Martin Kettle's Blog, page 48
June 21, 2018
May wants to break with Thatcher’s legacy. More cash for the NHS is a start | Martin Kettle
The Tory leader’s pledge signals a possible break with dogma many in the party still cling to. Will she change their minds?
Brexit so often dominates our politics, as it did this week with yet another fraught House of Commons debate on how it is to be achieved. But, strange though it may seem, Europe is not the only epochal argument in British politics today. The implications of this week’s announcement about funding for the National Health Service run it very close, with one important difference. The Brexit argument is deafening in the public arena. The spending argument is not. It awaits its public voice.
Theresa May’s handling of the NHS spending announcement was mendacious and silly. Nevertheless this is big money, serious governmental stuff. It is an explicit recognition at the very top of the Conservative government that public spending can be politically and socially essential. Yet May’s party has yet to internalise that truth. May herself has a track record of public advocacy of this progressive kind – on the “just about managing” in 2016, on reform of social care last year, and now on health. But she also has a bleak record when it comes to acting on it.
Antonio Gramsci wrote of his sense that the old order was dying but the new was struggling to be born
Related: A warning to the Tories: Britain’s true-blue suburbs have turned liberal | John Harris
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Simon Rattle bows out at Berlin with Mahler, Merkel and standing ovations
After 16 years at the helm of Europe’s most prestigious symphony orchestra, the conductor’s final concerts were emotional affairs. His energy and skills have won him more friends than enemies
After 16 years not just at the heart of Europe but also at the head of the continent’s most prestigious symphony orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle bowed out as the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic this week, in an emotional farewell concert in the German capital.
The Liverpool-born conductor, who in 2002 became the first Briton ever chosen for the Berlin job, was never the traditionalists’ choice to take charge of the jewel in Germany’s musical crown. But, in his last performance in Berlin’s Philharmonie Hall before returning to the UK to take over at the helm of the London Symphony Orchestra, all that was history. Rattle received the kind of loud cheering, standing ovation and bouquets of flowers from admirers that used to be reserved for opera divas.
June 20, 2018
May's parliamentary ping-pong – Brexit Means… podcast
Ahead of next EU27 summit, Jon Henley and the team discuss Theresa May’s parliamentary slugfest, the Brexit dividend and security cooperation
How likely is it that Theresa May will end up losing the game of parliamentary ping-pong she’s currently playing, and what will be the consequences if she does?
Ten days from their next major summit, and with progress on talks all but stalled, have the EU27 now got more important things on their plate than Brexit? What might be the consequences of that?
Continue reading...June 14, 2018
May’s Brexit crunch moment in parliament was just the first of many | Martin Kettle
The case against Theresa May’s prime ministership is easily made. But there’s a case for Theresa May too. This pro-May case is principally technocratic. It says she became leader in the aftermath of a referendum vote that was the biggest disruption of the parliamentary system since 1945; and that she has often managed intertwined tasks more effectively than anyone else could have done in the circumstances.
Related: May walks Brexit tightrope as Tory rift over final deal deepens
Continue reading...June 8, 2018
'Acerbic and firm': Mary Wilson remembered fondly after death at 102
Wife of Harold Wilson was much more formidable than her public image suggested
She hated the limelight, she rarely gave interviews and she remained a fiercely private woman right to the end. But the death of Mary Wilson this week at the age of 102 has triggered a wave of public affection and respect for the former Labour prime minister’s wife that she probably never even guessed existed.
The 1960s satirists mocked Mary Wilson as the epitome of middle-class domesticity. But the real woman was a much more formidable person than that, recall those who know what she went through.
Continue reading...June 6, 2018
Don’t let the right have its way. The left must speak for England | Martin Kettle
Progressives need to engage seriously with England’s mood and England’s needs – or cede the ground entirely
We will be hearing a lot about England over the next few weeks as the World Cup gets under way. But this column is not – at least not explicitly – about football, English or otherwise. It’s a column about England itself. It is a column about the country whose name is surprisingly rarely referenced outside the sporting context, yet a country with which the overwhelming majority of people living in these islands strongly identify.
A lot has been written since 2016 about whether the Brexit vote marked an eruption of English nationalism. My experience is that this debate gets ahead of itself rather too easily and that those who make the claim sometimes put their fingers on the scales for reasons of their own. Explicit English nationalism remains nonexistent or dormant, not active, unlike other nationalisms in these islands. That the Brexit vote was, in part, an immense expression of English identity is, on the other hand, beyond dispute.
Related: English patriotism on the rise, research shows
Related: Labour must embrace Englishness – and be proud of it | Tristram Hunt
Continue reading...June 3, 2018
Bavarian State Orchestra / Petrenko review – Rattle's heir thrills with wild intensity
Barbican, London
Kirill Petrenko’s rapport with the awesome Bavarian players delivered a truly dazzling Mahler Seventh, and underlined why his move to Berlin is hotly anticipated
Coincidence? Surely not. In the very week that Sir Simon Rattle gave his farewell visiting concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic across London in the Royal Festival Hall, who should turn up at the rival Barbican Hall but Rattle’s heir and successor Kirill Petrenko, in company with the Bavarian State Orchestra, the awesome Munich opera house band with whom Petrenko has done so much to burnish his qualifications for the Berlin job.
Comparisons are invidious at this supremely exalted level of orchestral execution but they are also fascinating. Both orchestras play with an extra gear that is rarely heard in this country, let alone twice in the space of 48 hours. In Bruckner two days previously, the Berliners had once again astonished with the depth and texture of their sound. In Mahler’s Seventh symphony, it was the Bavarians’ unremitting virtuosic intensity that made its mark. This, though, seemed to emanate directly from the explosive energy and tight grip of Petrenko on what is often thought of as Mahler’s most diffuse and enigmatic symphony – as well as a long-time Rattle speciality. While some Mahler Sevenths wander scenically through the work’s constantly inventive sound world, Petrenko’s control and press-on approach were manifest from the clipped opening bars of the first movement, which was never permitted to meander into reverie.
Continue reading...June 2, 2018
'Hugh Grant is uncanny': Liberals glued to A Very English Scandal
Grant is remarkable as Jeremy Thorpe and the basic thrust is right, say people linked to the story. Shame about the cars ...
Watching Hugh Grant’s TV portrayal of Jeremy Thorpe, it is almost impossible to believe that such an extraordinarily reckless public figure could really have prospered in 20th-century British politics. But he did.
The insouciance, the exhibitionism, the darkness and the utter unreliability that Grant captures so brilliantly in A Very English Scandal may seem like a grotesque caricature of Thorpe. But it isn’t.
Related: A Very English Scandal review: funny and confident – like Jeremy Thorpe
Continue reading...June 1, 2018
Trump’s trade war threatens global peace | Martin Kettle
Trade war. Surely the clue is in the name. Incredible as it may seem, the United States has just declared war. Not on adversaries like North Korea, Iran or Russia. Instead it has declared war on Europe, on us. The modern world has lost the habit of thinking in a historical way about free trade.
Today’s global economy has been predicated for more than half a century on open international markets. Through most of that period, arguments over trade have been arguments about good forms of free trade – such as the tariff-free flow of products that boosts prosperity all round – versus the bad forms – such as lower labour standards, tax avoidance or the undermining of public institutions.
Related: Markets shrug off trade war fears and Spanish vote as US jobs beat forecasts - as it happened
Related: Trump’s tariffs spell it out: Brexit Britain can’t rely on the US | Adam Marshall
Continue reading...May 31, 2018
Berlin Philharmonic/Rattle review – all guns blazing on Simon's farewell tour
Royal Festival Hall, London
The fruits of Simon Rattle’s long partnership with the Berlin orchestra were evident in a magisterial Bruckner Ninth and vivid miniatures by Hans Abrahamsen
In 2002, newly installed as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Simon Rattle brought Bruckner’s unfinished Ninth Symphony to the Festival Hall on one of their first joint visits. The performance was a serious disappointment, wonderfully played – as you would expect, but all on the surface and with little interpretative depth.
What a change the intervening 16 years have wrought. Here, in the first of two London concerts marking Rattle’s departure from Berlin, was a performance for the ages of that same Bruckner symphony. It showed how much Rattle has come to terms with Bruckner during his Berlin years but, above all, it displayed the deep musical rapport between players and conductor that has matured during his long tenure in the German capital.
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