Soap Opera

A row has broken out over the reviews of a new production of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne. The critics have objected to aspects of the performance, specifically to the body-type of Tara Erraught, who is playing Count Octavian. Here's what they've said:

'Tara Erraught’s Octavian is a chubby bundle of puppy-fat, better suited to playing Mariandel in Acts 1 and 3 than the romantic rose-cavalier of Act 2 - ' wrote Andrew Clark in the Financial Times, adding, as if this is a distantly secondary consideration - 'albeit gloriously sung'. At least Rupert Christiansen in the Telegraph applauds her singing before turning to her figure: 'she is dumpy of stature and whether in bedroom déshabille, disguised as Mariandel[,] or in full aristocratic fig, her costuming makes her resemble something between Heidi and Just William. Is Jones simply trying to make the best of her intractable physique or is he trying to say something about the social-sexual dynamic?'. Richard Morrison in The Times makes even swifter work of her performance: 'Unbelievable, unsightly and unappealing'. In The Independent, Michael Church originally called Erraught a 'dumpy girl', though has had the cowardly decency to get that quietly edited out. Even The Guardian gets in on the act with Andrew Clements declaring that 'it's hard to imagine this stocky Octavian as this willowy wom[a]n's plausible lover'.

These critics are wrong at so many levels, that it's hard to disentangle them. First, of course, it's really disgraceful to say these personal and unpleasant things about another human being who, let's remember, has to go on stage every night in front of an audience and sing this role. At this level the problem is one of impoliteness. Second, there is the horrible, sneering misogyny of these comments. As if being 'unsightly and unappealing' to Richard Morrison is something an opera singer should be criticised for. Kiri Te Kanawa was on Radio 4 this morning and her dreadful defence of Erraught was to say she'd been frumpily costumed and anyway she's a 'lovely little girl'. Look, I think the picture at the top of this article shows how beautiful Erraught is, but that is not the point. It's about male opera critics thinking they have a right to judge a mezzo-soprano almost entirely on her looks. As we've seen Andrew Clark only adds a comment on her singing as an afterthought; Andrew Clements deals with the three women leads' voices in a sentence. Michael Church and Richard Morrison don't mention Erraught's  singing at all.

There has been some push-back, notably from the former North American editor of Gramophone, Anastasia Tsioulcas, who is wonderfully icy and determined in her remarks. The great Alice Coote has written a powerful attack on these reviews. Her argument is simple: these criticisms are entirely out of place because 'OPERA is ALL about the voice'. Any reference to the visual aspect of a body is irrelevant, because Opera 'is about and really ONLY about communication through great singing'. 

Is that right? Let me first say that I've not seen this production. Let me also admit that I'm not an avid operagoer. But I think there are some principles at stake here that overlap opera and theatre, about which I do know something. I am sure it is true to say that the vocal performance in opera is supremely important and by that we mean something live; it is not true to say that everything you can from live performance can be got from a recording. As in theatre, it's not just the performance but that the performance is happening there, right there, for us, by that extraordinary human being only a few arms' length away and which will never be repeated in quite the same way again. But that doesn't mean that this is the only thing that opera is about. In the nineteenth century, operas were frequently given as little more than recitals in some form of costume. Audiences were there for the live performance but not for the theatre of it. After Wagner and other innovators, the production became much more important and opera became immersive theatre avant la lettre a fusion of all the arts at the highest level, straining to give experiences of transcendent ravishment. So while opera may place the vocal performance at its heart or its height, it does not seem correct to say that comments on the visual aspects of the performance are out of place. Sexist and misogynist comments are - for other reasons - disgraceful but that doesn't mean critics should not be entitled, indeed encouraged, to assess the visual aspects of the performance.

Which leads me to my main point. It seems to me not a problem that the critics are making comments on the visuals; I don't even think that the fundamental problem is the sexism. It's the preposterous literalism of these comments that seems so out of place. 

Let's just recap here. This is the story of Der Rosenkavalier: Octavian is the young and secret lover of the older Princess von Werdenberg, whose husband is away. After a night of passionate sex, they are repeatedly interrupted and almost discovered, so Octavian dresses up as a chambermaid 'Mariandel' and thereby attracts the attention of the Princess's cousin, Baron Ochs. The Baron himself has been wooing the beautiful and wealthy heiress Sophie and is seeking a rose-cavalier, a young nobleman to take a silver rose to her as a way of proposing marriage on the Baron's behalf. This Octavian does but he and Sophie fall in love at once and Sophie spurns her fiancé. The Baron is furious and in the confusion is scratched with a sword, whereupon he pretends to be gravely wounded; the marriage is back on the cards. Octavian sends a letter purporting to be from Mariandel, accepting an invitation to dinner, so the Baron thinks he has both women. But as they are dining together, some hired hands have created a strange pantomime in which ghostly figures accuse the Baron and others appear claiming to be his wife and children. All is chaos, topped by Sophie's father discovering the tryst and fainting. Eventually the Princess arrives, sees off the Baron, and gives up her young lover Octavian to marry Sophie.

Chekhov it ain't. This is a farcical story, a broadly comic opera with some deeper resonances about the fickleness of male affection and the toll of time on women's attractiveness to men (a thematic which might have given - but didn't - those opera critics pause before they declared themselves on the matter of Erraught's figure). There is, to be sure, some degree of psychological truthfulness - it's not an entirely surreal fantasy - but its brush is broad and the strokes are vividly coloured. 

Can I just point out a couple of other obvious things? Octavian is conceived as a breeches role. It's a male role, to be played by a woman. This creates all sorts of non-realistic resonances: we watch a woman playing a man playing a woman; it allows for all sorts of queer frissons in the relationships between Octavian and the Marschallin and between Octavian and Sophie and between Octavian and the Baron Ochs and between Octavian and Mariandel; it also creates pleasurable intertextual references to similar breeches roles like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro. And finally: they're singing. The whole way through, when we know that in the imagined fictional world they are speaking, here we are seeing them singing. 

This is not naturalism. What we see is not what we take to be happening in the opera's fictional world. This is probably truer of opera than any other kind of performance. 

But look at the miserable defences that these critics have made of their comments? Richard Morrison in The Times this morning declared that audience 'expect dramatic credibility. They get that in films, in TV dramas and in the spoken theatre and don't see why exceptions have to be made for opera. When they are paying up to £215 a ticket, as at Glyndebourne, those expectations are pretty high'.

What a crock of shit. First, just because you see something in one cultural area, it does not mean you expect to see it somewhere else. On TV and film I see images projected against a screen; I don't expect to see that in the theatre. When I read novels and poetry, I see words printed on a page; I don't think I have a right to see that in an Opera, even if I were paying £500 a ticket. The problem here is that he's used this weaselly term 'dramatic credibility' and then secretly decided it means realism. But it doesn't mean that and he's offered no explanation for why he thinks it means that. And, let's also remember: this is a Richard Jones opera production. Richard Jones, who has probably gone as far from naturalism as any major director in this country; a man who has staged a scratch-and-sniff Love of Three Oranges for ENO in the early nineties is probably not really fishing in the naturalism pond.

This is important, because if the idea that the theatre can only represent the world through visual verisimilitude takes hold in opera, we're all sunk. Opera is like the bulwark against this kind of thin-lipped, flat-minded literalism in live performance. It has everything going for it: music (never realistic), the plots (never realistic), the scale (never realistic), the casting (never realistic), the designs (mostly unrealistic). There is always this push towards the directly realistic, the relatable (hideous hideous word), the accessible (defined as narrowly as possible). And these things are modes in which theatre can move and has moved very valuable from time to time, but it is a small percentage of what the theatre can be. How much will we impoverish ourselves and hurt the grandeur of a culture by telling extraordinary women like Tara Erraught that she's too fat to play a man who could attract two women. And there again, we see the thinness of this so-called realism: how many big, fat, generous, fleshy guys do you see with slim and beautiful women? Loads. This isn't realism; it's literal-mindedness which in turn is a mask for ideology.

Morrison suggests that it would be hypocritical to suggest that the production doesn't want us to comment on the bodies: 'The curtain goes up on the Marschallin, played by Kate Royal, gyrating - totally naked - in a shower of glitter. What is that except a blatant incitement for the audience (and critics) to take an interest in the bodies on stage as well as the voices?' See again, the duplicity and confusions. First, one naked body doesn't licence you to simply write the entire review with your cock in hand. Second, there's a keyword there: glitter. Is this a deliberate appeal to your lust or is it a knowing, camp, representation of desire as excess? Is it not referring to the gaze of the male/female Octavian, staging it as problem and question? Third, taking an interest in the bodies on stage is not the same as rebuking a woman for her weight. You should notice the bodies, but the bodies are part of the whole system by which the production is asking us to look again at this story, these characters, these feelings, that music, this opera. It is not an invitation for critics to fat-shame a young woman.

Fair's Fair

There's a thing people have started saying which interests and puzzles me. It's 'to be fair'. Now, I know what 'to be fair' usually means, but what's happening now is that people are using it exactly in place of 'to be honest'.

It's a very subtle shift of meaning but it's definitely happening: I've noticed it for a couple of years now. I first heard it in footballers' post-match interviews. 'Our defending just isn't good enough, to be fair', 'if we want to escape relegation, we're going to have to give it 110%, to be fair'. But it's spread elsewhere. Last week, I heard a chef in a TV cookery competition admit 'If I don't up my game I'm going home, to be fair'.

Each of these comments would have made perfect sense with 'to be honest' in the place of 'to be fair'. They make slightly less clear sense with 'to be fair'.

What's happening here?

First let's recap on what these two different adverbial clauses mean. 'To be honest' announces, as it says, a confession, a new level of honesty. It says, 'I'll come clean'; it suggests sincerity and honesty ('to be honest, I just haven't got round to it', 'to be honest, I just don't know'). It doesn't just have to mean laying oneself bare in a vulnerable way; it can also be used to announce the removal of euphemism and tact ('to be honest, I'm really wondering why I don't just sack you', 'to be honest, you're getting on my tits'). It adds force or authority to an utterance by drawing attention to one's personal attitudes, beliefs and opinions.

'To be fair', previous to this new shift, meant a re-establishment of balance. Either I have been unfair to you (or another), as in 'to be fair, though, he does work very hard' or 'no, you did say that, to be fair'; or you (or another) have been unfair to me, 'to be fair, you'd have to admit I've been saying this since July', 'to be fair, that was not in our agreement'. 'To be fair' in this context adds force or authority by drawing attention to impersonal facts about the world.

What is interesting then, is that people using 'to be fair' in this new context are replacing a directly personal declaration with one that has the appearance of being impersonal. 'Our defending isn't good enough, to be fair' has the patina of reasonableness, objectivity as if we're talking about someone else; 'our defending isn't good enough, to be honest' sounds, in comparison, like a vulnerable admission; it is almost a confession that brings about a crisis. It charges the present encounter with meaning and momentum; I am saying something to you. Something has to change, both in the fault being admitted and the nature of the present encounter. But 'our defending isn't good enough, to be fair' allows acknowledgement of error but holds it at a distance, cools it down.

In that sense, I wonder if it is similar to the epidemic of 'myself' that I've noted before. Its an impersonalisation of a personal utterance, as if our language is reflecting an aversion to personal encounters. It's a way of avoiding the emotional intensity of the situation. 

Interviewer. How happy are you with your own performance?
Footballer. I guess that's for yourself to judge.
Interview. You must have an opinion.
Footballer. Our defending isn't good enough, to be fair.

This is not an implausible exchange (listen to BBC 5Live on any Saturday, you'll hear versions of this). I think in this context, it may be about a footballer not wanting to come out and say 'I played badly', because of (a) ego and (b) not wanting to let down team morale. But it has spread into the wider culture and I wonder if we do culturally have a problem now with face-to-face contact. I'm sure I'm not the only person who prefers to email or text than to speak on the phone. That's partly about control and convenience; rather than commit to a negotiation, you can just send off your question and now it's up to someone else to deal with. But this creates an attenuation of everything else that's involved in communication; maintenance of friendship beyond mere utility, checking in on a sense of community, the  exchange of informalities, small acts of emotional labour, the grain of the voice.

And what if the values and practices of email and text were to creep further into face-to-face contact, such that the latter becomes reduced to utilitarian exchanges, hemmed in by health warnings and risk aversion? Odd verbal formations like the new 'to be fair' are perhaps the linguistic equivalent of those warnings at the bottom of corporate emails. This from the BBC:

This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated.
If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system.
Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately.
Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails sent or received.
Further communication will signify your consent to this.

There's something about 'to be fair' that suspends the situation, holds it in tongs, sanitises and quarantines what we're talking about.

This new 'to be fair' seems to me part of the way we are turning away from personal contact, allowing a form of privatisation of the public sphere. How can we reacquaint ourselves with each other, commit ourselves once again to just being with one another, unlimited by what we need to get out of any exchange?

And in case you think I'm pointing the finger anywhere else, I'm really not. This is a note to self, to be fair.

Money is No Object

Britain is enduring the worst flooding for 250 years but don't worry, David Cameron is on the case. 

My message to the country today is this. Money is no object in this relief effort, whatever money is needed for it will be spent. We will take whatever steps are necessary. [...] We are a wealthy country and we have taken good care of our public finances.

Well that sounds like good news, doesn't it? Except it's rubbish. Obviously rubbish. Is he really making unlimited public funds available to sort the crisis out? Dredging rivers, draining fields, building run-offs, widening sewer mains, rebuilding, restoring and rehousing flooded-out families? This could all cost 100s of billions. Why would David Cameron, who has been so scornful of the last Labour Government for spending 100s of billions preventing the banking system from collapsing, write the emergency services a blank cheque?

The answer is of course that he isn't. The Transport Secretary has been carefully redefining the meaning of these words:

I don't think it's a blank cheque. I think what the prime minister was making very clear is that we are going to use every resource of the government and money is not the issue while we are in this relief job, in the first instance, of trying to bring relief to those communities that are affected

So by 'money is no object', he meant 'money is not the only way we will offer help', which is strange because that is not in any sense what those words mean.

In case we are still hoping for large-scale government action, the Tory Chief Whip has today explained:

Money is no object in this relief effort. We have increasing funding for flood defence to £2.4 billion over the four years of this government from the £2.2 billion of the previous four years.

That's hardly a blank cheque. It's, what, £50 million more a year? Except that it isn't even that. The Tories have a tendency to include local authority funding in their estimates. Direct government spending, as they recently had to reveal, has gone up from £2.341 billion in the 2011-15 spending review to a whopping £2.371 billion in the next. A change of £30 million, or £7.5 million per year, with the funding not kicking in for a year or more. And I don't know what inflation will do to that figure either; is it possible that they will actually have cut funding for flood defences in real terms?

The thing is, I don't think they can help themselves. It's not that they are lying to us. It's just ideology. It's what the Right does: it denies the central foundation of their belief: that the profit motive is what sorts everything out, not altruism, or moral responsibility, or kindness, or love, just profit. Which means that money, according to them, should come first; it should be the top practical priority. Because this is clearly such a despicable attitude, they are reluctant to say it out loud. So the head of a privatised rail company tells us, with all sincerity, that 'safety is our number one priority', even though their fiduciary duty to their shareholders means that it mustn't be. Safety is only important if an accident hits profits, but all these companies know there for the shareholders danger must be balanced by profit.

So when David Cameron tells us that 'money is no object' he's just exercising that ideological reflex to deny the overwhelming crowning importance of money in his view of the world. He's so used to denying what he thinks, he even says it when it means nothing and stands in blatant contradiction to everything else he thinks.

It's pure ideology, pure misdirection, pure hokum. Look at it: the phrase is almost a vanishing trick - whoosh! look - and the object is gone...

Not I

Samuel Beckett's Not I has to be seen in a theatre to be understood. The play takes the form of a nine-minute monologue performed by a disembodied mouth babbling in the darkness. The words, when spoken as quickly as Lisa Dwan does at the Court, are almost impossible to follow. Instead you take in the image and the whole experience. That experience is very emotional, perhaps extremely so. Oddly, I find myself watching this play physically aware of my spectatorship. Watching it I feel my skin crawling and a sense of sympathetic physical tension taking me over. Ironically, this play performed only by a mouth is a full-body experience. 

I first saw Not I  when I was 17 or 18, I think, at a study day about Samuel Beckett at the University of Birmingham, I think, or it may have been Reading. I'm fairly sure it was a student performer and there were presentations by James Knowlson and Gerry McCarthy about Beckett's work; there was, I vaguely recall, an extract from Godot too. I'd read Not I, as a bit of a Beckettophile teenager, but nothing really prepared me for the effect of seeing it live. First, the mouth is tiny; of course, it's a mouth. And even in a darkened theatre, unless you're very near, it denatures quickly, not looking much like a mouth, but variously, a pulsing point of light, a cat's eye; at moments it seemed to me that it has rotated 90 degrees and the jaws were moving sideways; throughout, the mouth seemed to drift within the proscenium, even though I knew that was not possible. The effect was exhilarating and nightmarish. When I described it to a friend that evening, he said I sounded like I'd been on a ghost train.

I directed the play at university. Liz Harris played the part and talking to her about it was extraordinarily interesting. I'd sort of thought of Beckett as a bit cruel to his actors, making them crouch (not sit or stand) in an urn for Play, burying them in sand up to their waist and then neck in Happy Days, and, in Not I, placing you high above a stage, head braced in one position forced to repeat a nine-minute text at terrifying speed. It has always stayed with me that when I mentioned this thought to Liz, she replied: 'oh no, I think he's very kind to his actors. There's a short series of screams that he gives us in Not I and when I get to that bit I always say "thank you, Sam' because without being able to scream, to let out the tension, Not I would be unbearable to do'. In fact, no one writes for actors like Beckett. Unlike most playwrights he writes for actors as bodies, not just mouths.

One of the things that strikes me is the way he aligns the play with the performance situation very closely. In Happy Days, Winnie is buried up to her waist in sand which is rising to engulf her but seems gaily unconcerned, perhaps even deliberately unaware of this awful situation. She distracts herself from her gradual annihilation with her memories expressed in repeated motifs ('what is that unforgettable line') and the contents of her handbag (including a revolver which it never occurs to her to use on herself). The actress, one might say, is also in a rather awful situation, having to handle a two-hour monologue virtually single-handed (her husband is on stage but not visible to the actress, and providing little significant interaction). The fear, I suppose, is of getting lost in the text, forgetting your lines, drying. Buried in that sand, there would be nothing to do but face the embarrassed stares of the audience. In other words, there is a precise alignment of the character, distracting herself from her predicament with props and catchphrases and the actor doing exactly the same. In Beckett's production notebooks for his own 1979 production he itemises all of the props and repeated verbal motifs, making it very clear how deliberately he reduces all of that in the second half, leaving the actress, buried up to her neck, facing her fear.

The tale that Mouth seems to be telling in Not I is about a woman, abandoned by her parents when young, lived a fairly uneventful - certainly rather silent - life until the age of 70 when, all of a sudden, while walking in a field, everything went dark; she could hear buzzing and was aware of a light; and she hears a voice and realises it is her own, a ceaseless babbling stream of language, and she begins to think she has being required to tell something but has no idea what. When an unseen interlocutor suggests that this woman is mouth herself she aggressively denies it in a way that only confirms that this is indeed her own story. 

But it's also, in many respects, the actress's own story. She too is sitting in the dark, babbling incoherently, and, if you perform it at the speed that Beckett asked Billie Whitelaw to do in his own production, the lines cannot be individually and consciously produced, but must be repeated from deep in the memory, bypassing, in a sense, conscious control. The play enacts its own experiment in trying to escape responsibility for one's own consciousness. The actress can get to a point of disengagement from the text, the brain just observing the mouth repeating it. If the actor feels they have to take conscious responsibility for the text, that may well get in the way of the performance and she'll dry.  The actress, too, has reason to wish that the mouth that is speaking is Not I. And because of the way the mouth will be illuminated, she will be aware of a light near her, a stage lantern that will be faintly buzzing.

Not I is, on one level, incomprehensible in performance. That is to say, its total effect is rich and complex but the detail of the lines will mostly be lost in the onrush of words. One catches snatches: 'merciful ... (brief laugh) ... God' 'old black shopping bag' 'lips... cheeks ... jaws ... tongue' 'tears presumably ... hers presumably' 'dull roar like falls' 'always winter some strange reason' 'start pouring it out ... steady stream ... mad stuff ... half the vowels wrong ... no one could follow' are some of the shards that embedded themselves in me this time. But the story is unlikely to be registered; it's the image, the sense of a person denying herself that we experience. The sheer difficulty of the task adds to the tension in the actress's voice that heightens the emotional intensity of the performance. Reciprocally, we appreciate the difficulty of the task which produces a certain tension in us. This tension is given focus and a certain existential dread because the image is so nightmarish: what is it? a brutally dissected bodily organ? a vagina dentata? an insane fellatrix? a voice of your conscience? (One tiny footnote: Not I opened at the Royal Court in January 1973; six months later, in the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court, came the premiere of The Rocky Horror Show; when Richard O'Brien came to film that show, he opens with a disembodied mouth singing the opening song [pictured]. Presumably not a coincidence? There are earlier precedents for the image, of course, including Dalí's Mae West Lips Sofa in 1937 or even John Pasche's 1970 Rolling Stones logo, but I'll bet Not I was the source.)

Lisa Dwan's performance is precise, beautiful and, surprisingly, funny. She gives it a much warmer sense of character than I've seen before, imbuing, for example, the location of Mouth's sudden change, Croker's Acres, with charm rather than the fury that Billie Whitelaw offered. This diminishes slightly the sense of the play as an experiment about how we might exist without consciousness, but it does allow us to enter into the world of the play with great generosity. Billie Whitelaw's performance was, by all accounts, astonishing but such a mindfuck that she got Big Sam to let her film it so that she would never have to do it again. The resulting film of Not I is just great and worth watching on a proper TV because at some point it will occur to you, even more nightmarishly, that your television has got a mouth. It reproduces some aspects of the theatre experience in that you oscillate between horrified experience of the overall image and a kind of horrified fascination with the mouth as an organ, Whitelaw's lips expanding, contracting, changing shape, several times a second and, at one moment, a blob of spittle forming on the lips (no time to lick, even) which then drops visibly onto the chin. It's a performance and a play that both seeks to escape the physical and shows us imprisoned by it; it also wants to escape consciousness but is imprisoned by it.

It's on at the Royal Court now, alongside a sepulchral Footfalls and surprisingly sad and compassionate Rockaby. Go go go.

Scotland 2014

What will happen on 18 September 2014, when Scotland goes to the polls to vote on independence?

The polls seem to be saying that they will reject independence by a majority, though perhaps not as clear a majority as once it seemed. Pretty much all the polls show between 25% and 35% planning to vote yes and between 40% and 55% planning to vote no. The large variations there should give us pause, though, as should the sizeable 'don't know' figures: 33% in the last poll I saw (December 2013). If those 'don't knows' convert to Yeses, then Scotland will be independent. There's only limited evidence that something like that could happen: so far, the polls broadly show that the lower the 'don't knows' the higher the 'No' lead, which suggests that there's most movement between 'don't knows' and 'No' voters.

Data taken from WingsOverScotland.com (2012)

Personally, I will take no particular pleasure in the failure of the Yes campaign. Not because I am a particular advocate of Scottish Independence: I think Scotland's influence in the UK is a fundamentally good thing, so I worry that we'd all become a worse, duller, more parochial, conservative and Conservative nation. One passionate advocate of Independence put aside these worries, saying that Scottish votes have never swung a UK election, but that's probably not true. As the table (left) shows, three times since the war, Labour would have been unable to govern without its Scottish MPs, though in 1964 it could perhaps have governed as a minority party, maybe after the 2nd 1974 election too (though that would almost certainly not have been called, given the revised result in February of that year). Now, as with all counterfactuals, we don't know how England would have behaved without Scotland, but those of us on the English Left have possible reason to worry about Scottish independence.

But that thought is selfish and no one on the Left should sacrifice the right of self-determination for the dream of a socialist England. As someone said, if the English are so worried about perpetual Conservative governments after Scottish Independence, all we have to do is stop voting for them. (I should also say, because someone is bound to raise this canard, that just because it is of course the Scots' legal right to determine their independence [or not], this does not mean that no one else is allowed to have or offer opinions about it, so don't bother trying to slap me down about that.)

The real reason I will take no pleasure in a No vote is the idiotic, scaremongering, unimaginative nature of the No campaign. For the last eighteen months, the No campaign has produced a non-stop series of dim-witted and preposterously false scare stories suggesting only inevitable catastrophe resulting from a Yes vote. Scotland will have to renegotiate 14,000 treaties! The Scots will be forced to join the Euro! Scottish phone bills will go up! And best of all, Scotland will have to give its pandas back!

They have offered nothing positive: there is no positive flesh on the bones of their positive slogan 'better together'. Why are we better together? In what sense will we not be together after independence? We in England will continue to benefit from Scottish culture in just the way that we benefit from French or American culture. Imagine the American "No" campaigner in 1773, worrying that they won't be able to use the pound and who will they put on their banknotes now? 

These thoughts are prompted again by this interview with David Greig, or, more precisely, by the extraordinary response to it in the comments below. I know, I know, never read the bottom half of the internet, but here you do see how the No campaign conducts itself almost entirely in ignorant bluster and, now, ad hominem insult: 'Well, well, well another separatist who's enjoyed an English education and success in London hoying his twopenneth worth of opinion in on what will be best for the "other" cities of England. Raging hypocrite springs to mind' writes one commentator; 'Who cares what the writer of the musical of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory thinks? Its a very patronising comment to campaign for Scotland to leave the UK and then tell England whats best for them. Arrogant twerp,' offers another. And what is Greig's crime? He is suggesting that Scottish independence might lead to a flowering of debate about the nature of English democracy. It would send a ripple through the system that says, things can change, we do not have to have the system that we have; we can do things differently. 

What is depressing is that the No campaign seem determined not to have that debate. Their approach is conservative, small-minded, blinkered. If it's characterised by anything, it seems to be a fear of even thinking about what change might be. It has whatever might be the opposite of imagination. In the very back of my mind is a thought so cynical that I mostly try to dismiss it as the product of some deep-seated misanthropy: could it possibly be that the Tories realise they will benefit from Independence and so have decided to conduct the worst campaign possible? I dismiss this pessimistic thought with an even gloomier one: no, they are conducting this campaign like this because this is the very essence of right-wing thinking: an aversion to the very possibility of change.

For what it's worth, if there's bad feeling after the referendum (assuming the No's have it), it will be because there was a moment for a debate and the No campaign won by refusing to have it.

Predictions, then: Labour will, if it has any sense at all, announce full support for Devo Max (full or substantial fiscal independence), perhaps at the Scottish Conference in late March. David Cameron will be cornered by this and will make half-hearted hints about listening hard to what the Scottish electorate will say. In May, the SNP will get a boost from the European Parliament elections, though this may in retrospect be seen as a guilty vote in anticipation of voting No in September. At the referendum, we will see a No majority, but slimmer than predicted. Finally, we will come to see this as a lost opportunity to reflect profoundly on who we are.

NOTE: I've just (1.30pm, 5 Jan 2013) revised this slightly, especially the table which was wrongly calculated. Thanks to Kieran Hurley for gently putting me right.