Martin Kettle's Blog, page 28
April 7, 2021
In the US, Joe Biden is backing the unions. Britain can only look on in envy | Martin Kettle
The UK needs a political leader who will follow the US president – and put dignified work at the heart of our post-Covid recovery
Last week, Joe Biden unveiled a $2tn infrastructure renewal plan whose boldness and scale caught the attention of the world. He began his launch speech in Pittsburgh with a particularly striking affirmation. “I’m a union guy,” the president said. “I support unions. Unions built the middle class. It’s about time they start to get a piece of the action.”
Biden’s American Jobs Plan consists of many more substantial things than this warm rhetorical embrace of America’s trade unions. The package involves massive federal investment in transport, housing, green jobs, electric cars, social care and much else besides. And Biden has vowed to reverse much of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts on companies and the wealthy in order to pay for it.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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March 31, 2021
Starmer has a second shot at making a good first impression. He mustn't waste it | Martin Kettle
Those who are already writing off the Labour leader are remarkably premature, but the challenges ahead are immense
David Cameron writes in his memoirs that two days in the calendar matter more for a leader of the opposition than all the others. One is the date of the leader’s autumn party conference speech, which gives a rare chance to stand in the televised spotlight and tell the country what you stand for. The other is the spring local elections day, which gives the country the equally rare chance to say if it likes what it sees and hears.
The ghostly strangeness of Keir Starmer’s first year as leader of the Labour party is reflected in the fact that in the 12 months since he succeeded Jeremy Corbyn neither of these two normally crucial opportunities for an opposition politician has come his way. The first lockdown meant that last year’s local elections were postponed, while the continuing of the pandemic meant last year’s party conference season was effectively scrapped too.
Related: It should be Super Thursday for local elections but London still holds the reins | Rafael Behr
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...March 25, 2021
The silver streamer: older people are bingeing TV? News to me
I love the telly – but the older generation is as susceptible to the waning attention spans a glut of content can cause, and after a year in lockdown I’m in need of a break
According to Ofcom, the UK’s communication regulator, Britain has become a country of lockdown binge-watchers, with viewing habits that were previously associated mainly with young people soaring up through the age bands to engulf even my own generation of “silver streamers”.
I do not want any part of that weird cult of sanctimonious souls who proudly refuse to have a TV in their house, and who insist that they fill their time in more virtuous and improving activities of other kinds. I’m not one of those. Never have been. Never will be. I love the telly. But even I have struggled to watch anything like the 6 hours 25 minutes of TV on any single day that Ofcom has found is the average daily viewing figure.
People go on about the wonder of Call My Agent!, but somehow I don’t feel the call
Continue reading...March 17, 2021
Like Brexit, Boris Johnson's vision for 'global Britain' is an idea not a policy | Martin Kettle
Instead of delivering a strategy, the prime minister’s defence review was an exercise in political opportunism
Defence reviews and foreign policy resets come and go in British politics. Some of their conclusions struggle to survive sustained contact with the real world. Most are remembered only by defence specialists and whichever armed service does well – or badly – out of the reordered spending that is each review’s core purpose.
Occasionally, there is a substantial exception, a defence review that embodies a real strategic decision that resonates across the years, both in the wider world and at home. Labour’s 1968 “east of Suez” withdrawal white paper was a notable example. It marked a major step in the dismantling of Britain’s post-imperial role. Arriving in the wake of Brexit, Boris Johnson’s integrated review of foreign and defence policy this week had the potential to be another.
Related: Why can't Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill? | Priyamvada Gopal
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...March 10, 2021
The closer Boris Johnson forces the union together, the more likely it will fall apart | Martin Kettle
Vital decisions about Wales and Scotland are being unilaterally taken in Westminster, fuelling the arguments for devolution
It is often rightly claimed that Boris Johnson is determined not to lead the United Kingdom out of the European Union only to preside over the UK’s own breakup. Johnson is not as indifferent to the UK’s survival as some around him. The problem is that his chosen UK survival strategy is increasingly having the opposite effect. It is threatening to aid the breakup of the UK not to prevent it.
The problem goes far beyond Johnson’s Marmite personality. It even goes beyond the facts that he is a Conservative and led the break with Europe. Johnson’s centrifugal destructiveness to the UK rests increasingly on the particular kind of unionism he embraces and on the measures that he takes to promote it.
Related: Westminster warned as poll shows record backing for Welsh independence
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...March 3, 2021
Nicola Sturgeon and Rishi Sunak were both playing for Scotland's future | Martin Kettle
The SNP leader was battling for her political life in Holyrood, but she had an opponent in Westminster too
At first glance, there may seem little connection between Britain’s two big political events today. Rishi Sunak’s budget speech at Westminster and Nicola Sturgeon’s near-simultaneous inquiry appearance at Holyrood were each newsworthy set pieces. But they inhabited different political worlds and addressed largely different audiences.
Nevertheless, it is hard to fully understand them without understanding the gravitational pull that each exerted on the other.
Related: Budget 2021: the verdict on Rishi Sunak's plans | Gaby Hinsliff and others
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...February 24, 2021
The feud between Sturgeon and Salmond could derail Scottish independence | Martin Kettle
Damage inflicted by the former first minister on his protege could have serious consequences in May’s Holyrood elections
Few spectacles are more horribly watchable than a political feud. From Caesar and Pompey in the ancient world to Gordon Brown versus Tony Blair in the modern one, feuds are riveting and often barely believable in their intensity. During the Napoleonic wars, a pair of cabinet ministers even found time to fight a duel, in which the foreign secretary George Canning was shot in the thigh by the war minister Viscount Castlereagh.
Related: What is the Alex Salmond controversy all about?
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...February 19, 2021
Few will mourn the passing of London's great concert hall that never was | Martin Kettle
The scrapping of ambitious plans for the Centre for Music lays bare the place of the arts in austerity-torn Brexit Britain
There always was an artistic case for London to have a 21st-century concert hall. Both the Royal Festival Hall (built in the late 1940s) and the Barbican Hall (1960s-70s) have fundamental problems in matching the best halls in the world. London is – or was – one of the world’s cultural capitals. It could undoubtedly have made rich use of a better venue – a venue that was in the works until ambitious plans for the £288m Centre for Music were scrapped on Thursday.
In a perfect world – in which money was no object, the arts were more celebrated and politicians felt under pressure to treat cultural value seriously – the Centre for Music would have been a marked improvement. Simon Rattle’s 2017 appointment as head of the London Symphony Orchestra, based in the Barbican, gave the project a star power it otherwise lacked.
It was hard not to see it as an elite project, only distantly connected with wider public need
Related: Joseph Middleton: Brexit is destroying music. Why has the government let this happen?
Continue reading...February 17, 2021
Today's Ireland is built on political compromise. The UK could learn from its success | Martin Kettle
The Northern Ireland protocol is messy but it can be made to work, and is better than the Brexiters’ zero-sum approach
Brexit wounds. Covid failures. Fairness in retreat. Nationalism on the march. It is hard to find reasons to be cheerful about this country’s future as a successful state in the modern world. Yet in the west there is a gleam of hope. To see the kind of politics that the UK needs to learn from in this time of troubles, look no further than Ireland.
To many, this will seem counterintuitive. The suggestion that Britain can learn from Ireland flies in the face of the former’s long self-image of dismissive superiority towards “John Bull’s other island”. It upends the centuries in which British governments saw Ireland as a problem to be mastered and controlled, not as an island offering solutions, insights or lessons.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...February 15, 2021
From the sublime to the ridiculous: our critics best and worst of Wagner's Ring Cycle
Ahead of Radio 3’s broadcast of all four operas, we asked our writers which moments of the epic they love the most – and which they hope to never hear again
The list of operas I’d happily never sit through again grows longer by the year, but Siegfried has been very near the top of it for a long time. I’m not a perfect Wagnerite by any means (another of his greatest works would also be on my blacklist), but nor am I a Wagner-phobe: I find Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung totally compelling parts of The Ring. Yet the galumphing comedy of Siegfried leaves me utterly cold, and even the glorious scene between Erda and The Wanderer that opens the third act can’t begin to redeem the whole work.
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