The World at One - What I Would Have Said

At lunchtime I picked up an e-mail from a reporter at Radio 4's World at One looking to call me re a Lib Dem related item on the programme. This piqued my interest but work commitments would have made any contact next to impossible. C'est la Vie...

My instinct was that the report would be on activist reaction to the four Lib Dem MPs who voted against the third reading of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act and the rather high-profile abstentions of Party President Tim Farron and Deputy Leader of the Parliamentary Party, Simon Hughes. Just as with Secret Courts, many activists will have cause to think twice when it comes to campaigning for these MPs.

It transpires, though, that the piece was in response to Clegg's speech this morning in which he defended the coalition and reinforced his intention it should continue to polling day in 2015. Wouldn't it be better to exit now?

I'm aware this blog has had it's disgruntled moments, but they were barking up the wrong tree if they thought my response would have suited their story. Indeed, my response would have been similar to a Bristol Lib Dem colleague - who was told they had had a number of similar replies and his contribution wouldn't be required!

Whilst there's no denying that coalition hasn't worked out as planned - we've failed over various Constitutional Reform and we're still suffering the fall out from the Student Fees debacle (despite the implantation of a far more progressive system) - the country has had stable Government in a period of economic uncertainty.

Whilst a full-blown recovery has remained elusive - and there is more that could be done on the economy - implementing Labour's (post-election) alternative in 2010 would have left us with much higher public spending and debt, higher borrowing costs, a shrinking private sector and any illusion of growth generated through public spending would probably be wearing thin by now.

True, the economy has stagnated and there are many issues to fix - infrastructure investment and capital expenditure should be increased, for example - but when the Eurozone is in it's sixth quarter of recession, Socialist France has entered it's second quarter of recession in four years and economic indicators remain weak around the world, then the government deserves more credit for progress made towards a rebalanced economy than it is getting.

Meanwhile the coalition has made important progress in other areas: reforming the tax system by increasing Capital Gains Tax Rates, reducing Tax Relief allowable through pensions and other schemes, increasing the Personal Allowance, extending Stamp Duty to punitive levels for those using companies to avoid it. Introducing a Single Tier Pension, the legislation for which was in the recent Queen's Speech, will simplify State Pension Provision and erase many of the biases inherent in the current one.

In social areas, too, the Government has made some important decisions - the pupil premium which targets additional spending at schools with pupils in most need of it, extending parental rights by allowing parents to split Maternity/Paternity leave in a way that suits them not tradition. Another key area - and a vital lasting legacy for this Government is Equal Marriage - another step change in moving society forward to a new level of acceptance, tolerance and understanding.

So, whilst the Lib Dems may not have achieved the "Big Wins" of coalition government - we have played our part in ensuring the country had a stable government with progressive input at a time of international economic crisis for which the previous government was ill prepared. We should continue that work right up until polling day.

In the end, the World at One didn't run a feature on the Lib Dem attitude to the coalition... perhaps everyone approached said much the same as I would have done...

Andrew

Gay Footballers: What are the Chances?

One of my favourite Radio 4 programme's is Tim Harford's More or Less. It takes a weekly look at some of the statistics and numbers in the news and explores the basis of these: often uncovering cases of these being misapplied or misrepresented.

Yesterday I listened to the 2012 "numbers of the year" edition in which various journalists, reporters and personalities chose a significant statistic and explained something about it.

Bill Edgar, Statistics in Football writer for the Times, and author of Back of the Net: 100 Golden Goals decided to look at the chances of there NOT having been a gay footballer in the English League since the last (and first) openly gay footballer (Justin Fashanu) ended his English career at Torquay, some 20 years ago next month.

Assuming that a) the proportion of gay footballers is similar to the percentage in broader society and b) that this percentage is a conservative 1.5%, the chance that there has been no gay players in the English League is...

Of the 13,600 players to have played in the League in the past 20 years, the chances of none of them being gay is (drum roll please)

1 in 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

In the Premier League, there have been 3,200 players in this period. The chances of picking 3,200 men at random from the general populace and not picking any gay ones is:

1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

The only recorded case of an active professional footballer being openly gay, anywhere, is the (Liverpool-born) Swede Anton Hysén (pictured) - you can read more about Hysén over on Stephen's blog. For more of More or Less, you can download the podcast.

Andrew

Bert Weedon's Guitar Boogle Shuffle

One of the many podcasts I listen to is Radio 4's Last Word which features a diverse range of obituaries on various people who have died in the week prior to broadcast. It is always an interesting and eye-opening listen - and often brings to my attention the life and work of fascinating people just a little too late.

One such this week - whose death was reported on the main news as well as Last Word - was Bert Weedon, the man who wrote "Play In A Day" and is credited with teaching Eric Clapton, Brian May and Sir Paul McCartney the guitar.

He learnt guitar at the age of 12 and developed his Play In A Day concept in 1957 at the age of 37. In 1959 he was the first British act to have a guitar single - but he very almost didn't get credited for it... He had come by the track (written in America) and wanted to record it but the studio he was signed too (Top Rank Records) weren't interest. Weedon arranged to record it elsewhere and for it to be put out under a pseudonym. When he went back to Top Rank, they conceded defeat and the track was released on their label, properly credited.

Here it is, in a version from around 1982, Bert Weedon's Guitar Boogie Shuffle:

Andrew

James Naughtie and The Wasp Factory

James Naughtie is one of my favourite Radio 4 personalities. Not only is he the "good cop" to John Humphrys' more robust and assertive cop on the Today programme but his too-rare pieces of reportage showcase a great skill of approaching complex issues from a sympathetic and human viewpoint. His reports from the campaign trail in the last US elections were essential listening in this regard as were those from Japan in the wake of the Earthquakes earlier this year.

(These foreign assignments are a matter of ongoing controversy on Radio 4's Feedback programme - not to mention The Daily Mail, of course - the argument against such trips typically being: "How many correspondants does the BBC need in any one place? And what point is there in presenting the show from, say, Japan when it could equally well be done in London? For my money (and it is in part) Mr Naughtie is a shining example of how being at the source of the news informs and illuminates in a way analysing it from thousands of miles away can never do. But I digress...)

Aside from his political nous, though, Naughtie also has a wide range of artistic and literary interests which the Today production team also ensure are utilised when the opportunity arises. These interests are also given expression when presenting the Proms and Radio 4's monthly Bookclub.

The format of the Bookclub is an interview the author of a given book, guiding the listener through the thought process of the writer, the issues and plotting devices, the characters and intent as well as chairing a discussion and taking questions from the audience. Naughtie does this expertly, showing a real knowledge of the book under discussion and ensuring that the major themes and questions are addressed.

This month's book happens to be one of my favourites and by one of my favourite authors: The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. It's waiting on my iPod to listen to but I've no doubt it'll be a corker. You can find it on iPlayer or you can download the podcast. 

Here's a taster of the programme courtesy of Naughtie's own e-mail. If you're at all familiar with his accent and the cadence of his voice, you should be able to detect that in his writing:

"I’m fairly sure that Iain Banks is the first guest on Bookclub of whom I have asked the question: have you ever let yourself be psycho-analysed? I was therefore slightly disappointed when the answer was no, but it was worth a try.  (Radio 4 Bookclub this Sunday 6 November at 4pm and Thursday 10 November at the new time of 3.30pm.)

If you know The Wasp Factory, the book that launched Iain’s serious writing career 27 years ago, you will know why the question arose. Frank’s story, which gives the book its shape and its spirit, is one of grotesque adolescent excess, particularly in the matter of violence. He has killed three people (at least, we’re told, one of them a sibling) and much of his delight while he is growing up comes from meting out undeserved punishment on any living thing that passes by. Take the alarm clock contraption which involves wasps being pinned to the hands and, as a consequence, being killed to a timetable set by Frank, allowing him to wake up to see his latest victim being squashed as the clock strikes the hour, with another one coming along behind. The book is a picture of disturbance, a kind of punk’s-eye view of the world, which is a place of gothic horror and badness. Yet, as Iain told us, “Frank thinks he is relatively normal – it’s as simple as that.”

You can see why I wondered if he’d ever had his head examined to see where the story came from, and he recalled happily a launch party for one of his books in Edinburgh when an American student asked him if he had experienced a very troubled childhood, expecting the answer yes. Iain pointed out his grey-haired mother in the crowd, who duly obliged with the truth: “Och no, Iain was always a happy wee boy.”

We were talking in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, where our readers had been re-reading the book, sometimes after several years, and returning to the themes that Iain has picked up in his overtly science fiction books (which he writes under the name of Iain M. Banks, a distinction which I think he now mildly regrets) and which have given him a cult following. The Wasp Factory presents a world where the certainties that Frank lives with are ones that would repel or terrify the average reader – burning dogs, tortured wasps, murders, a bizarre substitute religion in which he believes that the future is foretold by one of his grotesque killing machines, which kills its animal victims in a dozen different ways. So why was the book so popular?

His answer is that he thinks readers get the joke – “it was a hoot and a giggle” – in a way that critics certainly didn’t. A number of reviewers wondered how a publisher could stoop so low in letting the book onto the streets. Why can’t they get it, he wonders? “It’s a simple method, gross exaggeration. Being a science fiction writer helps – the term is extrapolation but it’s basically exaggeration.” When Eric, a brother whom Frank hasn’t killed, emerges from an old-style psychiatric hospital, it allows Frank to appear normal by comparison, but readers learn of the strange happenings in his past. By the end of the story, Franks makes a discovery that is clearly one of the most important of his life and will shape his future. We do mention in the course of the programme what this revelation is, simply because the book has been around for long enough for that to seem reasonable, but I won’t talk about it here, in case some of you are reading the book for the first time. Let’s just say that it changes his identity.

The story is set in a community in the far north of Scotland, which Iain knows well, on an island. Frank’s father Angus, an eccentric doctor, is part of the psychological puzzle of the novel, going every now and again to Inverness to sell drugs, which he makes at home, and perhaps sharing some of the Frank’s attitude towards women – in the absence of a mother in the house, he rails against the betrayals of women, even Mrs Clampy, the housekeeper, who is a bastion of sanity in the place. Iain is happy to describe it as a psychological study : Frank creates not just a physical environment that suits him, and his urges, but a mythological one too. Iain is as convinced as aetheist as you are ever likely to meet (he will acknowledgement that perhaps 1% of him is simply agnostic, but no more). Iain says, as you might expect, that he’s always found Frank a fascinating character, but he echoed the feelings of surely nearly every reader of the book when he said that he wouldn’t like to find himself living next door to him.

I don’t know if you agree with the reviewer who said that he found it incomprehensible that a publisher could have stooped to such levels of depravity (that was The Irish Times) or with one of our readers who said that, having not expected to enjoy it, she found herself reading the gory and funny bits to her husband on a long car journey and laughing out loud. Either way, it was a landmark book – a piece of gothic fiction and fantasy that established Iain Banks’ career and seem to fit happily into the early 80s punk-influenced popular culture. I hope you enjoy the programme."

If you've not heard the programme before, do give it a go. I'm sure you'll enjoy it!

Andrew

Because this will never grow old...

I don't think I will ever tire of the clips in this post, even if I live to be 100. Just before eight on December 6th 2010, James Naughtie managed to, ehm, "mispronounce" the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt's name on live radio. Here it is for your enjoyment:

...and here's Andrew Marr repeating the error barely an hour later:

Andrew