Herald Columns

I'm trying to spot those which don't appear online & offer them here. I think this may have been missed from April 4.


If you’re taking part in a debate, it’s a good policy not to ask any questions that you don’t know the answer to. That’s because debate, like “abate” and their aphaeretic relative “bate” in all its various senses – diminution, strife, rage – ultimately shares a root with “batter”. Debates are for bashing the living daylights out of your opponents, not for establishing the truth, which may be why, having delivered what he no doubt thought was the knockout punch, Pontius Pilate didn’t stay for the answer.
But you and I are above all that sort of sophistry, so perhaps we can approach, in a spirit of honest, humble, Socratic inquiry, one of the urgent questions of our age: “Why is the Labour Party so remarkably useless?”
As attentive readers may have guessed, I haven’t generally delivered my vote in the direction of that party, even when it tempted me with Bob Gillespie in Govan. But I’m aware that, for unfathomable reasons, not everyone shares my views, and -– in the midst of what we keep being told are “savage cuts” – Labour’s comparative lack of support strikes me as genuinely rather puzzling.
True, the party is ahead in the national opinion polls by five or 10%, but during the “savage cuts” of the Thatcher governments in the 1980s, it was regularly out in front by 20% or more, and it contrived to lose all those elections. For the Holyrood elections, as the Rev Ewan Aitken, Labour’s candidate for Edinburgh Eastern, put it yesterday: “We are not behind but we are not ahead.”
To be neck and neck with the governing party is an alarmingly feeble position for an opposition on the eve of an election but, as party managers must know, it is at least better than the frankly catastrophic showing of Iain Gray in the poll before last week’s STV debate, in which only 7% of respondents identified him as the best candidate for First Minister.
No doubt I should be heartened when Scottish voters rank their country’s Tory leader above the leader of its Labour party, but the truth is that I’m baffled. Or at least I was until I saw Mr Gray’s performance, which went some way to explaining it. Tavish Scott was a hole in the air, and managed to be more impressive; Patrick Harvie came out of it better, and he wasn’t even on the programme. But the fault isn’t just Iain Gray’s; Ed Miliband is faring no better south of the border.
Perhaps the polls are wrong. After all, three days before that Govan by-election in 1988, Labour were on 53% to the Nationalists’ 33%. The platitude of all politicians in the face of poor opinion polls – that the only poll that matters is on election day – has, like most clichés, the virtue of being true.
Nor, though I might wish it otherwise, can it be simple cause and effect derived from that other political cliché which brought Bill Clinton the presidency: “It’s the economy, stupid.” After all, despite Norman Lamont’s efforts, the economy was in pretty good shape by the end of John Major’s government, and it didn’t stop them from getting one of the worst bloody noses in electoral history. It may be more surprising that although Gordon Brown left the economy in the worst condition in living memory, it didn’t lead to a Tory landslide.
But it’s for precisely that reason that one would expect Labour to be in much better electoral shape almost a year on, now that the cuts to public services are beginning to take effect, and when growth remains hesitant. Where, for example, is the surge of support from all those Left-wing Liberal Democrats who feel betrayed?
I don’t know, but I suspect that the trouble for the Labour leaders, both at Holyrood and Westminster, is – appropriately enough – the same as the inept debater’s. They have no answer to offer. During his speech at the March for the Alternative, Mr Miliband neglected to say what the alternative was, and Mr Gray has not been much more forthcoming at differentiating Labour’s spending plans from those proposed by the Nationalists.
The public may dislike and fear the cuts being proposed by the Coalition government, but on the whole, they believe in their necessity. They may be sceptical about the SNP’s spending plans, but no competing vision is being offered by the Labour party, other than increasing the rate at which we borrow money. For the “savage cuts”, which amount to just over 3%, will only return us to the spending levels of 2008. We are not paying off our debts, but merely addressing the deficit by slowing the rate at which we are borrowing.
In many ways, the other week’s rally typified the Labour party’s problem. It brought together a large number of people who work in or depend on the public sector to complain noisily (though, I happily concede, almost entirely peacefully) about the level of cuts. But surely few, even among the protestors, would argue that no cuts are required. That irritating chant “No Ifs, No Buts, No [fill in the name of your special interest group here] Cuts” is not an argument.
There are lots of “ifs” and “buts”, yet no credible alternative vision is being suggested by Labour, not even an illusory one, such as Tony Blair’s specious “Third Way”. Even with the last government’s expansion of the public sector, the protestors are hugely outnumbered by voters who, for all their worries about public services, acknowledge that we cannot continue dunning taxpayers to expand the state forever.
Labour’s central support, of course, and the vast majority of its financing, comes from the public sector unions. Gordon Brown attempted to expand the party’s natural support by adding 800,000 people to the public payroll, and by dragging almost everyone he could think of (including families earning £60,000 a year) into the welfare system. That story had a very unhappy ending.
The Labour party has yet to find another political narrative to offer those outside its core constituency. Until it does, it will have trouble in parliamentary constituencies, whether for Holyrood or Westminster.

Saatchi and Tatton Park: British Contemporary Art Now

How tautological is it to talk about contemporary art now? As compared to Sensation, say? Here is my Wall Street Journal Europe piece on the new Saatchi show. Pressure of space means it doesn't explicitly say that Phoebe Unwin's paintings are very good, but they are.

Herald Column 1 June 2010

This morning's Herald column (not on website).

You may have missed a good story about David Laws which emerged on Friday afternoon. No, not the one which came out later that evening. Paul Goodman, the former Tory MP for Wycombe, reported on the website Conservative Home that Laws had been asked whether he wanted a pot plant for his office. He declined, but took the trouble, while he was doing so, to ask what the Treasury’s budget for pot plants was. Apparently, he got a fairly quick answer. And straight after that, the Treasury no longer had a budget for pot plants.
It was that sort of approach which led so many people to be optimistic about Laws as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. It’s difficult to overstate the damage that a ministerial resignation of any sort does to the coalition government not much more than a fortnight into its term, and it’s worse still that it should be over expenses, the very issue which prompted their promise of a “new politics”. But of all the members in the new administration, Laws was perhaps the single most damaging scalp which could have been claimed.
He’d already won widespread admiration for the speed with which he had identified cuts, and for his assurance at the Dispatch Box. The fact that it was a Liberal Democrat who had frontline responsibility for taking the axe to public spending was also a useful piece of political cover for the Conservatives: the necessary pruning could not simply be characterised as typically vindictive Tory cuts. It was a useful glue, too, for keeping the two parties committed to the same programme (which is almost certainly the thinking behind Danny Alexander’s appointment to the post).
But Mr Laws’ experience in the financial sector and his efficiency in getting on with reducing the deficit made him the emerging star of the front bench. If anything, he was even more of a pin-up boy for the Conservatives than for Liberal Democrat backbenchers: he was the principal architect of the Orange Book policies which moved the Lib Dems to a genuinely liberal economic position, and made the current alliance not only thinkable, but positively attractive.
So his departure is a great shame. But it was inevitable. I don’t share the sentiments of those who argue that David Laws should have been more candid about his personal life. Though I know and like both Ben Summerskill of Stonewall and Peter Tatchell of OutRage, I can see no reason why MPs need to declare what they get up to in the bedroom. Indeed, staying in the closet, like Mr Laws, is, some might argue, more dignified than parading about the internet in your underwear, like Chris Bryant, the Labour MP for the Rhondda.
But Mr Laws didn’t need the payment of taxpayers’ money to his partner to protect his privacy. Even he, one suspects, put little stock in his slightly weaselly defence, which relied on claiming that the rules are unclear on exactly what constitutes a partner. They are a bit, but hair-splitting on the issue sounds particularly unconvincing from a man who put out a positively sanctimonious statement about his own exemplary record on expenses.
I imagine quite a lot of the public will have some sympathy with his fears that stopping claiming rent would have given the game away about his relationship with his landlord, but I suspect very few of them think it was worth £40,000 of their money to keep up appearances.
The expenses scandals have been deeply damaging not merely in exposing the bad behaviour of a fairly large number of MPs. They have created a corrosive atmosphere in which any expense is assumed to be unjustified, and every politician on the take. That is a problem, because there clearly are justifiable expenses involved in the work of a member of parliament. David Laws happens to be a very rich former stockbroker, but it would be very damaging to insist that all prospective MPs should have such resources. The expenses row has also created a rod for the back of the parties (that would be all of them) who claim the impossible: that they are going to keep things Persil-white from now on.
But if there will always be some trouble from this quarter, it can at least be dealt with robustly by the measures that David Cameron was the first to suggest, chief amongst which is the decision to make all such claims available to public scrutiny. It is of a piece with that thinking that one of Mr Laws’ first decisions was that any public sector salary higher than the Prime Minister’s would have to be personally approved by the Chief Secretary. And the government has also announced that same should apply to public spending decisions. Hence the online publication of all public sector spending over £25,000 (a measure Derek Brownlee introduced into the Public Services Reform Bill in Holyrood in February).
There must be no room for complacency in this scrutiny. Treasury estimates have apparently suggested that tax revenues are rather better than expected, and that Mr Laws might be able to ease off slightly on the cuts, and still bring the deficit below £100 billion by 2013. Quite correctly, he responded that there should be no let-up in finding and enforcing savings.
Correctly, because politicians’ expenses may be the visible scandal, but the figures become trifling when they are placed next to the unnecessary expenses in the public sector. If Danny Alexander can bear that in mind, his lack of economic expertise may not be a problem. Between 2005 and 2009, government departments ran up a bill of £780,000 on pot plants and cut flowers. Mr Alexander must simply ask whether spending of that sort, and on everything else, from PR consultants and first class travel to newspapers and biscuits, can be justified. We already know that it cannot be afforded. That is the lesson of Mr Laws’ hostility to the pot plant. If his legacy is that kind of approach, his 17 days in office will not have been wasted.

Herald column 24 May 2010

I'm getting some complaints that the column isn't always online at the Herald site. Here's the raw copy:

If you wanted to make an investment of £100 million or so, would you hand it over to a bunch of people who want to build a 2,500-seat velodrome in the East End of Glasgow, where it will provide a lasting legacy for the many thousands of budding Chris Hoys for which that part of the world is renowned? Or might you wonder whether your cash would be safer in a chain of kebab shops, off-licences and tattoo parlours?
To put your mind at rest, the outfit handling this investment guarantees “100% dedication. 100% satisfaction.” The very first line of its mission statement promises: “to organise and deliver the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games in a way that fully realises the aspirations of the Glasgow Bid and the contractual obligations of the Host City Contract – on time and on budget.”
Which sounds lovely. There’s a snag, though. With four years still to go, Glasgow 2014 Ltd is already £70 million over budget. I wouldn’t describe my satisfaction at that as “100%” – au contraire, in fact, as the man on the Channel ferry said when asked if he’d dined. The only thing it might be the correct percentage mark for is the level to which the organising committee for the 20th Commonwealth Games has met my expectation that it would demonstrate appalling fiscal incompetence.
Naturally, having shown early on the ability to throw money away that characterises grand projects of this sort, they’d now like some of the cash that they think they would have had if it weren’t being spent on the Olympics in London, so that they can throw that down the stank as well.
Possibly, like me, you don’t have £100 million to invest just at the moment. But then nor does the Westminster government. What it currently has to invest is minus £1.8 trillion, or 126% of GDP, or £76,000 per household. That’s if you don’t count the banks bailout, of course, which would make it minus £2.3 trillion, or 161% of GDP, or £96,000 per household.
In the face of these frankly terrifying figures, it seems fairly pointless to argue about whether the government should not spend this money that it doesn’t have in the East End of Glasgow, or not spend it in the East End of London. One simply concludes that they should not spend it.
But huge projects such as the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games are the most obvious example of taxpayers’ money being squandered on exercises in vanity masquerading as “investment” or “regeneration”. Private building contractors do not feel that throwing a gigantic beanfeast and shoving a couple of thousand testosterone-laden lunks into their newly built block of flats is a necessary preliminary to flogging them off. If the Government wants more social housing, or a swimming pool, or a gymnasium, why not just build the thing without the additional expense?
Because the truth is that for all the talk of how much such projects do to revitalise run-down sections of cities, there is precious little evidence that they do. The vast majority of these schemes do not deliver any appreciable benefit. The “multiplier” argument that the wider economy benefits is pretty bogus when it comes to sports facilities, which don’t produce much in the way of a financial boost for the areas in which they are constructed. Dressage arenas, volleyball courts and archery ranges have a fairly limited usefulness beyond their immediate function. And, of course, every pound spent in constructing a velodrome is a pound not being spent on, say, an accident and emergency unit.
Nor is there even necessarily a short-term financial boost from the event itself. Tour operators in South Africa report that holiday bookings have actually fallen in the run-up to the World Cup, as, understandably enough, more visitors are put off by the presence of football fans than there are football fans.
Two of the Olympics often held up as great successes – Atlanta and Sydney – suggest that the colossal expenditure required to stage them did not deliver much in the way of benefit. True, Atlanta (which was an exercise in naked corporatism which relied on huge levels of private sponsorship) did in fact turn a profit, just, but it brought in $10 million for an outlay of $1.8 billion. Sydney cost the Australian taxpayer around AUS$2 billion. And for all the bruited claims that it would showcase the city’s charms to a wider international audience, subsequent foreign tourism to New South Wales actually fell behind tourism in the rest of Australia.
I admit that I don’t have much interest in sport. But I wouldn’t go as far as Noam Chomsky, who thinks that its whole purpose is to foment jingoism and distract the lumpenproletariat from things which really matter, like seeing through the gigantic capitalist conspiracy organised by the military-industrial complex, of which the snooker at the Sheffield Crucible and the darts at Frimley Green are merely components.
In fact, sport can clearly be extremely good at generating money, which may be why billionaires are so keen on owning football clubs. Manchester United’s magazine, for example, sells 30,000 copies -– in Thailand. You don't need to be Warren Buffett to see the opportunity for making a bob or two in a market like that.
Successful sports teams, as a result, manage to attract customers, sell television rights, market replica strips and even pay the ridiculous salaries of their players without reaching into my pocket to do it. If they pay a design company £95,000 for a G in a set of circles which looks remarkably like one they produced earlier for an arts group, it’s nobody’s business but theirs. If they put up a stadium, they pay for it by selling tickets.
Given the apparently insatiable public appetite for huge sporting events, the real puzzle is how you can contrive not to make a fortune out of them. But the answer to that is simple enough. You just get government involved in the process, and wave goodbye to the money. Your money.

Credo

The thoroughly splendid Paul Cornell drew my attention to this item, whereby one can place one's faith in the coming regime. I find it impossible to believe that the author of Blink could let us down.

Spam

I've started getting spam comments on the blog (hence the removal of a couple). I don't look back down the old stuff all that much, so there may be more.

The reasons I thought these two were spam were (1) the first was entirely in Spanish and seemed to mention money (2) the second was from someone I'd never heard of who was delighted to meet me at the airport the other day (I haven't flown in the past three months) and pointed me at her website.

Is it a compliment to get drivel added to your site?

On the subject of blogs and their usefulness, or otherwise, can we start a campaign to get Uncle Zip's Window back up?

I know Mike has to earn a living and all that, but I really think folk ought to camp out in Barnes with placards saying "M John Harrison belongs to the people".

Upcoming

Spent the journey in this morning writing four short reviews (which involved reading more than a dozen books) for a roundup, to arrive and discover a large ad had sold, and they wanted two very short ones. Oh well. I suppose I may be alble to do the next one a bit sooner for that reason. What I hope you'll get soon in the Telegraph is Paul McAuley's Cowboy Angels and Charlie Stross's Atrocity Archive and Jennifer Morgue.

What's been held over from today is the Peter F Hamilton and Hunter's Run; but there are a few other books I'd like to have included, so I can add them to that pair and get another one soon, I hope. It's much harder to write 150 words on something in sf - especially if you've ploughed through 650 pages of PFH, for example, which you can only really write about if you've read the previous two 650pp tomes in the same series, than it is to knock out 850 words on anything else. Still, I suppose I asked for it.

Future Classics: Schild's Ladder arrived this morning. It doesn't really glow in the dark, or not very successfully.

Wednesday night

Back home, but with little to say for myself.
At the wedding I went to in Scotland, all the women knew a sort of line dance called The Slosh. I asked one of the men how it was that they all knew these individually simple, but (taken as a routine) moderately complicated steps. He said: "It's a thing women know." We left it at that.
I got sent Charles Stross's Halting State, which I think is out in America, but is not published here until next year. God knows what the Americans will make of it. It's very Scottish (though know he isn't, not really). I think it's very good fun.
I am accepting bids for anyone needing summarised or sent up (in the manner of Jorge Luis Borges, Lee Child, Jay McInerney or Robert M Pirsig), if only to give me an excuse to read something other than the thousands of review copies clogging my in-tray. Perhaps it ought to be William Gibson, once I've read the new one. But all offers considered.
Bear in mind I have other bogs and stuff, not to mention a day job writing, and it's the summer holidays. If it's quiet here, I may just be sitting in the garden. And?

Tired

Have been very busy with great directors (see Telegraph blog and obits archives). Am now going away for three or four days. I hope Alain Resnais doesn't die. Rent L'annee derniere a Marienbad or Hiroshima Mon Amour if you've never seen them. Fin.

Thanatophile News

I began a blog on the Telegraph site today; its basis for existence is that it will deal with obituaries, though I suspect it will become a more general thing, with the paper's obits, or issues arising from them, being used as a springboard for the usual aimless chatter. I will point from here to there when it seems appropriate (less often, I'd guess, in the other direction). Anyone especially interested in obits can find it in the list on the right. It is chiefly for those who read the paper or the online version, so its comments will probably be compaints about obits which haven't run, or perceived injustices or errors in those which have. Of course, there's nothing to speak of on it yet. But if you like obits, you might want to look at it in a couple of weeks. The Telegraph's main site is www.telegraph.co.uk. Enough.