Jean Charles de Menezes - a tragedy still happening

Nick Cohen recently wrote in the Evening Standard "Often it is hard to feel happy about the state of this country but the inquest into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes ought to make us proud."

Well, no, actually. You're wrong, and it isn't reasonable to compare our police to those attempting to police the favelas of Rio de Janeiro either, though you would like to. They may kill people, but they are in constant danger of being killed themselves. Our police just aren't .

Yes, it's good that we can hold our police to account, but it has no effect if noone will take responsibility for the mistakes made. The police officer in the dock today (deputy assistant commissioner John McDowall, who was responsible for developing the strategy to capture the men behind the attempted 21 July attacks) refused to admit fault after admitting that significant mistakes had been made. He had admitted that many officers had been on surveillance without any sort of photo of the suspect, Hussain Osman, and they had only ever seen a passport photo of him, despite the availability of better images. Incidentally, Jean Charles de Menezes didn't look much like Hussain Osman . He was unfortunate enough to live in the same set of flats, which the police mistakenly believed was a single house.

















This refusal to admit fault despite admitting mistakes - "clearly, I think, there probably are things that I could have done but for whatever reason at that time I did not think of it" - is symptomatic of the political attitude of the police in this country. They are no worse in this than any other major government-funded body, but that's no excuse.

If I drop a glass of red wine on the carpet, I have to get down there and clean it up. I can't just tell my girlfriend, "I could have paid more attention to what I was doing and been careful with the glass and our carpet but for whatever reason at that time I did not think of it". It's my fault and I have to deal with it. In the same way, if the police kill someone they shouldn't and it is demonstrably their fault, because they made significant mistakes, they have to, metaphorically, clean it up.

The refusal of the Met to accept that they were wrong and face the consequences is worrying for anyone who feels strongly about liberty. Freedom comes with a condition - you accept the consequences of your actions, whatever they may be. If our police can make bad mistakes, kill someone and get away with it, our "free" country is in a lot of trouble.

Corporate speak and how it's ruining communication.

Today I was travelling to a rehearsal in South London and so I had to change tubes at Euston. As I left the Northern Line platform I heard the member of staff who was standing on the platform say into the PA:

"Passengers are asked to move down the platform".

This struck me as a completely absurd thing to say. Quite apart from the fact that the people in question were not passengers, because they weren't on the train yet, why on earth would anyone talking to a group of people he could see and who could, if they tried, see him, address them in the third person and use the passive voice? Have you ever heard a child say to his mother "my parent is asked to give me a glass of milk", for instance? Would a teacher ever say to his class, "my class are asked to begin exercise four"? Of course not, because that would be bizarre. The use of the third person and the passive voice, both of which distance the speaker from the addressee, has the effect of taking a perfectly clear, simple request and making it hard to understand. And making the speaker sound like an automaton.

This is not the only example I've come across of modern English becoming less clear and more confusing. Here are some others:

A telesales person: "Do you have any identity theft insurance at all?"

What is this "at all" for? It serves no purpose and actually detracts from the clarity of the sentence.

Person from my mobile phone network provider on the phone: "Is there anything else I can do for yourself?".

Why "yourself"? This is a reflexive pronoun, like "myself". I can feed myself, but you can't do anything for myself. Only I can do things for or to myself. It has NO other purpose, and I wish people would stop using it like this. A more common misusage: "If you would like to join Paul, Sarah and myself on this trip..." Is it not painfully obvious that "me" is more appropriate and sounds better? If not, you've heard the wrong version too many times.

On a train: "We will shortly be arriving into our next station stop, which will be..."

Where do I start? "Arriving into"? "Station stop"? Or the fact that thirteen words are used here when six at most would do. "We will shortly be arriving at..." would have done exactly the same job.

This is not only about my linguistic snobbery, though that obvously has a part to play. It's also about clarity of communication, and there's nothing snobbish about that. If someone moves to this country, or even is just visiting from abroad, and English is not their first language, they don't need to be bombarded with superfluous syllables. Clarity is important. Whether through concern for foreigners, or care for the proper use of our language, we need to recapture it.

A party in meltdown

It is interesting to watch the current ructions within the Labour party. I am old enough to remember the mid-90s, when the Conservatives similarly lost all sense of perspective, but the difference here, and it's important, is that the Conservatives were at that point living on borrowed time. Neil Kinnock had handed them the '92 election on a plate, in the depths of a recession, two years after a damaging leadership contest, and they couldn't quite believe their luck. By 1995, they had descended into bickering, carping, backbiting and general self-destruction. Then, in 1997, after 18 years in office they were annihilated in the general election.

Gordon Brown, in contrast, became Labour leader (and thereby automatically Prime Minister, rather like John Major in 1990) a little over a year ago, ten years into Labour's time in office. Now, he is so spectacularly unpopular that there are rumblings of leadership contests. He has, correctly, sacked the minor party officials (enjoying their fifteen minutes of fame) who have been making public comments on the subject, but the effect is to make him seem more isolated.

Some have been predicting Gordon Brown's catastrophic decline for some time. Matthew Parris, in particular, gave warning of this well before Gordon actually became Labour leader. There are still those who believe Labour can come back from their woeful poll standings if they choose another leader. They are fantasists. Labour will lose the next general election, and they will lose it badly. And because it's hard to change a Labour leader while they're in office, and because even David Milliband isn't daft enough to take the poisoned chalice now, they'll most likely lose with Gordon Brown at the helm.

Flying into trouble

Today we heard of the collapse of the airline XL, which was apparently "a fundamental link in Britain's package holiday industry". Lots of people, apparently, now can't go on their holidays or, in at least one case, get to their own wedding. This is, of course, a bad thing for them, though most of them are entitled to alternative flights or a refund, so they'll get over it.

What surprised me about this news, other than the fact that BBC News seem to consider it their top story, is that I've never heard of XL. The company only has 21 planes, which isn't very many. BA have something like 233 in service at the moment, and even Portugal's relatively small national airline TAP has nearly sixty. So they're not huge players, but even so, their business model was clearly ropey, or they wouldn't have collapsed because fuel got more expensive. And this this brings me on to my point: booking with cheap airlines or package operators carries with it an obvious risk. They are cheap for a reason, so we shouldn't be shocked when, occasionally, they fail.

I fly fairly frequently to Lisbon, and from London you have three options: BA, TAP or easyJet. The latter (who, incidentally, have 166 aircraft in operation last I looked) have the advantage that the airport they fly from, London Luton (which is, of course, not in London in any way), is actually easy to get to from where we live. On every other front, the others win hands down. To help you understand why, let me describe for you the experience of flying with easyJet:

Before you go to the airport, you can check in online. Unless you have hold baggage, that is, and given the current ridiculous restrictions on what you can take in the cabin, most people will. In this case, you have to check in at the airport. This means you have to stand in an enormous queue with a lot of horrible holidaymakers (for some reason, the Lisbon flight always seems to be checking in at the same time as one to Tenerife) who have already painted themselves orange in preparation and who spend most of their time shouting at their feral children, until they finally reach the desk, where they shout at each other about who has the passports and the tickets. This all takes an almost unbelievable amount of time, but finally, minus your hold bag and plus a headache, you are allowed to go to security. This is even more fun.

At security you will be interrogated as to what liquids you may or may not have in your bag, forced to stand in another long queue with various differently orange people, and then made to take off most of your clothes and put them in a tray for the x-ray machine. When they are satisfied that you are not carrying anything sharp or explosive, you are allowed to put your clothes back on and proceed to departures.

Once in departures, you can avail yourself of all the wonderful facilities that Luton airport has to offer. Now, in fairness, it is slightly better than Heathrow Terminal 2, but then so is a Sudanese refugee camp - and you're more likely to get something to eat. But I digress: Luton is pretty dull, as airports go, but it's not quite the worst. Nevertheless, if you've taken easyJet's published timings seriously, you are early. No, really, you are. If you go to the gate when they ask you to, you will regret it. Go to the gate about twenty minutes or so before takeoff if you've checked in online (you'll be in the early boarding group). Otherwise, get there with fifteen minutes to spare and you'll find it's ample.

The experience at the gate is probably the worst bit of all, because easyJet refuse to allocate seats. So you board in priority order, and if you checked in at the airport you are almost bound to be in group B, which is last and biggest and has all the orange people in it. The experience of boarding is horrendous, as the bulk of the passengers can no more choose where to sit than they can prove Fermat's last theorem. So they dither, people stand around getting wet (no nice covered walkways here, you walk across the tarmac and up some steps, so it's always raining) outside the plane and the poor stewardess makes increasingly irritable announcements over the PA. When, eventually, everyone is sat down, the plane will think about taking off. And then the trolley service starts.

The trolley service is another offensive thing about easyJet. You have to pay for everything. Now, I wouldn't mind if their pricing policy on flights (cheap as possible) extended to the food and drink but it doesn't. A 33ml can of lager costs £3.20. An 18.5ml bottle of wine is also £3.20, or two for £6. A can of tango is £1.50. The sandwiches, which, incidentally are horrible, cost £3.50. So buy food and drink before you fly.

Eventually, you land so far from the airport building that the plane has to taxi for ten minutes just to reach the bus which will take another ten minutes to get you to the terminal where you will have to wait for half an hour for the bags which the paralytically lazy ground staff will have done their best to destroy. Then, when you've retrieved your bag, you are at last free to leave the airport. Drained, irritable and impecunious you have arrived. And you promise yourself that you'll fly with a proper airline next time.

Flight, by Jonathan Dove, as performed by BYO

The other evening, I went to see the opening night of British Youth Opera's production of Flight, by the currently immensely fashionable Jonathan Dove. It was a bit of a departure for BYO - they tend to perform totally standard repertoire, but here they were, producing an opera which was only written ten years ago. It wasn't much of a risk, though. Over the past few years, what with high-profile work with groups such as English Touring Opera and Glyndebourne Festival Opera, as well as TV operas (one about Diana, Princess of Wales, and most recently Buzz on the Moon, about what it was like to be Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon), Jonathan Dove is about as safe as living composers get.

His music is accessible too, blending as it does a strong flavour of the American minimalists (Glass, Adams et al) with great rhythmic vitality and an orchestral palette which calls to mind Janacek and Britten (indeed, BYO performed Dove's excellent rescoring of Janacek's Cunning Little Vixen four years ago). It's the sort of music which works well for a TV opera, where it can act as background as well as foreground.

Unfortunately, Flight is not a TV opera. Martin Lloyd Evans did a typically good job with the staging, making sure to squeeze every laugh out of the funny bits, and allowing the drama repose when the reflective moments came along. There are moments of real musical beauty in this work, and there are moments of high comedy, but somehow, they don't hang together as they should. Part of the problem is that Dove's distinctive style is also fairly limited, and a lot of the music sounds essentially rather similar - he does make use of what the programme notes call "organic thematic motifs", but they are not strong enough or characteristic enough to provide structural unity. The distinctive ideas come at the obvious moments - the airport announcement jingle, for instance - and they work, but only as markers, not as structural supports. The overall effect is somewhat confusing - you remember the big moments of the drama, and you are aware that music was present, but it is hard to remember how the music interacted with most of the drama, or even if it did at all.

That said, there were some strong performances here, notably from Andrew Radley as the Refugee, who gave a dramatically strong performance of a vocally demanding role. Colette Boushell and Nicky Spence made a fine bickering couple, and the mezzo Charlotte Stephenson made the most of her reflective moments as the Minskwoman, given some of the loveliest music to sing. Nicholas Cleobury conducted effectively, and Bridget Kimak's set and costumes worked well too. Another good BYO production, but as to the repertoire - I think best stick to the tried and tested in future.

The Class Gap

Today, in a painfully predictable attempt to pacify the Labour Party's disgruntled financiers, the trades unions, Harriet Harman has spoken about the need to "narrow the class gap" in the UK. Now, there are several things wrong with this, so lets start with the most obvious first: she and her chums have been in government for the last eleven years, going on about equality and social justice. So why start to make these noises now? The sad truth is, they have no more idea of how to achieve this goal now than they did eleven years ago.

The next thing that's wrong is the presumption that government should be the tool which we employ to "narrow the class gap". By definition, any change which government can make will be imposed from above, not generated from below. Individual human beings will continue to behave like individual human beings, and only if they are motivated on an individual level to change their lot will anything change on a larger scale.

The biggest thing that's wrong, though, is the presumption that the "class gap" is what matters. Social class is not something that people, by and large, choose (though some people are remarkably determined to call themselves working class, especially when they have quite a lot of money and are a bit embarrassed about it). Social class is about how you're brought up, what your expectations and aspirations are, where you see yourself fitting in. It's an individual thing, something over which government has no control. I walked past City and Islington College's Business and Arts centre today and was struck by the conformity and almost uniform dress of many of the students: baggy tracksuits, trainers, large baseball caps with big labels on worn at funny angles. This dress code represents their social class, where they come from and where they feel they fit. You can't tell them that it's wrong, any more than you can tell them that their names are wrong.

What Harriet Harman and her socialist ilk fail to realise is that it is precisely the government-encouraged culture of dependance on state munificence that has come to define the aspirations and expectations of those at the bottom end of the scale. Their lives are sufficiently comfortable, their parents (thanks to the same welfare state) never saw the need to aspire to anything greater, so they are happy to claim benefits, live in local authority housing and breed more of the same. It's like refusing to remove the stabilisers from a child's bicycle - it won't fall over, but neither will it go very fast, or go round corners very effectively, so they will never really learn how liberating it is to cycle on two wheels. Similarly, for the benefit-dependent class, their liberty and social mobility is undermined by this safety net. Which is why it needs to change.

That would be difficult to do - to tell the long-term benefit claimants that, unless they actually can't, they need to think about making a living for themselves, rather than depending on those of us who pay tax on our incomes to subsidise their lives. But it is the only way to really liberate those at the bottom of the scale - take off their stabilisers and watch them wobble along on two wheels until they get the hang of it.

Ed Balls on Andrew Marr

I feel I should relate what I saw this morning on Andrew Marr's Sunday morning show. It was the spectacle of the marvellously-named Ed Balls (our schools minister, in case you were wondering) trying to talk up the government's prospects.

There would normally be nothing unusual in a government minister being postive about the government, but there are two things which set this example apart: the fact that Ed Balls is one of Gordon Brown's oldest allies; and the fact that he could hardly bring himself to read from his internal script. For Mr Balls couldn't stop himself stumbling before words which he clearly didn't believe. Phrases such as "Gordon Brown has done really... well" and "the economy will grow ... stronger" really troubled him.

It must be hard to be part of a doomed government. Especially one which came in on such a high, and took on such a solid economy (whatever Gordon might tell you). Indeed, taking on a new leader seems to have made things worse, rather than better. But then, he was hardly new.

The next 18 months (which we will probably have to wait for a general election) will probably prove very entertaining. Despite the fact that we know who will win.

Another blog

I feel I should explain myself briefly. I am a London-based professional musician and a libertarian conservative. Simply put, my attitude to economic matters is conservative and my attitude to social matters is libertarian. If you're not sure what libertarian is (it is emphatically NOT the same as liberal), have a look here.

There's an interesting quiz here to see if you have any libertarian leanings.

This blog will be a bit of a mixed bag. Some music, some politics, some pictures. I hope at least some of it will be interesting.