Martin Kettle's Blog, page 35
April 7, 2020
Boris Johnson's illness is a message to us all about the true nature of coronavirus | Martin Kettle
Nothing that has happened so far brings home more clearly that we are in a collective struggle
Boris Johnson’s move last night into intensive care in London’s St Thomas’ hospital marks a turning point in Britain’s national Covid-19 crisis. On one level it is just one more personal crisis for another of the more than 1.3 million human victims of the virus around the world. But on another level it is much more than that, and its full significance for Britain has not yet been properly understood.
The incapacity of any prime minister at any time always throws a government machine into confusion. That’s no different in the case of Johnson’s sickness than in the many previous cases in British history in which other prime ministers have been afflicted by illness or the need for surgery. But the machine will adapt. It’s what government machines do.
Related: PM's move to ICU shows he's likely to have severe Covid-19
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April 1, 2020
Policing under coronavirus: the real test is yet to come | Martin Kettle
As the pandemic wears on, how long will we allow ourselves to be policed by consent?
Coronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverageAt the end of The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe bids farewell to his readers and to the characters in the novel. “I never saw any of them again – except the cops,” muses Marlowe. “No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.” Chandler was expressing a wider truth. In the words of the British criminologist Robert Reiner: “Welcome or unwelcome, protectors, pigs or pariahs, the police are an inevitable fact of modern life.”
Especially, we are again learning, in a national emergency. The Coronavirus Act 2020 has given a ratchet to three of the most persistently controversial themes in British policing history: police powers, police discretion and police coordination. All three are back in the spotlight in the Covid-19 lockdown. But this week’s arguments, prompted in part by the former supreme court judge Jonathan Sumption’s warnings about the growth of a police state, are only the start. The real test for the policing of the pandemic is yet to come.
Today’s events are reminding a new generation of police that relations with the public are always contingent
Continue reading...March 27, 2020
Opera and classical home watching picks: critics pick their highlights
There’s a growing treasure trove of classical music to watch for free. Each day, our critics are selecting a highlight
How often has one of the world’s great pianists played live for you at home? Igor Levit is doing it every day for all of us. As the sun goes down, he walks over to the Steinway in his Berlin living room and gives a concert, live on Twitter. There’s absolutely no formality. Levit wears whatever he has got on that day. He gives a brief introduction, in German and English, maybe with a reflection or two on our strange times, for Levit has always been a concerned citizen in every sense, and these concerts come from the heart. Some nights he plays Beethoven. Other nights it’s Schubert or Brahms. The sound quality is often variable and poor but you hardly care about that. That’s because, if you really listen to, say, his playing of Schubert’s B flat sonata D960, he is saying something so much larger about the work he chooses. He is saying that music is humanity at its best and that we and it will survive. It’s the fact of Levit’s wish and need to play for his worldwide audience that makes this feel so gripping and life-enhancing. It is an artistic act that is at once very informal yet also deadly serious. Martin Kettle
Related: 'Quarantine soirées': classical music and opera to stream at home
Continue reading...March 25, 2020
We simply don't know what kind of Britain will awake from all this | Martin Kettle
Beware confident predictions of our future after the Covid-19 crisis. Our response to seismic change is often to entrench existing views
If there is one thing everyone living through the Covid-19 emergency agrees, it is that it is unprecedented. Everyone is surely right about that. But what follows in politics, economics and social behaviour from that recognition? There is no agreement there. There are resemblances with wartime, of course, but Britain never went into almost total lockdown in wartime. There are echoes of past pestilences too, but these afflictions did not bring normal life to such a totalising standstill.
And these are only early days in a long process. Politicians are no better than anyone else at adjusting to radical change. As Boris Johnson’s uncertain initial messaging exemplified, adjustment takes time. The worst of the crisis is also yet to come. Covid-19 cases and deaths have not yet peaked. The outbreak may drag on for longer than we have yet grasped, or it may return. Pretending that life could be back to normal by Easter, as Donald Trump does, is delinquent. If the 1918-19 flu pandemic is a guide, the Covid-19 virus may be with us for a year.
Related: Coronavirus key questions: everything you need to know
Related: What Ebola taught me about coronavirus: panic will get us nowhere
Continue reading...Opera and classical home watching picks: critics pick their higlights
There’s a growing treasure trove of classical music to watch for free. Each day, our critics will choose a highlight
Prime attraction of this Munich staging for Verdi’s bi-centenary in 2013 is the starry pairing of soprano Anja Harteros and Jonas Kaufmann as ill-fated lovers Leonora and Manrico, the singing warrior – thus eponymous troubadour. With her rich lower range and fine coloratura, Harteros’ singing is rather wonderful and she is a remarkably graceful presence, in part for being required to play Leonora as blind. That was presumably to explain managing to confuse her lover with the baddie Conte di Luna – the same after-shave? – but surely unnecessary since mistaken identities and the wrong babies are everywhere in opera. Kaufmann is not an Italianate Manrico, but that hardly matters: he is gloriously passionate and tender both in his love for Leonora and for his gypsy mother, Azucena, whose tortured relationship with her own mother’s death haunts the staging from the outset. Verdi’s music moves inexorably to the tragic ending, yet there is something almost comic and frankly perverse in Olivier Py’s Regietheater spectacle: an elaborate multi-scened revolve, dance, acrobatics, martial arts, and a lot of naked flesh suggest that plot was the least of his priorities. Don’t even bother trying to work out why a single figure beats out the Anvil chorus on a version of Stephenson’s Rocket. Just listen. (available until 28 March, here’s the libretto) Rian Evans
Continue reading...March 18, 2020
Defeating the Covid-19 crisis could need a wartime coalition government | Martin Kettle
Boris Johnson may imagine he can still spin his way out of this national crisis, but it’s time for a different kind of politics
Coronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverageWe must act, said Boris Johnson on Tuesday, “like any wartime government”. The measures to control the population, he added, were “unprecedented since world war two”. Rishi Sunak, speaking later, announced, “We have never, in peacetime, faced an economic fight like this one.”
The second world war remains the foundation myth of modern Britain. Invoking it is a familiar default setting in British party politics. It has a Conservative version, embodied in Churchill, with whom Johnson compares himself. And it has its Labour version, in the form of veneration of Attlee and the post-1945 welfare state. The war still suffuses much of the national culture. It can sometimes be an inspiration. But it can sometimes, indeed more often, be a curse.
The playbooks of this peacetime effort will have striking comparisons with the playbooks of distant wartimes
Related: The Covid-19 crisis is a chance to do capitalism differently | Mariana Mazzucato
Continue reading...March 11, 2020
Rishi Sunak’s big-spending budget throws Labour a huge challenge | Martin Kettle
On 11 March 1952, Rab Butler unveiled the first Conservative budget since the second world war. It was also the first Tory budget since Labour’s creation of the National Health Service. It marked a political turning point for the Tory party. In that budget, not only did Butler become the first and last Tory chancellor of the postwar era to raise the basic rate of income tax – he also began the Tory party’s steady accommodation with key aspects of Labour’s postwar settlement, which lasted until Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
Related: It shouldn’t take a crisis for the chancellor to support ordinary people | Carys Roberts
Continue reading...March 8, 2020
Susanna review – young artists shine in cluttered Handel staging
Linbury theatre, London
Handel’s take on the biblical story of Susanna is well played and well sung in this new production by Isabelle Kettle, though less would have been more
Welcome back to Covent Garden, Susanna. It has been 271 years since Handel’s oratorio last had an outing at the Royal Opera House, where it was premiered in February 1749. On the basis of this finely played and well sung performance in Covent Garden’s subterranean Linbury theatre in a co-production with the London Handel festival, Susanna’s absence seems altogether extraordinary.
Handel set the story from the Book of Daniel in which two elders try to assault Susanna as she bathes. When the repulsed elders accuse her of adultery, she is condemned to death, but Daniel intercedes to expose the elders’ lies and Susanna is saved. It is a highly theatrical tale, often painted, which Handel bulks up with an extensive backstory that establishes Susanna’s probity, stoicism and faith before her trials begin.
Continue reading...March 4, 2020
Why is Patel still in her job? Because the boss needs her there | Martin Kettle
Priti Patel is a very lucky home secretary. Twenty-five years ago, when Michael Howard did her current job, the Conservative party lapped up his hardline penal policy of “three strikes and you’re out”. Patel shares much of Howard’s philosophy. But she is lucky his three strikes doctrine has gone. Patel would not be in her job if it applied.
In less than a week, three separate bullying charges have been lodged against Patel. The earliest, from when she was a junior minister at the Department for Work and Pensions in 2015, centres on a formal complaint of bullying and harassment. The second, from her time as international development secretary in 2017, involves what has been called a “tsunami of allegations” as well as “shocking” bullying of her own private secretary. The third, which came in her permanent secretary’s resignation statement, accuses her of creating fear by shouting, swearing, belittling, and making unreasonable and repeated demands.
In Cummings’s world, the loss of Patel would be both a victory for the hated Whitehall “blob” and for the hated BBC
Related: Priti Patel accused of bullying a third senior civil servant
Continue reading...February 19, 2020
The new Tory immigration system won’t work – except at the ballot box | Martin Kettle
Shutting out low-skilled workers from entering the country is all about politics, not the economy
There was a solitary question on the ballot paper in the 2016 referendum. It asked: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” The result – the majority vote to leave – was clear but close. Boris Johnson’s government has now begun to implement it and would like to pretend that the issue is done and dusted.
This is patently not the case. For one thing, most of the terms on which Brexit Britain will coexist alongside the EU remain to be decided. For another, it was common ground among leavers and remainers that a lot of umbilically linked questions clustered around the core EU argument. Among them were such things as austerity, business confidence, inequality, regional decline, hostility to London, nationalist narratives, resentment of elites – and immigration. Ever since 2016, these other Brexit-powered questions have helped to reshape British politics at least as much as Brexit itself has done.
The Tory party has become a nationalist party, sustained by the tabloid press, rather than a class party
Related: Immigration: firms will need to train more UK workers, says Priti Patel
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