How hope works

There is a moment when you realise that you are older. My moment was this morning watching the General Election results. In that moment I realised that my idealistic younger self had been turned and triangulated by the things that age brings; money worries, family worries, a sense that reaching for the stars is for kids and ‘life isn’t like that’. More than that, I was won over by the argument that only being centrist would win seats. That you could not offer a break with the norm without being wiped out.

Thankfully that was followed by a moment where I began to think that maybe that isn’t the case.

The Mea Culpa. I re-joined the Labour Party and voted for Corbyn as leader. I left prior to the second leadership election in despair at the shambles. At John McDonnell throwing Mao’s red book across the Commons, at Corbyn’s inability to communicate via the media, at that whole Vice documentary, at what I thought was a leadership that had taken a party hostage, at a hope crushed by left wing infighting, self-interest and smashed windows.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Over the course of the last six weeks it has dawned on me that whilst those things happened, somewhere along the line the protagonists got hold of the party, shook it and pointed it in one direction. The manifesto leak, a thing that would have previously been the start of a balls up of monumental proportions, became a starting point for what has transpired overnight. Momentum, that double edged sword of hope and less savoury actions, has delivered  a ground game that has energised and enthused a youth vote in a way no commentator believed was possible. The party leadership has turned the conventions of the Blair years on their heads. No longer the working classes put up with the policies to woo the middle class, the very reverse is true. Metropolitans like me desperate for an anti-Leave platform were ignored, the pitch was to respect the vote and that pitch secured gains in Wales, the Midlands and the North. We were put in the position of those folk throughout the Blair years, the calculation (correct as it seems) was we would go with it because an ordered, friendly exit versus the Tory offer was by far the better option. Look at the Lib-Dems for what a Pro EU platform might have delivered. Not only did that sweep London but it added places in the South we never anticipated. And everywhere, the youth vote, a vote of hope for a different future.

So back to my hope. No longer a Labour Party aping Tory spending cuts and squeezing through tiny changes terrified that the electorate wouldn’t stand for any suggestion of tax rises or spending increases. Fair play to Corbyn, McDonnell and all for not being ‘older’, for still believing in something bigger than doing the best with the same tools as their opponents, for standing for what they believe in and arguing for a new way. Kudos to them for paying out detailed plans and ot pulling their punches, for saying borrowing is not always bad, that Keynes is not dead and is, in fact, the way out of this awful zero hours world we have created. I may not be 18 anymore but I felt part of that youth surge this morning, I felt that hope and the belief in another way. I intend to hold on to it. More than that, I intend to get involved properly. For the many, not the few. That is a good place to be.

Why the demise of Radio One is bad news for new music

For those of us who have spent much of our careers dependent on one meeting a week at Radio One to define success or failure the news that the station’s RAJAR figures mark a further decline in listenership could be a moment for an outbreak of schadenfreude. They should not. 

In tandem with MBW’s analysis noting that Spotify now reaches more people (in very rough terms) than Radio One and The Guardian’s reporting this morning that David Bowie was the most popular act of 2016, this collision of data confirms what we all knew already; that new music is losing out to catalogue in the battle for public attention. 

Alongside the Radio One figures, it is worth remarking on the continued growth of 6 Music listenership. For those of us concerned with the ‘alternative’ scene who campaigned long and hard to keep the station from closure, such a boost would seem to be a positive, yet the combination of Radio One’s continued slide and 6’s quarter on quarter growth reveals an unintended consequence of the success of keeping 6 open; a ghettoization of music into dead ends. 

Many of us can remember the power of the Radio One playlist in its 90’s pomp. An addition to the B list was the moment that you could start to plan a sizeable campaign, an A list was a moment for bunting. Whilst neither was a cast iron guarantee of success, it was a big step towards it and that certainty allowed investment and risk which, in turn, delivered a vibrant and profitable new music market. The same cannot be said of a 6 Music playlist. This is not the fault of the station but the BBC insistence on atomising its content and allowing assumptions about listener age and taste to define its output. This has led to a relationship between artists and the organisation’s output that is less profitable for both parties. In hiving off music according to genre or artist age the corporation has shot itself in the foot, taking a mass audience and throwing it to the winds, diluting itself to a point where it has lost its position as the ‘home of new music’.

The great white hope is that streaming services will take up this mantle. Yet for all the positive talk about investing in new music and graphs and charts demonstrating the labels commitment to new artists, the reality on the ground suggests that either this is failing or that it is a shibboleth, a manipulation of the facts to suggest a reality that simply does not exist. It’s a simple exercise to conduct. The sales for new artists in 2016 revealed by MBW and reported by NME here are grim reading for those of us concerned with pushing forward new music at a successful and sustainable level – ie with returns that allow artists to be full time. Certainly the reduction of sales as a barometer plays a part here, this is not slam dunk fact territory, but then a look at Spotify’s most streamed debut artists of 2016 hardly reassures, the top spot being taken by anartist that we really should not be talking about in debut terms. Or talk to most managers or new artists about the gap between their ambition and available sources of funding; such pillars as tour support, personal advances and instrument funds being long consigned to the past amidst a feeling that capital is being reassigned to reissues and digital strategies to exploit catalogue; a business approach best characterised as ‘guaranteed return over risk’.

From a strict business perspective, this new landscape works fine for labels in possession of catalogue, a list that includes plenty of independent operations alongside the big three. I have yet to hear anyone from a label explain to me what happens in a decade or so when the list of artists that have achieved real, tangible, lasting success remains stuck in the late 90’s with odd exceptions like Adele, Sheeran etc. Some artists, the Stormzys and Skeptas are finding ways to work around that but the hit rate is still woefully poor and the DIY model is not a solution for every artist. 

Avoidance of risk given the easy money to be achieved from streaming services is an obvious attraction for labels but that, ultimately, is not a recipe for a lasting and progressive musical landscape. Labels need more certainty and support to invest in new music at the levels that new artists once enjoyed. Music is, after all, a business first and the current risk of a debut act is far too great given the likely returns. The idea that new music is driven exclusively by young people needs to be junked. For all their reverence of John Peel, a new equivalent would be first out of the door and on the way to 6 Music in the current climate. If the BBC wants to retain Radio One as a force for new music, a change in approach to how to contextualise new music and encourage a more diverse and engaged audience, regardless of when they were born, is needed.

Some answers

Following on from my last post, a fair few people have suggested to me that it’s all very well to point out problems but what about solutions?

My view is best described in short hand as follows:

That the current electoral system is a hostage to a variety of vested interests and, unless the system itself can mitigate against these then we will be unable to move forward in a rational way leaving ourselves open to disenchantment, disengagement from the process and, ultimately, the rise of extreme voices that appeal to those left behind.

That process is already well underway in both the UK and the USA and has flared up across the Western World (Greece springs to mind but almost every European country has a version of this happening right now). In the UK with Brexit and the USA with Trump it could be said that the process has delivered victories based on the premise of ‘outsiders’ gaming the system. Whilst France dodged that bullet for now, I maintain that the status quo will mean that it is only a matter of time before the next shock.

Too often we accept that change of the nature I suggest is impossible. History tells us otherwise. Were it not so I would be toiling for a feudal lord. The process by which the Western world reached this point is littered with painful (and sometime) cataclysmic conflict yet we find ourselves, for all our disenchantment, in a world that is safer and more prosperous than ever before. 

Any solutions will start at a low level and take years to achieve. In this accelerated age that may be hard to accept. Nonetheless I believe everything I suggest is possible eventually. Ultimately, the reason the democratic system endures is because it carries the majority with it. It therefore follows that if the majority will something, it will eventually happen.

So below are some suggestions as to what represents progress. These are, by their nature, fanciful in the current climate and wide brush strokes. They are easy to take apart as they are, by their very nature aspirational. The extremely likely victory for the Conservatives on June 8^th makes them a wish list but, should Corbyn defy the polls I would suggest a similar resistance to everything below bar the odd detail. That is a great part of the problem.

Electoral reform

The current system is, by any rational analysis, not democratic. A majority of votes cast hold no weight in the final result and too many are disenfranchised through the back door. Little surprise that a younger, more individualistic, demographic is increasingly switched off from the process.

First past the post favours the two main parties, it excludes independent voices from democracy at all levels, in particular the national stage, and reduces the political process to a he said / she said dichotomy where party principle trumps rational sense and good government. It is out of date.

The tragedy of this situation is that Blair’s first government had the prize in its hands but, swept away by the majority delivered under FPTP, imagined a social democratic future where coalition was not necessary. The next chance will be some time coming but needs to be taken if we are to live in a truly modern democracy.

Electoral Spending Reform

Money talks, bullshit walks. The second pillar of a corrupt system. All the major parties are in thrall to their donors and we all know it. Yet it persists. For truly independent voices to flourish the rules on spending in election cycles need radical and brutal reform. I would suggest caps on spending per parliamentary seat, junking party political broadcasts (which exclude ‘minority’ parties and independent voices) and caps on online advertising and display advertising spends, all funded through government. No outside money should be permitted in election material or campaigning.  Independent candidates would be offered a state fund for their campaigning in line with local caps for established parties. Fanciful? Maybe, but a way to ensure that a plurality of voices is heard. Those caps should be low, no election cycle needs endless billboards proffering half-truths, attack ads or major advertising agencies getting fat.

Legislation on any constitutional change

Whatever your view on Brexit there is no doubt that in execution the process was flawed. When golf clubs have more precise and detailed rulings on changes to membership than the nation’s parliament on major constitutional change there is something wrong. Any plebiscite on major constitutional change should be ratified by 51% of the electorate, not the votes cast and only be advisory and subject to debate, further proposal and a second plebiscite unless ratified by 66.67% of the electorate. The assumption being that no vote is a vote for the status quo. No solution is perfect but that seems a much better approach to me. That may seem tedious and plenty of Leavers will no doubt howl that this is partiality but I would suggest a similar bar on any future vote to rejoin the EU. This is not about a single issue but rather about a political society where change is accepted on a real majority scale rather than a (numeric) minority of the public.

The dismantling of the current party system

Party whips, three-line whip votes, towing the party line. These are anachronisms in an age of Twitter, Faacebook and the transference of individual opinion in real time. Hence the spectacular success of those shouting about ‘cosy elites’ and ‘stitch ups’. We no longer live in a mass voting bloc society, workers do not share the same concerns en masse. That is the triumph of the post war consensus, a journey from basic rights to individual concerns. A modern political system needs to understand that.

It seems no coincidence to me that the UK and USA labour with a fractured political consensus maintained by minority (in the total electorate sense) majorities whilst Germany, with an alternative political culture that can sustain even coalition between its two opposite parties, has (thus far) managed to see off the upstart challenge of the likes of AFD. Whilst the US legislature has been hamstrung and deadlocked for a decade with entrenched opinion delivering paralysis and the UK has fiddled whilst UKIP burn, other political systems offer hope that moderation and consensus can deliver progress to the majority.

To achieve that the progressive forces in UK politics need to accept that the age of entrenchment is over. Shared ideas and beliefs trump rosette colour. I do not necessarily remove all Conservatives from this equation, there are no doubt some Conservative MPs and supporters deeply worried by Theresa May’s direction of travel but boxed in by the reality that any olive branch to ‘the other side’ will be placed in a narrative of ‘defection’.

Those of a political mind must stop thinking of party and start thinking of policy.