OK, I really did intend to leave off blogging for a while (https://bernardjporter.com/2026/10/28/the-last-post/). But yesterday’s American ‘Mid-Terms’ has sent me scurrying back to my keyboard.

Along with Hungary’s and Serbia’s recent parliamentary election results, and the present tribulations of the ‘Reform’ Party in the UK, I’m beginning to think – and to hope – that Trump’s come-uppance is a sign that the modern rise of neo-fascism may be stalling globally. At the very least it means that a little over half of Americans have seen through Trump; although whether that’s because they’ve suddenly grown more perceptive, or simply because of the price of gasoline at the pumps, we can’t be sure. Hopefully it’s the former. The world needs more perceptive Americans.

Obviously we can’t lower our defences. The underlying conditions for full-grown fascism are still there, in the US, and possibly everywhere. (Certainly in Britain, and even here in Sweden.) Trump can’t be the only one of his kind. And American capitalism is likely to throw up more.

My relief at the results of the American elections is only tempered by this thought; and by my regret that my old friend Professor Roger Louis – imperial historian extraordinaire and Texan latterly – didn’t live quite long enough to see it. He was a true American democrat. RIP.

This may well be my final contribution to this blog. I’m out of hospital now, and back in Stockholm; albeit still feeling a bit groggy, and – in particular – confused by the changes that have been made to this site since I started on it. It used to be pretty simple and straightforward, well suited to elderly farts like me; but has become more complicated recently, its clever young managers offering services I don’t want, which clog up the whole procedure. It has taken me an hour this morning, for example, to get to this point.

Of course scarcely anyone (apart from you!) reads my blog; but that was never its main purpose. I saw it as simply way of getting things off my own chest, and indulging my emotional need to continue writing, which I’ve been privileged to be able to indulge for more than half a century now. It was a kind of literary masturbation, if you like; an indelicate metaphor, yes, but an apt one.

I may instead embark on another book, in order to enable the literary juices (ugh!) to continue flowing, and a little more potently. One idea I’ve had is an openly subjective history of the past eighty-five years: ‘My Life and Times’ if you will; but with the emphasis very much on the ‘Times’. That will mean that I don’t need to do much research, which is always exhausting, in my sixty-odd-years’ experience. And it might satisfy those kind readers who have suggested that I turn to autobiography – the very idea of which repels a modest guy like me. (Or was it immodest to write that?)

Or I may return to this blog. We’ll see.

I was intending to post a blog on this, following an announcement that the issue of proportional representation was going to be discussed again. But then I was hit by some sort of illness ten days ago – main symptoms: extreme vertigo and vomiting – and so was ambulanced into into hospital, where I have been lying supinely until Friday. I’m out now – it was nothing life-threatening – but am still feeling somewhat foggy mentally; which may be a side-effect of the medication I’m on – Cyclizine and  Cinnarizine (anyone heard of them?) – or otherwise the normal condition of an octogenarian. (Donald Trump seems to have it too.)

I have little more to say about the UK voting system, further to what I wrote ten years ago: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/. I could perhaps tell you about about my experience of voting in the recent Swedish general election a couple of weeks ago – PR of course – but that will have to wait. Besides, there are far more serious international issues we should all be focussing on; not least the fate of all of us in the light of global warming, the crisis of capitalism, and the rise of the Right.

Arday’s autobiography, published posthumously, eventually reached me in Stockholm. I was planning to write a review of it, but have decided not to bother. Firstly because so much has already been written about him and his ‘case’, including by his collaborator, an American who describes herself as a ‘ghostwriter’ (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242978426-great-and-unfortunate-things) – so how much of the book really is his? And secondly, because the whole affair upsets me so much; as a writer, a Leftie, a former academic, and a Cambridge alumnus.

Cambridge – specifically its Department of Education – must take most of the blame for the way things have turned out there. There’s no doubt at all that Arday did commit the ultimate academic sin, in directly plagiarising much of his PhD thesis and his (few) published articles. The plagiarism is not difficult to spot, and should have been spotted by those who appointed him as a professor, and as a Fellow of Jesus College. The other claims he made about his pre- and extra-academic life, many of them false and some even ludicrous, should also count against him. He was a liar, a cheat and a fantasist, and not at all deserving of the high-status academic position he was accorded at the end of his life.

That he was also monstrously hounded – probably to his death – by the right-wing press is no reason to doubt any of this. If he has a defence it should be on the grounds of his psychological infirmities, pretty clearly indicated in his memoir; which indicate that he should have been seriously and sympathetically treated for those, or even ‘sectioned’, rather than either encouraged to go for a very top position in academia, or – of course – driven to what we assume was his suicide. At the very least his qualifications, as they were presented to Cambridge and the other universities he passed through, should have been more meticulously vetted than they clearly were. If they weren’t for ideological reasons (DEI), then that should fill the ideologues with shame.

Apparently one of Jason Arday’s main purposes in life was to encourage better representation of minorities in academia. His tragedy – or one of them – is that his ‘case’ might have the very opposite effect. That – together with of course my deep sympathy for him and his family – is what upsets me.

The War of 1812-13 is usually presented to Americans as being their second ‘War of Independence’, which they won. Well, OK – up to a point. It did help to save the fledgling USA from re-conquest by Britain; but the Americans certainly didn’t win it. Overall it could be described as a ‘score draw’, with the northern colonies holding out against the American ‘revolution’, and refusing to relinquish their British (and French) ties. It was their War of Independence, against the emerging American hegemon.

And the result stood for more than two centuries; until President Trump decided he would like to finish the job on the US’s terms. ‘Canada’, as the clutch of northern territories came to be called, would become the ‘51^st State’ of America; with Greenland, currently owned by Denmark, following on. It seemed rational, when you looked at the map – with the US and Canada being the closest of neighbours it is possible to imagine. But not so rational when you made allowance for their rather different cultures; Canada’s being still more European – specifically, social-democratic – than the USA’s is today. Which makes Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cunning plan of allying his country with the European Union equally rational, and – to my mind – the most promising idea to come out of the current ill-tempered stand-off between the US and (most of) the rest of the world.

By a historian of the British Empire it can also be seen as resurrecting the old post-imperial ideal of a ‘Commonwealth’, of equal and independent nations – mostly but not exclusively ‘white’ – sharing common values, and dominated by none of them: certainly not by Britain any more. That’s what the British Empire was inching towards in its dotage; and what made liberal anti-imperialists (like me) cleave to it then. The modern United States – deeply scarred by its 250-year history of ‘exceptionalism’, frontier and domestic violence, genocide, slavery, racism, anti-alienism, ultra-capitalism, and (as Carney has implied) simple bad manners – could clearly not be a part of this. (Not that these traits were not found under British rule too, of course; but – I would argue – not quite so existentially.) Canada exemplifies the difference that the British Commonwealth – heir to the rightly criticised Empire – continues to make; hopefully in keeping Trump’s more primitive and despotic type of imperialism in check.

I wonder whether Farage and the other Brexiteers realised that making it more difficult for foreigners to enter Britain might also make it harder for Britons to re-enter Britain from abroad? That’s my situation just now. Having lived in Sweden for two years now, I’m planning a brief return to England tomorrow, with a valid Swedish passport (I’m a dual citizen), but with my British passport having lapsed a few months ago. Trying to secure a visa for this trip  – renewing my British passport would take too long – is proving a nightmare, and I still don’t know whether I’ll be allowed in. To be fair, one of my problems has to do with the internet sites I’m using to secure an ‘ETA’ (Electronic Travel Authorisation), which I’m finding confusing, and almost impossible to negotiate – getting a photo of my Swedish passport posted on it, for example; but that might just be my advanced age. Or perhaps Brexiteers don’t want us Brits returning home to tell everyone how much better things are in the EU.

In Sweden we’ve just had a general election. The result is a bit messy, but the good news is that the Right-wing Sverigedemokraterna have taken a bit of a knock. I wonder whether the increasing stupidity and unpopularity of their former orange hero across the ocean has had an impact here?

One of the chief suspects in the recent tragic case of Jason Arday is ‘DEI’ – the acronym standing for ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’. The idea behind this is to ‘promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented, marginalized, or subjected to discrimination based on identity or disability’ (Wikipedia). The effect is meant to be to compensate for these disadvantages, for example when assessing or hiring people, by judging them by different – usually ‘lower’ – standards than the more ‘privileged’.

It’s originally an American thing, as I understand; and is currently the focus of attention – and of contention – over there, in the context of the so-called ‘culture wars’; where it is regarded by the Right as typically ‘woke’, and is blamed for Jason Arday’s meteoric rise to his professorship at Cambridge. (‘Professor’ of course being a rarer and more prestigious title there than it is at American universities.) Cambridge – so the story goes – was anxious to appoint a black candidate, out of guilt for 800 years of perceived racial prejudice against non-white academics and students; and then Arday came along. Although clearly less formally qualified at this level than most other possible choices, he fitted the ‘DEI’ requirements like a glove. (See below.) The Cambridge Education Faculty (which appointed him) preened itself for being so progressive. Arday himself basked in the fame and glory of having come this far, from just about as unlikely beginnings as it is possible to imagine; spelled out in a memoir published posthumously just last week. (I’ve not been able to secure a copy of it online yet – a Stockholm bookstore has promised me a hard copy by the end of the week; but here’s Amazon’s summary of it:

‘When Jason Arday was thirty-seven years old, everything changed. He made international news by becoming the youngest Black professor in the almost thousand-year history of the University of Cambridge. But that remarkable achievement is only part of his great and unfortunate tale. 

‘He grew up in a council house in south London with his parents and two brothers. Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at the age of three, he spent much of his non-verbal childhood navigating a system that struggled to understand him. Doctors and teachers believed there was ‘no one in there’. But Jason’s mother, Giff, refused to accept the limits others placed on her son. 

‘With the faith of his family and the support of a handful of extraordinary friends and mentors, Jason slowly found his voice. He spoke his first word at eleven, learned to read and write at eighteen, and discovered a passion for education and helping others that would transform his life. Along the way there were improbable triumphs and heartbreaking setbacks, tears of joy and moments so painful that laughter was the only option, and more than one occasion when everything seemed poised to fall apart.

‘Great and Unfortunate Things is an unforgettable book about resilience and love – and the transformative power of someone who believes in you when the world does not.’)

New and controversial as DEI may possibly be in America, in UK academia we’ve had something like it for very many years. As an ‘Admissions Officer’ in one of the universities I taught at, and as a ‘Leftie’, I was well aware of the disadvantage that boys and girls from deprived areas suffered under in trying to get into higher education, and made allowances for it. My faith in them was generally borne out by their academic results at the end of their university careers; often surpassing those of closely-tutored Public (private) school candidates with better ‘A’-levels. So I was practising a kind of DEI. Before that, as a student myself at Cambridge I had been shocked at the positive advantages bestowed on my Public school contemporaries, some of whom were as thick as (let us say) two short Boris Johnsons. When as a Fellow of my college I tried to interest our Senior Tutor in trawling different – State Grammar School – waters, I was met with the reply: ‘Sorry, Bernard; we don’t want this sort of boy here.’ I resigned my Fellowship shortly afterwards.

Have things at Cambridge improved since then? I think they must have done. My old college has admitted girls for more than twenty years now, for example; and probably more ‘black’ boys than it did in my day. ‘Girls’ were the main ‘DEI’ issue then. Decades before that, it had been Catholics, Nonconformists and Jews. All of these ultimately won their battles for ‘Inclusion’, which no-one would deny to them today. But I’m sure that there must be a lot more to do. And ‘DEI’, in one form or another, could be a means of achieving this.

The problem in Jason Arday’s case, of course, was the ease with which he and his sponsors exploited DEI to their own advantage, so overriding the scholarly values that should be the rock solid foundation of any academic reputation. I don’t blame him alone. His sponsors and examiners, initially at Liverpool John Moores University (where he did his PhD), and then at the other universities that employed him, culminating in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, should have gathered, somewhere along the line, that he was a plagiariser and a fantasist – his CV is frankly ludicrous  – and stopped him in his tracks. The result of their not doing so is the immense damage that has been done to the reputations of all the universities that have taught and employed him; culminating in my beloved alma mater, and its Faculty of Education in particular. (But then ‘Education’ as an academic discipline never did have much kudos there, as I remember from sixty years ago.)

I just hope that higher education in general won’t be smeared by this. You can almost hear the ‘anti-expertise’ Right (Michael Gove?) and ‘Friends of the poorly educated’ (Donald Trump) sharpening their knives.

Brexit was supposed to protect Britain from all those nasty immigrants from Europe who threatened ‘ar sovrinty’. Which it probably did, to some extent. Certainly we don’t find so many foreign doctors and nurses in our hospitals as we used to, which will be a comfort for the able-bodied; or all those people talking funny foreign languages on the Tube.

The other side of this, however, is the difficulties we can encounter travelling in Europe; and even returning to Britain after staying there, if we’re British. I’m planning a short trip back there next week, but with a lapsed British passport (I thought my Swedish one would suffice), and experiencing considerable problems getting the visa I now require; although that may be due to my stupidity with the internet. (All those passwords…)

That pales into insignificance, however, by comparison with the experience of Joyce Thomas, a 78 year-old British pensioner, who has lived here in Sweden for 22 years, working as a nurse, but whom the Swedish authorities won’t allow either to stay or to return to her grown-up family in Britain, because she doesn’t have Swedish citizenship, and so is still formally an ‘alien’. Before Brexit, of course, that wouldn’t have mattered. Dagens Nyheter has a report on this today. Luckily the Vänster (Left) Party have taken up Joyce’s case. One problem, however, is that the Swedes are sticklers for rules. It’s one of their less admirable characteristics, in my view.

And the Vänsters have other problems with migrants. I’ve mentioned the weaponisation of ‘anti-semitism’ in Sweden before (https://bernardjporter.com/2025/04/11/leftist-anti-semitism-in-sweden/). It’s coming up again, just before our general election this coming Sunday. What may justify the charge to an extent is the numbers of (naturalised) Moslem immigrants who have joined the party recently, on the grounds of its opposition to Israel in Gaza. The anti-semitism coming from them can be appalling; and food and drink for the Right.

My thoughts pretty exactly. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2026/08/16/plagiarism/.)

I‘m not a ‘conspiracy theorist’ – or at least I don’t think I am. But it’s difficult to dismiss the idea that there’s a dark conspiracy underlying the resistance of the US Department of Justice to the full publication of the ‘Epstein Files’, as instructed by Congress, which may reveal (1) evidence of Trump’s complicity in Epstein’s crimes; and (2) the truth about the latter’s mysterious death in a prison cell. In this case a ‘conspiratorial’ explanation seems the most obvious and common-sense one. So can I put my tin-foil hat away?