Martin Kettle's Blog, page 69
March 22, 2016
Beware the IDS of March – Politics Weekly podcast
Rowena Mason, Matthew D’Ancona and Martin Kettle join Tom Clark to discuss the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith citing cuts to benefits for disabled people and the damage done to the government – specifically chancellor George Osborne
Iain Duncan Smith’s resignation from the cabinet two days after George Osborne’s most recent budget was designed to cause the chancellor – and the prime minister – maximum political damage.
Osborne has now rowed back on a planned cut to disability benefits and he says the cost of the u-turn can be “absorbed” by the end of the parliament.
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Bombers take advantage of Belgium’s history as a country divided | Martin Kettle
It will take weeks of scrutiny to find out exactly what happened in the Brussels attacks, but the country’s past and its unique situation within Europe have made it a terrorist target
Terrorist violence is a global problem. Cities across the world all have to be on their guard. Although it is Brussels that dominates the headlines now, the explosions there came only hours after jihadi gunmen attacked an EU military training base in Bamako in Mali. Yet while the problem may be global, the ingredients are almost always specific and local too.
Any authoritative explanation of what happened in Brussels, and how and why, will require weeks of patient granular forensic scrutiny and information gathering on the ground. But there may, in addition, also be a longer view to take in order to more fully understand how the capital city of Belgium is currently so often in the terrorist front line. Why Belgium?
Continue reading...March 21, 2016
How convincing was David Cameron’s Commons statement? | Rafael Behr, Anne Perkins, Simon Jenkins and Martin Kettle
The prime minister attempted to call a truce between the warring flanks of his party. It wasn’t an unqualified success
Related: With the Tory party imploding, Labour needs to reinvent itself – fast | Paul Mason
Related: Iain Duncan Smith has revealed the empty truth of compassionate conservatism | Suzanne Moore
Continue reading...March 17, 2016
If I were George Osborne I’d be starting to sweat about Tory unpopularity | Martin Kettle
Even in a favourable political and economic climate, the British people don’t love the Conservatives
Three weeks ago, voters in Ireland went to the polls. The results were inconclusive. An incumbent government was punished for its austerity policies. But the voters declined to hand power either to the previous governing party, which had bankrupted the economy in the first place, or to a collection of left-talking parties whose rhetoric some voters seemed to like but whose programmes most seemed not to trust. And there things rest. Today, Ireland is still looking for a government.
As Ireland’s political class scratched their heads at what the voters had meant by all this, the columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote a piece in the Irish Times that cut through the confusion. The voters, he said, had essentially said they didn’t believe the story the political class had been telling them. They had not consented to the morality tale of “harsh austerity for the little people and astonishing generosity to bondholders” that has been imposed on Ireland, and many other countries, since 2008. Instead they had voted, albeit in a very fragmented way, for a shift in favour of equality and a fairer use of resources. As the headline on O’Toole’s article put it: “The winner of Election 2016 is social democracy.”
Related: George Osborne’s budget shows he is planning an early election | Tom Clark
This was a budget that revealed Osborne to be trapped by austerity too
Related: George Osborne is a Roman emperor indulged in all his follies and fads | Simon Jenkins
Continue reading...March 16, 2016
Scottish Ensemble/Montero review – engaging, crisp Piazzolla on a crowded platform
Wigmore Hall, London
In a South Atlantic-crossing programme, Gabriela Montero and the Ensemble’s adaptable string players gave punchy accounts of the Argentinian leg of the trip
They don’t often squeeze 14 musicians onto the small Wigmore Hall platform, never mind a grand piano as well. But the string players of the Scottish Ensemble are an adaptable and up-for-it band who have played in more challenging venues than this. Nevertheless, this highly engaging concert, in which the ensemble was joined by pianist Gabriela Montero, felt at times to be at the top end of what the Wigmore’s delicate acoustic could quite take. This is a hall in which even a soloist needs to calibrate the sound with considerable care.
The programme was a there-and-back-again South Atlantic crossing. Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue, K546 lacked atmosphere, but was followed by an arrangement of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasilieras No 5 aria for string orchestra, in which the solo part was beautifully played by the Ensemble’s director Jonathan Morton, though the version lacks the exoticism that the soprano voice famously generates in the piece. In an arrangement of the six-part Ricercar from Bach’s Musical Offering, however, the lines were beautifully delineated.
Continue reading...March 3, 2016
Cameron’s unlikely French love affair may be his saviour | Martin Kettle
Geography has always had as much to do with international affairs as economics or ideology ever have. So perhaps it is the symbolism of being a staging post on the old route between London and Paris that explains why Amiens is a place where Britain and France – so often economic and ideological rivals – meet and do deals. When the British and French leaders meet in the northern French town, as they did on Thursday, practical politics always seems likely to win out over even the deepest ancestral suspicions.
That was certainly the case when the two countries signed their compromise peace treaty in Amiens in March 1802, in which Henry Addington’s British government bowed the knee to Napoleon’s European conquests in the hope that economic prosperity and commerce would revive. In fact, the deal only lasted a year because Napoleon – incapable of banking his gains – always wanted more.
Cameron has courted appalling danger by putting all his European eggs, such as they have been, in the German basket
Related: If David Cameron is so smart, why is he waging war on his referendum allies? | Polly Toynbee
Continue reading...February 25, 2016
Think a Brexit vote would push Scotland out of the UK? Think again | Martin Kettle
So, Scotland will quit the United Kingdom if the vote in June goes against remaining in the European Union, will it? If you are a fervent Scottish nationalist you may be hoping so. If you are a worried pro-EU unionist you may be fearing so. And even if you are neither of these, you may have got the general impression that it is likely. But I say this: don’t jump to conclusions.
Interviewed by Andrew Marr on Sunday, the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon came close to promising a second independence vote if Britain votes to leave. The shift in Scottish opinion would be “inescapable” and there would “almost certainly” be a second vote, she said. The next day the party’s Westminster leader, Angus Robertson, said Scots “will demand” a referendum if they are “forced out” of the EU.
Related: EU referendum: Cameron claims leaving EU could make cutting immigration harder - Politics live
Sturgeon will only call a second referendum when she thinks she can win it, or when she is forced by party to do so
Related: Euroscepticism in Scotland soars to record high
Continue reading...February 18, 2016
Ideology or character? This is a fight for the Tories’ heart | Martin Kettle
Tim Montgomerie and Jeremy Corbyn make unlikely bedfellows. The Tory activist and journalist – founder of ConservativeHome.com – is a self-proclaimed admirer of Margaret Thatcher. She’s the reason Montgomerie went into politics. For the leader of the Labour party, on the other hand, Thatcher embodies everything he would like a Labour government to dismantle, reverse and bury.
Yet the two men agree about one thing. Montgomerie tore up his Tory party card on Thursday, protesting that there is very little that David Cameron and George Osborne are doing, not least in Brussels this week, that Blairites or Cleggites could object to. When Corbyn ran for the Labour leadership last year, he made pretty much the same charge. What’s more, he won the contest because a lot of supporters agreed with him.
Related: David Cameron: 'I'll be battling for Britain' at crucial EU summit
Ideology was a word no one knew. Backing the winner and getting the rewards of victory were what mattered
Related: Sorry Boris, this referendum is bigger than you | Rafael Behr
Continue reading...February 17, 2016
LSO/Gardiner review – lovingly attentive Mendelssohn
Barbican, London
John Eliot Gardiner and the London Symphony Orchestra celebrated the Shakespeare anniversary with a perfectly judged all-Mendelssohn programme
Shakespeare’s 400th is already making its mark in London’s musical programming this year. But it needs no anniversary to justify Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The pieces are so ideally judged to the atmosphere of the play that they can almost seem to have been conceived right alongside it, rather than over 200 years later, especially when they receive such a lovingly attentive performance as this one by the London Symphony Orchestra under John Eliot Gardiner.
Like Osmo Vänskä in his tremendous recreation of Sibelius’s less well-known music for the Tempest with the LPO a week before, Gardiner threaded the pieces together with a selection – better judged in this case – of Shakespeare’s lines, pertly delivered by Ceri-Lyn Cissone, Frankie Wakefield and Alexander Knox. The Monteverdi Choir very nearly stole the whole show with a pinpoint perfect rendering of the fairies’ lullaby for Titania. But, one false horn entry apart in the masterly nocturne, it was the consistent suavity of the LSO’s playing under Gardiner’s baton that impressed most of all. The winds were outstanding in Mendelssohn’s shimmering score, but Gardiner was not afraid to let the sturdier side of Mendelssohn’s writing have its voice, and some of the rarely played accompaniments in the lower strings had an almost Wagnerian tonality.
Continue reading...February 15, 2016
OAE/Norrington review – beaming grandad still has revelatory power
Royal Festival Hall, London
The iconoclastic Roger Norrington may have mellowed, but he turned Beethoven’s second symphony into a bubbling, rasping dynamo
Forty years ago, Roger Norrington would have ripped into Haydn’s G minor Symphony No 83 – one of six he wrote for Paris in 1785-86 – like a man on a mission. These days, with the task of revolutionising performance practice long accomplished, 81-year-old Norrington adopts a more mellow approach not only to Haydn’s urbane La Poule symphony, but to music-making in general.
On the evidence of this concert with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, of which he is emeritus conductor, Norrington’s preferred platform presence is now that of a genially eccentric grandfather. Conducting from a revolving office chair, which he enjoys using to dramatic effect, he turned to smile at the audience before, during and after each movement as if to make sure that we were enjoying ourselves as much as he clearly was. Indeed for long stretches, Norrington seemed content to bask in the orchestra’s star-studded playing, only intervening to point a phrase or freshen a bit of orchestral dialogue, but often simply listening and beaming.
Here, suddenly, was the man whose tight grip of tempo and colour made a generation think anew about the music
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