There are 20 BBC Singers and they cost less than one Gary Lineker. Unlike Lineker, they have broken no rules, but the BBC want to close them down. They have worked in a cave in Maida Vale for a hundred years and it is quite possible that top BBC executives, much too busy to listen to the Corporation’s own cultural output, know almost nothing about the Singers. They probably do not know, for instance, that the BBC Singers have a nice line in singing the Match of the Day theme tune. The Singers are a prime example of the sort of thing which justifies the BBC’s unique privilege of raising money through the licence fee. They are central to Britain’s musical ecology and keep our great choral tradition alive by commissioning new work in a way no commercial organisation could manage. The Singers also maintain the highest levels of training. You have to be extremely skilled as sight-readers to cover the range of music the singers sing. In turn, this requirement sets the standards throughout the world of choirs. Nobody really knows why the BBC is so zealous to destroy this unique body of people. It has given no clear reasons. But it seems reasonable to guess that it wants to run down its own classical music culture. Once you’ve got rid of the Singers, you will want to disband the orchestras too, then the Proms and eventually Radio 3 itself, whose classical coherence is already under threat. Speak up for the unsung Singers.
It is often said, as in the case of Gary Lineker and the small boats, that the reductio ad Hitlerum is to be avoided. The latest example is Hugo Rifkind in Tuesday’s Times, calling Lineker’s words ‘crass, because Nazi comparisons always are’. The warning is wise, but are comparisons always crass? In trying to work out what Vladimir Putin is up to, for instance, the Hitler comparison is instructive – the propagation of bogus history to work up grievance; the belief that democracies are weak and can be fobbed off; the deployment of territorial claims and the build-up of military threat accompanied by the denial that force will be used; the use of petty nationalist proxies, false flags, bogus plebiscites; the making of agreements in order to break them when you are ready to do so; the policy of total lies. Putin has surely studied carefully what Hitler did: therefore we should too.
Don’t you hate that phrase ‘the grown-ups in the room’? It is usually applied to those politicians and officials who are most assiduous in frustrating whatever wishes citizens may have expressed at the ballot box. Yes, some people in public life have more mature judgment than others, but whenever I look at the complacent faces of those who recognise themselves in that description, I become instantaneously infantilised and want to start shouting ‘Pee, po, belly, bum, drawers’, like the children that Flanders and Swann imagined.
Any intellectual history of our times should seek out the moment when knowing things became a mark of shame and was replaced in many professions and businesses by ‘skill-sets’, management as an end in itself and the hiring of consultants. I learnt recently that the Foreign Office now gets in people known as ‘SMEs’, which stands not for ‘small and medium enterprises’ but for ‘subject-matter experts’, as if these were a tiny band of eccentrics rather than the core of the work.
Last week, on a brief visit to Dublin, I had the pleasure of meeting many of that country’s great and the good. I admire the way they have maintained old-fashioned Irish charm while embracing European modernity. I can see why they are such happy members of the European Union. The EU gave them an escape from the economic and cultural dead-end of anti-British nationalism without forcing them to seek favours from their former masters in London. It helps them financially, gives well-paid and interesting jobs to the elites which such a small country cannot match at home and creates, through geography and language, a nice bridge between the United States and the Continent. It leaves Irish defence neutrality undisturbed yet keeps the Republic firmly in the western European camp. So my audience was politely uncomprehending of my support for Brexit and seemed to assume that it is just a phase from which the United Kingdom will soon emerge. I was grateful to one of my hosts who pointed out that struggles for independence are never quickly resolved: look at Ireland’s own a century ago. The EU’s advantages for Ireland were never available to Britain, and never will be, unless by our own efforts we impoverish ourselves – which, on current showing, is perfectly possible.
This week marks the 80th birthday of an Irishman I much admire. Eoghan Harris should be better known this side of the water. In his varied career, he began in the Workers’ Party (the political wing of the old Official IRA from which the Provisional IRA was a breakaway), was a friend of Marlon Brando, wrote screenplays for the Sharpe series, and then became, as well as a great journalist, informal speechwriter/spin doctor for several mainstream politicians including John Bruton and Bertie Ahern, both of whom who became taoiseach, Mary Robinson, who became president, and David Trimble, who won the Nobel Peace Prize. Eoghan makes plenty of enemies and chooses just the right ones. Starting as a socialist who hates the way nationalism divides the working class, he has devoted half a century to exposing the moral corruption of Sinn Fein/IRA and identifying those ‘moderates’ in Irish public life who make excuses for the Provos and their political heirs. He is currently being sued by some of those he has criticised. His birthday post online says that age and cancer probably mean he won’t see them in court, ‘but I promise them slim pickings from my bones’.
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