The German communications agency Euro-Informationen has come up with a neat way of making the point that together European countries can form a bloc with enough clout on the world stage to rival the USA and China.

If the EU were a country, it would be well out in the lead in the table of gold medals at the Olympics: at the time of writing having 51 golds, compared to 35 for China in 2nd place and 19 for the USA in 3rd place.

Of course the EU isn’t a country and in many ways this is just a piece of fun.  

But their table makes very well the simple point of just influential a power bloc the EU can be on the world stage when it acts together rather than separately.

I’ve been working on tidying up the recording of the recital which Sarah Wilkinson and I did in June of Schubert’s song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin, so it does now fit on a CD properly. As well as the usual useful experience of learning from hearing yourself singing, it’s also reminded me of the challenge of which language to sing it in, that I struggled with before the performance.

On the one hand, one of the things that Schubert does best, is to combine the music with the sounds of the words themselves in Wilhelm Müller’s poem cycle, originally written in German. Along with the strong preference of the musical establishment over the last few decades to perform music ‘authentically’, ie exactly as the composer intended and as he himself would have heard it, this makes a strong case for singing the songs in the original German. This would be the generally accepted way of performing the cycle these days (although personally I have significant differences with the whole authenticist movement, but that’s a topic for another post!).

However I do also feel very strongly that the actual meaning of the words is also integral to appreciating the songs, and Schubert’s achievement in setting the poems to music. The words and sense of the poems are so subtle and nuanced, and Schubert does such a good job of building the music around them, that I just think that if people can’t understand what is being sung, then there is almost no point in singing them. The songs are not just notes which the singer happens to be singing to a random collection of vowels and consonants – the words and music together form a whole experience communicating the poet and the composer’s subtle – and in the case of this cycle, extremely powerful – meaning.

And to a London audience, this means singing the cycle in English.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a rare degree of consensus about at the moment on where Britain’s political situation has got to, so I thought I would treat readers to my take on the current situation.

Firstly, I don’t buy this overall story that it’s now inevitable that Gordon Brown is finished. The parallel most in my mind has been John Major’s position in the spring of 1994. Then, as now, it was the accepted wisdom among political commentators that the Prime Minister would be ousted in a matter of weeks, and that inevitably, Ken Clarke (in 1994) would replace him in Downing Street. That was no less accepted fact then than Brown’s demise is now - indeed more so, I would say. But in fact what happened was that there was no moment of resolution in 1994, the immediate crisis passed and when, a year later, John Major did cause a leadership election, it was on his own terms and no serious rival came forward to challenge him. And indeed we should not forget the parallel of that leadership election either - this current Prime Minister has an established record of ensuring he is the only candidate in a party leadership election - something which, incidentally, you would think to listen to some people now was an accident. It was of course no such thing, but the direct result of Gordon Brown spending many years carefully wooing MPs and other key figures to ensure exactly that happened when Blair finally went.

And while it’s obviously not something that you can count on, we shouldn’t forget either the potential impact of sudden and shocking events. In the days after September 11 2001 all sorts of things that had hitherto seemed immovably set in stone changed in a matter of days. If some dramatic attack on Britain or elsewhere - and it need not necessarily be on the scale of 9/11, or the July 7th 2005 London bombings - were to happen, it’s not at all difficult to imagine events working out in such a way that people would turn back to Gordon Brown as a solid and figure, highly experienced in government and, as his defenders say, the best person to steer Britain through coming choppy waters.

In such circumstances, would people trust Gordon Brown or David Cameron more? Maybe the public perception of Cameron has moved on so much now that they would prefer him. But for my money I’d still say that people would hold on to nurse, for fear of something worse. Cameron’s ratings are still far more driven by comparative perceptions of Brown, than they are by perceptions of Cameron, and an emergency - depending hugely, of course, on what it was as well as how it was handled - would change that dynamic quite powerfully.

And indeed the little evidence we have of Brown’s handling of such circumstances, from the terrorist disturbances that took place in the few days after he took power, is that he handled them well (even though the whole episode always reminded, me for some reason, of the scene where the Minister of Magic first appears to the Prime Minister in Harry Potter, to explain various odd goings-on around the country).

Read the rest of this entry »

I spent three days in Kashgar, the scene of yesterday’s attack on some Chinese police, and where I took this photo in its famous and busy market, a couple of months ago.

It’s a city with a long and glorious history - first as one of the key trading points on the ’silk road’ with a famous international trading market - and then in the nineteenth century as a key location in the ‘Great Game’, the epic power struggle between the British in India and Russia, for control of Central Asia. The opening of a Russian consulate there nearly provoked full-scale war between Britain and Russia (in the end it didn’t survive long as a consulate, but you can still stay in the building, as one person I travelled with this year did).

Kashgar now finds itself in the ‘Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region’ - a huge and sparsely populated province which forms the whole north west of the modern state of China. But although it lies east of the massive Tian Shan range of mountains which forms China’s western boundary, bringing it naturally geographically into China, its people are not Chinese and have much more in common with the central Asian peoples west of the Tian Shan. The Uighurs of this region are ethnically central Asian, have been Muslim for many centuries, and speak a language, Uighur, closer to Uzbek, and which is written in the Arabic script. At various points in history they have attempted to assert their central Asian identity, most recently around the time of the second world war, when the ‘Republic of East Turkestan’ was declared (Turkestan being the whole huge central Asian territory of the peoples of Turkic descent going back to Genghis Khan and beyond).

Ethnically, they are clearly right that they belong to Turkestan rather than China.

But equally clearly the Chinese state, like any great power, is not at all keen to have unstable breakaway regions outside its control sitting on its borders. This is hardly something new from the post-1949 communist period in China - emperors two thousand kilometres away in China proper have long sought to have this region and these people under their control.

And so in many ways the Uighurs in Xinjiang (the Chinese name for the province, which I understand means something like ‘border province’) pose a similar challenge to their Tibetan neighbours.

Read the rest of this entry »

The ICC has hit the news again today because its prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has issued an indictment against Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, for his involvement in the atrocities in Darfur.

Involving the ICC in major conflicts around the globe can be far from straightforward – and in this case, the international community faces an extremely difficult dilemma, in judging whether everyone’s objective of ending the conflict and helping those who had had their lives devastated by it, is best achieved by involving the ICC, or whether that would do more harm than good by endangering ongoing peace negotiations among the parties there (some discussion of this is on the BBC here). This is a very similar dilemma to that which the international community faced a few years ago in deciding whether or not to refer Sudanese involvement in the conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (with bases in Sudan) and Uganda.

I’m not close enough to negotiations on these issues to make an informed judgement on this precarious balance. Certainly it would be a very difficult call to make potentially to endanger promising peace negotiations by involving the international court.

But generally I strongly believe that we should be supporting the cause of criminals around the world who are not subject to effective legal sanction in their own country, being brought before the International Criminal Court. Some of these will be formally private individuals, but some will be in government – for although Omar al-Bashir is the first serving head of state to be indicted by the ICC, the court is part of the same family of international criminal tribunals on specific countries which brought to justice figures such as Yugoslavia’s Slobadan Milosevic.

The idea that people guilty of such major crimes, who are not ever going to come before a court in their own country, should therefore be brought to justice at international level, is a really major step forward.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, and Captain of the Praetorian Guard of Brownism, launched a stinging attack on low educational attainment in 638 secondary schools across the country. These schools failed to get even 30% of their pupils to achieve 5 decent GCSEs (ie at grades A*-C) including English and Maths – a basic standard in being able to participate in the modern world. The tone of the DCSF press release is all very constructive and moderate, but the way in which it was presented to the media, which they duly followed, was of ‘failing schools’ being presented with an ‘ultimatum’ to improve, or ‘be closed down’ (here, here and here, for example)

His attack caused fury (and not just metaphorically, but literally) from teachers who felt they were being unfairly attacked by someone who hadn’t really understood the problem. Even if Balls’ take on this situation is “right”, then in the short-term at least he significantly demotivated the very people he needs to taker action to address it. A week after the initial attack, the TES published figures giving some of the greater complexity of the position, and specifically pointing out that of the 638 schools, a quarter had actually been graded as “good schools” by the schools regulator, Ofsted, and a few even “excellent”, the very top grade.

So who is right here?

Well firstly let’s take a look at the raw figures. If you look at the statistics and see only 20-odd percent of pupils get 5 A*-Cs including Maths and English, it does indeed seem that there is be a difficult group of schools who stubbornly fail to provide a good basic GCSE-level education to even a third of their students. It’s very easy to say that This Simply Isn’t Good Enough and so Something Must Be Done. I find it very difficult not to have some sympathy initially with this position. This is the life prospects of our young people that we are talking about here (as well as the economic future of the nation, if that kind of language gets your juices flowing more) and we need to get it right, not fail large numbers of them, as these figures imply.

Balls, a very political Minister who really wants to be able to show that he has made a transformational difference in this job, wants to do something to tackle this. In the thinktank and economics world in which he spends a lot of time, shifting the actual numbers and results is what it’s all about, and much of what follows in the next paragraph just sounds like whinging and making excuses.

Read the rest of this entry »

Under the system of Foundation Trusts within the NHS, governors* elected by members of the trust are responsible for representing the views of local people to the hospital.

I’m one of the governors of Whittington Hospital in Archway, so this post is really aimed at local people, appealing for any views you may have about Whittington and its development. I’m elected to represent the “south” constituency, which covers Islington, Camden, Hackney and pretty much anyone else who lives south of the hospital – but I’m not going to refuse any comments from anyone in other areas!

And I am specifically elected to represent not just patients of the hospital (who elect their own representatives) but anyone who lives in these areas, whether you have been a patient there or not.

Since being elected at the end of March I have been learning about the hospital, and am currently in the middle of a round of visits around it. It is a hospital very much in the middle of change at the moment – some of which is visible, such as the great new entrance, and some of which is not.

From what I have come to know I think this is very positive for the hospital and the local community, but it is my job to represent the views of local people so please help me to do that by telling me them!

You can contact me by email on jeremy.hargreavesATwhittington.nhs.uk (replacing the word AT in the middle with the @ sign – sorry about this, it is an attempt to avoid spammers!).

* some trusts use a different term, such as members of the members’ council.

If you should happen to be free and in London in the evening on Monday week (23rd June) and like Schubert, please do come along to Christ Church in Highbury, where Sarah Wilkinson and I will be performing his song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin.

It’s a few years now since I have done any serious singing of extended length, so I’ve been enjoying spending time learning the cycle and just getting back into singing properly. Although I’ve sung various of the twenty songs in it on various occasions over the years, there are a good many that I didn’t know at all so have been learning from scratch – and of course it is quite different doing the cycle as a whole rather than just individual songs.

I find the cycle itself of Wilhelm Müller’s poems, which Schubert set to music, not an entirely easy one. While there is an essential story of ardent love, followed by disappointment, bitterness and more, there are also some other ideas and emotions in there which I confess I haven’t yet fully understood. Müller’s “hero” seems to be a troubled individual with a lot of demons to wrestle with – only some of which I feel are explained by the differences between early 19th century Germany and 21st century London.

However I’ve enjoyed spending time on it, uncovering more and more of what Schubert has hidden away in there. I am a big fan of Schubert generally (I used to enjoy playing his Impromptus for the piano a lot) and the way in which he has put Müller’s poems to music really is great fun to explore. Despite the decidedly serious tone of some of the poems, I am particularly impressed with the way he manages not to get bogged down by that, and he has plenty of fun with them too.

We’re going to do one or two other things in the concert as well, but the Schubert cycle will be the bulk of it.

It is a great cycle of songs, and Sarah and I have been working hard on it, so I hope it will be a good evening – please do think about coming along if you should be free and nearby!

The concert is at 7.30pm on Monday 23rd June at Christ Church, Highbury, London N5 1SA (map here) . Tickets £6 on the door (proceeds to charity).