Martin Kettle's Blog, page 54
August 24, 2017
Piece by piece, the case for severing Britain’s ties to Europe is falling apart | Martin Kettle
Those who switched off with a sigh of relief in July may not have noticed. But something big is slowly stirring in the undergrowth of British politics. Fact by fact, announcement by announcement, the case for Britain to remain in the European Union’s single market and customs union is growing stronger and more irresistible by the day. Such an outcome is most definitely not this government’s policy. But, this autumn, something will have to give.
Related: Britain 'could remain under direct control of European court for years'
Related: The Norway option: what is it and what does it mean for Britain?
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August 17, 2017
Angela Merkel’s most daunting opponent is complacency | Martin Kettle
Though the German chancellor is set to win, she faces the prospect of coalition building and a need to address a raft of national concerns
You would hardly know this is general election year in Germany. I have travelled to Europe’s most important country three times this year, and each time to a very different part of it – first to Hamburg in the north, then to the flatlands of Brandenburg in the far east and, most recently, to prosperous Bavaria in the south. Yet until this week, when the campaign eased into gear, you would have struggled to realise that Europe’s most pivotal political contest is imminent.
So far, this has suited Angela Merkel just fine. It says a lot about the chancellor’s approach to the 24 September German election that she has just spent three weeks doing exactly what she likes doing each summer, election or not. First a visit to the first night of the Wagner family’s Bayreuth festival, then a walking holiday in northern Italy (the German-speaking part), in which she and her husband stayed in the same room in the same hotel in the same village as they always do.
Related: Angela Merkel races ahead in polls with six weeks to go
The political class says little about migration, which rocked the country two summers ago, but the issue remains potent
Continue reading...August 10, 2017
Mass tourism is at a tipping point – but we’re all part of the problem | Martin Kettle
Nearly 30 years ago, researching for a Guardian series on global population pressures, I interviewed the zoologist Desmond Morris. During that interview, Morris said something that was hard to forget. “We have to recognise,” he said, “that human beings may be becoming an infestation on the planet.”
Related: Only governments can stem the tide of tourism sweeping the globe | Elizabeth Becker
The stag-do culture is out of hand. But you can’t restrict access to those who know their Giotto from their Duccio
Related: Do your fellow Brits a favour. Stop going on holiday | Simon Jenkins
Continue reading...July 27, 2017
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg review – riveting restaging puts Wagner on trial
Bayreuth festival
Barrie Kosky’s mind-boggling production uses a giant puppet and the Nuremberg trials as a backdrop to ask: how far does the composer’s antisemitism taint his art?
Richard Wagner is directly responsible for two important buildings in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth. The first is the Festspielhaus theatre, to which Wagner devotees and the German elite flock each summer for the Bayreuth festival. The second is Haus Wahnfried, in which the composer and his family lived (and where he is buried in the garden) and which has recently reopened as an extended museum.
Barrie Kosky is not the first director to have the idea of putting the two icons together by placing Wahnfried on the Festspielhaus stage, as he does in his new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which opened the 2017 festival this week in front of an audience that included Angela Merkel.
Continue reading...July 13, 2017
Reject the chancers and their fantasy visions of post-Brexit trade | Martin Kettle
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
You can pick your own metaphor, for there are plenty to choose from. Falling apart like a chocolate orange was the auditor general’s image of choice today. You may prefer collapsing like a house of cards, wheels coming off the wagon, wickets tumbling like an England batting collapse, and many others. Any of them would now serve to describe what appears to be the potentially terminal unravelling of Theresa May’s Brexit strategy one year after she became prime minister.
It’s not one part of the strategy that is now under pressure. Increasingly it’s every part, home and abroad, present and future, each impacting the other in the way that happens if politics spins out of control. The publication of the repeal bill – no longer “great”, just long, complex and unwinding – shows how the domestic political context of Brexit is shifting. A year ago, the two main parties were united in their need to pay homage to the Brexit vote. Now Labour’s six conditions that must be satisfied before the bill can go ahead show the sharp stiffening of the oppositional impulse, while the Tory party is split every which way on Brexit, as the select committee elections showed this week.
Related: Brexit plans could fall apart 'like a chocolate orange', says auditor general
Related: Scottish and Welsh governments threaten to refuse repeal bill legislative consent - Politics live
Related: Theresa May’s first year was awful. Her next promises far worse | Polly Toynbee
Continue reading...July 6, 2017
Here is Britain’s new place in the world – on the sidelines | Martin Kettle
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
How knowingly we all nodded six months ago, when Theresa May went to a Brussels summit and no one talked to her. While the 27 other leaders greeted one another warmly and went off to dinner, May cut a lonely figure, returning quickly to London. It was Jona Lewie’s song about always being in the kitchen at parties made real. And it was a Brexit metaphor incarnate.
But we hadn’t seen anything yet. Back then, the early post-Brexit confidence still lay around May’s shoulders. The leave vote still fresh, she could brush off the isolation, political dignity intact, and ratings still rising. Six months on, still in office but no longer in power, much has changed. When May takes to the international stage in Hamburg tomorrow for the G20 summit, she will be a more isolated figure than ever.
Related: From Brexit to Trump, on both sides of the Atlantic populism has run aground | Rafael Behr
Most of the flippant deceptions of the leave campaign have collapsed. Few now swallow May’s talk of a clean Brexit
Continue reading...July 2, 2017
The Dream of Gerontius review – ENO takes Elgar's soul on a dramatic journey
Royal Festival Hall, London
Simone Young set a dynamic framework for this staged interpretation, while Gwyn Hughes Jones sang the dying man with emotional conviction, backed by incisive soloists and chorus
With the Meat Loaf musical taking over the English National Opera’s home at the Coliseum for the summer, the opera company itself has gone on the road. Two performances of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius across the river at the Royal Festival Hall are part of ENO’s peripatetic mix of projects in other parts of London, with this one also forming part of the Southbank Centre’s own Chorus festival.
It is hard to attempt a staging of Cardinal Newman’s poem about a dying man, not least because of the considerable challenge of the brief appearance of God in part two. The ENO’s version was nevertheless billed as a staging, by Lucy Carter. Carter sensibly took a minimalist approach, not requiring the singers to act, creating instead a lighting show whose responses to the score were a bit predictable.
Continue reading...June 29, 2017
Yes, polls can be wrong. But the alternatives are worse | Martin Kettle
It isn’t exactly cool to speak up for the opinion polls these days. The pollsters’ failure to predict the Labour surge in 2017 has now joined the failure to predict the Tory majority in 2015 and the failure to predict the Brexit vote in 2016 to produce a hat-trick of polling incompetence. In some quarters polls are dismissed as not just unreliable but as a malevolent distraction, a form of ideological intervention to be spurned. So to admit, however quietly, to taking the polls seriously means at the very least having one’s tin hat at the ready.
Two years ago, the polling industry was forced to eat crow after David Cameron sailed back into Downing Street in an election in which the pollsters almost uniformly anticipated a hung parliament. An inquiry found that they were not sampling the voters accurately enough. This year, however, the pollsters have been less apologetic – although they are hardly in triumphalist mood. That’s because, as Prof John Curtice, the country’s most prominent poll analyst, told me yesterday: “In 2015 all the polls were wrong. In 2017 we had a spread. The failure wasn’t collective this time.”
Related: After this general election is it time to downgrade opinion polls? | Mona Chalabi
Related: Polling’s dirty little secret: why polls have been wrong before and will be again | David Lipsey
Continue reading...June 26, 2017
This shoddy DUP deal will ultimately cost Theresa May far more than £1bn | Martin Kettle
When Martin McGuinness arrived in 10 Downing Street for his first talks with Tony Blair in the build-up to what became the Good Friday agreement, he looked at the cabinet room table and remarked: “So this is where all the damage was done.”
Related: Mrs May’s deal with the DUP threatens 20 years hard work in Ireland | Jonathan Powell
Related: Britain’s future depends on a party made in the destructive image of Ian Paisley | Ian Jack
Continue reading...June 22, 2017
Corbyn’s Labour has done well. To win power it needs to do far better | Martin Kettle
At a memorial event yesterday for the political scientist Anthony King, John Bercow recalled one of the things that always made King such an illuminating commentator on British elections. The House of Commons Speaker – a student of King’s at Essex University – observed that, while party politicians reflexively respond to election results with exaggerated claims and pitiful denials, King had a simple motto that cut through the spin: “Focus on the evidence.”
Related: With Momentum behind Labour, we can win back power | Chris Williamson
It has to be possible for Corbyn enthusiasts and Corbyn sceptics to talk to each other respectfully
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