Monthly Archives: September 2018

Architecture, Arts, Culture, Scotland

The V&A Museum of Design

SCOTLAND

DUNDEE’S equivalent of the Pompidou in Paris or Bilbao’s Guggenheim is now on full view. The V&A, designed by Kengo Kuma, is simply staggering.

With its instantly recognisable outline – part sea cliff, part galleon – the £80.4million V&A Museum of Design may soon find itself revered as a global design icon.

Certainly, few who have seen Scotland’s first dedicated design museum are likely to be left unmoved by its dizzyingly ambitious zigzag slabs of rough concrete, described variously as a crash-landed Egyptian pyramid, the ribbed carcass of a beached whale and the ragged remains of a mighty shipwreck. Art in its full splendour and glory.

On display: The £80million museum’s collection is expected to attract 500,000 visitors in its first year.

Following its official opening, the “V&Tay”, as it is ostensibly and affectionately known to its London colleagues, is expected to attract some 500,000 visitors from around the world in its first year alone, generating tens of millions of pounds for the local economy.

Critics may welcome a time when this controversial project starts to pay its way, having been blown off course by years of construction delays and escalating costs before finally anchoring itself at the heart of the city’s £1billion waterfront regeneration.

Since its conception, the original £45million budget has almost doubled and its Japanese architect and designer had been forced to tow his initial plan for a water-bound structure back to dry land.

On the V&A’s opening, however, a preview which was attended by dozens of the world’s media, Mr Kuma pronounced himself satisfied that his vision to create a “living room for the city” had been realised.

The attraction’s galleries showcase 300 objects, including Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Oak Room and the painstakingly reconstructed interior of Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street tearoom which has not been seen for 50 years.

Mr Kuma said: “It is fitting that the restored Oak Room by Charles Rennie Mackintosh is at the heart of this building as I have greatly admired his designs since I was a student.

“In the Oak Room, people will feel his sensibility and respect for nature, and hopefully connect it with our design for V&A Dundee. I hope the museum can change the city and become its centre of gravity.”

He said the magisterial light-filled atrium with its sweeping staircase and waves of oak panel boards was a nod to Mackintosh, who was deeply influenced by oriental art and design.

Mr Kuma said: “When I saw [Mackintosh’s] buildings as a student I was very surprised at how Japanese they were. Japanese quality, [and] Japanese sensitivity exist in his designs.”

Everywhere in the museum, glimpses of the Tay can be caught through small windows, while the hall and stairs glint with fossilised coral set into limestone flooring.

Complementing his daring design are the – often quirky – exhibits of the Scottish Design Galleries, from the so-called Valkyrie tiara, created by Cartier using more than 2,500 diamonds for Mary Crewe-Milnes, Duchess of Roxburghe, in 1935, to cutting-edge environmental material crafted from the fibres of stinging nettles by Dundee-based firm Halley Stevensons for Glasgow backpack-maker Trakke.

There is also some hand-coloured Beano artwork for a Dennis the Menace cartoon strip from 1960.

Also in the collection is the largest remaining fragment of the Titanic – part of a door from the first-class lounge of the liner – and a costume worn by Natalie Portman’s character, Padmé Amidala, in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, which was created by Trisha Biggar, the Glasgow designer.

A full-sized clay model Jaguar car sits between the entrants to the permanent collection and the opening touring show, Ocean Liners: Speed and Style, which tells the story of Scotland’s role in the golden age of cruise liners.

V&A Dundee’s director, Philip Long, said “it was with some emotion” that he was finally able to unveil the museum and that the challenges that beset the huge project had been overcome, more than a decade after it was originally proposed.

Another V&A director, Dr Tristram Hunt, said Ocean Liners: Speed and Style could “not be a more appropriate inaugural exhibition for Mr Kuma’s amphibious, semi-nautical, wonderful museum that is so successfully reconnecting the city with its historic waterfront”.

Dundee City Council leader John Alexander told invited guests to the first viewing of the museum that he felt a “tremendous sense of pride” in the building.

He said: “There’s a fire in the bellies of Dundonians that wasn’t there ten years ago. Dundee is leading the charge in cultural-led regeneration.”

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European Court, Government, Legal, Society

ECHR ruling: Intelligence agencies can harvest data

PERSONAL DATA COLLECTION

Controversial powers that have been used by British spies to hoover up vast amounts of personal information to help foil major terrorist plots do not automatically breach human rights, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.

It said UK intelligence agencies could scoop up data belonging to millions of citizens if there were proper safeguards and supervision.

Judges said harvesting and storing data on the websites people visited, who they called, texted or emailed, and their medical, tax and financial records was not “in and of itself” unlawful.

The ruling will be a boost to the Government, which says collecting “bulk data” and communications information has been crucial in preventing jihadist plots.

Ministers brought in the Investigatory Powers Act last year to tighten up the UK’s use of sweeping surveillance powers and introduced new oversights.

However, the ECHR found that the previous spying regime – exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations about intelligence techniques – did violate human rights.

In 2013, Mr Snowden revealed that GCHQ, the UK’s eavesdropping agency, had been secretly collecting communications sent over the internet on an industrial scale.

The ECHR judgment said the system did not have any proper safeguards because it led to completely “untargeted” collection of information.

It ruled this had violated Article 8 and Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights – safeguarding privacy and confidential journalistic material.

The court’s ruling related to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act which was replaced by the new Act at the start of 2017.

The court acknowledged that this act makes significant changes to the interception and communications data regimes, though critics call it a “turbocharged snoopers’ charter”.

The British Government has said it would give “careful consideration” to the ruling.

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Britain, Economic, Financial Markets, Government, Politics, Society

The real crisis of capitalism

ECONOMIC

THE past week has been a time for recalling the events of September 2008, their long shadow over the economics and politics of the past ten years and for drawing the right lessons for the future.

In particular, did the financial crisis prove that capitalism is fundamentally unstable and that a new model involving greater control and a much bigger role for the state, as favoured by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, is a better one? Or, the fact that the guilty men and women mainly got away with it, meant that public anger over the crisis was never assuaged?

We should understand that the financial crisis did not begin on the weekend of September 13-14, 2008, which saw frantic but unsuccessful efforts to save Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank. The crisis had been simmering for well over a year, a period that saw the run on Northern Rock and the start of Britain’s deepest recession in the post-war period.

The bankruptcy of Lehman, announced on September 15, turned a smouldering crisis into a ravaging forest fire that spread rapidly around the world. Banks were bailed-out by free-market governments using public funds. Alongside near-zero interest rates, central banks including the Bank of England did things they never would have contemplated in normal circumstances, most notably quantitative easing (or the printing of free money). Governments spent vast sums of money that ran into the billions boosting their economies to ease the impact of the crisis, but on the basis that they would cut back later. Austerity, on a scale and duration not seen in this country since the Geddes axe of the 1920s, was the course chosen by the coalition government in 2010.

 

MOST of what people think they know about the past decade is wrong. The danger in 2008 was of a prolonged period of deflation – falling prices and economic depression, a modern version of the 1930s. The reality is that both were avoided. After the shock of the crisis the economy grew more slowly than had been the norm, but it grew. All advanced economies were afflicted by weaker growth.

Income inequality in Britain has fallen since the crisis, not least because the burden of tax faced by the highest earners has increased. This financial year, 2018-19, the top 1% will pay almost 28% of all income tax, compared with just over 24% in 2007-08, paying £12bn a year more in tax than before the near meltdown. The top 10% accounts for 59.7% of all income tax revenues, up from 54.3%.

Austerity, as practised by the coalition led by David Cameron and now by a Tory minority government under Theresa May, was never about shrinking the size of the state for ideological reasons. The coalition’s mantra before the crisis was that after the spending splurge under Gordon Brown, the “proceeds of growth” would in future be shared between tax cuts and increased public spending.

Even faced with the task of reducing an out-of-control budget deficit, Mr Cameron ring-fenced NHS spending and imposed a target of spending 0.7% of gross national income on foreign aid. A better criticism of Tory austerity is that too much of it involved cuts to government investment and that the process has dragged on for too long, partly because it was leavened with tax cuts, mostly for working people.

 

THE financial crisis and its aftermath were painful but too many Tories seem to have been cowed by it from making a robust case for capitalism. This leaves the way open for Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, Labour’s anti-capitalist chancellor. When a privatised rail company messes up, or a housebuilding boss is awarded a bonus running into tens of millions of pounds, there is rightly an outcry. The crisis itself was the product, yes, of many greedy bankers and a few in handcuffs might have satisfied public opinion, but it was also the consequence of regulators whose job it was to stop them failing. In many cases, including the recent collapse of Carillion, many of these problems arise at the interface between the public and private sector.

Of course, we all want to return to a time when living standards are rising at a decent pace. That will be achieved only when productivity growth also returns to something approaching past norms. Capitalism in Britain has, since the crisis, delivered something like seven times the number of new jobs as those cut by the public sector. Unemployment is at its lowest since the mid-1970s. It is the private sector, not failed prescriptions of anti-capitalism, that will deliver prosperity in the future.

 

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