Cop and the League of Nations

In order to understand why all Cops (Conference of the Parties), including the one which began this week, are so unsatisfactory, historical analogy may help. They resemble the League of Nations between the wars. The League’s aim was to ensure world peace. The purpose of Cops, and their associated UN processes, is to arrest climate change. Neither purpose was/is achievable by the chosen means, chiefly because the countries where the problem was/is greatest were/are the least likely to cooperate. Germany, defeated in the Great War, was not allowed into the League in the first place. Japan and Italy withdrew from its council so that they could get on with their aggressions. This week, the leaders of China, India and Russia were all absent from Sharm El Sheikh. Not coincidentally, their countries are great carbon-emitters (over 40 per cent of the world total). Some people admit the problem but maintain that the Cops set a powerful example, shining like a good deed in a naughty world. The opposite case could be made. In the 1930s, democratic nations were slow to see the need to rearm against aggressive war. They took false comfort from the existence of the League of Nations. Nazi Germany and other dictatorships grabbed the opportunity. Today, each Cop tries to make people feel that this is our last chance to save the planet and that the Cop process is achieving net zero. Both these propositions are false, so Cop achievements are illusory. ‘Good’ countries pay a punitive energy price for these illusions. ‘Bad’ countries benefit from seeing through them.

What Egypt really needs is a conference called Copt. It would draw international attention to the persecution of that ancient Christian church in Egypt by militant Islamists.

Until the Blair era, a Ministry of Culture would have been unthinkable in Britain – too continental, too illiberal. Then came DCMS. Twenty-five years on, it has reached its natural development, which is not that politics becomes more cultured, but that culture becomes more political. Once upon a time, the Arts Council was an ‘arm’s length’ public body which helped independent cultural institutions. Now, as Arts Council England (ACE), it has moved from arm’s length to arm. It enacts the orders of government culture policy which decrees who lives and dies in the arts. Thus Sir Nicholas Serota, the ACE chairman, last week told the English National Opera it would lose all of its £12.6 million annual grant, so that the north could be ‘levelled up’ against London. Sir Nicholas says the ENO has done an outstanding job of putting itself to rights in recent years, but sentences it to death all the same, in favour of the Shakespeare Centre in Lancashire and the Blackpool Illuminations. He invites the ENO to pitch instead for some vague idea of modern opera in Manchester. If even a Conservative government sees culture in this politicised, destructive way, the best route for the arts to thrive is to get right out of the system. The enterprising ENO would be exceptionally good at raising its own money.

Actually, this is not really a rebalancing of money between London and the provinces, but favouritism towards organisations which boast of ethnicity, not of artistic quality. Thus, Welsh National Opera on tour and Glyndebourne Touring Opera have lost grants, as has the Britten Sinfonia, the only orchestra in the east of England. By contrast, the Chineke! Foundation has gained £700,000. It is a declaredly race-based organisation (being mostly for black and ‘ethnically diverse’ musicians). Its founder, Chi-chi Nwanoku, holds the CBE, but it refused to play the National Anthem at the Lucerne Festival shortly after the death of the Queen because, in Ms Nwanoku’s words: ‘The Chineke! Orchestra is full of musicians who are not from the UK and many who are the direct result of their ancestors being enslaved.’

A striking feature of the Gavin Williamson affair is that a former deputy chief whip (Anne Milton) publicly denounced a former chief whip (Sir Gavin) with accusations about his time in that job. I cannot think of a previous breach of whips’ omertà. If this can be done, how can whips successfully operate in future?

On a train coming into London recently, I happened to be listening for once to the loudspeaker injunction to report to the authorities ‘if you see something that doesn’t look right’. In my November mood, the words took on an almost poetic ring. Of course I could see something that didn’t look right, all about me. Like William Blake walking ‘near where the chartered Thames doth flow’, I saw in every face I met ‘marks of weakness, marks of woe’. So strong was this impression that I could not believe even British Transport Police could put things right. ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’ Pah!

The Today programme has had the good idea of a daily winter walk. On Tuesday the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, described his. The father of winter walks in verse, however, is William Cowper. As a neurotic person, Cowper wrote vividly about the calm that can be instilled by walking. His greatest poem, ‘The Task’, contains six parts, one entitled ‘The Winter Morning Walk’, another ‘The Winter Walk at Noon’. These mimic the way a winter walk leads the human mind effortlessly from one thing to another, as is expressed in Cowper’s ‘argument’ which prefaces each part. The ‘argument’ for ‘The Winter Morning Walk’ begins: ‘A frosty morning – The foddering of cattle – The woodman and his dog – The poultry – Whimsical effects of a frost at a waterfall – The Empress of Russia’s palace of ice – Amusements of monarchs – War, one of them – Wars, whence – And whence monarchy.’ The effect is both romantic and soothing. I like the end of the ‘argument’ for ‘The Winter Walk at Noon’: ‘The retired man vindicated from the charge of uselessness.’