Martin Kettle's Blog, page 64
August 18, 2016
Britain’s Olympics strategy can work for our economy too | Martin Kettle
The list of things that are open to criticism – and worse – about the Olympics is a long one. We all have our own special beefs. Mine include the current obsession with “British interests” at the expense of foreign excellence, and the pathetic press clamour for knighthoods and damehoods for favoured medal winners. But there are plenty more.
Simon Jenkins duly delivered a devastating arraignment of this kind in these pages this week. Part of me could scarce forebear to cheer. Yes, the Olympics are too inflated, too nationalistic, too full of hypocrisies about drugs and corruption, and some of the coverage is infantalising. A single look at the picture of the five-year-old Omran Daqneesh in that ambulance in Aleppo puts all the hyperbole into perspective.
Related: This Olympics hysteria shows that Britain has turned Soviet | Simon Jenkins
If government can invest intelligently in elite sport, why should it not do the same thing with other public goods too?
Related: Laura Trott, Jason Kenny and a British Olympic triumph of central planning | Barney Ronay
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August 15, 2016
BBCSO/Oramo review – Bray's restless writing is centrepiece of a varied Prom
Royal Albert Hall, London
Charlotte Bray’s cello concerto asked rather than answered questions and was played with absolute engagement by Guy Johnston
Even with Mahler’s fifth symphony and a Haydn rarity in the programme, Charlotte Bray’s new cello concerto, Falling in the Fire, was the centrepiece of this unfailingly interesting and varied Prom.
The concerto confronts two important, linked questions with which many creative artists have wrestled: how can a composer respond to the great public issues of the day – in this case the war in Syria – and how can any such response avoid being judged on moral as much as on musical grounds? Bray’s concerto sensibly embodies these questions rather than answering them.
Continue reading...August 11, 2016
There will not be an early general election – and here’s why | Martin Kettle
The chatter in Westminster and the media is of an election in autumn or spring. It is all so much hot air
With Theresa May donning her walking boots and heading for Switzerland, we have reached the breathing space that British politics has craved ever since the EU referendum. But we should enjoy it while we can, because it will be short. As soon as May returns from the Alps, speculation about an early general election, already widespread, will accelerate.
This chatter will be irrepressible. But in my opinion it will all be wasted energy. It is absolutely not May’s style to be looking for an early general election so soon after taking office. Her instincts, on this as on other matters of governance, are impeccably traditional. She believes the Conservative party won a mandate in May 2015, which she has inherited from David Cameron. She is personally untroubled by tabloid talk of needing to win her own mandate. Purists will say she is absolutely right about that.
Related: Theresa May launches Tory leadership bid with pledge to unite country
Voters know when an election is appropriate. Harold Wilson and Ted Heath both fell foul of that instinct
Continue reading...July 26, 2016
Sir Roger Norrington: 'I'm against music being handed down from on high'
No vibrato, principal violinists facing each other, audiences encouraged to applaud between movements … the great conductor celebrates the unorthodox at the Proms this week
It is typical of Sir Roger Norrington that one of the greatest highlights of his long orchestral conducting career was when the audience burst into laughter in the middle of one of his performances.
As a rule, conductors stand on their dignity. They take themselves seriously. They like to be revered. In his own idiosyncratic way, Norrington himself is all three: dignified, serious and revered. But he is also a lot of fun. He wants to connect with his audience. So when his listeners laughed out loud at a musical joke during his performance of a Haydn symphony, he was not offended but delighted.
Related: OAE/Norrington review – beaming grandad still has revelatory power
Continue reading...July 21, 2016
Theresa May will soon have to decide which Brexit to take | Martin Kettle
It is now a month since Britain voted to leave the EU. By common consent, at home and abroad, it was a massive historical moment. The best of times for some. The worst of times for others. Some compared it to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Others to the defeat of Hitler. Yet with the exception of the banner-wavers who occasionally turn up chanting “Theresa May/Don’t delay” and calling on the prime minister to trigger article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, the passions of June have dissolved in the torpor of July. Four million people signed a petition to hold a second referendum after the 23 June result, but little of their indignant spirit remains a month later. There have been few material economic consequences of the Brexit vote yet, especially in everyday life.
Related: In Brexit Britain, the northern powerhouse is more important than ever | Andy Burnham
Related: EU referendum full results – find out how your area voted
Continue reading...July 19, 2016
Munich PO/Gergiev at the Proms review – Ustvolskaya's powerful, profound symphonic scream
Royal Albert Hall, London
This rarely heard work by Soviet-era composer Galina Ustvolskaya is unusually scored and carries an almost physical charge, dominating the programme
With Valery Gergiev in charge of the London Symphony Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski at the London Philharmonic, the capital has heard a lot of Soviet-era music recently. Little of that, though, prepared one for the cogent originality of Galina Ustvolskaya’s dramatic Third Symphony at this Prom, where it was performed by Gergiev with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he is now the music director.
Ustvolskaya’s symphony is one of three idiosyncratically scored single movement symphonies from the 1980s which set searing 11th-century texts from which the subtitle Jesus Messiah, Save Us is drawn. But there is nothing pious or, to my ears, particularly religious about this piece.
Continue reading...July 14, 2016
A safe pair of hands? Theresa May has taken a massive gamble | Martin Kettle
The Unknown Prime Minister was the title of Robert Blake’s biography of the largely forgotten Conservative premier of the 1920s, Andrew Bonar Law. But it could in some respects apply to Law’s latest successor, too. Few modern politicians have climbed to the top of the proverbial greasy pole while revealing so little to the world about their politics as Theresa May has managed to do.
Related: Who's who in Theresa May's new cabinet
May's appointment of three senior Brexiteers is a statement that they must own the consequences of the referendum
Related: It’s goodbye to the Bullingdon set – and hello to grownup politics | Melissa Kite
Continue reading...July 12, 2016
Theresa May's ambitious agenda belies billing as continuity candidate
Incoming prime minister’s speech about ‘an economy that works for everyone’ set the bar for radical change extremely high
Theresa May is sometimes described as remote. Yet few incoming prime ministers have flagged up their policy priorities more clearly than May did this week. Her contest of ideas with the Thatcherite Tory leadership candidate Andrea Leadsom lasted barely an hour – from the moment May stood up to deliver her keynote speech in Birmingham on Monday morning to Leadsom’s resignation announcement at noon.
But an hour was time enough for May to reveal a hugely ambitious agenda that she very deliberately described as “a different kind of Conservatism” and “a break with the past”. And the past from which the new prime minister proposes to break is not the distant past but the recent past, when David Cameron and George Osborne set the country’s course in ways of which May revealed herself this week to be a substantial critic, in a speech whose theme was pointedly “an economy that works for everyone”.
Theresa May: our writers’ verdict on the new prime minister | The panel
Theresa May: our writers’ verdict on the new prime minister | The Panel
She has brought the Tory party together, but what will happen when she gets down to the nitty gritty of government?
Continue reading...Martin Kettle's Blog
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