P resident Sarkozy has made the right decision by avoiding the
World Economic Forum in Davos this week. The global titans of banking and politics are not looking good: to be photographed having fun with them would be a provocation. Not since the oil crises of the 1970s has there been less confidence in the people in charge. In normal times, one may not think very much about the astronomical sums made by money men, but one’s acceptance of their rewards depends on the idea that they run risks. Now it turns out that they don’t. There is a well-known saying that if you owe the bank £100, that is your problem, but if you owe it £1 million, that is its problem. What happens when the banks themselves owe several billion pounds? The answer appears to be that it is everyone’s problem except theirs. The US authorities are now helping out the big American banks on an enormous scale while the banks continue to pay their dividends, their bonuses, their huge pay-offs and, in the case of J.P. Morgan, hundreds of thousands to Tony Blair to meet their clients. Over here, Gordon Brown commits £55 billion of public money to make it safe for Richard Branson (or whoever) to own a bank that is in trouble. The late Alan Clark once told me that Hitler’s aggression had been worthwhile because ‘at least it stilled the steady tap of the counting house’. It was a (deliberately) terrible thing to say, but his frame of mind is one that afflicts societies which come to believe that the banks, instead of managing their money, have grabbed it for themselves.
The working week began with what the press call ‘Blue Monday’, the day in January when all the worst things about being alive — post-Christmas credit card bills, the dreariness of work, foul weather etc. — combine. It lived up to its billing, with the slump in the stock market, and wind and rain. I went for a walk. There were no colours but grey-green and brown, and almost no sign of life. Even the snipe that normally flourish in our marshy field seemed to have fled. I found this absence of redeeming features cheering. Looking back on previous recessions, I realise that I have enjoyed them, even when they hurt me personally. Recessions are moments of truth, which human nature needs after the lies that always go with a boom. The best way to deal with bad weather is to go out in it.
The latest government guidelines for preventing violent extremism in British universities walk a tightrope. On the one hand, they usefully illustrate certain situations which may arise ‘on campus’. What happens, for example, if a martial arts club starts adding political discussion groups to its agenda? What should you do when prayer rooms are taken over by a group that does not allow others in? How can you recognise the ‘single narrative’ which extremists use to win recruits? The document has sensible advice. On the other hand, it uses a different language from past official guidance to avoid causing offence. It keeps speaking of ‘al-Qa’eda-influenced terrorism’ as being the main problem, and eschews any mention of ‘Islamic terrorism’ or even ‘Islamist terrorism’. Obviously it is right to avoid giving gratuitous hurt, but the trouble is that the name ‘al-Qa’eda’ does not do the job properly. One of the most important lessons about Islamist extremism, well described in Ed Husain’s book, The Islamist, is that it is protean in form. There are Wahabis and members of the Muslim Brotherhood and followers of Jamaat Islamiya and of Hizbut-Tahrir. Much of it has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden. There are organisations that emerge, get into trouble and then vanish, only to reappear in different forms. There are some adherents of nasty groups who are not personally dangerous, and there are some adherents of apparently innocuous groups who are very dangerous indeed. As the document unfolds, it has to use the word ‘Muslim’ many times in order to be clear what it is talking about, and yet it shies away from one of the hardest things about the problem — its pervasiveness.
Studying some papers from 1981, I noticed that, in that year, Time magazine made Lech Walesa Man of the Year. Last month, it made Vladimir Putin Person (as it is now called) of the Year. Is this where we have got to since freedom came to Eastern Europe?
In the debate about their pay, MPs always complain that the decision falls to them. It is invidious, they say, that they should decide what they are worth. It is difficult, certainly, but not invidious. MPs jealously, correctly, guard their right to be the ultimate guardians of the public purse. That right is abridged if they invite someone else to tell them what they should be paid. The most honest way to deal with their pay is for them to debate it in public and vote on it annually. But if MPs refuse, and try to pass the buck, I have a suggestion. Let a quango decide the aggregate, unvariable amount of money that the House of Commons may have for its Members for the course of each Parliament, and then let MPs argue among themselves how best to divide it. They would quickly realise that they would get richer if they reduced their own number, and their entourages. We would probably end up with a mere 400 Members, instead of the ludicrous 646 there are at present. Greed would be good.
In the car on Sunday, I turned on Radio 3 and found myself listening to Andrew O’Hagan reading Robert Burns’s poem ‘Handsome Nell’. I was very struck with it, not so much because of the poem itself (I’m not quite convinced by the poet’s pious claim that ‘virtue warms my breast’), but because of how well it was read. O’Hagan understood that a poem read out loud must do two things which are not in conflict. It must make meaning as clear as possible, and it must sing. It is sad how rare this is. Old-fashioned actors tended to reduce sense in the interests of sonority. The more modern and more common fault is to think that the form of the verse must be suppressed in order to convey the sincerity of its intent. Recently, lots of poets read out their entries to the T.S. Eliot Prize on the Today programme. In most cases, their flatness of tone meant that their words, however good, were hard to take in or enjoy. No poetry prizes should be awarded without the judges hearing the entries declaimed, and the winner should show, in the declaiming, how poetry is a richer form than prose.
TV Licensing (continued). A reader draws my attention to the case of Kenneth Brierley, aged 46, who died of bowel cancer last October. In December, the late Mr Brierley was fined £200 by Rochdale magistrates for not possessing a television licence. That’ll teach him!
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