Martin Kettle's Blog, page 13

The Rwanda plan is dead in the real world, but will live on in the fantasyland of Tory politics | Martin Kettle

The supreme court judgment was clear. But that won’t stop the party’s nationalist wing believing they can still succeed

Ever since Brenda Hale stepped down as president of the supreme court in 2020, it has not been difficult to find lawyers who worried that her more judicially conservative successor, Robert Reed, would be anxious to avoid standing up to the UK government in the way that the Hale court did so dramatically over the prorogation of parliament in 2019.

Those fears now look to have been seriously misjudged, after the Reed court today unanimously dismissed the government’s policy of transferring asylum seekers to Rwanda. Lord Reed is a different kind of judicial thinker from Lady Hale. He can certainly argue that the judgment was impeccably conservative in legal terms. But the ruling is in many ways a more consequential and devastating rebuff to UK government and UK politics than even the Hale judgment.

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Maybe Sunak does have a grand plan. But that king’s speech looked more like an admission of failure | Martin Kettle

This ragbag of unambitious measures bears all the hallmarks of a programme that can be quietly abandoned later

Less than 24 hours after the king’s speech, supposedly one of the most reverberant events in the parliamentary calendar, Wednesday’s political headlines were quickly made elsewhere – by tensions between ministers and police over pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and by the not wholly unexpected resignation of a not widely known and extremely junior shadow minister.

Rishi Sunak is, of course, keen to embarrass Labour over the Israel-Hamas conflict and the protests. The latest iteration of Labour’s internal difficulties over the conflict – extremely unlikely to be the last – will not have been unwelcome to him. But the government’s readiness to switch attention away from its own programme at the start of the last parliamentary session before the general election also tells you something about the bigger picture in British politics.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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The Covid inquiry has exposed more than just a few bad apples – the whole system is rotten | Martin Kettle

The state was completely unprepared for the pandemic – and the next crisis won’t wait for us to fix it

Yes, Dominic Cummings was in almost every way the ultimate colleague from hell. Yes, Boris Johnson was in a different way the sum of all nightmares as a national leader. Yes, the macho culture of the Downing Street in which they strutted their stuff was a disgrace. And, yes, many people died of Covid-19 in every part of the United Kingdom who should not have done so, partly because of their responses to the Covid pandemic.

In its hour of need, our country was lamentably governed by Johnson and Cummings. That’s indisputable. But, shameful as it is, this is not really the most important lesson emerging from Heather Hallett’s official inquiry into the pandemic. Focusing too much on the individuals who were faced with making pandemic policy decisions, understandable though that is and reprehensible though many of them proved, risks missing the larger picture that will matter more for the future.

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Philharmonia/Bancroft review – fearless and fiery Copland is a dark heart of US programme

Royal festival hall, London
Part of the London-based orchestra’s season of American music, the programme featured Copland, Caroline Shaw and Samuel Barber’s violin concerto, brilliantly played by Renaud Capuçon

Large claims have been made down the years on behalf of Aaron Copland’s third symphony, written at the end of the second world war. But significant questions have also been asked, including by Copland champion Leonard Bernstein, who nevertheless made two recordings of it. Ryan Bancroft’s high energy account of the symphony, the centrepiece of the latest concert in the Philharmonia Orchestra’s autumn Let Freedom Ring season of American music, did not quite resolve the puzzle.

Serge Koussevitzky, who conducted the 1946 premiere, called Copland’s third the greatest US symphony ever written. It unquestionably gives voice to an optimistic postwar American spirit that chimed with the composer’s left wing New Deal politics and aesthetic. The finale, crafted around Copland’s then little known Fanfare for the Common Man, helped secure its place in the repertoire.

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Sunak’s shambolic government is achieving nothing. Must Britain really wait 15 months to throw it out? | Martin Kettle

Peter Bone’s suspension is likely to mean another lost Tory seat and a delay to the election we need sooner rather than later

Another week and, with disturbing predictability, yet another miscreant MP. Another recall petition looms as a result, carrying the likelihood of another parliamentary byelection to follow. And with that, another potential humiliation for the Conservatives. At times, while the world roils, it seems as if Britain’s party of power is simply rotting away before our eyes.

This time the offender is Peter Bone, the publicity-seeking rightwing MP for Wellingborough whose career reflects the ascent and now the eclipse of the Tory party’s Brexit obsessives – he was suspended from the party earlier this month. Even were there no other evidence against Boris Johnson’s judgment, you would find enough in his decision last year, as he tried to cling on to power, to make Bone a minister while the MP was under investigation. It is no surprise that a survey this week revealed that lack of faith in politics is now a larger public concern than Europe.

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Britten Sinfonia/Elizabeth Watts review – perfectly articulated songs of extraordinary power and delicacy

Milton Court, London
Soprano Watts captured the spirituality of Finzi’s Dies Natalis while a tribute to Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman was sung with overwhelming commitment alongside relishingly played new and old string music

Maybe it’s the intensity of the times that we are all living through. Maybe it’s music’s power to evoke heaven and heartbreak in a single phrase. Maybe it’s just indignation at the Arts Council cutting all of its grant to the terrific Britten Sinfonia. Probably it is all three mixed together. Whatever the reason, this season opening Sinfonia visit to London with the soprano Elizabeth Watts clicked from start to finish.

The peaks came in the two works featuring Watts as soloist. Yet what a contrast between them. Gerald Finzi’s Dies Natalis, setting works by the 17th century metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne, is a song cycle of innocent spirituality. The songs are Blakean in their imaginative power, and in this performance they felt like balm to the soul in our time of war. The cycle is most often performed by tenors, but Watts made a compelling case for preferring the tender purity of the female voice in these hymns to our better natures.

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Joe Biden’s peace mission to Israel exposed the limits of US global influence | Martin Kettle

The stakes couldn’t be higher. A wider war in the Middle East could embolden Russia in Ukraine and encourage China over Taiwan

The White House’s collective stress level must have gone up several notches as Joe Biden and his entourage sat on the runway waiting to leave for the Middle East on Tuesday night. After the violence and emotions of the past two weeks, the president’s visit was already a political gamble. But, as news came from Gaza of the blast at the al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital, anxiety about what the visit would be able to achieve surely reached new levels.

If so, those doubts were soon confirmed. With the Gaza hospital death toll soaring, and with popular outrage coursing through the region, Arab leaders pulled out of their scheduled meeting with Biden in Amman. By doing so, the Palestinian, Jordanian and Egyptian leaders made at least one of Biden’s key objectives – using face-to-face US presidential influence to discourage escalation – instantly more difficult.

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The universal rules of war that emerged after 1945 are being broken – and not just in the Middle East | Martin Kettle

The world’s agreement to protect civilians was never perfect. But that’s no excuse for leaders in Russia, the US and the UK to row back from it

Hamas’s murder of Jewish civilians in the Kfar Aza kibbutz on 7 October was “without doubt a war crime”, the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen concluded in his report from southern Israel this week. But what, Bowen then asked, about the lives of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, who now face bombing and siege – and possibly an imminent ground war – as Israel retaliates.

Bowen asked a fundamental wartime question. In response, the Israeli commander in Kfar Aza, Maj Gen Itai Veruv, gave him an impeccable and restrained reply. “You fight with [your] values and you keep your values at the same time,” he replied. “I know we will be very aggressive and very strong, but we will keep our morals and values.”

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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In his speech, Rishi Sunak’s showed what’s next for the Tories – and it isn’t him | Martin Kettle

At a chaotic conference, Suella Braverman wasn’t just preparing for a general election, but a leadership battle

Rishi Sunak has spent Conservative party conference week claiming he wants to do politics differently. If only. In fact, yesterday’s speech – quite possibly the only one he will ever give to a Tory conference as leader – was politics as usual. A series of policy announcements delivered from on high, some expected and others not, framed by an attack on Labour, made it the sort of speech that Tory prime ministers make on such occasions. But it was delivered to an audience and a party that know he may not be around to implement any of them.

True, it was the best-constructed and best-delivered conference speech by a Conservative prime minister since David Cameron. That may not be saying very much, given that the competition consists of spluttering Theresa May, blustering Boris Johnson and a self-destroying Liz Truss. But at least it had a theme running right through it. The theme was an attempt to redefine the party of government for the past 13 years as the party of change. The problem is that this is a trick, and not a good one, and Sunak isn’t the leader to pull it off anyway. It was his cones hotline moment. The audience could have greeted his speech with a chant of “One more year! One more year!”

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Look back at Giorgio Napolitano: learn the limits of dogma and the potential of good leaders to change lives | Martin Kettle

The former Italian president was a communist who learned that utopianism does not work and the common good involves compromise

It’s not every day that you see a pope paying tribute to a former communist – but it happened this week in Rome. By the same token, it is a surprise to hear one of the church’s most senior cardinals make an affectionate and generous address at the same communist’s strictly secular, defiantly non-religious, funeral – at which attenders included Emmanuel Macron – but these things, no less unusually, happened this week, too.

But then Giorgio Napolitano, who died a week ago aged 98 and whose funeral took place in Rome on Tuesday, was no ordinary president of Italy and no ordinary communist either. A lifelong member of the Italian Communist party until it dissolved in 1991, Napolitano was elected president in May 2006. He was also, very reluctantly, the first Italian president to be re-elected to serve a second term in 2013. Until the current president, Sergio Mattarella, overtakes him in a few days’ time, he was Italy’s longest serving head of state since 1945.

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