The elephant in the room of British politics

Now that the dust has settled on the 2025 political conference season it is a good time to take stock and see how what we traditionally call the ‘major parties’ are faring in these somewhat uncertain and turbulent times. One thing is clear: traditional mainstream politicians have, by and large, finally addressed the chain-smoking and velvet-collared elephant in the room that is Nigel Farage.

I say ‘by and large’ because of course it is only two of the mainstream parties that have actually tackled him and his Reform UK head-on, in the form of the Liberal Democrats and then the Labour Party. In the case of the Tories, I get the impression they are much more wary of criticising a party to which they are hemorrhaging members and would obviously like not to see take over their patch, although it seems that that is exactly what Farage’s team are doing.

Of course, challenging Reform UK is easier now that they have started making concrete policy statements, which they inevitably had to do at some point. Farage remains a pub car park agitator, egging on a fight from a safe distance; or a smug playground smart alec who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. But that only gets you so far. In a way, I am glad that he is showing his hand so clearly and making a stab for power, especially so early on in the election cycle, as it has given a chance for his ideas to be debated, and for mainstream parties to respond and present their alternative vision of Britain and where it should head.

Until Farage stepped out from the fog of vague notions and emotive ideas and into the harsh light of numbers, targets and firm promises, he was hard to attack. How does one attack a fog? How does one pin down something that is essentially (in both the sense of ‘in the most part’ and in ‘by necessity,’ as in that he and his party were not actually a real political party until that point) nebulous; in which the closer one gets to it, the more one sees that it does not really exist?

Well, now Farage and his ideas can be examined in the cold light of day, and his vision of Britain and its future direction can be examined and challenged. And after months of essentially giving him free reign and seemingly not wanting to challenge him and Reform UK on anything, other than to attack him personally, it is refreshing to see that the mainstream parties are, more or less, scrutinising their policies, warning of their consequences and, to a lesser or greater extent, offering up alternatives.

In the case of the Lib Dems, this means painting a nightmarish picture of what Britain would be like under Farage, and not unreasonably linking him to Trump, to whom Farage has shown himself to be his lickspittle. On the other hand, says party leader Sir Ed Davey, the Lib Dems see themselves as the guardians of what they describe as the British values of "tolerance, decency and respect”.

The Labour party, on the other hand, claimed, in the words of Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer, that Farage is a “snake oil merchant” who does not believe in Britain, and that the country faces a “defining choice” between national renewal under Labour or “division and decline” with Reform UK.

Stirring stuff, I am sure, but my sense is that many people who claim to support Farage and Reform UK are flirting with them and their policies, but would not feel secure in voting for an utterly untested party. They would, I believe, rather that the traditional parties make much stronger statements and develop concrete, actionable policies that address directly their real day-to-day concerns, from which politicians of all stripes have been running away for years and years. And if that is the outcome of Farage’s encroachment into mainstream politics, then it is, frankly, worth all the commotion.

Alongside all of this, there is also an interesting battle going on over the national flag, and what it means to wear it, fly it outside your house or to drape it over your balcony. It is not that long ago when it was considered borderline racist and practically worthy of hate crime investigation to fly an English flag in England, outside of a football tournament. The Union Jack was a little less problematic, but tainted with the notion of those who supported that particular combination of red, white and blue were old-fashioned fuddy duddies; men who wore gold buttoned blazers and beige slacks and brayed like donkeys in country pubs while telling blue jokes to fellow members of the Rotary Club.

And now, both flags have become the very visible centre of a culture war that gets to the very heart of the collective vision of the country’s past, present and future, to the extent that the hitherto mild-mannered Tim Farron has proudly draped himself in a version of the Union Jack designed for Blackburn Rovers football team.

The issue of a flag in theory should not be emotive, although in reality it can be none other when it is the most collectively shared and obvious symbol of nationhood and belonging, especially in these supremely polarised times. Identity politics take up a very large portion of what constitutes political debate at the moment, and so it is no surprise that the question of whether the flag should be waved and who has the right to wave it bubble up to the surface, with increasingly violence.

Except that this nation known as the United Kingdom, to which everyone belongs to in theory but with which very few people identify in practice (at least on a visceral level), has an issue with flag waving. If you unfurl the English flag, you are immediately excluding the smaller nations that make up our happy collective. Put out the Union Jack and, in most places, the sense that it evokes is nebulous and abstract.

We should believe in it as a unifying force, but it is based on a conscious decision and a sense of pragmatism, not the undeniable expression of an autochthonous sense of place and identity. You cannot manufacture belonging. Even in England, the desire to divide down and create something on more of a human scale has led to the creation of local flags, such as the the Lincolnshire flag in 2005, which has become a cherished symbol for residents of a county that is not known for its drumbeating or its passion.

Spending as much time as I do in France, the concept of flag waving has taken on a different hue for me in recent years. On the other side of La Manche, the flag can be seen atop all state institutions, from town halls to local schools, and is waved in tricolour profusion during national events and remembrances. The French are passionate about the flag around sporting events, but the rest of the time they rarely discuss it, and certainly never question its place in society. Saying that, the battle for a national identity is much more intense and passionate than in the UK, but is focused on an entirely different set of ideas and ideals.

Personally, I believe the waving or otherwise of a flag should be personal decision, although in doing so it immediately and inevitably becomes a statement of identity, and one relative to everyone else.

It’s been a while since I talked about classical music, but a revered and apparently large self-taught German conductor has been much in my mind recently. Günter Wand (1912–2002) made many of his landmark recordings in the 1970s and 1980s, benefitting from recent advances in recording technology but unfortunately ending up rather subsumed under the (sometimes undeservedly) enormous reputations of the German giants of classical music who immediately preceded him.

After initially coming across him in the late 1990s though his highly respected Bruckner symphony cycle. But I abandoned him somewhat after that set became superseded by the brilliance of those by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski on Arte Nova and, above all, Georg Tintner on Naxos, discoveries that coincided with me focusing more and more on baroque and classical era music. However, I came back to Wand in the last couple of years after listening by chance to his recording of Brahms Symphony No. 2 and being blown away by the beauty and delicacy of the reading, which opened up a whole new vista on one of my favourite orchestral pieces.

That led to me buying his Great Recordings box on Sony, which showcases the range of 19th century large-scale music that he tackled. In that, I discovered a lithe, limpid reading of the Beethoven symphonies that does not lack for passion or drama in the least but slides easily between moments of tender repose and almost aggressive power that give us Beethoven not in his complexity, which can lead to accusations of muddled compositions that hop around too much between contrasting ideas, but in his richness, where we see how he is capable of juxtaposing the sublime, the powerful and moments of levity that, together, suggest a man who must have been enlivening and inspiring company, even if he was occasionally difficult.

To clarify, that Beethoven was supremely creative is not in doubt; what can occasionally be questioned is whether he was always able to tame that unbounded talent and rush of ideas that clearly crowded his mind from dawn till dusk in the same way that, say, Mozart before him or, later, Dvorak were able, and to do so particularly with the large forces available to him when composing a symphony.

Listening to them now, I find a joy in Wand’s readings, and a freshness that is much-needed in pieces by Beethoven that have, for most part, been over-heard. One becomes almost too familiar with the great mans’ symphonies, to the extent that you can end up not hearing them even when listening to them. There is no chance of that with Wand. His readings sounds as if the ink is still drying on the manuscript. I can think of few conductors among the many who have offered their Beethoven cycle almost as a rite of passage over the past 80 or more years who manage to create something so direct and accessible, yet with a momentum that is undeniable and a beauty and power that leaves you in admiration not just of Wand, but also of Beethoven, whose work it feels like you are hearing for the first time. I place only William Steinberg, David Zinman and Paul Kletzki in that group of conductors who have achieved that rare combination.

I have to confess, however, that I do not much like Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. It’s a jumbled mess in the wrong hands and, the last movement aside, it comes across as meandering and something that I strongly believe Beethoven would have better edited if he had been better able to hear what he was playing and conducting. But there are times when a conductor is able to rise above all of that and provide the space and time for the music to breath, and for the orchestra to demonstrate that there are aspects of the 9th that take us beyond the brilliance of the 7th and 8th symphonies and point to the next stage in large-scale orchestral composition; a baton that Schubert would tentatively carry, that Brahms would cautiously shape and evolve, but that would only be fully taken forward for the first time by Bruckner, in his melding of Beethoven’s knowing grandeur with Wagnerian emotional abandon.

Wand is one of those conductors. His 9th is arresting, breathtaking, compelling, driven and yet capable of moments of self-reflection that remind me a little of the dancing joy mixed with intense power that Sir Neville Marriner gave us with his superlative Tchaikovsky symphony cycle on Capriccio, or in his 1989 set of Schumann symphonies currently available on Brilliant Classics; or indeed we experience with Jean Martinon’s Ravel recordings for EMI.

Suffice to say, it is a set that I shall return to again and again, and Wand’s recordings will never now be too far from my stereo.