Friday, 7 October 2016
Thank God Theresa May is continuing the historic Tory tradition of fighting the elite
Whenever an elite is unjust, anywhere in the world, from South Africa to Chile to Saudi Arabia, it’s been the Conservative Party that has bravely fought them by selling them weapons and inviting their leaders to dinner.
Mark Steel in The Independent
What a welcome message from Theresa May, that she’s sick of the elite. The Cabinet all applauded, as you’d expect; although 27 of them are millionaires, that doesn’t make them elite – they all got their money by winning it on scratch cards.
The Prime Minister was only abiding by a change to international law that states everyone who makes a public speech now has to insist they can’t stand the “elite”. Donald Trump – a man whose background is so modest that, in one of his castles, he has to go outside to use the moat – hates the elite. Iain Duncan Smith with his modest 15-up 15-down Tudor mansion is fed up with the elite, too. Boris Johnson stands up against the elite, because his background was so humble that one of the kids at his primary school had an imaginary friend who didn’t have his own valet.
This year, the Queen will probably start her Christmas speech by saying, “My husband and I are sick to death of the elite. When one has been required to reign as a working-class monarch, one rather views these elite types with sufficient disdain to get the right hump.”
But May was more specific. She singled out the “Liberal Metropolitan Elite,” for ruining our lives.
You can understand why, because these are the very people who have spoilt everything with their liberal ways. There’s Topshop’s Philip Green, who wasted millions so he could complete a course as a human rights lawyer and get his hipster beard trimmed. Mike Ashley, condemned for his treatment of staff at Sports Direct, has “homeopath” written all over him.
There’s Alan “cycle lane” Sugar, who, if I remember right, turned down his knighthood as a protest against the number of toads that get run over. And the most powerful man in the media is Rupert Murdoch, who publishes newspapers full of feminism and media studies.
One way we must stop these liberals, she insisted, is prevent human rights lawyers from haranguing the army. She’s right there: if there’s one area in which human rights lawyers have absolutelyno need to investigate, it’s war. Whoever heard of an army that isn’t careful to look after human rights? They should concern themselves with real human rights culprits, such as florists.
These abuses have come about because, for 35 years, British life has been relentlessly liberal. It started with Margaret Thatcher, who shut down the mines so they could be replaced by documentaries on BBC4 about Tibetan dance. And she brought in the Poll Tax, but only because she was convinced this would lead to wider ownership of African wood carvings bought from antique shops in Notting Hill.
Then we had liberal Tony Blair with his liberal invasion of Iraq, in which he insisted the air force only used Fairtrade depleted uranium. Now, at last, we’re all sick of being ruled by these elite liberals.
Conservative figures such as Amber Rudd have this week been forced to ask “can we at last talk about immigration?” Thanks to the elite, who can think of a single occasion in the last six months when anyone in public eye has mentioned immigration?
There are some programmes on radio or television that simply refuse to discuss the issue. For example, during a first-round clash in the Swedish open snooker championship on Eurosport, a whole four minutes went by on the commentary without mention of how you can’t move in Lincolnshire for Bulgarians. And two minutes passed by without any talk of immigration during the two-minute silence on Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph. And if we can’t talk about protecting our borders at that time when can we discuss it?
The idea that we should welcome immigration is a perfect example of how the Liberal Metropolitan Elite operates, because foreigners are alright for some with their cheap nannies but down-to-earth types, bless them, can’t stand people who have the nerve to move over here and fix radiators or bed-bath the elderly.
This week is the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, when thousands of people assembled in East London to prevent the British Union of Fascists from marching through a Jewish area. I wonder who was in the crowds that day, linking arms to defy the supporters of Hitler? It can’t have been the working class, since they must all have said “it’s alright for the elite, but these Jews come over here and lower our wages.” So it must have been the Liberal Metropolitan Elite who took on the fascists, by hurling antique carriage clocks at them after distracting them with an avant-garde contemporary dance evening.
Theresa May seems ambitious, because she said she’s going to battle an “international elite”. So they’re global, these elites, and they can only be fought by determined earthy salt-of-the-earth types such as Anna Soubry. Jeremy Hunt, for example, looks exactly like someone who’s just come off an eight-hour shift driving a forklift truck carrying tomatoes round a warehouse for Lidl, shouting “there you go sweetheart, stack them up while I sort out these elite doctors giving it all that about weekends”.
If there’s one thing we know about the Conservative Party, it’s the natural home for common folk who want to take on the international elite.
Whenever an elite is unjust, anywhere in the world, from apartheid South Africa to military Chile or patriarchal Saudi Arabia, it’s been the Conservative Party that has bravely fought them by selling them weapons and inviting their leaders to dinner. Just like the poor-but-happy folk down any council estate always keep a door open for a military dictator, the little darlings.
Lies, fearmongering and fables: that’s our democracy
George Monbiot in The Guardian
What if democracy doesn’t work? What if it never has and never will? What if government of the people, by the people, for the people is a fairytale? What if it functions as a justifying myth for liars and charlatans?
There are plenty of reasons to raise these questions. The lies, exaggerations and fearmongering on both sides of the Brexit non-debate; the xenophobic fables that informed the Hungarian referendum; Donald Trump’s ability to shake off almost any scandal and exposure; the election of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, who gleefully compares himself to Hitler: are these isolated instances or do they reveal a systemic problem?
Democracy for Realists, published earlier this year by the social science professors Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, argues that the “folk theory of democracy” – the idea that citizens make coherent and intelligible policy decisions, on which governments then act – bears no relationship to how it really works. Or could ever work.
Voters, they contend, can’t possibly live up to these expectations. Most are too busy with jobs and families and troubles of their own. When we do have time off, not many of us choose to spend it sifting competing claims about the fiscal implications of quantitative easing. Even when we do, we don’t behave as the theory suggests.
2.8 million voters punished Al Gore for the floods and droughts of 2000 – ironic, given his position on climate change
Our folk theory of democracy is grounded in an Enlightenment notion of rational choice. This proposes that we make political decisions by seeking information, weighing the evidence and using it to choose good policies, then attempting to elect a government that will champion those policies. In doing so, we compete with other rational voters, and seek to reach the unpersuaded through reasoned debate.
In reality, the research summarised by Achen and Bartels suggests, most people possess almost no useful information about policies and their implications, have little desire to improve their state of knowledge, and have a deep aversion to political disagreement. We base our political decisions on who we are rather than what we think. In other words, we act politically – not as individual, rational beings but as members of social groups, expressing a social identity. We seek out the political parties that seem to correspond best to our culture, with little regard to whether their policies support our interests. We remain loyal to political parties long after they have ceased to serve us.
Of course, shifts do happen, sometimes as a result of extreme circumstances, sometimes because another party positions itself as a better guardian of a particular cultural identity. But they seldom involve a rational assessment of policy.
The idea that parties are guided by policy decisions made by voters also seems to be a myth; in reality, the parties make the policies and we fall into line. To minimise cognitive dissonance – the gulf between what we perceive and what we believe – we either adjust our views to those of our favoured party or avoid discovering what the party really stands for. This is how people end up voting against their interests.
We are suckers for language. When surveys asked Americans whether the federal government was spending too little on “assistance to the poor”, 65% agreed. But only 25% agreed that it was spending too little on “welfare”. In the approach to the 1991 Gulf war, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they were willing to “use military force”; less than 30% were willing to “go to war”.
Even the less ambitious notion of democracy – that it’s a means by which people punish or reward governments – turns out to be divorced from reality. We remember only the past few months of a government’s performance (a bias known as “duration neglect”) and are hopeless at correctly attributing blame. A great white shark that killed five people in July 1916 caused a 10% swing against Woodrow Wilson in the beach communities of New Jersey. In 2000, according to analysis by the authors 2.8 million voters punished the Democrats for the floods and droughts that struck that year. Al Gore, they say, lost Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, Florida, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Missouri as a result – which is ironic given his position on climate change.
The obvious answer is better information and civic education. But this doesn’t work either. Moderately informed Republicans were more inclined than Republicans with the least information to believe that Bill Clinton oversaw an increase in the budget deficit (it declined massively). Why? Because, unlike the worst informed, they knew he was a Democrat. The tiny number of people with a very high level of political information tend to use it not to challenge their own opinions but to rationalise them. Political knowledge, Achen and Bartels argue, “enhances bias”.
Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems
Direct democracy – referendums and citizens’ initiatives – seems to produce even worse results. In the US initiatives are repeatedly used by multimillion-dollar lobby groups to achieve results that state legislatures won’t grant them. They tend to replace taxes with user fees, stymie the redistribution of wealth and degrade public services. Whether representative or direct, democracy comes to be owned by the elites.
This is not to suggest that it has no virtues; just that those it does have are not those we principally ascribe to it. It allows governments to be changed without bloodshed, limits terms in office, and ensures that the results of elections are widely accepted. Sometimes public attribution of blame will coincide with reality, which is why you don’t get famines in democracies.
In these respects it beats dictatorship. But is this all it has to offer? A weakness of Democracy for Realists is that most of its examples are drawn from the US, and most of those are old. Had the authors examined popular education groups in Latin America, participatory budgets in Brazil and New York, the fragmentation of traditional parties in Europe and the movement that culminated in Bernie Sanders’ near miss, they might have discerned more room for hope. This is not to suggest that the folk theory of democracy comes close to reality anywhere, but that the situation is not as hopeless as they propose.
Persistent, determined, well-organised groups can bring neglected issues to the fore and change political outcomes. But in doing so they cannot rely on what democracy ought to be. We must see it for what it is. And that means understanding what we are.
What if democracy doesn’t work? What if it never has and never will? What if government of the people, by the people, for the people is a fairytale? What if it functions as a justifying myth for liars and charlatans?
There are plenty of reasons to raise these questions. The lies, exaggerations and fearmongering on both sides of the Brexit non-debate; the xenophobic fables that informed the Hungarian referendum; Donald Trump’s ability to shake off almost any scandal and exposure; the election of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, who gleefully compares himself to Hitler: are these isolated instances or do they reveal a systemic problem?
Democracy for Realists, published earlier this year by the social science professors Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, argues that the “folk theory of democracy” – the idea that citizens make coherent and intelligible policy decisions, on which governments then act – bears no relationship to how it really works. Or could ever work.
Voters, they contend, can’t possibly live up to these expectations. Most are too busy with jobs and families and troubles of their own. When we do have time off, not many of us choose to spend it sifting competing claims about the fiscal implications of quantitative easing. Even when we do, we don’t behave as the theory suggests.
2.8 million voters punished Al Gore for the floods and droughts of 2000 – ironic, given his position on climate change
Our folk theory of democracy is grounded in an Enlightenment notion of rational choice. This proposes that we make political decisions by seeking information, weighing the evidence and using it to choose good policies, then attempting to elect a government that will champion those policies. In doing so, we compete with other rational voters, and seek to reach the unpersuaded through reasoned debate.
In reality, the research summarised by Achen and Bartels suggests, most people possess almost no useful information about policies and their implications, have little desire to improve their state of knowledge, and have a deep aversion to political disagreement. We base our political decisions on who we are rather than what we think. In other words, we act politically – not as individual, rational beings but as members of social groups, expressing a social identity. We seek out the political parties that seem to correspond best to our culture, with little regard to whether their policies support our interests. We remain loyal to political parties long after they have ceased to serve us.
Of course, shifts do happen, sometimes as a result of extreme circumstances, sometimes because another party positions itself as a better guardian of a particular cultural identity. But they seldom involve a rational assessment of policy.
The idea that parties are guided by policy decisions made by voters also seems to be a myth; in reality, the parties make the policies and we fall into line. To minimise cognitive dissonance – the gulf between what we perceive and what we believe – we either adjust our views to those of our favoured party or avoid discovering what the party really stands for. This is how people end up voting against their interests.
We are suckers for language. When surveys asked Americans whether the federal government was spending too little on “assistance to the poor”, 65% agreed. But only 25% agreed that it was spending too little on “welfare”. In the approach to the 1991 Gulf war, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they were willing to “use military force”; less than 30% were willing to “go to war”.
Even the less ambitious notion of democracy – that it’s a means by which people punish or reward governments – turns out to be divorced from reality. We remember only the past few months of a government’s performance (a bias known as “duration neglect”) and are hopeless at correctly attributing blame. A great white shark that killed five people in July 1916 caused a 10% swing against Woodrow Wilson in the beach communities of New Jersey. In 2000, according to analysis by the authors 2.8 million voters punished the Democrats for the floods and droughts that struck that year. Al Gore, they say, lost Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, Florida, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Missouri as a result – which is ironic given his position on climate change.
The obvious answer is better information and civic education. But this doesn’t work either. Moderately informed Republicans were more inclined than Republicans with the least information to believe that Bill Clinton oversaw an increase in the budget deficit (it declined massively). Why? Because, unlike the worst informed, they knew he was a Democrat. The tiny number of people with a very high level of political information tend to use it not to challenge their own opinions but to rationalise them. Political knowledge, Achen and Bartels argue, “enhances bias”.
Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems
Direct democracy – referendums and citizens’ initiatives – seems to produce even worse results. In the US initiatives are repeatedly used by multimillion-dollar lobby groups to achieve results that state legislatures won’t grant them. They tend to replace taxes with user fees, stymie the redistribution of wealth and degrade public services. Whether representative or direct, democracy comes to be owned by the elites.
This is not to suggest that it has no virtues; just that those it does have are not those we principally ascribe to it. It allows governments to be changed without bloodshed, limits terms in office, and ensures that the results of elections are widely accepted. Sometimes public attribution of blame will coincide with reality, which is why you don’t get famines in democracies.
In these respects it beats dictatorship. But is this all it has to offer? A weakness of Democracy for Realists is that most of its examples are drawn from the US, and most of those are old. Had the authors examined popular education groups in Latin America, participatory budgets in Brazil and New York, the fragmentation of traditional parties in Europe and the movement that culminated in Bernie Sanders’ near miss, they might have discerned more room for hope. This is not to suggest that the folk theory of democracy comes close to reality anywhere, but that the situation is not as hopeless as they propose.
Persistent, determined, well-organised groups can bring neglected issues to the fore and change political outcomes. But in doing so they cannot rely on what democracy ought to be. We must see it for what it is. And that means understanding what we are.
Thursday, 6 October 2016
PG Wodehouse's creative writing lessons
Sam Jordison in The Guardian
Anyone wanting to learn about plotting, not to mention prose perfection, should look to Leave it to Psmith's lean, absurd genius
Anyone wanting to learn about plotting, not to mention prose perfection, should look to Leave it to Psmith's lean, absurd genius
'I always feel the thing to go for is speed' … PG Wodehouse at his typewriter at his Long Island home in 1971. Photograph: AP
"I have been wondering where you would take this reading group for the book, although very enjoyable, isn't particularly nuanced or layered. What you read is all you get."
So wrote Reading group contributor AlanWSkinner wrote last week. I've been wondering too – worrying even. Leave It To Psmith offers plenty of delights. I laughed all the way through this story of impostors, jewel thieves and poets at Blandings Castle. But it's true that most of the novel's pleasures lie on the surface. AlanWSkinner may be right that there isn't much more than meets the eye. That's not a problem. But what scope does it leave for literary inquisition?
The truth is that I'd feel like I was attacking a soufflé with a pickaxe if I were to start hacking around for deep themes, dark images and political implications. Maybe it's possible to make something of the hilarious moral qualities Wodehouse ascribes to clothing. Why does he present Lord Emsworth "mould-stained and wearing a deplorable old jacket"? When we first meet Psmith, is it important that we are treated to the sight of "a very tall, very thin, very solemn young man, gleaming in a speckless top hat and a morning coat of irreproachable fit"? If this were Shakespeare I'd be looking for great significance in the similar descriptions that run throughout the book. But in Wodehouse, it just seems too much like over-explaining the joke, like attaching too much weight to an admirably light book. I think it's probably safest to assume that the only thing that really matters is that these sartorial notes are funny and help conjure up that magical inter-war world. Safe not least because burrowing any deeper would put us firmly into the camp of the poets and poseurs that Lady Constance Keeble has started to inflict on her poor old brother at Blandings Castle. And who wouldn't sympathise with Lord Emsworth when he declares: "Look here Connie … You know I hate literary fellows. It's bad enough having them in the house, but when it comes to having to go to London to fetch 'em … "
Fortunately, although I don't want to go deep, there are still things to say about Leave It To Psmith. For a start, that surface is covered in gems:
"The door opened, and Beach the butler entered, a dignified procession of one."
"My son Frederick," said Lord Emsworth, rather in the voice with which he would have called attention to the presence of a slug among his flowers."
"It contained a table with a red cloth, a chair, three stuffed birds in a glass case on the wall, and a small horsehair sofa. A depressing musty scent pervaded the place, as if a cheese had recently died there in painful circumstances. Eve gave a little shiver of distaste."
As the erstwhile editor of a series of books about Crap Towns, I also can't resist quoting the following description of the fictional Wallingford Street, West Kensington, at length:
"When the great revolution against London's ugliness really starts and yelling hordes of artists and architects, maddened beyond endurance, finally take the law into their own hands and rage through the city burning and destroying, Wallingford Street, West Kensington, will surely not escape the torch … Situated in the middle of one of those districts where London breaks out into a sort of eczema of red brick, it consists of two parallel rows of semi-detached villas, all exactly alike, each guarded by a ragged evergreen hedge, each with coloured glass of an extremely regrettable nature let into the panels of the front door; and sensitive young impressionists from the artists' colony up Holland Park way may sometimes be seen stumbling through it with hands over their eyes, muttering between clenched teeth 'How long? How long?'"
How wonderful to be in the presence of a master.
Such writing cannot be equalled. I wouldn't recommend that anyone should try. I'd also attempt to conceal from budding authors the horrifying information that Wodehouse wrote 40,000 words of this quality in just three weeks in 1922 and wrapped up the entire novel in a matter of months.
Otherwise, Leave It To Psmith should be compulsory reading for creative writing classes around the world. Especially when backed up by PG Wodehouse's own generous suggestions for a wannabe writer in a Paris Review interview given two years before his death in 1975 (a mere half-century after he wrote this novel) :
"I'd give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a great slab of prose at the start."
In Leave It To Psmith the younger Wodehouse does just what his 91-year-old incarnation recommends. He hits the dialogue within a page of opening, and although many beautiful descriptions follow, a quick flick through suggests that there is never any more than a single page without some conversation. No danger of getting lost in details here.
In the same interview, he said:
"For a humorous novel you've got to have a scenario, and you've got to test it so that you know where the comedy comes in, where the situations come in … splitting it up into scenes (you can make a scene of almost anything) and have as little stuff in between as possible."
Again, it's all but impossible to find anything "in between". All the action takes place in clear, discrete scenes and each one leads to the other naturally and easily and with remarkable precision. It's lean. It's heading somewhere.
It almost didn't surprise me to learn that the book was successfully adapted for the stage during Wodehouse's lifetime. Almost. Because although the scenes are laid out as neatly as moody Blandings gardener Angus McAllister's flowerbeds, there's still a fiendish complexity behind them. Wodehouse also told The Paris Review:
"I think the success of every novel – if it's a novel of action – depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, '"Which are my big scenes?'' and then get every drop of juice out of them. The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through?"
Yes, he thought about how things might work on the stage. But the crucial phrase here is "twist". The practical exercise I'd give to those lucky creative writing students would be to try to draw a schematic diagram of the plot of Leave It To Psmith, using coloured pencils, and, if they want to get really fancy, algebraic symbols for each of the characters and their movements. The resulting equations would be of fiendish complexity, there would be rainbows and arrows all over the place, leading to increasingly thick clumps where, with exquisite timing, Wodehouse has managed to land everyone in the same place at the right time. To give one quick example, the way in which he gets Psmith to Blandings Castle depends on at least three incredible coincidences, four or five bravura pieces of scene shifting that ensure Psmith lands in a chair opposite Lord Emsworth (and recently vacated by the Canadian poet Ralston McRodd) – not to mention a quite brilliant sleight of hand to enable Psmith to convince the Earl that he is the "Singer of Saskatoon" and expected at Blandings … And that's before he meets the Honourable Freddie Threepwood on a train and the plot really gets moving.
It's a masterpiece of timing and technique and the beautiful thing is, as a reader, you hardly even hear this intricate mechanism that Wodehouse has set ticking, so wonderful is everything else. There's a famous quote from VS Pritchett about his fellow Dulwich college alumnus: "The strength of Wodehouse lies not in his almost incomprehensibly intricate plots –Restoration comedy again – but in his prose style and there, above all, in his command of mind-splitting metaphor. To describe a girl as 'the sand in civilisation's spinach' enlarges and decorates the imagination."
I don't entirely agree. I think his plots are extraordinary. Few writers are better at moving characters around the board, even if few make them do sillier things. Their complexity is part of their charm and it's no surprise that Wodehouse said:
"It's the plots that I find so hard to work out. It takes such a long time to work one out."
What is surprising is that he then added:
"I like to think of some scene, it doesn't matter how crazy, and work backward and forward from it until eventually it becomes quite plausible and fits neatly into the story."
Plausible! That's almost as funny as his intentional jokes. The other delight of the Wodehouse plot is that it is almost entirely, gloriously absurd. But still. If you want to know how to construct a story, there are definitely worse places to look than Leave It To Psmith.
Where Pritchett is right, is in saying that the real glory of Wodehouse's scenarios lies in providing a platform for all his other talents. For getting Freddie Threepwood into a situation where he might propose to Eve Halliday by stating: "I say, I do think that you might marry a chap." For getting us all wondering what Ralston McTodd means when he invites us to look "across the pale parabola of joy". For sending Baxter tumbling down some stairs in a "Lucifer-like descent". For making, in short, this work of genius possible.
"I have been wondering where you would take this reading group for the book, although very enjoyable, isn't particularly nuanced or layered. What you read is all you get."
So wrote Reading group contributor AlanWSkinner wrote last week. I've been wondering too – worrying even. Leave It To Psmith offers plenty of delights. I laughed all the way through this story of impostors, jewel thieves and poets at Blandings Castle. But it's true that most of the novel's pleasures lie on the surface. AlanWSkinner may be right that there isn't much more than meets the eye. That's not a problem. But what scope does it leave for literary inquisition?
The truth is that I'd feel like I was attacking a soufflé with a pickaxe if I were to start hacking around for deep themes, dark images and political implications. Maybe it's possible to make something of the hilarious moral qualities Wodehouse ascribes to clothing. Why does he present Lord Emsworth "mould-stained and wearing a deplorable old jacket"? When we first meet Psmith, is it important that we are treated to the sight of "a very tall, very thin, very solemn young man, gleaming in a speckless top hat and a morning coat of irreproachable fit"? If this were Shakespeare I'd be looking for great significance in the similar descriptions that run throughout the book. But in Wodehouse, it just seems too much like over-explaining the joke, like attaching too much weight to an admirably light book. I think it's probably safest to assume that the only thing that really matters is that these sartorial notes are funny and help conjure up that magical inter-war world. Safe not least because burrowing any deeper would put us firmly into the camp of the poets and poseurs that Lady Constance Keeble has started to inflict on her poor old brother at Blandings Castle. And who wouldn't sympathise with Lord Emsworth when he declares: "Look here Connie … You know I hate literary fellows. It's bad enough having them in the house, but when it comes to having to go to London to fetch 'em … "
Fortunately, although I don't want to go deep, there are still things to say about Leave It To Psmith. For a start, that surface is covered in gems:
"The door opened, and Beach the butler entered, a dignified procession of one."
"My son Frederick," said Lord Emsworth, rather in the voice with which he would have called attention to the presence of a slug among his flowers."
"It contained a table with a red cloth, a chair, three stuffed birds in a glass case on the wall, and a small horsehair sofa. A depressing musty scent pervaded the place, as if a cheese had recently died there in painful circumstances. Eve gave a little shiver of distaste."
As the erstwhile editor of a series of books about Crap Towns, I also can't resist quoting the following description of the fictional Wallingford Street, West Kensington, at length:
"When the great revolution against London's ugliness really starts and yelling hordes of artists and architects, maddened beyond endurance, finally take the law into their own hands and rage through the city burning and destroying, Wallingford Street, West Kensington, will surely not escape the torch … Situated in the middle of one of those districts where London breaks out into a sort of eczema of red brick, it consists of two parallel rows of semi-detached villas, all exactly alike, each guarded by a ragged evergreen hedge, each with coloured glass of an extremely regrettable nature let into the panels of the front door; and sensitive young impressionists from the artists' colony up Holland Park way may sometimes be seen stumbling through it with hands over their eyes, muttering between clenched teeth 'How long? How long?'"
How wonderful to be in the presence of a master.
Such writing cannot be equalled. I wouldn't recommend that anyone should try. I'd also attempt to conceal from budding authors the horrifying information that Wodehouse wrote 40,000 words of this quality in just three weeks in 1922 and wrapped up the entire novel in a matter of months.
Otherwise, Leave It To Psmith should be compulsory reading for creative writing classes around the world. Especially when backed up by PG Wodehouse's own generous suggestions for a wannabe writer in a Paris Review interview given two years before his death in 1975 (a mere half-century after he wrote this novel) :
"I'd give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a great slab of prose at the start."
In Leave It To Psmith the younger Wodehouse does just what his 91-year-old incarnation recommends. He hits the dialogue within a page of opening, and although many beautiful descriptions follow, a quick flick through suggests that there is never any more than a single page without some conversation. No danger of getting lost in details here.
In the same interview, he said:
"For a humorous novel you've got to have a scenario, and you've got to test it so that you know where the comedy comes in, where the situations come in … splitting it up into scenes (you can make a scene of almost anything) and have as little stuff in between as possible."
Again, it's all but impossible to find anything "in between". All the action takes place in clear, discrete scenes and each one leads to the other naturally and easily and with remarkable precision. It's lean. It's heading somewhere.
It almost didn't surprise me to learn that the book was successfully adapted for the stage during Wodehouse's lifetime. Almost. Because although the scenes are laid out as neatly as moody Blandings gardener Angus McAllister's flowerbeds, there's still a fiendish complexity behind them. Wodehouse also told The Paris Review:
"I think the success of every novel – if it's a novel of action – depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, '"Which are my big scenes?'' and then get every drop of juice out of them. The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through?"
Yes, he thought about how things might work on the stage. But the crucial phrase here is "twist". The practical exercise I'd give to those lucky creative writing students would be to try to draw a schematic diagram of the plot of Leave It To Psmith, using coloured pencils, and, if they want to get really fancy, algebraic symbols for each of the characters and their movements. The resulting equations would be of fiendish complexity, there would be rainbows and arrows all over the place, leading to increasingly thick clumps where, with exquisite timing, Wodehouse has managed to land everyone in the same place at the right time. To give one quick example, the way in which he gets Psmith to Blandings Castle depends on at least three incredible coincidences, four or five bravura pieces of scene shifting that ensure Psmith lands in a chair opposite Lord Emsworth (and recently vacated by the Canadian poet Ralston McRodd) – not to mention a quite brilliant sleight of hand to enable Psmith to convince the Earl that he is the "Singer of Saskatoon" and expected at Blandings … And that's before he meets the Honourable Freddie Threepwood on a train and the plot really gets moving.
It's a masterpiece of timing and technique and the beautiful thing is, as a reader, you hardly even hear this intricate mechanism that Wodehouse has set ticking, so wonderful is everything else. There's a famous quote from VS Pritchett about his fellow Dulwich college alumnus: "The strength of Wodehouse lies not in his almost incomprehensibly intricate plots –Restoration comedy again – but in his prose style and there, above all, in his command of mind-splitting metaphor. To describe a girl as 'the sand in civilisation's spinach' enlarges and decorates the imagination."
I don't entirely agree. I think his plots are extraordinary. Few writers are better at moving characters around the board, even if few make them do sillier things. Their complexity is part of their charm and it's no surprise that Wodehouse said:
"It's the plots that I find so hard to work out. It takes such a long time to work one out."
What is surprising is that he then added:
"I like to think of some scene, it doesn't matter how crazy, and work backward and forward from it until eventually it becomes quite plausible and fits neatly into the story."
Plausible! That's almost as funny as his intentional jokes. The other delight of the Wodehouse plot is that it is almost entirely, gloriously absurd. But still. If you want to know how to construct a story, there are definitely worse places to look than Leave It To Psmith.
Where Pritchett is right, is in saying that the real glory of Wodehouse's scenarios lies in providing a platform for all his other talents. For getting Freddie Threepwood into a situation where he might propose to Eve Halliday by stating: "I say, I do think that you might marry a chap." For getting us all wondering what Ralston McTodd means when he invites us to look "across the pale parabola of joy". For sending Baxter tumbling down some stairs in a "Lucifer-like descent". For making, in short, this work of genius possible.
Tuesday, 4 October 2016
Don’t blame foreign investors – the roots of the housing crisis lie closer to home
David Madden in The Guardian
In a city where super-prime properties and tenant evictions are both on the rise, the housing system is broken and many residents are looking for someone to blame. For Londoners, rent consumes nearly two-thirds of the typical tenant’s income, and it will take 46 years for the average single person to save for a deposit on their first home. With overseas buyers acquiring as much as three-quarters of all new-build housing in London in recent years, it is understandable that foreigners would be cast as the villains behind the housing crisis. As a result, the London mayor Sadiq Khan last week launched an inquiry into foreign investment in the city’s housing market.
Londoners are not alone in questioning the impact of global investors in local housing markets. The issue is being politicised in cities throughout the world. In Vancouver, Canada, where single-family homes cost around 21 times the region’s median income, the city introduced a 15% tax on non-resident foreign property owners this August. Australian states that encompass Sydney, Melbourne, and other cities have also introduced or raised taxes on house purchases by foreigners.
It’s important to understand how overseas investment shapes residential opportunities and neighbourhood life. Khan is right to draw attention to the ways that housing in London is intertwined with global financial flows.
But foreign ownership is only part of a complex story – one that involves many actors and institutions located much closer to home. Searching for meddling non-natives to blame is ultimately a distraction. The idea that the housing crisis can be pinned on foreigners is a politically convenient simplification that risks letting other culprits off the hook, while doing little to change the status quo.
Focusing on overseas investors allows British policymakers to obscure their own role in producing the housing crisis. Over the decades, politicians at all levels of government have played an active part in creating this situation. Ministers promoted market-centric reforms such as the right to buy and more flexible tenancies, welcomed institutional investors into the housing market, and pushed through budget cuts in the name of austerity. These changes undermined council housing and weakened tenants’ security while making housing a more liquid commodity. Councillors across greater London have given the green light to estate demolition and gentrification, and allowed developers to build expensive new projects without significant numbers of affordable housing units.
Without these actions, we wouldn’t even be talking about Russian or Chinese investors. National and local political elites in Canada, Australia, the US, and elsewhere likewise bear responsibility for promoting the financialisation of housing.
Pointing at foreigners is a way to pretend to address the housing problem while ignoring the demands of activists
Blaming overseas investors similarly ignores domestic ones. Foreign owners may be particularly disconnected from local knowledge and conditions, but if they were simply replaced by their native counterparts who pursue the same strategies, the housing crisis would remain.
Pointing the finger at foreigners is also a way to pretend to address the housing problem while ignoring the demands of activists. The movements that have been mobilising in opposition to developers, councils and national government are fighting against displacement and in favour of establishing housing as a universal right. Whether exploitative landlords and serial collectors of luxury flats are British or foreign is beside the point. No housing activist has ever carried a sign demanding “British mansions for British oligarchs.”
None of this is to say that foreign ownership doesn’t matter. But the real issue is the political-economic condition that makes it possible: the commodification of housing. This term describes the process by which housing comes increasingly to function as a financial instrument rather than as shelter. Foreign ownership only matters because it is fuelling this broader process.
Rather than lashing out at foreigners, who are an easy target, city-dwellers and politicians such as Sadiq Khan need to ask tougher questions. Whose interests are served by urban regeneration in its current form? Why are collective resources such as public housing being dismantled and sold off? What alternatives to deepening housing inequalities are possible?
In a city where super-prime properties and tenant evictions are both on the rise, the housing system is broken and many residents are looking for someone to blame. For Londoners, rent consumes nearly two-thirds of the typical tenant’s income, and it will take 46 years for the average single person to save for a deposit on their first home. With overseas buyers acquiring as much as three-quarters of all new-build housing in London in recent years, it is understandable that foreigners would be cast as the villains behind the housing crisis. As a result, the London mayor Sadiq Khan last week launched an inquiry into foreign investment in the city’s housing market.
Londoners are not alone in questioning the impact of global investors in local housing markets. The issue is being politicised in cities throughout the world. In Vancouver, Canada, where single-family homes cost around 21 times the region’s median income, the city introduced a 15% tax on non-resident foreign property owners this August. Australian states that encompass Sydney, Melbourne, and other cities have also introduced or raised taxes on house purchases by foreigners.
It’s important to understand how overseas investment shapes residential opportunities and neighbourhood life. Khan is right to draw attention to the ways that housing in London is intertwined with global financial flows.
But foreign ownership is only part of a complex story – one that involves many actors and institutions located much closer to home. Searching for meddling non-natives to blame is ultimately a distraction. The idea that the housing crisis can be pinned on foreigners is a politically convenient simplification that risks letting other culprits off the hook, while doing little to change the status quo.
Focusing on overseas investors allows British policymakers to obscure their own role in producing the housing crisis. Over the decades, politicians at all levels of government have played an active part in creating this situation. Ministers promoted market-centric reforms such as the right to buy and more flexible tenancies, welcomed institutional investors into the housing market, and pushed through budget cuts in the name of austerity. These changes undermined council housing and weakened tenants’ security while making housing a more liquid commodity. Councillors across greater London have given the green light to estate demolition and gentrification, and allowed developers to build expensive new projects without significant numbers of affordable housing units.
Without these actions, we wouldn’t even be talking about Russian or Chinese investors. National and local political elites in Canada, Australia, the US, and elsewhere likewise bear responsibility for promoting the financialisation of housing.
Pointing at foreigners is a way to pretend to address the housing problem while ignoring the demands of activists
Blaming overseas investors similarly ignores domestic ones. Foreign owners may be particularly disconnected from local knowledge and conditions, but if they were simply replaced by their native counterparts who pursue the same strategies, the housing crisis would remain.
Pointing the finger at foreigners is also a way to pretend to address the housing problem while ignoring the demands of activists. The movements that have been mobilising in opposition to developers, councils and national government are fighting against displacement and in favour of establishing housing as a universal right. Whether exploitative landlords and serial collectors of luxury flats are British or foreign is beside the point. No housing activist has ever carried a sign demanding “British mansions for British oligarchs.”
None of this is to say that foreign ownership doesn’t matter. But the real issue is the political-economic condition that makes it possible: the commodification of housing. This term describes the process by which housing comes increasingly to function as a financial instrument rather than as shelter. Foreign ownership only matters because it is fuelling this broader process.
Rather than lashing out at foreigners, who are an easy target, city-dwellers and politicians such as Sadiq Khan need to ask tougher questions. Whose interests are served by urban regeneration in its current form? Why are collective resources such as public housing being dismantled and sold off? What alternatives to deepening housing inequalities are possible?
Monday, 3 October 2016
Sunday, 2 October 2016
Nissan is an early sign of the downturns and the divisions Brexit could bring
Will Hutton in The Guardian
One of the few advantages of Brexit is that the unfolding debacle may be the trigger for the deep economic, political and constitutional reform that Britain so badly needs. It will only be by living through the searing events ahead that people will become convinced that the indulgent Eurosceptic untruths they have been fed are not only economically disastrous but open the way to forms of racism that most Britons, Leave voters included, instinctively find repellent. Brexit will force home some brutal realities.
Leave voters in Sunderland – 61% in favour – will have woken up on Friday to the news that Renault Nissan, the largest car plant in Europe and a crucial pillar of the local economy, employing 7,000 people, has deferred all new investment until the details of Brexit are clear. The chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, explained that it was not because the company did not value its Sunderland plant, its most efficient. Rather, as a major exporter to the EU, its profitability depends on the prevailing tariff regime, which promises to change sharply for the worse. “Important investment decisions,” he said, “would not be made in the dark.”
It is hard to fault Ghosn’s reasoning. Gaining control of EU immigration is both a matter of personal conviction and a political necessity for Theresa May. But how can that be squared with ongoing membership of the customs union that defines the single market and which requires acceptance of free movement? Concessions can only be minimal without wrecking the EU’s core structures. Moreover, the Tory hard Brexiters, wedded to the notion of a clean break from an EU they detest, are in the political ascendancy.
One senior official tells me that a hard Brexit is inevitable: the best that can be hoped for is perhaps some agreement on the movement of skilled people, but beyond that the future is trading on the terms organised by the World Trade Organisation.
If so, Renault Nissan will face up to 10% tariffs on the cars it ships to the EU. Unless the UK government is prepared to compensate it, a bill that could top £350m a year, it cannot make new investments. The Sunderland economy will be devastated. The same is true for the entire UK car industry. Last Wednesday,Jaguar Land Rover made similar remarks: if the position had been more explicit and fairly reported rather than airily dismissed as Project Fear, the wafer-thin 3,800 majority for Leave in Birmingham might have switched their vote.
Every part of our economy involved in selling into Europe will be affected both by the rise in tariffs and by the new necessity to guarantee that our products and services meet EU regulatory standards, the so-called passport. This doesn’t only apply to the City where 5,500 UK registered firms turn out to hold the invaluable passport, but to tens of thousand of companies across the economy.
The Brexiters insist the losses will be more than compensated for by the wave of trade deals now open to be signed, but trade deals take many years to negotiate. More crucially, there is no free-trade world out there; rather, there is a series of painstakingly constructed, reciprocal entries to markets, the biggest of which we are now abandoning. Liam Fox is delusional, as former business minister, Anna Soubry, declares, to pretend otherwise.
Nor do hard Brexiters confront the fact that alongside China and the US, Britain has accumulated a stunning $1tn-plus stock of foreign direct investment. Nearly 500 multinationals have regional or global headquarters here, more than twice the rest of Europe combined. They are here to take advantage of our ultra pro-business environment – so much for the Eurosceptic babble about being stifled by Brussels – and trade freely with the EU. Britain was becoming a combination of New York and California, with a whole continental hinterland in which to trade. Hard Brexit kills all that stone dead and puts phantoms in its place.
The years ahead will be ones of economic dislocation and stagnation. But the impact goes well beyond the economic. Hard Brexit legitimises anti-foreigner and anti-immigrant sentiment. When Britain’s flag outside the EU institutions is brought down and Messrs Farage, Davis, Johnson, Redwood, Fox et al delightedly hail the sovereignty and supremacy of Britishness, it could signal a new round of street-baiting of anybody who does not look and sound British: expect more attacks on Poles and Czechs from Essex to Yorkshire.
Politicians of right and left are fighting shy of delivering the condemnation this deserves. Rachel Reeves’s remarks at the Labour fringe, warning of a social explosion if immigration were not immediately curbed, show how far the permissible discourse on immigration and race has changed. Britain has moved over the past 50 years from being one of the most equal countries in Europe to the most unequal. The result is rising social tension, with immigration the tinder for enmity and hate. The hard-working immigrants who add so much vitality and energy to our society are blamed for ills that have deeper roots. Brexit has made this harder to say.
This conjunction of the economically and socially noxious horrifies not only me but also many Tories. Scotland’s Ruth Davidson, a bevy of ex-ministers, some in the cabinet and a large number of backbenchers are keenly aware of the slippery racist, culturally regressive and economically calamitous course their Brexiter colleagues are set on and are ready to fight for the soul of their party. George Osborne is positioning himself as their leader. It is an impending civil war, mirroring parallel feelings in the country at large.
Beyond that, the referendum raised profound constitutional questions. In other democracies, treaty and constitutional changes require at least 60% majorities in either the legislature or in a referendum. Britain’s unwritten constitution offers no such rules: a parliamentary majority confers monarchial power so a referendum can be called without any such framing. Article 50 is to be invoked without a parliamentary vote: a change of government in effect without a general election.
In good times, the constitution interests only obsessives. Suddenly, Britain’s constitutional vacuity is part of a deep national crisis. The economic and political structures, along with the biased media, that delivered this are rotten. The question is whether the will – and political coalitions – can be built to reform them. If not, Britain is sliding towards nasty, sectarian decline.
One of the few advantages of Brexit is that the unfolding debacle may be the trigger for the deep economic, political and constitutional reform that Britain so badly needs. It will only be by living through the searing events ahead that people will become convinced that the indulgent Eurosceptic untruths they have been fed are not only economically disastrous but open the way to forms of racism that most Britons, Leave voters included, instinctively find repellent. Brexit will force home some brutal realities.
Leave voters in Sunderland – 61% in favour – will have woken up on Friday to the news that Renault Nissan, the largest car plant in Europe and a crucial pillar of the local economy, employing 7,000 people, has deferred all new investment until the details of Brexit are clear. The chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, explained that it was not because the company did not value its Sunderland plant, its most efficient. Rather, as a major exporter to the EU, its profitability depends on the prevailing tariff regime, which promises to change sharply for the worse. “Important investment decisions,” he said, “would not be made in the dark.”
It is hard to fault Ghosn’s reasoning. Gaining control of EU immigration is both a matter of personal conviction and a political necessity for Theresa May. But how can that be squared with ongoing membership of the customs union that defines the single market and which requires acceptance of free movement? Concessions can only be minimal without wrecking the EU’s core structures. Moreover, the Tory hard Brexiters, wedded to the notion of a clean break from an EU they detest, are in the political ascendancy.
One senior official tells me that a hard Brexit is inevitable: the best that can be hoped for is perhaps some agreement on the movement of skilled people, but beyond that the future is trading on the terms organised by the World Trade Organisation.
If so, Renault Nissan will face up to 10% tariffs on the cars it ships to the EU. Unless the UK government is prepared to compensate it, a bill that could top £350m a year, it cannot make new investments. The Sunderland economy will be devastated. The same is true for the entire UK car industry. Last Wednesday,Jaguar Land Rover made similar remarks: if the position had been more explicit and fairly reported rather than airily dismissed as Project Fear, the wafer-thin 3,800 majority for Leave in Birmingham might have switched their vote.
Every part of our economy involved in selling into Europe will be affected both by the rise in tariffs and by the new necessity to guarantee that our products and services meet EU regulatory standards, the so-called passport. This doesn’t only apply to the City where 5,500 UK registered firms turn out to hold the invaluable passport, but to tens of thousand of companies across the economy.
The Brexiters insist the losses will be more than compensated for by the wave of trade deals now open to be signed, but trade deals take many years to negotiate. More crucially, there is no free-trade world out there; rather, there is a series of painstakingly constructed, reciprocal entries to markets, the biggest of which we are now abandoning. Liam Fox is delusional, as former business minister, Anna Soubry, declares, to pretend otherwise.
Nor do hard Brexiters confront the fact that alongside China and the US, Britain has accumulated a stunning $1tn-plus stock of foreign direct investment. Nearly 500 multinationals have regional or global headquarters here, more than twice the rest of Europe combined. They are here to take advantage of our ultra pro-business environment – so much for the Eurosceptic babble about being stifled by Brussels – and trade freely with the EU. Britain was becoming a combination of New York and California, with a whole continental hinterland in which to trade. Hard Brexit kills all that stone dead and puts phantoms in its place.
The years ahead will be ones of economic dislocation and stagnation. But the impact goes well beyond the economic. Hard Brexit legitimises anti-foreigner and anti-immigrant sentiment. When Britain’s flag outside the EU institutions is brought down and Messrs Farage, Davis, Johnson, Redwood, Fox et al delightedly hail the sovereignty and supremacy of Britishness, it could signal a new round of street-baiting of anybody who does not look and sound British: expect more attacks on Poles and Czechs from Essex to Yorkshire.
Politicians of right and left are fighting shy of delivering the condemnation this deserves. Rachel Reeves’s remarks at the Labour fringe, warning of a social explosion if immigration were not immediately curbed, show how far the permissible discourse on immigration and race has changed. Britain has moved over the past 50 years from being one of the most equal countries in Europe to the most unequal. The result is rising social tension, with immigration the tinder for enmity and hate. The hard-working immigrants who add so much vitality and energy to our society are blamed for ills that have deeper roots. Brexit has made this harder to say.
This conjunction of the economically and socially noxious horrifies not only me but also many Tories. Scotland’s Ruth Davidson, a bevy of ex-ministers, some in the cabinet and a large number of backbenchers are keenly aware of the slippery racist, culturally regressive and economically calamitous course their Brexiter colleagues are set on and are ready to fight for the soul of their party. George Osborne is positioning himself as their leader. It is an impending civil war, mirroring parallel feelings in the country at large.
Beyond that, the referendum raised profound constitutional questions. In other democracies, treaty and constitutional changes require at least 60% majorities in either the legislature or in a referendum. Britain’s unwritten constitution offers no such rules: a parliamentary majority confers monarchial power so a referendum can be called without any such framing. Article 50 is to be invoked without a parliamentary vote: a change of government in effect without a general election.
In good times, the constitution interests only obsessives. Suddenly, Britain’s constitutional vacuity is part of a deep national crisis. The economic and political structures, along with the biased media, that delivered this are rotten. The question is whether the will – and political coalitions – can be built to reform them. If not, Britain is sliding towards nasty, sectarian decline.
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