Is the hour of socialism upon us? Thanks to the exhausted financial orthodoxies of those who rule the eurozone, austerity is producing slump. No electorate, it seems, is yet ready to elect leaders who go to the root of the problem and reject the European currency, but almost all have lost faith in the Frankfurt solutions. So if François Hollande becomes the next President of France on Sunday, the cry will be that ‘growth’ (which, in this context, means more government spending and borrowing) is the answer, and the centre-right will be cast in the role history has allotted to Herbert Hoover. If Hollande can pull this one, how long before the two Eds proclaim their New deal here? What will David Cameron’s answer be?
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In the latest Sunday Times Rich List, only one of the ten richest people mentioned seems to be British-born (the Duke of Westminster). The question which I find myself asking, but cannot answer, is ‘Is this a good thing?’ On the one hand, it is a sign of a vigorous and open society that people should be able to come here, do business and do well. On the other hand, it is not an unequivocal blessing if rich people, for complicated tax reasons rather than Anglophilia, domicile themselves here. Are we a proud powerhouse of prosperity, or a convenient offshore postal address?
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One could ask comparable questions about immigration lower down the economic scale. There is huge resentment, which I share, about mass immigration. But this week I was sitting in a modest barber’s shop near Victoria having my hair cut by a Moroccan. I noticed a photograph of a rowing eight pinned to his mirror and asked him about it. One of the oarsmen was his son, Moe. Moe, who is 6ft7, was spotted as a talent by an inspiring Australian PE teacher at his comprehensive in Surbiton. He got the boy into the sport, and now Moe is a member of the British Olympic Eight, which has a good chance of a medal. You would have to be very hard-hearted not to see every aspect of this story as positive, not just for the proud Moroccan and his family, but for this country.
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Johann Zoffany was also an immigrant (born in Frankfurt in 1733). I finally got to the Zoffany exhibition at the Royal Academy last week. It is as fascinating historically as it is artistically. Zoffany first won the patronage of David Garrick, then of the Court. He painted English noblemen on the Grand Tour and impoverished opticians, and beggars. He went to India, and painted its princelings and Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match. The collective impression conveyed is of a culture which, though hierarchical, was also free. The last room was, to me, quite unexpected. It contains two horrible, almost Goya-esque paintings, one of the mob murdering Swiss soldiers in the Tuileries after the execution of Louis XVI in August 1792, the other of them plundering the King’s wine cellars. The contrast with the rest of the artist’s work illustrates the difference between liberty under the law and liberté, egalité, fraternité. With the way the eurozone is going, we are in for more of the latter (see above).
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As I write, reports flow in of country-dwellers coming to London specially to vote for Boris. Labour needs to ban votes for second-home owners.
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If a judge with experience in the field spoke out about, say, government threats to human rights, the need to protect jury trial, the pointlessness of sentences for drug possession and so on, he would get a sympathetic audience. But when Sir Paul Coleridge, who sits in the Family Division, wishes to discuss the fruits of his professional experience of marriage breakdown on behalf of the new Marriage Foundation, critics in the posh media suggest that it is none of his business. This must be because such people believe that marriage is a private matter. You can talk about it in public, therefore, only in terms of extending rights and choice — think how well received Sir Paul would be if he had pronounced that gay marriage would be a good innovation. Yet rights are only one aspect of the subject. Marriage is public, as well as private, for the obvious reason that it is has a legal framework, with witnesses, property rights and so on, and because it, and its collapse, affect everyone else. Sir Paul estimates that 3.8 million children are caught up in the family justice system every year. One way of illustrating it is to compare it with the national experience in the first world war. In the British Empire, nine million men were mobilised, of whom just over two million were wounded and just over 900,000 were killed. That amount of dead was ‘only’ 10 per cent of those directly involved, but the effect rippled outward, so that one could fairly say that every single citizen was affected, and millions suffered. To this day, there are still people alive who never met their father because he was killed in battle between 1914 and 1918. The casualties of the marriage war are even more numerous, and the fighting seems to be getting worse. Of course it should be a matter of public policy to try to seek peace.
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At the Stratford Literary Festival at the weekend, I chaired a panel which discussed the effect of the parsonage and its inhabitants on English literature. P.D. James spoke beautifully about Jane Austen and the precariousness of her female, unmarried, vicarage status. At supper afterwards, I talked to Phyllis James about writing, and she told me her method. She writes out the first draft of her novels by hand and then dictates them to her able and meticulous secretary. It matters, Phyllis believes, how the words sound, and unless you stop and listen, you barely notice their dissonances. The reader, however, does, perhaps without quite knowing what is wrong. Words read without a sense of their sound are like food eaten without a sense of smell.
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Now that the John Lewis model is being applied to the civil service pension scheme, it needs a slogan. How about ‘Never knowingly mis-sold’?
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