Martin Kettle's Blog, page 15

Starmer’s caution infuriates some in Labour. But there’s method in his mildness | Martin Kettle

With pivotal byelections being fought, and boundary changes in the offing, the Labour leader is wise to resist making promises voters know he can’t keep

Muhammad Ali called it his “rope-a-dope” strategy: don’t attack until you are ready to do so and your opponent has exhausted themselves. The Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus followed a similar approach against Hannibal’s Carthaginians, preferring to tie the enemy down in a long war of attrition rather than confronting them in a pitched battle. At the time, many impatient contemporaries thought both Ali and Fabius had taken leave of their senses. Many were proved wrong.

Keir Starmer has neither Ali’s charisma nor Fabius’s military prowess. But it is not entirely an exaggeration to suggest he has a rope-a-dope strategy and an attritional mentality all of his own that carry at least some echoes of these two legends. Nor that this is all straining some impatient supporters to the limit, just as it did at ringside in Kinshasa and doubtless did in the taverns of Ancient Rome.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian associate editor and columnist

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Prom 1: BBCSO/Stasevska review – energy, ovations and defiance open season

Royal Albert Hall, London
A programme ranging from Sibelius, Grieg and Britten to a world premiere by Ukrainian Bohdana Frolyak opened the Proms with conductor Dalia Stasevska engaged and outgoing.

The first night of the BBC Proms season is always an event. But it isn’t necessarily always a big occasion. The launch of the 2023 season at a packed Albert Hall was undoubtedly the latter. This was down to the well chosen programme, of course, and the on-form musicians of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but it drew at least as much on the audience’s palpably energised mood.

Even before the start, it was as if a switch had already been thrown. Part of this reflects the new controller Sam Jackson’s determination to make a bigger than normal noise about the Proms on Radio 3 in the run-up. But it also felt as if the penny has at last dropped with audiences that classical music is under threat in Britain. This concert felt like a fight-back.

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Yes, the Tories’ migration bill is bad – but the lack of Commons scrutiny is more disturbing still | Martin Kettle

Despite their best efforts, rebel MPs couldn’t muster enough opposition to the government’s plan – nor even much interest in it

An observant visitor from another world would surely find today’s Britain a troubled place, facing historic difficulties – inflation, war, inequality, its unsure place in the world, climate breakdown. But they might struggle to learn it from much of the country’s media, which is seemingly more interested in allegations against TV presenters than in illuminating the country’s much larger problems.

The visitor would have witnessed a dimension of this national disjunction if they had sat in the House of Commons gallery on Tuesday to hear MPs debating the latest stages of the government’s illegal migration bill. Here, after all, was indubitably a debate on an important problem. Migration policy is not working well, is in need of fresh and coherent approaches, and is causing concern to many. In short, it is a classic example of the many ways in which ours is a country – and a continent – no longer at ease with itself.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

This article was amended on 13 July 2023 to remove an erroneous assertion that Tim Loughton was chair of the home affairs select committee

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The Land of Might-Have-Been review – Ivor Novello meets Vera Brittain in a new wartime musical

Opera House, Buxton
Two doomed romances are at the heart of this effective show, which deftly weaves together Brittain’s feminist memoir and Novello’s sentimental songs

There is opera by Bellini, Handel and Mozart to come, but this year’s Buxton international festival opened with the premiere of a musical. The Land of Might-Have-Been weaves the romantic 1930s melodies of Ivor Novello into the pacifist autobiographical writing of Vera Brittain, who grew up in Buxton. At first sight it’s not an obvious pairing, though Novello and Brittain were exact contemporaries. Yet it works surprisingly well.

Novello composed the patriotic anthem Keep the Home Fires Burning in 1914, but the world’s troubles cast no discernible shadow over the hit musicals he wrote in the 1930s and 40s. One of the many achievements of Michael Williams in knitting Novello’s sentimental songs so tightly into a narrative drawn from Brittain’s morally charged memoir Testament of Youth is that the music and the words enhance one another so effectively. On their own, each would be an interesting curiosity. Together, they draw things out from each other, conjuring an effective piece of musical theatre.

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Get ready for a reprise of the Enemies of the People show: it's all Sunak has got left | Martin Kettle

Their plans in disarray, the Tories will fight the next election pointing blame yet again at judges, clerics and ‘leftie lawyers’

Political prediction is a mug’s game. Wise commentators should try to refrain from too many of them. Yet it is hard to look at Rishi Sunak’s government right now and not offer one. Here’s mine. Amid the government’s current struggles, a culture war campaign against liberal institutions is increasingly likely to be the centrepiece of the Conservative general election effort next year. For convenience, call it Enemies of the People 2.

It was not intended to be like this when Sunak took over. When he first set out his five priority targets, the goals by which he invited the public to judge his government when election day came, they appeared quite sensibly chosen, mostly modest, perhaps at least partially achievable and a welcome contrast from the gassy bombast of Boris Johnson and the delusional dogmas of Liz Truss.

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LSO/Rattle review – wistful and life-enhancing, a terrific farewell for the departing chief

Barbican, London
Signing off with a joyous new commission from 96-year-old Betsy Jolas and a return to a longtime Messiaen favourite, Sir Simon led a regretful but sunny evening

Simon Rattle’s final concert at the Barbican as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra was inevitably an evening suffused with regret. Having got him back from Berlin in 2017, we should not have lost him again after only six years. His departure for Munich tolls another warning about music’s increasingly beleaguered status in Britain.

As a concert, however, this was the very opposite of sad. Indeed, it would be hard to devise a more joyous programme – as well as one closer to Rattle’s musical heart and ethos – than the Betsy Jolas world premiere that began it and the monumental Turangalîla symphony of Olivier Messiaen with which it concluded.

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Brexit was Johnson and Johnson was Brexit. Now that he has gone, Britain must think again | Martin Kettle

The disgraced former PM and our disastrous exit from the EU were umbilically linked. His fall presents a precious opportunity

It is easy to overlook the fact that something larger is at stake amid the Conservative party’s midsummer mayhem. Something larger, for sure, than Boris Johnson’s petulance or Nadine Dorries’ attention-seeking. Something affecting us all, not just the Tory party. Something that underlies everything else about current British politics and will outlast the current excitement. That something is the future of Brexit.

Yes, Johnson’s latest self-centred lord-of-misrule melodrama is remarkable even by his own standards. Yes, Dorries’ latest career move, going postal in parliament, on the run from her own resignation, is providing a suitably disturbing coda to an already dauntingly disturbing political career. And, yes, Rishi Sunak’s laboriously constructed authority as prime minister is again under threat from the intemperate disloyalty that has become the default setting of a section of the Tory party.

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What would Britain look like today if we’d chosen to follow the roads not taken? | Martin Kettle

An exhibition in Berlin explores 14 alternative histories for Germany. What a shame that we don’t do the same

What might have happened if Britain had … But where do you go with that thought? Especially in such grim times as these. If only we had voted against Brexit, perhaps. Or been better prepared for Covid. Gripped the climate crisis more ruthlessly. The list of missed moments and might-have-beens in our recent past is dauntingly long.

But always remember this. Might-have-beens are not always more benign options. Missed opportunities can look very different from the Guardian reader-pleasing list above. If only Britain had … Not joined the EU in the first place. Not imposed a Covid lockdown at all. Sent the Windrush generation back. Kept on digging the coal to fire the power stations.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Pay attention to Rachel Reeves: her economic thinking is a return to sanity | Martin Kettle

The shadow chancellor has a vision for social democracy in an age of economic shocks and uncertainty – New Labour this isn’t

The mythology of political history insists that politicians’ speeches are important. A lifetime in political journalism tells me different. Political speeches have got to be made, and some politicians are good at them – Michael Heseltine, the best I have ever heard – but most speeches are events of the moment. They are decorative, not determinative. Most do not matter much and are rightly forgotten, even the good ones.

There are, though, occasional exceptions. Rachel Reeves’ speech to the Peterson Institute in Washington DC on Wednesday has a claim to be one of those with a longer shelf life. Not because it was an oratorical tour de force stuffed with smart lines. It wasn’t. Some of Reeves’ terminology, such as her embrace of what she calls “securonomics”, is a distracting barrier to understanding what is otherwise a key idea. But that’s a small point. This speech matters a lot. It matters because the ideas and commitments it contains are serious – and because it addresses something indisputably important.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Keir Starmer does have a vision – and it’s not New Labour 2.0 | Martin Kettle

Defying political orthodoxy, the leader believes he can win an election outright by reuniting his party’s working- and middle-class wings

For some, any idea that Keir Starmer and audacity are words that can sit comfortably in the same sentence will seem nonsensical. To many who define themselves as Labour supporters, the most salient characteristic of the opposition leader is not his audacity but its opposite, timidity. In this critique, Starmer’s strategy, if he really has one, is to do as little as possible to offend the voters, and wait for the Conservatives to eject themselves from government by their own divisions and incompetence rather than to drive them from it.

Seen thus, the English local elections of 2023 were quickly interpreted as an object warning on the limits of this supposed approach. The Conservative vote share on 4 May was predictably down after the negligence and bloodletting of 2022. Labour’s lead, though, was more modest, so the spoils were shared with the Liberal Democrats and Greens. After the voting, a Labour landslide no longer beckoned as brightly. Instead, the future seems more likely to offer a hung parliament and talk of coalition deals.

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