All Downhill

WAGES AS PROPORTION OF GDP FROM 1955-2008

This graph, based on one printed in Stewart Lansley's excellent book "The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of the Super-Rich and the Economy" (Gibson Square 2011), tells you almost everything you need to know about the roots of our current crisis.

It depicts the percentage of UK GDP paid out as wages from 1955 to 2008. It starts around the ~59% level that prevailed almost from the end of WWII until the 1973 oil crisis, then shows the sharp spike up above 65% during the union militancy of the mid-70s (whose impact on prices and profits drove the country into the arms of Thatcher). In effect it's a graph of the British class struggle over that crucial half century.

A steady downward trend following 1979 as labour lost out more and more has taken it below 54%, a level at which demand in the economy is severely curtailed. The answer is not more QE to put cash into the banks, but to put cash in people's pockets, restore this measure to around 59% and restart the economy.

[Subscribers can read my review of Lansley's book in the next issue of The Political Quarterly, Volume 83, Issue 4 (not yet online), and my PQ reviews over two years old of other books are readable on my blog here]

Elders of Zion >> Zinoviev Letter >> Innocence of Muslims

Given the current febrile state of the world the temptation to succumb to conspiracy theories is very strong indeed. Nevertheless I can't restrain myself from saying this: doesn't this Arab rioting, and killing of the US ambassador to Libya, just two months before the US presidential election, smell of a provocation to anyone else? In the grand old tradition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Zinoviev Letter? Remembering what happened to unpopular Democratic president Jimmy Carter after the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1980? All the usual suspects are involved: petty criminals with pseudonyms, bogus consultants, mad evangelical pastors. But no connection to the Republican Party (yet). 

Higglety Pigglety Pop

Finally we have the answer to the nature of Matter, the Universe and Everything (and it isn't 42 after all). It's all a vast herd of quarks (some strange but many charming) milling around in Peter Higg's field until they get heavy. Now we know, can we please shut the fuck up about it and concentrate on the real problem, which is to prevent a tiny elite of greed-crazed rentiers from stealing our grandchildrens' lunch money.

A Sad Canticle

A Sad Canticle is a computer-generated tune I created using Ableton Live with a vocoder filter that gives a no-language/all-languages or Esperanto effect. Its punning title is deliberate, alluding to the horrors being perpetrated in Syria. Readers new to this blog might form the impression that I'm only interested in politics, but nothing could be further from the truth.

In particular I've been passionately interested in music for most of my life. I started listened to, then playing, black American music - blues, R&B and soul - in the early 1960s, progressed to jazz, particularly bop, post-bop and '60s free jazz, which lead me onto modern composers like Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartok . From there I explored backwards in time to absorb the classics from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert to Wagner and Richard Strauss. I've spent many, many nights at the opera and concert hall and am a regular patron of the Wigmore. My tastes in popular music are highly eclectic and highly selective, stretching from rock, bluegrass and country to reggae, as a glance at my Spotify playlists will confirm.

I haven't bought many records or seen live performances of popular music for decades - I was once keen on new wave bands like Talking Heads and Pere Ubu, as well as dub reggae, but as for many people of my generation the era of hip-hop and dance music became a big turn-off: too old for raves and clubbing but the music not sufficiently interesting for me to just listen. However the last few years have seen a change in my attitude. Though popular music is now fragmented as never before and the extraordinary animus between fans of the myriad different genres is pretty off-putting, I recently find myself attracted to a lot of the experimental music being produced - it feels as though, bored with the blandness of commercial pop, young musicians are rediscovering for themselves the fascination with pure sound that was there in free jazz and other '60s modernisms. The technology of music production has also advanced enormously, so that they can now create on a laptop computer extraordinary sounds that once were the exclusive domain of the avant-gardists of Paris's IRCAM. Some of the sounds coming out of the dubstep scene and its million descendents, or from musicians like Beck, Jack White and Saint Vincent, are really very exciting indeed, recalling the spirit of Coltrane, Mingus, Coleman, Shepp and Albert Ayler.

As a keen practitioner of obscure computer programming languages I've also, since the early 1990s, been interested in computer composition (more about my efforts in algorithmic composition on my website here) it was pretty well inevitable then that I'd eventually buy myself a copy of Ableton Live (the tool of choice for much dance music) and start to produce electronic music of my own. I'm all too acutely aware of the potential for ridicule in the spectacle of old codgers getting "down wiv da kidz", and so I deliberately steer clear of attempting house, techno, dubstep and other beats-oriented genres. In any case I'm not really interested in getting people to dance as there's a surfeit of people doing that already.

I'm more interested in playing with sound and rhythm for their own sakes and to disturb various musical conventions. I've recently been experimenting with synthesised nonsense vocals that nevertheless, because they so resemble real human voices, have an emotional effect that's devoid of overt meaning: I suppose if a label is needed it would have to be "expressionist", because I constantly find myself creating tunes that remind me of my outrage at certain current political events. This music is rather a long way from easy-listening, but I do hope that people might at least be upset by it. (I have to warn that if you don't like either modernist music or free jazz, you're unlikely to enjoy this at all). I post my most successful compositions on the popular SoundCloud website, which is mostly frequented by young dance music composers, and here's a widget through which you can hear some of my pieces:    

Hemmed in by Language

Charles Rosen is one of a handful of living writers whose work I always look forward to reading, which for me mostly means articles on music that he writes for the New York review of Books. Rosen is a first-class pianist who had a professional career on the concert platform (his recording of the Goldberg variations is one of my favourite interpretations). He writes marvellous articles on the appreciation of composers like Chopin, Ravel and Liszt: since the arrival of Spotify I may sometimes spend a whole evening reading one of these pieces while concurrently listening to each of the performances he mentions (I hope music schools have discovered what a great resource Spotify is).

Rosen also has broader interests beyond music, and occasionally writes about philosophical matters and art theory, with a special interest in Romanticism. For example in the latest NYRB (May 10th 2012) he has a piece called "Freedom and Art" in which he typically digs far deeper than the guff one normally reads on this subject (Dada against the bourgeoisie, Constructivism for the revolution, Abstract Expressionism as Cold War weapon, Pop against elitism etc etc ad naus). In this article Rosen starts by discussing the constraints on freedom posed by fixed meanings and having to learn language, and comes out with this extraordinary sentence:

"Of all the constraints imposed on us that restrict our freedom—constraints of morality and decorum, constraints of class and finance—one of the earliest that is forced upon us is the constraint of a language that we are forced to learn so that others can talk to us and tell us things we do not wish to know."

It struck me that in this single sentence he summarises, in an arresting and comprehensible way, everything post-modern theorists have been banging on about in such deliberately exclusive jargon for the last 40 years.

PS As a postscript to this thought, my partner Marion's grandmother often professed a belief that monkeys could actually talk, but they didn't because they knew that if we found out we would make them work...

Thought Prompted by the Petrol Strike Debacle

"We are likely to find ourselves as intellectuals or political philosophers facing a situation in which our chief task is not to  imagine better worlds but rather to think how to prevent worse ones."
Tony Judt

In a week where cabinet ministers appear to be urging voters toward Buddhist-style self immolation, I thought that perhaps an automobile metaphor might be apposite. If you imagine society as a motor vehicle then the capitalist market is its engine and social democracy is its braking system. Hands up everyone who wants a car without brakes. OK, just Osborne and Clarkson then...

A Very British Coup?

David Cameron is likely to be questioned about his friendship with Mrs Brooks by Lord Justice Leveson as part of his inquiry into press ethics Photo: REUTERS/GETTY

 






In 100 years time the last week of February 2012 will be remembered as a turning point in UK history, for three events that don't seem all that remarkable at first sight.

The first event was the appearance of Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan police Sue Akers at the Leveson inquiry, where she claimed that there was a "culture of illegal payments" at the Sun newspaper, in which police officers and other civil servants were not merely paid for specific information but were in effect kept on retainer to leak regularly. Akers testimony coincided with James Murdoch finally resigning the chairmanship of News International, the Sun's holding company. 

The second event was the announcement that the West Midlands and Surrey police authorities have invited bids from G4S and other major security companies on behalf of all forces across England and Wales to take over the delivery of a wide range of services previously carried out by the police. A West Midlands spokesman said that "Combining with the business sector is aimed at totally transforming the way the force currently does business – improving the service provided to the public". Needless to say Home Secretary Teresa May is an enthusiastic promoter of this scheme, which she hopes to have in place by next spring.

The third event was Prime Minister David Cameron's admission that he had indeed repeatedly ridden a horse loaned to former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks by the Metropolitan Police.

Now to anyone with a modicum of political nous it should come as no surprise to learn that the so-called "ruling class" is nothing of the sort - it is not a class, nor is it singular, nor does it "rule" in any straightforward way. Complex social democracies like that of the UK are ruled by a collection of powerful institutions that pass around power and funds between them, not with much sense of solidarity but more like a Darwinian struggle for dominance. These three events shine a spotlight on three of the most powerful of the institutions, two public (the Tory government and the Metropolitan police) and one private (News International), but other equally powerful ones like parliament and the judiciary are currently involved in a titanic struggle that almost amounts to coup and counter-coup.

That News International has had a baleful influence on British politics for the last 30 years is scarcely news to any but a blinkered few. During its 18 wilderness years the Labour party developed such a debilitating fear of the Sun's power over its natural voter base that NI in effect controlled the mainfesto of New Labour, dictating a continuance of Thatcherite economics and a hands-off policy on the media regulation that might have set them free. However it is somewhat newsworthy to learn that Cameron's "detoxified" Tory party too is almost completely integrated with News International, socially as well as politically.

It appeared for a while that News International's hubris had actually brought it down - the flagrancy of its illegal and anti-democratic behaviour over phone hacking lead to public revulsion and a revolt by parliament and the judiciary: to the Leveson inquiry, the closing of News of the World and the downfall of both Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch. Last week Sue Akers testimony suggested that the Metropolitan Police, feeling the strength of the gale that's blowing, had changed sides in this struggle and decided to clean out the corruption, sever links with News International and start doing its job again. And then, POW!, we learn that the power of the police nationwide is to be dissipated by hiving off many of its activites to private sector security firms already known to be rapacious, inefficient and mired in corruption. What a coincidence.

I had a foretaste of what's to come when my motorbike was stolen a couple of years ago. The police found it, damaged and immobile, just outside London, but the officer who came to my door explained they could no longer return it themselves: instead it was being held by a private recovery company in Stevenage who charged £150 storage for every day I didn't reclaim it. On contacting my insurance company they were unfazed by this and having assessed my claim eventually paid some £900 storage fees (though of course I and everyone else ultimately pay in increased premiums). The bike was written-off rather than repaired as a result. This is the thoroughly British way of corruption, an insurance claim (whiplash, a "burned hearthrug", a privately-stored motorbike) rather than a handful of banknotes as in India or Latin America, or a newspaper parcel of home-grown cucumbers in the old Soviet Union.

This campaign poses the biggest threat to rule of law since Robert Peel first established a public police force. Combined with the concurrent assault on the NHS, it threatens to change entirely the nature of British society, driving it in the same dysfunctional and collapsing direction as the USA. Business interests will ensure News International eventually wriggles off the hook. Corruption will dominate everyday life as people strive to pay for their health-care and protection from crime. Private security firms will effectively become warlords in the poorer parts of the country. And all this is from the Detoxified Party of Law and Order. I think I preferred the toxic version, at least you knew where you were.