MG Zimeta
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
These are dark times to be a politician or a banker. Hedge fund managers, newly relegated to the social wilderness reserved for sex offenders and arms dealers, may or may not be pleased to now be joined by their MPs. The recent national anger at our political and financial elite has been unprecedented: but are we right in our rage? “Anybody can become angry,” warns Aristotle, “that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose – that is not in everybody’s power, that is not easy.” In the furore about the failed morals of our political and financial institutions, are we in danger of compromising our own moral standing, or missing a valuable opportunity to fix what went wrong?
The easiest response to wrongdoing is retribution. Several of our expense-fiddling MPs and senior failed bankers have been subject to humiliating public scrutiny of their finances and lifestyles. Such vengeance can feel good, but it plays to the lowest parts of our own character. And establishing guilt, unfortunately, does not always mean establishing remorse: “I pleaded guilty, a secular plea,” says JM Coetzee’s fallen academic David Lurie in his novel Disgrace. “That plea should suffice. Repentance is neither here nor there.” “I accept responsibility for that which I was responsible,” wrote Sir Fred Goodwin, former CEO of RBS defending his £16m pension after the treasury used £20bn to bail out the crippled bank. “[T]o voluntarily accept a reduction… is not warranted.”
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Ed Howker
Boris Johnson once admitted to devoting “hours, days, years” in his late twenties to obsessing over former EU President Jacques Delors. He even claimed that the “pipe-puffing French socialist” inspired his best piece of writing, an article entitled “Delors’ plan to rule Europe” in the Sunday Telegraph, and held aloft by Danes marching to oppose the Maastricht treaty. Yet even now Johnson cannot escape the Frenchman’s legacy, especially the EU funding of “regional offices” that spawned the Greater London Authority—over which Johnson has spent a year as mayor.
That this evangelical anti-federalist owes his job to the godfather of European integration is just one of a long list of incongruities in the Johnson mayoralty. It is a supposed testing ground for a future Conservative government, yet he rejects the Cameron label. He is mandated by the largest direct democratic election of any office in Europe, but has limited power. He leads with a of cult of personality insufficiently large to disguise a lack of direction. But of all the pen-portraits of Johnson’s first year in office, described variously as “a disaster” and “formidable,” few have admitted the obvious: not a great deal has been done.
Certainly, much has been cancelled. Johnson has junked the extension of London’s congestion charge, along with the Thames Gateway Bridge. A police commissioner has resigned, as have rather too many mayoral staff. The “bendy buses” which Johnson scorned during his campaign still snake through London’s streets, and the high rises he promised to block continue to scramble towards the skyline.
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Andrew Gilligan
Discuss this article at First Drafts , Prospect’s blog
If anyone doubted the need for that much-mocked practice, race awareness training, or the distance that it seems to have carried the Metropolitan police in the past 25 years, they should read the following quotes from a 1983 report, “Police and People in London,” by the Policy Studies Institute.
“I call them niggers myself,” said one Met officer. “Whilst not being very intelligent, they have this low animal cunning,” was how another put it. A third said: “Well, they’re used to running round in the jungle, plucking what they want from the trees…”
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Mark Cousins
In Woody Allen’s 2005 movie Match Point, Londoners saw the London Eye, Tower Bridge and the Houses of Parliament—their city as tourist metonym. Those who attended the glitzy premiere of David Cronenberg’s latest movie, Eastern Promises, which opened the London film festival, were confronted by a very different city: dank alleyways, a fetid bit of the Thames, a nondescript hospital and service entrances instead of front doors—monumental urbanism.
It’s tempting to see the former as fake and the latter as real, but as you watch Cronenberg’s vision unfold, you realise that Eastern Promises is not a response to Woody Allen’s blindness to the particularities of 21st-century London. Although it was written by Steven Knight, who also wrote Stephen Frears’s far more realistic Dirty Pretty Things, Cronenberg’s film isn’t interested in the specifics of place; but then again neither were The Fly, Naked Lunch or Crash. Cronenberg’s films could be set almost anywhere. Excise the markers of individual cities, and they work as universal nightmares.
But this is not to say that physical reality is of no interest to him. Far from it. Like his North American compatriots David Lynch and Matthew Barney, he is deeply interested in texture. Though Eastern Promises is not his most visually distinctive film, he none the less appeals to our senses through the blonde softness of Naomi Watts’s character, a midwife who investigates the death of a Russian teenage girl, and her contrast to the black hardness and muscularity of the Russian chauffeur who is connected to the girl’s murderers. In one signature scene, the chauffeur, played by Viggo Mortensen, asks for a hairdryer to defrost a frozen human body so that he can peel open its jacket and remove a wallet. We can sense Cronenberg’s relish at the involuntary way we imagine the feel of marble-hard flesh as it softens, and smell its decay.
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Martin Kettle
A golden age of stick-waving?
Those meddlesome people who like to straighten things out have always been offended by the untidy arrangement under which London has four permanent subsidised symphony orchestras. London does not need so many orchestras, they say. Can’t it make do with just two or three, like other places? And surely fewer would mean better?
There is no logical answer to these questions. If you were designing London from scratch, you probably wouldn’t give it four symphony orchestras, any more than you would allocate it 11 railway terminuses or five airports. But the plain fact is that, unlike with the airports, having four orchestras works. So I say: stop trying to fix something that isn’t broken. Actually, I say something much more than that. Judged by the quality of the conductors now being attracted to all of the London orchestras—to say nothing of those working with the other British orchestras too—we are fortunate to be living in a golden age of orchestral playing and stick-waving. As someone once said in another context: just rejoice at that news.
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Annie Maccoby Berglof
I marked international women’s day at a dinner at the Savile Club, the legendary retreat of London’s literary giants. The list of previous members could double as the English syllabus of an American college, pre-Foucault: Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, HG Wells and CP Snow. Even Henry James, who was practically English, made the club. The list goes on and on, with members even today sharing one other requirement besides artistic merit: they are all male.
Despite, or maybe because of, the membership restrictions, another exclusive club, Svea Britt—the Swedish working women’s association in Britain—picked the Savile as the perfect site to usher in international women’s day. And so on 8th March, the elegant 19th-century club rooms (which, like many grand London settings, are available for hire) were taken over by 90 Swedish women, two Americans and one Frenchwoman: Laurence Auer, the dinner speaker, honoured for her four years as deputy press secretary for foreign affairs to outgoing president, Jacques Chirac, and for being the first woman to hold the job.
At exactly 6pm, the women poured into the Mayfair club and into the all-male cloakroom, where a fierce attendant swatted them out. “No women’s coats in here.” A few grumbling members fled towards the back bar, while others ducked down to a basement, where they glued themselves to glowing green computer screens.
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Paul Barker
London has always thrived on a gentle version of anarchy. It wasn’t created, or much shaped, by royal or imperial edicts. Nor will it be, I now trust, by mayoral ones. Apropos Ken Livingstone and London, Prospect last month asked: “Is his megalopolis out of control?” To which the best answer is: “Let’s hope so.”
To Prospect Livingstone spoke like a wheeler-dealer, who adapts to almost anything. Not quite so: he is a man with a Plan. “The spatial development strategy for greater London”—otherwise known as the London Plan—was published in 2004. Anyone living in London must pray it is never carried through. The Plan, which is very personal to Livingstone, claims it doesn’t “dictate lifestyles.” But it does.
London’s big burst of new energy—Prospect rightly noted—occurred in the years after 1986, when Livingstone’s previous stamping ground, the Greater London Council, was abolished. Boroughs did deals with central or semi-central agencies. Not the best idea—but it preserved us from a grand design.
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Simon Parker
Simon Parker You still describe yourself as a socialist, but the approach you take to London and to politics in general appears to be quite different to what it was in the 1980s, in the GLC days. How do you think your views have changed since then, and what does it mean to be a socialist today, running this most capitalist of cities?
Ken Livingstone Well, the whole world has been transformed since the early 1980s. I grew up in a world in which everything came down to where you stood in a conflict between America and the Soviet Union, and that poisoned the politics of every country. When I became leader of the GLC, in 1981, we had an agenda that now looks incredibly moderate in terms of discrimination: making the police accountable and so on. Now you have David Cameron embracing most of these things, but in those days it was seen as a threat because it was somehow on the Soviet side. When we cut the fares on public transport, the Daily Mail said this was the first step towards the introduction of a full Soviet economy; you need to remember that everything was being seen through the prism of Fleet Street, where there wasn’t a single black reporter, no-one was openly gay, and there were no women in any senior positions. It was a repository of homophobia and misogyny and racism: they felt threatened by our approach and just laughed at it all.
My role has changed since GLC days too. Then, my job was the day-to-day management of the Labour caucus. Now, I just have to make sure my budget goes through the assembly once a year—and in the rest of my time I can put together coalitions of interests around a common agenda. City Hall is the centre of a web. So, for example, you get everybody signed up to Crossrail [the proposed east-west rail link through central London, running from Maidenhead to Shenfield and Abbey Wood]. Where before I was looking inward to the party machine, now I look outward. It’s a position that, thanks to the prestige of the office enables, you to broker deals with government or the private sector—Americans understand this better than we do. Another example of this kind of coalition: we have just launched our climate change strategy, which identifies how to reduce emissions by 30 per cent in ten years, and 60 per cent in 20. New York and LA and Chicago are working on similar strategies as well, and here it’s involved working with the boroughs, with the private sector, with the government. City Hall is the centre of the web—together we can get all this done.
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Simon Jenkins
London is the world’s top city, so it is shouted from the rooftops. Back in the 1980s boom, when London “boosterism” was first emerging after decades of the British disease, an American immigrant told me that there was only one reason the world was rushing to colonise the place. It was because being a Londoner was like living not in a city, but in a small town like he had known back home.
Only recently has London even referred to itself as a city rather than a town. It was never planned, laid out, formalised or, until the 20th century, governed as a civic unity. London was spared Paris’s Haussmann, Vienna’s Ringstrasse and Manhattan’s gridplan. It simply sprawled outwards, engulfing villages, landed estates and suburbs in one multifarious settlement. The Hanoverian monarchs, as local landowners, were church wardens at St Martin-in-the-Fields. When Karl Marx moved his family to Walthamstow, he found to his astonishment that he had to do service as a vestry constable. The rubric “a city of villages,” which survives to this day, was a misnomer and yet a potent one.
I have lived variously in Camden Town, Upper Norwood, Pimlico, Crouch End, Earls Court and Primrose Hill. Most Londoners would recognise these places as geographical personalities, even if they never visited them. London’s topography is not of its administrative boroughs but of Kentish Town, Crystal Palace, Hampstead, Pimlico, Battersea, Stepney, Rotherhithe. My village of Primrose Hill possesses the essential components of an urban village: high street, parish church, square, clinic, council flats, primary school and a branch library. Yet it possesses no shred of self-government. To government it is a postcode, no more.
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Stephen Everson
A Monday in mid-March, and the Argentinian mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink is giving a lunchtime recital at London’s Wigmore Hall. All the 500-odd seats are full, and several people, none of them young, are standing along the back wall of the hall. Fink begins with some songs by Grieg, works not performed very often, and as she sings, at least two thirds of the audience are following the texts of the songs in the programme. Every few songs, there is the sound of turning pages as the audience follows the programme’s injunction only to turn the page when the song has finished. On two occasions, a sound of muffled coughing is followed by someone’s making a quick, but pretty well silent, exit from the hall into the lobby. Fink herself is on the highest form—technically flawless but expressively free—and at the end of the recital the audience mixes its enthusiastic applause with more than a few cheers.
While Fink is certainly in the top rank of singers, she has not received the kind of star-making publicity enjoyed by Cecilia Bartoli or Renée Fleming. Indeed, it is unlikely that more than a handful of the 2,000-odd people who packed out Fleming’s Barbican concert last autumn would know Fink’s name. Yet through reputation rather than hype, not only is the Wigmore full for her recital, it is filled by an audience that responds to her with silent concentration and with real appreciation of her accomplishment. And that certainly isn’t something to be taken for granted any longer.
It is difficult to overstate how much the nature of an audience can affect the experience of a concert. You may think that this is only a matter of its being quiet. After all, the basic and absolute rule for concert-going must be: just don’t make any noise. A good audience is one you can forget while you concentrate on listening. This is to think of the audience, or the rest of the audience, as an unwelcome necessity. If only you were rich enough to pay the fees, the ideal would be to have Brendel or Pollini playing for you alone.
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