Porter’s Pensées

Vince Cable has it exactly right. I’m ashamed of my generation.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-4764742/Lib-Dem-leader-SIR-VINCE-CABLE-attacks-Brexit-fanatics.html

One of the problems with Brexit is how to replace the free trade we presently enjoy within Europe, but which we might lose – especially after what is called a ‘hard’ Brexit – with something else as profitable. At the beginning of the so-called ‘debate’ over Brexit, its supporters were claiming that there were enough opportunities outside Europe to fill the gap; with some harking back nostalgically to pre-Common Market days, when we had an Empire or Commonwealth free trade area that could, perhaps, be revived. In historical fact that was never a complete reality, and insofar as it was, was declining in any case; and the likelihood of Commonwealth trade fully compensating for our losses in Europe today seems remote. The figures just don’t add up. A US trade deal would seem to be our best hope of a replacement for the EU one, and that would come with environmental and other conditions that many would find unacceptable.

Lying behind this there seems to be at least a smidgeon of imperial nostalgia, and of longing for a union of old and trustworthy friends and relatives to replace one with ‘foreigners’. That’s where I come in, as an imperial historian. The idea of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ union or federation goes back a long way in British history. Some versions of it envisioned the USA coming back into the Empire or Commonwealth, imparting a strength to it wouldn’t have otherwise – British imperialists were fully aware of the potential of America, from the later 19^th century on; sharing with us ‘the White Man’s burden’, as Kipling memorably put it, and even perhaps taking over the lead. The Americans after all shared much of their history with us, as well as their political values, and many of their genes. ‘Anglo-Saxon’ federation ideas can be traced back originally, I think (there may be earlier precedents) to Charles Dilke’s influential 1868 book, Greater Britain, by which he meant the ‘settler’ colonies (as opposed to the ‘dependent’ ones). Later, in the early 20^th century, when the Empire looked to be vulnerable to foreign competition, it was reflected in schemes floated by Joseph Chamberlain, Cecil Rhodes and the ‘Round Table’ group of Commonwealthists to turn the existing Empire into a federation of equal states, with a place open for America if she wanted it.

More recently it has come up in the emergence of the term ‘Anglosphere’ to describe this collection of countries, and the claim that its ‘Englishness’ somehow makes it essentially distinctive from the rest of the world. ‘Anglosphere’ is an imprecise word, sometimes denoting a racial or ethic identity – Dilke’s old ‘white’ colonies – but at other times including non-Anglo-Saxon countries that have nonetheless been essentially Anglicized in their institutions, usually under past British imperial tutelage. ‘Cricket’ can be used as a measure of this. But it’s consanguinity that is usually emphasized by present-day users of the term. Australians, Americans and the rest are our ‘brothers’, or ‘cousins’, at least in great part (especially if you add in the Celts); and consequently share the greatest identity with us Brits.

It’s in that sense that the journalist Melanie Phillips uses the word, in a recent extraordinary article in which she looks forward to a post-Brexit revival of the ‘Anglosphere’, in a more material and tangible form than it possesses today. (HTTP://WWW.MELANIEPHILLIPS.COM/OPEN-DOOR-SWINGING-ANGLOSPHERE/.) For her the Anglosphere consists mainly of Britain and the United States; for which two nations she makes claims that would not, I think, be accepted without considerable qualification by any serious historian (apart perhaps from Niall Ferguson). One is that America and Britain are together ‘the mother-ship of political liberty and democracy’, and ‘the foundation nations of western freedom’; the principles of which other nations understand only ‘imperfectly’ at best. Unfortunately (for Phillips), both Britain and America lost confidence in these principles, and consequently in themselves, after the last World War. This was what gave rise to the widespread and guilt-ridden anti-‘Western’ reaction we can see today in the West, and to new and dangerous ideologies: ‘such as moral and cultural relativism, feminism and multiculturalism’, ‘capturing the citadels of the culture such as the universities, the churches, the media and others and subverting from within the west’s core values’.

According to Phillips, joining the EU was – in some way, not fully explained here – a symptom of that. And the reaction against the EU expressed in the 2016 referendum, together with the reaction against conventional American politics that brought Donald Trump to power, were consequently essentially a ‘reassertion of [the] western national identity’ that could revive these Anglospherical principles. ‘With both the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump, the door to the Anglosphere’s future suddenly burst open’, writes Phillips; although she’s not altogether confident – especially in view of May’s weakness and Trump’s obvious failings – that it will remain open for long.

It’s an interesting argument for Brexit, by-passing the usual commercial ones; which in any case aren’t apparently all that important for older Brexit voters, half of whom would be – according to a recent poll – quite happy to sacrifice their children’s prosperity in exchange for what they conceive as ‘national freedom’. (See http://www.scotsman.com/news/half-of-older-leave-voters-would-accept-job-loss-for-brexit-1-4519647). The flaws in it will be apparent to any historian: the idea that Britain and America have sole responsibility for the development of democracy and the rule of law, for example, with other European countries being historically resistant to them; an assertion which must seem even more questionable in view of both Britain’s and America’s serious deviations from these principles in recent times, against the more liberal present trends in western Europe. Particularly astonishing is the inclusion of ‘feminism’ among the ‘destructive and dangerous ideas’ that are undermining ‘western’ (by which she means Anglo-American) values today, when most people would see it (though not exclusively) as a logical development of those values. One gets the impression here that Phillips is merely lashing out at traditional right-wing bêtes noirs, like ‘political correctness’, without any thought for their real provenance, or for how they fit into the logic of her general argument. Then, lastly, there is the racist – or at the very least ‘culturist’ – implication of this whole ‘Anglosphere’ thing; which as well as being objectively misleading, can also be dangerous, if it persuades people there is a particular virtue in being ‘British’, either presently or in heritage, as against ‘foreign’.

By other ways of looking at it, British and Americans – and also Canadians and Australians – have at least as much dividing as uniting them, deriving from the material circumstances that influence people and countries probably more than their common historical roots; and making it at least as logical for a people to ally with their close geographical neighbours as with their far-flung ethnic ‘cousins’. Such alliances will also be more productive and creative than remaining, boringly, with one’s own ‘sort’. That’s how British culture, including our political culture, has developed over the centuries: ‘multiculturally’, to name one of Phillips’s other bêtes noirs; and one reason why some of us are happier in a relationship with peoples who might teach us something, rather than with countries we believe – arrogantly – can only learn from us.

(Revised 5 August.)

A brief historical coda to yesterday’s post.

Nineteenth-century British Tories were also against educating the plebs at almost every level, beyond what would be required for their strict and natural function in society: which was to labour for the gentry. Anything more would give them ‘ideas above their station’. Later, when some (male) plebs were given the parliamentary vote (1867), Disraeli changed the Tories’ tune, famously proclaiming, in defence of a Bill extending free state-provided elementary education to everyone, that ‘we must educate our masters’. Obviously, for our Telegraph commentator, that can be taken too far, if it educates them in their own oppression.

My early Victorian liberal friend Samuel Laing (see recent posts), who never completed his own university course, also devalued higher education on the grounds that it could make young men (only men at this time, of course) dissatisfied with their lot, and so more radical. He saw a lot of this in the politically turbulent German states. It would be better for them, he thought, if they worked practically for a living, instead of having their young heads filled with airy and potentially dangerous philosophical notions. Marx would have been at university about then. So perhaps Laing had a point.

The DT piece fits in well with the ‘anti-intellectualist’ trend which is taking hold in so many political areas today.

Despite working in the Higher Education sector, I was never one of those who thought that universities were for everyone, or even a majority of people, which I believe is the situation in Britain today; and was especially dubious of the sleight of hand by which Margaret Thatcher enormously increased the number of university places simply by allowing existing polytechnics and other colleges to call themselves universities. That went down well because the title ‘university’ had always carried a certain cachet – less so now that they are so common, I imagine, and in particular following the gross devaluation of the ‘First-class’ degree in recent years. (That’s the market working: if you’re paying through the nose for your degree, you demand only the best.) But by the same token it also got the ex-polytechnics trying to ape the more traditional universities in every respect, so as to seem to merit their new status, rather than preserving and developing the unique modern features that had given them their raison d’etre before. I couldn’t see the value in that.

But I hadn’t reckoned on another effect. That is, apparently, to augment the number of Left-wing voters in British society. Apparently the more highly educated you are, the more likely to vote Labour, or at least Green or Liberal; and to have voted Remain in the last referendum. There’s an obvious lesson to be learned from that. One Daily Telegraph columnist, however, chose another. He used it as an argument for reducing university places again: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/29/left-will-continue-resurgence-long-many-go-university/. The message seems to be that if you want people to vote Tory, keep them ignorant. Well, it figures.

On holiday; which releases me, I feel, from the duty of commenting on the farcical political events I’m reading about from Britain and America. We’re presently on a train climbing through high snowfields (in July!) in Norway. Donald, Theresa, Boris, Nigel and the rest seem so blessedly far away.

This blog isn’t supposed to be a travelogue, so I won’t bore anyone with extended impressions of the country. In brief: Trondheim was wonderful, the cathedral in particular – a Romanesque/Gothic gem, this far north. And we managed to see the valley – Verdal – where my man Laing lived, but which suffered a terrible landslide in the 1890s, killing 116 people and probably destroying his farm. He described the valley as more beautiful than anything in Scotland; but he was a utilitarian, and I guess liked it because it’s wide and flat and so eminently cultivable.

Oslo has turned itself into a modern-looking capital city since I was here last, when it had appeared rather provincial. Ibsen’s flat shows what it used to be like. The opera house is a fantastic piece of modern architecture, and a new city library is going up – so the Norwegians are still keeping faith with books. But then they’ve always been a literary people. It must be the dark winter nights.

(OK: the less said about the prices the better – £10 for a half glass of wine! Also the food: mostly rather tasteless fish, apart from some whale meat, which was horrible. But that serves me right, I suppose, for eating an endangered species. Kajsa thinks I’m being hard on the fish. It was better when they served it – surprisingly often, outside England – in an egg batter, with chips.)

We’re on our way by rail to Bergen now, for Grieg. (Our holidays are always cultural. Or, if you like, pretentious.) I would have liked to look up Svendson and Halvorsen too – they wrote the romantic symphonies that Grieg never got round to – but they don’t seem to be so celebrated.

In between the culture, the landscape is as spectacular as its reputation. It’s why the philistine Brits have always preferred Norway to Sweden, as I gathered from my study of British travelogues years ago. It must go back to the Romantics. It conjures up a picture I got from Mary Wollstonecraft’s account of her visit to Norway in the 1810s, where, among the mountains and in a personal emotional turmoil, she describes herself baring her breasts to the elements… I can’t get that image out of my mind. (Not that I particularly want to.)

But for a more sober account of the Norwegian nation, Samuel Laing’s Journal of a Residence in Norway (1840-ish), a reproduction of which is still available, remarkably, through Amazon, is worth looking up. I’m thinking of writing another piece on Laing when I get back, now I’ve seen his Norwegian valley, and – years ago – visited the house in Orkney where he was born. It does sometimes help a historian or biographer to have experienced a subject’s geographical environment. But don’t rely on the Journal as a guidebook to present-day Norway. I don’t imagine the MacDonald’s in Verdal was there 180 years ago.

My latest review.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/20/m-by-henry-hemming-review-mi5

I can’t think of another period in British history where leading politicians were drawn from the ranks of professional journalists. Salisbury used to write (anonymously) for the press before becoming PM, but it wasn’t his main occupation. WH Smith – a cabinet member in the 1880s – sold newspapers. Karl Marx supported himself by writing newspaper articles, but he never made it into the British cabinet. Today, however, we have Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, both cabinet ministers, and both indeed vying for the top spot, whose only job before entering politics was writing ‘op. eds’ for the Times and Telegraph. In other words they came down from university straight into inflicting their clever young opinions on the British public in the Tory press, with no real experience of life or public affairs to back those opinions up. They and their editors thought they were entitled to do this, no doubt, because of the patina of ‘intelligence’ that surrounded them – in Boris’s case simply, I suspect, because he knew some ancient Greek – and because of their vaulting self-confidence. In both cases, when you analyse what they say, they hardly live up to that reputation. Gove is a simple-minded ideologue; Johnson an intellectual chancer.

It’s always been my opinion that a representative democracy ought to be represented by representative people, both in parliament and in the cabinet. At present the House of Lords is in this sense, and ironically, rather more representative than the Commons, because – apart from the minority of hereditary peers – it’s composed of people who have done things in their lives; that is, have had proper jobs. How many Commoners have? Most of them have been student union politicians who have later on gone to work for trade unions, if Labour, or, on the Tory side, young privileged men and women whose daddies are rich enough to have supported them in unpaid appointments in Conservative Central Office.

A few professions have done quite well, with plenty of lawyers in the House of Commons – OK, I think, if they have genuinely practiced Law – and a sprinkling of bankers. Again, I wouldn’t object to them if they really were just a sprinkling, proportionate to the total population they were representing, and were broad-minded. And I’ve nothing against Boris’s profession of journalism: a great profession, so long as it concentrates on reporting affairs that would be hidden from people otherwise, and even heroic, if it does this against pressure from governments, bankers and others. Neither Johnson nor Gove comes into this category. Johnson’s ‘reporting’, from Brussels at one stage, consisted in simply telling lies; apparently ‘straight bananas’ was one of his. Gove just vents his prejudices, confidently, backed up by selective reading. At the Leveson hearings much of his testimony, in an area I’m familiar with, was historical nonsense. Beyond these, what other ‘jobs’ are as well represented? I’m not pleading here for a chamber made up of hoary-handed men (and women) of toil, though a few more might make Dennis Skinner and his few hoary-handed mates look a little less isolated – and deter the Tories from mocking Northern accents. Simply for all MPs to have done some kind of ‘proper’ job before standing for Parliament. (Plus a few very young ones who won’t have had that kind of experience, but will know what it’s like to be young.)

Mere scribblers are unlikely to make good governors. How was it that Stanley Baldwin characterized the press of his day: ‘power without responsibility; the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’? It must be difficult to shed that once in real power. Johnson and Gove show no signs of doing it.

It’s been a blessed relief to retire to a civilized country for a while, from the political chaos that is present-day Britain. I can’t entirely escape from the latter, of course, with the Swedish broadsheet press covering it pretty well, and unmercifully – they really do think we’re mad; but at least it puts some distance between me, here on ‘our’ idyllic island, and the ‘Eton mess’ back home.

I’ve always tried, in this blog, to contribute some historical context to the current events I comment on, as a justification for commenting at all, I suppose – for I have no other expertise that might raise my views a little above the level of mere ‘opinion’. But it’s difficult to in this case. I can – and have tried – to place present happenings in their very broadest context, of the modern crisis of capitalism, which obviously – to my mind – lies behind UKIP, Trumpery, the Front Nationale, and all the rest. That’s been building up for some time, and so qualifies as a historical phenomenon. But the crisis is taking different forms in different countries, some of which, it seems to me, have no exact historical parallels. I can’t find a very close one for the extraordinary phenomenon that is Trump, for example, though there are some very loose comparisons that can be made with 1930s European fascism; and the present political mess in the UK seems to me to be entirely without precedent. When did we (Brits) ever experience a crisis so self-inflicted, by unwise leaders, crazily idiosyncratic politicians, an irresponsible press, and a grossly misled public, as we (back home) are suffering today?

‘There’s nothing new under the sun’, they say. Oh yes there is. – That may be a historical point worth making.

While I have him in mind: two more interesting (?) points about Samuel Laing the Elder.

He was one of the first assertive and ideological philistines I’ve come across in history. He argued that ‘art’ was an unrelievedly bad thing, suited only to peoples at low stages of civilization, before they had advanced into the state of progressive utilitarianism he thought he saw in Norway, where no-one wasted their time on such fripperies but instead concentrated on the solid, material things of life. So one sign of Sweden’s inferiority to Norway was her superiority in the fine arts – painting, decorative architecture, and so on. The same was true all over Europe (where he travelled and recorded after leaving Scandinavia). Italy and France were at the lowest stages because they were artistically accomplished; Britain near the top because she was unartistic, devoting her people’s time, money and efforts to making useful things like steam engines and money. I explored this in another ‘Laing’ article: ‘”Monstrous Vandalism”: Capitalism and Philistinism in the Works of Samuel Laing (1780-1868)’, in Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer, 1991). In a later reply to comments on this, I waspishly suggested that this might be the reason why modern ultra-capitalist America was so relatively poor at ‘art’ (except jazz); only to be denounced as elitist, of course. (I’m not really.)

Secondly – and this should be borne in mind when we consider the early ideology of ‘liberalism’ generally – Laing was convinced that the free market and all its trappings were conducive to human equality. It was this that made him a democratic as well as an economic radical. John Stuart Mill, the doyen of Victorian liberals, took this idea from him, in his Principles of Political Economy, where he wrote (2^nd edn.) that if that did not turn out to be the case he, for one, would become a ‘socialist’. (Michael Caine voice:) ‘Not many people know that’. It shows how fundamentally the ideology of ‘liberalism’ has changed over the years: indeed, has almost metamorphosed into its opposite. Victorian liberalism, which Thatcher for example professed to worship, must not be confused in any way with the ‘neo’ kind.

Samuel Laing would not have approved of our present-day ultra-capitalists. Or indeed, to return to his ‘philistinism’: of Edvard Grieg. (We hope to make a pilgrimage to Grieg’s house in Bergen next week, after visiting Laing’s Levanger.)

I’ve been back in Sweden for a few days now. I’m sleeping much better – it must be the social democracy. But it takes a while to get re-adjusted. Hence no posts. I hope to resume soon.

We plan to go to Norway next week, following the route taken by one of my historical subjects, Samuel Laing the Elder, in the 1830s. (See http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03468759850115936?src=recsys.) Laing was an Orcadian travel writer – among other things; he was also a kelp farmer and translator of one of the Norse sagas – who lived and farmed briefly in Levanger, and published an admiring account of contemporary radical Norway. He then followed this with a brief visit to Sweden, recounted in a second book, which painted that country as the polar opposite to Norway: aristocratic- and church-dominated, morally corrupt – he made great use of illegitimacy statistics – and entirely bereft of self-sufficiency and enterprise. Naturally, the Swedes objected. (Their ambassador complained formally to Lord Palmerston.)

I made my study of Laing’s works some time before I came to experience Sweden for myself. Luckily I didn’t allow them to influence my view of the latter. (Please note, Migrationsverket. I’m still waiting for you to approve my citizenship application.) Next week I can put his judgment of our neighbours to the test; as well as visiting the most northerly Romanesque/Gothic cathedral in Europe, Trondheim – I’m really looking forward to that – and some spectacular scenery. I’ve been warned about the food. (When I complain about Swedish cuisine, they always reply: ‘Ah, but Norwegian is even worse‘.)

More serious posts to follow.