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New Statesman
07-05-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Letter of the week: Roundabout responsibilities
Photo by Xavier Cervera/Millennium Images William Davies's excellent article 'Bonfire of the bureaucrats' (Cover Story, 2 May) misses one key point: Britain's centralised state. One example will suffice. Lawnswood in Leeds is famous for two reasons. Alan Bennett went to Lawnswood School – and it has one of the most dangerous roundabouts in the city. In the past, Leeds Council's highly qualified engineers drew up plans to improve the roundabout and sent them to the government as part of their annual transport bid. Unbelievably, the Leeds engineers now have to send the plans to the West Yorkshire mayor's office who examine them, and send them on to London, and the circus continues. Can you imagine Chicago sending plans for a roundabout to Washington, or Lille to Paris? This process is replicated across council departments. Until Westminster devolves powers to local government, it will be necessary to employ thousands of civil services in London to mark local authorities' homework. David Kennedy, Ilkley, West Yorkshire Digitise It Yourself The eternal debate about the size and efficiency of taxpayer-funded bureaucracies needs to be broadened from a focus on civil servants to include the wider public service, which, thanks to a combination of austerity and digitisation (and now AI), is undergoing a process of what I would describe as 'libraryfication'. This refers to the increasing use of volunteers to run public services that otherwise might disappear. It increasingly includes DIY services where it is assumed that everybody should go online to do tasks previously performed by paid staff. 'Bureaucrats' may disappear, but the cybersecurity industry will continue to grow exponentially. And of course we will all have the opportunity to provide 'feedback' – even if there's no one left to read it. Colin Challen, Scarborough Changing the narrative Andrew Marr is wrong to suggest 'curbing migration' is one of the four essentials for Starmer to win the next election (Politics, 2 May). The Home Office's steps to reduce or offshore asylum claims and to limit legal migration numbers only serve to reinforce the legitimacy of the even more extreme and inhumane policies of Reform. Labour must reframe this narrative. It is absurd that potential overseas NHS staff, care workers, students and researchers are discouraged from coming to the UK because of counterproductive restrictions on family members and very high costs. Yes, Marr is right that Starmer must finally 'find his voice and move decisively'. But he needs to do more with it than sing Farage's tune. Gideon Ben-Tovim OBE, University of Liverpool Young historians While I endorse Richard J Evans's praise for Tim Bouverie's Allies at War (The Critics, 2 May), I want to query his ageist comment that the subject was 'a formidable challenge for any historian, let alone one still in his thirties'. There are numerous precedents for British historians under 40 making impressive contributions to German history. Think of Alan Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, AJP Taylor's The Course of German History and Hugh Trevor Roper's The Last Days of Hitler. From America, there is the young Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. There is no doubt in my mind that Tim Bouverie's is the most formidable – at least until the next 30-year-old historian publishes their magnum opus. Colin Richards, Spark Bridge, Cumbria Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Music to my ears I found Kate Mossman's review of Alice Vincent's Hark: How Women Listen (The Critics, 2 May) profoundly interesting. Yes, I may be a man, but I have never once perceived aural perception as gendered: indeed, as a cellist, I have most often found my deepest connections with others when I have been the only male in a quartet. Perhaps now is the time to reassess why music can deliver? Robert Grosseteste was (perhaps) the first to suggest, in the 13th century, that music can salve the deranged mind and so order knowledge. Vincent and Mossman point to an intriguing idea, that music is universal and, therefore, cannot be retrospectively gendered. Rather, it is simply human, existing above and yet within our temporal lives. A letter sent with greatest thanks to both! Dr Owain Gardner, University of Glasgow I read with interest Kate Mossman's review of Alice Vincent's Hark. I enjoyed it as I do much of Mossman's work. But I think she's on shaky ground to say that the first 'music fan(atic)s' were female Beatles fans. Frank Sinatra and Johnnie Ray can claim earlier female fan worship than the Fab Four. (So can Franz Liszt, for that matter. Lisztomania and its transcendent effects could be seen as the prototype for Beatlemania.) Mossman has spent time a lot of time interviewing rock stars. I'm prepared to bet that they, like countless other men, were inspired to pick up a guitar or write a song because of the Beatles. And the Beatles' impact on fashion was on men's haircuts and suits rather than female fashion. So on that, I'm with Mossman: music is not 'gendered'. Pete Goodrum, Norwich Sister film Simran Hans's review of the new Georgian film on abortion, April, is moving and important. She mentions in her opening sentence the book Happening, where the award-winning author Annie Ernaux vividly describes her illegal abortion in 1960s France. Hans later describes the acclaimed theatre adaptation of Ernaux's The Years, in which the abortion scene from Happening is staged. But she omits any reference to the film adaptation of Happening, which won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival in 2021. 'On-screen portraits of abortionists are rare,' writes Hans, which is why Audrey Diwan's memorable and powerful film of the above should be highlighted. Julia Edwards , Winchester Brewhaha Reading Andrew Jefford's take on the greatness and glorious savoury taste of fine British ales (Drink, 25 April) made me smile in agreement but also feel quite sad that my favourite, Newcastle Brown Ale, is now a product of Holland. It has been the best of the beverages I have known since I saw Helen Mirren serving it to Alan Price in O Lucky Man!. I tried some in a bottle with a new yellow label and it just wasn't the same. Surely it wasn't my imagination. Gary Sweet, Lancaster, Texas We reserve the right to edit letters [See also: The war to end all peace] Related
Telegraph
04-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Britain, the US and Russia, all friends? Those were the days
In Allies at War, the historian Tim Bouverie, author of a well-received history of appeasement six years ago, has produced an ambitiously all-encompassing study of the diplomatic relations between the United States, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, the Free French and Nationalist China during the Second World War. 'Their collaboration was sophisticated, diverse, mighty and conquering,' he writes. 'Yet it was also fractious, suspicious, duplicitous and rivalrous.' It was certainly mighty. In 1943 alone, the Allies produced no fewer than 2,891 ships, 60,720 tanks and 147,161 warplanes, against the Axis's 540 ships, 12,825 tanks and 43,524 warplanes. The way this overwhelming amount of weaponry was ultimately deployed was agreed upon between the Allies despite what Bouverie calls 'profound differences in ideology, ethics, personality, political systems and post-war aims, as well as disagreements over strategy, diplomacy, finance, imperialism, the allocation of resources and the future peace'. Although Allies in War rightly concentrates on the decision-making of the 'Big Three' – Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin – that story has been told well and often. Where Bouverie is especially strong is in describing the much less familiar struggles going on elsewhere, which constantly feed back into the narrative of the Big Three's interaction. For example, bar the works of Rana Mitter and a few other scholars, the influence of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist China on the outcome of the war has been consistently under-represented; yet around 15 million Chinese people died in it. Similarly, Colin Smith is one of the few historians to have investigated the conflict between Britain and Vichy France from June 1940 until November 1942, which, although war was never officially declared, saw action on land, at sea and in the air. The British-Free French campaign to oust the Vichy French from the Middle East tends to rate no more than a paragraph or two in most histories of the war, yet it threw up a series of complex issues at the time. Bouverie commendably covers China and Vichy and all the profound diplomatic consequences they entailed for the Alliance, as well as important areas such as Allied relations with Franco's Spain and neutral Ireland, the Iraqi revolt of May–June 1941, how to deal with liberated Italy and Yugoslavia, the problems thrown up by sphinx-like Turkey, and the short but decisive British intervention in the Greek civil war. All of these issues needed to be discussed between the Allies, and some led to strains and stresses that were hammered out in very different ways, especially once the centre of power began inexorably to move away from Britain and her empire and towards the two superpowers that were to emerge after the war: the Soviet Union and the United States. Bouverie has not only been diligent in covering all the publicly available sources concerning the major players, but he has also worked in the papers from 100 private collections, those of foreign ministers, ambassadors, civil servants, emissaries, translators and observers. These may not have been principal figures, but he argues, wisely, that 'the opinions of those beneath and around the wielders of power are critical, since they reveal the context in which decisions were made; the nexus of attitudes, prejudices, knowledge, advice and assumptions from which political action derives.' That said, there are problems associated with relying on the recollections of members of entourages, particularly on the Soviet side. ' Stalin forbade his associates from taking notes during meetings (the exception being translators),' Bouverie records, 'while apparatchiks found it safer to repeat party prejudices than speak truth to power.' Speaking truth to power was never very good for your health in the Soviet Union; thankfully, the recently-published diaries of Ivan Maisky, the Russian ambassador to London from 1932 to 1943, have proved an invaluable source. Bouverie presents his new evidence from these fresh sources in an agreeably witty style, with vivid pen-portraits of the various eccentric figures that diplomacy tends to throw up, especially in wartime. One such was Archie Clark Kerr, later Lord Inverchapel, the British ambassador to Moscow from 1942 to 1946, whom Bouverie describes as 'a raffish and eccentric Scot' who wrote his despatches with a quill pen and had, during the First World War, disguised himself as a Cossack in order to take part in a Russian cavalry raid. As ambassador to Baghdad in the 1930s, Clark Kerr had 'delighted in and despaired of the antics of the 23-year-old King Ghazi, whose fondness for 'pillow fights' was curtailed only after an especially vigorous bout with his Hejazi servants landed him (and subsequently the Queen) with syphilis'. Forced to take refuge in a Kremlin air-raid shelter during his first meeting with Stalin, Clark Kerr bonded with his host by telling dirty stories and discussing pipe-smoking. It was, as he reported to the foreign secretary Anthony Eden, a case of 'two old rogues, each one seeing the roguery in the other and finding comfort and harmony in it'. Later, during a banquet in honour of the American vice-president Wendell Willkie, 'he demonstrated the correct way to use a Tommy gun by pretending to rake the bellies of Stalin, Molotov and [Willkie] with the weapon.' Yet politicians and diplomats, however charming and raffish, could only achieve so much. 'Only Hitler could have brought them together,' is Bouverie's conclusion about the Allies in the Second World War. Anything less than the simultaneous threat that Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and (to a much lesser extent) Fascist Italy posed to the rest of the world could not have kept the fissiparous alliance in one piece. An obvious question raised by this extremely timely book must be this: at a time when Donald Trump and JD Vance seem actively to be encouraging the fracturing of the assumptions that have kept the peace between the Great Powers for 80 years, can even today's threat, posed by communist China, imperialist Russia, theocratic Iran and neo-feudal North Korea, keep the Western alliance together?
