Weird opera - Prospect Magazine

Transcription

issue 202 | january 2013
www.prospect-magazine.co.uk
Ten reasons
for hope
ten reasons for hope
What Osborne got wrong
GEORGE MAGNUS, adam posen
Olympus: Japan’s scandal
LEO LEWIS
After Oppenheimer
WILL SELF
Spain’s last king?
JONATHAN BLITZER
Weird opera
WENDY LESSER
New Year’s Resolutions
Mo Farah, Cherie Blair,
Hilary Mantel, Norman
Tebbit, Nassim Nicholas
Taleb, Arianna Huffington
ISSN 1359-5024
01
9 771359 502057
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es a 2
B eric p9
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Am tir
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Travel: Cool Mediterranean
january 2013 | £4.50
1
prospect january 2013
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ISSN: 13595024
Look ahead to 2013
It has not been hard to list 10 trends that may lend 2013 a
surprisingly optimistic cast (p26)—so much so that I’ll start
with two that are the opposite.
One is the Leveson inquiry into regulation of the media. I
used to make a point of defending Nick Clegg. A few marks
for the pragmatism of coalition. A few more for resilience
even if the day had brought only rebuff (often, it had). And
most for being, it sometimes seemed, the only liberal in
town. But after the response to the Leveson inquiry by the
leader of the Liberal Democrats, I’ll give it a rest. Probing
too little into the implications of statutory control of the media, he surrendered
the claim to defending liberal values to David Cameron. Ed Miliband was worse;
tangled in his opportunism, he conveyed nothing clear except his desire to link
the prime minister with Rupert Murdoch.
The anger towards the media that the inquiry revealed was dispiriting; so was
the ignorance. Critics took for granted the media’s role in exposing hypocrisy,
contradiction and fraud, wanting investigation without intrusion, and were too
casual about the necessary conditions for any of this to take place—not least,
financial survival. Alexander Lebedev’s interjection that he could not on his own
support the Independent’s losses any longer was pertinent. Most foolish, giving
the 2000 page report instantly an antique air, Leveson overlooked the vast
galaxies of the internet, describing only as “problematic” the distinction between
tweets, blogs, online newspapers, and printed newspapers. If journalism is the
exercise by occupation of the right to free speech, every citizen not only has
that right, but now, through the web, the broadcasting capacity too. The global
traffic triggered by Kate Middleton’s pregnancy, just days after Leveson’s report,
made the point: his recommendations, while potentially destructive for printed
newspapers, are irrelevant to the rest. His proposed regulators would be left
gravely scrutinising an empty shell as its contents streamed away online.
A second cluster of dangers is represented by the themes of Ehud Barak’s
article (p15). It’s a loss to Israel’s politics that the defence minister is quitting
the arena; he has largely been a temperate voice, particularly on the need for a
deal with the Palestinians. That isn’t much reflected in his piece published here,
it must be said, written in the wake of the Gaza strikes; nor was it in his and
fellow ministers’ justifications of the announcement of new plans for egregiously
predatory construction around Jerusalem and on the West Bank. No matter that
they describe this as retaliation for the UN’s de facto recognition of a Palestinian
state. It does nothing but leave Israel isolated as the threats around it multiply.
But these aside, we offer you 10 more hopeful trends for 2013. Less so in Europe,
perhaps; but if its prospects seem bleak, you can still follow our writers’ guide (p68)
to the beauty of the Mediterranean in the cool months, before the crowds pour in.
Happy New Year.
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/2012 14:18
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Contents
January 2013
This month
4If I ruled the world henning mankell
6Recommends
8New Year’s resolutions
mo farah, norman tebbit, arianna
huffington & others
10Letters
Science
Features
64Sun block
Want to see an eclipse?
frank close
Opinions
14Why do the British loathe Merkel?
katinka barysch
26Lucky ’13
Reasons to be hopeful for the New Year.
bronwen maddox
32Osborne’s mistakes
george magnus
What George should do next
adam posen
15Securing Israel’s future
ehud barak
16Leveson and the courts
alastair brett
17Keep policing free of politics
ian blair
18Time to tame the plutocrats
andrew adonis
plus stephen collins’s cartoon strip.
38It’s a policy knockout
Which one will come out on top?
peter kellner
Arts & Books
80In search of Oppenheimer
Revealing the father of the atom bomb.
will self
83Schwitters in Ambleside
Dada meets the Lake District.
james woodall
40Lost in Helmand
Soldiers and grief.
margaret evison
plus Is it time to leave?
86Reality hunger
A great writer who doesn’t trust fiction.
christopher r beha
44The outsider
The Olympus scandal: made in Japan?
leo lewis
88The strangest art
Why isn’t opera flourishing?
wendy lesser
20Don’t give up on climate change
stanley johnson
Travel: Cool Mediterranean
68Past glories: Genoa and Ceuta
david abulafia
52Burma’s slow march
Who’s really running the country?
nic dunlop
58Sovereign debts
Can Spain’s monarchy survive?
jonathan blitzer
70Halcyon days: Greece in the frost
bettany hughes
72Marseille: a box of light
john gimlette
76Jerusalem without the crowds
wendell steavenson
78Mediterranean wines
julia van der vink
90The month in books
rohan silva
Fiction
92Exhortation
george saunders
Endgames
91The Prospect list
Our pick of events.
94The generalist
didymus
96The way we were
Working at the BBC. ian irvine
4
If I ruled the world
Henning Mankell
© Adrian Sherratt Photography Ltd/Rex Features
Everyone should be able to read this column—I’d use my powers to eradicate illiteracy
I’m sure that even the smallest child experiences the desire to
rule the world, whether as a result of anger or innocent hubris.
A parent forbidding a child from going out onto a jetty, or somewhere else where there’s a risk of drowning, could provoke this
reaction. Both the child and the parents know the water is
barely a hand’s breadth deep. And yet the child is still forbidden. Everyone can identify with the furious reaction such a situation justifiably provokes.
Most people revisit this desire for personal hegemony on a
regular basis in later life. Not least when faced with idiotic rules,
bureaucracy which lacks rhyme or reason, or with people who
don’t seem to be able to comprehend a word one says. In the name
of personal hegemony, I, for one, think that all available resources
should be used to root out the stupidity that manifests itself in idiotic or pointless bureaucratic rules. Naturally, as well as carrying out an immediate ban on noisy lawnmowers, loud jet skis and
unnecessary music which blasts out wherever you go, I would
ban more serious things, such as crime.
What a wonderfully idiotic thought: to ban crime!
To rule the world and use this limitless power to ban
an entire state of affairs seems to me to be both
parodic and pointless.
Better, then, to use this power to eradicate
one of the greatest injustices we humans continue to accept, even now, at the beginning of the
21st century.
I’m referring to the fact that this text makes no
sense at all to far too many millions of people.
They will never be able to understand my thoughts
or how I express what I think.
For all of them, what is
written here is only a
collection of symbols
leaping around in seemingly endless chaos.
I’m talking about illiteracy. The fact that, even
in this day and age, millions
of people are forced to live
their lives without the ability to read written texts or to
write themselves; people for
whom there is no reason ever
to enter a bookshop or to pick
up a pen.
For me, as a writer, and completely dependent on being in
command of the instruments of
both reading and writing, this
would be a terrible fate. I do
not hesitate in regarding illit-
eracy in the same light as an epidemic plague, which can, on a
spiritual level, be compared to a disease such as smallpox. We
have managed to eradicate that disease. How is it possible that
we have not eradicated illiteracy? No one can say that we lack
the tools and resources. There are no unknown elements in illiteracy as there often are in the search for cures or vaccines for
other diseases. From a purely technical point of view, it’s hard to
imagine anything easier than teaching people to read and write .
You could, of course, question my choice of target as ruler of
the world. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to stretch the bow as far
as it will go? To, instead of eradicating illiteracy, deal with the
extreme poverty that affects so many people in the world? Particularly now, when the gap between the haves and the havenots is growing wider all the time. But I stand by my decision.
I believe quite simply that it would be impossible to eradicate
poverty as long as millions of people cannot read or write. I
believe that most of the important problems in the world today
cannot be solved when so many people are unable to
receive information via books, newspapers and computer screens.
Radio is just not good enough at disseminating information. Really poor people can rarely,
if ever, record radio programmes and then listen
to them again later on. With a book, you can go
back and re-read it time and time again. Nor
do I believe that it’s possible to send as
many lecturers out into the world as
would be needed to spread important information to those who
can’t read.
So I stand by my choice. As
ruler of the world, I choose to call
for a final battle against illiteracy,
to be fought with energy and focus.
It must be eradicated within a
year and no longer.
And with that, the foundations of a stronger and more
sensible world would be
laid; one in which world
rulers would no longer be
needed.
Common sense never
acts alone. Common sense
demands solidarity. Common sense demands that
illiteracy be eradicated.
Anyone disagree?
Henning Mankell is a Swedish
novelist, playwright and human
rights activist
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6
Prospect recommends
Five things to do this month
Film
Lincoln
On release from 25th January
Either prescient or a lucky gamble, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln was
released in America just as Barack
Obama was re-elected. A president needs a second term to get
things done, as Lincoln shows. The
film focuses on the pinnacle of its
namesake’s re-election government
of 1864-65—the passage through
Congress of the 13th Amendment
to the Constitution that set black
slaves free.
Spielberg’s masterstroke is to
concentrate on the key weeks of
political manoeuvre. Drawing on
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 bestseller Team of Rivals: The Political
Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Tony
Kushner’s screenplay describes
votes begged and borrowed in an
era when Republicans were progressive and Democrats conservative over slavery. Despite a huge
cast, there’s little Spielbergian
epicry and the sentimentality
remains restrained. Daniel DayLewis’s performance quietly towers (like that famous statue) in this
intimate study of Lincoln’s manners and methods both with colleagues and wife, played by Sally
Field. Startlingly revisionist? Perhaps not, yet a film about political
process is marvel enough.
Francine Stock
Festival
London International Mime Festival
Various venues in London, 10th to
27th January
Forget what you know about fruit
being thrown in opera houses. The
stage floor will be very pulpy by the
end of Smashed, Gandini Juggling’s
intricate theatre piece—nine jugglers and 80 apples strong—which
will run in the Royal Opera House’s
Linbury Studio as part of this
year’s London International Mime
Festival.
Now in its 37th year, the festival is the largest of its kind in the
world. Many of the performances
are based around skills not typically associated with mime, including acrobatics, illusionism and
puppetry. These are all turned to
London International Mime Festival: Leo by Circle of Eleven
the purpose of showing scenes and
characters without using words,
and the effects, more often than
not, are riveting.
Australian Wolfe Bowart’s
piece, Letter’s End, shows what
can be done with deftly-projected
films and old-fashioned clowning.
Another highlight is the premiere
of Not Until We Are Lost, by Ockham’s Razor, a London-based aerial theatre company. All human
relationships start to look very
risky when played out on the tilting, trapeze-like apparatus they
use.
Laura Marsh
Opera
The Minotaur
Royal Opera House, 17th to 28th
January
When Harrison Birtwistle’s opera
The Minotaur premiered in 2008,
it was greeted with shock and awe
as well as acclaim. Relatively short
—13 scenes, two acts—this potent
distillation of the story of Ariadne,
Theseus and the eponymous beast
resonates long beyond its running
time of 110 minutes.
With a libretto by poet David
Harsent, Birtwistle has fashioned
a modern classic of malevolent
beauty. The production conjures
the terror of the white-faced innocents as they are taken to the Mino-
taur’s labyrinth for sacrifice, as well
as the pathos of the Minotaur’s condition. The work shuttles between
three distinct elements—the “bullfight” scenes in which the Minotaur
confronts, rapes and slaughters the
human characters, the “human”
scenes between Ariadne and Theseus, and the dream sequences in
which the Minotaur can express
himself through speech.
If this is an opera from which
one emerges shaken and stirred
rather than humming snatches of
aria, the surging brutality of the
percussive score and the unflinching approach deliver a primitive,
provocative power similar to Pier
Paolo Pasolini’s films of Medea
and Oedipus Rex. Conducted by
Ryan Wrigglesworth, who replaces
Antonio Pappano (suffering from
tendonitis due to a surfeit of batonwaving), this magnificently ugly
beast of an opera will rise to terrify
us once more.
Neil Norman
Theatre
No Quarter
Royal Court, 11th January to 9th
February
Dominic Cooke’s five years as artistic director of the Royal Court have
been measured out in three plays
by Polly Stenham, poster girl for
his brave and successful policy of
giving centre stage to the theatre’s
Young Writers Programme.
A whole raft of talented young
playwrights have followed in the
wake of Stenham’s 2007 hit, That
Face, a devastating re-working of
the Oedipus myth in a middle-class
teenage world of drugs, peer pressure and sexual promiscuity.
That Face transferred to the
West End, won every award going
and established Stenham as the
most conspicuously “young” playwright (she was 20) since Noël
Coward in the 1920s or Christopher
Hampton in the 1960s; there were
elements of both in the play.
Her new offering, No Quarter,
opening in the Royal Court’s intimate upstairs studio, promises
more dysfunctional family fall-out,
with a young boy taking solace in
music and sanctuary in the remote
family fastness. Is he a new Hamlet
for the text and twitter generation?
Michael Coveney
Art
William Scott
Tate St Ives, 26th January to 6th May
February marks the centenary of
the birth of British painter William
Scott (1913-1989). This exhibition
has gathered paintings from over
six decades to chart the evolution
of his work from romantic British
post-impressionism to a haunting
space between abstraction and bare
figuration.
To mark the moment, his sons
have donated to the Tate one of his
most radical works, The Harbour,
painted in 1952. It is an extraordinary work. A jetty—or is it simply
a bold black line?—forges out into
thick white paint with irrepressible
energy, while thin black lines above
and below map out harbour walls.
A decisive break from his earlier
colourful paintings of figures, still
lifes and landscapes, it points ahead
to the bold abstracts of the 1960s,
but also to the tenacious hold of the
physical world on his imagination.
While he was one of the first British artists to discover the American Abstract Expressionists after
the war, this exhibition emphasises his roots in Scotland and
Ulster, his links with St Ives and his
indelibly European sensibility.
Emma Crichton-Miller
8
New Year’s resolutions
Prospect asked what people
will do—or not—in 2013
Bonnie Greer
Olympic gold medallist
I would like to learn another language,
either French or Spanish.
Playwright, trustee of the British Museum
Continue to adapt more plays by my lovely
“wintry white guys”: Ibsen and Strindberg.
Work with more musicians and composers.
Write fiction, non-fiction. Dance. Listen
more. Eat the best food, drink the best wine.
Live my life like a jazz lady.
Hilary Mantel
Danny Alexander
Winner of the Man Booker Prize for fiction
My resolution for next year is to stay at
home in Devon and write, to make progress
with the final part of my Thomas Cromwell
trilogy. Outside working hours, I mean to
taste all the delights and depravities Budleigh Salterton has to offer.
Lib Dem MP; chief secretary to the Treasury
Fair tax will be the top of my agenda for the
next 12 months—cracking down on avoidance, and continuing to help hard working
families with their tax bill through 2013 and
beyond.
Arianna Huffington
Professor and author
Have a bit more randomness in my schedule—the good type of randomness.
Mo Farah
Co-founder of “The Huffington Post”
I’m on a mission to reduce stress in every
area of my life. I want to parent with less
stress, travel with less stress, work with less
stress, etc etc etc. But because not meeting
goals, like New Year’s resolutions, can be
stressful, I resolve to not stress out if I don’t
meet my goal of not reducing stress.
Peter Mandelson
President, Policy Network; Labour peer
I should make the case for Europe once a
week as allowing its unity to break apart will
not help Britain (or the rest of Europe). I
hope backing Europe in 2013 will be a less
lonely place.
Rolf-Dieter Heuer
Head of CERN, the particle accelerator
Keep science moving up the popular
agenda, with people talking excitedly about
Higgs bosons—and understanding why
they’re so important.
Wade Davis
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for
non-fiction
Like everyone else, my New Year’s resolution is to get in shape. Ten years ago in Peru,
I took part in the mujonamiento. Runners
begin at 11,500 feet, drop to the bottom of
a sacred mountain, storm up to 16,500 feet,
cross two Andean ridges and finally run the
24 hour circuit for home. At 48 I was the oldest ever to complete it. Today, I can scarcely
climb as high as my desk! In the New Year
this will all change.
Cherie Blair
Barrister
Every year I resolve to live more healthily so
this year my aim is to try and keep to that, at
least until February.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
David Steel
Former Liberal Party leader
For 2013, make fewer speeches but better
ones and not just in USA and South Africa.
And try not to be so cross about the great
coalition.
12,000 sq kilometres, it may take more than
a summer recess!
Len McCluskey
General secretary, Unite
My wish for 2013 is to continue to fight the
government’s harsh economic and social
polices and fight for jobs and growth, so that
working people and their families have hope
for a better future, with more employment
and restored public services where the rich
pay their fair share of taxes.
Norman Tebbit
Conservative peer; former party chairman
To try harder to understand why so many
other people can be so wrong about so many
things at once.
Will Self
Novelist
I’m going to take my money out of NatWest
and put it in the Co-op—the next revolution
will be consumer led!
Margaret Hodge
Chairman, BBC Trust
I’ll read Ulysses on the Tube—not.
Labour MP; former culture minister
Everybody should pay their fair share of tax.
The UK should create a tax offenders’ register to name and shame wealthy individuals
and profitable businesses who avoid paying
their proper and fair share of tax.
David Sedaris
Andrew Neil
Humorist and author
Make more Korean friends.
Broadcaster
Get David Cameron and/or George Osborne
to be interviewed by me on the Sunday Politics, even if I have to promise to be nice to
them (I’ll be lying, of course).
Chris Patten
Jon Ronson
Writer
My New Year’s resolution is always the
same. It’s a product of the clash between
two of my mental disorders—my generalised anxiety disorder and my malingering.
Usually sufferers of generalised anxiety disorder don’t also suffer from malingering as
it tends to make us feel quite anxious. But I
am an anomaly. So my resolution is the resolution I always have: I must work harder.
Ken Livingstone
Former mayor of London
I never do New Year’s resolutions—they’re
crap.
Charles Kennedy
Former Liberal Democratic leader
I have the pleasure of representing the largest—and arguably one of most beautiful—
constituencies in the country, so I hope to
embrace any free time I have this year to
show my son, Donald, more of the wonderful scenery and people along the way. At
George Monbiot
Guardian columnist
I’ll give my children no option but to learn
to roam wild.
Tristram Hunt
Historian & Labour MP
New Year’s resolutions are irrational.
Lisa Randall
Physicist
Since most resolutions are doomed to failure anyway: to solve the problems of the
universe—and to clean my office.
Marcus Brigstocke
Comedian
Bring visits to Twitter down to just 20 a day.
Lose some weight / eat more cheese; I don’t
mind which. Both of these if possible. Read
at least 12 “proper” books before the end of
9
New Year’s resolutions
2013. Stop visiting online postings that serve
no purpose other than to make you feel sad/
desperate/alone/grumpy/snarly—Mail
Online, this IS about you.
Alastair Campbell
Political strategist
It is likely to be the same as last year’s, and
the year before... Stop swearing, stop eating chocolate. I usually last half a day... Also
hope to write another novel.
Steve Jones
Biologist
I’ll vow, as every year, to drink less, and as in
every year, I’ll fail.
In fact
The New Year’s Eve tradition of lowering a
time ball from the top of One Times Square,
New York, began in 1907. The ball was made
from iron and wood and weighed 700 pounds,
compared with today’s ball, which weighs
11,875 pounds.
ABC News, 30th December 2011
Ethiopians celebrated the arrival of the second
millennium on 11th September 2007. The
seven to eight year gap results from alternate
calculations in determining the date of the
Annunciation of Jesus.
The Independent, 11th September 2011
Eighty-eight per cent of all New Year’s
resolutions fail, according to a 2007 survey
conducted by psychologist Richard Wiseman.
Wall Street Journal, 26th December 2009
Every year, 12 per cent of Britons injure
themselves opening a bottle of champagne.
Corks can erupt at speeds of up to 60mph and
there is 70 pounds per square inch of pressure
behind each one.
The Huffington Post, 31st December 2011
In Elmore, Ohio, locals drop a brightly-lit, 18
foot sausage from the sky to welcome in the
New Year.
Reuters, 28th December 2008
Until 1751, in England, Wales and British
dominions the New Year started on 25th
March—”Lady’s Day.”
Calendar (New Style) Act, 1750
Social networking site Twitter groaned under
the weight of 16,197 tweets per second at the
stroke of midnight on 31st December 2011 in
Japan, causing the site to crash.
The Daily Mail, 1st January 2012
Sixty per cent of gym memberships begun
as New Year’s resolutions go unused. Gym
attendance usually reverts to normal levels by
mid-February.
Time, 1st January 2012
One of Germany’s most popular New Year’s
Eve traditions is to watch Dinner for One, an
obscure 1963 British music-hall comedy. The
tradition has made it one of the most frequently
repeated TV programmes of all time.
BBC, 1st January 2012
Residents of Hillbrow, a suburb of
Johannesburg, celebrate the New Year by
throwing large appliances, including fridges,
televisions and microwaves, off high-rise
buildings.
Global Post, 31st December 2011
© Chris Penn/http://www.eyeubiquitous.com/Eye Ubiquitous/Corbis
10
Letters
America rising
Ian Morris, professor of classics
and history at Stanford University
Bill Emmott points out that the
House of Representatives is still
firmly in Republican hands. The
power that this gives [Republican members of the House] is
not backed by an equally great legitimacy. The electoral boundaries
within many states are set by the
incumbent majority administration. With the majority of states
controlled by Republicans the extent of their gerrymandering has
exceeded anything the Democrats
could achieve. In the Senate where
each state elects two members
[who do not represent separate
geographical constituencies], increased Democratic support produced a net gain of seats.
Harvey Cole
Hampshire
Goal scoring
Clare Lockhart’s attack on the Millennium Development Goals was
uncharacteristically ill informed
(“The UN’s own goal,” December).
There has been a lot of progress
since the goals were introduced.
Andrew Christensen
Via the Prospect website
“The American century is not over,” Bill Emmott, Prospect, December
Suspicious minds
The first goal was to halve the
proportion of people living in extreme poverty. We hit that target
five years early. For the first time
since measurement began most
Africans were above the poverty
line.
The universal primary education target was a response to
research that clearly shows that
if a generation of children go to
school, even just to primary level,
they drive an advance in development. Girls who have been to
school marry later, have fewer children, who are more likely to survive, and enhance family income.
Universal primary education also
drives a need to educate teachers
and therefore improve secondary
and tertiary education. There has
been progress everywhere but the
target will not be fully met, unsurprisingly.
Progress beyond the goals includes an increase in life expectancy and a rise in the number of
democracies since 1990.
The lesson is to build on the
progress we have made. The current fashion for carping over aid
and development is in danger of
throwing away the prospect of further progress, and a safer and more
just future.
Jon Huntsman suggests that the
change of leadership in China and
the renewal of President Obama’s
mandate offer an opportunity for
renewed US-China collaboration
(“New leaders, new chance,” December). This would be a positive
trend but there are strong countervailing currents in both capitals.
Most recently, the former secretary
of defence, Harold Brown, called
for the US to develop a long range
bomber “capable of penetrating
sophisticated defences and delivering great force,” specifically to deal
with what he sees as the growing
Chinese capacity to project lethal
force. On the Chinese side, sabre
rattling in the South China Sea has
the US’s allies alarmed. With both
sides sending mixed messages, cooperation will remain dogged by
mutual suspicion.
Clare Short, former secretary of
state for international development
A history lesson
Comparisons between the 1930s
and the eurozone crisis of today
are unhelpful and misleading
(“Europe’s long shadow,” December). The world has changed and
it serves nobody’s interest to keep
drawing these historical parallels.
Just as the era of empire is over,
so is the era of isolationism. In a
world where cyber warfare poses
a greater threat than conventional
military attack and in which the
collapse of one state’s banking system can bring the rest of the world
to its knees, isolation is not an option. What we need is a reformed
and strong EU which can carry the
flag of multilateralism led by the
democracies of Europe. If we are
to take anything from the 1930s,
this must be the lesson.
Emma Reynolds, shadow
Europe minister and MP for
Wolverhampton North East
Aiding waste
I am completely in agreement with
Ian Birrell (“Aid is a poor answer
to poverty,” December.) However,
this is not an issue confined to the
UK government aid budget. All
the donor countries and individuals, even though mostly western
based, need to reassess the nondisaster aid funding and projects
undertaken in many countries.
Our own guilt at knowing that
there is human suffering, and our
genuine desire to alleviate that,
appear to drive many of our aid
decisions. However, there is tre-
Isabel Hilton, editor of
chinadialogue.net
Free radicals
I respect Douglas Carswell MP,
but he is wrong to say that this government is similar to its Labour
predecessor (“Bad government,”
December). This government is a
radical one—taking the tough decisions to ensure Britain can succeed
in the future. And in the process,
clearing up Labour’s mess.
The deficit has been cut by a
quarter. Taxes have been cut for
25m people. Bureaucracy has been
taken out of the planning system.
© getty images
Bill Emmott may well be right
about Obama’s second term, and I
hope he is (“The American century
is not over,” December), but the
real issue is long term. Just look at
Britain’s own story. 200 years ago,
it was the world’s only industrial
economy and greatest power, but
its free markets spread industrialisation (especially to America). The
US then had its own industrial revolution and by 100 years ago it was
catching up with Britain. America
took over as the great promoter
of free markets, which spread industrialisation further (especially
to east Asia). Following the same
pattern, China is now having its
own industrial revolution, and is
catching up with America. The
21st-century US will have ups and
downs, just as 19th-century Britain
did. The 1990s tech boom was an
up; the 2008 financial crash was a
down; and perhaps the 2010s will
see an American energy boom.
But the trend is clear. By 2045, a
hundred years after it began, the
American century will be ending.
mendous difficulty in ensuring
that each pound donated is alleviating the suffering that caused the
donation to be made. A huge NGO
“industry” has evolved in the past
30 years, with NGOs from many
countries wastefully competing for
and undertaking development aid
projects in many countries.
The duplication of effort and
expense has been and remains extraordinary, but we, the donors, are
assured that our donated money is
making a difference, ensuring ongoing funding. Were we to know
the truth of the ineffectiveness,
the cash flow would slow down and
possibly stop.
12
Immigration has been capped.
Crime is down. And as Douglas
himself acknowledges, our welfare and education reforms are the
most radical in decades.
There is much more still to do.
But this government has made
good progress so far.
Grant Shapps is MP for Welwyn
Hatfield and Conservative party
chairman
Still special
Robert Fry raises the issue of the
future for special forces (“Survival
of the Fittest,” November.) However the world turns out, these forces’
response will be more bespoke and
nationally determined than he suggests.
The prominence of special forces over the last ten years is in part
because of the changes in the nature of defence and partly the misconception of what the post-9/11
challenge has been about. Military
forces are trained to kill people
and break things; at this they have
been hugely successful. Yet with
the relatively brief interludes of
the toppling of the Taliban government and the initial invasion of
Iraq, the military has increasingly
been used as top end law enforcement in support of a political process (nation-building in Iraq and
Afghanistan.)
UK special forces are sufficiently vague in concept and fluid in
construction to adapt and indeed
anticipate future need. The more
uncertain the future, the more
their role as a vital part of problem definition, not just resolution,
should be valued. Their greatest
threat will come from tidy minded
policy controllers whose planning
instincts demand predictability.
Jonathan Shaw, assistant chief
of defe n c e s ta f f a n d re t i red
major general; General Officer
Commanding, multi-national
division south east Iraq 2007
Indulged eccentrics
The article by Tom Carver (“Awed
by Authority,” December) explaining why Jimmy Savile was able to
get away with his behaviour for
so long, rings very true. Certainly
the casual misogyny was similar in
the US as viewers of Mad Men will
recognise.
There is another interesting
thread which is the British celebration of eccentricity. When I moved
here from Chicago I was charmed
Letters
by this—and still am. In the more
conformist US, the word is rarely
used: the preferred term is “weirdo.” The British seemed much
more tolerant. The dark side is that
only those living closest to him (it’s
usually a him not a her) know how
selfish, difficult and occasionally
psychopathic a professional eccentric can be while the rest of the
world looks on, charmed or making lazy excuses.
Tom Carver’s analysis of the
now deplored misogynistic, hierarchical culture of the time provides
the bulk of the explanation. But
the tendency to take so-called eccentrics on their own terms—still a
strong cultural value—and look no
deeper exacerbated the situation.
Judie Lannon
London
Paying our way
Gavyn Davies recommends three
ways of stimulating the economy:
reducing taxes, spending on infrastructure and getting more money
lent to companies (“The unfortunate Mr Osborne,” October.)
All three may be possible without
destabilising the markets and
may therefore help to avoid more
austerity. None of them, however,
does anything to deal with the
UK’s fundamental problem which
is our inability to pay our way in
the world. We cannot do much to
expand the economy or avoid very
high unemployment because our
external payments position is so
weak. Only manufactured goods
can plug the gap and to make our
exports sufficiently competitive
we have to have a much lower exchange rate—maybe $0.20 to the
pound. Targeting inflation at 2 per
cent is the wrong goal.
John Mills, Exchange Rate Reform
Group
Drugs despair
I despaired at trying to follow Peter Lilley’s convolutions (“Drugs
Haze”, November.) While supporting cannabis legalisation he
tries to distance himself from
liberals and cosy up to right-wing
Peter Hitchens whose disagreement with him is more “thoughtful” than the liberals who agree
with him. This hinges on the ideas
that while drug taking is “immoral” per se (loss of moral control)
it should still be legalised because
lots of immoral things are legal.
Oh, and a glass or two of that other drug, wine, is both legal but not
immoral (why not?).
I turned in relief to Ken Dodd’s
review of John Major’s new book
(“Music Hall Dad,” same issue),
a model of passionate, funny and
above all clear writing. Please
spare us writers who don’t seem
to know what they think, or don’t
think, or why, or who they do, or
don’t, agree with. Look at Doddy,
Mr Lilley, and learn.
David Cheshire
Via email
A doddle
Judging by Ken Dodd’s articulate appreciation of John Major’s
book My Old Man, he can enjoy a
successful career as a theatre and
literary reviewer, should a live audience start throwing vegetables
at him.
Peter Stoppard
Bristol
Judge for yourself
I’m not a great fan of the German constitutional court myself
(“Power struggle,” November);
it usually arrives at the politically desired judgement anyway,
but I can only wonder why Britons “wonder why a bunch of unaccountable judges holds such
power.”
Many other modern representative democracies have a
constitutional court. Britain
is an exception, not the norm,
which doesn’t mean that Britain
Winner: Prospect’s science poetry competition
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, chair of the judging panel for the Royal
Society Winton Prize for Science Books, has selected Rebecca
Nesbit as the winner of Prospect’s competition for the
best four-line science poem. Rebecca wins the six books
shortlisted for the Winton Prize for her entry below.
Deoxyribonucleic acid
Lets us breed cats to make them placid,
Protect our crops by keeping them strong
And make sure that dachshunds are stupidly long
is wrong, but there’s no need to
wonder about it.
Paul Daniels
Germany
Katinka Barysch thinks that the
German constitutional court and
the constitution itself are the
real impediments for rescuing
the euro. She claims that some
Germans “are becoming fed up
with the constraints that the
court keeps imposing on Angela
Merkel’s policies.” This is a minority view.
Judges of the highest court
are not democratically elected
but nominated by parliament—
similar to the Supreme Court in
the US. Nevertheless, they speak
in the name and for the good of
the people.
The constitutional court was
inaugurated in 1949 after World
War II and is a judicial institution
sui generis. It was the explicit will
of the Allies to have a high court
that oversees and restricts decisions taken by politicians so as
to ensure that they do not violate
the constitution. Previously, that
had not been the case. In 1919, the
Weimar constitution had inaugurated the Supreme Court of the
German Reich with limited constitutional jurisdiction. In 1933,
a democratically elected Chancellor usurped the constitution
and named himself Führer of the
German people. He did not need
a coup d’état to do that. No constitutional body could stop him.
Christian Nolte, German national
now working in Italy
A good Currie
I never thought I would agree
with Edwina Currie on anything
but her piece on ruling the world
in the December issue made good
sense. What a good Prospect.
Terry Johnson
Via email
When all’s said and done
Incredibly, Hephzibah Anderson
has written a short piece on clichés without mentioning the rich
nautical history inherent in some
(“In praise of the cliché,” December). Was she three sheets to the
wind?
Keta
Via the Prospect website
Have your say: Email letters@
prospect-magazine.co.uk. More at:
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
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14
Opinions
© Marc Müller/dpa/Corbis
Why Germans love Merkel 14
Israel’s new threats 15
Let the media publish 16
Police without politics 17
Time to tame the plutocrats 18
Still a chance on climate change 20
Katinka Barysch
The genius of Merkel
Germans love her, Europe loathes her
Greek newspapers like to portray German
Chancellor Angela Merkel in Nazi uniform.
The Italian daily Libero has greeted her with
a rude Vaffanmerkel! on its cover. The New
Statesman has declared her “Europe’s most
dangerous leader.” Many here in Britain
think that Merkel’s austerity drive is destroying the euro. In my home country Germany,
meanwhile, Merkel is the most popular politician bar none. She is almost guaranteed to
be re-elected for a third term in 2013. Why do
the Germans cheer their leader while the rest
of Europe seems to loathe her?
One fundamental reason for Merkel’s persistent popularity is the German economy.
It’s hard to imagine if you sit in Greece, Spain
or even depressed Britain. But German output has risen by around 8 per cent since
the start of the euro crisis, according to the
German economics ministry. The German
export juggernaut is purring along nicely.
Unemployment is at a record low and wages
are finally rising. What’s not to like?
The Germans give Merkel a lot of credit
for having protected them against the crisis.
That credit is not fully earned—the labour
market reforms pushed through by her predecessor Gerhard Schröder have a lot to do
with Germany’s current success; as does
strong Asian demand for German cars and
machine tools and a modestly priced euro.
But Merkel appears careful not to squander
taxpayers’ money on euro bailouts and she is
tough on southern European countries that
are slow to reform. Most Germans wholeheartedly approve of Merkel’s handling of
the euro crisis.
Another reason why the Germans love
their chancellor is that she avoids scandal
and bling. She still resides in her modest Berlin flat rather than the airy apartments of
the chancellery. She is often seen in her local
supermarket. In July she wore the same dress
to the Bayreuth opera as she did in 2008.
Most Germans are frugal. Merkel is too.
Even her earthy laugh and her addiction to
text messaging signal that she is just like you.
Merkel is also a very cautious politician
who hates big statements. She is often underestimated. She tends to under-promise and
over-deliver. She can be ruthless in getting
rid of potential political challengers but she
never says a bad word about her opponents.
These traits have made her politically unassailable at home.
But perhaps most important, Merkel
is the epitome of German politics. Germany’s post-war constitution (written with a
little help from the Americans and British)
created a political system that values caution and consensus and prevents rash decision-making. Merkel is exceptionally good at
knocking heads together and getting people
to agree on solutions. She has no ego. Nor is
she weighed down by inflexible political principles (opposition parties rightly complain
that Merkel keeps taking over their most
popular ideas). The euro crisis has helped her
to look even more presidential as she travels
from summit to summit. She seems to float
above the petty squabbles that dominate the
German parliament.
Germans think the ability to create consensus is important for leadership. For Britons, accustomed to the adversarial politics
of first-past-the-post voting and prime minister’s question time, this is almost impossible to understand. Merkel simply would not
work in Westminster. The Germans, on the
other hand, would probably find most British
leaders loud-mouthed, impulsive and unnecessarily combative in style.
In any case, the differences between
Germany and the rest of Europe are somewhat exaggerated. The media loves Merkel-bashing but Europeans seem to hold
her in grudging respect. Earlier this year,
the Pew Global Attitude Project found
that in all large European countries people
gave Merkel higher marks for handling the
euro crisis than their own respective leaders. Two-thirds of Britons applauded Merkel, but only 51 per cent thought Cameron
was doing well. Also, the British-German
love-in at the last EU summit (where Merkel backed Cameron’s veto of a bigger EU
budget) has revealed that Merkel and Cameron can make common cause.
Merkel is a euro pragmatist. She firmly
believes in the economic and political benefits that European integration brings for Germany. But she is no bleary-eyed federalist. In
that sense, she is closer to most British politicians than to former German leaders such
as Helmut Kohl or Hans-Dietrich Genscher.
But make no mistake: this also means that
Merkel will stand up for German national
interests whenever that is necessary. This
new German assertiveness will keep Merkel’s
approval ratings up at home but it will put
her at odds with other Europeans.
Katinka Barysch is deputy director of the
Centre for European Reform
opinions
Ehud Barak
Stiff-necked people
How to secure Israel’s future
There is an ancient maxim from the Babylonian Talmud that reads: “The Land of
Israel is acquired through hardships.” The
closing months of 2012 once again attest to
the veracity of this statement.
Just as a child cannot choose his or
her parents, neither can a nation choose
its neighbours. We live in a tough neighbourhood, one in which there is no second
chance for those who are unable to defend
themselves. A neighbourhood which is
characterised by uncertainty, instability
and hostility. For the state of Israel, true
security must be viewed through a manysided lens.
“Iran remains the chief
sponsor of terror. Its
influence stretches to our
doorstep through its
support for Hezbollah.”
About 15 per cent of our citizens have
spent the last decade under the direct
threat of artillery rockets, mortars and missiles, launched indiscriminately by terror
groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
During the recent escalation with Hamas,
half of the country was within range of
the terrorists’ missiles launched from
Gaza (and 1,500 were fired in eight days
in November). Without the ingenuity of
the Israeli-designed “Iron Dome” system,
which intercepted more than 400 of those
missiles, and the continued financial support for additional weapons batteries from
the US, the loss, in terms both of human life
and property, would have been far greater.
In addition to the threat from Gaza, on
our northern border, Hezbollah, a Shia terrorist organisation based in Lebanon, has
amassed an arsenal of around 70,000 artillery rockets and missiles. The Sinai peninsula has become anarchical while the brutal
civil war in Syria has already trickled over
into the Golan Heights.
Further afield, Iran remains the chief
sponsor of terror, continuing—openly—to
arm and fund the terrorist organisations
seeking to destabilise the region. Its influence stretches to our doorstep through its
15
support for Hezbollah, while the regime
directly supports President Bashar alAssad’s brutal campaign in Syria. It aspires
to be the regional hegemon and continues
to develop its military nuclear programme.
All the while, we face an incessant threat of
jihadist terror from Judea and Samaria [the
West Bank].
As a life-loving nation, facing this relentless terror, our institutions of national
defence and security must be built on a
wider bedrock of national resilience; that is
the true strength of a nation.
National resilience derives from many
factors: international legitimacy, a strong
and vibrant economy, social cohesion, solidarity and unity, a sense of purpose, and a
common vision regarding the future of the
nation. These must be taken into account
when formulating operational tactics or
recalibrating strategic focus in the new and
unpredictable environment of today’s Middle East.
During the escalation with Hamas in
November, the people of Israel have once
again demonstrated exemplary national
resilience in abundance. Israel’s economy
remained robust (with only minor fluctuations in the stock market), while the Israel
Defence Forces (IDF) retained the support
of the overwhelming majority of the population throughout the operation.
Once again, the IDF was forced to deal
with the most extreme type of asymmetric
warfare, fighting an internationally recognised terrorist organisation which continues to demonstrate a complete disregard
for human life. While the IDF conducted
intelligence-based precision strikes in order
to minimise civilian casualties on both
sides, Hamas again implemented its cynical
and cowardly use of civilian human shields
on the one hand, and launched barrages of
rockets at our civilians on the other—a double war crime.
In the face of the great changes in the
region, we continue to recalibrate our strategic assessments. Hamas is enjoying the
tailwind of Muslim Brotherhood successes,
while Iran, as well as its role in Syria, continues to deceive the world in its pursuit
of nuclear weapons. This pursuit must be
stopped.
On this matter, we, our friends and allies,
think alike, and we mean every word we say.
A military nuclear Iran threatens the entire
world order. It is commonly accepted that
it would be the start of a regional nuclear
arms race. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and maybe
the new Egypt will be compelled to join the
race. The leaking of nuclear technology to
terrorist organisations, whether Sunni or
Shia, becomes almost an inevitability.
The world leadership—with the United
States and President Barack Obama at the
fore—holds the same view: a nuclear Iran is
unacceptable.
16
opinions
It is often noted that the Iranian threat
represents a complex challenge for Israel.
That is undeniable, but for Israel, this
“complex challenge” could become a potentially existential threat. The US understands that only Israel itself will make the
call regarding the issues vital to our security and our future.
That security and that future also depend
on achieving a just and secure peace with the
Palestinians. The answer is a two-state solution; two states for two peoples, the demarcation of a border in the land of Israel. A
secure state of Israel next to a viable Palestinian state, the expression of the hopes and
ambitions of the Palestinian people.
We are currently witnessing a dramatic
geopolitical shakeup, one characterised
by both uncertainty and instability. It is in
times of such unpredictability that decision makers must lead wherever possible,
shaping events, not merely being shaped
by them. The challenges before us demand
extra vigilance and attentiveness.
Israelis are a stiff-necked people. We
must be strong and open-eyed; extending
one hand out perennially to feel for any
potential opportunity for peace. The other
hand, however, as is imperative in our tough
neighbourhood, must remain firmly on the
trigger, ready to protect our citizens should
the necessity arise.
Ehud Barak is a former prime minister of Israel
and now defence minister
Alastair Brett
Leveson’s law
© rex features
Make it easier to get redress—
not harder to publish
Following the Leveson report into the culture, practices and ethics of the press, the
most heated discussion concerns whether
Fleet Street would be subject to self-regulation or to statutory intervention. But this
binary discussion omits a crucial element:
the judiciary, which has a role of great significance to play in shaping the post-Leveson media. Its contribution should be to
assist in reforming the appalling cost of taking legal action. Victims of the press must
have a right to proper redress at a fraction
of the cost of current High Court litigation.
Lord Justice Leveson, a close friend of
the lord chief justice, Lord Igor Judge, is a
clever man who believes implicitly in a free
press and an independent judiciary. Last
year, in a speech on media regulation, Lord
Judge referred to these as two pillars of a
healthy democracy. Leveson likewise has
emphasised that a new press regulatory
body must be independent of parliament
and the industry.
However, any suggestion of pre-publication regulation greatly alarms the press.
Indeed, Leveson’s biggest mistake was to
suggest that Ofcom, which regulates TV and
radio, would have oversight of any new independent regulatory body—Ofcom’s head
is appointed by the government using parliamentary procedures for public appointments. The press hates the idea of their
arbiter being in hock to MPs or in any way
licensing them.
So who should guard the guardians?
Some, the prime minister included, advocate delaying any legislation to give the press
time to find its own solution. In this case, the
media would be becoming its own guardian,
signing up, under contract, to a new independent regulatory body, which would have
two or three years to show it can work.
Any new regulator must offer victims of
press intrusion and bad behaviour access to
justice through a fast, fair and cost effective
dispute resolution system. And that system
must involve awarding damages to people
whose reputations have been damaged.
Protestors dressed as David Cameron and
Rupert Murdoch at the publication of the
Leveson Report on 29th November
Leveson has recommended a new system of free, binding arbitration, paid for by
the industry, as a precursor to High Court
litigation, which everyone accepts is cripplingly expensive. However, a new arbitration system like this will remain optional
and ineffective unless either it is introduced under statute—which the press
would not like—or the judiciary builds in
incentives for litigants to choose this new
arbitration route. The best way to ensure
that voluntary arbitration will work is not
through statutory regulation, but by making it financially very risky to ignore the
arbitration route on offer. If defendants or
claimants choose not to go down this quick,
cheap, new route, they will be penalised
when it comes to recovering legal costs.
For more on
the Leveson
Inquiry, read
Claire Enders
online at
prospectmagazine.co.uk
All disputes should be processed in the same
way and civil litigation should become a level
playing field. If the press ignores the question of access to justice and fails to encourage
judges to buttress the new free arbitration
system, then the industry may one day be
subject to statutory intervention. If Leveson
is to be effective then the judiciary itself must
now move with precisely the speed that, at
present, it expects from the press.
Alastair Brett is a solicitor specialising in
media law and managing director of Early
Resolution CIC
Ian Blair
Policing politics
Elected commissioners are here
to stay. What now?
Leveson’s option for binding voluntary
arbitration, with the press industry footing the bill in most cases, will only work if
there are real incentives to pursue arbitration and both rich claimants and powerful
newspapers go down this route. Equally the
press must be reassured that under a new
“free” arbitration system, the floodgates
for hundreds of hopeless cases will not be
opened. There must be major reform of how
and when judges award costs and when they
award exemplary damages.
© rex features
“Victims of the press
must have a right to
redress at a fraction
of the cost of current
High Court litigation.”
So we come back to the judges and
whether the Civil Procedure Rule Committee will make it clear that those not using the
new independent arbitration system will be
penalised in costs. If they do subscribe to the
new arbitration system, then statutory intervention might just be shelved.
The judiciary and the Civil Procedure
Rule Committee must now make sure that
the free arbitration system posited by Leveson has strong incentives and deterrents.
17
opinions
“Farce,” declared the Telegraph, “flop,” said
The Times—and those were newspapers that
had supported the introduction of directly
elected police and crime commissioners.
With average voter turnout at a record low of
15 per cent, the Guardian came closest to the
truth, describing November’s police commissioner elections as a half-baked solution
to an ill-defined problem.
Nonetheless, 41 police commissioners are
en poste across England and Wales, and it is
worth considering what the political parties
now do about them. The system is here. It
needs to work. I suggest five basic tests by
which the new commissioners can be judged,
and which all politicians need to watch.
The first is public confidence in policing,
which presumably the government expects
to rise with the introduction of elected commissioners. But other factors—above all,
significant budget cuts—will be equally
important for public confidence.
A second test is whether commissioners will be able to avoid making operationally unjustifiable political calculations. Take
Thames Valley, for instance, where the Conservative candidate won. Policing in this
area is concentrated in Reading and Slough,
where crime is most common. But how can
the commissioner hope to be re-elected if
Reading and Slough soak up the majority of police resources, so that heartland
Tory areas further north and west do not
see enough police, for which they are paying? Many of the areas that now have a commissioner are vast and politically, socially
and economically varied. In areas like this,
policing risks being opened up to political
tribalism.
The third test is whether the introduction of commissioners threatens resources
for non-local policing. Again, political considerations are the danger here. A commissioner may find that their chief constable
wishes to send local police resources to support national counter-terrorism or cross-border crime. But what if a home secretary of
one political party asks a commissioner of
another party for police resources and is told
no? What then?
The fourth test is whether commissioners can stay away from operational matters,
with which they are forbidden to interfere.
Also, will chief constables have the courage
to disagree with their commissioner when
that individual has power of arbitrary dismissal over them?
The final test is exactly the opposite. The
old system of police authorities—independent panels of local people sharing responsibility for management of policing—were
unwieldy but they did have one advantage.
No chief constable could capture all the
members. A charismatic and manipulative
chief might well be able to dominate a single
commissioner.
The next police commissioner elections
are not until May 2016. Before that, however, comes the general election. The political parties must decide soon what to say on
this subject.
The Conservatives will need their policy to produce visible reform if they are to
make up for the embarrassingly low turnout
in November. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, will have to decide whether they support the policy or not. At present, the party
is deeply divided on the subject.
But it is the Labour party that has the
most thinking to do. Both in the Commons
and the Lords, Labour opposed this policy.
But going into a general election promising
to remove a democratic right from voters will
not be easy.
Labour’s alternative proposal of directly
elected police authorities (rather than individual commissioners) solves the problem
“Markets rose slightly today.
No one knows why.”
18
that, in some places, one person alone cannot fulfil the commissioner’s job. But the risk
of police politicisation in constituencies that
lean strongly one way or another would still
remain. (This was why the old police authorities had independent members, a reform
ironically introduced by the Conservatives
in the 1990s to combat politicisation.)
Last year Labour commissioned Lord
Stevens, the former Metropolitan police
commissioner, to head an independent policy review on policing. The report is expected
next year, and it’s probably too far advanced
to consider the most striking question raised
by November’s elections: the number of
independent candidates who won. It was
far more than expected: 12 independents
won, compared with 16 Conservatives and
13 Labour.
The independents were almost exclusively people with real and relevant experience, like Bob Jones in the West Midlands
or Ian Johnson in Gwent, respectively chairmen of the association of police authorities
and of the police superintendents’ association. Voters were looking for people who
could do the job.
What should Labour learn from this? The
best way forward would probably be to alter
the new system, rather than abolish it. Crucially, candidates should be allowed to stand
only as independents. That does not mean
that commissioners cannot have emerged
from political careers, but that political parties should not be able to sponsor them. Now
that would be real localism and an interesting manifesto proposal.
Ian Blair was commissioner of the Metropolitan
Police from 2005 to 2008. He sits as a crossbench peer
opinions
Andrew Adonis
Taming plutocrats
The rich must pay
In 2009, the Gates Foundation gave out
$1.8bn in grants to improve health in developing countries. If it were a state, it would
be the world’s 10th largest international aid
donor. Its operations certainly resemble a
state, complete with an eight acre headquarters in Seattle housing 1000 staff and
a virtual diplomatic service in the countries
it assists. Its buildings are designed to look
like arms reaching out to the globe.
“Today the top fifth of
Americans own 84 per
cent of national wealth.
The top 1 per cent own
nearly a third.”
This is the more attractive face of plutocracy and the “new global super rich,”
described by Chrystia Freeland in her new
book, Plutocrats. “After a few million or
something, it’s all about how you’re going
to give back,” as Bill Gates puts it. But
there are also less attractive facets.
A century and a half ago, Alexis de
Tocqueville wrote of the United States:
“nothing struck me more forcibly than the
general equality of conditions among the
people.” Today, the top fifth of Americans
own 84 per cent of national wealth. The
top 1 per cent own nearly a third.
How big is the global plutocracy? Credit
Suisse defines “ultra high net worth individuals” as those with net assets of more
than $50m. Last year the bank reported
that the number of them worldwide had
surged to an estimated 84,700, of whom
roughly a third had net assets of more than
$100m. Nearly half of them are in North
America and a quarter in Europe.
“The past decade has been especially
conducive to the establishment of large
fortunes,” Credit Suisse noted, contrary
to expectations that the 2008 crash might
have halted or even slowed the trend. So we
are talking about a fairly numerous global
plutocracy, defined by income, whose lifestyle and mores influence a still larger hinterland of the mere “super rich.”
A big and under-debated question is
the compatibility of this plutocracy with
modern democracy. This is a more specific issue than the growing concentration of wealth within society at large. It is
about the political status of the new class
of the super rich and their ability to shape
law and society in their own image. “Figuring out how the plutocrats are connected
to the rest of us is one of the challenges of
the rise of the global super elite,” argues
Freeland.
The failure of public policy to tackle
the wilder excesses of corporate greed
which create and sustain much of today’s
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01/11/2012 16:15
plutocracy is a defining challenge of progressive politics for the next decade.
Today’s super rich believe they deserve
their wealth, like the 19th and early 20th
century British aristocracy who struggled
so bitterly against the rise of democracy.
They are constantly looking over their
shoulder at those who are even richer,
who make them feel almost poor; and they
believe their income is highly vulnerable
and under constant political attack. As
Robert Harris puts it in his novel, The Fear
Index, “He was remembering now why he
didn’t like the rich: their self-pity. Persecution was the common ground of their conversation, like sport and the weather for
everyone else.”
The plutocrats are fighting hard
against the irreducible minimum requirement of democratic equality—that they
contribute to the state on the same basis
as everyone else. Thanks partly to the scrutiny of Mitt Romney’s tax affairs, people
now see that plutocrats do not do so. It is
not that they pay somewhat less tax, proportionately, than the middle class. They
avoid and evade tax wholesale, courtesy of
tax havens, tax loopholes, and gaming different tax treatments for different classes
and locations of income and assets. This
is organised by what Freeland calls the
“income defence industry” with its international armoury of lawyers, accountants
and consultants, who are paid multiples
opinions
more than the public officials they confront and routinely outwit.
“Within the top 1 per cent, the richer
you are, the lower your effective tax rate,”
writes Freeland. In 2009, the top 0.1 per
cent paid just 21 per cent. The top 400 tax
payers in the US paid less than 17 per cent
of their income in tax.
When tackling deeply entrenched
interests, the imperative is for a simple
and easily understood reform, which cannot be contested by them with a straight
face. In the case of the plutocrats the simple reform is this: they should pay tax on
their overall income, however derived, at
no less than the average rate for middle
income earners. I see this reform as the
critical test for reconciling plutocracy and
democracy in the next generation.
When President Barack Obama suggested a modest reform to this end—that
private equity firms should not be able
to exempt large swathes of the income of
their staff from tax by calling it “carried
interest”—Steve Schwarzman, founder of
the private equity behemoth Blackstone,
said it was “like when Hitler invaded
Poland in 1939.”
It looks like we are in for a heroic political struggle. Let the battle commence.
Andrew Adonis, a former Labour Cabinet
minister, is author of “Making Aristocracy
Work” (Clarendon Press), about 19th
century British aristocracy’s struggle against
Stanley Johnson
Cool down
A climate change agreement is
not out of reach
The Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the
most significant attempt so far to shield us
from the effects of man-made global warming, expires on 31st December. We need a
successor. Since the 1997 Kyoto agreement,
scientists and engineers have developed
new ways to use energy more efficiently.
But these changes won’t be enough without a more ambitious global deal than
we’ve had before.
It’s hard to overestimate the importance
of the two-week Doha climate change conference, which ended on 7th December.
Seventeen thousand people from 197 countries have poured into the tiny Gulf state of
Qatar (which happens to have the highest
per capita emissions in the world). The aim
is to lay the groundwork for a successor to
© Adela Nistora/Demotix/Corbis
20
the Kyoto agreement—Kyoto Mark 2—in
Paris in three years’ time.
The Kyoto Protocol set greenhouse
gas reduction targets for 37 industrialised countries. It led to some falls—partly
because it coincided with the drop in the
use of coal in Europe—but not nearly
enough. Three years ago in Copenhagen,
40,000 ministers, officials and activists
tried again. Their starting point was the
scientific recommendation that the rise
in average global temperatures should be
kept within two degrees Celsius of preindustrial levels. They predicted that this
had a good chance of limiting some damaging consequences of global warming such
as a rise in sea levels or swings in weather
patterns.
For this to be done, the scientists projected, global carbon emissions should not
exceed 44 gigatons in the year 2020. Yet
current greenhouse gas emissions are over
50 gigatons (which means there is already
an “emissions gap” of over six gigatons) and
will rise to 58 gigatons by 2020.
Can we make cuts on this scale or is this
A British protestor
ahead of the Doha
climate change
conference
opinions
all pie-in-the-sky? One of the most important things to come out of the Doha meeting was the Emissions Gap Report 2012,
coordinated by the UN Environment
Programme and the European Climate
Foundation. The report estimated that
reductions in the range of 17 gigatons are
possible, from efficiency in the design and
construction of buildings, power generation
and transport. That potential 17 gigaton
fall would bring annual global emissions
below the crucial 44 gigaton level.
There is another reason for optimism.
Large reserves of natural gas that have
recently come onto world markets have
already lowered emissions. American shale
gas, less polluting than coal, has helped the
US move halfway towards meeting its commitment of cutting emissions to 17 per cent
below 2005 levels by 2020.
So what’s the need for a new Kyotostyle treaty? Wouldn’t it be enough just to
make the efficiency gains spelled out in
this report, using economic incentives to
encourage technological innovation and
changes in practice?
The problem is that these efficiency
gains may be hard (and sometimes costly)
to achieve. The challenge is shown more
clearly in an assessment by PwC, the professional services firm. This monitors the
rate of “decarbonisation”—reducing carbon
emissions—required to prevent temperatures from rising by more than two degrees.
This year, PwC estimated that the
improvement in global carbon intensity
(how much carbon is emitted for the energy
consumed) which is required to meet that
two degrees target has risen to 5.1 per cent
a year, for every year from now to 2050.
No modern industrial economy has
ever attained this level of decarbonisation; yet the task is to
achieve it for 38 consecutive years. Since
the
millennium,
there has been an
average improvement in global
carbon intensity
of only 0.8 per
cent per year.
If the world
continues
to
decarbonise at
this rate, there
will be an emissions gap
of 12 gigatons of carbon dioxide
by 2020 and nearly 70 gigatons
by 2050.
21
Given the scale of the possible shortfall, prudence dictates a two-pronged
approach: an efficiency drive, pursued
by national governments and regional
groups, plus continued efforts for an international deal which would build on local
achievements.
For instance, the UK has set itself
legally binding targets for greenhouse gas
emissions. The 2008 Climate Change Act
calls for a 34 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050
(measured from 1990). That should be
the UK’s and the EU’s starting point in the
post-Kyoto talks.
Gains delivered through technology
and market forces must be supplemented
by international agreements, which aim to
ensure the “buy-in” of countries not part
of the OECD, a group that represents the
older industrialised countries. In 1990,
Anil Kumar Agarwal, founder-director
of one of India’s leading environmental
groups, argued that the rich industrialised countries were to blame for already
having used up the “absorptive capacity”
of the atmosphere. If developing countries
were to be forced to take measures to deal
with a problem not of their own creation,
he argued, they should be helped to do so.
His argument lies at the heart of the
challenge of global climate talks today.
While developed countries examine what
they can do at home, they also have to consider what it might be worth to them to
help poorer countries, in cash or technology, to follow suit.
The economist Nicholas Stern, now
Lord Stern, estimated back in 2006 that it
might cost 1 per cent of global GDP to hold
atmospheric carbon concentrations at the
500 to 550 ppm (parts per million) level.
Such levels might indeed take the world
beyond the two degree increase in global
temperatures so far considered an acceptable limit. So there would be measures of
adaptation and “mitigation” to be paid for
as well.
If the total costs of dealing with climate
change rose, say, to 1.5 per cent of global
GDP, with most of that being borne by the
richer countries, would that be totally out
of reach? Surely not, given the costs—as
Stern pointed out—of not taking action.
In 1987, confronted with the realities of
the “ozone hole” in the upper atmosphere,
the world adopted the Montreal Protocol
on ozone-depleting substances with clear
targets and financial arrangements to
encourage the participation of developing
countries. There is no reason why Kyoto
Mark 2 can’t do the same. As always, it is a
matter of political will.
Stanley Johnson is a former director of
energy policy at the European Commission
and author of “Where the Wild Things Were”
(Stacey International)
ADVERTISING FEATURE
MOVING TOWARDS A
NEW WORLD ORDER
THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE IS THAT THE US IS IN DECLINE AND THAT CHINA’S METEORIC RISE WILL CONTINUE,
LEADING TO TENSIONS AS THE TWO VIE FOR SUPREMACY. BUT A GROWING REALISATION THAT INTERDEPENDENCE
STRENGTHENS MUTUAL INTERESTS COULD TURN THE NARRATIVE ON ITS HEAD
M
any of the natural
and man-made
infrastructures on which
world order depends are
under extreme stress - from the risks
of economic and political chaos, to the
threats of climate change, the collapse
of biodiversity, food, water and energy
supplies, to fragile technological
systems, cyberwars and beyond.
Yet conventional assessments of
power and the emerging world order
ignore these clear signals, and fail to
ask questions about winners and losers.
The dominant narrative is that
the West and the US are in decline,
the Chinese renaissance will continue
and tensions will grow as the two
vie for supremacy. Is this a credible
conclusion to draw? Not if you look at
the fundamentals, or think in terms
of complex systems and the growth of
networks.
To put this in context, as the world
becomes ever more interconnected,
complexity, uncertainty and the speed
of development increase. Left alone,
systems become unstable and over
time, more difficult to understand.
The danger is that policymakers,
without working models of the world,
stick to belief systems, with the result
that unintended
consequences
and errors
spread far
and wide.
C000612 Prospect December V8.indd 4
What is less understood is that
interdependence can drive
collaboration and this may turn out to
be the more important story. So what
are these extreme scenarios?
Take natural systems, for instance.
Imagine that over the next decade
climate change results in more
frequent failures in sea defences,
energy, water and agriculture.
In such a scenario the US will
look relatively stable and largely
self-sufficient in energy, water and
food. To many in the US, at least until
the droughts of summer 2012 and
hurricane Sandy, there was a widely
held view that either climate risks
were not real, or change would be
benign, gradual and long term. After
all, the US has shown some resilience
and has been less vulnerable than
other countries to natural disasters.
China, already suffering
environmental stress in a ‘steady state’,
may look more vulnerable.
To China, ecosystem security is a
clear and present danger, economically,
politically and most importantly,
socially. This helps explain the recent
policy statements on the environment
by Hu Jintao; the vast increase in
investment in innovation directed at
water, agriculture and energy systems;
and why China may become a world
leader in infrastructure technology.
Contrast these natural systems
risks with the unquestioned
assumption on security: that the
technologies on which geopolitical
and economic systems depend remain
stable.
There is an argument that these
systems are vulnerable to cyberwar
and crime - and that the unrecognised
risks are the consequence of
complexity itself. Systems have
become so interconnected that no-one
understands them.
This is not to paint a bleak picture.
There is growing evidence of a positive
set of outcomes. Take what US
Defense Secretary Panetta calls the
‘operational domain’ of cyberspace.
Here US and Chinese think tanks
are collaborating to avoid the risks of
‘accidental war’, which is a scenario in
which everyone would lose.
We can argue that as policymakers
begin to better understand that we
are already deep in what academics
call a ‘system of systems’ world,
the more they will recognise that
interdependence means that selfinterest and shared interests are one
and the same. In cyberspace, for
example, ensuring the security of the
system as a whole is important for
everyone.
In such a scenario the
US will look relatively
stable and self-sufficient
in energy, water and food
29/11/2012 17:03
A new era of geopolitical, and
economic collaboration?
When faced with existential
risk, collaboration will eventually
emerge. But there are mixed signals,
particularly if we look at how media
and corporate power influence
international relations.
Take media first. The 21st century
media environment is highly charged,
networked, distributed, and diffused.
National governments, corporations,
NGOs, terror organisations, cyber
warriors and the public are vying
to translate power into ‘effective
influence’.
With the rise of global networks,
people power is emerging to challenge
the legitimacy of established
institutions and raising fundamental
questions about their ability to act.
Governments and corporations
are held to account less by votes and
shareholders, but by what alarmists
might call ‘smart mobs’, who use the
internet and social media to garner
support.
The question is whether this
‘hypermedia’ world is the source of
instability, or democracy and freedom.
The answer is both, but the outcomes
of the transition will remain deeply
uncertain. The genie is out of the
bottle: transparency may seem benign,
but it has disruptive effects in the
US and Europe, just as it does in the
Middle East and China.
Meanwhile, corporate power over
networks receives little attention. Yet in
most key industrial sectors oligopolies
have emerged where just four or five
companies develop market scale
and power. Many of these powerful
companies are US-based and as the
complexity theorists would say, the “big
get bigger” as they build ever-stronger
barriers to entry. >
29/11/2012 17:03
ADVERTISING FEATURE
A CASE STUDY: COMMERCIAL AVIATION
Despite the enormous growth of the commercial aircraft industry over the
past 60 years, intense competition has left a duopoly – Boeing and EADS (of
which Airbus is a subsidiary). They have broadly similar revenues in commercial
aviation and spent about $4bn on research and development in 2011.
While the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) is at an
advanced stage of producing commercial jets, collaboration is also growing, with
Airbus extending and strengthening its joint venture assembly plant in Tianjin.
As in other industries, the picture continues down the supply chain to key
component suppliers and sub-system integrators. As Professor Nolan has shown,
two or three companies dominate engine development; braking systems; tyres,
seats and windows. Key suppliers are themselves global giants, such as engine
makers GE, Rolls-Royce and United Technologies that again spend heavily on
development.
>
US holds the high value cards
Yet there are critical provisos.
Corporations must continually adapt
to volatile markets if they are to grow.
They often fail because they become
too complex. The key measure is the
relationship between their ability to
create wave after wave of invention
against the complexity and speed of
the world around them.
Companies that have successfully
adapted include Boeing and Airbus
in commercial aircraft; Thomson
Reuters and Bloomberg in financial
information; Apple and Samsung in
smartphones; and enterprise software
players Oracle, SAP and IBM.
When it comes to corporate power,
US companies hold many of the high
value cards in the evolving picture.
But as Professor Peter Nolan
highlighted in his book
Is China Buying The
World?, not only
do Western
oligopolies
tend to
The West is more
‘in China’ than China
is ‘in the world’
dominate global industrial markets,
but they are deeply intertwined with
China. Indeed, the West is more ‘in
China’ than China is ‘in the world’.
China faces challenges in
establishing globally successful firms
on the back of domestic growth
and success, largely because of the
inventive capacity and competitive
strengths of Western multi-nationals.
China is evolving, both in
developing highly competitive,
creative businesses and by investing
overseas, but it is still early days.
When it comes to investment,
myth and reality are different. Chinese
foreign direct investment (FDI) is
rising (from $2.5bn in 2002, to $69bn
in 2010) but its outward FDI stock of
$366bn amounts to just 1.7% of the
global figure. To put this in context,
the world’s top 500 asset managers
control $65trn in assets, with the top
100 controlling 60% of the total.
growth and trade, particularly in the
industrial growth sectors, such as
cleantech, energy, water, agriculture
and healthcare.
While there are risks, the world’s
systems will become increasingly
densely interconnected. If they are
fully understood, we may yet see
the emergence of a more secure,
collaborative world. A world in which
the interests of the whole may be
readily reconciled with narrow and
reductionist views about national
hard power.
Fortunately, theories that can
change the practice of governance are
emerging.
Complexity can be taken out of
systems to create both growth and
Collaboration pays
Even so, global trade, economic and
financial interdependence is becoming
ever more pervasive.
The common ground, where
mutual interests are most easily
defined is in corporate innovation,
29/11/2012 17:03
stability. Systems can be designed
for resilience by creating diversity.
Multiple ‘small worlds’ could be
created. We could have decentralised,
locally innovative structures, yet with
strong networked links designed
so that one world can fail, without
bringing the whole system down.
If political leaders, policymakers
and corporate strategists begin to
reach these conclusions we may see a
breakdown of the strategic mistrust
between the US and China. This could
lead to a shared agenda on vital issues
and a new, secure world order. Both
may emerge as winners as a result.
Commissioned by Coutts from
Peter Kingsley, PJR
A CASE STUDY: THE RISE AND RISE OF
ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE
Multi-national corporations depend heavily on global communications
and technology infrastructures, without which transport, logistics,
WYTTP]RIX[SVOWPEVKIWGEPIEYXSQEXMSRERHGSWXIJ½GMIRGMIW[SYPH
be impossible.
Some studies have suggested that containerisation has been the
primary driver of globalisation, but the picture is more complicated. The
rise of software enabled business is often so obvious that it is taken for
granted.
Yet the rise of enterprise resource management and database
software illustrates both the nature and the scale of change. In headline
terms, the amount of data generated around the world doubles every
18 months. By 2013, 15 billion mobile devices will be connected to
the internet.
The enterprise business software industry that aims to create
IJ½GMIRG]VIWMPMIRGIERHMRRSZEXMSREQMHWXXLMWEGGIPIVEXMRK[EZISJ
connectivity is dominated by Oracle, SAP and IBM. Their continuing
growth is an important thread in the story of globalisation.
All three illustrate not only the growing importance of networkSVMIRXIHWSJX[EVIFYXEPWSXLIGLERKMRKREXYVISJXLI½VQ8LIWXVIRKXL
of the ecosystems they operate is in their shared interests. The risks are
in complexity.
29/11/2012 17:03
26
Features
10 reasons to be hopeful for 2013 26
Osborne: the verdict 34
Peter Kellner: what people really want now 38
Lost in Helmand 40
The Olympus scandal: made in Japan? 44
Burma’s slow march 52
Sovereign debt: Spain’s royals in trouble 58
Lucky ’13?
Ten reasons to be hopeful for the year ahead
bronwen maddox
I
t might seem perverse to argue that 2013 will bring fewer
of the problems that have gripped so many countries, and
people, for the past four years. The reasons why it might
do the opposite seem more obvious.
The eurozone has failed to resolve a crisis that is plunging Greece “into the economic Stone Age,” in the words of one
central banker, who added, “no country has been through this
since America’s Great Depression.” More than half the young
people in Greece and Spain are unemployed, a paralysis of lives
and loss of skills that changes a country in a generation.
The protests in Tahrir Square against Mohamed Morsi, the
president who is the product of Egypt’s “democratic” revolution less than two years ago, and who has now seized powers to
block all constitutional challenge, is a reproof to those who readily cheered the Arab Spring. “Nobody knew. Nobody knows now.
We are all at sea,” said Matthew Parris recently in The Times; he
had warned at the time that the fall of despots did not mean the
rise of democracy. Prophesies of Bashar al-Assad’s fall in Syria
have been premature, while those of the threat to Jordan’s King
Abdullah II may prove prescient.
And 2013 may yet be the year when Iran gets within easy
reach of a nuclear weapon. Pakistan is increasingly hostile to the
US, public anger stirred up by American drone strikes which its
politicians have condemned in public while carefully tolerating
in private, and may become after its imminent elections a problem that only China, the original supplier of its nuclear expertise, can contain.
Meanwhile, in Britain, George Osborne’s Autumn Statement
showed that even if the economy picks up, many planned cuts
have yet to have their impact (see George Magnus and Adam
Posen, p34). “Don’t forget 2015,” when much of the austerity
drive will take place, has been the message from Paul Johnson,
director of the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Yet many trends are transforming the way countries are governed, and improving the lives of millions of people. Some even
derive from the financial onslaught of 2008. After four years, we
Bronwen Maddox is editor of Prospect
are finally making use of a good crisis.
Here are ten problems that may look better in a year’s time.
1. Democracy will fare better
These have been tough years for democracy: economics points
to a path that politicians with hopes of re-election fear to tread.
Prospect has spent much time recently on the afflictions of the
US, Europe and Japan—“diseases of the rich,” as the American
mathematician and lyricist Tom Lehrer put it.
So, while economics might argue for allowing more migration of workers, or shifting support from the elderly to the young,
these are politically toxic. “It’s a nightmarish problem,” says
David Miliband, former foreign secretary.
It’s not the first time that our societies have had high debt and
deficits; cue those grainy pictures of Wall Street in the 1930s that
have been ubiquitous for the past few years. What is new is that
populations are more elderly. The numbers claiming pensions
and healthcare are rising, while fewer are available to pay tax.
Governments know they can’t afford to meet the bargain with
voters that has stood since the second world war—on welfare,
health, education. You might call it the bonfire of the promises.
Some ask whether democracy is up to the task of tough
reforms at all. They point, say, to Mario Monti, an unelected
technocrat endorsed by Brussels to sort out Italy, even if one so
self-contained and neatly-suited that he evokes the tidy conference halls of Europe’s capital, not the gold braid and epaulets of
Europe’s past dictators. And it’s true there is a kind of gridlock
across the democratic world.
In Japan, which has had six prime ministers in six years, governments have failed to find the answer to two “lost decades”
of stagnation. In the US, the hostility between Republicans and
Democrats in President Barack Obama’s first term has brought
the amount of legislation enacted to the lowest level since the
second world war; the current Senate has passed only 2.8 per
cent of the bills it has introduced, a 90 per cent drop from its
high in the mid 1950s. Even in India, where the population is
much younger, bureaucracy and corruption are undermining
© Getty Images
Will Germany save Europe?
lucky ’13
27
© REUTERS
© AFP/Getty Images
28
lucky ’13
support for government—and choking the growth that has cut
the number living in poverty by nearly 140m since 1990.
It feels a long, long time since the Iraq invasion of 2003, when
Donald Rumsfeld, then US secretary of defence, declared that
“freedom is untidy,” a moment when America regarded the
rhetoric of democracy as its most powerful weapon. Europe and
America could make a stronger case now to President Morsi
that his grab for constitutional powers was unacceptable if they
had become less diffident about the virtues of their own political arrangements. It matters for liberal values that they become
more vocal again.
The reason to be more hopeful is that voters know the world
has changed, and are prepared to let their leaders pursue an
uncomfortable course if there seems to be a good case. Look at
Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor (see Katinka Barysch,
p14) who is riding high in the polls despite bailing out Greece,
a policy so loathed that Bild newspaper (circulation, 3m) trumpeted “Is Greece going to break our banks?” (It even sent a
reporter to dish out old drachma notes in Athens to give itself
the headline “Bild gives broke Greeks their drachmas back.”)
Resentment at paying for unification still runs deep—and there
was no serious public challenge to that ecstatic, historic gesture to embrace fellow Germans; it would have been no surprise
if Germans, particularly younger ones, rebelled at paying for
Greece. But they haven’t.
And Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg,
and author of the over-quoted phrase that “we know what to do,
we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it,” is
living disproof of his own maxim; first elected in 1995, he is the
world’s longest serving elected leader, even if he is stepping down
from the attempt to broker a deal in the eurozone.
In Britain, the same is true, up to a point. The phrase “we’re
all in this together,” is welded to George Osborne’s reputation,
an exhortation always bound to provoke derision had he tried.
And the Conservatives remain about 10 points behind Labour
in the polls.
But protests about austerity have been astonishingly subdued
given the scale of the changes, while the coalition has survived,
against many predictions. The disappointment has been that
Labour has not admitted more directly how close its own projections of spending are to those of the government, nor produced
its own account of how to cut the deficit. It has lost the chance,
then, to make the debate a more explicit one
about how the pain should be distributed.
But others have not, and have put inequality at the centre of debate, a healthy
step. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize
winning economist, and others have argued for recognising the damaging impact on
the economy, not least by shutting the children of poorer families out of access to education
(see Andrew Adonis on Chrystia
Freeland’s new book about plutocrats, p18). You don’t have to
accept Stiglitz’s view that governments should have spent much
more, much earlier, to stave off
recession, to agree with him
about the costs to the economy
India: women show their voter identity cards as they queue to vote
in Khunti. Below, a supporter of President Morsi, in Cairo
and society (even if, like his fellow advocate, Paul Krugman, he
is more sure-footed in his case on the US than on the rest of the
world).
On that note, too, the debate about how to stimulate growth
has become more thoughtful and more likely to generate
answers, after years when politicians expended sound and fury
in accusing each other of lacking a “growth plan.” It is extraordinary that Britain’s coalition government does not have an
answer to the question of where it wants a new airport, housing, or energy supplies, three of the projects on which investment
could productively be spent. But the answers—of how to spend
it, in the laconic title of the Financial Times magazine—are getting sharper in their focus.
2. America’s growth will recover
On that note, a second argument is the strength of America’s
recovery, and the country’s capacity for change. Some years ago
I wrote a book called In Defence of America (a short book, perhaps I should say), contesting the predictions of US decline
after the fiasco of the Iraq war. It’s getting easier to make
that case again.
I’d concede—who wouldn’t?—the huge problems facing
the States. As Bill Emmott wrote in Prospect last month
(“The American century is not over”), the US’s $11.5 trillion
public debt hangs over all political debate. No politician—apart
from Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s running mate in the unsuccessful Republican bid for the White House in November—has
lucky ’13
29
who think that the US’s involvement—generally—helps resolve
conflicts abroad. When America is prosperous, it is more likely
to be prepared to do so.
3. Poland, Turkey, Mexico
dared propose cuts to Medicare, the healthcare scheme for the
elderly, which, even more than state pensions, threatens to bankrupt the country. President Barack Obama’s legislation did at
least break the taboo that healthcare was too hot to handle, but
while it took the popular step of extending insurance to those not
covered, it avoided the pain of cutting benefits. Meanwhile, the
centre ground has disappeared from Capitol Hill politics, much
more than it has from the electorate; the shining white dome sits
over a cauldron of partisan poison.
But the rise of the Hispanic vote is shattering that gridlock—
while immigration has given the US one of the youngest workforces in the industrialised world, a big advantage. Nor is it
fanciful to project that the energy revolution—stemming from
the new access to vast reserves of shale gas (see Stanley Johnson,
p20) will significantly boost the US’s chances of a strong recovery. It’s an extraordinary fact that US greenhouse gas emissions
are sharply down—8 per cent lower in the first quarter of 2012
than the year before, and the lowest for that period since 1992.
The US’s energy revolution may delay the shift to more efficient technology, and weaken its interest in pushing for a deal on
climate change. President Obama has brought in new efficiency
standards, but the waste in private and commercial use is still
immense. Still, it’s impossible to overstate the boost to national
optimism; fears that the US would be forever dependent on the
oil of Saudi Arabia and other combustible places have fallen away
like the gantry at a rocket launch, to be replaced with the heady
vision that the US—or perhaps, the US and Canada together—
might be able to supply all of their own energy within a decade.
On his re-election, Obama delivered the ominous pronouncement that “nation-building begins at home,” bad news for those
An odd trio of flags make up the third reason for optimism;
the common factor is that although they are not giants, their
new strength is helping their regions.
I’m not going to argue for cheerfulness about the eurozone;
the bailouts so far have barely postponed worse trouble. The
International Monetary Fund reckons that even on its best
scenario, there will be less lending to the private sector, choking growth; on its worst, there will be sharp recession (and it
has cut its forecast of global growth from 3.9 per cent to 3.6
per cent partly because of the eurozone.)
But within Europe, Poland has suddenly become a country
that writes the script for the union, after years when its leaders—right and left of centre—affected a wistful sulkiness at
Brussels’s failure (as they saw it) to appreciate the country’s
natural stature. Now, Poland is the unquestioned star of the
10 that joined the EU in 2004. It has wrong-footed Britain,
which was relying on Poland to share its antipathy to the euro;
officials in London were stunned when their Warsaw counterparts moved adroitly to take advantage of the increased British distance. Radoslaw Sikorski, foreign minister, published a
joint report with 10 others in September calling for more integration, and is now signing the new memorandum to authorise the next round of bailout money to Greece.
This is good for Europe; it solidifies the union’s embrace
of the east, an important force for stability. At the same time,
signs that EU leaders will encourage Turkey to keep looking
westwards are healthy, not least given the central role that
Turkey now plays in the Middle East. In October, Merkel, during talks with prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stated
that Turkey’s EU membership “negotiations will continue,
irrespective of the questions we have to clarify” (and she no
doubt also has in mind that trade between Germany and Turkey reached a record €31.4bn in 2011, a powerful glue).
Seven thousand miles away, the improvements in Mexico are rewriting relations both with the US and partners to
the south. Confidence in Mexico has been blighted by the
astounding eruption of violence in the drugs trade, which has
killed over 50,000 since 2006, and spilled far over the US border to Phoenix, Arizona. Now, things are a bit better.
Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has come to
power promising tax and industrial reform; the drugs trade has
not vanished, nor the violence, but has abated a little, and the
country is showing growth. In Washington in November, Peña,
then president-elect, told President Obama that “We should
reconsider greater integration of North America to achieve a
region that is more competitive and capable of creating more
jobs.” That call seems more plausible than for years.
4. Africa–progress is sticking
The World Bank says that in a continent of a billion people,
21 countries, with a combined population of 400m, have now
achieved middle income status. The bank predicts that 2012
will have brought growth of 4.8 per cent, despite the weak global
economy, eurozone crisis, and rises in oil and food prices. Africa’s
lucky ’13
© Sipa Press/Rex Features / EPA / STRINGER/AFGHANISTAN/Reuters/Corbis
30
Left, Lagos, Nigeria, is expected to become Africa’s biggest city in 2013. Centre, a Russian activist in an anti-Putin protest, demanding
freedom for political prisoners. Right, a man in Kabul makes a call on his mobile—sales in Afghanistan have rocketed
exports grew by around 30 per cent in the first quarter of 2012,
partly because of hunger for raw materials (China accounted for
a fifth of trade for the whole continent in 2011).
And the future looks even brighter. The IMF has just revised
its forecasts for the continent’s growth in 2013 from 5.3 per cent
to 5.7 per cent, while the African Development Bank predicts the
economy could grow by around eight times in the next 50 years.
And though the north will continue to have the highest income
per head, the east will see the most growth.
However, the coming nation is Nigeria. Research by Morgan Stanley predicted that by 2025, the country’s economy may
overtake South Africa to become the biggest on the continent.
Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer, pumping over 3m barrels
per day at full capacity, and in 2013, Lagos is expected to overtake Cairo as the continent’s largest city, with almost 12m people.
Another of Africa’s largest oil producers, Angola, produces
1.9m barrels per day; the African Development Bank predicts
that its real GDP growth will be 8.2 per cent in 2012 and 7.1 per
cent in 2013, figures of which European finance ministers can
only dream.
One figure stands out: that remittances to the African continent (including the north)—money sent home from workers who
have left to work abroad—are about equal to the level of global
aid flows, according to the World Bank. Countries that suffered
a brain drain for 30 or 40 years are now reaping an investment
gain from the diasporas sending money and knowledge home.
5. Iran’s elections may help
This is a tough one—only a slim chance for progress. President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is barred from standing in Iran’s presidential elections in June as he’s reached the constitutional limits of his term. Three leading candidates are Ali Larijani, speaker
of the parliament, Saeed Jalili, the chief nuclear negotiator, and
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a ubiquitous presence in Iranian
politics and business for four decades.
There is no real sign that any potential leader is inclined to a
deal with the US to curb Iran’s nuclear programme, which has
moved forward steadily without pause—other than that created
by malfunctioning technology—since Ahmadinejad’s election as
president in 2005. All the same, a change of president might help
create an opening for the deal which US officials have been quietly probing when they find themselves on the margins of big UN
jamborees with their Iranian counterparts—lifting sanctions in
return for forswearing the manufacture of fissile material.
The obstacle is that the regime has deeply invested itself in
holding the pressure at bay. It has wide public support—there is a
sense of pride at the pursuit of technology which “even Pakistan”
(in the common, disdainful Iranian phrase) has achieved, and a
sense of humiliation at being leant on to relinquish it. Yet US and
EU sanctions are clearly biting; one place to see that is in Herat,
in neighbouring western Afghanistan, previously an island of
comparative prosperity in one of the world’s poorest countries,
but now struggling from the collapse of trade with Iran.
6. Autocracy: unappealing
It isn’t just Twitter; it’s the mobile phone—the ubiquity of personal communications is making it impossible for governments
to control their people, even in Burma (see Nic Dunlop’s report
on the refugee camps that can’t be brushed aside, p52). North
Korea remains, just, the exception.
In China, the new leadership is likely to be more open even
than the last. Xi Jinping, who takes over formally as president
in March was 25 in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping began to open
China to the world; having lived through that transformation,
it is impossible for him to have the same mindset as the generation before him.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin, while presiding over a democracy
in name, has taken the unpopularity of his role as far as it can go;
his astonishment at the protests against his decision to reinstate
himself as president, which began a year ago and have persisted,
lucky ’13
was one of the choice spectacles of 2012.
In Syria, resistance to the government of Bashar al-Assad
remains a clear statement of the popular unwillingness to continue under his rule. In November, the rebel cause won international support from François Hollande, the French president,
whose endorsement of the Syrian rebel coalition carried special
significance—the country was a French mandate from 1922-1943.
True, as Matthew Parris said, no one can readily predict the
course of the changes shaking the Arab world. But at least the
upheaval gives some of the more astute leaders, in a region frozen too long by autocratic rule, good reason to attempt reform—
while they can. Twenty years ago, Saudi Arabia used to issue
brochures, by way of public relations, with the claim that it was
achieving “progress without change”. Given the changes the
kingdom is permitting, even if slight by revolutionary standards,
that is not a boast it would now make—or a joke you could now
make at its expense.
7. Mobile books, banks and lessons
This will be the year when people will access the internet more
through mobile devices—phones and tablets—than through
desktop computers or laptops, according to projections from
Morgan Stanley. This is another significant jump in the life of
the internet. The past decade has seen a revolution in the use
of mobile phones, bringing communications to villages in India
and Africa that had little hope of much landline capacity (and
making a mockery of all those consultants’ models built to work
out when countries would finally be “wired”.)
The new supremacy of mobiles will make a reality of “e-wallets”—using phones to make electronic payments—particularly
in places without a good banking system, and that will transform
the way people conduct their lives and the capacity for growth.
The Afghan experience shows why it will spread fast—paving the
way for Britain, and others, where the technology is embryonic.
In 2002, when international forces arrived in Afghanistan,
only a small percentage of a population of about 23m had access
to a bank, and fewer than 200,000 access to a phone. By 2012, the
31
SMS financial transactions system set up by Roshan, Afghanistan’s largest phone operator, with Vodafone, had 1.2m users.
These customers pay cash to a certified mobile money agent, and
then spend or transfer their “e-money” elsewhere. Around 15m
now have access to a phone; the police have been paid by e-money
for three years now, and it helps, say, teachers in remote areas
who might have to wait months to receive cash due to transport
difficulties, where mountains can separate villages only a few
miles apart as the crow flies, and where the roads can be lethal.
The coming year may also bring real triumph for the e-book
in Britain. Reading on digital devices may start feeling truly
normal for most people. In the first half of 2012, sales of digital fiction rose by 188 per cent, and that trend looks set to continue, with the Christmas boom in gifts of tablets and e-readers.
“It feels as if the last outposts of non-digital culture are rapidly
being outflanked—and Britain is streets ahead of Europe here,”
says technology writer Tom Chatfield.
Prospect has written about the digital revolution in higher
education (“Professors without borders,” by Kevin Charles Redmon, July, and “Education for all” by Martin Rees, December), through massive open online courses (Moocs). EdX—a
joint venture between universities including Harvard and MIT—
has almost 400,000 registered students; another, Coursera,
has 1.7m, and is growing “faster than Facebook,” according to
its founder Andrew Ng. British universities—apart from Edinburgh and the University of London—have been slower to jump
on board. Adrian Smith, the new vice-chancellor of the University of London, told the Guardian in December that “You can’t
hold back the tide. This is a big wave and you have to work out
how to surf it rather than drown.”
8. Great cities: ideas and growth
Even if national politicians are tempted to become xenophobic,
the mayors of the world’s great cities will push back. Boris Johnson, mayor of London, in India in November, attacked Britain’s
tightening of the rules on student visas, prompting students to
turn away from London. Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor,
32
lucky ’13
has criticised laws that prevent foreign students who secure high
qualifications in the US from remaining there. “We become a
laughing stock of the world with this policy,” he said in 2011.
Not all cities are prosperous, of course, but most display a
concentration of talent—and innovation. It’s cheaper to deliver
services there, so health and education tend to be better, and cities attract and foster a middle class.
The number of megacities of more than 10m people is set to
double over the next two decades. You might not want to live
in them—but many do. Every month, 5m people move from the
countryside to a city somewhere in the developing world.
Take Macau—it has a population of just half a million, but for
a decade, the economy has grown by almost a fifth a year, nearly
twice as fast as mainland China, and the average resident earns
more than the average European. The city of Guangzhou, the
heart of China’s Guangdong province, has an economy bigger
than Algeria’s; there are plans to link it with other Pearl River
Delta cities to create a megacity of 42m across 16,000 square
miles. Mexico City produces over a quarter of Mexico’s GDP. And
Gurgaon, near New Delhi, barely existed 20 years ago but now
has more than 1.5m people—and 26 shopping malls—although
still (like too much of India) lacks reliable electricity or water.
9. Rockets and drugs
It will be a great year for science, offering some comfort that, if
the species cannot manage a currency bloc, it can at least survey
other galaxies and the interior particles of atoms. More countries see big science as a matter of national pride, which will pour
a flood of new research into the common store of knowledge.
Advances in genetic testing and a plummeting of the cost of
scanning a person’s DNA are bringing closer changes in medicine that could revolutionise treatment. That has enabled doctors to work out that some cancer drugs, for example, work far
better than tests had previously revealed—but only for small
numbers of people with a certain genetic make-up.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, in development
since 2007, is due to launch in 2013. It will take five years to create a 3D map of the Milky Way, unprecedented in scale, helping
scientists understand the evolution of our galaxy; they predict
that it might discover up to 50,000 previously unknown planets,
and “brown dwarfs”—tens of thousands of stars that failed to
ignite. India, which launched a moon probe in 2009, also plans
to put a spacecraft in elliptical orbit around Mars in November,
studying the atmosphere and looking for the presence of life.
China’s unmanned Chang’e-3 orbiter, meanwhile, is expected
to touch down on the surface of the moon towards the end of the
year. The mission will send a robotic “rover” to explore the surface—the first spacecraft to land on the moon since 1976.
In physics, as Frank Close (p64) points out, “2013 is the centenary of Niels Bohr’s model of the atom, which he imagined as
planetary electrons orbiting a dense compact massive nucleus.”
The year is likely to bring more insight into the atom’s structure—more confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson
and its properties, from analysis of the particle collider at Cern.
“If so, the Nobel Prize for physics is likely to go to Peter
Higgs,” says Close, but “there are many who lay legitimate claim
to aspects of the basic idea, let alone the huge experiments that
are taking place. The committee will have their work cut out
deciding [who else might share the prize].”
It is possible that other particles might show up during
2013. But, as Close says, although “we can expect more precise measurements of the properties of dark matter... as to its
origin—barring some unexpected breakthrough, that seems
likely to remain unknown, at least for another 12 months!”
10. Population growth slowing—
but not in the royal family
The rise in the world’s population is slowing down. Between 2010
and 2015, the UN predicts an annual increase of 70m, rather
than 80m per year at 2000. Birth rates in African nations including Ghana and Angola are falling. The same is true even in Arab
countries such as Bahrain and Qatar. That will help environmental problems—not least climate change.
But not among royals. The standing of the Spanish royal family may have been shaken by scandal and recession (see Jonathan
Blitzer, p58), but the announcement that Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, is pregnant, has saved the British newspaper
industry for another year, as well as reinforcing the appeal of
the most popular flank of Britain’s royal family, after the Queen.
What might the new heir to the throne be named? According to nameberry.com the success of films such as “The
Hunger Games” will mean 2013 will see a surge in mythologicallyinspired names. Be prepared for a wave of infants named Augustus, Athena, and, apparently, Thor. For the House of Windsor,
Thor I, perhaps?
The change in the rules of succession in October 2011 means
that if the royal couple’s first child is a girl, she still becomes third
in line to the throne, ahead of either a later son or Prince Harry.
That is the quietest and quickest constitutional change Britain
has managed for years (it also secured the approval of the other
15 nations of which the Queen is monarch). It is a sign of how
uncontroversial equality of the sexes now is.
Good news for women—and the media. Congratulations to
the royal couple. And for everyone else, reasons to look forward
to 2013.
Additional research by Justin Cash, Daniel Cohen and David Wolf.
SCHOOL OF THOUGHT
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JPW Mallalieu Philip Toynbee William Buchan
Brian Inglis John Mortimer EP Thompson
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Antonia Fraser Peter Hopkirk Timothy Sprigge
Thomas Pakenham Jon Stallworthy
Richard Sorabji Peter Jay Christopher Booker
Stephen Jessel Humphrey Carpenter
David Jessel Stephen Oppenheimer Chris Lowe
Pico Iyer Nicholas Shakespeare David Shukman
James Runcie Paul Watkins Rageh Omaar
Alain de Botton William Fiennes
Poppy Adams Rory Stewart Hugh Miles
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34
Osborne was wrong
Despite what the chancellor says, the global economic slump is not his main problem
george magnus
G
eorge Osborne’s Autumn Statement marks the half- bility of the government’s strategy will fray. The deficit target will
way stage in this parliament. It is a moment to reflect be missed regularly, and the ratio of debt to national income will
on his economic strategy and to look forward—with
just keep rising, regardless of steps that might momentarily flatsome trepidation, it has to be said. The strategy to ter the public accounts, for example, the recent decision to have
breathe life into the economy, eliminate the struc- the Bank of England transfer its profits from quantitative eastural part of the deficit and bring the debt to national income ratio ing to the Exchequer. If the debt keeps rising, the risk of soverdown by the next election in 2015 has not worked. The
eign downgrades and loss of creditor confidence will become more
economy remains in a mild depression, with perisignificant.
odic ups and downs, and the deficit target has
So when did it all go wrong? Sadly, from the start. The
now been “rolled out” to 2017/18. Without a
strategy was based on unwarranted confidence in the
shift in strategy, this state of affairs could
basic structure of the economy in the wake of the cricontinue for a long time, bringing the risk
sis, and on a failure to understand the nature of the
that unemployment will rise, and the covpredicament into which we had fallen. The overconfieted AAA sovereign credit rating will fall.
dence showed up time and again in the forecasts of all
To be fair, the chancellor could not have
the official agencies, including the OBR and the Bank
taken office at a less favourable time. The
of England. In the March 2011 Budget, the prediction
economy had just experienced the deepest
was still growth of 1.7 per cent in 2012 and 2.5 per cent
recession since the 1930s. The budget defiin 2013. These numbers have since come down, now to
cit was over 10 per cent of GDP and the ratio of
-0.1 per cent and 1.2 per cent, respectively.
public debt to GDP was 25 per cent higher than in
But the OBR’s longer-term optimism
2008. He introduced an emergency budget in June
remains, with growth back to nearly 3
2010, based on Alistair Darling’s spending plans in
per cent by 2017-18.
the previous government, and established the
Overconfidence was also evident
Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)
in the belief that the economy would
as an independent auditor of public
rebalance away from finance and
finances. Greece had just received its
housing towards industry and comfirst financial package from the Euromerce without government help.
zone and the IMF, amid fears about
This revival of private sector entera eurozone sovereign debt crisis. The
prise and investment was never going
chancellor had to send a message to
to happen so simply. UK companies
the country’s creditors and financial
have been saving money for a decmarkets that the government was
ade, and although they are not doing
determined to regain control over
so as dramatically as in 2008/09—
public finances, and to restore sustainwhen they saved 10 per cent of GDP—
able growth.
they’re still saving 5 per cent of GDP.
Man of steel? The chancellor visits Port Talbot works
Osborne has had help in reassuring
Clearly, they are not assured about
Britain’s creditors. The Bank of Engthe outlook for the economy, investland presided over a 20 per cent fall of the pound’s value between
ment and employment.
July 2011 and July 2012. The Bank’s unusual monetary policies—
And quite where the government got the idea that banks should
quantitative easing—and those of the Federal Reserve in the US, simultaneously gather more cash on their balance sheets while
have held down the cost of government borrowing.
lending more to small and medium sized companies, remains a
But it is clear that the goal of restoring growth has failed, and
mystery. It is not surprising that the attempts to spur lending —
this is what really counts. Since the election, the chancellor pre- Project Merlin in 2011, Credit Easing in 2012—have fallen flat.
sided over sporadic, weak growth, followed by a decline in GDP, Financial policy, especially towards the banks, has been conwhich has all but cancelled the prior rise. The 1 per cent growth fused—the Bank and the Treasury must share the blame. The
towards the end of 2012, widely attributed to special factors and
Bank’s Financial Policy Committee said in November that banks
the Olympics bounce, is bound to have fallen back sharply.
would need to provide more capital as protection against future
It should be clear that if there’s little or no growth, the credi- losses. The Treasury wants them to lend more. This does not compute, and while the credit offered by banks remains inadequate,
George Magnus is a former senior economic adviser to UBS and the author
of “Uprising” (Wiley)
there will be no private sector recovery.
Total public sector expenditure
Spending adjusted for inflation
Total public sector spending
(£bn)
Blair
Brown
Coalition
announced two infrastructure initiatives since 2010, trying to bring
in private finance, but there has been little follow-up. He offered a
glimmer of hope in his 2012 Mansion House speech, saying that
the government could promote spending on new homes, roads,
and other infrastructure, for example, by extending guarantees,
if not hard cash. This means the argument may have shifted from
whether to use the government’s balance sheet, to how.
T
he government could have considered eliminating the
structural deficit by, for example, 2020, or adjusting
the pace of deficit reduction to bring it into line with
the economy’s performance. It could have based its
strategy on the fundamental view that there wasn’t
going to be any significant expansion any time soon, and therefore no improvement in public finances. It could have been bolder
early on by shuffling more current spending on goods and services
towards investment, where the benefits in the form of employment
and future returns are stronger, especially when the government can borrow at rock bottom rates. We would still have had to
embrace painful structural reforms and higher taxes, and a longterm programme to reform welfare, raise the retirement age and
address unfunded pension and healthcare costs. But the point is
that we might have been able to do this with an economy that was
rebalancing in an environment of steady, if moderate growth.
The government’s misunderstanding has not just been about
the balance sheet recession. It has also been party to muddled
thinking about what we call the “fiscal multiplier,” which helps
calculate the effects of tax and spending changes on the economy.
The OBR has been working on the assumption that the multiplier
is around 0.35-—meaning, for example, that if the government
tightens budgetary policy by 1 per cent of GDP, the effect would
be to lower GDP by 0.35 per cent. But the IMF caused an economic
storm at its annual meeting in Tokyo in September by suggesting
that in current conditions, it may lie somewhere between 0.9 and
1.7, significantly larger than in previous adjustment programmes.
In other words, the scale of austerity is exacting an equivalent or
greater toll on the economy.
It is also unfortunate that the government hasn’t levelled with
the country about its own responsibilities, and the problems
caused by the euro crisis, which have aggravated its problems. At
the IMF annual meeting in Washington DC in September 2011,
the chancellor sought to emphasise the severity of the crisis with
UK unemployment
(%)
Major
650
10
625
8
600
Blair
Brown
12
Coalition
Overconfidence can be corrected, and it seems a little humility
has crept into official pronouncements about the outlook for our
national debt, future economic prospects and so on. But misunderstanding is more liable to linger, and in this respect the Treasury is culpable. It has failed to recognise the nature of our malaise,
which professional economists call a “balance sheet recession.” As
a result it has made matters worse. You just have to consider the
performance of the US, where tough and instant austerity has not
been pursued, to appreciate the difference. The US economy has
surpassed the level of the last peak in early 2008. In the UK, it is
languishing at a level that is still 3 per cent lower.
Conventional recessions usually end as policies are eased,
confidence returns, and normal lending and spending patterns resume. The government runs a deficit for a while, but the
resumption of expansion in which the private sector spends and
borrows more is matched by a retreat in the spending and borrowing of the government. Balance sheet recessions are different. As the name suggests, they involve a fundamental mismatch
between the two sides of the national balance sheet—the assets
and the liabilities. Lending and spending can’t get going again
until this imbalance is remedied, which means saving more to
bring liabilities in line with depreciated asset values. In our case,
the household, banking and corporate sectors are all trying to
save more—but so is the government.
The trouble is that it is impossible for the private and the public
sector both to save more simultaneously without causing precisely
the kind of economic conditions that we have in the UK. When the
private sector wants or needs to restructure its balance sheets, the
government is supposed to accommodate it for as long as is necessary. If everyone wants to save more, someone has to borrow more.
Had the government understood this at any time since 2010, it is
likely that policy would have been quite different.
In the event, the chancellor has underwritten a strategy that,
as the table below shows, has allowed the nominal value of public
spending to rise by over £40bn since 2009/10, but once inflation
is taken into account, it can be seen that spending has remained
frozen. Some of the sharpest cuts have been made in the government’s capital spending, with public sector net investment falling
in money terms (worse if you factor in inflation) from £48.5bn in
2009/10 to an estimated £27bn in 2011/12. It is predicted to fade
over the next five years to £23bn. This squeeze on potentially
productive public investment is ill-advised. The chancellor has
675
35
Osborne was wrong
6
575
4
550
2
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
2011-12
Source: HM Treasury
1998
2010-11
1997
2009-10
1996
2008-09
1995
2007-08
1994
0
500
1993
525
Source: HM Treasury
36
what next?
his “Six weeks to save the Euro” speech, by which he meant the
G20 in Cannes later in the year. In the 2011 Autumn Statement, he
cited the eurozone crisis, and higher commodity prices as villains,
and he has referred to the euro crisis often since as the principal
cause for the UK’s predicament. According to the chancellor, it is
this, not the government’s failure to get a grip on public finances,
that is to blame.
There is no question that the euro area economy and financial
markets were in a rotten state. The economy barely grew in 2011,
and will have declined for two consecutive years in 2012-13. But the
view that the eurozone crisis has blown the UK government’s economic strategy off course is an overstatement. The trade sector is
important for the UK with exports to the eurozone accounting for
about 16 per cent of GDP. But the critical questions today are the
same as two and half years ago. How can employment be strengthened and wage and salary incomes be increased so as to help the
household sector to recover? How can investment incentives and
spending help reverse the long slide in the investment proportion
of GDP and get companies to spend some of their £750bn cash
pile? How can banks be encouraged to lend? And why is the government dashing forwards with an austerity plan that is only making things worse?
George Osborne’s Autumn Statement offered few new answers,
but the disappointment over growth and pressure from within the
coalition may be starting to have an effect. He announced measures, spanning an extra £5.5bn of infrastructure spending, the
creation of a £1bn business bank, a large rise in investment allowances, simpler and lower business taxes, and initiatives to exploit
shale gas, and to get UK companies to sell more to emerging markets. These are encouraging from the standpoint of longer-term
competitiveness and productivity. But they still leave huge questions over the government’s economic management.
What next?
Time for a change of direction
adam posen
W
hile serving on the Monetary Policy Committee, the committee at the Bank of England
that sets interest rates, I avoided addressing
directly the current government’s Plan A for
economic recovery through austerity. I felt and
feel that sitting central bankers should not publicly comment on
fiscal policy beyond forecasting its short-term effects, or on structural matters. Silence, however, was not assent on my part. For
two-and-a-half years, the coalition government’s economic policies have focused on the wrong narrow goal, been self-defeating
in pursuit of that goal, and in so doing have eaten away at British
economic capabilities and confidence. It is past time for me, and
“The coalition’s economic
policies have focused on
the wrong narrow goal.”
far more importantly for the chancellor, to say so. Unfortunately,
his Autumn Statement reiterated the same misguided priorities of
deficit reduction and the same failed approach, with only minor
variations.
The coalition government has failed to address the shortfall in
productive British investment. As many have pointed out, British capital investment, public and private, has been well below
the level of that of its international competitors like Germany,
France, Japan, and the US. Addressing the shortfall
requires structural, supply side measures, as well as
a demand or stimulus agenda that fits with those
measures, and is by definition business supporting.
Adam Posen, formerly of the Bank of England,
becomes president of the Peterson Institute for
International Economics in 2013
It requires confronting the real deficiencies of the British financial
system with the same reformist zeal with which governments took
on labour market liberalisation in the 1980s and 1990s. For at least
100 years, the City has far better served global finance than British
domestic business, and that means the UK government needs to
develop alternatives to the City for internal investment.
First, fiscal stimulus—or at least significant slowing of fiscal
consolidation—should be adopted in the form of aggressive investment tax credits to non-financial business. Investment tax credits channel investment to directly where the shortfall lies, raising
productive capacity and thus tax revenue over the longer term—
certainly far more than consumption tax cuts. The UK government should go further, changing corporate governance rules to
make it less attractive for businesses to sit on cash, e.g., by making large cash corporate holdings that are neither invested nor
returned to shareholders as dividends over a two-year period automatically subject to a vote at the Annual General Meeting. It is
understandable in the aftermath of the crisis that businesses want
cash buffers and are risk averse. What is incomprehensible is the
government playing with a long list of proposed tax adjustments
from the Pasty Tax on up over the last two years, and never proposing a serious investment credit.
Second, the UK needs to create a credit market that lends to
projects in the small and medium business sector that can’t get
credit. Right now, the British economy is lacking the diversity of
lending sources that the US and Germany have, with no small or
community banks, a very high minimum company size required to
float corporate bonds, and tiny corporate paper and venture capital markets. Countries around the world are passing laws, issuing
charters to specialised financial institutions, making markets to
allow companies to borrow from the market by issuing bonds (in
conjunction with the central bank), and encouraging new entrants
to create just such infrastructures in their own economies. Both
Latin American and South East Asian emerging markets have
made huge strides in domestic credit and capital creation in
recent years through such policy efforts. It is time the government
learned from these initiatives, and benefitted from the handbooks
that the IMF and World Bank have written for how to do so.
Third, the government needs to create more competition in
domestic banking, as the Vickers Commission has bluntly and
rightly advocated. The current British banking oligopoly creates
distortions—for the world’s eighth largest economy to have essentially only five domestic lenders (plus one very large mutual doing
mortgage loans) is extraordinary and, as liberal economics would
tell you, distortionary and inefficient. The government should sell
off parts of the banks currently under its (meaning public) ownership control, just as it would break up any instance of excessive
market concentration. As importantly, it should change the rules
governing the entry of new banks into the system, and encourage
the expansion of the banks tied to supermarkets and the like. Regulators should make banks more transparent, fees and application forms for loans should be standardised, and services should
be mandated to assist microbusinesses and small or new firms
with such applications.
Fourth, to further promote both domestic financial development and bank competition, the government should create a
sizable specially chartered public bank for lending to small businesses, and accompany it with creation of a Fannie Mae-like
company to bundle, securitise, and sell those British enterprise
loans. Since I first advocated this approach in September 2011,
many British officials and business leaders have taken up the call,
including the British Chambers of Commerce, the Labour party
leadership, and the current business secretary Vince Cable. The
chancellor’s autumn statement, however, omitted any commitment to creating such an institution, and it is clear that any efforts
the current Treasury would make in this useful direction would be
insufficiently ambitious. Again, most of the UK’s major competitors, including Germany, France, and the US, have such banks—
so state aid rules are not a real barrier—and provide better funding
for small and medium-sized business. Concerns about reducing
the franchise re-sale value of the semi-nationalised banks in UK
government hands is about as classically penny-wise and poundfoolish, from a growth and investment perspective, as one can
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37
what next?
get. It is also moot, given that no one is going to be reselling those
banks at a profit for years to come (another argument for selling
off parts, as argued above).
Finally, the government should restore public investment levels, with an emphasis on large infrastructure projects. As Gavyn
Davies, former chief economist at Goldman Sachs, has pointed
out, British public investment has fallen by a quarter since 2010.
That is a huge reduction, and is self-defeating in terms of shortrun revenues and long-run growth. Besides, some humility about
criticising wasteful investment is called for after the throwing
away of private investment funds in the bubbles and frauds of
the 2000s. Figures as politically different as Gordon Brown and
Michael Heseltine have pointed out that the UK can get ahead
in public-private partnerships and even sell stakes in large infrastructure projects abroad.
The MPC and Bank of England can and should support this
pro-investment agenda, once it is pursued by a government, as
I have been arguing for some time, right up through my last two
speeches as a member of the MPC last summer. The Bank of England can purchase assets other than UK government bonds, particularly loans and bonds for public-private investment funds,
and loans from the newly created banking entities, thereby simultaneously providing more effective monetary stimulus and giving British businesses access to more credit. In its new financial
supervisory role, the Bank of England can enable new entrants to
increase competition, and increase transparency of fees and counter other oligopolistic behaviors in the current British banking system. And the MPC and its members should stop talking about
the need for reductions in spending when forecasting British
economic growth and inflation—as argued above, the economic
argument goes against such scaremongering. Furthermore, statements to this end from the MPC officially feed the policy defeatism and austerity cycle that is currently doing so much harm to
British economic policy and the British economy.
It is not enough for Messrs Cameron and Osborne to claim that
they have done what they promised to do. Their policies have left
the British economy malnourished, and indeed made parts of it
quite ill. There are alternatives available, and the British government should switch to these now.
Featuring articles
from leading financial
commentators on the latest
developments, trends and
challenges, Private Investor
is essential reading for
those who need information
on financial markets and
trading.
QUARTERLY MAGAZINE • ISSUE NO.2 • AUTUMN 2012
The high
price of
safety
JONATHAN RUFFER
Caution in a crisis
RODNEY HOBSON
Long-term arguments
for owning mines
ELENA CLARICI
SCIPION MINING AND RESOURCES FUND
Don’t get caught out
by currencies
JOHN HARDY
SAXO BANK
Corporate bonds:
edging out equities?
ANDY DAVIS
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38
It’s a policy knockout
I
What policy do people most want the government to pursue in 2013? Our four-round
competition has a clear winner
peter kellner
n the end it comes down to a choice of which to punish:
the world’s poorest people, or some of the world’s richest companies. By a clear margin, the public thinks the
top priority for Britain in 2013 is to crack down on companies that use accounting ploys to avoid paying taxes
here on profits made within the country.
That is the outcome of a unique polling exercise that
YouGov has conducted for Prospect. We asked people to consider 16 policy proposals. We wanted to find out what voters
most want the government to do in 2013. Instead of asking
whether they supported or opposed each idea, we asked them
to choose between them.
We did this by organising a knockout tournament like, say,
Wimbledon or the FA Cup. For round one, we arranged the 16
proposals into eight pairs and asked respondents in each case
which they thought would be better for Britain. The next day,
the eight “winners” went forward into round two, where they
were arranged into four pairs. Day three saw the semi-finals,
contested by the four victors in round two. Day four saw the
final, between the two semi-final winners.
The way the contest unfolded sheds a bright, even harsh,
light on what really matters to people at the end of 2012.
Little surprise that one of the most emphatic “victories” was for
doing more to fight unemployment. The alternative, doing more to
reduce inflation, is considered less vital these days, for it remains
subdued, even if above the government’s 2 per cent target. Getting people back to work is plainly seen as the more urgent priority. Perhaps more surprising is that two “bash the rich” policies,
both very popular when tested on their own, attract little support when pitched against other policy ideas. A “mansion tax”
on properties worth more than £2m loses out to a cut in Britain’s
spending on overseas aid, while a three-to-one majority reckon
it’s more important to nationalise the railways than to impose a
maximum pay limit of £1m.
We pitched two right-wing favourites against each other: ending all immigration versus Britain leaving the European Union.
By a narrow margin, immigration is considered the higher priority, although more than one voter in three said “neither” (26 per
cent) or “not sure” (11 per cent).
Likewise we tested two great, politically sensitive public services against each other. By four-to-three, improving the National
Health Service (NHS) is seen as more vital than raising standards in state schools. And, forced to choose, most of us would pre-
Cut unemployment
60
Cut overseas aid
60
Give voters the right 59
to sack MPs
Nationalise the
railways
53
Reduce inflation
24
Tax £2m properties
26
Make the Lords
wholly elected
Cap all pay at £1m
18
20
Improve the NHS
69
Toughen financial
regulation
Nationalise the
railways
20
Give voters the right 22
to sack MPs
ROUND 3
ROUND 2
ROUND 1
Peter Kellner is president of YouGov, the pollster
Round one
(%)
Winners
Losers
Source: YouGov; fieldwork November 18-22.
Crack down on
firms that avoid tax
61
Toughen financial
regulation
27
68
And the winner is…
A crackdown on firms that avoid tax,
the policy that respondents would most
like the government to pursue in 2013
39
it’s a policy knockout
fer the government to go after companies that avoid paying tax on
profits rather than “welfare cheats.”
One pair of policies produced a near-tie. When we pitched
tougher bank regulation against tougher sentences for criminals, the public is evenly divided, 44 per cent each way. We had to
go to decimals to discern the “winner”: tackling the banks “won”
by 44.4 per cent to 44.1 per cent. (By two-to-one, Conservative
voters prefer to go after criminals. The figures for Labour and
Liberal Democrat voters are almost exactly the opposite.)
Round two
The two big winners in round two, beating their rival policies by
more than three-to-one, are the NHS (over railways privatisation) and bank regulation (over the right to sack misbehaving
MPs between elections). On the evidence of this exercise, socialist ideology and constitutional reform have limited appeal, when
set against other priorities.
The other two contests produce narrower results, with taxavoiding companies and overseas aid regarded as more urgent
targets than immigration and (by a whisker) unemployment.
But was the tightness of these contests a sign of uncertainty
over Britain’s priorities—or an indication that these were tough
draws between strong contenders, like a Murray-Federer match
at Wimbledon?
Semi-finals
Given that the four surviving policies had each “won” twice and
therefore demonstrated widespread appeal, the semi-finals produced strikingly clear results. In the world of corporate shenanigans, cracking down on tax avoidance beats bank regulation by
more than two-to-one. And when it comes to the work of government spending departments, voters are keener to reduce Britain’s aid budget of around £8bn than to get better care from the
£106bn health budget.
This runs directly counter to traditional saliency questions.
Health always comes at or near the top of public concerns, along
with jobs and crime—other issues that displayed limited appeal
in this knock-out exercise. I suspect two forces are at work. First,
voters have little faith in government competence, whereas a cut
in aid funding is relatively straightforward to arrange. Something that can definitely be done, however modest, is preferred
to a much larger aspiration that may not be achieved.
Secondly, it looks as if overseas aid is especially unpopular
with lower-paid people—those who struggle to make ends meet.
They are plainly attracted by a measure that could reduce their
taxes without jeopardising public services here in Britain.
Final
So the final choice is a cut in overseas aid versus a crackdown on
tax-avoiding companies. And the winner is…. tackling corporate
tax avoidance, by 56 per cent against 36 per cent. Conservative
voters divide evenly, while Labour voters prefer to clamp down
on tax avoidance by two-to-one—a preference shared by an even
larger, four-to-one majority of Liberal Democrats.
It’s possible that these figures partly reflect the news agenda.
In the days leading up to this knockout policy cup, the actions of
companies such as Amazon, Starbucks and Google were making headlines. At another time, the figures might work out differently. That said, it is striking that the two finalist policies
brushed aside more traditional policy concerns along the way.
It looks as if millions of voters these days have lost faith in the
government’s ability to solve difficult and fundamental longterm social problems. Instead they want Whitehall and Westminster to tackle issues that, in their view, not only cry out for
action, but which look sufficiently clear-cut for ministers to be
able actually to sort out.
52
Improve the NHS
50
Toughen financial
regulation
44
End all
immigration
33
Crack down on
welfare cheats
30
Improve state
schools
37
Toughen sentences
for criminals
44
Leave the EU
29
Crack down on
47
Cut overseas aid
44
Cut unemployment
45
End all
immigration
34
Crack down on
56
Cut overseas aid
36
WINNER
WINNER
Crack down on
Cut overseas aid
57
Improve the NHS
34
© SHUTTERSTOCK
40
© Biteback Publishing & The Robson Press
Lost in Helmand
As argument intensifies about whether troops should stay in Afghanistan, the mother of a dead
officer, herself a grief counsellor, relates how hard it is to handle death—for soldiers too
margaret evison
As British soldiers continue to die in Afghanistan, arguments are intensifying about whether they should stay until
2014, as stated, and whether further deaths before that exit
will have been justified by any gains. Paddy Ashdown, Liberal Democrat peer and former special forces officer, wrote
in November that “The only rational policy now is to leave
quickly, in good order and in the company of our allies.” The
strategy was “divided, cacophonous, chaotic,” he said, and
the mission was not worth the life of another soldier.
But General Sir Richard Shirreff, Nato commander in
Afghanistan, retorted in The Times that “now is not the
time to cut and run,” and that security in the country was
improving.
“We can be proud of significant success,” said Nato’s deputy supreme allied commander, Europe, calling for the alliance to “remain committed, albeit in a reduced capacity.”
Margaret Evison is a consultant clinical psychologist and the author of “Death
of a Soldier: A Mother’s Story” (Biteback), from which this article is adapted
As this argument becomes louder, one mother records the
way in which she dealt with the death of her son in Helmand.
My son’s death in Afghanistan was one of many, both in this conflict and in others. But for me at the time it was the only death.
Where does the journey begin? At its most prosaic, it should
be the April leaves around the front door, the brief kiss, the perfunctory “see you in six months.”
We had spent Easter together. Immediately after that weekend, on 13th April 2009, Mark went away to his other world of
soldiering. He had been cautious about telling me exactly the
dangers of where he was going, underplaying them, or perhaps
he did not know. Much later I understood what a challenge it had
been. His letter sent on 28th April read:
“Sorry we were unable to speak properly a couple of nights
ago… Things here are great. We have now settled into
the fort and are awaiting 10 Afghan National Army bods
as well as an interpreter before we can patrol to our full
extent.
41
lost in helmand
Mark Evison in Afghanistan
The poppy harvest is still ongoing but coming to a close
and the fighting season is supposedly about to start, could
be interesting for a few weeks.
We have bought a turkey off a local farmer and he will
be included on the BBQ on Sunday night which will be my
first fresh meat in two weeks. On top of that next Sunday
is my shower day and so double-whammy. Can’t wait. It’s
funny how the smallest things like a shower you really miss
when it is not on tap.”
I was so keen for contact, for a little reassurance that my
world and his were still touching, overlapping. I sent him weekly
parcels: custard, suntan lotion, cake, sweets, noodles, bits of his
childhood to make him know that his mother was still there.
It was a beautiful early May morning when I heard. I had
been to get the paper from the local shop and as I turned into
the drive I saw a casually dressed man apparently loitering, talking to a neighbour.
“Can I help?” I asked. He said he was a major in the army.
“I have a son in the army.”
“I know. Would you mind if we went inside to speak?”
As we walked down the path I said I hoped nothing was
wrong, but he was non-committal. We went into my back room,
the large angled windows overlooking the garden. He introduced
himself: Major Ransom, a casualty notification officer. He said
that Mark had been shot, very seriously injured. He could tell
me nothing more, except that Mark was priority one to be flown
back to England, and that I would have a visiting officer to help
me who would come later in the day. I have no memory of Major
Ransom going but I don’t think he was there for long.
The weekend moved slowly. No more information, except that
Mark was stable and on life support in Camp Bastion field hospital. But he did not come home. Then I heard that he had been
shot in the shoulder. The subclavian artery of his right arm was
injured. There was a suggestion of internal damage, perhaps
lungs and liver. I printed off pages from the internet about the
subclavian artery, a large important artery in his shoulder feeding his arm, and wondered if his injuries would be too serious to
allow him a life, or if his life could be lived without an arm, damaged forever.
Finally, late that afternoon, I was told that he was to be flown
back to Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham, an NHS hospital that
had trauma facilities and expertise in treating injured soldiers.
The next day we were allowed to visit Mark. The consultant
was stuffy and formal, doing his job to explain. My daughter sat
with me, then left, unable to stay. The consultant said that there
was only a very small chance that Mark was not brain-dead, that
at present his body was slowed by large amounts of pain medication and that they would have to withdraw this, and then carry
out brain stem tests the next day to see if there was any response.
He explained that the brain stem—the conduit to the brain, the
messaging centre—was probably gone, and that the chance of
recovery was very small. He said it would be unfair to Mark if we
left him on life support machines, as he would deteriorate but
not wake up. I was aware of a huge thirst as he spoke, wanting
many glasses of water. I felt drained, empty of life, still clinging
to that small chance, unable to accept death.
There was Mark—my Markie, the Mark I knew, despite the
tubes and the huge wound in his side, apparently raw flesh
Is it time to leave Afghanistan?
Public disenchantment with the war continues to grow, says Peter Kellner
Over the past five years, what residual
optimism existed about Afghanistan has
drained away. At no point did more than
a tiny minority think we were winning;
but the proportion that thought we would
eventually succeed has halved from almost
four in ten to fewer than two in ten. Not
surprisingly, the proportion thinking our
troops should be brought home as soon as
possible has grown.
In some ways, public disenchantment
with the war in Afghanistan is more telling than opposition to the Iraq war. That
controversy was dominated by allegations of illegality (the absence of a clear
UN mandate for the invasion) and dishonesty (over the “evidence” of weapons
of mass destruction). The war in Afghani-
stan was explicitly backed by the UN, and
few Britons doubt that al Qaeda and the
Taliban are ruthless and violent. It is performance, not morality, that concerns the
public. We went to war in a good cause, but
have not prevailed. We want our troops to
go to war for the right reasons; but we also
need them to win. We are not at all keen on
noble failure.
Afghanistan
Do you think British troops are winning the war with the
Taliban in Afghanistan, or not?
Should British troops be brought home from Afghanistan?
70 %
60
% 70
No, not possible
Yes, soon
60
50
50
40
No, but will
eventually
30
20
Yes
Don't
know
Aug Oct Nov Apr
2007 2009
2010
30
No
20
Don't
know
10
0
40
Yes, immediately
Jan
2011
Jan
2012
Nov
Aug Oct Nov Apr
2007 2009
2010
10
Jan
2011
Jan
2012
Nov
0
42
lost in helmand
taped over with see-through dressing, and his swollen right arm
high in a solid plastic sling.
Several of Mark’s friends came to Birmingham from London,
and even one from Hong Kong who left as soon as he heard of
Mark’s injury, telling work and his girlfriend as he booked a flight
in the taxi. It is hard to describe the upset of Mark’s friends who
visited his bedside, talking to him and playing his “awful” music
to him to get him to stir before we switched off the machines.
On Tuesday Mark’s father, David, and I sat in clinical silence
whilst the two consultants carried out brain stem tests, explaining what they were doing in flat, perfunctory voices. It was calm
and light in the room as they tried to get a reaction from him and
his brain, any flicker of life. This was the first time I realised he
was dead, the first time there was no hope. David did the second
set of tests with them, without me—I could not bear watching his
still, unresponsive body.
We all said goodbye to Mark, privately, in and out of the room
in turn. At about 11am we switched off the machines. I watched
the spirit leave Mark in less than a second as his face changed.
We were bringing our son’s life to an end. But there was no life
there to be had; it had all gone.
Mourning is a very strange process. It is so painful, the
rational self struggling with the emotional self. The rational self
hardly gets a look in. After Mark’s death I became like a child
wanting something so badly, not able to let go. Sometimes I simply preferred to believe that, magically, he had not gone. I had
“lost” him, why could he not come back?
I work as a psychologist with cancer patients, and as with
Mark’s fellow soldiers, I had to get back to it. I had to be able
to talk to patients without that awful hot surge of uncontrollable tears that I knew so well; I needed to be cool and rational for
them, my head in control and my heart dampened and yet not
too saddened. How to do it?
I
did not choose, I did not decide. But perhaps years of training and experience dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients and listening to awful stories have
taught me that it does not work to sweep trauma and sadness under the carpet. It is better to have it out, face it, to kill it
early and effectively with words.
As well as the sadness of loss, I had the upset of knowing how
Mark had died. I could not talk to close family about it; I did
not want them to have to deal with my pain and even know how
Mark died. I went to two army padres and my GP, men who were
professionally used to hearing such things. They listened, and I
noticed that with each episode a specific upset would fade in a
day or two, as my rational self struggled to gain control. Yes, I
could understand that even a small amount of morphine could
help desensitise Mark to the pain; I could understand that he
was a brave young man and that rugby injuries had been part of
his life. I was even told by a doctor friend that dying from bleeding was a preferred death for the early Greeks; they noticed the
pleasantness of being light-headed.
So I dealt with those very tangible shocks by talking, and that
put them in a place where they no longer hurt.
I did three other things which might have helped. The weekend before Mark’s arrival at Selly Oak, when he was still on life
support in Bastion, I took to my safe place, my May garden.
It was exuberant with new life, welcoming the warm, hopeful
joy of summer. Four days later we switched off Mark’s life support machines. That time was dry, automatic, painful beyond
my capacity to believe, and so surreal. Exactly one year later, as
the garden identically remembered that day’s joy of a year ago,
those memories came back, stored in some concrete vault in my
mind. Smells, sounds, impressions, just as they had been. I felt
trapped by my brain, those memories, those feelings, unable to
function again. For some reason I decided to take to pen and
paper as the only way I could get some relief. That was helpful; it gave me time to reflect, time to weep, and I used it many
times later.
I often met another mother and a wife, both also mourning
loved ones lost in the same war. Talking to them was strangely
comforting. I could see the madness of my own grief in theirs;
they went through the same irrational struggles between their
heads and their hearts. But most of all we could be honest with
each other, more honest than with others in our lives; and we
understood each other.
Most powerfully, I talked to Mark’s soldiers. Five of them separately and very bravely met me, prepared to talk to the mother
of their dead leader. It was not easy, for them or for me. This
felt very close, and I cried, unable to control myself for them.
I realised then how painful it was to them too, how they had no
one to share this with, how they just needed to let their thinking
selves peek into this emotional box unfrightened and let something out, crying as they did so. It felt so important to me and to
them. They had been with Mark and knew how it was, they could
understand how I was, and that powerful place was shared.
But this experience allowed me partially to understand
the army’s stiff upper lip approach to death. Two of the men
were subsequently diagnosed with PTSD, but the others also
silently suffered symptoms: nightmares, flashbacks, replaying
what happened and other ways it could have been, unable to get
relief. Talking and words were not part of their training, their
culture, and often not part of their childhoods. The words were
hard to find.
Some time later, I was told that before the four-day coroner’s
inquest in July 2010, the soldiers had been cautioned about talking to me and telling me too much. How short-sighted that was,
how lacking in understanding.
So what is the answer? For the soldiers in combat, I can see
the problem. They need to get on, to normalise and almost trivialise death. Mark’s platoon were in that patrol base in Helmand
province when they heard that Mark had died in hospital. Some
sobbed quietly; they all built a wonderful wooden cross and stone
memorial to him, and then they took to their guns, blasting the
Taliban “for Mr Evison,” expressing their rage about it. But I
could see that they needed to talk more, even to allow themselves
to cry as they had with me. The army and the soldiers themselves
were perhaps uncomfortable with that, in that very male environment. Mark would have let them talk, understood that they
should do so, encouraged them, and that is partly why they
admired him.
What about other mothers, other wives, other loss? The
answer has to be honesty, talking and time. When that is completely understood, that lifelong shackle “the stiff upper lip” may
finally be abandoned, and grief dealt with as it comes along in its
ravaging fury, until it is tamed. The person cannot come back,
and when the heart has wept and can accept that, the head will
understand.
I will never get over Mark’s death. But I can talk about it without crying, even the tough bits; and I have been able to get on
with my life, as Mark would have wished.
CS_PROSPECT_FPC_PROSPECT 29/11/2012 11:21 Page 1
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© Bloomberg via Getty Images
The outsider
Was the Olympus scandal unique or does it reveal
something rotten in Japan?
leo lewis
O
n 20th April, wearing his late father’s cufflinks for
luck, Michael Woodford, the former president of
Olympus in Japan, took a taxi from Shinjuku to
Akasaka. For seven months, accounts of his courage and tenacity had captured the public imagination in Japan and around the world. Even hard news reporting of
his story and exit from the company was laced with awe. Before
leaving the Park Hyatt that morning, a Japanese MP told the
51-year-old Liverpudlian that he was praying for him.
To the now familiar volley of flashbulbs and questions, Woodford, the world famous whistle-blower, stepped out of the cab
Leo Lewis is Beijing bureau chief for The Times
and into the Hotel New Otani. About to begin in the ballroom
was an Extraordinary General Meeting of Olympus, the iconic
camera and electronics company eviscerated by a $1.7bn fraud.
Events set in motion that day would lead to three of Olympus’s top executives, Hisashi Mori, Hideo Yamata and Tsuyoshi
Kikakawa, the former president of the company, pleading guilty
in court to filing false financial reports.
Olympus had been writhing in scandal—initially behind
closed doors, and then beneath the horrified glare of global
media and markets. In late 2011, Japanese investigators at the
Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission are reported
to have considered the possibility that organised crime syndicates were involved. Even though no link was established, with
the outsider
45
Blow-up: Michael Woodford, pictured in November 2011 arriving at
the Tokyo headquarters of Olympus
every new twist, the Olympus story posed new and unsettling
questions about Japan, each of them imbued with a sense that
nothing could quite be trusted.
By April, Woodford was an exhausted and damaged man.
The company’s president—who started work in a British subsidiary of Olympus as a salesman in his early 20s and rose steadily
over 30 years—was driven on by his outrage.
Minutes after Woodford arrived at the New Otani Hotel, perhaps the most tumultuous shareholder meeting in Japanese corporate history was underway. Shuichi Takayama, the company’s
third president in a year, was preparing to step down and leave
the management of the shattered company to a new board.
This “new” Olympus was supposedly a chastened creature,
tamed by the exposure of its crimes and lies. Takayama ground
through a speech that promised a clean rebirth. The board
bowed deeply, apologising as one.
“You arseholes!” screamed a shareholder, incensed by the
near annihilation of the company’s stock price, “If you think
that’s going to make a difference, you’re wrong!”
The outburst, a surprise venting of righteous rage by a Japanese investor, was a glimpse at what Japan might become with a
little more practice at truculence.
As the barracking of the new board intensified, Woodford was
finally called upon to put a question to the “new” Olympus. He
wanted to know whether the new board believed that his sudden
sacking in October had been unjust. If it did, judged Woodford,
then perhaps there was hope that lessons had sunk in and things
could move forward at the company he still loved. If not, then
the whole Olympus imbroglio was just another sad little splutter in Japan’s decline.
The question was dodged. Triumphant in defeat, Woodford
left the ballroom to chants of “Michael! Michael! Michael!”
Outside, he spoke to the press. He snarled at the timidity of
Japan’s media, the infuriating silence of its institutional shareholders, the passivity of its regulators and, ultimately, the failure of the whole affair to make any sense to him. “What we’ve
just witnessed was a mockery,” he said. “It’s why the world looks
on and continues to think that Japan works in a completely different way. It’s Alice in Wonderland.” It was a comparison he had
been making for months and which pervades his new account of
these events, Exposure: Inside the Olympus Scandal.
The tirade was unquestionably what the world had wanted to
hear that day from Woodford the superstar whistle-blower. Nestled in that impassioned rant outside the New Otani were the
revenge fantasies of every foreigner who had ever howled in frustration at the damnable Japaneseness of Japan.
And it was a reminder that, from the very beginning, this
had been a crisis begging to be parsed as Japan in microcosm.
Japan is oddly prone to grand theorising. Olympus’s fraud and
the company’s reaction to being caught disguising massive losses
on speculative trades could be made to fit almost every theoretical template out there. For those that see Japan as a swirl
of unique cultural impulses or a basket case of shoddy corporate governance, here was proof. For those that see rancid deceit
behind exquisite edifice or identify a culture of instinctive coverups, cronyism and corrosive deference, here was the big reveal.
For those that see the tattooed, nine-fingered hands of the
yakuza (organised crime gangs) in every shadow, as Woodford
did at one point, there was enough to suggest at least an indirect connection.
Critical to all those interpretations is a narrative that views
Woodford as the sole whistle-blower and holds that, without his
determination and sacrifice, Japan on its own would never have
allowed all that malfeasance to come to light. Woodford’s book is
billed as such. It is marinated in resentment, but beneath Exposure’s noisy cascade of emotion and confrontation, the author
himself ends up inadvertently puncturing the myth of the single-handed gaijin (foreign) hero.
W
oodford’s story begins with the arrival of an
email in July 2011—a “tiny time bomb… that
was to change my life forever.” At this point,
he had been president of one of Japan’s largest
and most famous companies for just four months. To Woodford’s dismay, the chairmanship and CEO roles were still held
by Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, a figure transformed over the course of
his narrative from benign mentor to “a little puffed-up duck in
a 500-buck tie.”
When the fateful email dropped, Woodford was in Hamburg,
the home of Olympus’s European headquarters. It was through
the success of Europe and the company’s highly competitive
the outsider
© Bob Thomas/Getty Images
46
endoscope operations that Woodford the gifted salesman, and
later Woodford the cost-cutting manager, would be lifted to the
summit of the Japanese group.
Although he leaves little doubt of his drive as an executive,
Woodford does not devote much of his book to his sometimes
preternatural motivation to see the Olympus wrongdoing fully
exposed and his tormentors brought to justice. A chapter on
his childhood and early working life recalls learning the art of
salesmanship by selling blackberries collected in used yoghurt
pots to neighbours and of the cruelty of being mocked at school
for having “Asian features” from his father’s side of the family.
As well as a yearning to leave relative poverty behind, he says
that “Liverpool was where I developed my insecurities.” His
account leaves little doubt that many of these have survived into
adulthood.
The July email was from a trusted friend Woodford does not
identify. It revealed that an article had appeared in a Japanese
business magazine, Facta, alleging massive financial impropriety at Olympus. Woodford was convinced he had to fly back to
Japan immediately but travelled with the confidence of a loyal
company man, assuming the article must be either malicious or
sensationalist. According to his account, it marks Woodford’s
last moment as a naïf.
On his return to Tokyo, the non-Japanese speaking Woodford was shown a translation of the full article. The two principal allegations were detailed and chilling. The first was that,
between 2006 and 2008, Olympus had paid irrationally large
sums of money, nearly $1bn in total, for three Japanese com-
panies that fell spectacularly outside the sphere of its business.
Thenceforth referred to by Woodford as the “Mickey Mouse
companies,” the trio comprised a medical waste disposal company, a manufacturer of microwavable dishes and a mail-order
cosmetics company.
The second part dealt with the $2bn purchase of a Londonlisted medical equipment group, Gyrus, in 2008. While the purchase itself might have made sense, the 58 per cent premium
paid for the stock did not. Even stranger was the fact that,
between 2008 and 2010, Olympus paid almost $700m to a mystery seller for a tranche of preferred shares in Gyrus.
This may all have come as a shock to Woodford, but it was
by no means the first time Olympus’s financial behaviour had
raised eyebrows. Even he acknowledges that something had not
struck him as quite right about the Gyrus deal, which should
have fallen squarely on his European management patch back
in 2008, but was instead entirely undertaken by the head office
in Tokyo. Analysts covering Olympus had never been happy
with the premium paid for Gyrus or the three other mysterious
acquisitions. Veterans suspected tobashi: the ruse employed by
Japanese companies to conceal massive losses sustained in the
aftermath of the bursting of the late-1980s bubble. For them, the
Facta article was confirmation of suspicions.
“This had huge implications,” he recalls thinking. “Even if a
small part of the article was true, heads would roll, and the company’s reputation would be irreparably damaged. And where, as
president, did this leave me?”
Although Woodford will forever be feted as the whistle-
the outsider
Left, Olympus started as a camera business and diversified during
the 1980s boom. Above, Tokyo public prosecutors raid a building
housing three Olympus-owned firms, December, 2011
blower who took on Japan, that, as he acknowledges, is only part
of the story. By the time the email appeared in Woodford’s inbox,
the whistle had already been blown. Facta’s story was not some
tour-de-force of investigative journalism but a report based
on the insider evidence of a man who later turned out to be an
Olympus employee. This was the real whistle-blower. At least at
first, Woodford was simply an assiduous president, new to the
job and still oddly unfamiliar with the mores of corporate Japan,
responding to a set of public allegations with more vigour, persistence and honesty than is normal for the head of a Japanese
corporation.
For the foreign press, the whistle-blower epithet was useful shorthand to introduce Woodford as the battered hero of
each new episode in the drama. For domestic Japanese media,
casting Woodford as whistle-blower allowed them to disguise
the fact that one of the greatest scoops of the 21st century had
emerged in an obscure magazine and that the actual whistleblower had trusted none of them with his information.
Soon after reading the Facta article, Woodford learned that
Kikukawa had ordered staff not to show it to the gaijin president. In a magnificently tense scene, with panic rising on both
sides, he confronted Kikukawa and demanded to know how
much of the article was true. The answers were vague. Through
his account, we have a flash of Woodford’s irritability. Mentally,
47
he starts to define the crisis in cultural terms and through the
vagaries of “the Japanese way.” Kikukawa attacks the tone of
Japanese investigative journalism and says that companies need
to be treated with more respect.
By the end of that day Woodford was exhausted by what lay
before him, not as a whistle-blower, but as a responsible corporate officer. “I knew full well that I was the person with whom
the buck stopped,” he writes.
Throughout the narrative, there are important issues on
which Woodford chooses not to dwell for long. Prominent
among them is the question of why he was made president of
Olympus in the first place and what, precisely, Kikukawa and
the board thought they were getting. Some have suggested that
the board mistakenly chose a man they believed they could control, a man whose loyalty to Olympus would restrain him from
doing its name any harm.
Certainly, Woodford had performed strongly as a manager
in Europe, and, in late 2010, the company as a whole was in the
middle of a dismal slide in operating income. Woodford was
offered the job by Kikukawa, who told him: “I haven’t been able
to change this company, but I believe you can.”
The few other Japanese companies who had taken the step
of appointing non-Japanese presidents—Carlos Ghosn at Nissan, Howard Stringer at Sony, Stuart Chambers at Nippon
Sheet Glass—had found their gaijin implants useful. In theory,
the foreign presidents could get on with the grim and culturally awkward business of slashing costs and headcount, while
the boards could shrug and blame the ruthless foreigner for all
the nastiness.
Clearly Woodford believed he was up to the task. Seeing the
promotion as a reward for loyalty in a culture where that was
highly prized, he convinced his Spanish wife, Nuncy, that he
should swap Southend for Tokyo and “change this company for
the better. It’ll only take a few years, and I owe so many people that.”
It is one of many lines in the book that hint strongly at Woodford’s non-expertise in Japan. There was “a game being played,”
he writes, “and nobody was informing me of the rules.” As
Kikukawa and the board confront him first with stonewalling,
then with dirty tricks, then with outright confrontation, Woodford keeps discovering a dark aspect of Japan of which he was
either ignorant or had only an academic understanding. At one
point, at the height of the scandal, he returned to the country
for a showdown. His arrival coincided with the appearance of
a viciously critical piece about him on the Jiji Press newswire.
“So that was how it worked in Japan, one-sided stories based on
‘sources close to’,” he writes, appalled by a totally standard Japanese practice.
The book is compellingly paced and unsettling. But at times,
the story of one of Japan’s most intriguing and sensational scandals almost feels written by a first-time tourist. For an executive
who had spent three decades of his working life in the subsidiary of a Japanese corporation, it is surprising how often he is surprised by Japan.
By late September, still astonished that mainstream Japanese media had not picked-up the Facta story and that institutional investors were not raising hell, Woodford was on the path
for which he would soon become known around the world.
He started writing formal letters to the Olympus board—
there would be six in total—demanding clear explanations of
what had happened and laying out his concerns. None were
48
the outsider
satisfactorily answered. To the fury of Kikukawa and others in
Tokyo, Woodford engaged an accountancy firm to conduct an
impartial investigation of what had been going on. Through
the letters, he formally alerted Olympus’s existing auditors to
the potential problems. The genie, he writes, was well and truly
out: Kikukawa would be held to account after a 10-year reign in
which he had seen himself as the “all controlling, all-powerful
Emperor.”
“I must have turned into Kikukawa’s worst nightmare,” writes
Woodford. “But he knew what he was taking on with me. He only
had himself to blame. I’m organised, I’m structured, and I could
defend myself.”
Even at this adrenal pitch, Woodford’s tone, his urgency and
fears for his personal safety all surged after another Facta article
on 20th September. This time, the focus was on the identity of the
shareholders who had sold their bafflingly expensive stakes in the
three unprofitable “Mickey Mouse” companies to Olympus. If the
thread of ownership were followed, said Facta, the nature of the
companies was uncertain.
It is a measure of his character that Woodford chose to stride
deeper into this maelstrom. His demand was that he be given the
CEO position held by Kikukawa and the executive power he felt
was required to begin the “huge clean-up operation, the purging of all this wrongdoing.” There followed more showdowns in
Tokyo, more occasions for Woodford to allude to Alice in Wonderland, but eventually his demands were met. On 30th September, he became chief executive, a position he would hold for just
a fortnight.
He immediately flexed his new executive muscles, commissioning PwC to review the inexplicable payments of $687m in
“fees” for advice on the Gyrus deal to a company in the Cayman
islands called Axam. As a proportion of the deal, the sum represented the most ever paid as an advisory fee in the history of
investment banking. The PWC report that came back eight days
later described the deal as “questionable” and a “cause for concern.” It was all Woodford needed to pen his next letter to Kikukawa, this time demanding that he step down as chairman.
What followed a few days later was explosive: the moment
when months of turmoil and mistrust finally erupted from inside
the Olympus boardroom and onto the world stage. Even now,
Woodford is unable to write about his final minutes as president
and CEO of Olympus without rage. Summoned for a meeting
at 9am on 14th October, he arrived clutching a statement to the
board of directors that would not, in the event, be read out. It
detailed his concerns with the massive $687m deal fees paid to
Axam for Gyrus, and the $800m paid for the three meaningless
companies.
At 9.07, Kikukawa “waddled in like a duck, wearing a shiny
blue suit.” In Woodford’s ear was the voice of a translator, as the
chairman changed the agenda from discussing concerns over
mergers & acquisitions to “the dismissal of Mr Woodford as President, CEO and representative director.” Woodford waited for the
room to stir. It did not.
“Oddly, I had an overwhelming desire to laugh. I was in a room
full of people—of colleagues, some of whom I had known for over
30 years—who were now operating beyond all the recognisable
codes of conduct, not just in Japan but anywhere in the business
world,” Woodford writes, postulating that Kikukawa was not acting irrationally by sacking him, and was “scared of something far
worse.” He does not elaborate on that.
Minutes later, the first foreign president and CEO of Olympus
was handing his company mobile back to staff. Distressed, fearing for his safety, he found Tokyo instantly sinister. He headed
home to pack, and then to the open spaces of Yoyogi Park. With
Olympus furiously spinning the line that the man it had only just
appointed CEO had been sacked because of his failure to understand Japanese business culture, Woodford was the real story to
western journalists. He fled Japan, convinced that he was leaving enemy territory and terrified that the yakuza would exact a
revenge for the uproar that had just been unleashed.
F
rom that moment on, Woodford’s battle would remain
in the public sphere. He refused almost no interview
and those who followed the scandal will find the Woodford of Exposure very familiar. Kikukawa was forced to
step down in late October but even then Olympus was clinging
to the claim that the purchase of the Mickey Mouse companies
had been legitimate. Woodford was convinced that the Olympus fraud would be investigated more thoroughly than previous
Japanese accounting scandals. He also believed he had gained
sufficient momentum among shareholders to stage a proxy fight
for his re-instatement as CEO with a new board behind him.
Those hopes would be dashed when, once again, he underestimated the passivity of Japanese institutions. The fight was abandoned in January 2012 when he realised that he was not just
fighting with the board of Olympus, but with “the whole Japanese system.”
As for the fraud itself, Woodford’s tenacity would eventually
be rewarded. Under the glare of proper investigation, it emerged
that the dodgy deals had indeed been used as a way of hiding
unrealised losses sustained when previous management of the
company had taken crazy bets on derivatives and structured
products during the bubble. For long-term Japan watchers,
what Olympus had been trying to do in its aftermath was all too
familiar—creating fake or madly inflated deals to “blow away”
those unrealised losses and leave the consolidated accounts
looking clean.
It is often forgotten how traumatic the bursting of the bubble
was for Japan. The 20 years, the so-called “lost decades,” that
have followed have been like an anguished Dr Jekyll attempting to repair the damage after a night of violent, catastrophic
insanity in the persona of Mr Hyde. Olympus’s strategy was
unambiguously criminal and foolhardy. But no country in the
modern era—even America in 1929—has suffered in the same
way as post-bubble Japan.
When Olympus, under pressure from shareholders, set up a
“third party committee” investigation into the affair, Woodford
was not alone in fearing the outcome would be timid. It was not.
The 185-page report described the management of Olympus as
“rotten to the core” and called on the company to “remove its
malignant tumour.” Armed with that judgement from a former
Supreme Court justice, Woodford sought damages from Olympus. He is thought to have settled for around £10m. Some 19
former and current members of Olympus senior management
are being sued by the company itself.
In late September and at the start of their trial, Kikukawa
and two other former Olympus executives, pleaded guilty to
charges of falsifying accounts in an attempt to cover up to $1.7bn
of losses. “The entire responsibility lies with me,” Kikukawa,
who faces up to 10 years in prison, told the Tokyo district court.
In common with so many observers of the Olympus scandal,
Woodford is unable to resist a final chapter that tackles the

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50
the outsider
question of what the incident says about Japan. Like so many
others, he is determined that the affair revealed something
profound about a company and a country everyone thought
they knew.
Despite having been one of only a tiny handful of foreigners to see corporate Japan from the captain’s deck, he is illequipped to make the big call. He is so eager to demonstrate
that this was a “made in Japan” scandal that he does not spend
time analysing whether it was worse or comparable with fraud
elsewhere. Cultural explanations, remarked one analyst at the
height of the scandal, are offered by people who haven’t done
their homework.
Woodford is able to point to the manifold failures of Japanese
institutions—particularly the mainstream media, the accountancy industry and the major pension funds—and repeat existing condemnation of their weaknesses. Japan’s unique system
of cross-shareholdings (two companies holding each other’s
shares) also comes in for stern criticism.
But Woodford and others make another leap from there and
hint that there may be many more Olympus-type scandals lurking beneath the corporate fa�ades of Japan. Beware these theories, says Nicholas Smith, a Japan strategist at the brokerage
CLSA: “There is nothing exotic or uniquely Japanese about the
Olympus tobashi affair. Window-dressing and fraud are as ubiquitous as the grass. The affair is interesting precisely because
financial scandals are so rare in Japan. It does not reveal corporate Japan to be an accounting minefield.”
Although this analysis represents the most optimistic end of
the spectrum, it is most likely closest to the truth. Many Japanese companies encountered similar problems with unrealised
losses in the 1990s and many hoped that the problem could be
hidden. As that became more difficult for some, tobashi methods
were employed in varying scales and complexities. There was,
effectively, a window for companies to come clean: many took
it, some clearly did not. The scale of the Olympus fraud and the
Heath Robinson-style mechanisms used to carry it out strongly
suggest that it was both qualitatively and quantitatively exceptional. There may be a few more scandals to come, but not dozens.
In the final analysis, the Olympus scandal revealed much
about the place Japan has allowed itself to become as it enters
its third post-bubble decade. It shows what happens to a national
psyche and a corporate culture that are only lightly held to
account by the media. The 2011 earthquake which led to the
Fukushima disaster has done something very similar—revealing regulatory and behavioural failures in and around Japan’s
nuclear industry.
When the investigative commission on the Fukushima disaster published its initial findings earlier this year, it concluded
that: “This was a disaster made in Japan. Its fundamental causes
are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture:
our reflexive obedience, our reluctance to question authority;
our devotion to sticking with the programme; our group-mentality; and our insularity.”
It is tempting to apply the same analysis to the Olympus
scandal. But on close inspection, the Fukushima statement is
a piece of deliberately deceptive self-flagellation. The cultural
argument absolves the individual from responsibility.
Through the dysfunction of Japan’s fourth estate, the country has nurtured a belief, put into words by Kikukawa, that companies deserve respect. The real failure of the Japanese media,
the accountants, the Tokyo Stock Exchange and investors is not
that they missed the specific fraud at Olympus—it was, after-all,
a very elaborate cover-up designed to fox precisely those parties. The failure is that a generation of Japanese managers has
learned to live without a constant, gut-churning fear of any of
those sentinels.
In his (or his publisher’s) eagerness to be remembered as the
great whistle-blower, Woodford overlooks a serious weakness of
Japan that could be very simply addressed: its lack of strong
laws to protect whistle-blowers.
There is no doubt that Woodford believed he and his family
were in serious danger. But halfway through the book, Woodford appears to lose interest in the suspected links to organised
crime. He does his readers a favour. Olympus’s large scale fraud
relied upon a complex series of actors operating in a realm of
finance that was, by necessity, legally questionable. Given the
pervasiveness of yakuza activities in Japan, it would not be surprising if the route Olympus took to conceal its losses crossed
the path of organised crime. But that should not allow the Olympus debacle to be written as a crime driven by the yakuza, as
Woodford tacitly admits.
Even if criminal gangs were never involved, or never planned
to permanently silence the combative Brit, Woodford’s courage is not in doubt. But much greater risks were taken by the
original source of the Facta story—the anonymous Olympus
employee who decided that the fraud must be brought to light.
It is at the very end of the book that its most telling line
emerges. Woodford, back in Japan, finally meets the true whistle-blower and finds someone impressively ordinary: “No superheroics. No airs and graces. Just another Olympus employee.”
Woodford, shredded and exhausted by months of public battle,
is confronted by what he must have looked like when he was
first appointed president of Olympus. Now, he is the Southend
Samurai, the maverick who took on Japan. A year earlier, he
had been quite the opposite—Kikukawa’s protégé and a company man through and through.
“When you became president I really wanted to email you to
tell you what was happening. But I didn’t know you weren’t one
of them. I’m sorry,” said the whistle-blower.
“We don’t generally accept entire economies...”
52
Burma’s slow march
For all the excitement about change, the generals are still in charge—and refugees still
marooned in camps
nic dunlop
I
n April 2011, just after reformist president Thein Sein was
sworn in, Win Myint was at his home in Rangoon when
suddenly there was banging on the door. Half asleep, he
opened up and police and military intelligence burst in.
Armed with automatic weapons, they searched for almost
two hours but found nothing. Then, before they left, they threatened Win Myint and his sisters with arrest and imprisonment.
Win Myint had come under suspicion because his brother—
a former soldier in Burma’s army—appeared in a 2010 HBO
film I co-directed, Burma Soldier, where he spoke out against
the military. The brother, Myo Myint, was jailed by the regime
and severely tortured, serving 15 years in prison. He later fled
to Thailand as a refugee and was resettled in the US.
Nic Dunlop is a Bangkok-based photographer and film-maker. His new
book, “Brave New Burma,” will be published in the spring
After threats and harassment, Win Myint and his two sisters fled to the Thailand-Burma border, hoping to be accepted
as political refugees and re-united with their brother in the US.
Having made contact with the US embassy, they went to Umpiem Mai refugee camp, joining more than 140,000 refugees in
the camps of the Thailand-Burma border. More than a year
later, they remain stuck in the camp and without hope.
Today there are nine refugee camps that straddle the illdefined frontier between Thailand and Burma. Most have fled
the fighting between the Burmese army and ethnic insurgents.
Recently, the Burmese government has brokered ceasefires with
most of these armed groups, but the situation remains tense.
Meanwhile, change in Burma continues at a dizzying rate.
After elections in 2010, reforms swept the country. They
included amnesties for hundreds of political prisoners, new
labour laws and the relaxation of press censorship. Nobel
Above, 15,000 soldiers parade in Nay Pyi Daw, the Burmese capital, on Armed Fores Day, 2007
burma’s slow march
Above, refugees on the Thailand-Burma border. More than 140,000 refugees remain in camps located along the border
The Burmese military has “dominated every part of Burma’s
landscape for almost half a century”
53
54
Win Myint and his sisters, pictured in Umpiem Mai refugee camp, having been hounded by the Burmese authorities
laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was released, joining the political mainstream as a member of parliament. In response to the
reforms, most sanctions have been lifted. Washington has normalised relations with Burma faster than it has with any other
country in the past, including post-apartheid South Africa. In
November, President Barack Obama made an historic visit to
Burma, meeting with President Thein Sein and praising him
for the “steps that he has already taken for democratisation.”
For years, Suu Kyi’s stand against the military dictatorship
informed western policy. Imprisoned for 15 years, she became a
global icon. The regime, by contrast, was regularly rebuked for
its human rights record. Now, what were once benchmark positions for dialogue with the dictatorship—such as the unconditional release of all political prisoners—have been abandoned
by the US. Although several hundred prisoners have been
released, there are still more being held.
Despite this, investors and governments, keen to exploit
the new political situation, are rushing in. Burma is strategically placed between India and China and, with its rich natural resources, it is viewed as a final frontier for business. But
the problems that have plagued ordinary people under military rule—poverty, forced labour, land grabs, harassment and
intimidation—continue.
Many refugees on the Thailand-Burma border have been
observing the west’s relationship with the new government with
a mixture of hope and alarm. “They [western governments]
believe in the changes,” one Burmese aid worker told me, “I
believe some of them, but the Burmese army is still very powerful.” After decades of military rule and the world’s longest
running civil war, there is deep distrust among the refugees.
“The Burmese are lying,” another said of the reforms. “They
always lie.”
For years, the camps have been supported by a consortium
of international aid agencies but in recent years financial support has dwindled. In the politically driven world of donor aid,
there is a view that the border refugees are a burden. As an aid
worker said, donors like the EU “have never been sympathetic
to the ethnics.”
And, as the world’s focus shifts, large amounts of foreign money will likely be redirected for reconstruction inside
Burma. But this view, aid workers argue, is short sighted. “If
you want genuine reconciliation,” the same aid worker told me,
“you should be investing in these people, not cutting them off—
they are part of the future.”
The Thai government has a patchy history as a safe haven
for those fleeing persecution or conflict. Thailand never ratified
the UN Refugee Convention and the populations of the border
camps are not considered refugees but illegal migrants with little legal protection. The Thai embassy in London said, “Thailand is not a state party to the convention relating to the status
of refugees and related protocol.” This means that under immigration law, if refugees go outside the camps, they are subject
to arrest, detention and deportation. But, the embassy said in
a statement, “we respond to all cases in the spirit of the convention and human rights and humanitarian principles.” Repatriation “will be on a voluntary basis and taking into consideration
their safety and dignity.”
But there have been instances where refugees have been
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56
forced back, most recently with hundreds of Muslim Rohingya
from Burma, one of the world’s most persecuted minorities.
Although the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) makes regular visits to the camps, the refugees know the UN is powerless to provide protection. When I asked the UNHCR for a guarantee that
refugees will not be forced back, the regional spokesperson could
only give vague assurances. Resettlement, wrote the UNHCR
to me by email, “may be offered to them as a possible solution.”
Chief among obstacles on the road to meaningful change
is the Burmese military, an institution which has dominated
every part of Burma’s landscape for almost half a century.
Despite the euphoria, it is the generals who continue to be the
ultimate arbiters of power in Burma. And it is the military who
threatened Win Myint and his sisters.
For them the reforms have meant little. They have been targeted because their brother has done something few former soldiers dare to do: speak out against the army about the routine
abuse of civilians. “The army thinks that we are distributing
the DVD—they believe that the film is aimed at breaking the
army,” said Win Myint.
Phil Robertson, deputy Asia division director at Human
Rights Watch, sees Myo Myint’s family’s situation as a test case
for resettlement, because there is no guarantee that even in a
reformed Burma the army will not come after them. “It’s quite
clear,” Robertson wrote to me, “the Burma army is a power
unto itself and can do what it wants—especially with relatives
of someone who it views as a traitor.”
According to a report by the US Agency for International
Development, it is not clear what influence Thein Sein actually has over the generals. His calls for an end to the fighting
in Kachin state have been ignored by commanders. The 2008
constitution, which was pushed through by the military regime,
legalised military rule and the army has the legal and constitutional means to reassert martial law at any time. In early 2012,
soldiers burst into a Christian conference in western Chin state.
When an ethnic Chin MP intervened, telling the soldiers they
had permission from the local authorities to hold the meeting—
in accordance with tight controls in place over Christian gatherings—a captain pointed a gun at the MP’s head and screamed,
“We take orders from the North Western Regional Command!”
Although long time supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi’s party,
Win Myint and his sisters are doubtful of her ability to influence the military. “She has no power,” says Win Myint. “She
must organise the army to follow the government, but in reality she can’t do anything.”
Above left, Myo Myint struggles past the Umpiem Mai camp, which
holds 20,000 refugees. Above, Kayah refugees attend a church
service at Noi Soi on the Thailand-Burma border
Over the past year, although the US and the UK have generally condemned violence in western Burma, they have
remained silent on the issue of continued abuse by the armed
forces specifically. “While we have not specifically condemned
the military in Burma,” said Jonathan Farr, senior press officer
at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London, “we
expect the [Burmese] government to do what it can to bring an
end to the violence.”
In the rush to re-engage, the US has even considered inviting
members of Burma’s armed forces to observe the annual Cobra
Gold military exercise between the US and Thailand.
Meanwhile, says Phil Robertson, “the Thai government is
twiddling its thumbs and playing for time, waiting for the day
when it can send all the refugees back to Burma.”
For now, Win Myint and his sister remain in the camps along
with thousands of others. Whatever reforms take place in the
country, they know where the ultimate challenge lies, and that
is with the military itself.
More than a year after arriving, their situation has stagnated. The refugees of the camps remain in limbo, fearful they
will be forced to return. “We don’t know what will happen to
us. We’re afraid we’ll be sent back by force,” Win Myint said.
“According to UNHCR, we won’t be sent to a third country [like
the United States] because we’re over 18 and unmarried,” he
explained. “We have no hope.”
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58
Sovereign debts
As Spain suffers its worst crisis in 40 years, its once beloved monarchy is in turmoil.
Will it survive?
jonathan blitzer
I
n April, King Juan Carlos I of Spain went hunting.
Even at 74 years old, the sprightly king likes to keep
up one of his favourite hobbies. This time he was off
to Botswana. It was a private affair, and meant to stay
under wraps. But after four days in Africa, Juan Carlos
got up at dawn in search of a bathroom, tripped on a stair, and
fell. His hip was broken in three places.
He flew back to Madrid for emergency surgery. As he lay
in hospital, rumours spread in the press about the precise
details of the trip. Queen Sofía, who was on holiday in her
native Greece, did not return immediately to be with her husband. Word also got out that the hunting trip, though not on
the public dime, had cost more than the average Spaniard’s
annual salary.
In an unprecedented move, Juan Carlos issued an apology on national television. Scraping out on crutches to meet
journalists at the hospital, Juan Carlos pronounced eleven
words in Spanish: “I’m really sorry. I made a mistake. It won’t
happen again.” The statement reverberated as much for its
symbolism as for its ambiguity. Was the king crestfallen, or
down-to-earth? And what, exactly, wouldn’t happen again?
Public apologies are almost unheard of among Spanish
politicians and royals. But the king had to say something. At
the nadir of the country’s economic crisis, Juan Carlos was
shooting elephants in Africa. “The contrast was stark,” said
Fernando Jiménez, a professor of politics at the University of
Murcia.
“The king has gone on thousands of hunting trips,” said
Jaime Peñafiel, an 80-year-old monarchy watcher for the
newspaper El Mundo. This is the same man, Peñafiel said,
whom Spaniards have known and accepted for decades.
“The king has always been this way; what has changed is the
country.”
Juan Carlos embodies the history of modern Spain—and
like the country itself, he and his dynasty are now in trouble.
In the late 1970s, after the death of the longstanding dictator General Francisco Franco, the king presided over Spain’s
fledgling democracy. His pivotal role in the transition from
fascism to democracy made the Spanish monarchy into a
treasured national institution, almost beyond criticism. It
became virtually synonymous with the new democratic order.
That view is starting to come under fire. “For the past few
years a growing swathe of the population, particularly young
people and leftists, have been questioning the process of the
transition [to democracy],” said Fernando Jiménez. “The king
personifies [that era] and is the most obvious target of attacks.”
Jonathan Blitzer is a journalist, critic and translator based in Madrid
The country’s current woes have made matters worse. A
quarter of Spaniards are jobless, including half of Spain’s
young people, thousands of homeowners have been evicted,
and politics is stuck in the gridlock of austerity. The economy has buckled under €65bn of tax hikes and spending cuts.
Spain is the eurozone’s fourth largest economy—it teeters at
the continent’s peril. “Never before has there been a crisis so
unexpected, and that’s affected so many people,” said José
Bono, former president of the national congress. Unemployment was nearly as high in the 1980s. But then, according to
historian Santos Juliá, “there was confidence that the country was reconstituting itself to enter the European economic
community. There were expectations for the future.” Europe
is now a world of constricted opportunities.
Now words like estafa (fraud) and corrupción circle over
any mention of the political class. For two years running,
the “Indignados,” young Spaniards who have taken to the
streets to protest against austerity measures and unemployment, have sounded a nonpartisan rebuke: “The politicians do
not represent us.” The king, too, has been absorbed into the
ubiquitous imagery of institutional failure. Juan Carlos has
become a limping symbol of a once-celebrated ruling order
brought low.
The king’s hunting fiasco capped a bizarre week in which
his 13 year-old grandson Felipe Juan Froilán had accidentally
shot himself in the foot when hunting with his father in northern Spain. This one-two blow to the royal family’s credibility
came just months after an even more damaging scandal. In
February the king’s son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, appeared
in court to face questions regarding allegations of misuse of
public funds. Urdangarin’s case is still pending.
The king, like his cohorts across the continent, is constitutionally immune from legal prosecution. But now, even these
age-old prerogatives have become a target. A new satirical
magazine called Mongolia—a punchy, progressive monthly—
titled its April issue: “The King Could Rape You: 100 things
the king can do and you can’t.”
“Urdangarin’s misdeeds are precisely the sort of corruption that the current economic crisis has laid bare,” said Santos Juliá. “What went on during the boom years, before the
present fallout, was the mixing of public and private prerogatives,” he said. “Municipal and regional governments funded
lavish public works with all the easy money floating around,
and networks of corruption sprang up. When news broke
about the [king’s son-in-law], the public perception was: “the
crown was involved in this sort of thing, too?’”
These scandals have come at a delicate time in the history
of Spain’s monarchy—just as the king is preparing to hand
sovereign debts
59
© AFP/Getty Images
Juan Carlos’s story is that of modern Spain. When General Franco, his tutor, died, the king oversaw the transition to democracy
over the reins to his son, Prince Felipe. The Palace has tried
to adapt to a new climate of scrutiny. In February it hired a
former journalist, as opposed to a diplomat, as its new press
director. The king now has a website and a blog. The strategy is to highlight all his work, especially his globetrotting to
promote Spanish businesses. But this also risks overexposing
him. “The king cannot improve his image at this point,” said
Elvira Lindo, a journalist at El País. “He has shored up all the
capital he’ll ever have… The more he goes around to burnish
his image, the more of a mess he’ll inevitably make of it.”
Lindo has a point. In September, Juan Carlos posted
remarks on his website about the brewing showdown over
independence for Catalonia, another row the eurozone crisis
has exacerbated. It was only natural for a symbol of national
unity to admonish the pro-independence camp. But his
remarks were clumsy—even political allies, requesting
sovereign debts
© Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images, © Matthias Oesterle/Demotix/Corbis
60
Left, Juan Carlos’s speech headed off a 1981 coup. Centre, protestors against Catalonian independendence hold up a photo of the king and queen.
anonymity, told me the king had made a mistake.
It would be inconceivable in any other western European
monarchy for missteps like these, however clanking and maladroit, to raise existential questions about the viability of the
institution itself. But in Spain that is precisely what has happened. No one is talking about storming the Zarzuela Palace,
exactly. And yet it is not outlandish to question whether the
country still needs a monarchy. “Spain is not, and never has
been, a country of monarchists,” journalist and documentary
historian Victoria Prego told me, when I went to see her at her
office at El Mundo. “Juan Carlos changed that.”
K
ing Juan Carlos is a member of the Borbón line that
has ruled Spain, on and off, since 1700. In 1931, the
election of the anti-monarchist Second Republic sent
his grandfather, Alfonso XIII, into exile in France.
When civil war broke out five years later, the royal family supported the nationalist rebels fighting to overthrow the republic.
Their victory in 1939 brought General Franco to power. Despite
his promises to reinstate the royals, Franco balked at the prospect of sharing power with a competing figurehead. Years of
demurrals and evasions followed. In 1941, with the family still
marooned abroad, Alfonso XIII died and his son Don Juan de
Borbón took up the cause.
Eventually, Franco made a brazen proposal: that Don Juan
send his 10-year-old son, Juan Carlos, to be educated under
Franco’s tutelage. Franco could then give the impression that
the royal family had finally made peace with his rule as regent,
while Don Juan could entertain the illusion that Franco was
grooming the prince for an eventual transfer of power back to
the Borbóns. The boy “would be a hostage,” wrote the historian Paul Preston. Don Juan consented, and his bewildered
son, who had been living in Switzerland, left for a country in
which he had never before set foot.
In 1969, Franco named Juan Carlos as his heir, designating
him “Prince of Spain,” as opposed to the Borbón title “Prince
of Asturias.” By changing the title, Franco pointedly “broke
with the continuity… of the Borbón line,” according to Preston.
This was not a restoration of the old monarchy. The announcement left Don Juan feeling badly betrayed by his son. Yet Juan
Carlos had little choice; he was trapped between his father and
Franco, whom he regarded as like a grandfather.
In 1977, with Franco dead, there was an awkward abdication
ceremony. It was pure symbolism at that point: Don Juan was
ceding the throne to his son, who had been the de facto king for
two years. They stiffly shook hands and avoided eye contact.
Their discomfort was palpable—each stood rigid by the other’s
side, staring straight ahead.
sovereign debts
61
© Splash News/Corbis
Right, Princess Letizia and Prince Felipe, who faces a difficult inheritance. Though his father is admired, the monarchy is not
By then, Juan Carlos had become a political protagonist in
his own right, and even an unlikely democrat. He had spent the
twilight years of Franco’s life in careful pursuit of allies and a
new image for the monarchy. At the time the international community, as well as the Spanish left, viewed Juan Carlos with
suspicion. The right, meanwhile, harboured doubts about his
fidelity to Franco’s legacy. There were murmurings that this
would be the reign of “Juan Carlos the Brief.”
Yet Juan Carlos and his advisors understood that the route
to institutional longevity lay with democracy. A few years earlier, the Carnation Revolution had toppled the dictatorship in
Portugal, while in Greece, Juan Carlos’s own brother-in-law,
King Constantine, had lost power to the military. By contrast,
Juan Carlos’s handpicked prime minister legalised left wing
parties. Soon after, representatives of five different parties,
spanning the political spectrum, drew up a constitution.
A sense of deep loyalty to the king took root, especially
among those on the left, whom Juan Carlos had brought into
the political process after their persecution under Franco.
Author José García Abad, in his book La Soledad del Rey,
describes it as a “marriage of convenience between the monarchy and democracy.” Even so, Spain is unique in being a country where republicans unflinchingly declare their respect for
the king. Cándido Méndez, the affable secretary general of
Spain’s largest trade union, is a case and point: “I belong to
a generation in which the debate was ‘dictatorship or democracy,’ not ‘republic or monarchy,’” he said.
Still, it took the dramatic events of 1981 to seal the public’s loyalty to King Juan Carlos. On 23rd February, a cadre of
rogue generals launched a coup, during which 186 armed civil
guardsmen stormed the parliament building and held 350 politicians at gunpoint. It was a moment of immense pressure for
the king, who is the head of the armed forces. His former secretary, an erstwhile confidant, was one of the generals behind
the uprising.
Six hours after the initial assault, Juan Carlos appeared on
national television to denounce the militants and defend the
constitution. He spoke for less than two minutes, but his words
resounded as a powerful defence of democratic principles. In a
recent interview, Paul Preston dubbed the king the bombero de
la democracia, the fireman of democracy.
Juan Carlos had always had two sides in the public imagination: first as heir to the dictator and then as democracy’s
saviour. His handling of the coup effectively buried the first
and enshrined the second. Polls from a government research
agency, the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, showed that
throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Spaniards credited
the king, more than anyone else, with steering the country
62
sovereign debts
toward democracy. “No other past politician has ever enjoyed
such high regard,” a former minister of defence told me.
Even after his annus horribilis this year, Juan Carlos remains
a widely admired figure, particularly among an older generation of politicians and pundits. Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, secretary general of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, is a case
in point. Speaking to me in his Madrid office, where a painting
of the socialist party’s founder hangs above his desk, Rubalcaba
said he considered the king a kind of father figure. “He looked
out for me, and for all of us politicians coming up through the
ranks over the years, and now, like an aging parent, he depends
on us too, in a way.”
S
ince hip surgery, in April, Juan Carlos moves cautiously, in a kind of lurching, discombobulated shuffle. His neck and shoulders are stiff and upright, while
his legs jangle out beneath him. But there is no gingerness, only glee, in actor Toni Albà’s impression of the king in
a new musical about the royal family called La Familia Irreal.
In the show, a swarm of protestors, fired up by the current
crisis, storm the Zarzuela Palace, forcing the royal entourage
into hiding. Juan Carlos brings out a red phone to call a cast
of bigwig politicos for help. But the numbers are either out of
service, or else fronts for lovers’ cell phones. The family’s only
recourse is to pile into a tiny apartment and disguise themselves as a normal Spanish family: parents and children under
a single, rickety roof.
The script is peppered with the king’s recent statements: his
hunting apology, the admonition on Catalan independence,
a flubbed line from a trip to India. “Ten years ago this sort of
comedy wouldn’t have been possible,” Jordi Ventura, one of
the play’s writers, told me on the show’s opening night in Barcelona. He recalled an incident involving the satirical magazine El Jueves in 2007, when it had to pay a fine for a cover
depicting the prince and princess having sex. Authorities at
the time removed unsold issues from the news stands.
Five years on, Ventura thinks that the monarchy has
reached an existential tipping point. He attributes it to the
build up of “all the frivolousness of the monarchy: the glossy
magazine coverage, the tabloid-style attention.” The monarchy is now more associated with tawdry headlines than stately
gravitas. “Everything Juan Carlos did to secure his institution’s legitimacy,” Preston says, “was over by 1982.” Now, in the
words of the historian Santos Juliá: “The king’s [celebrated]
symbolic power is not enough anymore to overshadow recent
scandals.” With most Spaniards suffering as the country reels
under the eurozone crisis, old indulgences smack of excess.
Perennial questions about the king’s personal fortune have
resurfaced, as have public calls for more transparency about
the Palace’s finances.
The issue of succession looms large. The accession of Prince
Felipe to the throne will undoubtedly test the durability of
Juan Carlos’s institutional legacy.
“Succession is like transferring a finite amount of water from
one glass to another,” says Charles Powell, an expert on Spain’s
monarchy. “You need to fill up the prince’s glass slowly, so as not
to drain the king’s too soon, and yet the prince’s glass cannot be
seen as half-empty, either.” Other monarchies have stored up
centuries of tradition, a deep fount of inevitability. The Spanish monarchy draws its prestige from the comparatively shallow
well of Juan Carlos’s achievements. Many Spaniards share Cán-
dido Méndez’s assessment: the prince, he told me, is “serious
and well-prepared… But everything the king has done, including how he carries himself, does not transfer to an heir.”
“He is better educated and better groomed than his father,”
says author Javier Cercas. But Juan Carlos had a specific role
to play. The “better qualified” Felipe will inherit a strictly ceremonial post. He has less to do than his father, and a harder
time justifying himself. The institutional challenges now are
cosmetic—this is its blessing and its curse. Felipe wants to symbolise unity at a time when crisis is pulling the country apart.
“In a new musical, a swarm of
protestors, fired up by the
current crisis, storm the
Zarzuela Palace and force the
royal family into hiding”
Many, like Serra and Powell, are not sure the king will
abdicate in his lifetime. When the crown eventually passes to
Felipe, the monarchy may return to favour. “This is a country that respects the dead,” said Serra. “The massive outpouring of support that would follow the king’s passing will put
the public squarely behind Felipe.” Until then, the prince is in
a holding pattern, while the country grapples with the aging
symbolism of his father.
For now at least, judging by reactions to La Familia Irreal
on opening night, the Spanish public are hungry for satire
that channels their anger towards the country’s ruling elites.
Smiles of surprise, somewhere between gasps and laughs, rippled through the audience.
The parting shot drew guffaws. Not sure how else to retake
the throne, Juan Carlos and his family dress up like civil guardsmen and restage the 1981 coup that had cemented his standing.
To set the scene, he and his family encourage the audience to
stand. And once everyone’s up, with a Tarantino-like flourish,
they scream at the theatregoers to “get the fuck down”; this is a
hold-up. The king waves his pistol in the air. But instead of firing into the ceiling, as the original ringleader had, Juan Carlos
drops his arm. Then, he shoots himself in the foot.
“Grandad, tell me one of your old anti-war stories”
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64
Science
Sun block
Chasing the total eclipse across the Pacific Ocean
frank close
W
hat is the most beautiful natural phenomenon that you have ever seen? A brilliant rainbow set against a distant storm, or a blood red
sky just after sunset, perhaps? But anyone who
has experienced the diamond ring effect that
heralds the start of a total solar eclipse will agree it puts all others in the shade.
About once every 18 months, the moon passes directly between
the sun and earth. As the moon moves slowly across the face of
the sun, it casts a shadow on the earth’s surface about 100 miles
in diameter, which is the distance from one horizon to another.
As our planet spins in its daily round, the shadow rushes across
land and sea at about 2000 miles an hour. Those beneath it as it
passes see, for a few minutes, night brought to the dome of the sky
directly overhead. Looking up myopically, you would see stars as
if it were normal night, accompanied by an awesome sight: a circle of profound blackness, a veritable hole in the sky, surrounded
by shimmering white light, like a black sunflower with the most
delicate of silver petals. One watcher described it to me as like
“looking into the valley of death with the lights of heaven far away
calling for me to enter.”
There is a slow build-up to the show, as the moon gradually
covers the sun, which becomes a thin crescent as darkness falls.
Then as totality approaches, excitement mounts. After the thrill
of the eclipse you can’t wait to do it again, but wait you must until
that exquisite alignment of sun, moon and earth comes around
once more, and when it does you must go to the thin arc where
the moon’s shadow momentarily sweeps across a small part of the
globe.
I have just returned from seeing my fifth total eclipse, where I
was reacquainted with people whom I had met on previous occasions: Polynesia in 2009, the Sahara in 2006, Zambia in 2001 and
Cornwall in 1999. I had passed up on an opportunity to go to the
Antarctic or the North Pole, to witness others, but our group
included veterans of nearly a score of eclipses, who had visited
places that they would never otherwise have seen.
For a total eclipse is only visible at special places on earth; a
mere 0.5 per cent of the earth’s surface is totally obscured by the
moon’s shadow for just a few minutes, while the remaining 99.5
per cent sees either a partial eclipse or nothing at all. Stay at
home and you will miss it. No one who hasn’t experienced one can
understand why people are prepared to adventure to the far side
of the earth, by plane and sea, to be there.
Frank Close is a professor of physics at the University of Oxford and author
of “The Infinity Puzzle” (OUP)
This latest eclipse was on 14th November, and lasted for just
three minutes and two seconds. To experience it we had to travel to
grid reference: 26 degrees and 45 minutes south and 166 degrees
46 minutes east, an anonymous spot in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean. Most of the globe is covered by water, and eclipses occur
over sea more often than over land. Having flown halfway around
the globe to Fiji, I joined a hundred other eclipse chasers, who
spent three days on a ship travelling to our rendezvous.
Among our party was Bill Kramer, veteran of some 15 total
eclipses, and one of the foremost calculators and illustrators of
eclipse predictions. A lanky American with a dry sense of humour
who could double for Will Self, he now lives in Jamaica when not
travelling to eclipses. His love affair with them began in 1972, when
his father—who had never seen one himself—took Bill along to
experience one at sea off the coast of Canada. They were so overwhelmed that the next year, Bill’s father took him to Africa with
the same purpose. “I dedicate every one to my father,” he told me,
as he anticipated this latest eclipse with all the excitement of 40
years of experience.
Among Bill’s specialities are predicting the duration of the
eclipse, its path and the nature of the diamond ring, the flash of
light as the sun shines through valleys on the moon’s surface at the
start of totality. This is the most beautiful sight in nature, according to Bill. The sun is about 400 times bigger than the moon, and
is about 400 times further away. This cosmic coincidence means
that the moon can completely obscure the sun if it passes directly
between our nearest star and our line of sight, causing the total
eclipse. But the moon is not a perfect sphere, being covered with
mountains and valleys. Just as it is about to obscure the sun, some
of the moon’s mountains cover the sun’s disc early, while the valleys momentarily still allow the last slivers of sunlight to pass
through. Bill uses charts of the moon’s topography, and knowledge of its orientation, to compute which valleys will play starring roles, and thereby he predicts the position and time span of
the diamond ring.
He can calculate the duration of totality to one tenth of a second. This is important for photographers and those observing the
ghostly solar corona through telescopes. It is painful to look at
the sun without eye protection, but being caught unawares as the
sun reappears at the end of three minutes of darkness, when your
eyes are fully adjusted to the gloom, can literally be blinding. The
actual time of start or finish he calculates to about one second, as
it depends on your location.
According to Bill, the eclipse path was due to cross the northern
tip of Australia and then sweep over the Pacific Ocean, never again
touching land. Trusting the ability of people like Bill to compute,
sun block
65
© Newspix/Rex Features
Total solar eclipse: “like a black sunflower with the most delicate of silver petals”
our ship had travelled for two days and three nights out of Fiji on
the assurance that an eclipse would occur just after 8am local time
at the appointed location.
As the sun rose on that third morning, the view from our deck
was of water extending to the horizon in every direction, seemingly no different than the scores of barren liquid horizons that we
had traversed along the way. There was a clue that this place was
special, however. Having seen nothing but sea and sky for three
days—not even a vapour trail, let alone a ship—about a mile from
us was a yacht, bobbing in the waves. Either this was a remarkable coincidence, or we were not alone in trusting Bill. We learned
later that a cruise liner, with over a thousand passengers, had set
off from Sydney hoping to include the eclipse in its itinerary, but
was delayed and never made the rendezvous. They saw about 98
per cent of the sun obscured—a 98 per cent partial eclipse—interesting certainly, but not totality. Totality is something utterly different. What sights they missed.
Each total eclipse is different. Seeing my first, under cloud
in Cornwall in 1999, was profound; the shadow of the moon was
spread above us, like seeing the film from behind the cinema
screen. Zambia on 21st June, midwinter’s day, was entirely different not least because the sky was clear. On that occasion I realised
the profound effect that an impending eclipse can have on those
who are not well informed. “Who’s arranged this eclipse?” was the
first question I was asked, as soon as the locals in the Lower Zambezi National Park discovered why I was there. “Is this the government doing it to make money?”
I said it was a natural phenomenon. “If it’s natural how do you
know it’s going to happen?” they asked. I explained, and they all
agreed they understood, one of them adding: ”I still don’t believe
it will happen but if it does then I will believe in science.”
And now, 11 years later, trusting in science, I am on a ship in
the anonymity of the south Pacific, hundreds of miles from any
land. About an hour before the main event was due, someone
shouted “first contact,” which is astronomer-speak for “the moon
has begun to cross the sun.” Through binoculars, suitably protected against the glare, a small nick could be seen disturbing
that perfect circle, and it was growing. For me, this is one of those
moments where I feel humbled by the ability of science to predict:
on this day, at this particular time and place, the moon will begin
to be in the direct line of sight to the sun.
In the final minutes before totality, a host of unusual phenomena begin to assault the senses.
As a disc of pure blackness began to slide across the face of the
sun, dusk began to fall. But it was a strange twilight. In Zambia
I had seen turtle doves begin to fly low across the trees and
66
sun block
Left, eclipse chasers shield their eyes using home-made devices; right, “as totality approached, there was an intense sense of anticipation”
vultures coming in to roost, circling lower and lower like at normal
sunset, except that darkness was so sudden the vultures landed in
the dark. For us humans, also, it was strange: the light got dimmer
but the shadows didn’t lengthen. Here at sea, the only apparent
animal life consisted of the expectant humans, gazing in wonder
as the crescent remnant of the sun got thinner and thinner.
As totality approached, there was an intense sense of anticipation. The air cooled, and then, in the west, a wall of darkness, like
a gathering storm, rushed towards us: the moon’s shadow. No wonder the ancients were terrified. In an instant we were enveloped
by the darkness as the last sliver of sun disappeared and, as from
nowhere, a diamond ring flashed around a black hole in the sky,
vibrant, like a living thing.
As I looked around, the night was revealed to be only in a dome
above us, floating on a purple haze, which in turn rested on a 360
degree sunset. It was an awesome sight, as if we were witnessing
the end of the world, its energy having been sucked into the depths
of infinite space above us, a vision that was simultaneously ghastly,
beautiful, supernatural.
You take from a total eclipse what you bring to it. A spiritual
person will see this three minutes of ecstatic wonder as confirming the infinite power of the creator, some deeply religious observers even having visions of iconic images in the shimmering corona
surrounding the black hole in the sky. Others marvel at the ability
of science to predict where and when this singular event will occur.
Historically, it was during total eclipses that it was possible to study the sun’s corona. This ephemeral regime of hot
gases extends out far beyond the visible surface, but is normally
swamped by the intensity of the sunlight. During totality, when
normal light is dimmed, it is the corona that is seen in its full glory.
Electrically charged particles form wispy tendrils, which reveal
the magnetic fields surrounding the sun, much as iron filings
reveal the fields surrounding a magnet in a laboratory demonstration. Nowadays, the corona is studied by experiments in satellites,
which are capable of making artificial eclipses by blotting out the
bright sun with specially designed shades. Even so, it is only during total eclipses that the innermost regions of the corona can be
studied, and this is probably the main scientific interest of total
eclipses today.
The most famous scientific experiment during an eclipse is
that performed by Sir Arthur Eddington in 1919, which proved
Einstein’s general theory of relativity. According to Einstein, light
is deflected by a gravitational field. The sun is the main source
of gravity in the solar system and, if Einstein was correct, should
deflect the light arriving from distant stars. During a total eclipse,
the position of a star adjacent to the sun was found to be moved
slightly from its expected position. The amount was, according
to Eddington, in agreement with Einstein’s theory. Subsequently
people have debated whether Eddington’s experiment was really
as sensitive as believed at the time. It is hard to imagine anyone
having the sangfroid to perform a delicate scientific measurement
during such a singular event.
The sound on a video recording of the eclipse revealed unexpected delights: people gasping and screaming as if partaking
of a mass orgy. Some broke into a form of Jamaican patois that
shouldn’t be repeated in polite society. Bill later described the
experience as, “like going to a Grateful Dead concert but without the drugs.”
Three minutes later—at least, that’s what my watch said, but
the intense experience seemed to have lasted just a few seconds—a
second diamond ring flashed as totality ended, and little red flickers called “Baily’s beads” could be seen running around the limb
of the moon as gaseous prominences on the sun’s surface were
momentarily visible. Daylight returned with a rush. And a booby
flew over our heads. Unknown to us all, there had been birds roosting on the ship, and they had awoken as from a catatonic sleep.
Life returned to normal, Bill Kramer dedicated one more eclipse
to his father, and our plans to see the next one began.
Inspired by Bill’s father, I plan to take my children and grandchildren to see a total eclipse. What more inspiring legacy could
there be? Now let’s see: west Africa 2013, Faroe Islands 2015, USA
2017…
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68
cool mediterranean
Past glories
The glimpse into history offered by Genoa and Ceuta
goes unrecognised too often, says David Abulafia
T
o experience the Mediterranean in
winter is to experience a sea whose
character has changed, along with
that of the places along its shores:
Venice immersed in fog, Vesuvius
lost in the clouds above Naples, and the
Sierra Nevada high above Granada blanketed in snow. Those places are magnets
for tourists at any time; but there are other
places where it is possible to escape from
crowds of visitors and to lose oneself among
the locals. There is a chance to experience the
rhythm of life when a place is not dominated
by tourists.
Here, then, are two places bound
together by their remarkable history. One
is a self-confident community of citizens,
the other a curious remnant from the early
years of European empire—the Italian city
of Genoa, and the Spanish outpost of Ceuta,
located on the northern tip of Morocco.
It is a mystery why Genoa is left off the
list of cities that any visitor to Italy should try
to see. It tends to be treated as the summer
gateway to the very beautiful towns and villages of the Ligurian coast and yet its museums and monuments are reminders of a
scintillating history of trade and empire, in
bitter rivalry with Venice. Rather than great
panoramas across canals, Genoa offers narrow streets that have not altered since the
Middle Ages, where you may see a scurrying
monk who reminds you that you are in the
21st century rather than the 13th only by carrying a plastic bag full of groceries. Instead
of the sense of floating on the sea under wide
cerulean skies, Genoa cascades down the side
of the Ligurian Alps, and there are switchback rides to be had on little funicular trains
that carry you up to the 17th-century fortifications high above the city.
69
cool mediterranean
Cool Mediterranean
© Umberto Fistarol
Try venturing along its coasts before the heat and
the crowds arrive and into the streets of cities
often overlooked by travellers
Genoa possesses a grand street full of
Renaissance palaces, now converted into
a series of museums—the Palazzo Bianco
and the Palazzo Rosso. There, portraits by
van Dyck express the pride of the patriciate of a city known as “la Superba.” But it is
the tightness of space that strikes you. The
medieval cathedral is covered in alternating bands of black and white marble, but is
so crowded with buildings that it is difficult
to stand back and get a sense of its scale.
Once inside, the treasury mimics the sense
of secrecy the city likes to convey. In a dark
cavern, you can see the Roman bowl made of
green glass that was brought from the Holy
Land by Genoese crusaders over 900 years
ago. They were convinced it was the dish
used at the Last Supper. And this is one of
Genoa’s most appealing features: you never
know what surprise awaits you around a corner. It may be the Galleria Nazionale, whose
treasures include a portrait of Christ by the
pioneering Renaissance painter Antonello da
Messina. Or the treat may take the form of a
bowl of trenette al pesto in a small trattoria,
which bears no relation to the potted pesto
on supermarket shelves.
In its medieval heyday, Genoese merchants traded right across the Mediterranean, travelling to and beyond the great port,
as it then was, of Ceuta, now an autonomous
Spanish city on the north coast of Africa,
bordering Morocco. Enclaves and anomalies have a special appeal, and the Straits of
Gibraltar contain two: one, Gibraltar itself,
is popular and accessible, while Ceuta is less
easy to reach and many of the people you see
on the fast boat from Algeciras simply use
The old mariners’ neighbourhood of
Boccadasse in Genoa
it as a gateway into Morocco. Ceuta is built
on a spit of land so narrow that you can see
both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean to
left and right as you walk up the main street.
Reminders of its complex past are everywhere. Its great trading history ended when
Prince Henry the Navigator helped capture
the city for Portugal in 1415, and the Portuguese walls still impress. The Arab baths can
(in theory at least) still be visited, though the
opening times seem to be a fantasy. As you
approach the intimate cathedral of the Virgin of Africa, there are street signs you will
not see in other Spanish cities, except pointing to historical monuments: Catedral, Sinagoga, Mesquita—the Ceutans take great
70
cool mediterranean
pride in the free exercise of the three Abrahamic faiths by citizens of the city.
Modern Ceuta has its attractions: the
former casino is one of Spain’s most striking
art deco buildings, decorated with great
sculptured dragons, and a different, darker
Spain can be rediscovered in the Museum of
the Spanish Foreign Legion, adorned with
the motto “Legionaries to fight, legionaries
to die.” Or there is a higgledy-piggledy
historical museum, with beams from the
mosques of medieval Ceuta, and Roman and
Arab pots and anchors, serving as a reminder
that this was once a city choc-a-bloc with
warehouses and madrasas.
Both Genoa and Ceuta are places that
speak of lost glories. Genoa is now a secondrank Italian city and Ceuta seeks an identity,
trying to promote a cosmopolitan culture
without sacrificing its belief in its Spanish
identity.
David Abulafia is professor of Mediterranean
history at the University of Cambridge
© SprengelMuseum Hannover
The moat surrounding the defensive city
walls of Ceuta
SPAIN
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
Ceuta
MOROCCO
Halcyon days
Try visiting Greece when it’s freezing,
says Bettany Hughes
S
ummer is not eternal. I am irrationally irritated by those who cast
the Mediterranean in a balmy,
Augustan perma-glow. Think
instead of Socrates standing with
his bare feet, dreaming up solutions to the
human problem while ice creeps along the
shoreline; or Plutarch’s reference to a distant land where the cold is so intense words
freeze as they are spoken, and thaw in the
spring. Just as Virgil prays for sunny winters in his Georgics, the winter months in this
part of the world can have their own dangerously glittering beauty. Istanbul in the snow
is a wonder. The extravagant pleasures on
show in the Topkapi Palace Museum—the
sultan’s robes thickly lined with squirrel fur,
mobile foot-braziers to keep out a cold that
whips relentlessly off the Bosphorus—presage modern-day sultanic delights. Hot-oil
massages in the Hotel Les Ottomans, roaring fires in the Kempinski’s winter palace.
Perhaps this season is best experienced
in the extremes: in the hearts of cities and
deep in the countryside. One tip is to select
those spots frequented by canny, local vis-
itors to avoid that sad, out of season dip.
The unspoilt Cycladic island of Siphnos is
a good bet. Over 85 per cent of Siphnian
tourism is home grown—Hellenic old-timers who expect their holiday experiences to
be authentic. The winter ferry from Athens takes six hours and is crammed with
old ladies clutching caged canaries. Visit in
winter or spring and you will find around
“The ancient pathways that
used to connect cities,
sanctuaries and temples in
the classical and Byzantine
worlds are being restored”
3000 islanders, as opposed to 40,000 holiday-makers in summer, so the experience
can be wonderfully reminiscent of a Gerald
Durrell novel. Every Saturday afternoon
the men of the island still mount bikes,
mopeds and donkeys to take terracotta
pots of chickpea soup to the island’s roaring
communal ovens, white-hot with burning
brushwood and maquis herbs, to be roasted
overnight. This is real fruit of the soil stuff,
local chickpeas, thyme and onions, with
rainwater as stock. Most households will
offer up tumblers of what they call “sun
wine” to wash the broth down—sun-roasted
grapes (raisins to you and me) generating
16 per cent proof alcohol. Potent stuff; I
would defy anyone to feel chilly after a couple of glasses. Votsaris, the only official viticulturist on the island, has some unofficial
“friends and family” casks of sun wine in
the back of the winery.
Just outside the Votsaris vineyard are
lovingly renovated dry-stone walls and
ancient paths. Proving that not all Greeks
are tax-dodging profligates, Elliniki
Etairia, an Athens-based NGO, is quietly
working to save some of the most distinctive features of the Hellenic landscape and
heritage. In an act of sheer brilliance they
are restoring many of the ancient pathways
that connected cities, sanctuaries and temples in the classical and Byzantine worlds.
Too hot to comfortably attempt in August,
October to March is the perfect time to
strike out along these once-neglected
tracks. Spick and span Siphnos was dubbed
the “Switzerland of Greece” back in the
18th century; cheerful locals, like the wallbuilding, fiddle-playing Bairamis who
celebrate their work by breaking into spontaneous rhyming couplets, are helping to
ensure the island still deserves its epithet.
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72
The Peloponnese is worth exploring during the winter months, before it fills up with tourists
Another example of local renovation can
be found on the Greek mainland, deep in the
Peloponnese where the idyllic guesthouse
Aldemar Epohes hides in one of Greece’s few
chestnut forests. Travelling here to visit the
birthplace of Zeus, my family and I found
ourselves in a bucolic heaven. In the surrounding, tiny village of Ambeliona there
are no notes of modernity; just birdsong,
children playing and church bells. Shaded
by fig trees and fed by spring water, a husband and wife team cooked us five-course,
fresh-as-a-daisy meals. The village’s resident (and extremely shy) Bouzouki player
coloured the crisp afternoons with summer
sound. We were the only visitors and were
welcomed as long-lost relatives.
The phrase “halcyon days” is cast
around willy-nilly. The name actually
comes from a Greek legend: the two weeks
Marseille: a box of light
A frenzy of old glory and noise—give the 2013
Capital of Culture a chance, says John Gimlette
W
hen I told French friends I
was going to Marseille to
research a book, they were
horrified. They said the only
things the Marseillais have
ever been famous for are football (at which
they cheat), soap (which they never use)
and the national anthem (which is actually
Alsatian). These days, I was told, almost all
of them are either on benefits or heroin, or
some sort of jihad.
“Be careful,” said one Parisian. “Marseille is like a bomb.”
So, from the French perspective, it’s
an odd choice as the European Capital of
Culture for 2013. There’s never been much
encouragement to go there. For years, the
cheap airlines stayed away (and Eurostar
still stops just short of the city). In guidebooks, it was a place to be endured, not
enjoyed. Until recently, only one hotel
had more than three stars and there were
no proper museums, boutiques, Disneylands or intelligible works of art. This
was strange, considering that Marseille is
Europe’s third biggest port, and the oldest
and most spacious city in France.
And now? Arriving in Marseille is like
falling through several layers of history and
ending up just short of the present. From
a distance, the knobbly, desiccated mountains of the Côte d’Azur look much as they
did to the Phocaeans, who founded “Massalia” in 600BC. Closer in, it looks more
in winter when Aeolus, the god of the wind,
holds back the storms so a female kingfisher (once his daughter, Alcyone) can nest
safely at sea. If the Halcyon days of a Mediterranean winter, god-blessed, were good
enough for sublime kingfishers they should
certainly have something to offer us all.
Bettany Hughes is a historian, travel writer and
the author of “The Hemlock Cup” (Vintage) .
Her website is www.bettanyhughes.co.uk
Roman: foothills covered in pantiles and
villas. Millennia pass, and you’re soon in
among the great 16th-century forts. The
villas meanwhile have turned into tenements, and the harbour is now a vast rectangular basin.
This basin, Le Vieux Port, is still the
focal point of the city. It’s like a room full
of sea or an enormous box of light, packed
with thousands of yachts. During my stay,
I spent hours on this great limestone rim.
It’s a cacophony of fish and sirens, whistles,
drunks, Ferraris, sunlight and raï. Each day
would begin with a fish market—as it has
for the past 26 centuries—and then people would drift down, out of the hills, just
to gather on the edge of their magnificent,
liquid piazza.
Way above is a basilica, Notre Dame de
la Garde. It’s slim and candy-striped, and,
on the top, is a vast golden Virgin, carrying
a baby the size of a small plump elephant. If
the Virgin were ever to lose her battle with
gravity, she’d crash her way through several
neighbourhoods before blocking off the
Passage along the Irrawaddy
A journey from Mandalay to Yangon aboard the RV Thurgau Exotic II
The ‘Golden Land’ of Burma, (renamed Myanmar since 1989) is today the most original tourist destination in South East Asia. There is no other Asian country
with such a vast and varied range of cultural sites, including of course the 3000 standing monuments at Bagan. With its ancient civilisation, its Buddhist culture,
its traditional life-style, golden pagodas and sublime hospitality, it offers a stark contrast to major cities, to Western expectations and to mass tourism. Perhaps
the most pleasurable way to see Myanmar, understand its history and feel its pulses is to explore by river. River life dominates the country and still to this day
forms the main system of transportation, irrigation and food source. It is then fitting that we should explore this beautiful country by cruising along the
Irrawaddy. Our cruise combines scenic interest with a study of local life and culture. For our voyage we are delighted to be working with the newly built,
28-passenger Thurgau Exotic II which offers the ambience of a bygone era combined with modern elegance.
The Itinerary in brief
Day 1 - London Heathrow to Yangon. Fly by scheduled indirect flight.
Day 2 - Yangon. Arrive and transfer to your hotel for an overnight stay.
Day 3 - Yangon to Mandalay. Transfer to the domestic airport and fly to
Mandalay. Embark the RV Thurgau Exotic II.
Day 4 - Mandalay & Amarapura. This morning there will be a city tour
of Mandalay, the former Royal capital of Burma.
Day 5 - Mandalay & Mingun. Afternoon visit to the famous Mingun
Paya, believed to be the biggest pagoda in the world.
Day 6 - Sagaing & Ava. Join the excursion to the beautiful Sagaing
Hills. We will visit the 14th century Sun-U-Ponnya-Shin pagoda on the
hilltop and stop at a nunnery. Relax this afternoon as we sail.
Day 7 - Yandabo. Enjoy a morning walk through the picturesque village
of Yandabo with its many family-run potteries.
Day 8 - Bagan. Bagan is the former Royal historical capital with more
than 3000 Buddhist shrines. We will spend the morning visiting some of
the most important temples and pagodas.
Day 9 - Tan Gyi Taung & Sale. Arrive at Tan-Gyi Taung in the morning
and drive up the hill by jeep to enjoy the view. In the afternoon explore
the little town of Sale.
Day 10 - Magwe. Relax this morning as we sail downstream. This
afternoon join the excursion to the surrounding area of Magwe.
Day 11 - Magwe & Minhla. This morning there will be a city
tour by local rickshaw, with a visit to a large local market and a
blacksmith. Continue to the fortress of Minhla on foot.
Day 12 - Thayet Myo. Enjoy a sightseeing tour by horse cart
around the town and market.
Day 13 - Pyay & Shwe Daung. Enjoy a morning excursion to Pyay,
once an important trade town on the Irrawaddy River. Continue to
the famous Shwesan-Daw pagoda.
Day 14 - Myan Aung. Relax onboard this morning and enjoy a lecture
as we continue sailing. Afternoon walk in the small town of Myan Aung.
Day 15 - Danupyu & Ma U Bin. This morning there will be an excursion
to Danupyu by local rickshaw with a visit to a century-old monastery with
a beautiful botanical garden and a traditional cigar factory.
Day 16 - Irrawaddy Delta & Yangon. Early this morning we will sail
to the confluence of the Irrawaddy and Yangon Rivers then continue
through the Twante Canal to Yangon. Enjoy a city tour of Yangon.
Day 17 - Yangon to London. Today we continue our exploration of
Yangon. After lunch transfer to the airport for the return scheduled
indirect flight to London.
Day 18 - London Heathrow. Morning arrival.
Departures dates and prices per person
5th*, 18th November; 16th December 2013; 13th January; 10th February; 10th March 2014
Prices per person based on double occupancy start from £4995 for a main deck cabin. Single cabins from £5995.
Price Includes: Economy class scheduled air travel, 14 nights aboard RV Thurgau Exotic II on full board with Cruise Director, one night hotel accommodation in Yangon on
bed and breakfast basis (for Mandalay to Yangon direction only), shore excursions with local English speaking guides, entrance fees, transfers, port taxes, UK departure tax.
NB. The itinerary shown is for guidance only and is subject to change depending on local conditions. Travel insurance, visa, gratuities are not included in the price.
*Operates in the reverse direction.
Call us today on 020 7752 0000 for your copy of our brochure.
Alternatively view or request online at www.noble-caledonia.co.uk
6115 Noble Cal Prospect Mag FP.indd 1
26/11/2012 12:40
cool mediterranean
© superstock
74
The view from Notre Dame de la Garde, where people bring gifts to the Virgin to thank her for saving their lives
port. People bring her gifts for saving their
life, and, amongst this catastrophe kitsch,
there are dented helmets, lifebuoys, false
limbs, and, for some reason, Didier Drogba’s number 11 football shirt.
From the port, the main street looks like
the gateway to France; an enormous portal of columns and voluptuous nymphs. La
Canebière, wrote Conrad, is “a street leading into the unknown.” Two blocks up, however, the glory falters. The stockbrokers
have gone and the nymphs look as if they’d
just clambered out of the coal. Meanwhile,
the Hôtel Louvre et Paix has become a
rather Soviet department store. According
to a plaque, Mark Twain once stayed here,
amongst the socks and pants.
The Marseillais don’t seem to mind the
fall from grace, and seek their escape in
food. Even in the roughest corner of the
city you can find something exquisite to
eat. Forget bouillabaisse (an expensive local
wheeze, foisted on tourists). No, Marseille’s
gift is simplicity, that by-product of sunlight and poverty. It was Elizabeth David
who brought it back to Britain. It was
called “Mediterranean cuisine” but most of
it she found here, in the soot. Perhaps my
favourite eatery is the crumbling Pizzaria
Etienne, over in Le Panier.
When I first climbed up to Le Panier
(“The Basket”), I had a sudden feeling that—like the proverbial cat—curiosity would eventually get the better of me,
and here was a prowl too far. Once home to
Napoleon and Casanova, this quarter has
worked hard to earn its name: it’s a dense
lattice of lanes, criss-crossed with rat-runs
leading deeper into the dark. It was, however,
never as satanic as I’d imagined. Everything
had a pastel glow and the shops sold soap
and scented paper. Although it was still defiantly foxy in parts, tales of depravity had, it
seemed, lingered long into gentrification.
Another place the city will flaunt next
year is Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse. Built
between 1946 and 1952, it rises from the
clutter like a concrete tooth. Its streets
in the sky were supposed to have been “a
machine for living.” Architects may worship
it, but I don’t. It reminds me of too many
places that it’s inspired; the sink estates of
the 1960s, slums from here to Bombay, and
the gigantic dentistry of Soviet Europe. The
locals, I discovered, called it La Maison du
Fada, or The House of the Raving Mad.
For all its faults, by the end of my stay,
Marseille had become one of my favourite cities. It horrified me how much I felt
at ease amongst its cheery, foul-mouthed,
fish-faced citizens, and it was impossible
not to enjoy their world, however brash and
cheap. I loved the hand-painted cars, the
streets of lime trees, the voluptuous plasterwork, the elaborate displays of dogs, and
the flea-markets with all their war-clubs
and clogs. I loved, too, the way that, during
the day, the city worked itself into a frenzy
of heat and litter, and then each morning
opened the fire-hydrants and washed it all
away. So there it is: my unhealthy affection
for Marseille.
John Gimlette is winner of the 2012 Dolman
Travel Book Prize for “Wild Coast: Travels on
South America’s Untamed Edge” (Profile)
“Well yeah, laughter IS the best medicine—but
Xanax is a very close second”
76
cool mediterranean
Cultural cross-stitch
Wendell Steavenson wanders through Jerusalem
before the crowds pour in
“Oh the best time to come to Jerusalem
is in February or March! There are no
tourists and the weather is cool. Yes, well
it rains a bit in the winter as well, but this
is my favourite time in the city.”
Tour guide, overheard outside the Holy Sepulchre
© Hanan Isachar/CORBIS
I decided to enlist two good friends to take a
walk with me through Jerusalem.
“What would you advise visitors to see?”
I asked them.
Gali Tibbon, a photographer, shook out
her long black hair and a tumble of silver
bangles jangled along her arm. “Well if they
are coming in the winter it will be raining.”
Gali always dresses only in black with silver
jewellery; serried silver earrings twinkled all
along the edges of her ears. “So they should
probably go to the Israel Museum first.”
Canaanite stone lions, Roman bronze sculptures, Bukharan-Jewish embroidered wedding dresses, medieval illuminated Torahs,
impressionist paintings and the Dead Sea
Scrolls. Gali’s favourite piece is a photograph, by the Israeli artist Adi Nes, Israeli
Defence Forces in their barracks seated
behind a long trestle table in the exact postures of Jesus and his disciples in Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper. “It touches a
lot of subjects about Israeli society,” she
explained. “The juxtaposition of the Jewish and the Christian, the intimacy of mili-
tary life. It evokes a sense of sacrifice and of
portent.”
Gali is sardonic and cynical. Benji Balint, once a devout yeshiva student who now
teaches the history of the Enlightenment at
a Palestinian university in the West Bank,
represents a more mystical side of the city.
We entered the Old City through Jaffa
Gate. “I would tell visitors to walk the
walls,” said Benji, looking up at Crusader
ramparts. “You get a sense of the heavy layers of history.” The three of us jagged away
from the crowded souks with their miniature brass menorahs next to Free Palestine
flags. Benji played tour guide, pointing out
the gay Armenian barbershop as purplerobed cardinals swept out of an anonymous
doorway. We managed to talk our way into
part of the labyrinth hidden behind walls;
the Greek Orthodox compound, a city
within a city. Stone alleys ran under intersecting archways, turned into roofs and
bridges or ended in flights of stone steps cut
between ancient walls.
We found ourselves on a roof, looking
down on the tourists gathered in a courtyard in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We could see over the neighbouring
wall into the garden of the Mosque of Omar,
the oldest mosque in Jerusalem, and beyond
to the golden Dome of the Rock, the pale
white curve of the Hurva synagogue recently
Ethiopian Orthodox Easter celebrations at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
rebuilt after it was destroyed in 1948 and
even as far as the Mount of Olives. Jerusalem
is terraced tesselation; every language and
alphabet; the eye of the three great Abrahamic faiths.
“On the roofs you feel closer to God,”
said Gali, disavowing her secularism for a
moment.
Gali has spent long hours taking photographs in the Holy Sepulchre. “It’s like a
kaleidoscope,” she says. The basilica complex is shared between the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox,
Roman Catholics, Egyptian Copts and Ethiopian Copts. To prevent dispute the keys
to the front door have been entrusted to
the guardship of the same Arab family for
almost a thousand years. “It’s chaotic, you
get lost, you can forget about the real world,”
said Gali. Below us we could see a procession
of Franciscan monks in their plain brown
robes tied with cord.
“You see that ladder there?” Benji
pointed out an ordinary set of wooden rungs.
“It’s the famous ‘immovable ladder.’ You can
see it in photographs from 100 years ago. No
one can move it because the ledge belongs
to one of the denominations and the window
it leads to belongs to another and there’s an
ancient argument between the two.”
We continued our tour, weaving through
the Old City, past Zalatimo’s where they
make the thinnest filo pastry you have ever
seen and then fold it into envelopes of curd
cheese or ground walnuts mixed with cinnamon; past the photoshop of three generations of Armenian photographers where you
can buy prints of Jerusalem from the days of
the British mandate; through its mazy Muslim markets and butchers’ lane with piles
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78
of tripe and tongues. As all Jerusalemites do,
Gali and Benji argued over the best place to
eat houmous—Lina’s or Abu Shukri or the
place they didn’t want me to reveal where
Benji once saw the Jerusalem chief of police
eating with his entourage after the Ceremony of Fire in the Holy Sepulchre on the
Friday before Easter.
“Oh and my favourite place for coffee,”
said Benji, “is in the Cotton Souk, a covered
market that leads to the Temple Mount and
the Dome of the Rock. You can sit on stools
cool mediterranean
and drink little cups of thick Turkish coffee
and watch the people go past.”
At the end of Habad Street we climbed a
blue metal set of steps and found ourselves
on an expanse of roof, a stretch of no-man’sland between the Muslim and Jewish quarters. In one of the lanes, an Orthodox Jew
was coming back from prayers at the Western Wall, with his fringed prayer shawl over
his shoulders as Arab boys bicycled past
screeching with glee. In the foreground
there was a fenced roof terrace overlooked
Mediterranean wines
The region is producing some of the most remarkable and
undiscovered wines in the world, says Julia van der Vink
W
hether it was first in Turkey, Georgia or Armenia,
the area to the east of the
Mediterranean is the birthplace of wine. Winemaking
here stretches back throughout ancient civilisation, from the Mesopotamians to the
Phoenicians.
While many wines from the wider Mediterranean region fell into obscurity over the
last century—a result of image problems,
caused by generally unremarkable winemaking—the area has been in the throes of
a high renaissance during the past 25 years.
Small producers in Sicily, Santorini, and Lebanon are currently making some of the most
expressive and nuanced wines in the world.
And they are set on representing their roots.
One of the most exciting new-old wine
regions is Sicily’s Mount Etna, where ancient
vines over 100 years old crouch precariously along the steep slopes and foothills of
Europe’s highest active volcano. The wines
from Mount Etna are some of Italy’s most
unique, as each small plot has its own distinct terroir defined by the specific elevation,
exposure and lava in the soil. The dominant
grape variety is the lean and graceful nerello
mascalese, which produces delicately spiced
wines with a certain noble elegance that has
seen Etna Rosso coined “the burgundy of the
Mediterranean.”
Ten years ago, there were eight wine producers in Etna; now there are more than 60.
The region’s winemaking revolution began
around 2000, when producers like Benanti,
Biondi, Foti and Cornelissen pushed to preserve and revive its ancient vineyards. Cornelissen’s wines are the most exotic example
of Etna’s unique terroirs. With a traditionalist attitude to winemaking, the grapes
are grown with minimal human intervention, and the wine is fermented in terracotta
amphorae and buried underground, using
the Etruscan technique. While Cornelissen’s
grand cru wine Magma may ring out your
pockets, at about £95 a bottle, his entrylevel wine Contadino is a brilliant introduction to old school Etna funk. Be warned, his
wines are not for everyone. For tamer examples of Etna Rosso, look for Vini Biondi Outis
Nessuno 2007, Murgo Etna Rosso 2009 and
Calabretta Etna Rosso 2002.
Within the Mediterranean, the Greek
island of Santorini may have one of the
richest histories of winemaking, boasting
a small collection of sandy vineyards that
have been continuously cultivated for 3,500
years. While it has taken years for Santorini
to shake its singular reputation for Retsina
and Vinsanto, the island is finally becoming known for its full-bodied dry whites from
the ancient and indigenous assyrtiko grape,
which are rapidly gaining international prestige as some of the finest white wines in the
world. The best are characterised by bracing
acidity, intense minerality and citrus notes.
Founded in 1991, Domaine Sigalas was a
pioneer of organic viticulture on Santorini,
and produces some of the finest white wines
on the island. The Sigalas “Santorini” Assyr-
Picking grapes at the Cornelissen winery, Etna
by a guard booth where a Jewish yeshiva
had been set up in the Muslim quarter. A
Talmud student stretched out flat with his
face to the sky and his black trilby perched
on his nose. “There are many junctions,”
said Benji. “This is one of them. Too many
tourists come here and see the immobile
historical sites but the best appreciation of
Jerusalem is to be had in the small interstices between the buildings.”
Wendell Steavenson is an associate editor of
Prospect
tiko 2010 is both excellent and affordable
with notes of lemon zest, sea salt, and wet
stones. The Hatzidakis Winery was founded
even more recently, by a husband and wife
duo dedicated to organic farming and noninterventionist, traditional winemaking.
Showing incredible complexity and soul,
look for the lean Hatzidakis “Santorini”
Assyrtiko 2011, or the riper, oak-aged Hatzidakis Nikteri Assyrtiko 2009.
Some of the finest wines in the Mediterranean hail from the drink’s spiritual homeland: the Bekaa Valley, in Lebanon, where
winemaking has been ongoing for over five
millennia. Château Musar remains the most
exceptional producer in Lebanon, three decades after first putting Lebanese wine on
the map. Located in an 18th-century castle
in Ghazir, 15 miles from Beirut, Musar has
produced every one of the last 53 vintages,
despite instability and civil war—except
1976, and 1984, when battle among the vines
forced a halt in production.
Serge Hochar produces some of the most
brilliantly honest and idiosyncratic wines in
the world. The reds are Bordelais in structure, comprised of a blend of cabernet sauvignon, cinsault and carignan. Look for the
Château Musar, from any vintage, really.
The whites are blends of the indigenous obaideh and merwah grapes, similar to chardonnay and sémillon respectively. They produce
complex, savoury and robust white wines
that are both substantial enough for winter
and lively enough for spring.
The wines from the Mediterranean offer
unbeatable diversity, idiosyncrasy and allusion to ancient tradition. In the last two
decades, regions that had been entirely overlooked have started producing some of the
most exciting wines in the world, and at some
of the greatest prices. The best new-old wines
from the Mediterranean are not trying to be
anything other than what they are. They are
not as universally lovable as Bordeaux or
Burgundy: they have crooked teeth, narrow
shoulders and sharp elbows. But that is why
you will love them.
Julia van der Vink is a sommelier and wine
writer based in Washington, DC
Wines mentioned here cost £10 to £30, except
Cornelissen’s Magma. For information on stockists, visit www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
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80
Arts & books
In search of Oppenheimer 80
Dada in Britain 83
Alice Munro’s uneasy fiction 86
The weirdness of opera 88
The month in books 90
The man who wasn’t there
Ray Monk’s biography of Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, is a heroic failure, says Will Self
Inside the Centre: The Life of J Robert
Oppenheimer
by Ray Monk (Jonathan Cape, £30)
On 6th August 1945, the Enola Gay, a B29
Superfortress—christened, some might feel
a little grotesquely, after its pilot Colonel
Paul Tibbets’s mother—dropped the world’s
first offensive atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” from an altitude of 32,000 feet on
the Japanese city of Hiroshima. This single
act of aggression resulted in the deaths of
more than 100,000 Japanese. Concentrated
into the 120 by 28 inches of the bomb were
not simply 16 kilotons of explosive yield, but
what stands as the most concerted effort
of human industrial muscle and technical
innovation the world has ever seen.
The $2bn (equivalent to $25.8bn today)
Manhattan Project, which resulted in the
production of the Hiroshima bomb—and
of “Fat Man” which was dropped on Nagasaki three days later—was calculated by
its most thoroughgoing historian, Richard Rhodes, to have been an undertaking equivalent to building the entire US
car industry, as it then was, in a mere two
years. The overall organisational supremo
was an unimpeachable US Army Corps of
Engineers brass neck, Major General Leslie Groves. But the man who orchestrated
the significant advances in the theoretical
knowledge of physics, and their application
to the technology of mass destruction, was
a thin, nervous, chain-smoking aesthete
with pronounced communist sympathies.
The rise and fall of Robert Oppenheimer
stands as emblematic of the loss of American innocence itself, for, as Ray Monk is at
great and exhaustive pains to point out in
his lengthy—and frankly exhausting—biography of Oppenheimer, the architect of the
Manhattan Project was first and foremost
an American patriot.
Oppenheimer, the son of wealthy German-Jewish immigrants, had a pampered
upbringing on the upper west side of Manhattan; he was a physics wunderkind—but
also a polymath—who went on to study at
Harvard, then Cambridge, and Gottingen under Max Born. By his early 20s he
had entered the orbit of the giants of theoretical physics—Born, Niels Bohr, Paul
Dirac, Werner Heisenberg et al—whose
momentous discoveries in the 1920s and
30s had resulted in the new field of quantum mechanics. Great things were expected
of Oppenheimer as well, but while he
made some contributions to the field, he is
remembered as “the father of the atomic
bomb”; a charismatic organiser of others’
genius, and an ambitious—arrogant, even—
political operator, who, as he laboured to
win the war for his beloved homeland, was
under systematic surveillance by the security apparatus of his own project. He had
also been wiretapped by the FBI in the late
1930s, and it was his activities during this
period—when he was a hugely influential
and popular professor at Berkeley—that
eventually proved to be his undoing. He was
stripped of his government security clearance in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism,
after a humiliating and protracted tribunal.
There have been several biographies
of Oppenheimer, as well as collections of
his writings. In his rather defensive introduction Ray Monk makes the case for his
being more germane, because his aim is to
“understand Oppenheimer”; furthermore,
if one wishes to do this, “one must attempt
to understand his contributions to science.” Labouring as Monk was under the
oppressive weight of Kai Bird and Martin
J Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy
of J Robert Oppenheimer, which appeared in
2005—perhaps halfway through the writing
of Inside the Centre—he attempts to distance
himself from their “exhaustive detail” when
it comes to Oppenheimer’s personal life
and political activities. “One would never
know,” Monk says, “from reading Bird and
Sherwin’s book how much of Oppenheimer’s time and intellectual energy was taken
up with thinking about mesons… The word
‘meson’ is not even in the index.”
This is indeed true—but perhaps more
pertinent is that the solution to the problem of mesons was not a function of all the
time and intellectual energy that Oppenheimer spent thinking about them. Indeed,
the solution—when it came in 1957—didn’t
even originate with any of Oppenheimer’s pre-war crop of Berkeley and Caltech
graduate students, but from Tsung-Dao
Lee and Chen Ning Yang, Chinese-born
physicists who studied, respectively, under
Enrico Fermi and Oppenheimer’s nemesis, Edward Teller (the bullish, Hungarian-born “father to the H bomb”). It’s true
that Oppenheimer had a Pandarus-like
role—bringing them together in his capacity as a director of Princeton’s Institute of
Advanced Study—but no one, including
Monk, tries to pretend that his own theoretical work was substantive.
The one area in which Oppenheimer, as
theoretician, can claim to have had a lasting
impact on our conception of the physical
world is in his 1939 paper “On Continued
Gravitational Contraction,” co-authored
with his student Harland Snyder. In this
they hypothesised the existence of what,
decades later, came to be known as “black
holes.” For want of empirical testability, the
paper languished, seen as a mathematical
curiosity—but Oppenheimer also showed
no real interest in pursuing the physics of
arts & books
81
© U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Left, a rare colour photograph of the first nuclear test. Above, Oppenheimer with General Groves at the Trinity test site in 1945
82
arts & books
Two scientists, working on the top secret Manhattan Project, manually haul out a container of radioactive material from a shed
impacting stars, preferring to play his part
in making artificial suns. As far as Bird and
Sherwin’s book goes, it does have a perfectly
reasonable, albeit brief, description of this
work—and frankly this is sufficient, because
the problem of Inside the Centre is not that
Monk isn’t a good and clear expositor of the
intricacies of theoretical and experimental physics—he is—but that Oppenheimer’s own highly impressive thinking about
physics, while it may have allowed him to
become the great impresario of the bomb,
was not the stuff of which full-blown theoretical rigour is made.
So what can Monk make of the psychology of his subject, given his misconstrued scientific focus? In the summer of
1963, entering the final lustrum of his life,
Oppenheimer helped organise what Monk
describes as “an odd little conference” at
Mount Kisco in New York state. This was
one of those talking shops in which Oppenheimer shone—at the outset of his career
the coruscation had been focused on physics, and physics alone, in graduate seminars and theoretical powwows such as the
momentous Solvay conferences—but now
he favoured an interdisciplinary murkiness
and a certain high-cultural cliquey-ness.
So it was that in the course of addressing
the 14 other invitees to this intimate colloquium—among them the poet Robert
Lowell and the philosopher Stuart Hampshire—Oppenheimer expounded once more
on his view that Niels Bohr’s conception of
“complementarity” (put simply, the notion
that the measurements of phenomena are
affected by the instrumentation employed)
could be applied not only at the subatomic
level but to the human persona as well. As
Monk puts it: “This leads him into an intimate, almost confessional passage, of a
kind very rarely to be found in any of his
other recorded utterances.” In fact, Oppenheimer’s remarks seem surpassing bland:
an acknowledgement of “a very great sense
of revulsion or wrong” in all that he said,
or did, throughout his long and privileged
childhood, leading up to an epiphany: “I
had to realise that my own worries about
what I did were valid and were important,
but they were not the whole story, that there
must be a complementary way of looking
at them, because other people did not see
them as I did. And I needed what they saw,
needed them.”
Having waded through the minutiae of Oppenheimer’s life, as related by
Monk, we already know when this epiphany occurred—in Corsica, in the summer of 1926, when Oppenheimer was on a
walking holiday with two friends—and we
already know what provoked it—the reading of a passage in À la recherche du temps
perdu—and we already know what interpretation he placed upon it, because Monk
has already quoted the relevant passage at
length from the 1963 talk 545 pages earlier.
This recursive figure could, I suppose, be
forgiven, if it wasn’t about as insightful—
into Oppenheimer, and into the generality of humankind—as the pop lyric “people
who need people are the luckiest people
in the world.” And that’s the strange thing
about Inside the Centre: it’s a biography in
which one’s sense of the very subjectivity of
its subject, instead of becoming richer and
more complex as the narrative unfolds, on
the contrary becomes progressively more
attenuated, until, when Oppenheimer dies
of throat cancer in February 1967 (at the
comparatively young age of 62), we have
the sense of a human being reduced to the
habiliment of his fame, then leaving that
notoriety—and with it, his corporeal and
psychic being—behind, as he evaporates
into the delusory state of posterity.
What is to blame for this? I pondered
the matter long and hard as I read Monk’s
book. I have often said that his two earlier biographies—one of Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, and the other of
Bertrand Russell, The Spirit of Solitude—
are between them perhaps the best introduction to 20th-century philosophy for
the non-specialist; seamlessly fusing as
they do the theoretical, the personal and
the historic. It seems to me that while the
rigours of Russellian logic, or the gnomic
utterances of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations may be taxing, they are not
inconceivable in the way that the physical
processes underlying quantum mechanics are for those of us who cannot “speak
maths,” or otherwise visualise the properties embodied in Planck’s constant.
Oppenheimer himself (on a post-war
trip to Japan, as it happens), was publicly
scathing about CP Snow’s “two cultures”
conception of the widening gulf between
the scientifically and the culturally literate;
and understandably so, given that he was
a polymath who famously learnt Sanskrit
in order to enjoy the poetry of the Bhaga-
vad Gita in the original—so giving rise to
the apocryphal story that on witnessing
the successful Trinity Test in July 1945—
the first human-engineered nuclear explosion—he uttered its minatory line, “Now
I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
But, as Monk points out, in a later lecture, “Physics and Man’s Understanding,”
Oppenheimer argued that the reason why
the great scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton had such a
momentous cultural impact, whereas that
of Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg’s had
been comparatively small, was that in the
first case the new theories corrected generalised misconceptions about the physical world, whereas in the latter they only
corrected the misconceptions of physicists.
It may have been true up until 6th August
1945 that the equivalence of energy and
matter was not generally conceived, but
thereafter this comprehension was seared
into the world’s consciousness with the light
of ten thousand suns.
Of course, it’s all too easy to look at
Oppenheimer’s life in retrospect as a tragedy, displaying the classic Grecian narrative
parabola defined by hubris and its inevitable downfall. But sometimes the facile simply is correct: a cosseted rich boy brought
up according to the dictates of Felix Adler’s
Ethical Culture Society (a humanistic version of Judaeo-Christian moral and social
thinking), Oppenheimer’s personality was
a heady cocktail of neurosis, charm and
vanity from the very start. His exposure to
the American southwest via his non-Jewish
friend, the future writer Francis Fergusson,
undoubtedly became talismanic for him:
this was a realm where men were men, and
those men came with a horse. It is ironic
that it was Oppenheimer’s own happy
horse-riding on the Los Alamos tableland
that led to his establishment of the Manhattan Project laboratories there in 1943.
For Monk there are only two heuristic
keys necessary to unlock all of Oppenheimer’s subsequent behaviour: his ambivalence towards his own Jewishness, and the
83
arts & books
intense patriotism he cultivated—as if aiming a pre-emptive strike against all the accusations of disloyalty that were to follow. If
this seems rather simplistic it’s because it is;
surely the truth is that Oppenheimer’s “people need people” epiphany of 1926 found its
most fruitful expression in the wide range
of socialist, communist and trade union
causes he supported during the Depression
era. That Oppenheimer was a “fellow traveller” is not in dispute, but what Monk—with
his swerving away from the personal and
the political, while cleaving to the purely
physical—cannot adequately convey is the
extent to which Oppenheimer was typical
of the liberal American intellectuals of his
generation.
Shorn of the vast weight of circumstantial detail—about social mores, friendships,
cultural milieu—that Bird and Sherwin
provide, Monk’s Oppenheimer free-floats,
like a particle in a vacuum, subject only to
the strong attraction of Uncle Sam, and
the weaker one of Moscow. Monk’s writing
about the Manhattan Project itself is spare
and scrupulous but the drama of the events
is so compelling, even the most lackadaisical of narratives could not fail to be driven
forward by them.
If his period as an active leftist was what
allowed Oppenheimer to experience his version of Bohr’s “complementarity,” then his
betrayal of his friend Haakon Chevalier to
the FBI was surely the point at which he
abandoned interdependence in pursuit of
outright, egoistic ambition. For what other
complexion can we place upon Oppenheimer’s desperation to get stuck into the
management of the astonishing concurrent theoretical and practical work that
resulted in the atomic bomb? In later life,
after the stripping of his security clearance, Oppenheimer would never express
any regret about the pivotal role he played
in the deaths of so many people, repeating
the mantra that under the circumstances it
seemed the lesser of the available evils. But
reading between the lines of Monk’s biography—and right on them in Bird and Sher-
win’s—we find all the evidence required
of a man in full and conflicted flight from
the awful act he had perpetrated, and
the dreadful new political reality that his
actions had helped to usher in.
It’s true that there’s a certain kind of biographical writing—often, but by no means
always, by Americans—that depends for its
effects on a spuriously contemporaneous
and proximate viewpoint. Bird and Sherwin employ this style, writing as if they
were the direct witnesses of events, rather
than their secondary recorders. In contrast, Monk is never anything but forensically punctilious; as befits a philosophy
professor, that whereof he cannot know,
thereof he remains silent. The result is that
the creeping perception the reader has of
Oppenheimer as an emotionally moribund
man, winnowed out by the guilt he was unable to acknowledge, is only confirmed after
his death, when Monk explains how little
evidence there was in all the archives his
subject left, of any real, intimate human
contact. There’s this, and there’s the circumstantial evidence: a marriage to an
alcoholic that would be described nowadays as “co-dependent,” and children who
in their chosen ways—one through suicide,
one through pained denial—sought to distance themselves from their emotionally
remote father.
But as I say, the reader of Inside the Centre has to piece this together for himself,
and delicately separate this evidence from
the voluminous and at times bewildering
catalogue of Oppenheimer’s professional
connections. I longed for the American
style of introducing each character with a
thumbnail physical description, so I could
keep a handle on this cast of thousands
of physicists. I retain the greatest respect
for the integrity of Monk’s project, and
this biography is exemplary in its precision, however it ultimately displays a scientific exactitude where I’m afraid an artistic
approach is probably called for.
Will Self’s most recent novel is “Umbrella”
(Bloomsbury)
Dada in Ambleside
The polymath artist Kurt Schwitters still thrills and shocks today, says James Woodall
Schwitters in Britain
Tate Britain, 30th January to 12th May 2013
The Dada polymath Kurt Schwitters has
always had a habit of turning up in the most
unexpected places. The unlikeliest of these
is surely the Lake District. A refugee from
Nazi Germany, this pioneer of the German
avant-garde suffered an unstable and impoverished final decade in Norway and Britain.
It is the British years, from 1940, in London
and the Lakes, which lie behind a thrilling
new show at Tate Britain.
With scraps and rubbish Schwitters created a form of collage which, in exuberance,
far outruns Braque and Picasso’s contemporaneous experiments. He made threedimensional pictures. In one, from 1921,
toy skittles and painted strips of wood create a defiantly strange abstract image. He
wrote cackling sound poems and, in recital—
though sadly little of Schwitters’s live recordings survives—anticipated performance art
by at least four decades.
It was not until the second half of the
century that Schwitters began to filter into
popular culture. In 1959 Robert Rauschenberg, an American collagist and lover of
found objects, claimed that Schwitters had
“made it all just for me.” British artists
arts & books
courtesy of: Musée National d‘Art Moderne, Paris; SprengelMuseum Hannover
84
Above, En Morn, 1947. Right, Merzbild 46, 1921: Toy skittles and painted strips of wood create a defiantly strange image
Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi
were avid followers. Damien Hirst is a fan,
Brian Eno has used samples of his poetry,
and a few months ago Jarvis Cocker played
some of his anarchic 1920s poem “Ur
Sonata” on BBC radio.
Along with paintings and many roughand-ready late sculptures, Schwitters’s dazzling inventiveness will be on display at the
Tate in dozens of collages: painstakingly fabricated, neat and symmetrical, yet mildly
crazy. Doremifasolasido (1930), with its lopsided and upside-down pieces of text, is a
delightful puzzle, as are so many of these
pictures—tantalising, funny, provocative,
one subtly distinct from another.
A wonderful oval composition from the
mid-1940s, Untitled (ROSS, with Penny),
unites a feather, a coin, plastic foil and
paper on cardboard. It brings to mind the
judgement of fellow artist-in-British-exile,
Naum Gabo: “[Schwitters] would pick
up something... a stamp or a thrown away
ticket. He would carefully and lovingly
clean it up... Only then would one realise
what an exquisite piece of colour was contained in this ragged scrap.”
Although Schwitters died, stateless, in
Ambleside a day after papers for British naturalisation had arrived in January 1948, a
bit of him nonetheless survives in Cumbria.
In woods a few miles north of Kendal stands
a stone-walled hut, used by Schwitters as a
studio that became a kind of sculpture itself.
It is called the Merz Barn. Today, the roof
leaks. It might be best suited for housing
sheep (not many would fit in). What did its
idiosyncratic occupier see in it?
“With scraps and rubbish
Schwitters created a
form of collage which, in
exuberance, far outruns
Braque and Picasso’s
experiments.”
The first world war had radicalised Schwitters, as it had dozens of young artists.
With the arrival of photography and the collapse of the 19th-century social hierarchy, a
great deal of the most innovative art, from
Paris to Moscow, was driven by an assault on
bourgeois order and representation. Dada,
which began in Zurich in 1916, was a piercing cry for the deliberately incoherent and
fragmented.
In Hanover, Schwitters had for several
years been dreaming up his own renegade
manifestos and moving towards a defining categorisation of art, or anti-art: Merz.
Derived from—and a deliberate critique
of—the German bank Commerzbank, Merz
was Schwitters’s unified concept of art. He
was founding his own movement. “Merz
denotes,” he wrote in 1919, “...the combina-
tion of all conceivable materials for artistic
purposes... A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool... [have] equal
rights with paint.”
In the name of Merz, he constructed
a weird zigzag room in his house in Hanover but it disappeared during Allied bombing. He built something similar in Norway
but that vanished in a fire a few years after
his death. The Cumbrian version, the Merz
Barn, was Schwitters’s last attempt to keep
his singular aesthetic alive. By then, he’d
become a profoundly deracinated figure,
full, it seems, of the old vim, cheek and
plans, yet lost. Decades were to pass before
this iconoclastic German’s legacy would even
begin to be understood.
In 1978, as Schwitters was becoming better known thanks, in part, to Brian Eno, I
went to a lecture on him by an elderly, professorial type at London’s Goethe Institute.
About 20 minutes in it was rudely interrupted by a bristling agitator, who stood
up and took issue with everything the professor had just said. Security eventually,
and tactfully, ushered him and a couple
of henchmen protesters out. One of them
jeered, “Yeah, and why don’t you pull out
your gun?” It was absolutely Dada. Schwitters would, unquestionably, have approved.
The professor ended by calling him a “great
lyric poet.” Tate Britain has caught, perfectly, his unique, agitating spirit.
James Woodall is an associate editor of Prospect
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86
arts & books
Reality hunger
Does one of the world’s greatest writers mistrust the power of
fiction? asks Christopher R Beha
Dear Life
by Alice Munro (Chatto & Windus, £18.99)
A diligent literary novelist might be
counted on to write between one and two
dozen books over the course of a career.
Along the way, most authors will develop a
template, consciously or not, and the more
times it is returned to, the less vivid the
work that results.
A continued willingness to start from
scratch, to discard old ideas about how a
story works, is the common trait that binds
those masters still able to cast a spell into
their 70s or 80s. Here (the recently retired)
Philip Roth comes to mind. James Wood
once called Roth a “stealth postmodernist,”
because he is “intensely interested in fabrication, in the performance of the self, in the
reality we make up in order to live.” But his
fiction expresses this interest, as Roth himself writes, “without sacrificing the factuality of time and place to surreal fakery or
magic-realist gimmickry.” Despite an apparent commitment to realism, this attention to
fabrication is the reason Roth’s work continued to remain fresh after more than half a
century, though he returned obsessively to
the same subject matter—“Family, family,
family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew,
Jew,” as he has put it.
Much the same could be said for Alice
Munro. Sixty years ago, a 21-year-old Munro
wrote “The Day of the Butterfly,” the earliest
of the stories included in her first collection,
The Dance of the Happy Shades. Since then she
has published more than 100 stories. Fifteen
years have passed since the publication of her
selected stories solidified her standing among
the finest writers in the English language,
and the collections she has published since
then—particularly The Love of a Good Woman
and Runaway—contain work with more vitality than anything else she has written.
Most of these stories are set in Toronto or
the rural areas of Ontario surrounding Lake
Huron. They share an unruffled elegance
and wise generosity that feels hard earned,
although it has been present from the very
beginning. For all that, Munro’s stories are
remarkable in their formal diversity. Considered carefully, they don’t look much alike.
Some of Munro’s work relies on the subtle, life-altering epiphany that is the standard engine of the post-Chekhov literary
story, but often her stories are driven by
events that border on the melodramatic.
There are moments of sudden violence—
anyone who thinks of Munro as the author
of well-made but quiet domestic tales should
count the number of murders in her work—
and then stretches of pages in which years
and disappointments accrue so unobtrusively that their cumulative power is equally
shocking. And then there is something else.
Beginning perhaps in the mid-1980s, with
the collection The Progress of Love, Munro’s
writing has been coloured by doubts about
the process of storytelling itself. Here are the
first lines of “Differently,” published by the
New Yorker in 1989:
“Georgia once took a creative-writing
course, and what the instructor told
her was: Too many things. Too many
things going on at the same time; also
too many people. Think, he told her.
What is the important thing? What do
you want us to pay attention to? Think.
Eventually she wrote a story that
was about her grandfather killing
chickens, and the instructor seemed
to be pleased with it. Georgia herself
thought that it was fake. She made a
long list of all the things that had been
left out and handed it in as an appendix to the story. The instructor said that
she expected too much, of herself and
of the project, and that she was wearing him out.”
Munro’s earliest stories were exemplary
entries in the “grandfather killing chickens”
genre, but with each passing collection she
seems more haunted by what must be left
out to achieve elegance. One result of 60
years spent composing hundreds of stories
seems to be a nagging suspicion that most
storytelling is a form of evasion, a means of
escaping the truth rather than confronting
or capturing it. It is an odd mark of Munro’s
mastery that she is often seen as the standard-bearer of an imperilled brand of subtle realism while her stories have proven
increasingly sceptical of realism’s power to
contain the mess of life.
This tendency has reached a kind of culmination in her latest collection, Dear Life.
The first story, “To Reach Japan,” focuses
on an engineer named Peter and his wife,
Greta, a poet.
To Peter, stories are meant to be entertainment—it would be pointless to analyse
them. He believes that “the people who put
them together were probably doing the best
they could.” In response, “Greta used to
argue, rashly asking whether he would say
the same thing about a bridge. The people
who did it did their best but their best was
not good enough so it fell down.”
Munro examines this clash of beliefs—on
Most of Munro’s stories are set in Toronto
or the area around Lake Huron (above)
the one hand, that stories are harmless diversion; on the other, that a badly made story,
like a badly made bridge, might destroy
lives—throughout Dear Life, returning to it
compulsively.
In “Leaving Maverley,” a girl named
Leah takes a job collecting tickets at the
local cinema, although her family’s religion
forbids her from watching the movies played
there. When she asks Ray, the night patrolman who walks her home each night, why
she heard people in the theatre laughing, he
explains “that there were stories being told…
that the stories were often about crooks and
innocent people... Dressed up actors making
a big show of killing each other... People getting up from being murdered in various ways
the moment the camera was off them. Alive
and well, though you had just seen them
shot or on the executioner’s block with their
heads rolling in a basket.”
When Leah begins to rebel from her
strict upbringing in a way that suggests she
has taken these stories too much to heart,
she is punished by life—not in the melodramatic fashion of popular movies, but
in the all too real ways from which victims
can’t simply get back up when the camera
turns off. Except, of course, that Leah and
Ray and all of Munro’s other characters are
87
arts & books
© Wayne Simpson/All Canada Photos/SuperStock
themselves just words on a page, no more
real than the characters on the movie screen.
This is the question that animates many
of the stories in Dear Life: how can fiction—
with its made-up characters, its artificial
narrative conventions, its omissions—ever
really capture reality? Throughout these stories, Munro reminds us of this dilemma in
subtle but unmistakeable ways. This insistent note builds until we reach the last four
works in the collection, which are separated
into a section headed “Finale.” This section
comes with a curious author’s note: “The
final four works in this book are not quite
stories. They form a separate unit, one that
is autobiographical in feeling, though not,
sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they
are the first and last—and closest—things I
have to say about my own life.”
Like so much of Munro’s writing, this
statement is deceptive in its simplicity. What
does it mean to say these works are autobiographical in “feeling” but not in “fact”? For
that matter, even if they were works of stringent non-fiction, why would that make them
“not quite stories”? Munro has often drawn
from her own life for her fiction. What makes
these “works” so different? Munro’s distinction echoes a similar note at the beginning
of her collection The View From Castle Rock,
in which she describes the process by which
works based on her research into her family
history evolved from “something like stories”
into stories, full stop. Here it would seem
the usual process has not been applied. It’s
tempting to find in this a caveat lector: what
follows will not offer the typical satisfactions of a story. But given Munro’s increasing worry with the evasion or manipulation
that come as the price of such satisfactions,
I think she means to pay the works in this
last section a compliment when she says they
aren’t “quite stories.”
When using personal material in the past,
Munro’s aim was not to say something about
her life, but to make of it something other
than life—namely, stories. Here, she emphasizes that such a transformation is not taking place. In so doing, she shows us what
gets lost in the way of honesty when life is
turned into stories. “I think if I was writing
fiction instead of remembering something
that happened, I would never have given her
that dress,” she writes. Or, in another of these
final pieces, “You would think that this was
just too much. The business gone, my mother’s health failing. It wouldn’t do in fiction.”
The first of these stories, “The Eye,”
about Munro’s early family life, goes further, highlighting the way fiction can be
used to assert power over others. “When I
was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother
said was what I had always wanted,” writes
Munro. “Where she got this idea I did not
know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it,
all fictitious but hard to counter… Up until
the time of the first baby I had never been
aware of ever feeling different from the way
my mother said I felt.”
Yet for all her anxiety about the coercive
power of fiction, Munro is among the least
manipulative fiction writers imaginable. As
Hegel said of Shakespeare, she writes characters that are free artists of themselves, liable to shoot off in directions inconvenient to
the author. This is what gives Munro’s stories
their odd shape—their feeling of too many
things going on, and too many people—as
well as their vitality. If these last not-quitestories are not among Munro’s best, it is precisely because they feel too restricted, too
beholden to the truth. It is the stories in this
collection that are about Munro’s life that
seem least to live themselves.
In contrast, “Leaving Maverley” and
several others here—stories that do rank
among Munro’s best, which is to say, among
the best by any writer alive—remind us of
the paradox of great fiction: it depends precisely on the illusion of vitality. The old
postmodern trick of exposing the artificiality of fiction is too often used by writers simply to remind us that stories are cheap. At
its best, Munro’s fiction manages to remind
us instead that life is dear.
Christopher R Beha is the author of “What
Happened to Sophie Wilder” (Tin House) and
an associate editor at Harper’s Magazine
88
arts & books
The strangest art
© Clive Barda / ArenaPAL
A superb new history of opera argues that revivals of classic works are keeping the genre from
flourishing today. Not so, says Wendy Lesser
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Royal Opera House, 2004: Is the radical restaging of old operas a sign of the art form’s decay?
A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years
by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker (Allen
Lane, £30)
Opera must be one of the weirdest forms of
entertainment on the planet. Its exaggerated characters bear little relation to living
people, and its plots are often ludicrous. Yet
it demands from its audiences real involvement, real sympathy, even real tears. Mothers constantly fail to recognise their sons,
sisters their brothers, husbands their wives,
but we, sitting at a distance of hundreds of
metres, are expected to penetrate all the
thin disguises. Women dress as men posing
as women—mainly in order to make love to
other women—and nobody turns a hair. And
on top of all this, people sing all their lines:
not in the way you or I might sing, in a lullaby-ish, folk song-ish mode, but inhumanly,
extremely, with a visible awareness of their
own remarkable achievement.
No rock musician miming sex with his
instrument or destroying it on stage, no art
installation that creepily mirrors its visitors or pummels them with senseless questions, is nearly as crazy as opera. And yet,
because it has been around for so long, and
because its devotees pay so much money for
their seats and then sit passively in them
for such inordinate lengths of time, nobody
seems to notice. The formal rules disguise
the strangeness. The unnatural is successfully passed off as routine.
It is to Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker’s credit that in their new book, A History
of Opera: The Last 400 Years, they notice
all this. Despite their evident love of their
subject, they are willing to acknowledge
up front that, “the whole business is in so
many ways fundamentally unrealistic, and
can’t be presented as a sensible model for
leading one’s life or understanding human
behaviour.”
After observing how physically extreme
the act of opera-singing is—“people who
sing opera generate… huge acoustic
forces; if they turn their voices on you at
close range, you have to retreat and cover
your ears”—they genially ask us to perform a thought experiment. “Think for
a moment about what it would be like to
inhabit a world that is operatic,” they write.
“A world in which everyday life takes place
and ordinary time passes, but in which
everything—every action, every thought,
every utterance—is geared to never-ending
music… Think of the metaphysical questions that this state-of-opera would raise.
First, and most important: who is making
the music?”
This may seem like a joke at first—a mor-
dant joke comparable to the one that lies
at the heart of the Jim Carrey movie The
Truman Show, which Abbate and Parker
explicitly invoke as a comparison—but
their question turns out to lead somewhere
extremely useful. It gives us a way to grasp
those many moments at which opera seems
to point to itself, those places where characters comment on the music, or allude to earlier productions by their own composer, or
generally speak to the audience from outside the frame of their fictional situation.
Opera’s unreality, it turns out, releases it to
be something more real than most fictions,
because it can acknowledge and still transcend that unreality.
Abbate and Parker have a keen grasp of
these theoretical questions, but what they
excel at is marshalling the telling details.
They are especially good on Mozart. I don’t
think I’ve ever read or heard a better analysis of how a duet works than their segments
on the opening of The Marriage of Figaro and
the second seduction in Cosi Fan Tutte. They
are almost as good on Monteverdi, Gluck,
Verdi and Wagner; and they have useful
insights into moderns like Debussy, Janácek
and Britten. They write clearly and gracefully, and they forgo the usual off-putting
tools of the musicologist. They have forbidden themselves to quote passages from
musical scores; they’ve forbidden themselves
even to read musical scores in constructing
this book’s arguments and descriptions, and
have instead relied in every case on their own
ears, their own memories.
In the few places where I found myself
disagreeing with them, it was not because I
felt they were outright wrong, but because
they had failed to take the full measure of
a composer—Rossini, say, or Handel, or
Shostakovich. In such cases, their explanation for the composer’s success rests
mainly on social or historical grounds, as
if we couldn’t love Rossini’s The Italian Girl
in Algiers or Shostakovich’s The Nose simply
for their own musical sake. When they set
out to explain the recent resurgence of Handel’s operas, they seem blind to the deep
psychological realism that certain late 20th
and early 21st-century productions have
mined in his work. Instead, they see only
the practicalities—the way the historically
aware “insistence on lighter, faster interpretations of 18th-century music allows the
drama to move more quickly,” or the fact
that “the virtual absence of new works joining our repertory has necessitated everdeeper excavations of the past in search of
novelty.” These things are true enough, but
they are insufficient: they don’t explain why
the 2008 Stuttgart/San Francisco production of Alcina was one of the most haunting
and moving productions I’ve ever seen, nor
why the New York City Opera, in the early
years of this century, was able to wring so
much joy out of its Journey to Rheims and
its Semele.
In general, Abbate and Parker decline
to view opera production as an important
aspect of the art form. It is difficult enough
to cover many dozens of opera
composers spanning hundreds
of years of musical history. It
would seem unreasonable
A caricature by Gustave
Doré from the 1860s:
“People who sing opera
generate huge acoustic
forces,” writes
Lesser
arts & books
to add to this the request that the chroniclers consider specific performances as well.
But the quality of an opera cannot be completely separated from its production. Even
Cosi Fan Tutte does not work every time:
I’ve seen a terrible one in San Francisco, a
pretty good one at the Metropolitan in New
York, and an excellent one at a tiny theatre
in Berlin, where the music was played eighthanded on two pianos and the parts were all
taken by men. (You can see how this casting
ploy would obviate, or at least complicate,
the opera’s inherent misogyny.) A four-hour
Handel production can be as unimaginably
dull or as grippingly emotional as a Pedro
Almodóvar movie, depending on the acting
and the directing. Beautiful voices alone are
not enough to bring Handel to life.
Yet for Abbate and Parker, the radical
restaging of old operas is a sign of the art
form’s decay. Defining German-inspired
Regieoper (or director’s opera) as “the habit
of aggressively updating the visual side of
old works,” the two authors assert that this
“technology-fuelled movement, linked to a
taste for abstraction in the fine arts, started
as an attempt… to make operas in forgotten
idioms more relevant to audiences.” This
blurs the issue by implicitly equating the
visual novelties of a slick operator like Robert LePage (as displayed, for instance, in his
video-riddled Damnation of Faust) with the
deep, serious and all-encompassing rethinkings of the best modern productions.
As for a modern work like the Robert
Wilson/Philip Glass/Lucinda Childs Einstein on the Beach, or the John Adams/Mark
Morris/Peter Sellars Death of Klinghoffer—
well, there’s simply no way to evaluate the
opera without seeing it in the flesh,
89
because the relations between singers and
dancers, not to mention evocative lighting
and inventively designed sets, are crucial
to how the opera works. As long as the creators of those operas are alive, we can rely
on them to recreate the magic; when they
are no longer with us, their works will not
survive without inventive directors who are
capable of seeing “the visual” as something
more than just window-dressing.
The authors have a considered reason for
being unenthusiastic about directorial innovation. They feel that the constant restaging of the old wipes out the new, and as a
consequence they find themselves generally
opposed to vigorously modernised revivals.
(“Burn everything” is the title of one of their
later sections, echoing a line of Wagner’s.)
They clearly wish that today’s opera could
be as fresh and as fecund as it was in its Italian and Viennese heyday, with new works
emerging every season to displace the old.
But does the existence of Shakespeare
prevent good new plays from coming into
being today, and would we be willing to ban
all his works on the off chance that it would?
No, and no. Theatre audiences can enjoy the
staged reinventions of Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice and A Winter’s Tale—we can
even gain pleasure from the smallest innovations in line-readings, just as opera-goers
can appreciate the individual benefits that
a singer brings to a part—and still hope for
different kinds of pleasures from dramas
created in our time. Nothing, perhaps, will
ever be as good as Shakespeare,
but that doesn’t prevent
Tony Kushner or David
Mamet from writing marvellous
90
plays now. Shostakovich didn’t worry about
whether he was living up to his idols Rossini,
Mussorgsky and Berg when he gave us Lady
Macbeth of the Mtsensk District; he just did it.
But A History of Opera remains a grand
achievement. And if I find myself wondering, finally, who this book’s intended audience is, that is not to criticise, but to clarify.
People who have never been to an opera in
their lives need no scholarly preparation
for the experience, and might be put off by
Abbate’s and Parker’s thoroughness. (If you
are not already familiar with the operas,
arts & books
reading through the authors’ plot summaries, for instance, might be a bit like hearing
someone recite his dreams at the breakfast
table.)
Yet the book is clearly aimed at nonscholarly readers: all opera titles and
libretto quotations are given in both the
original language and in English, and the
musical description is such that any intelligent reader, even with no music background, could understand it. A History of
Opera is probably not meant to be read as
a consecutive story in the same way as, say,
Alex Ross’s continuously gripping history
of 20th-century classical music The Rest Is
Noise. Abbate and Parker’s book feels more
like a beautifully written reference work. It
is perfect for someone like me, who loves
going to the opera but has severe gaps in
her historical knowledge; and if you’re looking for something to pull off the shelves and
read before your next visit to the opera, I
suspect it might be perfect for you, too.
Wendy Lesser, who edits The Threepenny
Review, is the author of “Music for Silenced
Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets”
The month in books
From the future of America’s economy to the rise of China, January’s books
shine a light on the human lives behind geopolitical debates, says Rohan Silva
The Danish physicist Niels Bohr famously
noted, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” But with 2013
upon us, readers will be understandably
keen to prophesy about the year ahead. If
January’s books are anything to go by, we
should expect to see the next 12 months
dominated by such weighty issues as the
rise of China, ideological schisms in Britain and the nature of American economic
renewal, but we may also see welcome
attention paid to the human lives that are
often forgotten amidst lofty geopolitical
and economic debates.
This is certainly the case
with China’s Silent Army
(Allen Lane, £25), a breathless
journalistic dash
around the world, taking in
Congo, Kazakhstan, Cape
Verde and everywhere in
between to tell the story of
the millions of Chinese emigrants who are
braving hardship, prejudice and poverty in
the hope of a better life abroad. The book,
by Spanish journalists Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araújo, contains some
excellent macro-economic insights, such
as the fact that Beijing has now overtaken
the World Bank as the biggest lender on the
planet. But ultimately the human stories
are what make it so compelling—with tales
of Chinese entrepreneurs creating wealth in
the most unlikely circumstances, thanks to
business acumen, self-sacrifice and thrift.
By shining a light on the industriousness of
Chinese citizens around the world, China’s
Silent Army helps us understand why the
chairman of China’s sovereign wealth fund
recently criticised Europe’s welfare system
and employment laws for inducing “sloth
and indolence, rather than hard work.”
It ought to be required reading for all EU
bureaucrats.
There are more tales of
Chinese industry in Pow!,
(Seagull Books, £18) the
new novel from Mo Yan,
the first Chinese citizen to
win the Nobel prize in literature. Pow! tells the story
of Luo Xiaotong, a young
man training to become a monk, looking
back on his earlier life as a child living in a
rural Chinese village. While it is possible to
discern subversive political messages in the
depiction of political corruption and corporate malfeasance (the village butchers
are quietly pumping their meat full of formaldehyde), Mo Yan’s novel is another case
where human narratives offer infinitely
more insight than abstract technocratic
discourse. With its evocation of profound
childhood trauma married with dreamy
magical realism, Pow! reads like a sumptuous blend of Arundhati Roy and Gabriel
García Márquez.
Since market reforms
began in China in 1978,
millions have been able
to escape poverty. A similarly uplifting narrative
about the demise of state
socialism can be found in
Graham Stewart’s Bang!
(Atlantic, £25). Billed as “a history of Britain in the 1980s,” the book focuses on Margaret Thatcher, whose government was the
first to straddle an entire decade since Pitt
the Younger in the 1790s. Bang! chronicles
the intellectual and political insurgency
that transformed the British economy and
which continues to be relevant today, given
the ideological arguments over the current government’s economic agenda. In the
words of Thatcher herself, “The heresies of
one period became, as they always do, the
orthodoxies of the next.”
Moving from Britain’s past
to America’s future, Mark
Binelli’s The Last Days of
Detroit (Bodley Head, £20)
delves into the derelict tenement blocks and abandoned
streets of one of America’s
great cities. Binelli sketches
out a positive vision of Detroit’s—and
potentially America’s—economic renaissance, driven not by the top-down schemes
favoured by politicians, but through the bottom-up “DIY ethic” of the local civic groups
and entrepreneurs that are banding together
to rebuild their ruined city. By describing the
bravery and creativity of the urban farmers, voluntary demolition squads and citizen crime fighters, Binelli shows us that a
brighter economic future may be possible
even in the most benighted of cities.
If Detroit has problems, so
too does Anthony, the narrator of Gavin Corbett’s sparkling second novel This
Is The Way (4th Estate,
£14.99). Anthony (named
after the “saint of lost things”)
is a traveller, lying low in Dublin to escape decades of murderous feuding
between rival Irish clans. However much he
tries to escape his roots, Anthony cannot
break free from “the people that been here
before us.” The novel’s artfully childish language, with its “childer” in place of “children,” and so on, is reminiscent of the early
passages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, while the glancing references to quotidian violence have a hint of Cormac McCarthy.
This gloriously humane novel is a healthy
reminder that whatever changes 2013 may
bring, for millions of people around the world
life will carry on, much as it always has.
Rohan Silva is senior policy adviser to the
prime minister
91
Our pick of the best public talks and events in January
Devika Singh, academic
SOAS, Brunei Gallery, WC1,
6.30pm, free, 020 7637 2388,
www.soas.ac.uk
The Trouble with Public Art
Louisa Buck, art critic. Other
speakers tbc
Institute of Contemporary Arts, The
Mall, SW1, 6.45pm, £12, 020 7930
3647, www.ica.org.uk
Tuesday 8th
The Chemical Cosmos: a
guided tour
Steve Miller, academic
Royal Astronomical Society, Fyvie
Hall, University of Westminster,
Regents St, W1, 1pm, free, 020 7734
4582, www.ras.org.uk
© National portrait gallery
Thursday 10th
Volcano Trickery: how to
survive an eruption
Mike Cassidy, academic
National Oceanography Centre,
University of Southampton,
Waterfront campus, 7.15pm, free,
023 8059 6666, www.noc.ac.uk
Portraits as Accessories and
Accessories in Portraits
Marcia Pointon, academic
National Portrait Gallery, St
Martin’s Place, WC2, 7pm, £5, 020
7306 0055, www.npg.org.uk
Tuesday 15th
Israel is Destroying Itself with
its Settlement Policy
Daniel Levy, former advisor to
Ehud Barak, William Sieghart,
chair of Forward Thinking, and
Dani Dayan, chair of the Yesha
Council of Jewish Communities
in Judea and Samaria
Royal Geographical Society,
Kensington Gore, SW7, 6.45pm,
£25, 020 7591 3000, www.
intelligencesquared.com
The Problem of Evil and
“Intellectual Black Holes”
Stephen Law, academic
Goldsmiths University, New
Academic Building, SE14, 6pm,
free, 020 7919 7882, www.gold.
ac.uk
Wednesday 16th
Mughal Art in the 20th
Century
What the Dickens? The City’s
great financial scandals past
and future
Edward Chancellor, financial
journalist, Mike Jones, academic,
Brandon Davies, director of
Gatehouse Bank,
Gresham College, Barnard’s Inn
Hall, EC1, 2pm, free, 020 7831
0575, www.gresham.ac.uk
Friday 11th
Peter Stamm in Conversation
with Tim Parks
Peter Stamm, Tim Parks, writers
London Review Bookshop, Bury
Place, WC1, 7pm, £10, 020 7269
9030, www.lrbshop.co.uk
Sunday 13th
TS Eliot Prize Readings
Simon Armitage, Sean Borodale,
Gillian Clarke, Julia Copus, Paul
Farley, Jorie Graham, Kathleen
Jamie, Sharon Olds, Jacob Polley,
Deryn Rees-Jones, poets
Royal Festival Hall, Southbank,
SE1, 7pm, £15, 020 7960 4200,
www.southbankcentre.co.uk
© www.lacma.org/ heeramaneck collection
Thursday 17th
“I Wanted to Prove Myself to
the Men”: German Women in
the Nazi Killing Fields of
Eastern Europe
Wendy Lower, academic
University of Glasgow, Western
Infirmary Lecture Theatre,
University Place, 5.30pm, free, 0141
330 3593, www.gla.ac.uk
Amateur Naturalist and
Professional Spy: Maxwell
Knight
Stephen Moger, academic
Linnean Society of London,
Burlington House, Piccadilly, W1,
6pm, free, 020 7434 4479, www.
linnean.org
Monday 21st
Keeping the Lights On in 2050:
how can we do it and how
much will it cost?
David MacKay, academic
University of Cambridge, Wolfson
Lecture Theatre, Churchill, Storey’s
Way, £3, 01223 337733, www,cam.
ac.uk
Tuesday 22nd
Genetics, Epigenetics and
Disease
Adrian Bird, academic
The Royal Society, Carlton House
Terrace, SW1, 6pm, free, 020 7451
2500, www.royalsociety.org
Literary Lunch
Barry Cryer, comedian, Jane
Ridley, academic, Charlie
Mortimer, writer
Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, The
—
Explore it online and add your own
To view a wider list of events, and add details
of your own, go to
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/listings
Listings are free. We’ll print our pick of the best
in the magazine each month and highlight
recommended events among those online.
Strand, WC2, 12pm, £59, 01795
592 892, www.theoldie.co.uk
Wednesday 23rd
Liberty and Security—For All
Conor Gearty, academic
University of Durham, Durham
Castle, 8pm, free, 0191 334 2000,
www.dur.ac.uk
The Thing is... Death
Marek Kohn, journalist
Wellcome Collection, Euston Rd,
NW1, 7pm, free, 020 7611 2222,
www.wellcomecollection.org
The Importance of the Roman
Novel
Stephen Harrison, academic
Institute of Classical Studies,
Senate House, Malet St, WC1, 6pm,
free, 020 7862 8700, www.icls.sas.
ac.uk
Wednesday 30th
Whither al Qaeda? The future
of the “Islamist threat”
Christina Hellmich, researcher
University of Reading,
Whiteknights campus, Palmer
Building, 8pm, free, 0118 378 4313,
www.reading.ac.uk
Thursday 31st
Philosophy and the Black
Panthers
Howard Caygill, academic
Central Saint Martins, Granary
Square, N1, 6pm, free, 020 8417
9000, fass.kingston.ac.uk
Turkey and the Challenge of
the New Middle East
Yasar Yakis, former foreign
minister of Turkey, Rosemary
Hollis, academic, John Peet,
Europe editor of The Economist,
Timothy Daunt, former
ambassador
British Academy, Carlton House
Terrace, SW1, 6pm, free, 020 7969
5204, www.biaa.ac.uk
To attend events
Always confirm details in advance
and reserve a place if necessary.
Prices listed are standard; there
may be concessions
92
Fiction
George Saunders
George Saunders is one of America’s most
celebrated short story writers. “Not since
Mark Twain has America produced a
satirist this funny with a prose style this
fine,” says Zadie Smith. The story below
comes from his new collection Tenth of
December. Explaining the idea behind the
story, Saunders writes: “I’m intrigued by
the question of how people understand
their own bad actions. I think very few
people wake up in the morning fired up at
the notion of being evil. So this piece
attempts to mimic the voice of a pretty
nice guy who is in the middle of some real
filth, urging his colleagues to put their
shoulders to the wheel.”
MEMORANDUM
DATE: Apr 6
TO: Staff
FROM: Todd Birnie, Divisional Director
Re: March Performance Stats
I
would not like to characterize this as a plea, although it may
start to sound like one (!). The fact is, we have a job to do, we
have tacitly agreed to do it (did you cash your last paycheck,
I know I did, ha ha ha). We have also—to go a step further
here—agreed to do the job well. Now we all know that one
way to do a job poorly is to be negative about it. Say we need to
clean a shelf. Let’s use that example. If we spend the hour before
the shelf cleaning talking down the process of cleaning the shelf,
complaining about it, dreading it, investigating the moral niceties
of cleaning the shelf, whatever, then what happens is, we make the
process of cleaning the shelf more difficult than it really is. We all
know very well that that “shelf” is going to be cleaned, given the
current climate, either by you or the guy who replaces you and gets
your paycheck, so the question boils down to: Do I want to clean it
happy or do I want to clean it sad? Which would be more effective?
For me? Which would accomplish my purpose more efficiently?
What is my purpose? To get paid. How do I accomplish that purpose most efficiently? I clean that shelf well and clean it quickly.
And what mental state helps me clean that shelf well and quickly?
Is the answer: Negative? A negative mental state? You know very
well that it is not. So the point of this memo is: Positive. The positive
mental state will help you clean that shelf well and quickly, thus
accomplishing your purpose of getting paid.
What am I saying? Am I saying whistle while you work? Maybe
I am. Let us consider lifting a heavy dead carcass such as a whale.
(Forgive the shelf/whale thing, we have just come back from our
place on Reston Island, where there were 1) a lot of dirty shelves,
and 2) yes, believe it or not, an actual dead rotting whale, which
Timmy and Vance and I got involved with in terms of the cleanup.)
So say you are charged with, you and some of your colleagues, lift© “Tenth of December” by George Saunders, published 3rd January (Bloomsbury)
ing a heavy dead whale carcass onto a flatbed. Now we all know
that is hard. And what would be harder is: doing that with a negative attitude. What we found—Timmy and Vance and I—is that
even with only a neutral attitude, you are talking a very hard
task. We tried to lift that whale while we were just feeling neutral,
Timmy and Vance and I, with a dozen or so other folks, and it was
a no-go, that whale wouldn’t budge, until suddenly one fellow, a
former Marine, said that what we needed was some mind over matter, and gathered us in a little circle, and we had a sort of chant.
We got “psyched up.” We knew, to extend my above analogy, that
we had a job to do, and got sort of excited about that, and decided
to do it with a positive attitude, and I have to tell you, there was
something to that, it was fun, fun when that whale rose into the air,
helped by us and some big straps that Marine had in his van, and
I have to say that lifting that dead rotting whale onto that flatbed
with that group of total strangers was the high point of our trip.
So what am I saying? I am saying (and saying it fervently,
because it is important): Let’s try, if we can, to minimize the grumbling and self-doubt regarding the tasks we must sometimes do
around here that maybe aren’t on the surface all that pleasant.
I’m saying let’s try not to dissect every single thing we do in terms
of ultimate good/bad/indifferent in terms of morals. The time
for that is long past. I hope that each of us had that conversation
with ourselves nearly a year ago, when this whole thing started.
We have embarked on a path, and having embarked on that path,
for the best of reasons (as we decided a year ago), wouldn’t it be
kind of suicidal to let our progress down that path be impeded by
neurotic second-guessing? Have any of you ever swung a sledgehammer? I know that some of you have. I know that some of you
did when we took out Rick’s patio. Isn’t it fun when you don’t hold
back, but just pound down and down, letting gravity help you?
Fellows, what I’m saying is, let gravity help you here, in our workplace situation: Pound down, give in to the natural feelings that
I have seen from time to time produce so much great energy in
so many of you, in terms of executing your given tasks with vigor
and without second-guessing and neurotic thoughts. Remember
that record-breaking week Andy had back in October, when he
doubled his usual number of units? Regardless of all else, forget-
© vetta
Exhortation
Fiction
ting for the moment all namby-pamby thoughts of right/wrong
etc., etc., wasn’t that something to see? In and of itself? I think
that, if we each look deep down inside of ourselves, weren’t we all
a little envious? God, he was really pounding down and you could
see the energetic joy on his face each time he rushed by us to get
additional cleanup towels. And we were all just standing there like,
Wow, Andy, what’s gotten into you? And no one can argue with his
numbers. They are there in our Break Room for all to see, towering above the rest of our numbers, and though Andy has failed to
duplicate those numbers in the months since October, 1) no one
blames him for that, those were miraculous numbers, and 2) I
believe that even if Andy never again duplicates those numbers,
he must still, somewhere in his heart, secretly treasure the memory of that magnificent energy flowing out of him that memorable
October. I do not honestly think Andy could’ve had such an October if he had been coddling himself or entertaining any doubtful
neurotic thoughts or second-guessing tendencies, do you? I don’t.
Andy looked totally focused, totally outside himself, you could see
it on his face, maybe because of the new baby? (If so, Janice should
have a new baby every week, ha ha.)
Anyway, October is how Andy entered a sort of, at least in
my mind, de facto Hall of Fame, and is pretty much henceforth
excluded from any real close monitoring of his numbers, at least
by me. No matter how disconsolate and sort of withdrawn he
gets (and I think we’ve all noticed that he’s gotten pretty disconsolate and withdrawn since October), you will not find me closely
monitoring his numbers, although as for others I cannot speak,
others may be monitoring that troubling falloff in
Andy’s numbers, although really I hope they’re
not, that would not be so fair, and believe me,
if I get wind of it, I will definitely let Andy
know, and if Andy’s too depressed to hear
me, I’ll call Janice at home.
And in terms of why is Andy so disconsolate? My guess is that he’s being neurotic,
and second-guessing his actions of October—and wow, wouldn’t that be a shame,
wouldn’t that be a no-win, for Andy to have
completed that record-breaking October
and then sit around boo-hooing about it? Is
anything being changed by that boo-hooing?
Are the actions Andy did, in terms of the tasks
I gave him to do in Room 6, being undone by
his boo-hooing, are his numbers on the Break
Room wall miraculously scrolling downward, are people suddenly walking
93
out of Room 6 feeling perfectly okay again? Well we all know
they are not. No one is walking out of Room 6 feeling perfectly
okay. Even you guys, you who do what must be done in Room 6,
don’t walk out feeling so super-great, I know that, I’ve certainly
done some things in Room 6 that didn’t leave me feeling so wonderful, believe me, no one is trying to deny that Room 6 can be a
bummer, it is very hard work that we do. But the people above us,
who give us our assignments, seem to think that the work we do
in Room 6, in addition to being hard, is also important, which I
suspect is why they have begun watching our numbers so closely.
And trust me, if you want Room 6 to be an even worse bummer
than it already is, then mope about it before, after, and during,
then it will really stink, plus, with all the moping, your numbers
will go down even further, which guess what: they cannot do. I
have been told in no uncertain terms, at the Sectional Meeting,
that our numbers are not to go down any further. I said (and this
took guts, believe me, given the atmosphere at Sectional): look,
my guys are tired, this is hard work we do, both physically and
psychologically. And at that point, at Sectional, believe me, the
silence was deafening. And I mean deafening. And the looks I got
were not good. And I was reminded, in no uncertain terms, by
Hugh Blanchert himself, that our numbers are not to go down.
And I was asked to remind you—to remind us, all of us, myself
included—that if we are unable to clean our assigned “shelf,”
not only will someone else be brought in to clean that “shelf,”
but we ourselves may find ourselves on that “shelf,” being that
“shelf,” with someone else exerting themselves with good positive energy all over us. And at that time I think you can imagine
how regretful you would feel, the regret would show in your
faces, as we sometimes witness, in Room 6, that regret on
the faces of the “shelves” as they are “cleaned,” so I am
asking you, from the hip, to try your best and not end
up a “shelf,” which we, your former colleagues, will
have no choice but to clean clean clean using all
our positive energy, without looking back, in
Room 6.
This was all made clear to me at
Sectional and now I am trying to
make it clear to you.
Well I have gone on and on,
but please come by my office,
anybody who’s having doubts,
doubts about what we do,
and I will show you pictures
of that incredible whale my
sons and I lifted with our
good positive energy. And
of course this information, that is, the information that you are
having doubts, and have
come to see me in my
office, will go no further
than my office, although
I am sure I do not even
have to say that, to any of
you, who have known me all
these many years.
All will be well and all
will be well, etc., etc.,
Todd
94
The generalist by Didymus
Each pair of clues leads to two solutions
beginning with the letter indicated.
Solvers must assign each solution to its
correct place in the appropriate grid so
that a full alphabet appears in each.
ASister of Thalia and Euphrosyne (6)
100 make a shekel (6)
BNorthern Irish metaphor for a state of collapse (6,6)
With Rattray, a Perthshire burgh and
centre of a raspberry-growing district
(11)
CLong hair arranged in a knot at the back of the head (7)
Food poisoning caused by eating snails
or seafood (9)
DUnit of weight to measure the fineness
of silk (6)
A Black Friar (9)
E Moth of the family Lasiocampidae (5)
Fritz’s oath (3)
FChopped garnish for omelettes and
salads (5,6)
Erigeron, eg (4-4)
GAncient supercontinent produced by
the first split of Pangaea, two million
years ago (8)
Deep gorge in the Colorado River, up to
6,000 feet deep (5,6)
HOrcadian location of the Dwarfie Stane
(3)
Ancient capital of the Nguyen dynasty
in Vietnam (3)
I Its counties include Lemhi, Payette and
Teton (5)
Volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea,
“The Emerald Isle” (6)
J “Fair” or “soft” Cornish girl (8)
Danish peninsula adjoining SchleswigHolstein (7)
KFibrous protein in nails or the outer
layer of skin (7)
Trans-ships at sea or exports herrings
from Scotland to the Continent (9)
LSpanish poet and playwright who was
assassinated early in the Spanish Civil
War (5)
Capital of Angola (6)
MOld-fashioned golf-club corresponding
to a number five iron (5)
Sydney’s transport system serving
Chinatown, Darling Park and
Lilyfield (8)
NThe western area of the ancient
Frankish kingdom (8)
Bantu language of southern Africa
consisting chiefly of Zulu, Xhosa and
Swazi (5)
OIrish racehorse trainer of Nijinsky (6)
Fouquieria splendens, a Mexican
shrub (8)
PHardened lava with a smooth
undulating surface (8)
A relatively flat land surface produced
by a long period of erosion (9)
QTunnel for carrying irrigation water (5)
Holiday resort adjoining Bugibba on
Malta (5)
RUS photographer of fashion models,
who worked for Vogue and New Yorker
(7,6)
Commander of a troop of Indian
cavalry (8)
S A reaper (9)
German literary movement associated
with Schiller, Goethe and Herder (5,3,5)
TVerse of eight lines rhyming abaaabab
(7)
Coventry-based car firm bought by the
Standard Motor Company in 1945 (7)
UItalian provincial capital in FriuliVenezia Giulia region (5)
Breakfast of sausage, bacon, eggs, soda
bread and potato cake (6,3)
VHandbook carried with one for
immediate reference (4,5)
Irish rebellion in 1804 at the Australian
penal colony of Parramatta (7,4)
W1949 Ealing comedy based on the
sinking of SS Politician off Eriskay (6,6)
Fox terriers with rough hard coats (4-5)
XGozitan village site of the Ggantija
Temples (6)
Gozitan village with a church having
the third largest rotunda in the world
(7)
YCaribbean aroid plant with edible
leaves (6)
River forming part of the SomersetDorset border (3)
ZCzech long-distance runner who won
three gold medals at the 1952 Helsinki
Olympics (7)
C16th Swiss religious reformer and
minister in Zürich (7)
Competition
The generalist prize
One winner receives the complete DVD boxset, series 1-4, of The Thick of
It (£38.80). This BBC political comedy, written by Armando Iannucci,
follows the trials and tribulations of the fictitious
Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship, as its
members stumble their way through the corridors of
power. The satire won three Bafta awards in 2o1o—
best situation comedy, best female performance
for a comedy role, and best male performance for a
comedy role. “Television needs shows like The Thick
of It”—The Guardian
How to enter
Send your solution to answer@prospect-magazine.co.uk or Crossword, Prospect,
2 Bloomsbury Place, London, WC1A 2QA. Include your email and postal address
for prize administration.
All entries must be received by 9th January. Winners will be announced in our
February issue.
Last month’s solutions
Solutions across: 1 Jugation 5 Computer game 12 Cannikin 13 Demi-mondaine 15 Canes
Venatici 16 Anouilh 17 Amorist 18 Dandification 19 Llanfair Caereinion 23 Organ stops
24 Deactivate 27 Old English sheepdog 31 Slipper orchid 32 Reverie 34 Cambria 35
Ernest Marples 36 Pentathletes 37 On camera 38 Shepherd’s pie 39 Trotwood
Solutions down: 1 Jack Charlton 2 Gin and orange 3 Thiasoi 4 Oliver Twist 6 Obediences
7 Primitive Methodism 8 Troparion 9 Radio Caroline 10 Ab initio 11 Elephant 14
Landscape gardeners 20 Final Approach 21 Banderillero 22 Beagle Island 25 C-sharp
minor 26 Bishan Bedi 28 Earbasher 29 Usucapts 30 Diamanté 33 Versant
The winner is Dorothy Hainsworth, North Yorkshire
Last month’s “Enigmas & puzzles” solution
There were 12 friends.
“Several friends” implies more than one, so there were at least three children at the
party, Persephone included. The number of each type of wrapper must be a multiple of
the total number of children. Each number is either correct, or 1 too small. The prime
factors are:
gnoshibar
25 or 26
5×5 or 2×13
frootyloopy 39 or 40
3×13 or 2×2×2×5
chocolollo 51 or 52
3×17 or 2×2×13
The only factors appearing in all bars, with the right choices, are 2 and 13. But 2 alone
is too few children, and 2×13 = 26 doesn’t work for 39 or 40. Only 13 is left. Deduct
Persephone to get 12 friends.
The winner is Harald Fischer, Germany. Enigmas & puzzles returns in the February issue
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96
The way we were
Working at the BBC
©moviestore collection/ rex features
Extracts from memoirs and diaries, chosen by Ian Irvine
George Orwell writes in his
diary about working for the
BBC’s Eastern Service on 21st
June 1942. He supervised cultural broadcasts to India, with
contributions from TS Eliot
and EM Forster among others, to counter propaganda
from Nazi Germany aiming to
undermine imperial links:
“The thing that strikes one
in the BBC is not so much the
moral squalor and the ultimate
futility of what we are doing, as
the feeling of frustration, the
impossibility of getting anything
done, even of any successful
piece of scoundrelism. Our policy is so ill-defined, the disorganisation so great and the fear and
hatred of intelligence are so allpervading, that one cannot plan
any wireless campaign whatever.
“When one plans some series
of talks, with some more or less
definite propaganda line behind
it, one is first told to go ahead,
then choked off on the ground
that it is ‘injudicious’ or ‘preLindsay Anderson, director of the 1968 film If
mature,’ then told again to go
tion would be trivialised by the influence of
ahead, then told to water everything down
those concerned with what could be transand cut out any plain statements that may
mitted in visual terms.”
have crept in here and there, and then at the
last moment the whole thing is suddenly
Robin Day joins the Radio Talks Departcancelled by some mysterious edict from
ment of the BBC in 1954 and is told by his
above and one is told to improvise some
superior:
different series one feels no interest in and
“I want you to see yourself as—well, as
which in any case has no definite idea behind
having become an officer in a rather good
it.
regiment.”
“One is constantly putting sheer rubbish on the air because of having talks which
On 13th February 1973, Lindsay Andersounded too intelligent cancelled at the last
son, a film and theatre director, writes in
moment. In addition the organisation is so
his diary:
overstaffed that numbers of people have
“Today lunch at BBC TV Centre with
almost literally nothing to do.”
Mamoun [Hassan, head of production at
BFI] and Norman Swallow [film and TV
In 1947, the BBC resumed broadcasting
documentary maker], with the intention
television programmes. Grace Wyndof soliciting patronage from Huw Whelham Goldie, later head of talks and curdon [managing director, BBC TV] deserves
rent affairs, observed of some of the early
record. Suddenly the door burst open and
problems:
Wheldon burst histrionically into the room,
“The [radio] broadcasters’ speciality was
eyes flashing under his picturesque eyethe use of words; they had no knowledge of
brows. At first I almost laughed; then it
how to present either entertainment or inforbecame clear that Wheldon wasn’t in fact
mation in vision, nor any experience of hanparodying the situation, but imagined he
dling visual material. Moreover, most of
was playing it straight as a dynamic, eccenthem distrusted the visual; they associated it
tric leader of genius. At least we prevented
with the movies and the music hall and were
the occasion passing off as a mere, courteafraid that the high purposes of the Corpora-
ous get-together. Both Mamoun
and I spoke very directly about
the impossibility, as the BBC
stands, of certain kinds of talent
gaining employment or sponsorship. Wheldon’s response
was to become angry and thank
Mamoun not to teach him to
suck eggs… It was difficult to
take him seriously… And the
other point: his basic impregnable philistinism. No project,
no play or film or programme
to be valued for what it is. Only
for what it represents as a fragment of culture, a piece of contemporary artwork worthy of
patronage.”
John Drummond is appointed
controller of music at the BBC,
a post which included organising the Proms, in November
1984:
“I undertook to write a confidential review of the whole
position of music in the BBC,
especially as [the director general Alasdair] Milne wanted my
responsibilities to include music
on television as well as radio. I was allocated
an attic room in the old Langham Hotel,
then almost entirely emptied of BBC staff,
and I sat there for eight months, with Asa
Briggs writing the history of the BBC in the
next office as my only neighbour. I had the
services of one of those amazing women who
had for so many years been the backbone
of the Corporation. Monica Atkinson had
been in the organization all her life, latterly
as assistant to senior controllers. She knew
everyone and how to get hold of things. In
two days she furnished my office with everything I needed, from chairs to a CD player—
not neglecting the permitted quantity of
curtains and the contents of the drinks cabinet, both officially graded according to
the job. (Previously as an assistant head of
department I had curtains that would not
draw.) Monica became a great friend, and
was typical of a BBC now totally lost. Her
husband worked in the engineering division,
her son in Data. She loved the place and all
its oddities, and helped me avoid a hundred
elephant traps with a cheerful ‘Let me call
Maisie,’ or Harry, or whoever it was. She
always had a way around any problem and
an answer to any question, and unlike any in
John Birt’s BBC, she enjoyed her job.”
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