Martin Kettle's Blog, page 66
June 30, 2016
Die Walküre review – Opera North's orchestra are the true heroes
Royal Festival Hall, London
Lee Bisset’s Sieglinde excels out in a strong cast whose preparation and musical discipline pay fine dividends in this second instalment of Opera North’s semi-staged Ring
In Die Walküre, second instalment of Wagner’s Ring cycle, the orchestra really comes into its own. It’s as though, in the course of writing Die Walküre, and particularly in Wotan’s farewell, Wagner discovers the orchestra’s capacity to drive the drama and its underlying ideas. It was a lesson Wagner was never to forget, so it was fitting that the Opera North orchestra, again authoritatively conducted by Richard Farnes, were the true heroes of this Festival Hall performance.
Related: Das Rheingold review – Opera North's back-to-basics Wagner feels like a liberation
Continue reading...
June 29, 2016
Das Rheingold review – Opera North's back-to-basics Wagner feels like a liberation
Royal Festival Hall, London
This was a concentrated and riveting realisation of the first part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, with Jo Pohleim’s Alberich and Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s Loge particularly strong
During his visit to London in 1877, Richard Wagner was thrilled by what he saw of Victorian London from the river. “This is Alberich’s dream come true,” he enthused to his wife, Cosima: “Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog.”
Related: Exclusive: watch an animated guide to Wagner's Ring cycle
What perfect timing to bring this epic opera about power, greed, deceit, lies and self-delusion to London this week
Richard Farnes paces and moulds his Opera North orchestral forces with real mastery
Continue reading...June 28, 2016
Labour has split before – can its big heart withstand the current ructions? | Martin Kettle
The current power struggle over Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership may split the Labour party. If that happens then 2016 can be added to the resonant earlier splits that shaped Labour’s sense of itself. The two pre-eminent precedents are 1931, when Ramsay MacDonald and part of the parliamentary party went into a national government with the Conservatives and some Liberals, and 1981, when the Social Democrats walked away from Labour’s increasingly leftwing push and merged eventually, most of them, with the Liberals.
Related: Whether Jeremy Corbyn goes or not, Britain’s progressives need to stick together | Frances Ryan
Related: Labour mutineers are betraying our national interest | Len McCluskey
Continue reading...June 27, 2016
What Boris Johnson said about Brexit – and what he really meant
Martin Kettle reads between the lines of the Tory leadership frontrunner’s first Telegraph article following Thursday’s EU referendum
Continue reading...June 24, 2016
The downfall of David Cameron: a European tragedy
His predecessors as Conservative prime minister were both ousted by strife over Europe, so he knew the dangers
They used to call it Greek tragedy when the fates wrought their revenge on human folly and weakness. But maybe a better term in the case of the folly and weakness of the modern Tory party is European tragedy. For, as a broken David Cameron announced his resignation on Friday morning, one question must have been battering his exhausted brain more than any other.
How was it that a modern-minded liberal Conservative leader who long ago told his party to “stop banging on about Europe” if it wanted to get back into power after three successive defeats – and who then delivered two terms in government – has himself been brought down by that same party over that same European question?
Related: British Euroscepticism: a brief history
Continue reading...June 23, 2016
If referendums are the answer, we’re asking the wrong question | Martin Kettle
• EU referendum polling day – live updates
• With no exit poll, when is the result announced?
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive? I don’t think many will feel the same way that William Wordsworth did about the French revolution when they look back on June 2016 and our referendum on Europe. For this was no springtime of peoples, no logical debate in Plato’s republic, and no political Glastonbury either. And it has not produced the national catharsis that some hoped for. No one is snatching a few hours’ sleep this evening thinking, wow, that was just what we all needed, give us more of it.
This referendum was about Britain and Europe. But it was also a disturbing revelation of the way we now do politics. As such it cannot help but be a reflection on David Cameron. This was his show, prepared over years, not weeks. He produced, designed, directed and starred in it. It reflected his way of governing, his model of leadership, his priorities, his politics and his attitude to Europe. And it has been a shabby muddle for which he must take responsibility.
Related: The UK is now two nations, staring across a political chasm | John Harris
The referendum is now the weapon of choice for populist parties of left and right
Continue reading...June 20, 2016
Comparing David Cameron to Neville Chamberlain is insulting – and wrong | Martin Kettle
More than 75 years on, there is still no more insulting parallel to be volleyed at a Conservative politician than to be compared with the 1930s prime minister Neville Chamberlain. Being a quintessentially Conservative politician, David Cameron was duly outraged when a member of the studio audience fired the C-word at him on last night’s Question Time. It triggered a rare bit, in public at least, of authentic Cameronian anger and passion. But the question, with three days to go in the EU referendum campaign, is whether it’s the insult or the response that will resonate more with a public that seems to have had it up to here with the Brexit debate.
In Labour circles, there was for decades no worse insult than to be accused of being a Ramsay MacDonald, the leader who went into alliance with the Tories at the height of the depression in 1931 and went down in Labour history as the great betrayer as a result. Today, in some parts of the party, MacDonald’s place has perhaps been taken by Tony Blair. But in the Tory party, Chamberlain’s position as the party’s most despised former leader remains secure.
Related: EU referendum: our panel on the BBC's Question Time special
In the end, the only question, whether in 1938 or 2016 is what is the right policy for Britain in the circumstances
Related: It’s not too late for the tone of this referendum to change | Archie Bland
Continue reading...June 16, 2016
The EU referendum is a battle of the press versus democracy | Martin Kettle
The parallels between David Cameron and Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s first Labour prime minister, may not seem obvious at first sight. Cameron, after all, is the son of a stockbroker and a baronet’s daughter, educated at Eton and Oxford, and is every inch a Conservative. MacDonald, on the other hand, was the illegitimate son of a Morayshire farm labourer and a housemaid, left school at 15 and was for much of his life – a fact that tends to be overshadowed by his later break with Labour – a man of the socialist left.
Related: Paul Dacre’s EU subsidies hypocrisy won’t halt the Daily Mail’s Euro-lies | Polly Toynbee
Related: The rightwing press can’t be allowed to bully us out of the EU | Polly Toynbee
Continue reading...June 9, 2016
Narrow, nasty, unprincipled: whatever happened to Michael Gove? | Martin Kettle
The late Muhammad Ali said that if you think the same thing when you are 50 that you thought when you were 20, you have wasted the last 30 years. “When the facts change, I change my mind,” said John Maynard Keynes. If that’s good enough for an ultimate brainbox like him, it’s good enough for the rest of us.
Politicians notoriously have terrible difficulty admitting to changing their minds. They feel under constant pressure to be consistent, on message. The press beat them up if they change course, and their more doctrinaire supporters denounce them as traitors. Admitting to uncertainty is not in most politicians’ repertoire, the more’s the pity. U-turns are out of fashion. Politics is the poorer for it.
Related: Dr Sarah Wollaston defects from Vote Leave to remain campaign
It’s more than a U-turn. It’s the U-turn of a man who has got himself trapped in a revolving door
Continue reading...June 3, 2016
Our own bad habits have brought Britain to the brink of Brexit | Martin Kettle
Whether voters decide to leave or remain, we must address failures in our media, culture and politics
Trust the people, that’s what I always say to myself. By and large, over the long term, they will do the sensible thing. Or so I like to remind myself when British voters, as they often seem to do, choose a government I haven’t voted for. But the EU referendum isn’t like that. Its implications feel far more dangerous. And the contest is too close for comfort. Brexit may win.
If this happens, with all the chaotic and uncoordinated consequences it will have for both Europe and Britain, it won’t be because the leave campaign has the better arguments: it absolutely hasn’t. Or because the weight of evidence is on its side: it emphatically isn’t. Or because it is clear what Brexit actually means: it’s a complete leap in the dark. Or because it is masterfully led: that’s not true either.
We are paying the price of the failure of each of our political parties
Related: What happens next if Britain votes to leave the EU?
Related: The rightwing press can’t be allowed to bully us out of the EU | Polly Toynbee
Continue reading...Martin Kettle's Blog
- Martin Kettle's profile
- 2 followers
