Opera Buffa and a couple of buffoons!

I am incredulous, and slightly nervous, that tonight I find myself joining together two of the most disparate men in public life.  Never would I have thought it possible to imagine the former Tory MP, Mr. Terry Dicks, side by side on these pages with the 'uber-Whig' hack, Oliver Kamm.  To be fair, which tonight I am not minded to be, these two are facing each other in opposition.  Mr. Dicks, if my creaking memory serves, was an exceedingly fat and foolish man.  The late Mr. Tony Banks, former MP and wag, once described Dicks as "living proof that a pig's bladder on the end of a stick can be elected to parliament"!  Even so, it is, I suggest, beyond the bounds of possibility that even a fat fool like Dicks can be wrong about absolutely everything.  Certainly he was absolutely and completely right in his implacable opposition to the tax-payers supporting 'the Arts'.

Now Mr. Kamm is the opposite of Mr. Dicks in every respect, bar one, which I will come to in a minute.  Mr. Kamm is not at all fat as far as one can judge from the head-and-shoulders photo on his blog, and he is very definitely not a fool - hence my nervousness at, metaphorically, pelting him with rotten veg tonight.  Nevertheless, he is the opposite proof of that provided by Mr. Dicks, in that despite being absolutely jam-packed full of brains, he can still, on occasion, come out with a load of complete cods!

Shivering, I take cover behind Mr. Fraser Nelson in the Spectator Coffee House, who attracted Mr. Kamm's disdain in the first place, when he wrote the following:

"Great moment on the Today programme this morning when John Major – without irony – told James Naughtie how great the National Lottery was because an opera lover like him could benefit from the money poured into the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden."

He continued;

"[W]hy have British taxpayers subsidise the singing of songs written a hundred years ago in Italian or German? If the usually-rich people who tend to watch opera do not wish to fund the real cost of it, I have never seen why hard-pressed taxpayers should cover a chunk of the ticket price."

Nor have I! 

Oliver, with magnificent Whiggish superiority, slags off the hugely popular Classic FM radio station which brings pleasure to millions without a farthing from the Exchequer, as, my dear, just "vacuous populism", and then, after checking that his bigwig curls are hanging just so and that his beauty spot is still in place, peers down through his lorgnettes and pretends astonishment that Fraser Nelson would describe "opera subsidy as a middle-class rip off".

Of course it's a bloody rip off!  I'm a pensioner on a fixed income trying hard to make sure my out-goings do not exceed my taxed in-comings and the knowledge that part of my tax is going towards the price of a seat at Covent Garden fills me with incandescent rage.

Comments

[Laban]

The Blessed Oliver thinks that taxpayers should subsidise opera, but not Concorde.

http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2003/10/taking_from_the.html

"Concorde was a subsidy from British and French taxpayers to the rich and powerful"

And what's opera ?

I guess state subsidy is good if it's for something he likes. Just shows he has his little hypocrisies like the rest of us. It's a shame he can see no beauty in engineering. I'll lay odds more people have derived pleasure from Concorde than from the ROH.

http://ukcommentators.blogspot.com/2003/10/politics-of-envy-surely-not-from.html

[David Duff]

Laban, I am a bit pushed for time so I will follow your links a little later. Howewver, you are quite right, these little chinks in Oliver's armour are necessary to remind us all that, despite appearances, he is human!

I used to live near Heathrow and Concorde was a regular 'fly-over', incredibly noisy but I forgave it everything because of its beauty. All the government subsidies that were shoved its way should have been re-named as an Arts Council Grant!

[Larry Teabag]

Unless I'm missing something, NONE of your tax is going towards the price of a seat at Covent Garden. And you don't strike me as the type to buy lottery tickets, so you can subdue your raging incandescence.

[hambrough]

But, Larry, where *does* the funding for it come from?

[David Duff]

Larry, the Arts Council receives a mixture of government money (or *my* money as I fondly think of it) and Lottery money. From their website:

"Between 2006 and 2008 we will invest £1.1 billion of public money from government and the National Lottery in supporting the arts."

The Lottery, of course, is one of the greatest swindles perpetrated on the British public ... but I'll save my rant for another occasion.

[SIster Wolf]

I like your incandescent rage. I think you wear it well. Keep up the "I.R.", is my opinion!

[Tim Newman]

The Lottery, of course, is one of the greatest swindles perpetrated on the British public...

A tax on those who can't do maths, to be exact.

[David Duff]

Yes, 'SW', the occasional attack of it is good - it reminds me that I'm still alive!

Tim, how right you are. I seem to remember someone explaining that the odds of a win were roughly 14m:1. I'd rather back an outsider at a Selling Plate. Of course (he added pompously) I never buy a lottery ticket, myself - but if the little 'Memsahib' ever wins I'll certainly grab my half!