Martin Kettle's Blog, page 30
November 26, 2020
The toxic polarisation of our politics can be reversed, but it will take humility | Martin Kettle
Joe Biden’s approach is likely to include listening and cooperation. Politicians – and citizens – should emulate it
After Dwight Eisenhower had been sworn in as United States president on Capitol Hill in January 1953, he recited a prayer to the watching crowd that he had written himself that same morning. The words embodied how Eisenhower hoped to govern. “Especially we pray,” he told them, “that our concern shall be for all the people regardless of station, race or calling. May cooperation be permitted and be the mutual aim of those who … hold to differing political beliefs.”
To a 2020s audience those words may now seem anodyne and pious, the usual politician’s guff that we barely listen to. Race, in particular, would remain an unhealed wound through Eisenhower’s eight years in the White House. Nevertheless, the prayer truthfully embodies an approach to politics that actually worked for much of 1950s America.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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November 25, 2020
From Vivaldi to Vaughan Williams: more musical voices who have changed our world
Over the past few months, our Know the Score series introduced 20 great composers. But what of the many we couldn’t write about? Martin Kettle suggests some other names whose music is well worth exploring
The aim of the Know the score series was straightforward. To assist the reader who is curious about classical music, and to help them find some entry points with short guides to some of the art form’s best-known names. With the series now ended, where might the reader who is still curious go next? What of the many, many composers who didn’t make our top 20?
There is, of course, no definitive league table of great composers, and no two people would come up with the same 20 names that we chose to focus on. And so the aim of this article is to offer one entirely personal view of some of the composers who did not make it into the original series. And, for the sake of symmetry, we have another 20.
The enduring centre of gravity of classical music still lies in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The lamentable absence of women from such lists reflects those times
Continue reading...November 18, 2020
Tories hoping for a post-Cummings 'reset' face a problem – Boris Johnson | Martin Kettle
The dysfunctionality of the government is merely a reflection of the slapdash destructiveness of the prime minister himself
Towards the end of last week, while the courtiers’ power struggle still raged at Downing Street, I had an exchange of texts with an ex-minister. What did this experienced politician think the increasingly fractious row in No 10 was really about, I asked. Was it personalities? Policies? Power? The instant reply was short and to the point. It consisted of a single word. It said simply: “Boris!”
A few minutes later, the ex-minister followed up. The problem, he said, was the ultimately futile attempt of trying to deal with a dysfunctional person by endlessly discussing structural solutions. The same sort of thing had happened to New Labour at times. Now it was happening to the Tories too. A new chief of staff here. Bring in a new adviser there. A ministerial reshuffle perhaps. Before long, the ex-minister said dismissively, they will probably move the prime minister into a brand new room in the vain hope that a change of surroundings will solve the problem.
Continue reading...November 16, 2020
English National Opera/Wigglesworth review – Mozart's Requiem is urgent and direct
On iPlayer, filmed at the London Coliseum
Fine soloists, a committed chorus and Mark Wigglesworth’s instinct for dramatic immediacy combined to bring power to Mozart’s unfinished last masterpiece
In the time of Covid, any concert is an achievement in itself. This performance of Mozart’s Requiem by English National Opera under Mark Wigglesworth was unmistakably that. Originally scheduled for early November in front of socially distanced theatregoers to mark ENO’s return to its London Coliseum home, it went ahead as a pre-recorded lockdown concert from the Coliseum stage for a television and online audience. The pandemic backdrop and the proximity to Remembrance Day combined to create powerful extra context for Mozart’s unfinished last masterpiece.
On BBC iPlayer until October 2021.
Continue reading...November 11, 2020
Dominic Cummings, take note: even Thatcher had liberal civil servants | Martin Kettle
Committed to the common good, David Faulkner, who has died, embodied all that was right about the Civil Service
In a delicately weighted coda at the end of Middlemarch, George Eliot quietly celebrates the unheroic but life-enhancing example of the novel’s central character. Dorothea Brooke’s spirit may have “spent itself in channels which have no great name on the earth,” Eliot writes. “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”
The effect of the Home Office civil servant David Faulkner, who died last week aged 86, was incalculably diffusive too. I didn’t know him terribly well, but I am definitely one of many journalists, researchers, academics and practitioners whom he influenced. In manner, Faulkner was always modest, fair, serious and unflashy. When I have mentioned him to others in the last few days, the first thing that people say is always – and rightly – how nice he was.
Continue reading...November 4, 2020
The message from the 2020 election? The US still stands divided | Martin Kettle
Visceral complaints about being left behind and dismissed remain. Trump spoke to them in ways that Biden did not
Few saw this knife-edge US election result coming. But we can’t say we weren’t warned. Overall, the 2020 election bears a striking resemblance to the one that took so many by surprise four years ago. The belief that 2020 would be decisively different from 2016 turns out to have been based on a very human but ultimately very foolish triumph of hope over experience. In politics, we have been reminded, hope is not power.
Related: US election 2020 live: Biden holds narrow lead over Trump in Wisconsin as result awaited
Related: 'Authoritarian': Trump condemned for falsely claiming election victory
Continue reading...November 2, 2020
Bostridge/Connolly/Drake/Carducci Quartet
Barbican, London/online
The underused combination of voice, piano and string quartet made for a rewarding evening in works by Vaughan Williams, Chausson and Fauré
The catalogue of music for voice, piano and string quartet is not large, and seems mainly to consist of rearrangements. Yet in this Barbican concert with the tenor Ian Bostridge and mezzo Sarah Connolly, along with the pianist Julius Drake and the Carducci Quartet, any feeling of being stuck on a musical byway fell away and one wondered why more composers have not written for this interesting and rewarding combination.
Vaughan Williams’s song cycle On Wenlock Edge, his 1909 setting of six of AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad poems, is one of the few pieces originally written for such forces. The writing owes much to the composer’s studies with Ravel and makes a compelling case, exploiting the possibilities of its fast-changing mix of string textures, underpinned with the sonorousness of the piano, particularly effective in On Bredon Hill and well brought out by Drake’s authoritative touch.
Continue reading...October 29, 2020
From MacDonald to Corbyn: a history of Labour leaders who ran afoul of the party
Corbyn is the first ex-leader to be suspended from Labour – but he wouldn’t be the first to be expelled
Jeremy Corbyn already had a special place in the political record books. His more than 600 career Commons votes against Labour make him easily the most rebellious backbench MP ever to become a party leader. But Corbyn’s suspension from the party he led until April this year is a spectacular new first.
No former Labour leader in history has ever been suspended from the party. However, if Corbyn’s suspension – which he has said he will “strongly contest” – leads to his eventual expulsion, he will share a fate with a very different former Labour leader, in the shape of Ramsay MacDonald.
Continue reading...Christmas will be a public health disaster if the UK nations don't come together | Martin Kettle
Unless there’s a joint approach now to the challenges of the festive season the consequences will be grim
In any other year, it would be trite and lazy to be already writing about Christmas when we are still only in October. Yet in 2020 the subject cannot be avoided. If you think Boris Johnson has stranded himself on the wrong side of the argument over Marcus Rashford’s holiday school meals campaign, wait until you think about the Christmas car crash towards which he and his government are now foolishly speeding.
Christmas is less than two months away. This year, it beckons more than usually as a moment of balm, hope and connection amid grim and disorientated times. Yet Britain’s surging rate of second-wave Covid cases is getting out of control. The test-and-trace system is failing. Coronavirus restrictions across Britain are a confusing tangle. Unless he is extremely lucky, Johnson is hurtling towards an unwanted choice between imposing a Christmas lockdown and permitting a Christmas viral explosion in the population. The wrong decision here would make his mishandling of the Rashford campaign look like a pre-season warm-up.
Continue reading...October 21, 2020
Boris Johnson's refusal to seek compromise will be his undoing | Martin Kettle
Good prime ministers seek to negotiate their way out of trouble. From Manchester to Brexit, Johnson is unable to do so
Five million pounds. A huge amount of money. But, in the national scheme of things, £5m is tiny. It amounts to an almost infinitesimal 0.0005% of what the British government budgeted to spend during the current financial year. Spread among the 2.8 million inhabitants of Greater Manchester, £5m works out at £1.78 per head, less than the price of a one-day off-peak travelcard on the city’s trams.
Yet by refusing to come up with this £5m on Tuesday, Boris Johnson’s government finds itself in a state of political warfare with Manchester. More, it stands accused of abandoning a city that has been the cornerstone of Conservative efforts to rebuild the party’s credibility in northern England. Above all, it faces charges that, in their hour of need, it turned its back on the northern voters upon whom Johnson’s party depends. As recent political follies go, this is among the worst – and there is already a bulging shortlist for that award.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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