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As I write (mid-November) the final results of the US presidential election are not in, but we know enough to highlight some figures. With 66.7 million popular votes and counting, and with a lead of 6.5 percentage points over John McCain, Barack Obama won more popular votes than any other US presidential candidate in history: nearly 8 million more than John Kerry in 2004, and a cool 15.7m more than Al Gore in 2000 (when Gore won more popular votes than GW Bush, but lost in the Supreme Court – remember?). Obama’s share of the popular vote (52.6%) was the highest of any Democratic candidate since LBJ (1964), and higher than any Republican since 1956 except GWH Bush, Reagan (1984) Nixon (1972) and Eisenhower (1956).
Some suggest that Obama won because many Republicans failed to vote, but the figures scarcely confirm this: Senator McCain won 58.3m votes (46.1%, comparable with GW Bush in 2000 with 47.9%), 3.8m fewer than G W Bush in 2004 but 7m more than the same Bush in 2000. Each candidate won a very respectable share of the vote, on probably the highest percentage turnout (over 60%) for 40 years. Those who imagine an entire American population transformed by the election into leftish, colour-blind liberals need reminding that Senator McCain, after a policy-lite campaign driven by smears, innuendos and outright lies, nevertheless won 58.3 million votes across the country, including an estimated 55% of white voters, taking almost all the mid-west (from Montana and North Dakota southwards) and the south, apart from Colorado, New Mexico and Florida (where Obama won by 51-49%). Equally sobering, McCain was ahead in the polls until the financial crisis broke and he frivolously selected Governor Palin as running-mate, two events that probably lost him the election.
The victory of Barack Obama is hugely welcome to almost everyone in the outside world, but he will have a monumental task in living up to the extraordinary expectations that have been raised, especially confronting the challenges of climate change, global recession, world poverty, terrorism and foreign oil dependency, and two unwinnable wars – the poisoned chalice about to be handed to him by George W Bush.
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Was Mrs Thatcher, as she now isn’t, the first British political leader to confuse the economics of the private household with those of government, excoriating all borrowing as fecklessly irresponsible and asserting as common-sense that government must always balance its budgets? Such misconceptions have contaminated much comment on the financial crisis, people who should know better denouncing orthodox proposals to slash interest rates, reduce taxes on and increase benefits to the less well-off (who have the highest marginal propensity to spend rather than save, thus helping to boost demand in a recession), bring forward government spending on labour-intensive infrastructure public works, especially when environmentally positive, and fund this from increased government borrowing – since the only alternative is increased taxation, likely to deepen the recession. All good Keynesian economics: how surprising that it should appear controversial! The government’s critics are now agonising about the fall in the value of sterling. Massive exchange rate gyrations are unwelcome; but a fall in sterling helps exporters and so reduces deflationary pressures. Who’d be a finance minister at such a time?
My pre-new-year resolution for this diary entry is to resist the temptation to write about the credit crunch, global warming, the bankers, George Osborne, the Pope, the stock exchange, Governor Sarah Palin, the Daily Mail, the weather, Jonathan Ross, the flu epidemic or Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately I seem to have broken that resolution already. So I’ll say a word about Christmas cards instead. For the first time this year J and I aren’t sending any — well, hardly any. For years now J has done all the tedious work of buying and writing the cards, addressing the envelopes, getting the stamps, and struggling out in the freezing fog to post them. Apart from the freezing fog, J was doing this even when we had several hundred official cards, as well as our private ones, to send out from foreign parts, all those years ago. I have always thought that just about the sole convincing reason for sending Christmas cards was to have a contact at least once a year with old friends with whom we would otherwise lose touch. Now that’s much more easily achieved by the occasional e-mail, exchanges on the blog, even the odd telephone call, without all that business of reindeer in hard copy, manual work with the pen and the stamps, and excursions to letter-boxes — all so last century. What’s worse, because of the dire new Post Office postage pricing rules which involve measuring the envelopes as well as weighing them, you really have to take all the cards to the post office to be measured individually before you can safely post them.
J however explains our new non-policy on Christmas cards far more incisively. She puts it down to ‘senile inertia’.
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A few years ago, when I was involved in that splendid institution the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability (non-profit, non-NHS, but many of the patients funded by their local health authorities), I used to pop in to see one long-stay patient, who had been severely disabled by an asthma attack as a young curate but whose mind and, especially, sense of humour had remained (and still remain) unimpaired. His Christmas e-mail reminds me that his website is a real treasure-trove of jokes of every conceivable kind, many really funny (and that’s not just the few that I have contributed). The best thing I could find this year in reply to his message was:
“There was a little confusion at the meeting there at the White House when President Bush was told that Obama was coming. He said ‘Oh, you mean we caught him?’” (David Letterman).
Well, it made me giggle, anyway.
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Yet another admiring programme about Prince Charles has been on television recently. Some of it has been (presumably unintentionally) revealing. I loved the bit where HRH explains why he likes to be accompanied at all times by a member of his staff with a pen and a notebook. “If they don’t write down everything I say, it gets forgotten and nothing ever gets done.” Boswell, where art thou?
The Princess of Wales, Camilla (to give her her rightful title, even if she has been prevailed upon not to use it) has a walk-on part in the programme and performs it with notable grace. If and when the Prince succeeds his mother on the throne, Queen Camilla (to give her her rightful future title, even if she continues to be prevailed upon not to use it) shows every sign of being an excellent Queen Consort and probably an extremely good influence on a potentially wayward monarch.
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Tony Travers, the director of the Greater London Group at the LSE, had an interesting piece in Tuesday’s Guardian about what he called “a catalogue of struggles between the Conservatives and Scotland Yard”, of which the latest round has been the denunciation, now retracted with apologies, by Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, of the Tories’ alleged and denied role in publicising Quick’s private address in the Daily Mail (damn!), forcing him and his family to move to a different address. Quick, head of Special Operations at the Yard — not head of counter-terrorism as commonly said, although counter-terrorism is one important element in his command — is in charge of the investigation of two years of systematic leaks to a front-bench Conservative MP by a Conservative activist and civil servant at the home office. A potentially useful debate on the rights and, especially, wrongs of party-political leaking by civil servants to anti-government MPs has unfortunately been sidelined by the huge row over the arrest for questioning of the MP in question by Quick’s coppers, and the search of the MP’s parliamentary office for evidence. The police didn’t have a search warrant for the latter activity, but they did have written permission for it from the parliamentary Serjeant-at-Arms, which seems to me just as good. Anyway, such has been the hysterical uproar over the treatment of the MP by the police that it now looks as if the original police investigation of systematic leaking from the home office may be abandoned, much to the obvious relief of the more perceptive Tories. If there’s really a “struggle between the Conservatives and Scotland Yard” going on, I know whose side I’m on, for once.
The last sentence of Mr Travers’s article, by the way, referring to the two adversaries — the Tories and the Metropolitan Police — reads:
Both sides are better than the other would have us believe.
Who, I wonder is this “other” who would have us believe something? Obviously an unidentified third party. It’s a pity that good clear expressions such as “each other” and “one another” are being supplanted more and more by “both”, in this context ‘both’ inaccurate and ambiguous.
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J and I listened with nostalgic attention to the live radio broadcast this afternoon, Christmas Eve, of the traditional Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. We have been overseas for each of the past six or seven Christmas Eves so this was the first time we had heard the live broadcast for a long time. We were both sadly disappointed. The King’s choir, world-famous for its clarity and purity of tone, sounded muddy and even under-rehearsed. The boy solo treble who, as always, introduces the service with “Once in Royal David’s City” sounded understandably but regrettably nervous. The new carols sung for the first time in this event sounded tuneless and inaccessible (surprisingly: at least one of them was by the late Peter Tranchell, who composed great quantities of memorably tuneful music for cabaret and musical comedies when I was a Cambridge undergraduate, rather a long time ago). Even some of the old, familiar, traditional carols had been tinkered with for no discernible purpose unless to irritate. To cap it all, the nine lessons were almost all read by the usual assorted King’s big-wigs and small-wigs in a mannered and distracting style, with strong stresses in odd places.
Perhaps the Festival has always been like this and it’s just that when we were younger we didn’t notice, or didn’t mind. Now we do.
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Polly Toynbee, the Guardian‘s resident humanist and secularist, headed her Christmas column: “My Christmas message? There’s probably no God,” a partial quotation from a poster message that’s to appear shortly on a fleet of London and other buses in a new secularist campaign: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life“. This seems to me to strike all the right notes. No dogmatic assertion that God doesn’t exist: just a suitably cautious reminder that on the balance of probabilities and the available evidence so far, his existence is more improbable than probable, and thus no more a sensible hypothesis on which to build our lives than any other improbable proposition. The advice to stop worrying about it also seems apt, given the pervasive guilt and obsession with sin relentlessly propagated by much religion. And the exhortation to enjoy life pithily reminds us that it’s — probably — the only one we’re going to get, so it’s no good putting up with misery and oppression now in the vain hope that it will all be all right in the next one. Polly’s article has prompted the predictable tsunami of abusive denunciation from the dwindling ranks of the God-fearing faithful: 723 comments in Comment is Free, and counting; and a raft of laughably feeble ripostes on today’s Guardian letters page, including efforts by a Right Reverend, a Prebendary and a Rabbi, arguing variously that religion has contributed wonderful art, poetry, etc. to our culture; that “belief in atheism” is no more “rational” than “the adoption of religion” — breathtaking!; that Ms Toynbee’s liberal values are “largely based” on “Christian principles” (so much for millions of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Druids and flat-earthers); and that Polly shouldn’t attack religion at Christmas time. One letter denounces the invitation not to worry, because “True religion demands that we should be worried about our world, particularly in these troubled times, and take our lives and our responsibilities seriously.” Controversial stuff! Judging by those 723 comments on the Guardian website, the Toynbee column will have attracted a massive postbag of letters about the Toynbee column and submitted for publication in the paper. If those selected for publication today were really the best of the lot, God help the religious lobby (so to speak)! Sensible Christians like the intellectually rigorous and clear-sighted Revd. Giles Fraser, the vicar of Putney, must be thinking: “with friends like these….”
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Happy Christmas!
Brian
The 6 March 2008 issue of the New York Review of Books includes a magnificent demolition job in a review of the memoirs of that rascal of the far right, John Bolton, by the veteran retired international public servant, Sir Brian Urquhart. (Hat-tip: to Dr Lorna Lloyd at Keele, who alerted me to this review in the NYRB.) Earlier this year, Sir Brian recorded an interview lasting nearly an hour for a University of California at Berkeley series of Conversations on International Affairs, all eight parts of which are available on the Berkeley website. Both the book review and the extended interview are compulsory reading and viewing. You would never guess from the vigour and forthrightness of both that Brian Urquhart will be 90 next year (2009).
Brian Urquhart is by any reckoning the most distinguished and accomplished British national or international public servant of his generation, perhaps of any generation. He served in the British army and military intelligence throughout World War II in North Africa and Europe. In the words of his Wikipedia entry, –
Urquhart is well-known for his attempts to persuade the planners of Operation Market Garden to modify or abort their plans, in light of crucial information obtained from aerial reconnaissance and the Dutch resistance. The episode was described by Cornelius Ryan in his book on “Market Garden”, A Bridge Too Far. In the film version, directed by Richard Attenborough, Urquhart’s character was renamed “Major Fuller”, to avoid confusion with a similarly named British General.
Urquhart was a member of the staff involved in the setting-up of the United Nations in 1945, and has advised every Secretary-General of the United Nations since its inception. His main fields of interest and operation at the UN have been conflict resolution and peacekeeping. Urquhart organized the first peacekeeping force (in Egypt after the Suez crisis). To differentiate the peacekeepers from other soldiers, the UN wanted to have the soldiers wear blue berets. When that turned out to take six weeks to make, Urquhart proposed the characteristic blue helmets, which could be made in a day by painting over regular ones.
As Undersecretary-General, Urquhart’s main functions were the direction of peace-keeping forces in the Middle East and Cyprus, and negotiations in these two areas; amongst others, his contributions also included work on the negotiations relating to a Namibia peace settlement, negotiations in Kashmir, Lebanon and work on peaceful uses for nuclear energy.
Sir Brian Urquhart
Brian Urquhart retired from the United Nations Secretariat in 1986 (22 years ago!) and since then he has been an indefatigable advocate for liberal international causes, writing books and articles, lecturing and giving countless interviews about all the subjects on which he has absolutely unrivalled expertise: the UN, the role of international law in general and the UN Charter in particular, peace-making and peace-keeping, the role of the super-powers, non-proliferation and disarmament. His output of authoritative, meticulously documented book reviews and other articles for, especially, the New York Review of Books (listed here) is phenomenal and, happily, continuing. In the words of one potted biography:
Sir Brian has written several books, including brilliant biographies of Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche. He has also written an autobiography, A Life in Peace and War, published by W.W. Norton and Company. His books on decolonization, and more recently on reforming the United Nations system, have projected him into the international limelight of transnational politics. A tireless speaker and activist, Sir Brian [was] deeply involved in the events surrounding the fiftieth UN anniversary. His pieces on the UN volunteer force and the responsibilities of the UN system published in The New York Review of Books in 1993 and 1994 have set the terms of the debate for all future discussions of rethinking the UN system.
Knighted in 1986, Sir Brian has another, rarer distinction: his portrait, by Philip Pearlstein, hangs in the National Portrait Gallery (room 35).
During my time in the late 1970s and early 80s as head of a Foreign & Commonwealth Office department, heavily engaged for several years in the seemingly endless and tortuous negotiations leading eventually to the independence of Namibia under processes arising directly from a UN Security Council resolution, I periodically had some contacts with Brian Urquhart, then UN Under-Secretary-General and one of the two or three most senior members of the UN secretariat. He was, and no doubt still is, an extraordinarily good listener, ready to consider seriously any ideas and proposals emanating from any quarter without regard to its rank in the hierarchy. He was incredibly flexible and innovative, not the qualities most commonly found (in those days, anyway) in UN secretariat officials. He was strikingly courteous, calm and patient. If he had any defects as an international diplomat, you’d have had a job picking them out.
One more snippet about this many-sided, many-talented man. As his Wikipedia entry quoted earlier relates, during the second world war Brian Urquhart was an officer in the British Airborne Corps of parachute and glider troops. On one of his parachute drops — his last, as it turned out — his chute failed to open and he was very badly injured, not surprisingly. After six months in hospital he was sufficiently recovered to resume his military duties but not to make any more parachute jumps. As the Airborne Corps’s chief intelligence officer it was his job to give advice on possible dangers and risks to the planners of the ill-fated plan for a mass parachute drop to capture three key bridges over the Rhine (one of them at Arnhem) in advance of the Allied armies as they pushed across the Netherlands towards Germany. Urquhart assessed the risks of failure as so high that he felt bound to advise that the project should be abandoned or at least redesigned to reduce the 8 mile distance from the dropping zones to the objective, the bridge. This was not the advice that General Montgomery and the other generals wanted to hear and Urquhart was unceremoniously moved to other duties. He was subsequently proved to have been right and the Arnhem and other landings were a costly failure. In one of his Berkeley interviews conducted a few years ago, Urquhart reflected on the lessons he learned from this traumatic experience:
Well, the thing went very seriously wrong and I then realized what I hadn’t realized before, that these generals and great commanders and politicians who were so admired during the war were actually just like everyone else. They were vain, they were ambitious, they very often made extremely faulty judgments. I had not thought of that before; I had always thought that they were kind of super-people and I must say that the feeling has remained with me for the rest of my life. I never again trusted famous, glamorous leaders to resist vanity and ambition and make the right, mature decision, and get it right.
Recent British and American history alas provides ample confirmation of the rightness of that penetrating conclusion. Historians may not always give enough weight to the role of glamour, vanity and ambition on the part of political and military leaders in driving them on to fatal misjudgements and consequent disasters.
British people should be proud of Sir Brian Urquhart: those who know about him undoubtedly are. It’s a pity that he isn’t more widely known and his exceptional record more widely appreciated, although he’s not the kind of person who seeks or would enjoy celebrity status. It’s not perhaps too late for a Nobel Peace Prize, which would make him better known. That would be one in the eye for the appalling John Bolton, although several decades too late for the Arnhem generals.
Update (5 January 2009): This post has prompted Alan James, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Keele University, to send me the following reminiscence, which he has authorised me to quote attributably here:
In the mid 1960s I was commissioned by Alastair Buchan, Director of the Institute for Strategic Studies (as it then was), to write a book on peacekeeping. He and Brian Urquhart were friends, which doubtless helped with introductions when I travelled to the Middle East and Cyprus to see the sort of thing on which the UN was engaged. I also visited North America and there met Brian, he being Under Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs in the UN Secretariat, responsible for special assignments and negotiations and much else. As I maintained my interest in peacekeeping, this was followed over the years by many other meetings. Most of those which took place prior to his retirement were when he was Under Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs, but despite his considerable responsibilities he was invariably ready to see me. Even more valuable – and remarkable – was the fact that he was always exceedingly helpful. He would comment in an acute, frank, unstuffy, and often amusing way on my questions, put me in touch with others who could help, and smooth my way on visits to UN peacekeeping operations. I could not have asked for more.
I might just underline your point that his books and articles are no run-of-the-mill memoirs and analyses. When in 1987 I presented him for an honorary degree, I referred to him not just as a ‘soldier and very distinguished servant of the UN’, but also as a ‘scholar’ – a standing he had achieved alongside his work as an international official.
(Another) Brian
A friend and former colleague has set me a challenge that (probably recklessly) I can’t resist:
I would be interested in your view of 2 recent events involving Gordon Brown. The first is his reported reluctance to agree to the Tories’ request to be granted access to senior Whitehall officials as from early 2009 in accordance with the convention which enables opposition parties to prepare for possible office. This despite Labour having in 19997 being given similar access some 18 months before the last date for calling an election.
The second is the premature release by No. 10 of partial and unchecked knife crime statistics despite their being warned that they should not do so.
Both issues could perhaps be considered as relatively unimportant compared with the economic crisis but they appear to me, at any rate, as examples of shabby political manoeuvres designed to thwart the opposition from gaining any advantage – at any cost, and at odds with Brown’s avowed intent to insist on transparent and honest government.
I look forward to your reaction but somehow I doubt that these are issues which will feature on your blog site!
So here goes.
(1) Tory access to civil servants before the next general election: This seems to originate from a story in the Times of 12 December by Sam Coates, ‘Senior Political Correspondent’, headlined “Gordon Brown provokes Tory anger by delaying consent for Civil Service handover talks” and beginning:
Gordon Brown is risking a political row by considering blocking the Conservatives from meeting senior civil servants in the new year to discuss their proposals for power. Plans for the Tories to hold meetings with permanent secretaries from every department, widely expected to begin in January, have been put on hold because the Prime Minister has not yet given authorisation. Labour was allowed to begin talks with senior civil servants 15 months [sic] before the 1997 general election…
There are several things worth noting about this story. First, it is wholly speculative, and relies entirely on what unspecified “Whitehall sources” are said to have “suggested”. The sole fact in the report is that when the Cabinet Secretary gave evidence to a parliamentary select committee –
Asked at what point in the electoral cycle the Civil Service would talk to opposition parties, Sir Gus [O'Donnell] replied: “It’s when the Prime Minister agrees that with the Leader of the Opposition. I’m aware that the Leader of the Opposition has written to the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister will respond.”
This falls far short of evidence that the prime minister is “delaying consent for Civil Service handover talks”, as the headline asserts, or even that he is considering doing so. All we know is that David Cameron has asked when the contacts can begin, and that Gordon Brown has not yet replied.
Secondly, this is all rather premature. The Electoral Commission website confirms that “A general election to elect the new Parliament must be held by no later than Thursday 3 June 2010.” If the 15-month precedent of 1997 is followed, that would suggest that Tory contacts with civil servants might begin in or about March, 2009, i.e. in three months’ time. We might be forgiven for suspecting that Mr Cameron’s request is designed more to reinforce the impression that a general election is or should be imminent than to elicit information. It’s true that Tony Blair, when still prime minister, told Cameron that the contacts could start at the beginning of 2009, but he had no business seeking to pre-empt his successor’s decision on timing; Brown is under no possible obligation to regard himself as bound by Blair’s mischievous promise, since the timing is within his own discretion; and anyway the precedent of what did or didn’t happen in 1997 is no more binding than the precedents of other general elections either before or after 1997. There’s therefore no basis for describing whatever date Brown eventually sets as a “delay”, since there’s no established start date from which to measure delay. Moreover, if Brown had replied instantly that Cameron and his colleagues could start talking to the civil servants “immediately” (i.e. even before the date offered by Tony Blair), it’s a cert that Mr Murdoch’s Times and other noisy tabloids would have been running banner headlines announcing that Brown was obviously planning a general election early in 2009 (which may or may not be the case: the chances are that he has very sensibly not decided yet when to call the election). That this was indeed Cameron’s real purpose in demanding immediate access to the civil service is amply confirmed by what he said in his letter to Gordon Brown, as quoted by the BBC:
Given that you have allowed members of the Cabinet to speculate openly that an election is to be called imminently, I am asking you today to give the necessary instructions for such meetings to begin immediately.
Thirdly, it might (equally mischievously) be argued that since at least one Tory front-bench MP, and probably more than one, has been enjoying regular and systematic access to at least one home office civil servant for about two years, and possibly to at least one Treasury civil servant too, there’s no special hurry about putting such access on a legitimate basis. Mr Coates of the Times doesn’t mention that, for some reason.
My conclusion is that the Times story has no basis. It’s not a story at all: it’s political propaganda. As political reporting, it’s a dud. If and when the prime minister sets a date for these contacts to begin which leaves inadequate time for Tory shadow ministers to get briefing from their putative future department heads, that will be the time to bang on about the anger supposedly caused by his unfairness.
Update (pm 14 Dec 08): Sam Coates is at it again in today’s Sunday Times:
Transition talks blocked
A former head of the civil service criticised Gordon Brown last night for seeking to block “transition” talks with the Tories. Lord Butler of Brockwell, cabinet secretary for a decade until 1998, said the prime minister’s actions had been “wrong” and “regrettable”. Under a convention dating to the early 1960s, the Conservatives were due to open discussions in the new year to brief civil servants on their plans for government so as to ensure a smooth transition if they win the next election. However, Sir Gus O’Donnell, the present cabinet secretary, said last week that Brown had yet to give his permission for the talks. Butler said: “It would be a pity if that permission wasn’t given. In fact, it would be wrong.”
Once again, the sub-heading states as a fact what has clearly not in fact happened; and this time Lord Butler’s comments are said to refer to “the prime minister’s actions” which “had been” wrong and regrettable, as if the prime minister had done something both concrete and deplorable, whereas it’s clear from the direct quotation that Butler’s comments were purely conditional: “It would be a pity if that permission wasn’t given. In fact, it would be wrong.” Not content with that flagrant misrepresentation, Mr Coates conflates an alleged convention “dating back to the early 1960s” with a one-off undertaking about the timing of pre-election talks in 2009 given by a man (Blair) who isn’t now even a member either of the government or of parliament. Even editors of once-great British newspapers now appointed by Rupert Murdoch ought not to be approving this sort of stuff for publication.
(2) “Premature release by No. 10 of partial and unchecked knife crime statistics”: As far as I can discover, the ‘fact sheet’ containing these partial and unchecked statistics was issued by the home office at the behest of someone in No. 10, not by No. 10 itself, although I can’t find any sign of it on either department’s website, so it’s difficult to be sure. Since both were warned beforehand that the figures were not yet checked (as required by the statistics code of practice), that those intended to be quoted were incomplete and therefore gave only a partial picture, and that accordingly it would be premature to release them now, it was plainly quite wrong and indefensible to go ahead regardless and issue the fact sheet. An inquiry is reportedly under way into how this blunder came to be committed and who — probably primarily in No. 10, but also in the home office — was responsible for it. As the Tories and LibDems have gleefully remarked, such idiotic mishandling of official statistics brings all government statistics into disrepute by undermining public confidence in them. In other words, the fact sheet was another dud report.
None of which means that the basic message sought to be illustrated by the incomplete and selective statistics was necessarily — or even probably — untrue: namely, that (contrary to the impression deliberately given by the right-wing tabloids and opposition politicians) knife crime is declining. From such officially checked and published statistics as are currently available, e.g. here, here and here, it seems likely that knife crimes are indeed declining, or at worst roughly level, in the areas where special police measures have been introduced (a qualification conscientiously emphasised by ministers in the context of the fact sheet — whether it was also made clear in the fact sheet itself, I don’t know and can’t find out). In the words of these documents themselves,
These statistics on crime in England and Wales are prepared by staff of the Government Statistical Service under the National Statistics Code of Practice. They are produced free from political interference.
It was the present Labour government that established the independence of the Government Statistical Service, precisely to avoid suspicion that official statistics are massaged for political purposes. The blundering issue of the fact-sheet was in blatant breach of the government’s own rules. It was an own goal, providing predictable joy to those spectators in the grandstand who see advantage for themselves in encouraging the false idea that violent crime is a mounting threat to us all, despite the inconvenient fact that it isn’t.
And I’m happy to discuss both these dud reports on my blog: QED.
Brian
It looks as if YouTube and its owner, Google, may have come up with a revolutionary new idea that could save classical music from extinction in the digital internet age. If you have ever been moved by a string quartet, an opera aria or a cello concerto, you should give a warm welcome to the birth of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, announced on 1 December this year (2008) and launched at the New York and London offices of Google. “YouTube Symphony Orchestra” looks at first sight like a sort of oxymoron, but don’t laugh. If it all goes according to plan, a symphony concert at the Carnegie Hall in New York in April 2009 will mark the culmination of an extraordinary global collaboration between both professional and amateur musicians that is going to use the power of the internet to marginalise constraints of distance and time change to produce a symphony orchestra and even an original orchestral performance of a completely new kind.
The leading classical music magazine, Gramophone, has described the project like this:
The idea is to bring together a collaborative orchestra online by targeting as many musicians as possible around the world, made possible by the internet revolution. For the project, Tan Dun has composed the “Internet Symphony No 1, ‘Eroica,’” a piece which attempts to conjure a “21st century sound,” and which features hubcaps in the percussion section. By going to www.youtube.com/symphony, you can watch his performance with the London Symphony Orchestra.
Then anyone from Tasmania to Timbuktu, from Trenton to Tokyo, is invited to audition online now until January 28. Just download the part of your choice – violin, flute, bassoon, whatever – and play it with Tan Dun giving you the downbeat. You must also submit a video that shows off your musical and technical abilities. Hundreds if not thousands of entries are expected.
Then a panel made up of experts drawn from the LSO, the Berlin Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony and other leading orchestras, will choose a group of semi-finalists in February 2009. This is eventually winnowed down to the lucky finalists in March – determined by vote on YouTube. The democratisation of classical music has never been so palpable.
Perhaps even more strikingly innovative, Gramophone adds that
In addition to the culminating Carnegie performance, the most impressive videos submitted will be “mashed together” to create a YouTube Symphony, presumably watchable online.
Tan Dun
You can watch and hear Tan Dun, who has composed the inaugural symphony, and his collaborators talking about the project here. And Tan Dun conducts the LSO in a performance of his symphony — including the hub-caps and car brake disks used as instruments — here.
If news of this project doesn’t energise flagging music departments and school orchestras all over the world, nothing will. Classical music purists (including me) may raise a sceptical eyebrow or two at the idea of choosing the orchestra performers at the final stage of the selection process by popular vote on YouTube, a palpable concession to the current vogue for ‘reality TV’ and shows such as the Popstars series, America’s Got Talent, Dancing with the Stars, and Celebrity Duets, in which winners are ‘selected’ by the votes of viewers. But if this increases popular interest and involvement in the whole project, good luck to it. Anyway, since the earlier stages of selection will be in the hands of professional musicians, there should be no risk of the final outcome being corrupted by what one might call the John Sergeant effect.
So get that dusty viola down from the attic, all you musical geniuses out there; polish up the long neglected clarinet, and get the old piano tuned. Then download your score from YouTube and get practising. And if you’re a school music teacher, now’s the time to expose your star pupils to a spot of global competition. Who knows? They might yet be on the plane to New York to start rehearsing next March. The danger that the glories of classical music might have lapsed into oblivion in 20 years or so might yet be kept at bay.
I ought, I suppose, to declare an extremely indirect interest in all this. The prominent classical music promotion and consultancy firm 21C Media Group, based in New York, has been involved closely with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra project since its conception about a year ago (see the press release on its website here). I have no financial stake in 21C, only a proud paternal one, explained here.
Brian
A lively debate is in progress over on Owen’s blog about leaks of sensitive government information and the best way to deal with them. With apologies for my cowardly reluctance to butt in to the latest exchange between Owen and Paulie, I just want to make some points that are easily overlooked in the current enthusiasm for universal leaking on the part of those who have a professional vested interest in leaks, namely all journalists and most politicians apart from those actually in office.
(1) Contrary to much of what’s currently being said by MPs and journalists about the Damian Green brouhaha, it’s not only information concerning “national security” that sometimes needs to be protected from untimely public disclosure, or (sometimes) from disclosure at any time. Publication, or publication at the wrong time, of other kinds of information may do harm to (for example) the markets; to the legitimate business and financial interests of blameless companies and individuals; to the currency; to trust between the British and other governments; to international trust in the discretion of British politicians, diplomats, civil servants and others (by raising doubts about whether things communicated to such people in confidence will be made public); and to trust between ministers and officials. All this may be damaging, to a greater or lesser extent, to Britain’s national interests without in any way touching on “national security” or the unauthorised disclosure of information protected by the Official Secrets Act. Some of these kinds of disclosure may cause only trivial damage in each individual case but may have a much more serious cumulative effect if constantly repeated over a long period. The assertion, much heard in recent days, that all government information other than information involving national security can safely be made public, and should be, is rubbish.
(2) Any assessment of the justification, or lack of it, for keeping some kinds of government information secret needs to take account of the virulently confrontational and antagonistic character of British politics, in which all oppositions of whatever political complexion, and the tabloid press which supports them, seize selectively and unscrupulously on any stick with which to beat the government, and vice versa. This means that the public disclosure of official advice to ministers which warns of possible negative consequences of a policy option later adopted as government policy is certain to be seized on by the opposition and parts of the media as ammunition for denouncing the policy in question — even if the original policy advice concluded that the predicted negative consequences would be outweighed by greater benefits. Publication of official advice would also make it much more difficult for ministers to overrule official advice and act contrary to officials’ recommendations, since the official advice, once published, would be used to undermine the policy actually adopted. The acceptability and authority of official policy would also be undermined by the knowledge that it had been adopted contrary to the recommendations of officials. This would put a heavy premium on acceptance of officials’ advice even when it runs contrary to ministers’ political judgement and instincts, thus seriously limiting the options available to elected ministers.
(3) The likelihood, or even a remote risk, that officials’ advice, or records of discussions between ministers or between ministers and officials leading up to a policy decision might be published, will cause records of such advice or discussions to be destroyed or, even worse, result in no such records being made. Failure to make and keep records of the reasons for policy decisions is inimical to good government and to the accountability of ministers, as the sofa style of government employed by Tony Blair demonstrated. Bad decisions are much likelier when there is no record of who said what in the discussions leading up to them or when officials have been excluded from the discussion for fear of damaging leaks. Future historians also have a claim on the proper procedures being followed, and these include proper records — many of which can’t safely be made public for the reasons in (1) and (2) above.
(4) Of course there’s a strong countervailing public interest in making public the maximum possible amount of information about government decision-making, including as far as possible the facts and figures on whose basis policy decisions are made; and in particular there’s a strong public interest in the exposure of government wrong-doing (cover-ups of illegal or corrupt activity, unwarranted lying or misrepresentation of facts, dirty tricks, deliberately misleading misinterpretation of statistics, and so forth). It’s right that the law currently offers conditional protection to an official whistle-blower who can demonstrate that his disclosures perform a public service of this kind, and that he has tried but failed to put matters right through official channels before resorting to his whistle: in short, that his action is in the public interest. Even in these fairly restricted circumstances, however, the benefit to the public interest may need to be balanced against likely damage of the kind described above, for example if it involves the disclosure of classified information provided in confidence by a foreign government.
Finally, descending from the general to the particular, it’s worth noting that unauthorised disclosures of government-owned information designed to provide ammunition for the official opposition to fire at the government for party political advantage clearly doesn’t qualify for protection as being in the public interest, unless it can be shown to be the only available means of unmasking government wrong-doing of some kind. I suspect that Messrs Galley and Damian Green might have some difficulty in showing that this applies to the information that the former has, um, allegedly been “regularly” and “systematically” leaking to the latter over the past two years.
Brian
According to the BBC’s latest report,
The solicitor for the Home Office worker who leaked information [Christopher Galley] says he did it because it was material that was “important for the public to know”.
The problem is that Mr Galley’s ministers took a different view of what material needed to be made publicly available, and their view would have been informed by all sorts of considerations of which Mr Galley could not have been aware. There’s no suggestion that he was sending government information, without authority, to Damian Green in order to expose wrong-doing of any kind; he was not a whistle-blower of that traditional kind. He just thought he knew better than ministers what information should be released, and when. Even then he sent it to a Conservative opposition MP, not to the press.
The Home Office Official
If every unelected civil servant, senior or (like Mr Galley) junior, claimed the right to override elected ministers’ decisions about what sensitive government information should and should not be released, and on what timing, the work of government would grind to a halt. Ministers would be unable to trust their officials and would have to keep vital information from them (the reverse of what seems to have been happening in this case!). Anyway, it’s clearly an offence under both common law and statute law for an official to disclose information obtained in the course of his duties to a third person without proper prior authority. And it’s an offence for a third person to encourage an official to do so, although we don’t know whether Mr Green did encourage Mr Galley. He has denied that any financial inducement was offered or given.
The claim that Mr Galley’s motive in leaking the documents was to enable the public to know what he thought they should know, the ‘public interest defence’, is inevitably going to have to be examined against the background of Mr Galley’s position as a Conservative Party activist.
The Times report quotes Mr Galley’s solicitor:
The former Conservative council election candidate had first met Mr Green in the Houses of Parliament in 2006 and “regularly” supplied him with information for the next two years, Mr O’May said. [Emphasis added]
In the words of a report in the Daily Telegraph, no less, a pretty reliable source on matters affecting the Conservative Party, –
Relatives of Mr Galley revealed that he had held political ambitions since his school days. He has previously stood as a Conservative candidate in an election for Sunderland city council.
Christopher’s uncle Kevin Galley, Christopher’s uncle, said last night: “I just don’t understand how he could have got caught up in something like this.
“He loved politics and I think he was a member of the Conservative Youth.”
It’s also reported, and not so far denied, that Mr Galley had applied for a job in Damian Green’s parliamentary office and had met Mr Green in connection with his application (which was evidently unsuccessful).
You can see and hear the statement by Mr Galley’s solicitor, Mr O’May, of Bindmans solicitors, on the BBC website here — and on several others.
My initial reaction to the news of Mr Green’s arrest and the searches of his offices and homes was that although an investigation of the leaks was manifestly right and necessary, the manner in which the investigation was being conducted appeared to be disproportionate to the suspected offence (or offences) and unnecessarily heavy handed. Now, as more of the facts seep out, I’m not so sure. Two years!
Brian
