Much of this is played for laughs, and the audience around us laughed a lot during the first two acts. They were clearly surprised (as the West End Whingers were surprised) when a bunch of violence erupted in the third act, even though it was hard to not see this coming. Butterworth’s telegraphing throughout the play is a bit on the heavy side, frankly, but critics and audiences still claim to be surprised. Rylance, who is a fine actor and who is given considerably less to work with here than people think, plays Byron as an irascible rogue who is supposed to reflect some deeply held English values, but it’s a stereotype—he’s incapable of being anything other than an irascible rogue, even though he’s also, you know, deep, because of those long silences in the third act when he’s facing eviction. Sadly, most of the characters in the play are stereotypes as well. And those are just the ones who make some sort of sense. Among those who don’t make sense are the highly implausible former girlfriend and the six year old child who is Byron’s—Byron himself looks to be in his 50s, and we’re supposed to believe he’s irresistible to all women, especially those under the age of 16.

What’s irritating here is that Butterworth seems to have had the right idea in the first place—the marginalized in rural England, who here, as in real life, consist of the unemployed, and the unemployable, and the young (who often overlap), and the old. There is a real play in here somewhere, but Butterworth needed an editor or something. And some focus. He has attempted something major, trying to connect the myths of England with the realities of the marginalization of modern England for much of the population. But he loads it down with entirely too much verbiage, and implausibility, and a bit too much of the “England for the English” mentality that is driving some of the British Right these days. Yes, you can see the violence in the third act coming a mile away—but that doesn’t make it any more plausible in the context of the play itself. Chekhov’s pistol in the first act is supposed to be used, certainly, but it’s also supposed to have a reason to be there in the first place.

We were so surprised at this wreckage of a play, in fact, that we went home and tracked down every review we could think of. Whingers, as I noted above, loved the play, even though they admitted there were parts of it they just didn’t understand. Here’s a sample of some of the thinking going around:

When the comedy stops and the violence begins it’s a bit of a shock and we have to confess that we didn’t really know what it was all about. Butterworth’s teasing juxtaposition of the mystic and the mundane (Stonehenge and custard creams) is all very well but when we were just left with the mystic the Whingers were way out of their depth.

And yet they happily admit they would go sit through all three hours and 20 minutes again. Jeez.

And here’s Charlotte Higgins over at The Guardian:

The English love a rebel, a non-conformist: I began to think about the levellers, the diggers, the wonderful and outre sects thrown up by the English revolution and so beautifully described in Christopher Hill’s classic, The World Turned Upside Down. At the same time, Byron – fabulist, chancer, dangerous, oddly tender – seems to have some kind of indefinable connection with the land, with its ancient beating pre-Christian heart, that seems so rooted in the south-west of England. In Butterworth’s play, this stuff is all the more powerful for being so lightly sketched. Personally, I have a soft spot for England’s deep mythology (I read a lot of Susan Cooper books as a child). Overworked, it could all turn a little Wagnerian.

Lightly sketched—that’s an understatement. The fact that the play doesn’t hold together between the hystrionics doesn’t seem to register on Higgins.

I don’t mean to just pick on the Whingers and Higgins—they’re just representative of a theatre-going class that doesn’t seem to mind the fact that what they see on the stage often makes no sense whatsoever, but as long as it makes them laugh, they don’t seem bothered. What does seem to unify all these folks is the appearance that Butterworth is addressing something deeply serious–Englishness. Well, of course he is—that’s why we’re disappointed. Yes, it’s a non-mainstream view of Englishness which is messy and dirty, which is what everyone seems to find so appealing. And yes, rural England is in trouble. The Labour party has been no better than the Tories in their ongoing war against the English countryside, and people who make their living from the countryside—a tradition in England that goes back thousands of years, and which is still a significant economic and social sphere for a sizable percentage of the English population—find themselves adrift, both socially and economically.

We’re way outside of the mainstream here, and it is to Butterworth’s credit that he takes them seriously, or seems to, anyway. But treating everyone as a certain kind of stereotype does not help, nor does enobling Bryon when the reasons for it aren’t clear. Yes, he’s supposed to be an archetype, but it’s awfully vague about what. It’s that very vagueness that most audiences find appealing, I suspect. Any further clarity and Byron probably becomes quite unappealing—he sells drugs to teenagers, makes a public nuisance of himself, seems to have casual sexual relations with minors, and has long given up responsibility for what most of us take responsibility for. But because he sacrificed himself (in one of the weirder backstories of the play), and listens to the birds, and has seen giants, we’re supposed to find him deeply moving and symbolic. Rylance does his best, which is considerable, but Byron’s mythical status escaped us.

Butterworth is addressing something serious here, or seems to think he is, but he’s addressing it in a frightfully lazy, disjointed and possibly racist way (although only Dominick Cavendish of The Telegraph seems to have commented on this latter point). And it’s not much different from the “Englishness” that we’ve seen for decades on English television, ranging from Rab C. Nesbitt way on back to Steptoe and Son. We want this to be a better play, not the condescending one that it is. But maybe we’re just missing something. The fact that much of it is outright blather without an ounce of dramatic tension doesn’t seem to bother anyone else. There’s clearly a hunger out there for plays about this. I expect so see many more of them coming along. All you need, apparently, is some dialogue about ley lines and trailer parks and you’re all set.

It was a bit surreal, in fact–the Alternative Viewing Facility turns out to be the large auditorium in the Queen Elizabeth II Center where the inquiry is being held. There must have been 800 people in there, not many of them likely to have been on Blair’s side. All very well behaved, I must say–and a really broad age range, Clearly a lot of people had taken time off from work, as I had. This was important. It’s like being in the Iraq marches in 2002 and 2003–there was a need to bear witness, and this was one of those occasions that required it. Chilcot, to his credit, understands this, I think. It goes without saying that neither Tony Blair nor the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown (who testifies next month) wanted this inquiry. There were lots of demonstrators outside, of course, but there seemed to be even more police.

So what did we learn? Aside from the fact that Blair remains self-righteous and sanctimonius, supremely confident in the correctness of his own judgment, and incapable of learning from experience. So anyone expecting anything close to regrets or an apology was probably disappointed, but ultimately not surprised. It’s actually quite scary how much Blair resembles Bush in temperament–they each have a very simple view of the world, and are not afraid to act upon it. And Blair does have a simple view of the world, although he does have the ability to present it with enough dross hanging off of it that people can be taken in–as many Labour voters and politicians will attest. So today, we got the simple story for why things went wrong–Al Quaida and Iran, both mentioned a dozen times at least.

So in terms of the committee, I thought that Lyne was actually the most impressive, although kudos to Baroness Prashar for not letting Blair interrupt her, and for shutting him up when it needed to be done. Much of the questioning over the legality of the war, and how that decision was reached, took place this morning, but Lyne did an admirable job of summarizing the state of play up to Lord Goldsmith’s change of mind the week before the invasion. And he led Blair into a trap so elegant Blair didn’t even see it coming, and even now may not realize how badly he has been compromised on this issue. For what Lyne made very clear was that the legal opinion that Goldsmith came up with was one that allowed Blair to make the decision to take Britain to war unilaterally–just when Blair needed it–in spite of Blair’s throwaway comment that if the opinion had been the reverse, of course everything would have stopped, and there would have been no invasion. Right. Because what Goldsmith came up with was an opinion that stated that, contrary to the Foreign and Colonial Office’s view that a decision that Saddam was in breech of Security Council Resolution 1441 could only be determined by the Security Council, meant rather that this decision could be taken by individual countries. Which, conveniently, was the view of the legal eagles in the Bush administration. Lyne also kept returning to the point that this was an opinion that was not then, nor is it now, accepted by practically anyone in the international law community. This, of course, does not bother Blair in the least. Pretty neat, actually–Goldsmith provided Blair with his own legal defense. That’s what a good lawyer will do for you.

In spite of repeated assurances by the broadcast media this evening that Blair performed wonderfully, I don’t think he did. He looked stressed, and while his answers were occasionally fluid and practiced, assured even, often he was groping. Like when Lyne, and Baroness Prashar, and even Chilcot, made it clear that they were not about to accept the notion that the post-invasion problems associated with the occupation were caused solely by Al Quaida and Iran. What no one could have expected, Blair kept stating, was that Iran would get involved in trying to screw up the reconstruction. No one could have possibly predicted, etc. This was greeted by skeptical questions about whether or not there had been a serious risk assessment of the whole process. Oh, there was, Blair assured us, many of them. Well, why didn’t they anticipate this, commissioners wondered? Well, because Al Quaida and Iran etc. Nor were they impressed with Blair’s occasional non-answers, such as to the question of wouldn’t it have been a good idea if the US had notified Britain of Paul Bremner’s decision to shut down the Baathist party and disband the army before the fact–a decision that created a whole boatload of problems for the occupying forces, and which placed Britain, which had a certain legal responsibility as joint occupier or Iraq, in a quandary. Or Abu Graibh. Or any of the other interesting developments of April 2004. Blair kept trying to take things to now, and how much better it all is these days, but the committee wasn’t having much of this.

Blair was sort of useless on major stuff, not telling us anything he hasn’t already said many times before. But there were moments when a larger truth emerged, such as his basic non-response to being ignored on major US Iraq policy decisions, like disbanding the Iraqi army, or Abu Graibh. And this leads to one of Blair’s major flaws–his obsequiousness to the US. Because one of the things that has emerged forcefully in testimony the past several weeks has been Blair’s concern about–indeed, devotion to–the alliance with the US. We’ve written about it before, and how this entanglement has meant considerable grief to the UK at times, without much in return. But this doesn’t seem to bother Blair. Members of the committee, I suspect, were probably as surprised as the rest of this at Blair’s blithe unconcern with not being informed about major US decision making. For example, it’s pretty clear now–and has been for a number of years–that a considerable amount of the Iraq disaster can be laid squarely at the feet of the lack of interest in–in fact, complete unconcern with–planning for much of anything beyond the invasion by the Bush administration. This thought never appears to cross Blair’s mind, for whom the problems with the occupation are purely the result of Al Quaida and Iran. But it’s also indicative of another of Blair’s major flaws–his cowardice. Blair undoubtedly sees himself engaged in some sort of heroic struggle with the forces of darkness. The reality is that he couldn’t stand up to Bush–and will be dogged by this for the rest of his life, which perhaps explains his escape into the strange reality he inhabits.

I was a bit surprised at the lack of discussion of regime change, about which nothing was said during the afternoon session, presumably because Blair backed off his earlier comments on this issue. That was about the only thing he backed off on, though. He has no regrets, not one. He would do it all again. Because Blair’s world is binary. Hence his repeated insistence that if he hadn’t gone to war, Saddam would undoubtedly be pursuing WMD and competing with Iran on the nuclear front. Blair’s worldview allows no other options–ether invade Iraq to remove Saddam, or face a future where our very fates are hostage to Saddam’s madman whims. That there might be other alternatives does not even cross his mind. And this was the case in 2003, clearly–either invade Iraq, or Saddam would win and the US and UK would lose. That there might have been other alternatives is never given a second thought. Reality, for Blair, is never troubling, because it’s always binary–the notion that there might be subtlety, nuance or complications is never tolerated. It’s just not possible that the world is complicated–for every problem, there’s a simple Blair solution. Too bad he hasn’t figured out the mideast yet. But I’m sure the clients of JP Morgan and that hedge fund, and his students at Yale, are thrilled to receive this deeply informed wisdom from time to time. Because the world is actually a simple, uncomplicated place, and there’s always a simple Blairite explanation for why things don’t quite work out as planned.

Which is why, at the end when he gave his defense of his actions without a shadow of a doubt, you could tell that he believed every word of it. This is a man who genuinely believes that the world is a better place because he went to war. This is one genuinely scary guy.

And I haven’t heard back on whether they have Wi-Fi in the room that I’ll be sitting in, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to post. If not, it will all come out in one large post later.

So what happened this morning? Blair was asked about what happened at Crawford (nothing special, no secret deal), the relation of Iraq to the mid-east peace process (none, apparently, although he said he was “frustrated” at the lack of progress), his relationship with Bush (fine, and did not set conditions). So far, Blair’s main point is that 9/11 changed everything—specifically, the perception of risk. So even though he more or less conceded that the actual risk posed by Saddam Hussein did not change, the perceived risk did. And he was very fudgy on one point—he saw no real difference between regime change and disarming Iraq, an interesting non-distinction for someone who trained as a lawyer to make. Blair also said that his comments in his now-notorious interview with Fern Britton of the BBC last year was a mistake. We’ve also learned that Blair seems to worry a lot about threats—he’s mentioned Iran several times today. Is he secretly lamenting that he didn’t get an attack on Iran in while he still could?

And who is doing the asking? This is where it gets a bit interesting, because as we have noted before, not one of the five members of the committee is a trained lawyer. And certainly none of them has any prosecutorial experience. Three are senior and widely respected civil servants, and the other two distinguished historians. All are peers. They are not all completely without some entanglements, as we shall see. All were appointed by Gordon Brown.

Sir John Chilcot—Chair. Formerly a member of the Butler inquiry (which was great at amassing evidence about the massaging of intelligence leading up to the war, but not so good on drawing firm conclusions) and a number of other investigative committees. He has held a variety of senior civil service positions, including Permanent Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, and is associated with a number of police groups.

Sir Lawrence Freedman—Historian, Professor War Studies at the Imperial War College, and writer on wars, including this one, which he generally supported in the run-up. More famously, he contributed to Tony Blair’s famous 1999 speech that justified “liberal interventionism.”

Sir Martin Gilbert—not the mystery writer, but rather an historian and the Official Biographer of Winston Churchill (six volumes worth, plus editing the 12 volumes of letters), who in 2004 wrote (ht to Andy Beckett of The Guardian) “George W Bush and Tony Blair . . . may well, with the passage of time . . . join the ranks of [Franklin] Roosevelt and Churchill [as war leaders] when Iraq has a stable democracy.” He is the only committee member with military experience, as far as I can tell, having spent two years in the army for his National Service.

Sir Roderick Lyne—former British ambassador to the Russian Federation (2000-2004), and currently Deputy Chairman of Chatham House (the Royal Institute for International Affairs). Has held a number of diplomatic posts, including to the World Trade Association

Baroness Usha Prashar—First Civil Service Commissioner from 2000-2005, and on various quangos before and since.

A very good summary of the state of play, including the players and their styles, can be found in Andy Beckett’s piece in yesterday’s Guardian.

So far as I can tell, Lyne has been the most aggressive, if that’s the word, in his questioning of previous witnesses. But these are mostly civil servants, whose modus operandi, above all, is politeness. So reporters have been having fun translating, as it were—when one of them says “I’m puzzled by…” what is really meant is “I don’t believe a word of this,” that sort of thing.

And what lines of questioning should we be expecting this afternoon? Well, clearly the legal justification for the war issue has not gone away—in fact, it has been compounded, particularly by Lord Goldsmith’s admission on Wednesday that the main impetus for changing his view was a series of conversations he had in the US with members of the Bush administration. This is somehow not comforting at all, and committee members will likely pursue this issue. The other major issue will be the issue of whether the military was somewhat kept in the dark of the lead-up to the war, and was therefore unprepared for the occupation that followed the initial invasion. This was a clear message from a number of military and foreign Office officials who have previously testified.

According to the 2009WEO [World Energy Outlook], global emissions in 2020 are projected to be about 5 Gt for the reference scenario. According to the 450 ppm scenario, global emissions peak around 2015 at the level of 43.7 Gt and remain broadly stable at that level before starting to decline in 2020.

The UN Secretariat’s “reference scenario” puts the global emissions peak at or above 550 ppm, occurring after 2020, and at least 3 °C.

Most scientists studying climate believe that 2 °C is relatively safe for avoiding abrupt climate transitions, but that the higher you go above that, the more likely things are to get really bad really fast.

According to The Guardian:

The analysis seriously undermines the statements by governments that they are aiming to limit emissions to a level ensuring no more than a 2C temperature rise over the next century, and indicates that the last 24 hours of negotiations will be extremely challenging.

Other voice on this news:

• The official COP15 news site quotes Greenpeace:
  

  “The UN is admitting in private that the pledges made by world leaders would lead to a three degree rise in temperatures. The science shows that it could lead to the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, crippling water shortages across South America and Australia and the near-extinction of tropical coral reefs, and that’s just the start of it,” Greenpeace campaigner Joss Garman tells the newspaper.

• 350.org, a group advocating for emissions cuts to 350 ppm, not 450 ppm, says
  

  So if someone–Barack Obama, for instance–tells you that this agreement will hold temperature increases below 2 degrees (itself an unsafe level), just show him this document.

• A. Siegel at Get Energy Smart Now! claims that the “leaked UN documents show that current proposals would lead to a CO2 concentration of 770 ppm by 2100.” This analysis is from Climate Interactive’s Climate Scorecard.
• Democracy Now! has an interview with the journalist who received the leaked document.
• Andy Revkin at the NYTimes blog DotEarth said that “United Nations officials confirmed the document’s authenticity but declined to discuss it.” In addition, he points out that
  

  [3 °C] is far above the thresholds for dangerous warming being debated at the meeting and accepted in recent statements by the major economies of the world.

I’ll update this story as more information is available.

However, there’s another route to follow, although successive British governments appear unwilling to consider it. And that is to take the Commonwealth seriously. If Britain—or more specifically England (since Scotland will likely go its own way at some point), does not want a closer alliance with the European Union, and has learned (finally, we hope) that an alliance with the US is not all it’s cracked up to be, there’s a third option. And that is to become a leading presence in the Commonwealth, and, more importantly, make the Commonwealth mean something economically and geopolitically.

Just look at who’s in the Commonwealth—there are 53 countries (and you can find them all here). And they all have some relation to Britain. Yes, they were all colonies of Britain at some point (except for Mozambique, which was a Portuguese colony, actually—we’re not quite sure how it fell into Commonwealth membership). They’re all over the world. There are Commonwealth members on every single continent expect Antarctica (where the British Antarctic Territory has yet to apply for commonwealth membership—but of course it’s not a country, so it can’t). The list includes some very large countries, both geographically (Australia and Canada) and by population (India and Pakistan), and some very small ones—Samoa, Vanuatu. There are economies in various stages of development—from the very rich (Britain and Canada) to the rapidly developing (India again, Pakistan) to the very poor (Jamaica, Nauru). There are some of the most stable countries in the world, and some of the most troubled. There are some of the whitest countries in the world to some of the darkest. Some are very Christian, some are very Muslim, and are very Hindu, and some are all over the place. And the list includes some of the most complicated and interesting countries trying to work through a myriad of problems—South Africa and Pakistan, for example. And then there are the countries not there, but either who might be again (Zimbabwe, that poor country, or Fiji, suspended in September 2009), or won’t be but where the British influence is still having important ramifications (Hong Kong, which was a British colony until 1997 when its sovereignty was transferred to China).

What binds this extraordinarily diverse range of countries together? Well, obviously, they were all part of the British Empire at some time. And whatever one thinks of the Empire, you can’t deny that it was (1) big, and (2) global. The sun really didn’t set on it. In Roland Huntford’s wonderful Scott and Amundsen, about the race to the South Pole, Huntford recounts how Scott could travel from England to Antarctica without leaving the Empire at any time. And, for all the savagery with which the Empire was sustained at times, there was also a positive legacy of (often) a functioning legal infrastructure, an educational system, a civil service. These weren’t always sustained, of course, but in many places they were. And then there’s English, which everyone in the world speaks, and which usually has been ingrained in these countries as the basic language of, well, most things, including their legal and business systems. And speaking of the legal system, it’s pretty well established in most of these countries. And there’s more. If the Commonwealth were an economic bloc, it would be about the size of the US economy. And it clearly has the potential to be a formidable trading bloc—it already is, in fact, but it’s just not organized as one.

The mission statement itself is pretty vacuous, and you can tell that it’s deliberately mild:

The Commonwealth is a voluntary association of 53 countries that support each other and work together towards shared goals in democracy and development.

Well, that’s certainly broad enough to pretty much include any country in the world, with some obvious exceptions. And it has a familiar ring to it—it sounds like America exporting democracy to Latin America, for example, and we know what a double-edged sword that has been over the past century and a half. But the follow-up is actually pretty direct an unambiguous:

Beyond the ties of history, language and institutions, it is the association’s values which unite its members: democracy, freedom, peace, the rule of law and opportunity for all. These values were agreed and set down by all Commonwealth Heads of Government at two of their biennial meetings (known as CHOGMs) in Singapore in 1971 and reaffirmed twenty years later in Harare.

But these are pretty strong goals if taken seriously. By and large, they are. It’s been the violations of these relatively abstract goals that have resulted in the suspension of both Zimbabwe and Fiji, and which kept South Africa excluded for decades.

I like to think of the Commonwealth as this constant flow of people, in movement constantly from one country to another, in a constant stream from one end of the globe to the other. But it clearly has London as its unofficial capital. Everyone comes here from Commonwealth countries—and the British, mainly the English, go everywhere. They’re always wandering around somewhere, either in the jungle, or some mountain in Asia somewhere, or landing in Morocco or someplace in North Africa somewhere and walking south. But it’s the in-migration that’s interesting. Anywhere you go in Britain there are a range of ethnic nationalities. I learned this from my citizenship test—while immigrants make up about 10% of the population of Britain now, they make up one third of London (although the recent spurt of growth in immigration has come from non-Commonwealth countries in Eastern Europe). So the mosaic of London is constantly enhanced by the variety of cultures and languages that meld here. And the same is true for Britain as a whole. Yes, there are parts of the country that are still classically English, and there are certainly people who resent what they perceive as the cultural intrusion—there are times when you’re painfully aware that this is indeed an island. And there are people coming to this little green island from all over, and they stay for a while—perhaps a lifetime. But many move on, or move back. And this keeps the flow going, constantly.

So this creates perhaps one of the most international cultural milieus to be found anywhere in the world. I don’t really know what’s comparable. New York is international as well, I suppose, but in a different way—people go there with the intent of staying there, or as a gateway to somewhere else in America. But there’s not that sense of permanence to the flows that characterize this intra-Commonwealth movement of people through London. Some stay, but most don’t. But this just keeps expanding a certain element of Britishness to the rest of the globe in a manner that, I think is probably unique among cultures. Yes, there’s a French sphere, but it’s largely confined to Africa. Russian influence has certainly faded the past twenty years, and that was always weird anyway. American influence is considerably more complicated—American consumerism and media appear wildly popular worldwide (or at least until the externalities catch up with us), but American notions of democracy transfer very unevenly, as we’ve seen.

Anyway, here’s my question. Is there some reason why Britain isn’t trying to make this something more of a political organization? It doesn’t appear that way. But why not? Given the apparent schizophrenia in Britain about whether or not to be more American, or whether or not to be more European—questions that won’t ever really be satisfactorily answered, at least within my lifetime—why not consider another alternative? Here’s this organization that, to varying degrees, does represent what Britain has brought to the world. Why not try to make something more of it? Why not try to establish the Commonwealth as something of a player? Here is this organization that embodies perhaps the most interesting, diverse, and yet coupled group of nations in the world, an organization that encompasses governments of countries spanning six continents, with a population of over 2.1 billion people. That’s nearly one-third of the global population. The Commonwealth is not a political organization. It’s actually something a bit weirder. But it’s also an organization which has as its specific goal the spread of democracy and human rights. Why not take this seriously?

There are lots of objections to Britain trying to make this organization “stronger”, of course. It’s not obvious that Commonwealth countries actually want something stronger, for one thing. Countries don’t get much more Republican than Australia, for example, in terms of their loathing for royalty. The notion of India and Pakistan drawing closer together seems absurd at present. Canada may, with some justification, regard their Commonwealth legacy as a cute anachronism, given its proximity to and inter-connectedness with the US. And smaller countries may resent, to varying degrees, the notion of former Colonial masters once again trying to impose economic or political measures—or even suggesting them. That Zimbabwe thing hasn’t exactly worked out. And given the range of ethnic, religious and political backgrounds of the countries, it may be patent foolishness to suggest closer integration. And while there has been some abstract discussion of a Commonwealth Free Trade Agreement, it hasn’t progressed very far. Pursuing a more commonwealth-friendly economic set of policies may find resistance from both Europe and the US, of course—but that doesn’t necessarily mean walking away from either—although it may mean some readjustment of relations with both. This may be no bad thing.

And yet, and yet…the Commonwealth does include one-third of the world’s population, who all speak the same language, and who undeniably share (for better or worse) a cultural and political legacy. Why not try to make something more of it? At the very least, it would provide an interesting diversion from the tedious arguments about whether or not Britain is part of Europe. So Happy Birthday, Commonwealth. Here’s to 60 more years.

The above stamp was issued by The Royal Mail to commemorate the biannual Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London in 1977.

We have this great little library around the corner, which is very convenient. In London, there are lots of libraries, but it’s such big city geographically that it’s not always the case that there’s a library just around the corner. It’s a nice library—it’s right next to The Keats House, where John Keats lived next door to Fanny Brawne before heading off to Italy and an untimely death. The trees at the edge of the Keats House grounds hang over the path that leads to the library doors, and in Spring there are lovely blossoms dropping petals on the path. The building itself is that curious medley that one often encounters in England, a combination of a bit of old grandeur with some 1960s crap thrown in to make the interior more “functional.” But it’s comfortable, it has a good collection of books and newspapers, an attractive children’s room, and a bunch of PCs that people use for internet access, and it used to have a neighbor’s cat, Moggy, who would wander in and sleep all day before she died last Spring, much to the dismay of the regulars.

Recently there’s been a change in tone. There have been some new people showing up behind the desk, and they’re all chirpy. They ask questions, like “Did you find everything you need?”, stuff like that. They chat up the fact that, oh look, you have this book out, and that one too. Personally, I find this a bit irritating. I like my librarians on the reserved side, and not to be salesmen. Fortunately, this has not been a regular occurrence, but it makes me nervous. And it turns out that it may be part of a general plot to change the character of libraries in the area entirely. Well, maybe not a plot–it may not be nearly as well thought out as a plot would be.

The Heath Library, as it’s called, is part of the Borough of Camden library system. And the Borough of Camden has been trying to figure out how to cut its budget. Just like everyplace else in Britain, and the US, and any number of other places around the world these days. So Camden has decided to make some adjustments to how library services are provided in the borough. As the Camden New Journal reports this week:

CONTROVERSIAL plans to make a £2million cut to the library budget by reducing staff and introducing self-service machines were finally signed off at the Town Hall last night (Wednesday).

I can’t wait to see what self-service machines are all about. Self-service for what? Ah, checking out books. What could possibly go wrong here?

Liberal Democrat culture chief Councillor Flick Rea resisted pressure for a rethink and agreed to proposals mapped out in the council’s library reform programme, known as Growing Your Library and developed by council officials and consultants over several months.

Rea said the only way libraries would survive for future generations in its current £8.2million budget. “Otherwise the service will not survive in the tooth and claw climate of modern local government finance,” she said.

The cuts will be made over four years.

The plan here seems to be Growing Your Library by Cutting Its Funds.

Before making her decision, Councillor Rea heard deputations from library users who criticised the programme, including one from John Richardson of the Camden History Society who accused her of allowing it to be “pushed through without democratic process”.

She said the time saved by putting in self-issuing machines – and thus “freeing up” librarians to help readers – would be cancelled out by the staffing cuts.

“There is no evidence that the library service will improve as a result of the changes,” she added.

In addition to the 15 posts that have already been axed, more cuts, including some compulsory redundancies, are expected.

I hope someone eventually will explain to me why there never actually seems to be any money for saving the things that are worth saving. And why we can’t just hire more librarians “to help readers,” whatever that means. Finding books? Learning how to use the catalog? Finding stuff on the internet? People need help with these things?

How did the Borough of Camden come up with these plans? Well, for all its concern about saving money, the Borough doesn’t appear to mind spending a bit of money itself. As the Camden New Journal reports in a separate article:

CONSULTANTS hired to help redesign Camden’s library service were paid more than £2,000 a day over the summer.

American firm IDEO was paid £47,000 for 23 days work on the Growing Your Library (GYL) project, according to information released following a request by the New Journal under the Freedom of Information Act.

The work was part of a major overhaul of the library service in Camden, which will see some staff jobs cut and machines introduced.

Look, those machines again.

Reports suggested consultants visited a series of businesses, including the glamorous Apple Store in Regent Street, to see what ideas could be transferred to council-run libraries.

Well, I can certainly see how hitting the Apple Store would be useful in trying to redesign library services.

On its website IDEO describes itself as an “innovation and design” company. It lists some of its better known clients, a roll call of American multi-billion-pound organisations, including the Bank of America, food giant Nestlé and the charity set up by billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft owner Bill Gates, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Actually, the Ideo website is a hoot. Where do these people come from? Oh, Palo Alto, as it turns out. It’s like a William Gibson novel, one of the recent ones—everything is symbolic, and of the moment, or something. Someone named Ted Brown seems to be the design guru of the company, and you can hear him drone on in a video the site helpfully provides. And there are lots of references to design—Climate Change and design, how design got small and then big again, that sort of thing. Now, I don’t doubt that design is important, Climate Change being a pretty good example of how better design can help us out quite a lot, but it’s still not obvious to me how this is the group to talk to in order to determine how your library services can be “improved.”

So what did they actually do for Camden for two grand a day? It’s not actually clear, because Camden won’t release the report that they spent £47,000 on.

Freedom of Information officers at the Town Hall refused to reveal what the council got out of the deal and a request to see a draft of the ideas supplied to the leisure department was refused on the grounds that they have not been introduced yet.

Although officers accepted it was in the public interest to reveal what the money was spent on for “accountability and transparency” reasons, they ruled that to “prematurely” disclose the findings would result in “partial or inaccurate information being released” and would not allow Camden time to discuss with staff how the plans might affect them.

Officials insisted it was in the “public interest” not to release any more information.

We certainly wouldn’t want to release anything prematurely, to give the wrong impression. Just as well, because I imagine the discussion of the following probably needs some sharpening up:

Discussions held during a five-day workshop involving IDEO and library staff – described as a “deep-dive” brainstorming event – have been posted on the internal Camden intranet.

Details of some of the suggestions put forward by IDEO consultants have been criticised by staff, who contacted the New Journal to say the public would be “horrified” and “amused” at the “absurdity” of the week-long session and “the way their council tax money has been spent”.

The firm visited six businesses in London, including City Farm in Islington, the Apple Store in Regent Street and Jamie Oliver’s cook shop Recipease in Clapham.

City Farm? Where the cows and chickens are? That should help.

Consultants spent time at three Camden libraries – Regent’s Park, Kentish Town and Swiss Cottage – where they held meetings with library users and observed staff “to find out how they actually provided and used services”, but staff have queried their decision not to visit any celebrated libraries outside the borough.

Or any of the uncelebrated ones within the borough other than those three, for that matter.

The firm’s main specification was to come up with innovative ideas about what libraries and librarians could offer in the future, when Camden launches the second phase of its library reform programme next year.

This must be where the “self-service machines” thing comes from. Funnily enough, try as I might, I can’t find a single reference to anything about libraries on the Ideo website other than a link to an article in American Libraries magazine about “Design Thinking” in Libraries, by Stephen Bell, who may or may not be connected to Ideo. The article and comments are great—about “human-centered” somethingorother, and–here’s the kicker–providing a “memorable library experience.” There’s the Apple connection, all right. So it’s obvious why Camden chose Ideo to come up with some visionary thinking on how libraries can be improved at the same time their budgets are being hacked to death.

A council spokeswoman said: “The council approached a number of specialists to bid for work on the Growing Your Library project. IDEO, an international company whose UK headquarters are in Camden, was chosen in competition with a number of other agencies, as they offered the best combination of experience, capacity and proven track record in the field.”

Well, if this was the best of the lot, what did the other bidders look like? I’m reminded of that D.J. Taylor novel with a running subtext of the increasing rip-off of UK governments by management consultants running around a couple of decades ago in the country’s haste to privatize everything that moved. This sort of thing is the logical result—let’s have a firm of design consultants decide what libraries are for and how they should be used. After all, librarians wouldn’t necessarily have any idea of how to improve services, obviously, or anything above and beyond what you could extract in a day-long brainstorming session

Actually, given the apparently marginal state of libraries, we may as well have a design firm given an assessment of how to improve library usage. Libraries in the UK (and apparently in the US as well) are under pressure—over the past ten years over 100 libraries have been closed in England, visits per capita have been declining (marginally, but still), and expenditures per capita have been rising sharply. I can think of lots to fault the Labour government for, but increasing funds to libraries (until very recently) is not one of them. But, ultimately, libraries in the UK really depend on local council funding—and councils are currently hurting, so it’s not surprising that libraries make an easy target. It’s not as if anyone actually makes money from them. This is a familiar story, with a number of explanations—increasing access to the internet and other electronically-delivered information elsewhere, the increasing uneducatability of a number of children, and, perhaps, the possibility that people just read less—although I would need more convincing on this last point, in this country where not only is the major book award televised, but the bookmakers give odds on the potential winners.

So there are good reasons to get a broad range of inputs here. But it’s not clear to me that having librarians and library staff become the functional equivalents of the sales force at the Apple store is the right approach. Or brainstorming sessions, for that matter. What is needed, first of all, is a commitment to culture, and its preservation, and broad public access to it. In many respects, there is an admirable commitment to this notion here, or at least there was when times were good. But for a country with the literary heritage that this one has, even the closure of one library is a measure of our failure to meet this commitment

The past couple of weeks have been pretty interesting musically–we’ve been to a number of choral concerts, and they ranged from the truly boring to the magnificent. But what most characterized them was a distinction between the excessively academic approach to performance, versus what I guess we need to call a more Romantic approach. Not that the second label is remotely applicable to most of the music in question–it’s pretty much, with two exceptions, music of the 13th through the 17th centuries.

This all started with what used to be called Early Music Weekend at South Bank, before it was devalued by whoever it was that makes these decisions there. Back in the day, these were largely run and organized by the redoubtable Philip Pickett and his New London Consort, and the standards were uniformly excellent–great groups, great performances, and always an interesting thematic basis for each year. Then, suddenly, Pickett was gone, and things have been in decline ever since. Not that there haven’t been some interesting concerts–this year we had an absolutely first rate one or two, in fact. But we seem to have migrated to some excessively academic orientation, and the result has been increasing variability in the quality of the performances, and in the interest levels of the audiences–which, as far as I can tell, have been declining. A purely anecdotal view, however.

So this year it was called Taking the Risk. And what this was supposed to encapsulate was the fact that Medieval and Renaissance musicians–singers and instrumentalists both–often worked without written notes, and had to, you know, improvise. This penetrating insight formed the basis of a series of concerts that were supposed to demonstrate how, well, risky this was. Get it? Actually, given that the vast majority of attendees of these concerts are pretty sophisticated musically, it would be a bit surprising if they didn’t already know this. And it’s also the case that when singers and instrumentalists “improvised”, it was well within expected guidelines–there were lines that you just knew, and where and when to use them. It was part of your training as a musician. This wasn’t John Coltrane. There was a certain art, to it, of course–you were probably working within the confines of a group of some sort, and had to attend to what others were likely doing–but, there again, you probably knew what they were LIKELY to do in any given measure, so it was probably pretty straightforward. It wasn’t necessarily easy–but it was part and parcel of a musician’s training and education. So we felt there was a teeny bit of exaggeration here, and as best we can figure, there probably was some Arts Council funding involved. But what do we know?

Anyway, the four concerts we saw two weeks ago varied widely in their approach, with two– Stevie Wishart, and a group called The Division Lobby, led by lutenist Patrice Chateauneuf– being the disappointments. Not because of their level of professionalism, or their abilities–it was more the academic attitude that this is what improvisation meant. In the case of Wishart, it also meant several songs on the hurdy-gurdy, which were probably several too many. Granted, it’s an interesting instrument, but as a solo unaccompanied instrument it’s really of academic interest only. Not that there weren’t supporters of this approach in the audience. But it wasn’t quite what we had in mind. Same with The Division Lobby–I have seldom heard such uninspired “improvisation” from any group–and this was a group of pretty impressive musicians (it included Pavlo Beznosiuk and Elizabeth Kenny, stellar violinist and lutenist respectively), but it just didn’t work very well. I suspect there was a bit too much of a search for some sort of improvisational purity involved–but, sadly, this led to a pretty lifeless result. Which was disappointing, given the reputations of the participants (and the high regard I have for them). Of course, it gave the impression of being something of a pick-up group as well, which didn’t help. It’s hard to know why these two concerts were so lifeless. But I think it’s bound up, inextricably, with an excessively academic approach to what improvisation is supposed to entail, and the search for authenticity that has bedeviled early music devotees for the past 30 years.

The other two concerts of that series were considerably better–one in particular. The Orlando Consort presented a concert displaying a range of polyphonic styles, each building on the previous performance, which showed the evolution of chant over three centuries—mainly the 13th to the 16th. And, thankfully, they didn’t really talk up the improvisational dimension of this–but we knew it was there. In fact, if there is any polyphonic group associated with improvisation, it’s this group–they’ve recorded a couple of CDs with Perfect Houseplants, a jazz group (one of which as in interesting take on Armed Man Masses), and their most recent CD was recorded with a group of musicians from Goa. So these guys are pros. A satisfying concert in all respects.

The best of the lot, though, largely because it demonstrated the theme perfectly, was the final concert, Crawford Young and Friends. What friends! Patricia Bovi, the force of nature who founded Micrologus; Begoñia Olivade, who sings with Hesperion XXI and has founded her own group, Mudejar; and London’s own Leah Studdard, who founded Mediva. And Young himself–one of the best lutenists in the world, who disproves any notion that one may have about the limits of improvisation on the lute. This was a masterclass in not only improvisation, but also how to present a concert with a minimum of fuss. Five stars here, without a single reservation–the songs were impeccably chosen and performed, Bovi and Olivade are wonderful singers (although with different styles, Olivade coming out of the Spanish/Moorish tradition, and Bovi more of a straight-ahead Italian renaissance pro), and all are superb instrumentalist. This was the concert to see. And Young himself seemed a bit sheepish about “mentioning the ‘i’ word.”

This has been a recurring debate in early music performance for a couple of decades now–how “authentic” are these performances, and how can performers make them more “authentic?” Original instruments were supposed to resolve some of htis debate, and I guess it has, to some extent. Of course, the tuning goes out of whack on these instruments pretty easily, but that seems a price performers (some, anyway) appear willing to pay. The broader issue is what are the criteria for “authentic” performance? It’s this issue that I think has diminished the appeal of early music concerts. A bold statement, but the contrast between the pristine efforts of, say, The Division Lobby last weekend, and the more raucous performances of groups that improvise a lot, like Oni Wytars, Micrologus, Ensemble Unicorn, and Joglaresa, are pretty dramatic. And I vastly prefer the latter. I know, I know, if I were a music historian I would probably take this more seriously, but I’m not. I’m a reasonably well-informed concert-goer (and occasional singer), so my criteria are different–I want to be entertained, hopefully even exhilarated. It’s the difference between the Boston Camerata of thirty years ago and the one of today–the performances these days may be more historically accurate, but they lack the good-natured messiness that brought such joy in their early years.

A similar contrast emerged later last week in the two performances we attended. On Saturday night we heard the Tallis Scholars in a sumptuous concert, mainly of Lamentations by Lassus, Gombert and Josquin, and the Victoria Requiem Mass. And it was lovely. Peter Phillips conducts brilliantly, the singers are glorious, the balance is perfect, and the song selection is faultless. And it sounded just like every other Tallis Scholars concert we’ve ever heard. Everything they do, they do exactly the same way. Now, this can be justified by the general lack of critical markings in the pieces they’re singing–but whereas Harry Christopher and The Sixteen will add in interpretive modulation, Phillips doesn’t–and the Scholars sing it the way it’s written. This is why we stopped attending Tallis Scholars concerts–each one sounds exactly the same as another one. From the standpoint of academic purity, this is a brilliant approach. But it leaves some in the audience, including me, wanting just a bit more. In the Gombert pieces you could tell the choir was aching to cut loose, but they didn’t. A pity. This is why we prefer The Sixteen–they’re not afraid to take chances with the music.

Which brings us to the highlight of the past two weeks—last Thursday’s performance by Nordic Voices at Saint John’s, Smith Square. This, again, was Renaissance music, at least the first half–but there are only six of them, and they were booked into the gargantuan SJSS concert space by their record company, and the audience was not, shall we say, as sophisticated as one would have liked–it gave the impression that the Norwegian Consulate had pulled out the stops. But what a concert! The first half was Renaissance Lamentations, mostly by Victoria (again) and Gesualdo, but done with considerably more feeling than the Scholars. The voices were of comparable quality–the difference was the emotion Nordic Voices brought to the pieces. And the second half! This was devoted to contemporary Norwegian composers, who are producing some amazing choral works, many of which involve some sublime experimental voicing, particularly with overtones. And this includes the group’s baritone, Frank Havrøy, who composed the last scheduled piece in the work, a lullaby called Bysjan, bysjan, lite ban, that has to be one of the most stunningly beautiful lullabies–or choral pieces of any type, for that matter–we’ve ever heard. This is a group to savor. It was the first concert appearance in London, and I hope not the last. Hopefully, someone over at South Bank will book them into the Purcell Room, or Queen Elizabeth Hall–or maybe Wigmore Hall, where the acoustics are even better. But I look forward enthusiastically to their return, whenever and wherever it may.

Wednesday night’s concert at SJSS was something a bit different. The National Gallery has just opened its blockbuster show for the fall–The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting & Sculpture 1600-1700, and I imagine it will be a huge hit. If nothing else, the millions of Spanish tourists in London on any given day will be flocking to see it. It’s all that depressing painting that Spanish artists did during this period following the Council of Trent, when the Catholic Church struck back, as it were, against the Reformation, encouraging painting and sculpture with boatloads of religious imagery. So there will be lots of Velázquez and Zurbarán at their religious best, and if you know anything about the Spanish art of the time, you already know that it’s lots of doom and gloom. Beautiful doom and gloom, to be sure, but still. But this was a great period for Spanish composers as well—the demand for church music swelled, and composers like Victoria were matching their Italian counterparts in the beauty and complexity of their output.

We were surprised, then, to discover that the concert itself—which was designed to highlight the exhibition, and had the catchy title The Sacred Made Music—spanned the 16th through the 20th centuries, rather than focusing on the 17th century. This was designed to show, as the commentary pointed out, the influence of the counter-Reformation on Spanish composers through the centuries. And if the desired outcome was to demonstrate the stultifying effects of the Council of Trent on several centuries of Spanish composers, the concert succeeded brilliantly. The 16th and 17th century works, particularly by Victoria, Romero and Cererols, were stunning—and the later works, even those of the 20th century, were decidedly not. They all were lovingly sung by Coro Cervantes, an English choral group that specializes in Spanish music, and aside from one or two wobbly entrances, they were fine—good voices and balance, and inflection and modulation where appropriate. But there was no getting around the fact that the genius that characterized Spanish music from the 13th to the 16th centuries was already fading away in the late 17th century, and the next 300 years was pure derivation. The only later piece that stood out was the one composed by, of all people, Pablo Casals, whom I actually never really though of as a choral composer. This was true also of the piece by Fernanco Sor, whom I normally think of as the greatest composer for the guitar from any country, but whose choral compositions, if last night’s effort is any indication, probably deserve to be performed about as regularly as they currently are. Authenticity wasn’t really the issue in this concert. But I have rarely been at a concert where the quality of the compositions presented stood in such contrast. It was interesting in that regard, at least.

The Tate Museum has the finest collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner in the world, and from time to time they feel the need to refresh the public with another show to keep proving that Turner deserves the “greatest British artist ever” tag. Back in 2005 this resulted in a hugely interesting show called Turner, Whistler, Monet, which looked at the interactions between the three, and it was a genuine treat. This time around it’s Turner and the Masters, a look at the painters that influenced Turner. At least that’s the intention. And everyone loves it. Well, not quite everyone—only Brian Sewellseems to give it the critical eye it deserves. The Times calls it a “Magnificent and hugely ambitious exhibition.” It’s quoted right there on the Tate website. What it turns into, however, is something completely different, something along the lines of Turner the Competitive Cockney Gnome who Tried to Outdo Everyone without Ever Having an Original Idea.

This is certainly the impression we took away from the show, although I suspect it’s not what was intended. In fact, the real impression we had was the same as the one we had after seeing the Van Gogh and Millet show at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris many years ago—isn’t it interesting that van Gogh used Millet’s pictures as the architecture for many of his own paintings? It was known for years that van Gogh admired Millet, and even included “after Millet” in some of the titles of his works. But still, it was surprising to see how much copying was involved. “They are not copies,” Van Gogh told his brother, Theo, “but translations into another language.” Well, maybe, but after wandering through several rooms at the Musee d’Orsay, you’d actually be hard pressed to say that most of them weren’t copies, even if van Gogh transformed the scene with an entirely different sense of colour and a much more aggressive brushwork.

Van Gogh was at least lavish in his praise of Millet (”Millet is father Millet…counsellor and mentor in everything for young artists”), and never denied his debt. Turner, on the other hand, comes off poorly in this show, which was probably not the intent of the organizers. Yes, Turner was a prodigious painter, and the show concentrates on a small percentage of his output. But still, nearly every painting by Turner is paired with the painting that he was modelling in one way or another, and very often they are direct copies, with the only difference being Turner’s different use of colour and, again, his distinctive brushwork. And while he knew how to compose a picture as well as anyone, there are some pictures where the perspective just doesn’t make sense. And of course, like Bonnard, he just can’t paint people, a fact usually overlooked—or just ignored.

Now, this is always interesting—no artist works in isolation, there are always influences, and much of the fun of art appreciation is figuring out what those are. The fact that Whistler and Monet were friends shouldn’t be a surprise, but it’s something you normally don’t think about. We think of artists as solitary beings, but even if that has some truth in terms of their lifestyles, it can’t be true in terms of where their art comes from. The line from Millet to van Gogh couldn’t be more direct. And it is interesting to see what Turner derived from, say, Rembrandt, or Watteau, of Cuyp, or the painter that Turner felt himself most in competition with—Claude. Turner often is a great artist. But here in London he’s not only a great artist, but the greatest of all time, it seems. One gets that impression, anyway—from the time Ruskin started trumpeting him as the greatest British artist ever, the art establishment in the UK has shown no signs of disputing this. Turner, like the Impressionists, has become an industry. Sewell, who has a reputation for not liking much of anything, has some words of praise for the show, but he also captures it about right, warts and all:

Turner belonged to a generation of artists whose work was deliberately rooted in the past, who could be measured by the comparison that revealed how much they had retained, how much rejected, and how much moved on by adding something new and of their own that might suggest that they had exceeded the successes of their mentors. Turner painted not in slavish imitation but in rivalry, and two centuries on it is easier to see where he matched Claude’s subtleties and Rembrandt’s bravura and where he failed utterly — for this is an exhibition not only of Turner’s occasional sublimities but of dogged recapitulation that is dull and failure that is ludicrous.

And that seems about right. When Turner was good, he was as good as anyone. But he often wasn’t that good—and yet somehow we’re supposed to ignore the fact that he often painted bad pictures.

The show brings up two reservations. First, if the show is representative of Turner’s output, it’s an extraordinarily derivative output, without a single new idea until very late in Turner’s career. I suspect that’s an unfair portrait of Turner—he was prolific, and this is just a sampling. But the Tate is telling us it’s an extremely important sampling, and there’s nothing in the show to tell you otherwise. Turner painted what other artists were also painting, and we’re supposed to take away that, well, he was Turner, that’s al you really need to know. It’s a bad analogy, I know, but I’ve been looking for a place to use it ever since I saw the movie Mama Mia (the biggest grossing movie of all time in the UK, amazingly enough)—my main reaction was “Who knew Abba wrote so many bad songs?” Sewell is absolutely right—there are an awful lot of bad paintings by Turner here, especially the ones on mythological subjects. And to pretend otherwise is just silly, and a bit insulting.

Second, it’s a chronological show, so you can see how Turner developed as an artist. Yes, he had many skills, but it wasn’t until he was old that he became Turner. The Turner we think about, and whose art still stuns, is the Turner who lapsed into pure light and atmosphere. And he didn’t start doing these paintings until he was an old man (or relatively one). Turner was bon in 1775. And those extraordinary maritime paintings, with the storms, and the clouds, and the spray, and the sun—the ones that really do take your breath away—those are from the 1840s. And while Turner was acknowledged as a major painter by his contemporaries even before he was painting these stunning seascapes, some explication of how Turner got to this style would have been appreciated, other than the bland comments we’re greeted with in the narrative.

Still, it’s a very interesting show, worth seeing. For one thing, it’s not often that the competitive nature of genius is acknowledged, and it’s refreshing to see it so openly acknowledged. And Turner was competitive, absolutely. And it is interesting to study the comparisons to see where Turner was successful, and where he failed. Plus there’s the bonus of seeing some exceptionally good art that doesn’t normally show up in London. The Rembrandts are at treat, for example, including The Old Mill, normally at home at The National Gallery in Washington. And Claude—well, you can see why it was that Turner targeted him as the one to beat. And there’s a small masterpiece—The White House at Chelsea, pictured just above—by Thomas Girtin, a friend of and (in the spirit of the show) competitor to Turner. Girtin died when he was quite young—in 1802, at age 27. And the show quotes Turner’s comment that “had Tom Girtin lived I should have starved.” Looking at this little gem, surrounded by dozens of larger and more grandiose pictures by Turner and others, you understand exactly what Turner meant.

One series of pictures I found especially moving were from two January days in 1958. He photographed his home town to share with his fiancee, my Mom. Here is a look at London in 1958.

And they have certainly had lots of good news this week, of a sort. The English have always had a bit of a libertarian streak–just look how they drive–and those of that persuasion got lots of confirmation recently. For one thing, it’s autumn, which means it’s time for the annual party conferences. So last week we had the Liberal Democrats blowing themselves up a little bit, this week we seem to have had the Labour party disengaging completely from reality, and next week who knows what the Conservative party will manage to come up with. For another thing, it was just one of those weeks that had a lot of news flow that would make an anarchist smile.

Consider the recent measures the government has been putting forward under the Childcare Act passed three years ago with, presumably, good intentions. It basically said that childcare providers must be registered, with a whole raft of exemptions. One of these exemptions was mothers, funnily enough, but even there it gets complicated. The Independent valiantly tries to explain it:

The legislation, which came into force three years ago, is complicated. It says mothers who look after each other’s children are generally exempt from the requirement to register as childminders if they provide the service for less than two hours a day or 14 days a year. If one mother, Mrs A, goes to the house of another, Mrs B, to look after Mrs B’s child, she is also exempt because it is considered home care. But if Mrs A took Mrs B’s child to her own home, it would be deemed to be offering a childcare service.

Well, that seems clear enough. But now Ofsted, the educational authority which is sadly tasked with enforcing the provisions of the law, has decided to challenge the childcaring arrangements made by two policewomen who are taking care of each other’s children:

Ofsted has “lost the plot” by telling two police officers they broke the law by caring for each other’s children, it was claimed today.

Margaret Morrissey, of the parents’ pressure group, ParentsOutloud, said: “If we have reached the point in our society when we cannot trust our very close friends to look after each other’s children, I think it is time to give up and go and live in another country.”

She was speaking after the children’s services watchdog said the police officers’ arrangement contravened the Childcare Act because they were providing a childminding service for a reward. As such, the two mothers would have to register as childminders and subject themselves to regular inspections by Ofsted. The Children’s minister, Vernon Coaker, has ordered a review of the case and officials from his department are discussing with Ofsted how to interpret the meaning of the word “reward”.

It would take a far longer post than this one to detail the various controversies that have arisen from this law, however well-intentioned it may have been. But it once again raises the question of whether a Labour government can actually run anything that works the way it’s supposed to.

Nothing that anyone heard at this week’s Labour conference will have provided any consolation. Peter Mandelson suddenly is the darling of the party, after having been deeply loathed for the past decade, at least. It has constantly been a race to the bottom between Mandelson and Jack Straw, the current justice minister, whom Alan Watkins once described as “emerging from the slime”, or something along those lines. And I guess the view is that at least each has some vestiges of competence. Gordon Brown, on the other had, continues to lurch from one panic attack to another. His big speech yesterday basically (a) blamed the financial crisis on the Tories (who haven’t been in power since 1997), and (b) declared war on capitalism, or something, in an attempt to bring back the unions that the party has managed to infuriate since 1997 (through the constant and nibbling privatization of anything that moves, and some things that don’t, like the Royal Mail, Mandelson’s big idea). Every week it’s something new, it seems. If we’re not about to trash the schools further, we’re about to once again try to completely destroy the English countryside.

Brown himself looks like he’s in a perpetual state of coronary attack. Which I hope he isn’t, really, since I don’t want to inflict that on anyone. But he is deeply unpopular and approaching being an object of ridicule. His failed attempts to set up a bilateral meeting with Obama while in Pittsburgh elicited howls of laughter here, and a bit of pity as well–not a good position from which to lead a party which in one poll is now running third behind the Tories and the Lib Dems. And of course none of this is helped by Labour apparently deciding that its decade-long infatuation with the rich, especially the City rich, has reached the limits of its usefulness. It seems like only yesterday that Tony Blair was forever availing himself of the hospitality of the fabulously wealthy at every opportunity, especially around vacation time. Now Labour is going after the rich as vociferously as it can. Seems like old times. This wouldn’t be quite so bad if Labour weren’t also going after the middle class–on which it has relied for successive election victories–with just as much enthusiasm. At least he finally seems to be abandoning the ID card fiasco–although one can never be sure with these guys.

Well, Labour does indeed have a problem, and it’s not just Brown, as deeply unpopular as he undoubtedly is. It’s that practically everyone else is even more unpopular. Mandelson and Straw are both widely loathed outside the party. Alan Johnson, who several talking heads considered an appropriate replacement for Brown last spring before melting into oblivion as the Home Secretary, has proved, as they say, a damp squib. The fabulous Miliband boys remain just that. Education minister Ed Balls is just pathetic–his recent “big idea” of “saving” a couple of billion pounds by eliminating most of the leadership at secondary schools was hooted at, and will probably not ever be heard of again. Part of the problem here is that Labour is chock full of people who have never done anything else. Well, several of them were lawyers, but I don’t really think of that as doing “something else”. It’s like the Republican party these days–a bunch of people who work for the party, and then get elected to something. This is about as far from the real world as it gets, and it’s not exactly a training ground for preparing legislation that might actually work.

All of this will bring the Lib Dems a fair amount of cheer, after they managed to screw up their own conference last week. Actually, I like the Lib Dems, and if I could vote here, that’s probably who I would vote for (certainly not the arrogant and preening Glenda Jackson, who is technically my MP, and who has accomplished absolutely nothing of note during her tenure). It has a number of serious and thoughtful leaders–Nick Clegg, the party leader, Vince Cable, who is really the smartest guy in the room whatever room he happens to be in, and Menzies Campbell, who led the party in opposition to the Iraq fiasco. And the Lib Dems do hold their own in the local elections around Britain–in the last series of elections earlier this year, they got more votes than Labour, and in general they do pretty well head to head against the other two parties in local elections. But they haven’t been able to capture any real electoral advantage in the Parliamentary elections thus far, holding steady around 20% the last several elections. Maybe this time will be different, but the party’s big proposal at the conference–a surtax on homes valued at more than £1 million–flopped big time. As someone pointed out, in just the Borough of Richmond in London, most of the houses are valued at more than £1 million-and they’re mostly owned by retirees. It’s actually a fairly modest tax, and it may only affect 1% of the property owners in the country, but still. Clegg himself gave an ok speech, but the damage was done. Yes, it’s a wealth tax, but there are probably better wealth taxes.

So next week we get David Cameron and the Tories. Cameron has done a pretty good job of making the Tories palatable–he’s young, he rides his bike, he is unwavering in his support of the NHS, he has good instincts, he’s apparently turned the party green (although we’ll see if this remains the case if he gets into power), and he’s not Thatcher. At the moment, that seems to be enough. But the Tories will always be Tories–there are still some crackpots floating around, but it has to be said that so far Cameron has kept a lid on things. Right now, he looks fresh, and Brown looks very, very tired. And it’s not as if there would really be major changes in the direction of anything. Ross McKibbin’s excellent article on the election in the current issue of The London Review of Books is entitled “Will we notice when the Tories have won?”, and he has a point. None of the parties, whichever gets elected into a majority, will have much room to manoeuvre.

And McKibbin argues convincingly that Cameron has a much harder task here than Brown does. Brown simply has to convince people that things are still on the right track, and that he’s not Old Labour–a difficult task, certainly, but a straightforward one. Cameron has to keep his promises, which may be a bit harder to do:

Historically, however, the Conservative Party hasn’t always been penny-pinching; and even when it has, the pinching was often more apparent than real. The financial crisis, undoubtedly seen by many Tories as an opportunity to wield the axe, has been an embarrassment for Cameron. Previously, his fiscal policies had hardly been different from Brown’s. His aim was to keep government spending at high levels, especially on health and education, and not to make dangerous promises on tax. He had been firm on that, even in the face of a good deal of unease within his party. What happened cut the ground from under his feet as much as Brown’s. He simply hadn’t been thinking in terms of cuts; waste and red tape yes, but not cuts. To make things more complicated, he obviously still believes that any significant ‘attack’ on the NHS is politically impossible. The increasingly bizarre criticisms of the NHS in the United States have also compelled him, out of a sense of national loyalty if nothing else, to reaffirm this commitment: hence the promise not only to maintain current levels of spending but to raise them above the rate of inflation in the next parliament. This is a promise probably a majority of Tory MPs regret and most (privately or publicly) think impossible to fulfil.

Cameron’s position is shaky. He leads a party with warring fiscal traditions and he doesn’t currently represent the predominant Thatcherite one. He has made commitments on spending which, if maintained, will limit his and Osborne’s freedom to manoeuvre. Within the party the usual attempts are being made to argue that you can make ‘safe’ cuts by spending more effectively. Michael Gove, the education spokesman, is particularly strong on this. But one thing the Thatcher governments did demonstrate is that there are no ‘safe’ cuts to be found in the public services – or, if there are, no one has yet found where to make them. Cameron knows that. Yet everyone agrees that there will have to be cuts, and if health, education, defence and the Home Office are ring-fenced they will have to fall very heavily on a small number of programmes.

Meanwhile, there are nine months to go, and considerable scope for Labour–indeed, anyone–to trip over its own feet further. But if trends hold, we’re unlikely to see another Labour government in its current form–there could be a Labour/Lib Dem coalition, or a Tory/Lib Dem coalition, if neither Labour nor the Tories gains an absolute majority. But, as McKibbin notes, there is little likelihood of major changes in anything, really, if either Labour or the Tories become the majority party:

That the Labour Party has a fundamentally Tory conception of the state also diminishes partisan politics. It was not inevitable that Labour would adopt such a conception; but the fact is that having done so, it has maintained it for most of its history. Labour and the Conservatives do not always agree about what the state might do, but they agree about its institutions and hierarchies. That is why Labour has never been able to free itself from the inherited institutions of the British state: king-in-Parliament, a state church, a semi-medieval constitution, an overblown defence and security apparatus. And when it has tinkered with the state, even on important issues like devolution or the new supreme court, that has served only to make the whole system even more incoherent. Rather than challenging the Tory idea of the state, New Labour has entrenched it: to its cost.

All of which would bring a smile to the face of any self-respecting anarchist. Because he or she knows it could be worse–no one here is calling for a military coup.

2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools sounds like a lot. Swimming pools are big, after all, and 2,500 of them would hold lots of water. But when I dug a little further, I found that Whitehall’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions were actually reduced by only 12,000 tonnes, a nearly negligible amount.

To put this into perspective, in 2006, the Energy Information Administration estimated that the total emissions for the United Kingdom was 585.71 million metric tons (aka tonnes). 12,000 tonnes is only 2 thousandths of one percent of the UK’s total emissions three years ago.

So how did we get from 12,000 tonnes to “2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools?” It’s called the ideal gas equation.

Look at the image above – the equation shown is the ideal gas equation, where P is pressure, V is volume, n is the number of moles of gas (a measurement of the number of atoms of gas, which id directly proportional to the mass of the gas), R is the universal gas constant, and T is the temperature of the gas on the Kelvin scale (Kelvin is equal to degrees Celsius + 273.15). While the ideal gas equation doesn’t perfectly represent the real behavior of gases, it’s close enough that it’s pretty commonly used by scientists and engineers alike.

If you look deeper into the equation, you find that it shows essentially three relationships:

• Gas pressure increases when you add more gas to a constant volume at a constant temperature. Gas pressure also increases when you heat the gas up at a constant volume and constant mass of gas. And gas pressure increases if you reduce the volume the gas is contained in for a constant amount of gas and a constant gas temperature. (Pressure varies proportionally to mass and temperature and inversely proportionally with volume.)
• Gas volume increases when you add more gas at a constant temperature and pressure. Gas volume goes up if you heat it up at a constant pressure and mass of gas. And gas volume goes up if you reduce the pressure for a constant amount of gas and gas temperature. (Volume varies proportionally to mass and temperature and inversely proportionally to pressure.)
• Gas temperature increases if you increase the pressure but while holding the volume and mass of gas constant. Temperature also goes up if you increase the gas’ volume while holding the pressure and mass of gas constant. And temperature increases if you decrease the amount of gas in a constant volume and at a constant pressure. (Temperature varies proportionally to pressure and volume and inversely proportionally to mass.)

Some of these seem counter-intuitive upon first examination, but these properties of ideal gases are used all the time to produce liquid gases, pressurize oxygen for use in medical O₂ canisters, even to cool your body by evaporation.

Using the density of CO₂ gas, a value that is calculated using the ideal gas law, Smith or her staff calculated the volume that 12,000 tonnes of CO₂ would take up at a given atmospheric pressure and temperature. At one atmosphere (atm) of pressure and a temperature of 273.15 Kelvin (0 °C), 12,000 tonnes of CO₂ takes up 2,427.9 Olympic-sized swimming pools. And that’s close enough to the reported value of “2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools” that it’s reasonable to say that this calculation is almost certainly where Smith got her swimming pool number from. (When I looked up the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, I found that the volume is at least 2,500 cubic meters (or 2.5 million liters), but could be greater if the pool is deeper than the minimum 2.0 meters required by Olympic standards.)

But that’s not the end of it. The density of CO₂ gas is defined at a particular pressure and temperature, specifically 1 atm and 0 °C. If you cut the mass of gas to 6,000 tonnes (a reduction of n by 1/2) and held the temperature and the volume the same (0 °C and 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools respectively), all that would happen is that the pressure would fall to 0.5 atm. Similarly, cutting the mass of CO₂ by a factor of 100 (from 12,000 to 120 tonnes) would still fill up 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools – at an atmospheric pressure of only 0.01 atmospheres.

So Smith could just as accurately, from the standpoint of physics, claimed that nearly any amount of reductions produced a volume of “2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools.” And given the fact that the BBC article neglected to mention that the mass of the reductions was 12,000 tonnes, no-one who just read the BBC would have caught the deception.

It seems reasonably likely that the reason that Ms. Smith or her staff converted mass into volume specifically because Whitehall would look better, and thus deflect some criticism, using the larger volume number. But the problem is that the exact same physics games can be used to make exceptional progress in cutting emissions look insignificant. Here’s three quick examples.

Just as 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools can be the volume of a gas at 0.01 atm, it can be the volume of CO₂ gas at 10 atm too – crank the pressure up to 10 atm, hold the temperature and volume the same, and shazam! those swimming pools now hold 120,000 tonnes of CO₂ gas.

Better yet – compress CO₂ until it becomes a liquid (at 56 atm and 20 °C) and you increase the density of the CO₂ from 0.001977 kg/L to 0.77 kg/L, an increase of 389x. Suddenly someone who is trying to downplay a reduction of 4.81 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions can claim, perfectly accurately according to the physics, that it only fits into 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools (the math is 2.5 million L/ossp * 0.77 kg/L * 2,500 ossp, where “ossp” is “Olympic-sized swimming pool”). Even better – turn CO₂ into dry ice at 1 atm and -78.5 °C and you more than double the density again. Now those same 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools represent 9.76 million tonnes of CO₂.

For comparison, 9.76 million tonnes of CO₂ represents about 1.67% of the UK’s entire CO₂ emissions in 2006. That’s a far cry from the 0.002% that Smith attempts to trumpet by way of her “2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools” quote in the BBC and Kable articles

Clearly, using volume as a proxy for the value you really care about is almost entirely meaningless. Sticking with mass, even when it makes you look bad, is by far the more accurate and directly comparable measurement.

If Cabinet Office minister Angela Smith doesn’t want her opponents to start using her own physical manipulations against her, then she should probably not attempt to disguise Whitehall’s poor track record of cutting CO₂ emissions.