ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER’S WARNING
IT WAS a question that took me completely by surprise. I was at a press conference in Hamburg to discuss the opening of my musical Love Never Dies, and expecting to field questions about the cast, any changes to the book, the length of the run, that kind of thing. Then, from the audience, in perfect English, came this: ‘Are the British sleepwalking?’ My interrogator, it soon became apparent, was staggered by the possible outcome of the British General Election and particularly flummoxed by the rise of the SNP.
‘Isn’t what’s happening in the UK as dangerous as Germany reverting to a cluster of independent states?’ he continued, referring to his country’s pre-Bismarck disunited past. ‘Have the British not heard of Putin’s threats to go nuclear over the Baltic? How can anyone seriously vote for a party like Nicola Sturgeon’s that wants to close down the Scottish Trident missile sites at such a time?’ I limply replied that I hadn’t been in Britain for a while and was in Germany to talk about music.
I am spending a lot of time overseas at the moment. I have new productions in China, Australia and Russia and my top priority is a major new opening on Broadway this December of a musical version of School Of Rock. I am writing this in Istanbul where I have an opening of The Phantom of the Opera this week.
But,prompted by my Germanic inquisitor, I thought I should catch up on the UK Election 2015. So I watched recordings of the TV debates with and without David Cameron and Nick Clegg, and the Jeremy Paxman leader interviews. And I watched each one with utter incredulity and a mounting combination of frustration and fear.
First what struck me was that – to my amazement – four of the seven party leaders weren’t even elected MPs! But that almost comical fact soon paled into insignificance.
If the debates are anything to go by, the British electorate is being kept in the dark, and is blissfully unaware of what’s going on in the real outside world where I live and work. I fear that this, exacerbated by a dose of election fatigue, will cause the British people to unwittingly vote for a government that will be unequipped to navigate Britain through the dangerous international waters ahead.
Incredibly, not a single question was asked nor a word spoken about the world outside Little Britain during these TV marathons. That there is another world beyond our borders was only vaguely touched on when a female heckler in the first debate forced David Cameron to acknowledge the role of our increasingly diminished Armed Forces.
Yet in America, so often accused of being inward-looking, three international issues dominated the media last week. First, the ongoing everworsening situation in the Middle East and the horrors perpetrated by barbarous Islamic State.
Second, the very real danger of an imminent terrorist cyber attack that could hugely damage, if not destroy, the very fabric of Western society – an attack the Obama administration believes is imminent.
And third, the threat by Vladimir Putin to go nuclear if Nato intervened to preserve the sovereignty of the Baltic republics.
The British leader debates struck me as trite TV shop windows for mini Neros and Neresses arguing about divvying up a sweet shop while outside the world smoulders. As Ed Miliband droned on about people living on zero-hour contracts, I wondered if he’d given a nanosecond’s thought to how the world is living on borrowed time.
The petty point-scoring and deeply domestic tone of Election 2015 was set by Jeremy Paxman’s very first below-the-belt question about soup kitchens in his one-on-one with David Cameron. It was the sort of cheap trick a smart barrister uses to put a jury on the wrong scent and it wrong-footed Cameron brilliantly.
It made for dramatic, theatrical TV, but I took no pleasure in the Prime Minister’s discomfort. Indeed, how I wish he had come right back at our man Jeremy by replying that the question was beneath his dignity – and that Britain would be drowning in soup kitchens today if Gordon Brown and Ed Balls had been given the mandate to grind the economy into the dust for another five years.
Voters should never forget the infamous note left after the last Election by outgoing Labour Treasury Minister Liam Byrne wishing his successor good luck as they’d spent all the money. It is blindingly obvious that George Osborne has turned around the economy from a zero base. (Note that i n the TV debate which was held without Cameron and Clegg – bringing the tally of the unelected up to 80 per cent! –there was no mention of wealth creation, only niggling at wealth creators.) This alone should be enough to give the Tories five more years to keep the country moving forward on the path to sustained prosperity.
But at this Election, I believe that it’s the competence of an incoming administration to deal with the international situation that is every bit as important as its ability to manage the nation’s finances.
Even if the politicians, or their spin doctors, think the yellow brick road to Downing Street is paved with domestic sops, the voting test should be simple: who is best equipped to steer us safely through an increasingly extremist-threatened and war-torn world?
The threat of a cyber attack is all too real. We’ve already seen North Korea having a go. Its infiltration of Sony Pictures may have caused more embarrassment than damage to national security, but it was a graphic demonstration of how easy it is to breach the firewalls of corporate America. There is no limit to the havoc a hostile nation could wreak, let alone a determined terrorist.
Here the preventive work achieved by our intelligence services is of vital importance. They must walk a fine line between protecting us without compromising our civil liberties. Sometimes this line is questionably crossed: rightly people are very concerned about the encroachment of Big Brother.
But the determination of the next administration to respond to the terrorist threat is of paramount importance and, with a major UK terrorist act a horribly real possibility after Paris and Copenhagen, it is important to vote for the party likely to do so best. We have heard much from the Conservative end of the Coalition about the Government’s frustration that the Human Rights Act has been frequently exploited to prevent the deportation of known terrorists. Then there’s the knotty question of
We need leaders to fix the economy – and save us from terror
secret trials. None of us like the idea. But with the security services speaking of a major domestic terrorist attack not in terms of ‘if’ but ‘when’, unpalatable decisions have to be taken for the greater good.
The stakes could not be higher: an attack with a crude nuclear device is well within the capability of the most sophisticated and well-funded terrorist organisations. Maybe Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Justice Sadiq Khan, a lawyer with a human rights background and an outspoken critic of secret trials, would take such difficult, unpalatable decisions if he was voted into office. But right now I feel more secure with them in the hands of the tough-talking but cool-headed Theresa May.
We have heard from David Cameron about the volatile situations in the Middle East and African Islamic State, and we should hear more.
But from the Opposition there is a deafening silence on the most pressing international issues of the day.
In fact, with the exception of Labour’s ill-judged intervention into the Mediterranean refugee crisis last week, I can’t remember the last time I heard any mainstream pronouncements from Labour about
You can’t trust them to defend a UK they don’t believe in
foreign affairs at all – can you? (And it is deeply depressing that when Miliband did break cover to opine on the global tragedy of 800 migrants drowning off the coast of Sicily, that he chose to blame it on David Cameron’s ‘failure to stand by Libya’.)
This is particularly alarming given that their chief election strategist is Douglas Alexander, the Scot who also holds the post of Shadow Foreign Secretary.
Maybe Mr Alexander is worried that talk of the third big issue in the US last week, Putin’s Baltic nuclear weapons threats, will prompt someone to ask his leader Ed Miliband to unequivocally rule out any negotiations with the SNP if they continue to demand the removal of Trident. I am sure that’s a question the late great Sir David Frost would have asked.
It was to Sir David I turned when a few years back when I managed to secure a TV interview with Putin about – don’t drop your coffee cup – The Eurovision Song Contest. Putin was then Prime Minister of Russia and, primed by David, I asked him if he would ever become President again. There was a bit of guff about Russia being a democratic nation and of course he would consider it (if asked!) if, for example, he was required to solve a major issue – such as a threat to Russian nationals in the former Soviet republics.
Six years on and Putin is President again, and Ukraine is partially invaded. We are threatened with nuclear weapons if Nato ‘interferes’ in the Baltic, while Russian jets are challenging British air space. Meanwhile Russia openly harbours the traitor Edward Snowden whose security betrayals threaten each and every one of us. The Cold War is back in all but words.
In New York last week I went to a publicity meeting for School Of Rock. Someone had the idea of a competition for kids to find the funniest photos of their parents playing rock instruments when they were young. Bill Clinton with a saxophone came to mind. Someone mentioned Tony Blair with a guitar. What about David Cameron, someone else asked. No, mumbled a Brit, the best picture we’ve got of him is in a group shot of Oxford University toffs dressed-up in white tie and tails at the Bullingdon Club.
It was a throwaway comment but a telling one. For it reveals that we British are as obsessed with class as ever. And it got me thinking. Is this the real root of Britain’s sleepwalking? Is the real reason why the Conservatives are not way ahead in the polls – because so many of us want to give the toff in the Bullingdon Club photo a bloody nose?
Perhaps you are one of them. If you are, I urge you to think again. The last thing Britain needs is a hung parliament. We need as competent a team as possible to build on the recovery and nurture a prosperity in which everyone shares. Where that team went to school, or the clothes they once wore or the company they once kept is an irrelevance. What is important is the company they keep now.
With the security of this nation at stake, can you really trust a leader who would have to – despite all his protestations to the contrary – keep very close company with the SNP? A Scottish nationalist party that would not only hold a Labour government to ransom financially, but would exact as a price for its support the decommissioning of Britain’s nuclear defences? A party that does not believe that the notion or the nation of Britain is in fact worth defending at all, and is hell bent on its break-up?
This Election is not about giving the toffs a bloody nose. It is about voting for the Government best equipped to defend the United Kingdom in the dangerous years ahead. We must not sleepwalk into a Britain that, unless we open our eyes, will be run down, weakened and broken up by Miliband and Sturgeon, the most dangerous double act in British politics.