Oliver Cromwell, a man for this season?

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves gone!

So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!

Rob's Reply/Comments

(This is Rob's reply & comments - I'm posting it afresh to make it easier to read, and I'll post a follow-up at some stage...)

Thanks Dan, i enjoyed reading that - here is my rather hastily written response:

Now, don't get me wrong - i never said Gordon Brown wasn't an idiot ;) i just said that i thought he was sincere.

i actually agree with you more than you might think. i don't believe in imposing morality (because, as you say, then it is not true moral behaviour) - i believe in free will and the autonomy of individuals to act.

i believe in free markets, however i don't think they are anywhere near as 'free' at the moment as you seem to suppose. As i said to you earlier, it is about creating the illusion of freedom, the illusion of choice and autonomy. Try and step outside those boundaries and you will quickly find yourself ostracised from society, if not jailed. So we cannot pretend that everything is happy go lucky freedom town.

What i don't see however, in your very well thought out response, is much of a solution. This is the problem i have, it is easy to criticise but very difficult to offer an alternative...rather than attacking one another we need to be combining different ideologies to try and work out a solution.

You haven't addressed the issue of constant growth being unsustainable. What are we growing from? Where is the seed that allows unmitigated and supposedly infinite growth of economies? Is it the increased levels of production and efficiency that technology brings? Even that will be limited by time at some point...so what happens then?

Free markets need to be limited somehow - i do agree that it shouldn't be by intense regulation - because they cannot just grow indefinitely.

Although the economic and industrial boom over the past century or so has lead to untold riches, luxuries, and solutions to many of our problems - it will almost certainly come at a very strong price. The problem in the way we trade, create, grow economically at the moment is that for the vast vast majority of us we are looking short-term - we are thinking about ourselves.

We are not thinking rationally, but selfishly. As long as our family and friends are happy very few of us take even a minute a day to consider others that share this world with us, not all of them human.

Environmental damage is at a tipping point, and yet we scrap sustainable energy programmes because they are not profitable economically.

Social inequalities have improved somewhat through massive economic expansion of the twentieth century, but only for some. As long as it isn't on our backdoor we don't feel the need to worry about it - somebody else will do that...always somebody else.

What i am calling for, and i honestly don't give a stuff about Gordon Brown (even though it's easier to lump me in with the 'lefties' ;P), is for everybody to consider whether or not the descent into individuality and unbridled self-centeredness was/is really worth it.

What are we losing by doing this? My spiritual beliefs align with the idea that it is the ego, the selfish nature of humankind, that brings this physical reality further and further away from the Light. It causes all of our suffering and ensures that G-d is slowly pushed further and further out of the picture.

But i digress....

What i want to know is, what is the alternative? More 'information'? This crisis was caused in an age where information is exploding exponentially!

It is a bit of a mysnomer to say that nobody understood what they were trading. Most people might not understand it, but it is a bit patronising to say that nobody did. Why did they do it then? Because they thought they could ride the gravy-train home...

Why did they really do it? Because they knew that in the end, when they finally failed, they would be bailed out by the government/s. They knew this, it was an inherent aspect of why this occured. There was no sense of responsibility or consequence because many of these institutions KNEW that they were 'too big to fail'.

i say let them fail, because without consequence there is no morality (with very few exceptions). We cannot just build up another system that grows until a point where it is unsustainable and then collapses again - that cycle of history is undeniable and the charts (for what they are worth) just show it getting bigger and bigger each time.

If we get out of this one...you just wait until the next one and see how long it takes to build confidence then.

So what we need to be discussing is not who is an idiot and who isn't, but what are our options? What are the real alternatives, if any?

The time to be divisive for political, ideological, and egotistical reasons is long gone. If we don't rise above these vestiges of the human ego and realise that we are at a real tipping point in humanities history then i am afraid to say that i think all that we have gained will be lost, and within our - or at least our children's - lifetimes.

i'm not a lefty, i'm not right-wing, i'm not center. i fall into all of those categories at points depending on what we are talking about at the time. We need flexibility, not stubborn ideology. We need to listen, not instantly dismiss.... Read more

Most importantly, when we disagree we need to offer an alternative. Because otherwise we are just wasting time that we really don't have to waste.

Gordon Brown, the death of the market economy etc etc etc...

Partially written as a response to Rob Gordon, a friend who organised the event at St Paul's...

Over various facebook chats, Rob said the following (I've cut slightly, but not misrepresented, I don't think:

The market economy certainly isn't over...but we are starting to see that everything that was gained through it could all be for nought in the forseeable future because of inherent and crippling flaws in its ability to contain itself and be sustainable.

There are certainly many issues in the fine print of what he was saying, but the general gist of free-markets only really working if people aren't just going to destroy each other (and the planet) for personal gain seems like a pretty hard thing to argue against...

And here are some key quotations from Brown's speech (available in full here). Again, I've cut while trying not to misrepresent:

I say to you plainly: this old world of the old Washington consensus is over, and what comes in its place is up to us. Instead of a global free market threatening to descend into a global free-for-all, we must reshape our global economic system so that it reflects and respects the values that we celebrate in everyday life. For I believe that the unsupervised globalisation of our financial markets did not only cross national boundaries; it crossed moral boundaries too.

[snip]

Most people want a market that is free, but never values-free, a society that is fair but not laissez faire. And so, across the world, our task is to agree global economic rules that reflect our own enduring values.

[snip]

But as we are discovering to our considerable cost, the problem is that, without transparent rules to guide them, free markets can reduce all relationships to transactions, all motivations to self-interest; as Jonathan Sacks has said, they can reduce all sense of value to consumer choice, all sense of worth to a price tag. So, unbridled and untrammelled, they can become the enemy of the good society.

And we can now see also that markets cannot self-regulate, but they can self-destruct and, again, if untrammelled and unbridled, they can become not just the enemy of the good society; they can become the enemy of the good economy. Markets are in the public interest but they are not synonymous with it.

And the truth is that the virtues that all of us here admire most and the virtues that make society flourish - hard work, taking responsibility, being honest, being enterprising, being fair - these are not the values that spring from the market; these are the values we bring to the market. They don’t come from market forces; they come from our hearts, and they are the values nurtured in families and in schools, in our shared institutions and in our neighbourhoods.

So markets depend upon what they cannot create. They presuppose a well of values and work at their best when these values are upheld. And that is why I argued controversially some time ago, in a view that is now, I think, more generally agreed, that there are limits to markets just as there are limits to states.

I said to Rob that I thought Brown was sincere, but wrong. And this is why he, and Rob, and the nice middle-class boys and girls currently trashing RBS branches and costing the taxpayers some £10m in policing, are wrong as well.

First of all, let's examine some of the assumptions we/I am making:

1.Freedom is a positive good, not merely a means to some other end. As far as is possible, each individual should be left alone to do as he wishes.

2. We have a duty to act in such a way as does not harm others, and agree that we should be restrained from acting such. Some will go further, and say that we have a positive duty to help others.

3. Human beings are rational.

That should do us for the moment, I think.

An awful lot of pundits have been saying that the recent economic crisis shows that, in some sense, the market has failed. Now is the time for Government action, and even for concerted action by governments on a global scale. But what has actually "failed"? First of all, whatever else, it isn't "capitalism": and the reason for putting that in inverted commas is that capitalism is not an ideology. It's a description of how humans interact. They trade. They work. They use the proceeds for a whole of different things. People are still doing this, the world over, and therefore to say that "capitalism has failed" doesn't answer any of the questions about what went wrong. Perhaps there should be another word to describe human nature, but for the moment, "capitalism" will have to do.

Moving on, there's a more obvious target, and one that GB has mentioned a lot - a failure of regulation. Now, he does blame this on other people, and say that the FSA was a good idea when it obviously wasn't up to the job, but let's ignore that for the moment. The response has been to look at the ways in which we can increase regulation and do it on a global scale. Why is this a bad idea? Because we didn't have too little regulation in the first place, we had the wrong sort. The FSA and similar institutions across the world could tell you down to the last penny and cent how much money was sloshing around and where. What they couldn't do was analyse that information in a meaningful way.

The actual failure, I suggest, was that there was a failure of *information*. Markets depend upon information: I need to know what you're selling in order to judge whether it is worth the price you ask. I assess that by comparing it to other options. The key point about credit default swaps, securitised bonds etc etc etc is not that they were "toxic", but that people didn't know what they were buying. They had risk attached, and people forgot that taking a risk - while it can make you money - can also go wrong. Of course, as soon as some of them *did* go wrong, the price of all of them crashed, because people remembered the risk involved, and everyone sold at once.

Let's for a moment go back to premise (3): Humans are rational. The credit bubble is seen as an example of bankers behaving irrationally, and betting huge sums on bad terms. And yet, they were actually behaving completely rationally, given the information available (an important caveat). The failure of regulation was not because of the lack of regulation, it was because they failed to communicate that information in a reasonable fashion. They too believed that these bits of paper were risk free.

What about the man on the Clapham omnibus in all this though? Shouldn't he want his bank to act more responsibly so that his taxation doesn't have to bail them out when things go wrong?

Well, yes and no. Because once again there is a failure of information at work. When Building Societies demutualised, part of the reason was so that they could engage in more risky banking practices. And the new shareholders as well as investors took advantage of those risks by way of better interest and high dividends. But they never asked what the downside of the increased profitability was. Perhaps the government should have told them, but on the other hand, perhaps they should have thought about it.

The UK Government’s answer to this seems to be that we should stop banks from engaging in risky practices (or at least make them so unattractive that nobody will bother). It wants to do this to protect the taxpayer and the economy from another similar situation, which is laudable but foolish. Why should we prevent people from taking risks with their money? (And again, GB’s rhetoric here is misplaced: he blames bankers for playing with other people’s money as if to suggest that the investors were compelled to invest in, say RBS, rather than, for example, Nationwide). His enthusiasm for regulation is revealed by the way that he has refused to accept the idea of putting back the “glass walls” between retail and investment banking.

(There’s much to be written as well on the positive advantages of freedom and laissez-faire economics – perhaps for another time...)

Now let’s turn specifically to GB’s idea of putting morality back into the markets. He seems to accept that capitalism indeed has no morality inherent to it. Good. But his reaction to this is that we should *impose* a morality upon it. Bad Gordon.

The last people who tried this were, I think, the mediaeval theologians who decreed that lending money was a sin for Christians. The almost instant reaction of the market was to approach Jews for finance, and also to come up with cunning ways of getting around it (and illustrated in Niall Ferguson’s Ascent of Money). Markets don’t take kindly to morality, they find ways around it. There are perhaps two key causes of this: firstly, most people want to make money and will find ways to salve their (and others’) consciences in order to do so. And once one person does it, the others will follow in order to keep up. The second is that markets are not an ideology – they are a description of the ways of mankind. And so trying to impose a morality upon them is just as impossible as it is to impose a system of morality upon a group of individual people without resorting to totalitarianism.

Part of his call for moral markets is that by this course we can help the poorest in the globe – indeed, he goes on with the touching story of Tina and Themba. Bless. But his story goes against the grain of 2000 years of recorded development, and is also profoundly “colonialist” and patronising. When the Pope says “Faith in the poorest men and women of Africa and other regions of the world affected by extreme poverty is what is needed if we are going to get through the crisis,” he has a point. But the point is that by infantilising poor nations through aid and handouts will not help them build robust government or economic success, but only lead to another century of failed corrupt African states.

Finally, the part of his speech which I found most galling was his multifaith profession of how nice it is to be nice to each other. Coming from a man who has been at the centre of one the most anti-Christian, anti-Charity governments of the past 150 years, it is a remarkable cheek. It also goes completely against his welfare instincts. Christ’s commandments apply to the individual, not the state. What credit should we give someone who is his brother’s keeper not because of his desire to be a good person, but because the state compels him to do so? A morality imposed by edict is no morality at all – it is an infantilisation of every man, woman, and child.

Enough for now. There are certain bits I want to expand, but, Rob, that’s the start of why Gordon Brown is an idiot...

The Myth of the "Baroque"

There seems to be a sudden rash of TV, radio, and newspaper coverage of "the Baroque": much of it very interesting, and illustrated with pretty pictures, but also a real and obvious lack of historical thinking.

The key culprit (that I have come across) is Waldemar Januszczak, in his BBC4 mini-series, entitled "From St Peter's to St Paul's". The idea is to trace "the baroque" from Rome to London, over a period of about 150 years, via Italy, Spain, the Low Countries, and thence to England. An interesting project...

He starts by defining the movement (and he includes art, architecture, and music in this) as a key part of the Counter Reformation, lashing back against the Protestant revolt in the north, and its pared down aesthetic. Which is superficially, attractive, except for a few points.

The Council of Trent (which he made great play of), was certainly not thinking of baroque music as its ideal - Palestrina was much more to their taste. (See the amazing opera by Pfitzner for details!) Opera (the "quintesstial music of the baroque", apparently) started in renaissance Italy, and was by no means a baroque invention. The new aesthetic of the Italian (perhaps southern European) baroque was in no way a creature of the Catholic Reformation, at least to start with.

He then moves to Spain, where he characterises the Baroque as a new passionate religious artform (cue lots of monks and gruesome martyrdoms). But to suggest that 16th century Spain was not a place of religious passion is staggeringly ignorant: The music of "El Siglo d'Oro" is testament to that. Similarly, although they didn't merit a mention, the spirituality of Teresa d'Avila and St John of the Cross are perfect examples of pre-Baroque (on his definition at least) Spanish devotion.

With a bit more wiggling, the Baroque becomes, for Waldemar, a way of protraying doubt and ambiguity. And, from the examples he gave, I can see what he means. But it doesn't fit in with the previous ideas of it being a movement defined by a Catholic resurgence against Protestantism, nor, unless with considerable stretching, does it coincide with the idea of religious passion and committment.

He then moves on to the Low Countries: Rembrandt, Van Eyck, and friends. Here, of course, there is the slight problem that he is moving to cultures where there is no triumphant restatement of Catholic verities - which, presumably, is why we hear no more about religion. Instead, the Baroque has become a manifestation of civic pride, of peace rather than war - which hardly fits with his theories of the religious Spanish baroque.

The final programme hasn't arrived yet, but it promises Germany and England. Quite how he will mash it together I have no idea, but I am sure that he will, somehow, make Bach a cheerleader for frippery and Wren the ultimate religious enthusiast...

But perhaps this is being unfair, when we think exactly what "the Baroque" means.

I know what I mean when I say that a church or other building is Baroque: it generally involves twiddly bits, and decorating anything that doesn't move (and even some priests who do). Similarly, baroque music seems to me characterised by ornamentation - as well as some rather fun new harmonies and rhythmic styles. It also sees the use of new musical technologies - organs, better stringed instruments, more civilised brass and woodwind. Baroque painting seems to me an altogether harder genre to define. Perhaps Waldy has a point when he says that it is more about individuals than symbolic representations, but on the other hand, it's very easy to reel off a list of counterexamples to that.

The real problem, however, comes when you look at this across European culture. Bach and Vivaldi are both undeniably baroque. But they are trying to do very different things for different reasons - mainly to do with their religious circumstances. They may use similar musical techniques to acheive those aims, but a similarity of method should not blind us to a difference of intent.

Ditto Bernini and whoever-designed-German-baroque-churches (I'll leave out Wren for the moment because of the peculiarities of England in the 1660s), although here the techniques even have profound differences. They were striving for a different aesthetic meaning, even if some of the twiddly bits are superficially similar. Even more, the uses to which their products were put are so radically different that any real comparison just falls down.

Having read a reasonable amount about what the Renaissance might be, I'm well aware of how difficult it can be to define a period with any degree of precision, but surely it's time to throw away "Baroque" to mean anything other than twiddling. Let's find some better words for a few manageable distinctive phenomena. That way future BBC programmes might not suggest that Bach was taking a lead from the Council of Trent, that Spain was devoid of religious intensity before 1600, and (especially) that just because two things happen at the same time and look slightly similar, then they have common intent.

BBC Idiocy

Questions I want to hear asked of the Green Party:

1. How would they cope with the increasing problem of businesses relocating in response to tax rising national tax-burdens?

2. What is their response to the persistent questions asked of the science behind global warming?

3. Given their insistence upon "social justice" as well as strictly Green issues, what concrete changes would they start making to UK law to implement their ideas?

Number of those questions asked of Caroline Lucas, their newly-proclaimed leader on the Today programme this morning?

None.

Number of actually challenging questions asked of her?

None.

More European Madness

This report has garnered a lot of attention on UK-based blogs of late. It's an EU report on what certain MEPs see as the pervasive and worrying scepticism expressed by various blogs, especially in light of the recent Irish no-vote to the EU Constitution (let's not hide behind the farcical spin of the "Lisbon Treaty" moniker).

It's a disgraceful report, of which the authors should be ashamed. But I have no problem at all with them writing it. What I want to know if why on earth my taxes have gone towards its production. The Labour Party pays for its brand of nonsense, loosely defined as research and policy. The LibDems do the same. Even the Tory Party pays for its own (often terrible) policy documents.

Why on earth are we paying MEPs to produce this sort of bilge? And when did I get a chance to vote for (or against) it?

The European Parliament lacks a vital component. An Opposition. Democracy works by having new ideas and initiatives challanged, weighed in the balance, and ultimately approved by the electorate. Can anyone tell me who is in power in Europe? And who in opposition is challenging their plans, or at least scrutinising them?

How are Commisioners appointed? Did I get to vote for any of them? What impact does my vote for the Conservative Party have in the European Parliament? How do I get rid of them? Who questions them on their actions? Who even cares that their accounts haven't be passed in over a decade?

The EU is not only trying to suppress debate and opposition on blogs (thankfully, they have no chance of doing that, since they can be very easily moved out of EU jurisdiction), but is fundamentally an undemocratic institution. When it has a government, a mandate, and offers a choice, it might be worth taking seriously. But until then, it is a glorified gravy-train, an anachronism, an instition to be derided and opposed, rather than something which which we should engage or - more importantly - a body to be given billions of taxpayers' money.

Eternal Verities

If you are to have a popular government - if you are to have a Parliamentary Administration the conditions antecedent are that you should have a Government which declares the principles upon which its policy is founded, and then you can have the wholesome check of a constitutional Opposition. What have we got instead? Something has risen up in this country as fatal in the political world as it has been in the landed world of Ireland - we have a great Parliamentary middleman. It is well known what a middleman is; he is a man who bamboozles one party and plunders the other, till, having obtained a position to which he is not entitled, he cries our, "Let us have no party questions, but fixity of tenure." [...] What dreary pages of interminable talk, what predictions falsified, what pledges broken, what calculations that must have gone wrong, what budgets that have blown up! And all this too, not relieved by a single original thought, a single generous impulse, or a single happy expression! Why, Hansard, instead of being the Delphi of Downing Street is but the Dunciad of politics.

Disraeli, speaking not of Gordon Brown, or Tony Blair, or even the prospect of David Cameron, but against the Maynooth Grant in 1845.