May 31, 2007
We all need a Fiddler to remind us of our roots
The revival of an old musical has new lessons for a city which is a modern melting pot
Published in the Evening Standard
I saw Fiddler on the Roof before I was born. Or rather, I heard it. My parents were in Her Majesty’s Theatre on the night of February 24 1967 watching the now-legendary Topol production of the show – and I was born the very next day. I’m sure that as he belted out “If I were a rich man,” I was tapping my foetal feet in the womb.
Maybe that’s why the show, now energetically revived at the Savoy Theatre with the spirited Henry Goodman in the lead role, strikes such an instant, visceral chord with me. I only have to hear the opening strains of the Fiddler’s melody to feel myself welling up. Somehow this story of Tevye, the impoverished Jewish milkman struggling to bring up five daughters in Tsarist Russia, goes straight to the Jewish gut – via the heart.
Part of it is the sheer technical skill of the show. Unlike so many of the musicals which followed it, Fiddler packs one cracking tune after another, from Tradition to Matchmaker to Sunrise, Sunset – such a contrast with the one-melody- multiply-reprised efforts of more recent times. Andrew Lloyd Webber, take note.
The story has an almost classical simplicity. Tevye has three older daughters to marry off and each girl’s choice presents a successively greater challenge to the existing order. Tevye wants to see his children happy – but he also feels compelled to honour the traditions of his people and his past. It is a timeless, universal dilemma.
What’s more, it’s a great pleasure to see a parade of Jewish characters on stage who are not the product of an outsider’s imagination but are crafted lovingly from within. Some critics have suggested that Goodman’s gestures and shrugs inch uncomfortably close to caricature. Many others will wonder why we don’t mind seeing Tevye this way, but would recoil at a similarly-styled Fagin or Shylock (whom Goodman has also played).
But there’s a crucial difference. Unlike Dickens or Shakespeare, the creators of Fiddler on the Roof were rooted in the Jewish community they chose to depict. Tevye, Golda and Yenta were not alien, exotic creatures, but the composers’ own ancestors. There is little ethnic tourism in this show; rather it is a genuine Jewish cultural expression. One small example: when Perchik the radical wants to indoctrinate Tevye’s daughters about the wickedness of all employers, his chosen example is the deception perpetrated on the biblical Jacob by his boss, Laban. (Given all this, I’d liked to have seen a few more Jewish performers playing the Jews on stage: these days, you don’t find many non-Asians taking Asian roles, or white actors playing black characters. Why can’t that logic extend to Jews?)
The overall effect is to make Fiddler on the Roof a show which speaks to contemporary Jews like no other. I look at the fictional shtetl of Anatevka and I see the small rural hamlet of Dunilovich, the tiny speck on the map (now in Belarus) where my father’s family lived more than a century ago. I watch Tevye warned by the Cossack constable that a pogrom is coming and think of my own great-great-grandfather, Iddle Mindel the tailor, who was himself warned by the local nobleman that trouble was on the way. When I see Tevye and daughters pile up all that they own on a wagon as they leave their beloved Anatevka, I can picture my own forebears, packing up their own lives and heading for a new start – as immigrants in newly-Edwardian London.
And I am not the only one for whom Fiddler performs this function. Plenty of today’s Jews would admit that the clearest sense they have of their ancestors’ lives comes from a Broadway show that is just four decades old. Hard to believe, I know: but the immigrants of a century ago barely talked about the lands they had left behind. Instead most set about changing their clothes, their language, even their names – and settling into their new country. Their eyes were set firmly on the future.
I’m sure that partly explains why Fiddler is still so moving, even to those who are now four or five generations away from the experience it portrays. It shows us a world that would otherwise have slipped from the collective memory, a vanished realm of Yiddish, of wedding dances, of rabbis and matchmakers, all scratching out a precarious existence, surrounded by perils – like a fiddler on a roof.
But this is not only of value to Jews. The enduring success of the show, and the film, testifies to an appeal which goes far beyond one narrow ethnic constituency. It has become one of the great musicals, taking its place in the canon alongside Guys and Dolls or West Side Story. For those non-Jewish audiences, Fiddler serves primarily as a good night out. Yet it does something else too: it shows them where many of today’s Jews came from. Now any Londoner can go along to the Savoy Theatre and see that Jews did not always live in Golders Green or Stamford Hill; that they have a history.
It strikes me that in this city of immigrants, where close to 40% of Londoners were born outside Britain, we need rather more of that. Until now, the films or novels about Britain’s ethnic minorities that have broken into the mainstream have tended to be about the immigrant experience, from Brick Lane to Bend it Like Beckham to East is East. There has been all too little that tells us not about the life of these communities once they got to Britain – but about the worlds they left behind.
Black Londoners still speak of the early segments of the 1970s TV mini-series Roots the way I speak about Fiddler on the Roof - as one of the rare moments where their own heritage was made visible. The scenes of Kunta Kinte in the African village from where he was stolen into slavery live on in the collective memory – they were a glimpse of the life before.
There have been some efforts in this direction, with the likes of Monsoon Wedding and, in the West End, Bombay Dreams. But we need more of it. A Polish Fiddler on the Roof perhaps, or a Nigerian one. Something that will tell us that the people driving the mini-cab in Streatham or working at Starbucks in Soho did not start like this: that they have a story. Who knows, it could even become a tradition.
May 30, 2007
The internet will revolutionise the very meaning of politics
The web could yet bypass government and existing political communities, and either expand democracy in the process - or stifle it
Published in the Guardian
May 28, 2007
May 24, 2007
There's a good idea somewhere in HIPs
We should not write off the Home Information Packs - they might help first-time buyers and the environment
Published in the Evening Standard
It’s been like watching a train wreck - in very slow motion. The government’s plan to change the way we buy and sell houses – by obliging sellers to pay for a detailed Home Information Pack (HIP) before they put their property on the market – has crashed and burned before our very eyes. On Tuesday, cabinet minister Ruth Kelly finally had to face a jeering House of Commons to announced that HIPs would not be legally required on June 1 after all, but would kick in on August 1 instead.
That was not the only retreat. Now only four-bedroom houses will need a HIP: smaller properties will be included at some unspecified time in the future. And all this on top of last year’s climbdown, when the government dropped its requirement that the new packs include a “home condition report,” so eliminating the need for buyers to commission a survey.
Even if you don’t go along with the Tories’ chant that this is a fiasco, demonstrating the government’s “arrogance and incompetence,” you’ve got to admit it looks a mess. The usual rule when governments try to make a big change like this is to get all the relevant players – the “stakeholders,” in ministerese - on side. HIPs have indeed got almost all the relevant stakeholders in the housing market – estate agents, surveyors and lawyers – on the same side. The trouble is, they’re all against the government.
Some of their objections do bite hard, especially in London where the ever-surging housing market looks out of control at the best of times. Estate agents are warning of a rush of sales to avoid the August 1 deadline, so warping an already warped market. What’s more, they predict a new form of linguistic deception. To add to phrases like “opportunity for development” (meaning “it’s a dump”) or “part of a lively community”(meaning “noisy”), make way for “three bedrooms and a study” – meaning, “it’s a four-bedroom house but we didn’t want to do a HIP.”
Others have warned that HIPs could incur extra costs, especially in London where one estate agent initially predicted charges of £1000 (before the home condition report element was dropped). The critics maintain their view that, since the burden of cost will be placed solely on sellers, would-be buyers will still be able to pull out of planned sales as frequently as they do now – and that therefore HIPs will fail to achieve one of their key aims, reducing the number of deals that fall through.
And yet, despite everything, it would be a mistake to turn against HIPs. Yes, the handling has been a mess – but underneath all that there still remains a sound idea.
First, it’s no bad thing if sellers face a slight hurdle before coming into the market. The phenomenon of homeowners “testing the water” sounds harmless enough – until you’re on the receiving end of it. Several years ago, my wife and I went to look around a house that we instantly fell for. We put in an offer; it was accepted; we spent money on a survey. And at the end of it, we got a note from the owners saying that, er, they didn’t want to sell after all. Of course that was their right. But it’s possible that things would never have reached that stage – sparing us the expense of a survey – had the buyers first had to go through the cost and hassle of compiling a HIP.
What’s more, it’s surely a matter of common sense to do just one survey for each house, rather than getting a new one done for each potential buyer. Common sense, that is, for every one except the chartered surveyors themselves: they spotted a threat to their business and organised fast to block it. Getting the home condition reports dropped last year was a neat bit of self-protection by the survey industry – but it doesn’t mean it’s right. The logic of the initial idea – getting a single, legally reliable survey for each house before sale – still stands.
The same is true of the element not stripped out of the proposed HIP: namely, legal “searches.” Once again, there’s no need for those to be paid for several times over: better to get the buyer to do it once. And HIPs have already succeeded in driving the mysterious “searches” process – whose costs are usually hidden in solicitors’ bills – into the open. Indeed, sensing the possibility of competition, 25 local authorities have already cut the costs of their searches service.
The crucial thing to remember is that most of these charges are not new: we pay for searches and the like already, in the normal process of buying a house. The difference is that HIPs shift the cost onto the seller. Since most people who are selling a property are also buying one, that should cancel itself out. The only exception will be for first time buyers, who will now be spared those charges. In London especially we know how hard it is for first time buyers. Surely if there’s even one small thing we can do to help, we should do it.
All of these considerations are dwarfed, however, by the centrepiece of the HIPs – the new energy performance certificate, the document which shows how energy efficient (or not) your home really is. Right now, all white goods have an energy rating from A to G. Under HIPs, so would every house in the estate agent’s window.
OK, it won’t end global warming overnight. But it could make a substantial difference. More than a quarter of the UK’s carbon emissions come from our homes, with the leaking of heat from poorly insulated walls and roofs just one example. We can remedy that for newly-built homes, but we have to address the houses that are already here. So far, too many of us put off the task of insulation and the like to the distant future. But HIPs could make us act.
“If you go into Curry’s or Comet now, you just don’t see a D-rated fridge any more,” says housing minister Yvette Cooper. Being forced to declare their energy rating changed manufacturers’ behaviour. Cooper believes the same would happen to us as homeowners. Just as we now might buy “new cushions or a rug” to make our home more appealing, so we might change the boiler or install efficient light bulbs, to improve our rating and increase our chance of a sale.
So yes, maybe the HIPs plan has not been a model of political craft. But there’s a good idea here. Lets not wreck it.
A few scraps of honesty
The seven-week handover between Blair and Brown has at least had one positive effect: suddenly, ministers feel free to disagree. Publicly.
From the Guardian's Comment is Free
May 23, 2007
The six-day war is not over. Today, it brings the spectre of al-Qaida in Gaza
Victory in 1967 was as much curse as blessing. It paved the way for 40 years of mortal, political and moral disaster
Published in the Guardian
May 18, 2007
Brown's balancing act
One question remains in Labour's ruling circles: should the prime minister-in-waiting offer himself as the embodiment of change - or continuity?
From the Guardian's Comment is Free
May 17, 2007
Yes, there is a solution to the housing shortage
Published in the Evening Standard
Such is the power of a prime minister-in-waiting. Gordon Brown only had to mention the housing crisis in the south east this week for the issue suddenly to gain the prominence and airtime campaigners have craved for so long. They have been sounding the alarm for years, but a word from the man destined for Number Ten ensured that everyone started listening. Brown better get used to it: this is how things are going to be for the next couple of years.
The PM-to-be accepted that the south east housing shortage was becoming desperate; that too many young people are being priced out of the property market before they can even enter it. His proposed solution sounded great: a set of five new eco-towns, providing 100,000 carbon neutral homes. That way, we’d alleviate much of the housing problem and do our bit for climate change. And if it meant nicely trumping David Cameron’s green credentials, well, that’d be a happy bonus.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t taken long for the shine to dull on Brown’s big idea. Green groups say any benefit in reduced carbon from these eco-homes could be cancelled out if their occupants have to commute by car to their jobs, doubtless in London. And the Nimby crowd have wondered where exactly these new settlements are to be built. They might like the idea of green homes in theory, but they don’t want a big new town in their backyard thank you very much.
That’s just how it is with the great housing conundrum: name a possible solution and you immediately come up with two more problems. Little wonder it has our leaders paralysed.
Think of the pressure on the south east. First, London is growing, with more and more people keen to squeeze in. Latest figures project a leap in London’s population to 9m by 2031. That’s 1.5m more than live here now.
Much of that growth will come from immigration, so that pretty soon more than half of London’s people will have been born outside Britain. But it’s compounded by the sheer dominance the capital has over the rest of the country, as businesses of every kind are drawn to locate themselves here rather than anywhere else.
The effect of this vastly expanded population is clear. Suddenly there are not enough homes to go around. And the infrastructure begins to creak under the strain. Hospitals have more patients to treat; schools have more children to teach.
Think of a remedy and you soon hit a brick wall. Could we somehow reduce the flow of people? It’s hard to see how. The Poles, Lithuanians and Hungarians who are here are now citizens of the European Union, granted the right of free movement. Besides, not many politicians are in a hurry to position themselves as anti-immigration: it sounds too much like hostility to the ethnic mix that already exists here.
Above all, London has clearly shown that it needs immigrants. As Ken Livingstone pointed out this week - noting that in the last seven years of buying a coffee on his way to work he has only been served by a native-born Londoner once - it seems there are some jobs which only migrants are willing to do. With an ageing population, the pensioners of the future need these young workers to provide for them in their old age.
So much for immigration. What of shifting the national set-up, so that things are not so tilted towards London? It would certainly take the pressure off if more businesses upped sticks for Birmingham or Glasgow. But past attempts to encourage relocation have always failed. And if it was tough to make people move north in the 1960s and 1970s, how much harder now, when London is a global city. The focus of most firms is not Britain but the world; they want to look outward and London lets them do that.
OK, you might say with a sigh. It’s clear we’re going to have to accommodate all these people in the south east somehow. But where? Point to vacant terrain – like the 9% of farmland in the south east said to be subsidised for doing nothing - and you instantly collide with the Nimby problem. The defenders of the green belt are a mighty lobby, hard to beat. Would-be house builders can’t even rely on Londoners to be on their side: most of us tell pollsters we don’t want the countryside to be concreted over. We may not live surrounded by green and pleasant land – but we want to know it’s there for a visit.
In other words, people keep coming – but we don’t want to build on the land that might house them. Surely, something’s got to give. The answer might not be some new radical masterplan but a typically British one: to muddle on as we are.
For London has already absorbed 800,000 more people since 1986 – equivalent to a city larger than Leeds. We’ve done it simply by squeezing more of us into the space we already occupy.
The key is housing density. We may go on about how crammed we all are here, but if London was as densely populated as Paris there would be 35m of us living here. Only one pocket of London currently matches Parisian levels of density - and it’s not some slummy hellhole, but Bayswater packed with well-heeled apartment blocks.
It’s density the mayor is aiming for when he gives permission for new developments, combining a ground-floor store with multiple flats on top. And it’s density we’ll get as onetime family houses get filled up with half a dozen rent-paying singles, whether from Australia or Nigeria.
But the government cannot just stand aside and watch this happen. This crowding is a consequence of policies it has pursued, from EU expansion to the pursuit of surging growth. If it wants a denser London, it will have to provide the infrastructure that will make that possible. That means transport, like Crossrail, so that all these people can get around, as well as ensuring local councils can carry the extra strain on their services. The easiest way to do that is to allow local authorities to keep more of the revenue these new residents will bring. If they are going to pay the cost of a rising population, they should at least get the benefit of it.
These are the problems of success in London, but they are problems all the same. And they now find themselves on the desk of one Gordon Brown.
May 16, 2007
Brown needs to make sure there's a contest - and a hearing for his critics
Labour has been been gripped by election fever. Here are seven ways the chancellor can turn the frenzy to his advantage
Published in the Guardian
May 11, 2007
A contrarian and a magician
From the unbridled optimism of the 1997 landslide to the lows of post-Hutton disillusionment, Jonathan Freedland recalls how the decision to go to war ended our national love affair with the 'master of British politics'
Published in the Guardian's special supplement, The Blair Years
Olmert out? Little would change
Published in the Jewish Chronicle
You’ve got to hand it to Ehud Olmert: the man is, to use his own word, “indestructible”. Last week, when Judge Eliyahu Winograd delivered his searing, interim report on what Israelis call the Second Lebanon War, most observers were giving the prime minister the life expectancy of a hedgehog on a motorway. One poll found the number of Israelis who would vote for Olmert a cool, round 0 per cent. The mass rally which gathered in Rabin Square — united by the simple message, “Go home” — seemed set to give him the last, decisive push. Surely Olmert would be gone within days.
Yet, as I write this, he is still in his chair, his position secured by comfortable victories in a series of Knesset no-confidence votes. It is a remarkable recovery, reversing all expectation. Olmert is a first: gone today, here tomorrow.
Even if it turns out to be only a temporary reprieve, and Olmert is driven from office by Winograd’s final report later this summer, it is still an extraordinary feat. As several Israeli commentators have noted, if Olmert had only fought the Lebanon war with the same strategic acumen and energy he has dedicated to saving his own skin, very many lives could have been saved.
He has been helped by his enemies. Foreign minister Tzipi Livni, Olmert’s widely presumed successor as Kadima leader, has been slammed for failing to seize her chance and drive the PM from office. That criticism reveals just how utterly different Israeli political culture is from Britain’s and almost anywhere else’s. In fact, Livni went into Olmert’s office and told him, to his face, that he should go. She then repeated the demand to the media. In British terms, that would count as the greatest political assassination since Brutus. Yet in Israel she was accused of bottling it, of failing to stick the knife in. After all, she hadn’t rallied her fellow Kadima MKs formally to oust the PM. Whatever else you can say of Israeli politics, subtle it ain’t.
That, says the conventional wisdom, leaves Livni damaged: she is a vegetarian in a world of carnivores. Besides, if one of Winograd’s key complaints against Olmert and defence minister Amir Peretz was their inexperience, especially of military affairs, why would Israelis turn to the equally undecorated Livni?
Let’s say their search for a new prime minister takes Israelis outside Kadima; who might they choose? Not Peretz, obviously, who was condemned just as mercilessly by the retired judge. He, like Olmert, is living on borrowed time.
I confess to a twinge of sadness about both of them. I was among those who, back in the spring of 2006, saw something healthy in Israel at last being ruled not by military heroes, nor by aged titans from the first days of the state, but by regular, technocratic politicians — just like any other country.
In this view, the Olmert elevation, after the era of Ariel Sharon, was a small Israeli step toward normality. As for Peretz, I was excited by the prospect, at long last, of a major Israeli party led by an authentic voice of the Mizrachim. Besides, Labour’s alienation from Jews of North African background had cost it badly, denying it power for three decades. Peretz suggested a way that rift could at last be healed. It is a great shame that the advance of both men will now be remembered as a dreadful mistake.
Peretz might well meet his fate sooner than Olmert, when he is ejected in Labour primaries later this month. Jostling for the succession are the former intelligence chief, Ami Ayalon, and former premier Ehud Barak. Neither can be accused of military inexperience and, importantly for Labour, neither can be branded as soft on security.
Still, if Olmert falls and takes his coalition with him, thereby triggering elections, the chances are that none of these people — Livni, Ayalon or Barak — will succeed him: on current polls, the next prime minister would be the last but three, Bibi Netanyahu.
I will follow all this with unswerving interest, of course. But something will be missing. Recent years have cured me of the once strong hope that, if only the right person could somehow land the top job, Israel’s core problems could be solved. I remember thinking just that, with spirits high, when Yitzhak Rabin was elected in 1992 and again when Barak took office in 1999. In the end, though, even they were thwarted, Rabin tragically so. This conflict between Jews and Muslims is just too fraught for a neat Christian solution: a saviour riding into Jerusalem, bringing peace with a wave of the hand. For that to happen, it is not the leaders who will have to change — but the peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, who choose them.
And that might take a little longer.
May 10, 2007
The city that the Blair era changed - for ever
Published in the Evening Standard
This is the day the country begins its farewell to Tony Blair. It's a moment for the nation he has governed for a decade to pause and take stock. Many are debating how the outgoing prime minister has changed Britain. But what of the city where he has spent his political career, the city where he will continue to live once he’s left office? What did Blair do for London?
He's certainly left his mark on the landscape. His enemies will point to the Millennium Dome, seeing it as a permanent memorial to the Blair knack - later demonstrated more seriously in Iraq - for visionary rhetoric married to poor judgement, bad planning and financial profligacy. His admirers, on the other hand, will regard the post of London Mayor as Blair's greatest bequest to the capital, at last restoring the strategic city-wide authority that had been stolen in 1986.
But Blair's imprint goes deeper than a mere building or political institution. For London became a kind of showcase of Blairism, the place which more than any other demonstrates what, for good or ill, our departing prime minister was all about.
Just look around you. This city sparkles now in a way it did not 15 years ago. You can see it in the cranes sprouting like vegetation, sprucing up derelict and tired neighbourhoods, and constantly building, building, building. Disused warehouses becoming loft apartments; empty factories converted into chic eateries. Once shabby streets have smartened up; there are now pavement cafes and well-appointed restaurants of the kind you always used to find in foreign capitals, but only rarely here. These days our city looks more and more like the Richard Curtis version of London.
There's a simple explanation for that. The London of the Blair years has been rolling in money. Whether it's City bankers racking up bonuses or Russian exiles sheltering their fortunes, this last decade has seen the cash gush in. A city that was once in structural decline can now show off more money than at any time in living memory. Even the mayor of New York frets out loud that his city is losing its place as the financial capital of the world - to us.
Only the most hardened Labour supporter would award credit for all that to the government. But Blair has certainly not stood in the way. His most loyal lieutenant, Peter Mandelson, seemed to speak for his master when he famously quipped that Labour was "completely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich." In London, we've see the proof that Mandelson was speaking the clear truth.
Labour has let stand tax rules for so-called 'non-domiciles' allowing London to become a tax haven for foreign millionaires. The effect has been felt rapidly, from the high-end boutiques where Russian is a second language to the mansions in Kensington and Chelsea snapped up for eight-figures sums, bought by those for whom London has become the ideal landing pad for the super-rich.
It's not all about foreigners. The City boys have been allowed their head too, pulling in telephone number bonuses while hedge fund managers earn sums to make the eyes water. Blair has smiled on it all, the days when a Labour chancellor could promise to squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked a distant memory.
Blair's approach, and that of Gordon Brown, has been to step aside and allow London's wealth creation machine to work its magic. The LSE’s Tony Travers says it's no wonder the City has shelved its traditional suspicions of Labour: “It’s been left alone – and that’s all it ever wanted.”
And Blair has extended that attitude to London and the entire south east region. Labour ministers used to worry about the gap between the wealth of the capital and the rest of the country. Under Harold Wilson, George Brown pressured industries to relocate to poorer parts of the country, especially the north of England. Gordon Brown has done the odd bit of civil service relocation; otherwise, he has let economic nature take its course. The government has treated London and the south east as a golden goose: as long as the eggs keep coming, it's happy to let the goose do what it wants.
Even when that means people being left behind, both inside and outside the city. Inside, there are still the stubborn pockets of poverty, the estates filled with workless families that mean some London boroughs still rank among the poorest places in Europe.
Outside, it's meant the growing sense that London is pulling away from the rest of the country. There is now an entirely distinct London economy, with a private sector that is, proportionally, nearly twice the size of that which operates everywhere else. London house prices are in their own stratosphere.
The people of London are increasingly different from those of the rest of the country too. On some estimates, close to 40% of today's Londoners were born outside Britain (and the figure is rising). The Blair era has accelerated that change. Thanks to the enlargement of the European Union, and Blair’s decision to allow workers from the EU’s newest members to come here straight away, London now speaks with a Polish, Latvian and Hungarian accent. To be sure there are Eastern European workers in other parts of Britain. But the sheer scale of the diversity on display in London - with more nationalities living here than in any other city on earth - sets the capital apart.
This, then, may be Blair's true legacy for London: to have let the gales of globalised market forces gust through this city, showering gold here, bringing in new people there - and changing the landscape throughout. The Blair adventure began in this city, that dawn morning at the Festival Hall just over ten years ago. And it will end here, at Downing Street in a matter of weeks. Londoners may love him, they may hate him, but all of them must admit it: the Blair era changed this city for ever.
Calm down, everyone
The TV coverage of Tony Blair's resignation announcement is wildly over the top. Why? Because he's not actually going yet.
From the Guardian blog, Comment is free
May 09, 2007
Don't be fooled by Europe's mood. Globally, the left is reawakening
The political ructions of the past week can't hide a progressive resurgence - even in the belly of the capitalist beast
Published in the Guardian
May 05, 2007
Brown sees shape of politics to come
It's Brown's rotten luck to confront a devolved counterpart of a different political stripe.
Front-page commentary published in the Guardian
May 03, 2007
There's no substitute for the ballot box
Published in the Evening Standard
Just for once, something big is going on in this country and London will play no part in it. That's not how things usually work. The capital plays such a dominant role in British life that, much to the chagrin of Manchester, Edinburgh and Cardiff, it's a rare day when the action takes place somewhere else.
But today is that today. Elections are underway for the Scottish parliament, Welsh assembly and local councils across England. Everywhere in fact - except here. Much is at stake, not only choosing what is, in effect, a government north of the border, but also delivering an electoral verdict on the Blair era as it enters its final days and shaping the political terrain for his probable successor, Gordon Brown. Yet in this key political moment, London will stay silent.
Still, we should put aside any pique and look on the bright side. There is an advantage to giving elections a miss this year, waiting instead till 2008 to choose a new mayor and London Assembly. No, I don't mean it gives a few more months for the Conservatives to continue their desperate quest to find somebody- anybody - to take on Ken Livingstone. Rather it gives London a chance to ensure we get our elections right. Because today too much of the country will get them wrong.
I'm not speaking about the choices Britons will make, but the way they will express those choices. Specifically, the unfolding scandal of the postal vote.
There was a time when a vote by mail was reserved only for those who could prove they couldn't make it to the polling station on election day. That changed in 2000 when a postal vote became available to anyone who wanted it, no questions asked. But this new system was open to extraordinary abuse. With no signature or date of birth required, it wasn't too hard to apply for postal votes on behalf of other people. You could then steal the ballot paper that was sent out, mark an x in the box and send it back - all in the name of a voter who remained wholly in the dark.
All this came to light in Birmingham's 2004 council elections, where a High Court judge found vote-rigging that would, in his words, "disgrace a banana republic." New figures from Birmingham this week suggested the problem was even worse than first thought: once the police and council started checking up on postal voters, the number of them fell by 20,000 - suggesting that at least that number were on the list thanks to fraud.
As so often, this mess began with good intentions. The government wanted to increase voter turnout which, in local contests especially, is often embarrassingly low. (London's council elections in 2002 saw a turnout of just 32 per cent.) Maybe turning up at a polling station was just too much hassle in our modern, all-convenience world. Make voting simpler, ran the logic, and more of us would do it.
But that was to overlook the gaping hole left open for fraud. Now ministers insist they have learned the lessons of Birmingham and that the postal votes used today will be "as secure as possible."
And yet it's hard to feel reassured. Because even if the government is right, and they do ensure that every postal vote matches properly the elector it should belong to, that will still leave a major problem. The system will be safe - but it will no longer be secret. Only the closed curtain of the voting booth, and the locked metal of the ballot box, can guarantee that.
Take that Birmingham case. Much of the fraud went on in heavily Muslim wards, where Labour feared a backlash following the Iraq war. The six guilty men were Labour councillors, who were said to have either filled in voters' ballot papers without their knowledge or to have pressured individuals to deliver their households' votes. Ballots were sometimes collected door to door, so that they could be checked for the right answer and then sent off. The secrecy of the ballot was gone.
And secrecy matters. Those first campaigners for British democracy, the Chartists, listed a secret ballot among their key six demands. When William Gladstone was finally won over to the cause of a secret ballot, it was because he understood that, without it, workers and tenants would be pressured by employers and landlords to cast their vote the "right" way. Only a secret ballot could prevent bribery, he said, "because men will not pay for that which they do not know they will ever receive." If you don't know what the voter's doing behind that curtain, there's no point bribing them.
It's this principle, crucial in a true democracy, that is threatened by absentee voting, even when it's sold as glossy modernisation. If people vote online or by phone, there's not only a huge risk of fraud - as the recent TV vote scandals have proved - but also no guarantee of secrecy, and therefore no protection against family or community pressure. The distinguished former foreign correspondent, John M Morrison, now campaigning hard on this question, says with a sigh, "I have reported elections in all sorts of dodgy places in Africa and the former Soviet Union but I never imagined that the UK would lead Europe in trying to abolish the ballot box."
Voting is one of those areas where simplest is best. Americans have developed all kinds of elaborate electronic machinery and complex ballot papers. The result was the chaos of Florida in 2000 and the widespread allegations of fraud in Ohio in 2004. If voters had simply used a pencil, piece of paper and metal box both messes could have been avoided (and Al Gore would probably be president).
And if we're worried about turnout, there are other solutions. Labour MP Emily Thornberry suggests either weekend voting or, better still, making election day a mid-week bank holiday, so that people have plenty of time to vote (without the temptation of taking the day as part of a long weekend).
There are more radical steps still. A proportional, fairer voting system would surely encourage greater participation, because you would know that every vote counted. Close contests, like the high turnout presidential battle in France, always help. Or we could have some politicians who genuinely inspire. There's lots we could do, without jettisoning something we've got right. The secret ballot was hard-won. Let's not stick it in an envelope and send it into oblivion.