Author Archives: bernardporter2013

Incidentally – and following on from my last post – I used to think that writing novels must be far easier than writing history; not insisting, as history does, that you are bound by facts, but allowing you instead to … Continue reading →

What’s the point of blogging? Only a tiny handful of people read the posts of obscure academics like me. To be fair, a large audience was not what I expected, or even wanted, when I began this blog ten years … Continue reading →

Strictly speaking, democracy can be squared with dictatorship if the demos is choosing its dictators for itself. That – for those of us who wouldn’t welcome this outcome – is the great danger of the ‘populism’ which is gripping so … Continue reading →

I’ve just finished reading Tom Baldwin’s Keir Starmer, The Biography.  The author insists that it’s not ‘authorised’; but it could well be, relying as it does on sources very close to Starmer, including the man himself, and being overall pretty … Continue reading →

To a scholar, or I would have thought any educated person, the word ‘extremism’ doesn’t signify much. You can have an ‘extreme’ anything; even ‘extreme moderation’, if you’re willing to be pedantic about it (and a bit silly). Extremism is … Continue reading →

My doctors’ surgery in Stockholm. I suppose you could say that they shouldn’t be wasting their time with this sort of nonsense; but in Britain they wouldn’t have the time.

The NHS isn’t working. (This is in the UK.) The dental service isn’t working. The Home Office isn’t working (especially with regard to immigration). Local government isn’t working. The Police aren’t working (properly). The Army is grossly undermanned. Now we … Continue reading →

Rishi Sunak claims that he is ‘living proof that Britain isn’t a racist country’. That’s in connection with the current row over whether or not Lee Anderson MP’s claim that the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, is ‘controlled’ by militant Islamists, … Continue reading →

I think I can understand – and even empathise with – what’s in the minds of people in Europe and America who vote for right-wing, ‘populist’ parties these days. Not necessarily in the minds of their leaders, who may be … Continue reading →