same way as they felt themselves to be sexual outsiders in post-war Britain.

Early drafts of Montagu Slater's libretto make it clear that Grimes is a violent monster, responsible by negligence at the very least for the deaths of the three apprentices under his charge. But Britten changed the libretto as he went along to make Grimes a more ambiguous figure, so that we never know to what extent he is responsible for the first two deaths, and the third boy dies when scrambling down a cliff to Grimes's boat. The audience sees no violence, although Grimes does threaten the boy.

According to the Graun's review, in the new ENO production, the boy dies when Grimes, distracted by a vigilante crowd from The Borough, lets go of the rope holding him. So here Grimes has tried to safeguard the boy, and The Borough is partly responsible for his death.

This just won't do. Part of my discomfort, sitting through the opera, has been that no-one in it is terribly sympathetic. Grimes is horrible. The Borough are all hypocrites. The boy is a cipher, who doesn't even sing. Now I accept that it may be too much to ask that all art depicting human relationships should have someone nice in it somewhere; but life is short, and three hours in the company of unpleasant people is not something you should have to pay for, however good the music. Moreover, the opera portrays a whole society, and how many societies are entirely made up of such thoroughly disagreeable people?

But it's not just that. The drama is fundamentally unbalanced. We are asked to believe that Grimes is both a victim and a creation of The Borough, and that, according to the Graun's reviewer, they are "hypocritical . . . . a totally dysfunctional community, fuelled by religious bigotry . . . " Well yes, but even these are nicer people than Grimes. Grimes is a twisted self-hating bully, whereas they are just hypocrites. Who would you rather get stuck in a lift with?

This curious moral blindness reminds me of something Frank Kermode once said. He found that when teaching Camus' The Outsider he was always amazed by how readily his students identified with the existentially tortured murderer; yet almost none of them were interested in the anonymous Arab victim.

Yes, it's true: for artists there's no crime worse than provincial conservatism.

Houllebeq's "Atomised"

2009-05-06T01:35:00.000-07:00

The borderline Aspergers being over-represented in the Males from Hale, the men-only reading group I frequent, scores are assiduously kept on our resident accountant's Crackberry. In answer to my Stato-like query as to which book had the historic highest mark, Atomised by Michel Houellebecq turned out to be the winner. So I bought it for my wife at Christmas. She hated it. "Give me Jane Austen any day", she grumbled after thirty pages, tossing it over to my side of the bed.

I have just finished it. From the reviews plastered on the cover I was expecting a cross between the King James Bible, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Joy of Sex. Only better. Sadly not. Atomised tells the miserable life stories of two French half brothers Bruno and Michel, abandoned by their hippy mother in childhood. Bruno turns out an inadequate sex pest; Michel an unfeeling scientist. The West, Houellebecq tell us, has given itself over to a cult of individualism. The more selfishly we behave, the more unhappy we are. Bruno and Michel are certainly unhappy. Michel's researches lead him to opportunities for cloning humans, and at the end of the book (spoiler coming) we learn that humans are obsolete and have created their genetic successors, free from weltschmertz and fear.

So far, well, quite interesting. There is, if you like that kind of thing, a great deal of rumpy-pumpy. I guess if you want to say that people are having a lot of empty sex with people about whom they care nothing, you have to show them actually doing so. Which Houellebecq obligingly does, page after tedious page. This palled fairly quickly for me.

Then there's the technical problem of how, if your novel is essentially one of ideas, you weave those ideas in without lecturing. Astonishingly, Houellebecq makes almost no attempt to do this, so there are endless passages which read like a pamphlet, sometimes with the narrator addressing the reader directly, sometimes half-heartedly stuck into a scene such as the one in which the half-brothers tell each other about Aldous Huxley. It is quite extraordinarily lazy and often very boring.

Neither is Houellebecq's book free from internal implausibilities and contradictions. An early teenage admirer of Michel's, whom he unaccountably failed to shag at the time, turns up after 25 years and still carries a torch for him. "I just want you to give me a baby", she says (a characteristic piece of Houellebecq dialogue). She is beautiful, of course. After an accident, Bruno's sex-buddy becomes disabled, and throws herself down the stairs in her wheelchair when he hesitates a fraction of a second too long before agreeing to look after her. We never find out exactly how Michel's human cloning manages to do away with all the painful aspects of life-before-death. Nor why humanity, of which the tortured Michel and Bruno are not exactly typical, was willing to connive in its own obsolescence.

All of which is a shame, because Houellebecq is right about lots of things. We are obsessed with the idea of personal freedom, often with devastating results. Atomised is mercifully free of PC so hardly anyone escapes a kicking. There are some odd patches of truly luminous writing. But reading the gushing blurb (Julian Barnes in particular should have known better) I was struck by how fearful are critics of discovering they have failed to get on the right bandwagon. And learning that the book had won Houellebecq the Prix Novembre, it occurred to me that bad novelists everywhere should take heart - Will Self, David Baddiel, Jeffrey Archer - nil desperandum: one day all this could be yours.

In and Out of the Loop

2009-05-05T01:17:00.000-07:00

We went to see Armando Ianucci's In The Loop over the weekend.

Despite the film's anti-war premise, and despite being someone who thought invading Iraq might turn out to be marginally better than leaving Saddam in place, I laughed till my face ached.

But it wasn't just the antics of uber-angry Malcolm Tucker (right) that were funny. There were two other things about the film which made me smile.

Firstly, the alleged sexing up of the WMD intelligence, on which the film turns, overlooked the crucial point that almost no-one believed Alastair Campbell's dodgy dossier at the time. Sure, there are left-wing Labour MPs who claim that they wouldn't have voted for the war if it hadn't been for Campbell's gilding the lily; but they have short memories. Not long after it was produced, the dossier was widely ridiculed when a PhD student pointed out that some of it came from his work published on the internet. Then, as now, public credulity was in short supply.

But although the direct evidence was small, we knew Saddam had had WMD; we knew he had used gas on Kurdish villages; we knew he was doing everything he could to thwart Hans Blix and his colleagues; we knew that in Iraq's police state, where torture of dissidents and their families was routine, it would be very difficult to recruit informers, and hence the lack of direct evidence was not surprising.

Thus the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming, and not surprisingly everyone I spoke to (and this was a period in which bruising rows with my friends who opposed the war were routine) believed Saddam had WMD. Without exception. The idea that the UK's parliament, the US government and the UN Security Council were swayed into war by a bad-tempered Scottish spin-doctor is itself a piece of spin. Because, unappealing though the British government's manoevres may have been, they made no difference to the outcome. As a public, we believed Saddam had the weapons anyway.

Of course Mr Ianucci would say, "It's a satire; a fictionalised account. It's not meant to be a historical reconstruction". Well OK up to a point. But when real opponents of the war argue that we were led into it by a foul-mouthed Scottish spin doctor who sexed up the intelligence, and - lo and behold! - that's exactly what happens in Ianucci's film, it's a claim that will only run so far.

The second thing that struck me was, where was Saddam in all this? Nowhere. In Ianucci's film the war was to take place in abstract. That it would have the effect of removing from power one of the twentieth century's most ghastly dictators was airbrushed from sight.

Why should this make me smile? Because it confirms my thesis that if there's one thing the anti-war brigade don't want to hear about it's talk of Saddam. How inconvenient to be reminded of how things were under his regime! As for what things would have carried on being like (after Saddam, his sons, then some other Ba'ath Party strongman), these are things opponents of the war cannot even begin to contemplate. For them, success would have meant vast and peaceful rallies in London and Washington, followed by a climb-down by Bush and Blair.

And for them, Iraq would have continued to be "a faraway country", to borrow from Neville Chamberlain, "of which we know nothing".

Rufus "Anonymous" Wainwright

2009-04-26T13:27:00.001-07:00

So singer Rufus Wainwright has written an opera, and it's going to be put on at this year's Manchester Festival. Lucky Rufus. Last year it was Damon Allbarn's Monkey. A while back the London Sinfonietta was looking for a composer to work with. Who did they go for? Answer, Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead.

The moral? If you want your work put on, don't bother going to Music College, learning your craft, sending your music to people who'll never read it, going in for the same competitions everyone else is going for, trying to scrape a living while you write in the little unused corners of your spare time that aren't taken up by your domestic life.

No, instead become a pop star, because apparently that's a bit of a draw for the powers that be in classical music.

Don't get me wrong, these people may be talented and their work may be really good. May be. But let's face it, they got the gig because they were who they were. If they want to see how much their talent counts for, next time let them submit it anonymously.

Finally, spare a thought for poor old classical music, poking around in the bottom of the barrel for something the public might actually pay to see. Without wishing to labour the obvious, putting on works from composers the public quite likes might be a good place to start. Why not stop commissioning Birtwhistle and Rihm, whose stuff the mass audience cordially loathes, and encourage instead composers who care about whether the listener has a good time and can understand what's going on?

After all John Adams can't be the only one who can do it.

hypocrisy central

2009-03-19T02:51:00.000-07:00

The Guardian has had its knickers in a twist in the last few weeks over corporate tax avoidance, running a series of self-righteous articles under the heading Tax Gap. In its most recent scoop, it published details of transactions undertaken by Barclays to minimise its tax exposure, which the Bank promptly got an injunction to suppress.

But now what's this? The current issue of Private Eye suggests that the Guardian's owners have been doing a little avoidance of their own. Last year, it says, they bought Emap, a magazine publisher, via a parent company in Luxembourg and a string of offshore subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands. The aim? According to the Eye, to avoid paying stamp duty on the purchase of Emap shares.

Pass the sick bag.

Looking like Brad Pitt

2009-03-11T02:14:00.000-07:00

Over in Halifax, the orchestra's concerts are dutifully reviewed in the Courier by a lady I have never met called Julia Anderson. Her reviews are almost unfailingly kind to the orchestra and its Music Director. However she has described my conducting style as "energetic" so often that it came as no surprise that after last Saturday's concert - Tchaikovsky 4 and the Emperor concerto - she felt the need for a new adjective.

This time I was "attentive". I'm not sure I like it quite so much as "energetic", but perhaps it was time for a change.

For the soloist in the concerto, however, one word was not enough. Ms Anderson found Duncan Glenday both "young" and "very slight of frame". In a dark theatre appearances can be deceptive, but although all things are relative, "young" is probably pushing it a bit for Duncan. And when am I going to get my own descriptive just deserts? Who knows, if Ms Anderson thinks Duncan's young, she may well feel I look a bit like Brad Pitt.

From the back, of course. In a dark theatre.

Yes, I was in favour of the war!

2009-03-03T01:41:00.001-08:00

Although my experience of having been - reluctantly - in favour of the Iraq war, amidst a class of people who were overwhelmingly against it, is a subject for another time, I was reminded of it this morning by a letter in the Graun about civilian casualty figures. One Geoff Simons, author of Iraq Endgame: Surge, Suffering and the Politics of Denial, claimed that estimates of the dead topped one million.

Of course, no-one knows how many casualties there were, but it just so happens that the only organisation that has tried to count the actual individuals killed, Iraqbodycount.org, puts the total at slightly less than one tenth of that figure, ie at about 95,000. Now that is a lot of people, but it is a lot fewer than one million (presumably that's why it was ignored by Mr Simons), and in any event as a marker of whether the war was a bad idea or not is meaningless unless you consider "but for" test. Ie, but for the war, what would have happened?

Well, it's reasonable to assume that Saddam would have remained in power; that he would have continued to butcher and starve the civilian population as previously; that on his death he would have been succeeded by one or both of his sons; and that on the eventual collapse of the Ba'ath party regime, perhaps a generation into the future, a bloody sectarian power struggle would have ensued, only this time without the Americans to hold the ring and pay for the reconstruction. In other words, more of Saddam would probably have been deadly too, and to come to a fair assessment you need to set the war casualties against those who would have died if Saddam had been left in place. Unfortunately, you can't count those people, because no-one knows who they are; neither can you show emotive interviews with their grieving relatives on TV.

It seems to me, contra Mr Simons, that it's those opposed to the invasion who are in denial, because, however dreadful, it was probably no worse than the alternative. It must be hard for people like him to accept that it's because Bush and Blair ignored their protests that Iraq now has a democratic government.

A small satisfaction then of the post-invasion period has been the way in which the case against it has unravelled in the slowest of slow motion.

Symphonie Fantastique!

2009-03-02T02:14:00.000-08:00

You can think you know a piece pretty well, but some new things struck me after conducting Berlioz's masterpiece on Saturday night for the first time.

Extraordinarily, the Symphonie Fantastique was written in the same period (late 1820s) as Schubert's Great C Major symphony. But where Schubert does his wonderful best to follow in Beethoven's footsteps - Schubert lacks more than a small part of Beethoven's great gift for construction based on motivic development, but nevertheless the Great C Major is recognisably designed on the same principles - Berlioz's method is something altogether new and different. True, there are tunes, one of which recurs throughout the work, but Berlioz is less interested in contrasting and developing these than he is in the bravura opposition of brilliantly vivid and idiomatic orchestral textures; you might even say that this is the principal constructive device.

It shouldn't work. It should be rambling and incoherent. But it isn't. Why? Partly because the above-mentioned idee fixe ties it all together; partly because the ideas themselves are so wonderful; and partly because in the second half of the piece Berlioz cranks up the rhythmic excitement so successfully after the long silences of the central slow movement that you seem to be caught up in some crazy dance, a party that's got out of hand but that no one wants to end.

Conducting long symphonies like this one, I am sometimes just relieved to have got to the final bars without mishap. But on Saturday, admiration for Berlioz's achievement came welling up at the finish, and now I can't wait for the chance to do it again.