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You and I know the answer to this Great Historical Question, so I turned with apprehension to an article with this title by Robert McCrum. But it's an excellent piece, about a new book on this subject by the literary scholar James Shapiro. Here is what McCrum says about the claims of those who believe Christopher Marlowe was the true author:
"The case for Marlowe is a largely American farrago of wishful thinking and speculative fantasy that is typically paranoid and often downright phoney. The maddest of all the anti-Stratfordian plots, the idea was wittily sent up in Tom Stoppard's screenplay for Shakespeare in Love. For the hierophants of the Marlowe Society, however, their playwright was not murdered in a Deptford tavern after a row about "the reckoning" (the bill) but spirited away to France through court connections (Marlowe was a spy). There, for the next 20-odd years, he wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare, smuggling them back to London through diplomatic channels."
On a connected subject, I had a column in the paper this week about shifting perceptions of Shakespeare through history. I commented in passing:
"Two plays in the Shakespeare canon, Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, are widely accepted as collaborations with Fletcher. It is possible that there were more. It even became the orthodoxy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the works of Shakespeare must be the creation of several different hands, given the range of vocabulary that they deploy. The theory that Shakespeare was a pseudonym for some nobleman drew sustenance from this belief. Only a man of breeding, it was supposed, could have gained the learning and developed the literary skill to create such poetry.
"A Gateshead schoolmaster with the unimprovable name of J.Thomas Looney published one of the great works of crank conspiracy theory in 1920 in which he 'proved' that the true author of Shakespeare was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. The theory of alternative authorship has been continually debunked and is a peculiar piece of snobbery."
I know what will happen to the comments thread under this post. The Creationists of the literary world are welcome to do their worst.
The Times reports today on historians' findings about death toll from the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945:
"A furious debate about one of the most controversial episodes of the Second World War was ignited yesterday when an official German report concluded that fewer people were killed in the Allied bombing of Dresden than many reports previously estimated.
"A commission of historians confirmed earlier findings that up to 25,000 people died in the firestorm unleashed by British and US bombers on February 13-15, 1945."
I have an accompanying commentary about some of the myths that have grown up about Dresden, notably the inflated estimates of the death toll argued for four decades by David Irving. The comments underneath the piece are predictable, I'm afraid.
I'm deliberately not providing a link for the article that I'm criticising in this post. The reason is that the article is by David Irving, who a court of law has determined is a Holocaust denier. But you can take my word for it that the material I'm referring to can be found on Irving's website.
I've recently written about Irving's notorious inflation of the number of victims of the Allied bombing of Dresden. I wasn't familiar, however, with Irving's techniques in writing about the Pacific War, in which the Allies defeated another racist power, Imperial Japan. I was thus interested to read an article that Irving has recently posted on his website but that he wrote in 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. (The newspaper he sent the article to ignored him.) You can infer the argument and its quality from Irving's introduction, in which he says (referring to himself, like Caesar, in the third person):
'DAVID IRVING reveals [1995] that the Allies were aware of Japanese attempts to surrender before Hiroshima. The Japanese were not the first to find that it is easier to get into a war than to get out.'
I've dealt with this claim of revisionist historians - and also of the fraudulent ignoramus Howard Zinn, who wasn't a historian at all - many times and won't do so here. It's bogus. The shock of the A-bomb - Nagasaki as well as Hiroshima - was crucial for the 'peace party' in Japan's Cabinet to prevail. My interest here is not in Irving's argument, on which he's out of his depth, but in his supporting material. For he prefaces his article with a disturbing photograph. It shows mounds of corpses against a bleak and devastated landscape. And the souce is cited as the Robert L. Capp Collection in the Hoover Institution Archives.
I recognised the picture instantly. Here's a report from this newspaper by our Paris correspondent, Charles Bremner, in 2008:
'France's most authoritative newspaper has been forced to admit that it was fooled by gruesome photographs, supposedly of the 1945 atomic attack on Hiroshima, which have stirred anti-American sentiment this week.
'Le Monde devoted a page to a report on “Hiroshima: What the world never saw” last weekend. It recounted the discovery of “ten pictures hidden for more than 60 years by an American soldier which show for the first time the victims of the bomb dropped on the Japanese city on August 6, 1945”. It emerged however that the pictures, from the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, depicted the aftermath of a 1923 earthquake near Tokyo. They were immediately recognised by experts in Japan and the US.'
You've guessed it. The photograph that Irving illustrates his Hiroshima article with is one of that series. It isn't of Hiroshima at all: it's of the 1923 earthquake. Moreover, the American historian who found the photographs in the Hoover Institution archive, Sean Malloy, acknowledges that he was mistaken. As the NYT reported his correction:
'"The first lesson of this is that archives make mistakes and historians make mistakes," said Malloy, an assistant professor at the University of California, Merced, who has published a history of the 1945 bombing, "Atomic Tragedy," that contained rare photographs from the Hoover Institution. "Hoover made a mistake and I did too."'
This was in fact a grudging and evasive remark by Malloy. He was the one who disseminated the photographs, not the Hoover Institution. But what can you make of David Irving, two years after this fiasco, who uses the same photographic evidence to illustrate an article on Hiroshima?
My view of David Irving has long been that he has an extensive knowledge of primary and secondary historical sources and is a capable linguist. It's what he does with the source materials that is objectionable and an offence against historical truth. But this episode causes me to change my opinion. Irving is not only a racist faker: the man's a bluffer.
Ben Chu of The Independent continues to insist, in line with Nick Clegg's views and against John Rentoul and me, that the banks are a vested interest whose unaccountable power should be broken up. He poses this challenge:
"[W]ould re-imposing some form of Glass-Steagall - separating out the payments system from the inherently risky activities of the investment banking divisions - make the system much safer than it is at present?"
The question incorporates a strong claim. Chu nonetheless gives the answer "unequivocally: yes". He is mistaken, and thereby provides no. 94 in the series to which the title of this post refers (though I'm interpreting "historical" very loosely).
It's a debate worth having, but the evidence isn't there and I don't believe it. Let me refer Chu to an illuminating report published last month by the Centre for Economic Policy Research entitled Bailing Out the Banks: Reconciling Stability and Competition. (One of the authors is Diane Coyle, who was for some years an excellent economics editor of The Independent. In that capacity, she dealt with numerous emails from - in the deathless phrase of George Galloway - a total banker, viz. me, with extraordinary patience and unfailing courtesy.) The report covers many issues and it uses some technical terms (in the section I'm referring to, you need to know, e.g., what market beta and idiosyncratic risk mean). But in the section on "Universal banking and stability", pp. 23-4, there are some valuable empirical findings cited.
A universal bank means an integrated bank, encompassing retail and securities businesses among others. It's a standard European banking model. In my previous career, I was one of a team that set up an investment banking arm of a German commercial bank, and I served in the investment bank's senior management. I believe to this day that combining the balance sheet and deposit base of a commercial bank with capital market products serves a bank's customers and improves the efficiency of the wider economy.
The authors conclude, from various bodies of research that:
"[I]t would be a mistake to enforce a specific new business model on European banking. It is preferable to influence banks' business decisions through regulatory taxes...."
The reason they argue this is that greater restrictions on banks' activities (i.e. what business they can transact and what they can't, with different types of institution serving different purposes) can make the institutions more fragile. They don't have the benefits of diversification of revenue streams, and of economies of scale and scope.
I point this out to Chu, because his answer is far less obvious (or "unequivocal") than he thinks it is, and I don't think it's true at all. The reason that the banks brought down the financial system and plunged the global economy into a terrible recession is that they took on risks that ultimately exploded and that contaminated the interbank lending market and then the wider economy. That isn't unaccountable power and it isn't due to the size of the institutions. It's a reflection of a dysfunctional system in which there were benefits and incentives to take on risk without regard to the stability of the wider economy. The way to rectify that is to reduce the incentives - for example, through higher capital charges for engaging in certain activities - and impose limits on leverage rather than to break up the banks. At best, the sort of restrictions that Chu proposes are irrelevant. But I think they'd have a cost as well, in making the financial system less stable in a crisis.
One or two readers (literally, two readers) have asked what has happened to the weekly Pedant column in the new design of The Times.
You can now find it in the Saturday edition of the main newspaper, in the Register section.
I've been out this week and have now happened across a furious argument about comments by Nick Clegg. Clegg told The Spectator that the banks "represent a vested interest" comparable to the trade unions before the legislative reforms of the 1980s. John Rentoul took issue with this parallel; his Independent colleague Ben Chu and Iain Martin of the Wall Street Journal weighed in on Clegg's side; and now there's no stopping them.
Clegg and his defenders are wrong. You can't plausibly claim a parallel between the banks and the union-dominated corporatism of the 1970s. I've argued from the outset of the crisis that the fault lies with the financial sector and not with supposed government failure (a mistaken argument that has in fact been well aired in The Spectator). But this isn't due to an unaccountable concentration of power that needs to be broken up, as Chu argues. It reflects a dysfunctional financial system whereby there were incentives for banks to ramp up their risk-taking regardless of the consequences for financial stability.
Because of the stress on maximising returns on equity, banks' capital reserves were depleted and leverage increased. Banks that did these things were handsomely rewarded by the stock market, and bank executives whose compensation was linked to the share price did well. They weren't being stupid or "greedy": they were operating rationally, in a system where the individually rational course carried moral hazard and great risks to the wider economy. The mistake was to suppose that new financial instruments, which transformed bank lending into marketable securities that could then be widely distributed to investors, had reduced the risks of lending.
Chu argues that:
"... the Tories have actually been very sound on the need to break up the banks. Whatever else they might have got wrong on the economy, Osborne and Cameron have recognised that the financial services have become a powerful, undemocratic, vested interest that needs to be faced down for the good of the country."
This is largely nonsense, as is Tory policy to break up the banks. Has Chu forgotten the awesomely misnamed Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund that had to be rescued - by the banks, not by the US taxpayer - in 1998 because of the risk to the wider financial system? LTCM was not a big institution at all: it was an apparently insignificant one. The reason for its rescue was not its size but its leverage. But regulators didn't draw the right conclusion from the debacle. The typical bank is several times more leveraged than the typical hedge fund, for the reasons I've stated. That is why their collapse in 2008 would have been catastrophic. And in fact, the concentration of banks in the UK made it easier to mount a successful bailout than was possible in the US. If there were a repeat of the financial crisis, but with many smaller banks, regulators would be faced with numerous small and tricky decisions about which institutions counted as banks and which didn't (maybe the consumer finance arms of car manufacturers), even though they would all be doing roughly the same thing.
I'm no more a Brownite than Rentoul is, but the Government has handled the banking crisis with more sense and judgement than is being shown by the Tories or by Nick Clegg.
UPDATE: I've just noticed that The Spectator (or rather, its writer David Blackburn) has extolled the Tories on this very subject because:
"Free market capitalism has been suspended by a self-appointed financial oligarchy. Osborne would end the middlemen’s party by enacting ‘Glass-Steagal’ principles as part of a regulatory package that elevates shareholders above management. It is unsurprising that those vested interests view him with contempt."
This is fantastically misguided. A "regulatory package that elevates shareholders above management" is indistinguishable from the one we've had. The problem was that banks' attempts to maximise returns on equity caused huge instability for the wider economy. That was free-market capitalism, because the banks were competing to deliver larger returns to shareholders.
If the Tories enacted something like the old Glass-Steagall legislation in the US (the Depression-era law that mandated the separation of commercial and investment banking), that would do nothing to mitigate the problem. Lehman Brothers was not a commercial bank but its collapse had huge implications for the wider financial system. Northern Rock was not an investment bank. The big banking crises of the 1990s, in Japan and Scandinavia, were in the core banks not in investment banks.
One MP who will no longer be in the House after the general election is Bob Wareing. Wareing, aged 79, has sat for Liverpool West Derby since 1983. He was also Labour's candidate in the Liverpool Edge Hill by-election in March 1979, in which the Liberal David Alton won a hitherto safe Labour seat by a huge margin. Wareing's only front bench post was as an Opposition whip from 1987 to 1992. I've never referred to him in print, and it would be shame to allow his retirement to go unremarked. Here are some scenes from a political life.
A matter of weeks after Labour's landslide victory in 1997, the party suspended Wareing. According to The Independent:
'Labour moved quickly yesterday to try to defuse a second sleaze row by suspending the party's former whip, Bob Wareing, over allegations that he has breached the parliamentary rules on lobbying.
'"Serious allegations" against Mr Wareing have been received by Labour's Chief Whip, Nick Brown, and he has referred what one MP called "a sad case" to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Sir Gordon Downey.
'Two years ago Mr Wareing, who is chairman of the all-party British-Yugoslav parliamentary group, was criticised by his party for holding talks with the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, whose forces had been responsible for a programme of ethnic cleansing.'
A month later, in July 1997, The Independent reported:
'A humbling public apology, to be followed by a one-week suspension from the Commons, was demanded as punishment for a rule-breaking Labour MP last night.
'In its first report on the activities of a serving MP, the new Parliament's Committee on Standards and Privileges urged the punishment for Robert Wareing, Labour MP for Liverpool West Derby, after it decided that he had made a false declaration about a company shareholding.
'Mr Wareing set up a company called Robert Wareing Limited, which in March 1994 received a pounds 6,000 retainer from another company, Metta Trading, previously under the control of "a person connected with Serbia and Montenegro for the purposes of UN sanctions".
'When he was asked to register his interests in 1994, Mr Wareing declared that he had no relevant shareholdings in any public or private company, and yesterday's report said: "Mr Wareing made a false declaration ... We find Mr Wareing's conduct wrong."'
The motion that Wareing be suspended from the House for a week was proposed and took effect in October 1997.
Ten years later, Wareing was deselected as MP by his constituency party. Labour's candidate will be the former minister Stephen Twigg. Wareing declared that he would stand as an Independent at the election. While still in the House, Wareing has claimed £600 for his laundry bills on the grounds that: 'Someone in the Fees Office told me to do it, and if I’m told to do something I will.'
Asked to repay a total of £3,676 in wrongly claimed expenses, Wareing declared last month that he would not do so and that he was in fact owed more than £30,000 by the taxpayer: 'If I were to make retrospective claims I would be owed more than £32,000. That is because for years I didn't know that I could claim for service charges.'
Also last month, The Telegraph reported:
'Robert Wareing booked banquets for LVA, a training and conference organiser, in House of Commons facilities including the Churchill Dining Room and the Pugin Room.... Between April 2004 and July last year, Mr Wareing made 28 bookings on behalf of LVA or a linked company, Leading Ventures Associates, according to records disclosed by the Parliamentary authorities last week.
'LVA entertained more than 860 guests at the events in total, including a gala dinner in February 2006 and three other events with more than 50 guests.
'During the period, Mr Wareing made only six other room bookings, according to the Commons banqueting office log. None were for organisations with any obvious link to his Liverpool West Derby constituency.'
Last week, Wareing declared that he would not, after all, be contesting the Liverpool West Derby seat at the election, bringing his parliamentary career to a close.
I have a review in this week's Jewish Chronicle of a good book called Utopia or Auschwitz? Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust by Hans Kundnani. The book assesses the ideological journey of the radical Left, including its terrorist wing, among Germany's baby-boom generation:
"The collective insanity of a movement that ostensibly wished revenge on Nazism yet ended up embracing it is a salutary and bloody tale. Kundnani's is a model account of this Frankenstein's monster and a fascinating intellectual history. Yet he stops short of the greatest irony of the radical generation. The government in which [Joschka] Fischer served was an indifferent one because Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was an unprincipled, mediocre figure, who lacked the idealism of the pioneers of the Federal Republic: Konrad Adenauer, who allied German conservatism with the liberal west rather than authoritarian nationalism, and the Social Democratic Kurt Schumacher, who resolutely opposed Communism.
"Liberal democracy, rather than its revolutionary alternative, marked the true break in Germany's political history."
John Rentoul defends his claim that Michael Foot saved the Labour Party. He writes:
"In my defence, I summon as a witness my friend and other comrade, brother Steve Richards, who writes in The Independent today of the historical implausibility of Healey's becoming leader before 1983. The actual choice facing the Labour Party in this period was between Footism and Bennism, and by choosing Foot, in the form of Healey as deputy leader, over Benn, in 1981, the party chose to survive."
I agree with John that the crucial event in arresting Labour's descent into electoral irrelevance was Denis Healey's victory in the deputy leadership contest that Tony Benn forced in 1981. But in the deputy leadership election of 1981, it was not a contest of Footism and Bennism, for the straightforward reason that Foot wouldn't declare himself. Whereas Jim Callaghan made clear in 1976 that he favoured Foot as his deputy, Foot was neutral in the choice of deputy in 1981. Foot plainly recognised and deplored the damage to Labour's cause and prospects that Benn was inflicting. Yet he didn't draw the obvious inference: that defeating Benn and his supporters was essential to preseving Labour as any sort of electoral force.
I say this with much regret. In his last years, Foot displayed loyalty far beyond that of most other Labour elder statesmen to the finest peacetime prime minister of the last century. He was absolutely right in his aversion to Benn's preening absurdities. And when the closest thing to a National Socialist regime in Europe since 1945 launched a campaign of genocidal violence, Michael Foot was brave and isolated in urging Western intervention to rebuff Slobodan Milosevic. Yet when Labour was all but finished, it was not Foot - or Neil Kinnock, who didn't abandon nuclear unilateralism till six years after becoming leader - who turned the party round. It was Healey, alone.
My practice when a famous figure of left-wing politics dies is to pick a fight with the deceased. Not this time, though. It's a cliché, but true nonethless, that he was a principled man who ought never to have allowed himself to be put forward as Labour leader.
One point that I'm glad was mentioned in both this newspaper's obituary and its leading article is Foot's principled stand in the 1990s against the genocidal campaigns of Slobodan Milosevic. He and Jill Craigie, his wife, made the film Two Hours From London, documenting the war crimes perpetrated by Milosevic. I hope it will be shown on television as a tribute to him. He had his idiosyncrasies - a curious indulgence of Indira Gandhi's vicious state of emergency in India - but he was a democrat and a humanitarian.
So I'll pick a fight with three commentators instead. My friend and comrade John Rentoul sticks to his view that Foot was "the one who saved the Labour Party, not the one who nearly killed it". That's a theme too of the biography of Foot by Mervyn Jones, who died only last month. But I don't agree. Foot was an important part of the reason for Labour's catastrophe in 1983. No one could have secured victory for Labour, but Denis Healey was the obvious potential Prime Minister within Labour's ranks and Foot ought to have made way for him even when the general election had been called. Only two MPs, Jeff Rooker and Gerald Kaufman, urged Foot to stand down, thereby demonstrating an ineradicable feature of Labour history: if you're an effective leader, such as Tony Blair, then you're vilified; if you're unsuited to the job, you'll be treated with astonishing sentimentality.
Peter Tatchell put out a statement yesterday declaring
"Michael Foot was wrong to condemn my advocacy of extra-parliamentary protests and to initially block my endorsement as parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey. But this error of judgment, under pressure from SDP turncoats, does not diminish his stature as one of the most outstanding British socialists and democrats of the twentieth century."
I have a lot of respect for Peter Tatchell. He's a man of libertarian principle and great courage. When he stood for Labour in Bermondsey in 1982 he was the victim of a monstrous campaign of abuse and vilification for his homosexuality. (It's a measure, incidentally, of how much more civilised a society Britain has become in a generation that public attitudes to homosexuality have changed so markedly.)
But my view at the time and since is that Michael Foot was right to block Peter's candidature in Bermondsey. The crucial phrase, which I give from memory because it's stayed with me, is that Peter urged a campaign to "challenge the government's right to rule". This was a time when groups such as the Militant tendency - adherents of anti-democratic ideologies - were bent on transforming Labour into an insurrectionist party. It was important that Labour insist on the supremacy and sovereignty of parliamentary government. It was a measure of Foot's lack of authority (against plenty of affection) that he couldn't succeed in blocking Peter as a candidate.
Thirdly, there is a commentator I have no respect for whatever. In the Telegraph (where else?), Tony Benn argues that two things made it impossible for Labour to win under Michael Foot. Strangely, neither of these is called "Tony Benn". What a deluded, discredited, sanctimonious mediocrity he is.
Here, incidentally, is what Benn says about Foot in his latest volume of diaries, More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007. On 28 September 2002 Foot telephoned Benn to harangue him for having published his previous volume of diaries in the Daily Mail:
"[Foot] continued: 'I think it's a disgrace that you should publish your diaries in the Daily Mail, it's the most bitterly anti-government paper.' So I was a bit taken aback. He said, 'I want to tell you personally.'
"So I said, 'Fine, I know you don't approve of me, Michael, and you don't approve of diaries, and you don't approve of the Mail, but at least I didn't go to Australia at the expense of Rupert Murdoch!'
"That shook him a bit. Boy, he was angry! I thought, bloody hell, that man joined in the witch hunt of the left, with the full support of all the right-wing papers; he was once a great personal friend of Beaverbrook, so I didn't in the end take a lot of notice of it, but still, it registered."
Good for Michael Foot.
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