Martin Kettle's Blog, page 50
April 8, 2018
Bernstein's Mass review – meticulous take on a fascinating failure
Royal Festival Hall, London
Marin Alsop commands an army of performers including the National Youth Orchestra and a marching band as they tackle Bernstein’s uneven period piece
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass was neglected for many years after its 1971 premiere, when it opened Washington’s Kennedy Center. The neglect is now a thing of the past. This performance was at least its third professional outing in London in the last decade. The revival of interest tells us something about this ambitious piece’s enduring capacity to fascinate. But so does the earlier neglect. Mass is a problem piece for a reason.
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April 4, 2018
The Good Friday agreement is 20 – and Britain can’t afford to forget it | Martin Kettle
Like most people of my postwar generation in Britain, I started thinking about Northern Ireland only when the shooting started. I had no family connection with Ireland. We never learned about Ireland at school. I didn’t read a book about Ireland until I was at university. And I never went to Ireland, north or south, until I was in my 20s.
My guess is that most of this was pretty typical of its era. As a boy, I knew Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. But what else? George Best was about as far as it went. The Irish seemed to be like us but were not talked about with affection, the way Australians were. Later I learned why that was. But the fact that Northern Ireland was in effect a one-party state, in which half of the population was routinely discriminated against, was simply not on our radar.
Related: How old ghosts are haunting Ireland | Susan McKay
Brexit is a symptom of British unease, not just a spanner in the works
Continue reading...March 28, 2018
Is it really such a terrible thing for your MP to have two jobs? | Martin Kettle
Dan Jarvis wants to be an MP and Sheffield’s mayor – and he should be able to. The separation of Westminster from devolved government is ridiculous
Gilmour Leburn sounds like a character from minor fiction, the glamorous detective in some interwar country house whodunnit perhaps. The real life Leburn, however, was a Scottish Conservative MP. His claim on a footnote in British political history rests upon a solitary fact. His early death in 1963 caused a byelection in Kinross and West Perthshire. This byelection enabled the new prime minister, the Earl of Home, who was then a member of the House of Lords, to disclaim his peerage and win a seat in the House of Commons as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. That strange interregnum between Home’s elevation to the premiership in October 1963 and his arrival in the House of Commons in November was the last occasion when Britain was led by a prime minister who was not an MP – and even, for the period of the byelection, a prime minister who was not a member of either house of parliament. Such events feel as if they come from another world – impossible to imagine today.
Related: Labour MPs attack ruling that Dan Jarvis must quit to run for mayor
Related: Why has devolution been a disaster for gender equality? | Susanna Rustin
Continue reading...March 21, 2018
After Salisbury, Britain must realise its true friends are in Europe | Martin Kettle
Of all the vacuous slogans generated by the entire Brexit campaign and process, “Global Britain” is the most vacuous of all. Not before time, the phrase is being called out for what it really is. Last week the Commons foreign affairs select committee dismissed it as meaningless, the former head of the Foreign Office trashed it as “mushy thinking”, while the Economist scorned it as “globaloney”.
Yet still Theresa May presses on with using it. She was at it again today in prime minister’s questions. After a sycophantic backbencher had suggested to her that leaving the EU provided “Britain’s greatest opportunity”, May responded that “a truly global Britain” would soon be able to “forge its own way” in the world. The operative word there was “forge”. For this is dishonest nonsense on stilts.
Related: Spy poisoning: police say investigation could last until summer
At the time when Britain remains bent on leaving the EU, many policymakers are cleaving more determinedly to Europe
Related: Russia accuses UK of hiding evidence in Skripal case
Continue reading...March 14, 2018
The Corbynite tribes rule Labour, but how long can they coexist? | Martin Kettle
For more than two years, ever since Jeremy Corbyn won the first of his two overwhelming Labour leadership victories, there has been a tendency, widely shared across the British political spectrum, to see “Corbynism” as one thing, a unified leftwing project. Yet Labour’s current internal debacle over the selection of its next general secretary, due for completion next week at a meeting of the party’s national executive committee, should explode that laziness.
True, it now seems certain that Jennie Formby, the candidate of the Unite union, will win an easy victory in the selection race as Labour’s top official, as she will be unchallenged by any of the major alternatives. True, this will be seen, rightly, as further consolidating Corbyn’s hold over the Labour party machine after the resignation of the previous general secretary, Iain McNicol of the GMB union, a Corbyn opponent.
Related: Labour’s power struggle goes further than just Momentum versus Unite | Owen Jones
Until now, Corbynism has been able to ignore many of the tensions between its centralising and its grassroots tendencies
Related: Though gravity is on Corbyn’s side, victory is far from certain | Rafael Behr
Continue reading...March 2, 2018
A Midsummer Night’s Dream review – Carsen's classic staging makes a welcome return
Coliseum, London
Conductor Alexander Soddy leads a strong ensemble through a striking revival of Robert Carsen’s clean, uncluttered 1995 ENO production of Britten’s opera
Here’s a thing. Robert Carsen’s production of Britten’s Shakespeare opera first arrived at ENO in 1995 and was most recently revived in 2004. In 2011, it was replaced by a Christopher Alden production whose seedy, sexualised 1950s boys’ school setting delighted the radicals and offended the traditionalists.
Seven years on, the Dream is back at the Coliseum. Only this time it is in Carsen’s staging, not Alden’s. Why the switch? Here’s my guess. Jimmy Savile was still alive when Alden’s version opened. These are different times. Yet the Carsen revival, supervised once again by his associate Emmanuelle Bastet, is nothing but a welcome return. It’s a clear, classic and uncluttered staging of Peter Pears’s and Britten’s cherry-picked edit of Shakespeare’s play. And there’s no absence of sexuality. Until the final scene, the stage is dominated by green-sheeted beds and an omnipresent crescent moon. The story’s three worlds – fairies, lovers and rustics – elide and collide under the scuttling direction of Miltos Yerolemou’s adult and clownish Puck, who seems a close relative of Mozart’s Papageno.
Continue reading...February 21, 2018
The world is clear-eyed about Brexit, and knows it must be reversed | Martin Kettle
Our exit from the EU poses a threat to the international liberal order. In the long run, it is untenable
The foreigner’s political eye can be innocent, failing to see the tangled vernacular in an unfamiliar land. But it can sometimes see the big political picture with greater clarity. Foreigners can see what Americans struggle to accept about their terrible gun culture. Foreigners can see that Italians will demean their country if they re-elect Silvio Berlusconi’s party.
What about foreigners’ views of Britain? What do their eyes see that we too often miss? Here are three examples, all garnered from just the past few days. They are widely representative.
Politically and morally, Brexit will always comes back to Britain’s relationship with Ireland
Related: Hard Brexit would cost Irish economy €18bn, says study
Continue reading...February 14, 2018
Leaders like Zuma may be doomed. But they fight every inch of the way | Martin Kettle
From the ANC to Theresa May, there is something humanly compelling in the hand-to-hand combat of political survival
Political outcomes, even ones that may seem inevitable or even historically preordained, are always less clear in advance than they are in retrospect. Coleridge compares the problem to sailing on the ocean at night. Others invoke the fog of politics, likening it to the fog of war. Not to understand that politicians fear the unknown is not to understand politics. It’s why MPs mostly hate general elections. It’s why would-be leaders often bottle a contest they should win. It’s why those who have power try so hard to hold on to it, and why resignations are almost always messy and acrimonious.
The mechanics and tactics of Zuma's attempt to negotiate a face- and cash-saving deal are electrifying
Continue reading...February 13, 2018
Boris Johnson's naked ambition blinds him to the dangers of Brexit | Martin Kettle
The foreign secretary’s vision of a ‘liberal’ future outside the EU is a triumph of self-delusion
Boris Johnson has made his career out of creating myths about Europe. With Theresa May’s job again within his ever-ambitious grasp, he’s not going to stop doing it now.
The foreign secretary’s speech this week will conjure the prospect of a “liberal” post-Brexit free trading order. In this Johnsonian vision, Britain will be freed from politically driven European regulatory systems whose true purpose is only to create a unified Europe. Instead, he says, Britain will be able to create its own regulatory regimes to align issues such as social rights, the environment and energy with the country’s post-Brexit global free trade aspirations.
Continue reading...January 31, 2018
Theresa May’s vision of a global Britain is just a Brexit fantasy | Martin Kettle
We meet this evening, says Cassius to Brutus as they begin to plot the death of Julius Caesar. “Till then,” he adds, “think of the world.” It isn’t the most famous line in Shakespeare’s play, now given a pulsating, must-see new production by Nicholas Hytner at London’s Bridge theatre. But those words leap across the centuries and instantly engage with the modern mind.
Related: 'I'm not a quitter': Theresa May insists she will fight next election
We are no longer a superpower. We aren't the United States. Even the United States is struggling to be the United States
Related: Dunkirk and Darkest Hour fuel Brexit fantasies – even if they weren’t meant to | Ian Jack
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