Start the Week

01/11/2010

Andrew Marr looks at what the future holds for Ireland after the financial crisis, with the cultural commentator, Fintan O'Toole, who argues for wholesale reform of the political system. While the Conservative MP, Nick Boles puts forward his blueprint for a new Britain. The fate of Deborah Cadbury's family firm was sealed when it was bought out by an American company. But she looks back at a chocolate dynasty that mixed sweet success with bitter rivalry. And the cellist Steven Isserlis is on a mission to enhance the reputation of the much-maligned composer, Saint-Saens.

Producer: Eleanor Garland.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 01 Nov 2010
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast on BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello. There is a better public realm to be discovered. And as we stumble towards it, this more appetising future smells subtly, but unmistakably, of chocolate. If the plight of post-Crunch Britain is bad, spare a thought for the Irish Republic. Fintano Tool, whose blast of outrage at the country's economic collapse he called simply "ship of fools" is back, with a plan for a better island. Enough is enough. Nick Bowles, conservative MP for Margaret Thatcher's old seat and an enthusiastic supporter of the coalition, has published what he thinks should be its root map, called Which Way is Up. And later we're going to be talking about an earlier public controversialist, polymath and writer, the composer Sasson, which with the great British cellist Stephen Isilis. First though, you may be wondering about the chocolate reference. Well, Deborah Cadbury of that family has written the story of the great Quaker dynasties, the Cadbury's, the Fries, the round trees and their competitors, and it is actually bang on the money when it comes to our current dilemmas, because they were busy trying to make a better country, not only better chocolate bars. Deborah, let's just start by discussing Quakers as a group. They had emerged out of the religious controversies of the Civil War period, English Civil War period, and much oppressed and pushed out of ordinary sources of employment. That's right. As non-conformists, they weren't able to work in established positions. They were banned from teaching universities. They couldn't work in the law. It's pacifist. They couldn't work in the military. So they were very much as a group forced back on their own resources, and that took them into commerce and trade. But they were doing this really with a unique and very distinctive set of values. And I found it quite touching, you know, during the Credit Crunch, as we were seeing one bank after another collapse, to see that, you know, I was in the Quaker archives in the Society of Friends, just a mile away from the City of London, you know, dating back 300 years, there were these really beautiful books put together by Quaker elders and Quaker clerks, setting out a code of commercial ethics, you know, that the idea that wealth creation was only for personal gain was shameful, that it's spiritual wealth, rather than the accumulation of possessions was the guiding principle, you know, all this marvellous stuff that they were writing about. And yet what's interesting is that they were very commercially tough. I mean, they were determined to create big businesses, and they were as, you know, entrepreneurial as anybody else, certainly by the mid-Victorian period, where they seem to have dominated a lot of Victorian business. And yet they weren't doing it just for the sake of the money itself. Yeah, what I found staggering, really, when I started to go into it was just how successful as a group the Quakers were. By the beginning of the 19th century, you had 4,000 Quaker families running 74 Quaker banks and over 200 Quaker companies, and many of them household names today, you know, Barclays and Lloyd's, the banks had the origins in Quaker businesses, and there were numerous others, so the gun is the back houses, the P's. Kuntley and Palmer, Coleman. Exactly. Reckets, K's shoes, Clark's shoes, and then, of course, all the chocolate firms. And the chocolate firms, and some of the early railway companies as well were Quaker. Absolutely. I knew about the chocolate up to a point. I didn't realise that Quakers were absolutely everywhere. They were. Now, your book tells the story of Cadbury's and its rivals, both in Britain and abroad. One of the very, very striking things is how quickly Cadbury's and then Rountree's and the others want to produce decent housing and better education and doing lots of things for their workers that today we would expect the state to step in to do. Yeah. I thought Joseph Rountree had a really beautiful phrase. He said, "The real goal for an employer is to try to seek for others the fullest life of which an individual is capable, and you can see across the confectionery industries how they try to achieve that." So, from the earliest days, George Cadbury, who'd actually been an apprentice in Joseph Rountree's grocery shop up in York, right from the start, he was involving his very modest staff initially in trying to understand Quaker values and how that applied to their lives in the slums of Birmingham and trying to help them. But as soon as they'd actually managed to turn the business to a profit, they were very keen to divert the Quaker wealth to help initially the staff. So it was Saturday's off, it was raising the wages, it was a sick club and it soon progressed to the building of Bonneville, the building of a model village. And just on Bonneville, again something I hadn't realised. I knew there was a model village there and they were nice looking houses and cottages and so on. I hadn't realised that Bonneville included sort of pension schemes, dentists, doctors, all sorts of schooling, swimming clubs. Yeah, it was quite touching in the Bonneville archives because they do have pictures which show all of this and it's so nostalgic to go back because there are these women dressed in their 19th century elegant clothes and in their recreation they're doing things like playing croquet or sitting by the lily pond or there was a cricket ground for the men, there was masses of recreational facilities. But it was more than that, it was a really aspirational community. So you could, you know, there was education, there were sewing clubs, there was, you know, first aid clubs, Roman history, you know, just an entire community and how you could aspire to a better life. And this is all going on at a time of ferocious competition and the search for the perfect cocoa paella and then the perfect chocolate bar, which is a bit like people trying to create apps for computers and so on these days. It's ruthless commercial competition. But the story ends badly if I can put it that way because in the end one by one these companies are taken over and eventually of course Cadbury's itself is taken over by a global food giant, Kraft, just as Nestle has taken over. And it does seem to me that this is also a parable about ownership. Good ownership, bad ownership, who should own companies and what they should do with that ownership. Yes, yes. I mean for me I suppose the, I called that Quaker values, you know, I thought it merited a term in its own right, which I called it Quaker capitalism because it is distinct from the shareholder capitalism we have today. And plotting the course of the story, you see distinctly the change in a concept of ownership, because by the end of the story where Kraft is taking over Cadbury, the hedge funds owned 30% of Cadbury and they were quite prepared to sell Cadbury for a 20p profit. In other words, you know, they were quite happy to see the end of the company. It's the almost exact opposite of the ownership concept. So in the city, you know, the emphasis on short term value and, you know, the need for short term returns meant that the traditional ownership of the Quaker capitalist was in a sense turned on its head. So I think you see a very neat transition in the concept of ownership. Nick Boltz, when I was reading this, I sort of thought here is a great chunk of the political history in a way of Britain that I hadn't known properly about and we can learn from and deserve to know more about now. What did you make of it? I think it's completely fascinating. I mean, last week in the House of Commons, we had the second reading of the bill to privatize the post office in which there's a proposal to have the largest employee share ownership scheme that we've had for many years. Everybody in politics is talking about mutuals and the return of mutuals talking about John Lewis, which manages to be one of our most successful retailers while also being an employee partnership, not owned by some greedy capitalist. So I think we are all trying to find our way back to some version of this. I guess the question I have is whether these Quaker values, where will they come from without the religion? Because the religious belief that fostered them isn't there anymore. And I don't think government can legislate it. Quakers haven't quite died out, but there's very few Quakers left. There are still Quaker firms, though, and they do, in a sense, point a bit of a way forward. I'm thinking of things like Scott Bader, the chemical firm, which is run by the workers. And I suppose, in a sense, although it's not Quaker, although John Spader Lewis was influenced by Quakers, the John Lewis Partnership. But I think the Quaker model is very interesting, because firstly, it did put the community at the very heart of it. The business wasn't just for the entrepreneur, it was to benefit the whole community. And there is no reason why that can't be taken as a model today. But I also think it was a very enabling culture, and there are lessons looking back today to see how it was they were so successful at business. As I was very struck by the system of apprenticeships, the fact that the youngsters from each family would move around the country to other Quaker families and learn a trade, as George Cadbury went to study with Joseph Roundtree. There was a whole system of, within the community, you had obligations to help fellow Quaker businesses. So there was always someone you could turn to in the local community. What today we would see as mentoring was effectively happening through the Quaker network. Then there was fantastic communication between groups because there were monthly Quaker meetings, regional Quaker meetings. But that's a whole structure, going back to Nick Bowles' point, that we don't have now, in terms of the religious underpinning. Well, it's an extraordinary moving book, I think. And it completely undermines some of the really fundamental things that we've all been told for the last 25 years, which is that you can have efficiency on the one side or you can have idealism on the other side. You can have values on the one side or you can have good, ruthless capitalism that will create wealth on the other side. And you know, it really challenges what we mean by capitalist. Exactly. And I mean, I think what's ever said about the practicality of this, you know, so this isn't about some sort of airy, fairy notions, wouldn't it be nice if people do this. These were brilliant firms which were built on values. And I think your question about whether we can do that in the absence of religious culture, I think is the key one. Because what do we have if we don't have that sort of face-driven set of values? Well, what we have to do is we have to invent political values, you know, and what we really need to be talking about is, what are the 21st century political equivalents of face-driven 19th century values, which is not to say that those that the new values have to exclude people of face, absolutely not. But they have to be civic values, which actually are accessible to people from different cultures. And I think this is where ideas about a political community become crucial to economics. And economics has been cut off from politics and we have to reconnect. Well, we're going to come to that very shortly, just before we do, Stephen. I just wanted to ask Deborah, what happened to Quakerism? I mean, it must have been so powerful at that point with all those firms and all those workers. Why did it dwindle? Well, membership, I suppose, you know, some firms, as they became very successful, just left the Quaker movement, you know, they found it just too hard to tally what was happening with their commercial success with, you know, values from what seemed like another age. There were other firms that just didn't modernize at all. I suppose, fries of Bristol you could almost put in that category and almost got left behind. And then there was some that took a sort of more worldly path. That is, they tried to keep the Quaker values going, but at the same time, combine them with the commercial needs. I think Stephen was asking about the religion, particularly, I mean, from reading old book, I wish, well, I mean, all, yeah, I mean, that's hard to answer because religion, all religions have actually declined in membership massively, not just the Quakers. Do you think the Second World War had a impact? Because it's made pacifism, you know, a less acceptable viewpoint for a lot of people. Possibly, possibly. And they're not allowed to marry outside the religion. I think it's very hard to answer because, you know, this is a question for each person, why faith matters less in their lives. Well, let's move on to the Irish Republic, where, of course, the story does include faith and its disappearance. Finn's no tool enough enough is enough how to build a new republic. You begin the book by looking at what the Irish identity, and you argue that the crash, the collapse, the economic collapse, was a sort of existential challenge to Ireland in a way that it perhaps wasn't to other countries because Irish identity had been to do with nationalism and Catholicism and both were in decline. Yeah, and really what happens to us, I mean, I think one of the reasons why, of course, Ireland has shared a global downturn, you know, that's obvious, it was the most globalized economy in the world over the, in the early parts of the century. So it was obviously going to feel that sort of global shock in a very particular way. But beyond that, the reason why Ireland is so much worse than everywhere else I think is to do with cultural factors, actually, and political factors. And the cultural factors have a lot to do with the extent to which Irish identity was tied up with, well, southern Irish identity, with Catholicism, with nationalism, and with the fusion of the two into this state that emerged in 1922. And both of those things sort of collapsed, really, in the 1990s. And good riddance, you know, I'm certainly not here to say, you know, that they were wonderful things or that the fusion of religion and politics didn't have terrible consequences. But it did create a very strong sense of an Irish identity for a good and ill. And as both of those things collapsed, I think the nationalism collapsed under the weights of the Northern Ireland conflict, where, you know, sort of appeals to national mythologies were seen to have consequences, which were foul. Catholicism, I think, well, it was changing with secularization anyway, but it particularly has been killed off by the child abuse scandals, which have had a huge effect in Ireland, you know, in terms of people's sense of ownership of the church. What happened then is, well, you know, this coincides with... So if we're not nationalists and we're not Catholic, sorry. So what are we? Well, we are. Well, we're the Celtic Tiger. You know, it's this new invention of an idea, which is in some ways was positive, you know, I mean, Ireland suffered from an inferiority complex for a very long time, for also historical reasons. People felt good about themselves. People felt that they were getting rich, that there were these kind of material values that could take the place of everything else. Well, the problem was, of course, that they were very thinly rooted. And so you got this extraordinary self-delusion which played out in... We're richer than the Germans. We're richer than the Germans, you know. I mean, you know, you say this in the people laugh, but I mean, this is what economists were saying, you know, week after week, you know, new figures coming out showing GDP per capital in Ireland, you know, is higher than in Germany, is higher than Japan. It's just behind the United States, you know, where the second richest country in the world, all of which was complete rubbish. And you know, but it's interesting to explain why economists were saying that. Based on property values and inflated property values, it was partly inflated property values. It was also partly because GDP isn't a very good measure of what happens in Ireland because the Irish economy is very largely driven by outwards investments. So, you know, the U.S. companies, all of the agro in the world, for example, is made in Ireland. So, that adds enormously to, well, it explains a lot about that. The potent. The Irish idea. Perhaps somewhat inflated sense of self-worth, which arose in this period, but, you know, so, but I mean, that stuff, then what happens with the agro, okay, well, Pfizer will declare massive profits in Ireland. It will also then export those profits back to the United States. So, the tax reasons. Yeah. There was all that stuff happening, but the key issue, I think, was around self-delusion, and we're suffering from the horrific consequence of self-delusion because self-delusion feeds into debt, basically, and people borrow because they think they're rich. And of course, it's actually, it's the other way around to borrow it. I mean, well, to make the problem even tougher, you have an ill-functioning democracy, which you're very tough on, actually. I mean, in terms of the power of the oil over the government and the sort of client status of Irish TDs and MPs, which you blame partly on the electoral system. I do, yeah. I mean, I think the easiest way for people in the UK to get a sense of it is to think of the two words, Tammany Hall, you know. I mean, the Irish invented mass politics in the 19th century. You know, we were doing this stuff in the 1820s, and we were very good at it. The problem with being very good at it was that we created political machines, and of course, that expressed itself mostly through Irish immigration in Boston, in New York, in Chicago. You've still got a daily running Chicago, you know, I think he's about to go. But you know, those machines have lasted a very long time. So when Ireland became a state, essentially what you got was, well, we do this stuff very well. So we got, you know, two competing political machines with very little ideological difference, very little content in terms of what they were about politically. And partly as a result of this, you've got a kind of demented client in terms of the way politicians go about this. Now, I know, you know, Nick, as an MP, has to deal with his constituency. But he doesn't have anything like what an Irish member parliament has, you know, which is, you know, dealing with, I did a quick calculation on one guy, you know, talked about having sent out 220,000 letters seeking favors for his constituents, you know. And I kind of worked out that, you know, in the Irish parliament probably generates at least 13 million pieces of correspondence every year, persecuting civil servants basically, about stuff, which is nothing to do with national politics whatsoever. And part of the consequence of this is we have, I know, in the UK, people complain about the weakness of parliament, but my god, your parliament is from Ireland, looks incredibly strong in that there is some possibility that a government might be defeated in parliament here. Or at least might have to be challenged. And the committee is challenged. Yeah. That doesn't happen in Ireland. And that doesn't happen in Ireland. The second half of your book, you talk about the five distances, which is your programme for rebuilding, and they include a better welfare system, better education, and so on. What is, what's the hope for these five distances? Because you need a fair few, you don't need the Quakers at your back because you haven't got them, but you need someone at your back, they don't, you need a reform movement of something. You do that. I mean, absolutely. I'm what you need. And I think, oddly, this is where I'm making, like myself, people that were probably coming from a very different perspective, but you need public engagement, you know. And you actually need new ways of doing democracy. And you know, I'm inspired, oddly, I suppose, for an Irishman. I'm very inspired by what happened in the UK after the Second World War, you know. I think if you look at that from this perspective, and again, I think Deborah's book, you look at historical examples of how people were able to create better societies out of really horrific circumstances. Because again, we've been told over and over again that you can't redistribute wealth until it's created, you know, that the whole model is that you can't really do good things socially until you concentrate on wealth creation. Therefore, you get this worship of the very rich and everything else gets left behind. What you did in the UK in 1945, 1946, you know, was not out of wealth. It was out of massive debt. It was out of a horrifically traumatic experience. And you built welfare systems. And why did you do it because you focused on one very simple thing, which was fear. You said you cannot allow a society to get stuck in the kind of fear which nearly brought Europe to the brink of oblivion. And if you're going to do that, then you have to be able to offer people security. And I want to put a word on the table's weirdness out that you use in this context. And maybe it's misused at the moment, which is austerity. Yes. Because austerity must mean more than simply cuts and less. Absolutely. I was very taken with just a phrase that the late Tony Joe, the great historian of Paul Swore, Europe, used one of his dying essays, you know, but he used the phrase because he grew up in austerity of Britain. And he said, you know, ethical austerity was a phrase he used. But austerity was also an ethic. It wasn't just about having to queue up to buy powdered eggs, which nobody wants to go back to. It was also about saying, look, you have to concentrate on the essentials. And you have to cut out the waste. You have to cut out the fripperies. You have to cut out the lack of seriousness in politics, you know, and you have to, it's essentially a moral argument that austerity has to be about concentration. That's important. A fair point, Nick Boles, that perhaps austerity has been narrowed, as a word, to radically this period. Yes. I mean, I guess partly just because, you know, we've had to go through as a government here, this spending review process, you end up getting obsessed with money and obsessed with budgets for things and cuts and everything else. But I hope certainly that we're, you know, I think that David Cameron is trying to make the point that it's when money is not the answer and one everybody is having to cut back on their own material gain, that actually, hopefully, we rediscover the, you know, labour on this, that we rediscover communities, that we discover that actually the things that really nourish us and keep us going and keep us cheerful are relationships within our families and with people who live around us, rather than just what's, you know, coming in and out of bank accounts every month. David? Well, I was very struck with your use of the word austerity and defining it as a moral seriousness in public life. And it's very easy to say, look, the politicians have got to do it, which, of course, is, you know, we look to our leaders for that to happen. But actually, I felt really put to shame when I was reading about what the Quaker people had done because, you know, it wasn't just the full week in the factory, then it would be up at seven on Sundays on their one day off to go and drive the adult literacy program in the slums of Birmingham, taking responsibility, which, you know, we all of us need to do. And I don't do enough personally, but at the same time, I'm aware that all around the place, there are people getting up at seven to take kids to play football or rugby or, you know, there is a pretty lively community-based, non-state-based public realm around us who just doesn't get much talked about. Look, the key thing, I think, is, I think there is a danger of saying, look, you know, the state is finished, the state is corrupt and rotten on the one side, so we need to sort of take responsibility for all this ourselves. The reality is, I think we're all in a very deep hole and we need both, you know, that this isn't just about saying, yes, we all do need to do these things, but the real question for most people is, why do the good things we all do in our own lives not get reflected in our politics? And the real challenge, I think, is to change our politics so that it looks more like the kinds of values that we all instinctively try to put into practice in our own lives. But I can hear a voice of a long, dead Quaker saying, no, it's because you're not doing enough in your private life and your own lives aren't good enough, that your politics isn't good enough. I'll leave that, you know, when it comes straight onto Nick Bowles on that, on the same theme, your book, which weighs up, actually, like Finton Atoll, starts with the notion of a map and how you read a map properly. And this is meant to be a map for the coalition. And this part of the map, which is directly related to what we've just been talking about, which is the radical sort of decentralization of power away from the state. So let's just start with that. You propose that all sorts of things, including parks and community facilities of all kinds, should actually be handed over away from politics to local trusts. I think that basically the idea, what you find at the moment is that, you know, the local library, the local museum, the local swimming pool or park, tends to be the least important priority for the particular bit of local government that currently has responsibility for it, just because its value is small, its revenue is small, its cost is small. So it gets neglected. If actually you set up a trust in the community, we've not used set up, but the community set up a trust, of the people who use it and benefit from it, and its only responsibility was that facility, it would then, you know, find a much better way of getting volunteers involved in staffing it, perhaps adding particular services, you know, if it needed sprucing up, if the change in rooms needed a lick of paint, it would all be done by volunteers. The idea of actually giving communities control over the things that matter most to them, and that actually are the glue that bind people together. Well I picked that out because it seemed to me a concrete example of the rather amorphous phrase that everybody argues about the big society at the moment, what it actually means here, is there a serious danger that in wanting to hand over so much of what the state did to other groups, civil society simply isn't strong enough, lively enough, well organised enough, maybe it's too selfish to actually pick that up. I mean I think that there is clearly, it's clearly the case that there are going to be some places that are better prepared for this than others, and one of the reasons why one of the things the government is proposing to do is actually in communities that seem to have very little in the way of sort of civic society, of community activity, is actually to try and put sort of people in there, Barack Obama's community organisers who get in there and actually get people to start coming together to do things together, which is exactly what he was doing in an estate in South Chicago on housing issues. And there are community organisers of course, in Britain too, including in London. Exactly, and so to try and encourage that, but it is hard and it is, in a sense it is a challenge to a community, you know, we're going to give you power, but you've got to take responsibility, can you legislate, it's a bit like the Quaker values, can you legislate for the people to do that? No, it's a culture change, and we've got to try and lead a culture change, but you can't impose a culture change. And in terms of the political culture, you're a conservative, and there is quite a lot of the conservative thinking traditionally, which is suspicious of the big state, going back to Oakshot and philosophers like that, and now you're in coalition with a party who economically were quite pro-big state, at least for a long period of their history, but our hostile to the big state, in terms of the surveillance state and civil liberties and so on, is there something that one might call liberal conservatism, which is more than the sum of its two political parts? Well, I think there is, and obviously I would say that wouldn't I, but I genuinely- Well, I'm not sure you would, a lot of your colleagues wouldn't. No, I think the way we sort of combine is firstly on localism. I mean, I was very interested that Finton talked about the urgent need in Ireland for much stronger local government, actually running its own life, paying out of locally raised taxes for local services so that communities actually understand what goes in, what comes out, and they can make decisions together. I think we and the Liberal Democrats agree wholly on that. I think that what you've seen isn't through this idea of the people premium, which is actually assigning more money to the heads of children who are from disadvantaged backgrounds, so that schools actually want to take more of those kids because they bring more money. That's an idea of helping extend opportunity to the least well off, which I think, again, binds the sort of Cameron conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. So I think that there are things that we completely share, and I certainly believe it's, you know, therefore that this isn't a marriage of convenience, it's a marriage of true minds to which we should admit no impediment. And one of the more controversial or tougher areas in your book concerns immigration, where you think actually there needs to be a really major rethink, perhaps even going beyond where we are now, and you say that you yourself changed your attitude very much to immigration because of where you were living, and just explain to us a little bit about that. Well, yes, I mean, I spent most of the last 20 years living in central London and benefiting entirely from mass immigration. The food was better, the service was cheaper, the parties were more fun, and I won't go on because it's early in the morning, but you get the drift. And I then discovered, I became involved in Westminster Council and responsible for housing, and discovered that there was no ability to offer any social housing, any council flats, to children of longstanding residents, because all of it was taken up, housing asylum seekers and recently arrived immigrants. And I began to think, well, how do we keep our communities together if we can't actually find a place within them for the extended families? And then actually in my current constituency, in Grantham and Stanford, it was a further revelation, because we have a situation where, yes, lots of businesses there depend on migrant workers, and those migrant workers are fantastic. They work incredibly hard, they're totally motivated, they've got all of the right ethics, but unfortunately, we are also consigning huge numbers of our fellow citizens to a terrible life, and life that none of us would wish ourselves on benefits with no process. And your answer is therefore what? Because there is a cap on non-EU migration coming into the country, it's controversial among some people, but it's there. But what about EU migration, which has been much bigger, of course? It is, and I mean, I do think that was the elephant in the room in the last election campaign, which none of us really had the honesty to address. I think that we need to revisit this whole idea of, is it fundamental to the EU that any person can go anywhere in any number, certainly for future entrants? I mean, I happen to believe that Turkey should come into the EU, because we want Turkey, we want to tell people that EU isn't a sort of Christian conspiracy, it's an all-inclusive club. But the idea that we could bring Turkey in and allow any number of Turks to come and work in any country in the Western Europe, I just think, is not honest with people. So I think one point of restriction is- It's a new make of this, because, of course, the history of Ireland has been the history of emigration, and then, at least for a short period of time, immigration and no immigration again, as you said. Yeah. One of the things from the Irish experience is, of course, that we learn nothing from our own experience. So you had Ireland being the great immigrant nursery of the Western world, you know, having sent generation after generation as economic migrants, classic economic migrants around the world. As soon as things changed, and Ireland became a country which was attracting inward migrants, which was stunning for most of us, it was like people coming to the Sahara for the skiing, you know, that people coming to Ireland for the job, you know, it was amazing. But, of course, you immediately got people complaining about the migrants, you know, with no sense at all of Ireland, no sense of having learned anything. And I just think we need to be really careful about this. I think it's really good that Nick is addressing it. You know, you can't go on not talking about immigration, because if you don't talk about rationally and in a civilized way, it would be spoken about irrationally and in an uncivilized way. But I would qualify what Nick's saying with just two things. One is most of my aunts and uncles left Ireland in the 1950s and came to England to work. And they were exactly the sort of people who would be excluded under a quota. They were unskilled. They were uneducated. They'd all left school at 14. They had nothing to offer in economic terms. They took advantage of the welfare state. They got housing. They got schools for their kids. They got good health services. You know, their kids, their grand kids are good English citizens. They work hard. And I think they've contributed a lot to society here. And so there was a question of scale. Wasn't there? Well, well, I mean, an awful lot of Irish people came. I mean, come on, you know, it's very hard to find an Irish person. It doesn't have an Irish granny, you know, and there's reasons for that. I mean, the scale is very large. And I suppose what I'm saying is immigrants are us as well as them. And I think you'd be really careful about that. Do you think you ought to be really careful about it? I mean, Nick talks in his book about England as one or Britain as one nation and trying to integrate immigrants into the idea of one nation. Well, the last time I looked, Britain was not one nation. You know, I thought there was Scotland and Wales. And you know, you're talking about epic history being taught, well, whose history exactly are you going to teach? You know, you have to be very careful about the idea of people, people are capable of having multiple identities. Most of us have. And I don't think multiple identities are the kind of problem that sometimes they're made out of it. I think the example I'd use is American approach, you know, which is that you are African American, you're Korean American, you're any kind of American, you, of course, you have multiple identities. But do these people know American history, want to know what American values are and want to be part of them and want to sign up to them in full? What's been fascinating is Muslim Americans. There has been, you know, where we have had real problems with Islamism among certain groups of our own second and third generation Muslims who've been born in Britain. That hasn't been the problem in the States. And it's because they are better at integrating, while allowing people to have that other identity you talk about, nevertheless make sure they sign up to some one nation idea. I don't think you can look at an American inner city and say that it's integrated. You can't say that. It's not, you know, it's that you have white, black, it's completely separate. Okay, maybe they're Americans, but they're still a war. And now I completely accept that. And I think in many other ways, actually, weirdly, we're further ahead. But I think on this particular idea that the immigrants who come to America believe they're American want to be American, I think is something that they have done, which we have not managed to do in this country. And do you think their children should recite the Pledge of Allegiance? Well, it's one of the ideas I throw out there is that we should have a Pledge of Allegiance. The key things is not compulsory, as it isn't in the States. It's not compulsory. But it happens in every school, every morning, and they just stand up and they say, I pledge allegiance to this country. You've lot who are all better writers than thinkers than me would write it. But I think that we need a moment in which people make a commitment, because of all the behavioral psychologists tell you that if people make a verbal commitment every day to something, if the Quakers have their morning prayer session, which they did at the beginning of every working day, people will want their behavior to conform to that commitment that they've made. But it wasn't just a prayer and you buy into, you know, that you had to, there was a whole set of really applying the values to people's lives. So they would sit there and have a discussion and try to work out how they could help people in the slums in a much fuller way. We're now going to move on to a migrant worker, Quaker, chocolate maker, Camille Sassons. Well, actually, no, he wasn't. It would have made the program, neither, if he had been. On the other hand, on the other hand, astronomer, travel writer, animal rights campaigner, math scholar, playwright, poet, as well as, of course, a great composer, multimalist, and philosopher. But some philosophy. And yet his reputation as a composer hasn't been as high as he'd ought to be, you think? No, I think it's a problem for Sassonsons. I love his music very much. But the problem is you can switch on the radio and hear a Sassons piece and not realise it's by Sassons. You switch on a piece of Beethoven, you know it's Beethoven. I mean, if you know something about music, switch on a piece of Bach, you know it's Bach, whatever. Sassonsons is a chameleon. I mean, that somehow says it that he was expert in so many fields. He was almost too clever. So he could write in so many different styles. He took so many influences. And if a composer can't be pigeonholed, then people start to disapprove of him. And so you're starting a year as artists in residence at the Wigmore Hall in London, and 110 years of the Wigmore Hall amazingly, and you're giving your concerts are going to feature a lot of Sassons. Well, the first three, I know for 12 months I'm doing lots of different things, including some children's concerts. Sassons would have approved of him. He would have, he would have, he would have, the animals, which is one of the funniest pieces of classical music and also very beautiful. Yeah, so I'm going to feature Sansons. I always like to feature the sort of the underprivileged composers as it were. Of course, Sansons is a very famous name, but actually if you ask even musicians how many of these pieces they know comes down to about five. And he's fascinating. And a lot of this does involve politics in the wider sense I suppose, because he was an early champion of Wagner and Liszt. He was. And then later on, does the First World War and so on, he becomes one of the leading sort of Germano phobes. Yeah, so he was always very nationalistic. I mean, he felt that the French music was being overtaken by migrants, so he sort of championed society of French music, and he put on concerts of young French composers and his own music. And yeah, he's a, I mean, he's a contradiction in every way. People thought he was anti-Semitic because he didn't speak out in favour of Dreyfus and the Dreyfus case, but then he gave money for Dreyfus' defence. And yeah, he's always misunderstood. He was a difficult man at his 83rd birthday party. Half the guests wouldn't speak to him. That was great. And while they went, I don't know. And yet you found a wonderful photograph of him grinning. No, it's a film. It's a film. It's in the film Paris 1900. I went to the National Film Theatre and sat through like two hours of these faces I didn't mostly recognise, and then the sassons of this gorgeous smile. I mean, he's a very, well, it's also a tragic story. He, um, it's both his sons died with him about six weeks in each other. One fell off a window ledge, the other died of a measles or something. And he was a very sad man. He was quite lonely, but he was just a genius. I mean, just, you know, apparently he was the greatest organist in Europe, one of the greatest pianists, great conductor. I mean, you know, he wrote about other things, but he also wrote a lot about music and he knew all about room and theatres and old ancient instruments. I mean, it's interesting that most Western cultures have problems with polymaths. I mean, everybody gets irritated by Jonathan Miller because he can do three or four different things quite well. It's not allowed. That is irritating. You get irritated by anybody. You can do one thing well. But we always want to, yeah, we want, we want to pigeonhole people and say this person does this or this person does that. And, and sassons is perhaps a victim of that, maybe. But yes, I think there is that. But there's also, you know, as I say, just that because he knew so much, his music had too many influences. I think it's wonderful that there's a sasson revival. I came across the requiem a few years ago and thought it was exquisitely beautiful and tried to get hold of it and couldn't get hold of it anywhere. So I feel it's long overdue. And what I find amazing about sasson is that he started his life when you were more likely to have Burke and Mozart played. And by the end of his life, you know, you've got the, the incredible fluidity of Ravel and Debussy. And somehow sasson spans this and you can see the beginnings of this in his music. I don't know how you feel that came about, but it seems to me that's the genius. Yeah. I mean, he talked, Fourier, who talked Ravel, but of course he was still around. I mean, he survived Debussy. Yeah, well, I mean, he's obviously influenced by Mozart at the age of five. He was given as a birthday press on the score, full orchestral score of Don Giovanni, and he used to go to bed and read it at night at the age of five. And then very late in his life, Stravinsky, well, not that late, 10 years before he died, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was performed in a famous riot in Paris. And then the second performance, which is a concert performance, sasson was sitting there in a box. And it starts with a very, very high bassoon, which sounds like nothing on a sasson. What's that instrument? Somebody said, "Maitre, it's a bassoon." It's a lie. He said he went out, slammed the door. So I guess he maybe lived a little long to be here. I just wonder whether, whether wrongly, people feel that if you haven't committed to a particular style in creation, that somehow therefore you're a bit of a, you're a bit meritricious, you're sort of loose and then authentic. And while I don't see that as being right, because God knows Shakespeare could do many different styles and maybe criticize him for it. Maybe in music, somehow that's considered less acceptable. Well, I think it makes life difficult for critics and they don't know that. Writers about music. I mean, one has a problem and stands on so he writes that. And then, yeah, it is. I've used this analogy before. If a sheep in a field starts bleeding, then all the others start bleeding as well. And that has happened with people who write about music. But I have to say, musicians generally defend him. Well, the last thing we want to do in this program is make life difficult for critics. If you're not listening, of course, we have run out of time. Thank you to all of my guests. Enough is enough. I'd build a new Republic by Fintano tool. It's published this week. Deborah Cadbury's Chocolate Wars. And which weighs up by Nick Bowles out now as well. Stephen Islas will be playing at the Whigmore Hall in London this month and throughout the year, as he said, full details on the website. We did mistakenly say that Quakers can't marry out. Apparently Quakers can marry out. And since we've established we need more Quakers in this country, people have Britain, this is your moment. Get yourself a Quaker. Next week, financial journalist and anthropologist Gillian Tett looks at the new Gold Rush, poet Lars Gustafson talks about the responsibilities of the artist Patrick Wilken reassesses the reputation of the great French intellectual Claude Levy Strauss. And Ed Villiami brings dispatches from the American Mexican drug wars. But for now, thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Eleanor Garland.