Porter’s Pensées

In many countries History is taught in order (partly) to inculcate patriotism. This has meant prioritising one’s own country’s history over others’, and in some cases teaching and learning one’s own history alone. I’ve always been proud that History teaching in British schools and universities from ‘A’-Level onwards has not, generally speaking, followed that pattern. This was one of Margaret Thatcher’s complaints against the new National History (school) Curriculum that was drawn up in the 1980s (I had a very small part in that): that it wasn’t ‘British’ enough. (Her other objection was that it seemed to have jettisoned the rote learning of lists of Kings and Queens with their dates, in favour of critical thought.) My own (Mediaeval) A-level course was as much continental European as it was English; and when I got to university I found that it was impossible to take more than 30-40% of my History courses in British history alone. Most of the other choices were in continental European history, or American. That suited me at the time. It should have suited the ‘patriots’ too; for what better way is there of understanding your own country’s history than by studying it in the context of others’?

I had one gripe then; and I’ve added another to it since. Apart from American, which was seen as a kind of extension of British history, we were able to study very little extra-European history. There was one exception: imperial history, called – tellingly – ‘The Expansion of Europe’; which in any case was not highly rated, but only offered as an alternative for those who weren’t bright enough to cope with its alternative, which was the history of European political thought. (That’s what I opted for. Hence I became an imperial historian without ever having studied imperial history as an undergraduate.) So the syllabus still seemed to me to be Eurocentric, even if it wasn’t Anglocentric; that is, ‘white men’s history’ – yes, just men – alone. I hasten to add that this was many years ago, in the 1960s. I guess it will have changed now.

I wonder whether my other gripe has been addressed? That concerns the geographical limits that were placed even on the European history we were given to study; which comprised, almost exclusively, the histories of France, Germany and Italy – or what later became those nations. Other countries occasionally got a look in if they had fought with any of those nations, or with Britain, or had been invaded by them; so Russia, the Low Countries, the Balkans and the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires were given walk-on roles from time to time. But all the serious action revolved around the core European countries of France, Germany and Italy (together of course with Britain); with what we might call the continental periphery being almost totally neglected. That included the Iberian peninsular, Greece, and the whole of Scandinavia.

It’s the Scandinavian absence that has, naturally enough, struck me most since I started living (partly) in Sweden twenty years ago; not only the omission of the Nordic countries from our history syllabuses, but also the lack of any serious reporting from there in our current British media. The Swedish press has been covering our recent political shenanigans in great detail – and with an accuracy and objectivity we don’t often find in the British press. The only time Scandinavia is prominently mentioned in our papers, however, is when there’s a massacre there; or if it corroborates our stereotypes of the place: IKEA, leggy blondes, the ‘Nordic model’, and so on. When we want to make political or economic comparisons between our own national situation and foreign ones, it’s nearly always to the ‘core’ nations that we turn, even when Scandinavian ones might be more apt. The aptest one would be with Sweden’s (and for all I know Norway’s and Denmark’s) political, social welfare and economic systems. You occasionally find references to Swedish child-care, for example. But these are mere mentions, footnotes, never properly explored in the British discourse. If they were, they could teach us a lot.

Similarly, even we ‘intellectuals’ know very little about Scandinavia’s cultural life, apart from Ibsen, Bergman, Grieg, Abba, and The Scream. When I switch my computer on, it gives out the first chord (I think) of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony; leading me to wonder each time: what has become of Sibelius’s stock now? In my youth he was one of the great modern symphonists; now he is rarely heard on British radio. Is this another example of our (British) marginalisation of the North?

When I left university I still had only the vaguest idea of Scandinavia. One of my father’s friends was a nudist, and went to Sweden to practice his hobby. That coloured my image at the time. We heard stories of young Swedish women – mainly au pairs – being particularly liberal with their sexual favours. We assumed it was cold there all the year round. We also admired Sweden for its internationalism, anti-imperialism and pacifism. In the Labour Party we had this glorious vision of the ‘Swedish model’ of society, our ‘shining city on the hill’, which we hankered after in Britain, but without knowing much about it.

Meeting Kajsa in 1995 was my first proper introduction to the country. I can’t – mustn’t – say I was disappointed (where are all those nudists?), but I was surprised. Its women are not particularly promiscuous. Indeed, the Swedes are rather straight-laced about these things. (It comes out in their particular brand of feminism.) Its summers can be hot, and even its winters seem warmer (because drier) than ours. Historically, the country is not at all innocent of aggression, militarism, imperialism, slavery and collaboration with tyrants (in World War II). No country is perfect. But the Scandinavian ones are still better than most, and worth serious study, both historically and politically, by us Brits. We could learn a thing or two. They shouldn’t be dismissed simply because they’re way up there, on the edge of our ‘civilised world’.

For the 48% who voted to remain in the EU last summer – the narrow margin indicating a clear division, and probably a wide range, of opinion over the issue then – the argument of the more extreme Brexiteers that that vote gave them a clear and eternal popular mandate to distance Britain as far away from the EU as possible – a so-called ‘hard Brexit’ – is, frankly, ludicrous. There are four reasons why.

The first is that our parliamentary constitution gives them no mandate to claim such a mandate. The relations between Britain and other nations can only be altered by Parliament, after extensive consideration, and irrespective of any kind of direct test of ‘public opinion’, which – it’s perfectly clear – can only be ‘advisory’. The fact that our last craven Parliament voted against its better collective judgment, and in fear of popular (in fact Press) recrimination if it didn’t, only papered over this requirement. It voted, in effect, to surrender its constitutional responsibility; which I suppose makes the decision strictly speaking constitutional, but only by abandoning the safeguards against hasty decisions that the constitution is there to ensure.

Secondly, the claim that holding a second referendum in order to reconsider and even possibly reverse that decision would be ‘undemocratic’, is self-evident nonsense. In simple logic: if one referendum is democratic, why can’t another one be? Why should the first one bind us all for ever after, even if public opinion has shifted in the meantime? I don’t know whether that is the case (I’ve seen no polls to indicate it); but it’s quite possible that, for example, the young, who are the ones who are going to have to live longest with the new dispensation, and who would almost certainly have made a crucial difference if they’d bothered to vote last year, might come out and vote in a second referendum, as they did in the recent General Election, so reflecting a fuller range of public opinion than last June’s vote.

In the third place: the first referendum had obvious and blatant flaws, which rendered the result probably not a judgment on the issue that was formally presented in it, nor one taken on the basis of a fair presentation of both sides. I’ve posted on this before (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/). The vote was taken in a moment of high dissatisfaction with the government of the day, for all kinds of reasons, and reflected that general dissatisfaction at least as much as it did hostility to the EU per se. I’ve talked with Brexiteers of all kinds and classes, and although some were genuinely and knowledgeably concerned about Europe (I share many of those concerns), and a few others were simply stupid (as were many Remainers too: that’s the nature of our society), many others were far more concerned with other things. Politicians’ out-of-touchedness-with ordinary people was one. A few months later their discontent was made even more obvious by the result of the June 2017 General Election, which slashed the Conservatives’ majority. Really, the EU Referendum was held at a very bad time. It was like being asked to come to an important decision in a rage.

Fourthly, it seems obvious that not all Brexiteers were voting for the same kind of Brexit. What kind that was, was never spelled out, leaving a number of possibilities, ranging from absolute isolationism to the closer Norway model. There is no way of knowing which degree of Brexit the voters favoured, and no justification at all for assuming it was the most extreme kind. If it was not, then there would seem to be some degree of overlap between the two camps; a compromise, based on the preservation of the single market, for example, and with most of the rules, like fairly free movement, which that would bring with it: in other words, a ‘soft’ enough Brexit to satisfy most people on both sides.

All of which is why Parliament, which is a better – more deliberative – channel for public opinion than a crude ‘in or out’ referendum, and the one that is licensed by our constitution, must have the final say on whatever terms of exit are negotiated between us and the remaining members of the EU. We’d then know exactly what we were voting on. In order to achieve consensus, and hence a positive vote, it obviously couldn’t be as extreme and final as the Brexiteers are demanding today. And, by rights – in democratic principle, indeed – it should leave open the possibility of our reneging on Brexit, and returning to Europe, despite that knee-jerk vote of 23 June last year.

For me as a historian, as well as an ordinary citizen, this whole event has, I have to say, shaken me. Historians like to be able to rationalise history, to trace underlying causes and broad trends, in a way this referendum affair is going to make difficult. I don’t recall many historical events that have turned as much as this one on accidents, misunderstandings and errors. That makes me uncomfortable This is not because the result of the referendum turned out ‘wrong’ for me. Before it, I was in two minds about Britain’s membership of the EU, especially in view of the distortions caused by the Euro, the EU’s failure to come to grips collectively with the refugee problem, its neoliberalism, and its ‘imperialism’, as I saw it (as an imperial historian), in Eastern Europe and the Ukraine. (I’ve blogged critically on all these issues.) My reason in the end for voting ‘Remain’ was in order for us in Britain to retain a degree of ‘control’ over our affairs, with the help of our European allies, against what is the major contemporary challenge to our national sovereignty, which is not Brussels, but globalisation; which an isolated mid-Atlantic economy cannot hope to resist on its own. If we had decided to leave the EU in a more considered and constitutional way, I would still have sorrowed, at the way my cherished European identity (one of several) had been stolen from me; but not felt as angry as I do now. For this to happen in such an accidental, random and irrational way is what disturbs me as a historian, and upsets me as a citizen. I imagine that others feel this way, and will continue to do so if Theresa May’s form of Brexit goes forward. That festering grievance bodes ill for our stability and contentment as a nation for years to come.

Right-wing Americans have been dissing Sweden for decades. At first it was because of its socialism; no patriotic American could understand or credit the good it seemed to be doing to the country in so many ways. I remember years ago while in the US reading in a paper that Stockholm’s murder rate was higher than Chicago’s. More recently it’s been because of Sweden’s generous immigration policy, which must be posing an existential threat to the country, surely? Remember Trump’s reference to Moslem riots in Sweden six months ago – ‘Who would believe it! Sweden!’ – which turned out to be totally fictitious: see https://bernardjporter.com/2017/02/24/rinkeby/. But the Trumpists haven’t learned – or, probably, wanted to.

Robin Ramsay has sent me these two pieces of ‘fake news’ from more recent American blogsites:

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/06/sweden-on-the-brink-of-civil-war-national-police-chief-help-us-help-us; and http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-24/leaked-police-report-exposes-23-muslim-controlled-no-go-zones-sweden-plagued-violenc.

(And you should look at some of the BTL comments on these.) They are, of course, utter nonsense. One has a picture of posters allegedly put up by Swedish jihadists to mark ‘Sharia Law’ areas, written in English! Sweden has immigration problems, sure, but nothing like as serious as this. Indeed, this other US website shows how the others were conned:

http://www.snopes.com/sweden-crime-no-go-zone-police/

(again, from Robin). But I doubt whether this will persuade patriotic Americans. They believe what they want to. Sweden is a standing rebuff to all they hold dear: free market capitalism, Christianity, punishment, guns. So it can’t be real.

A small gripe. A pretty good documentary on BBC2 last night, Who Should We Let In?, fronted by Ian Hislop, was largely based on a book of mine, The Refugee Question, and on quotes and illustrations I provided directly to the producer over the phone and through the internet; yet with no acknowledgment of my contribution at the end of the programme. Should I be miffed? Or simply pleased that my findings – original when I published them – have now entered into the general discourse? I guess that the slight disappointment I presently feel is unworthy of a scholar who should be more concerned to reveal truths, than to gain personal kudos. But we’re all human.

It has been interesting entertaining Swedish friends here in England at such an eventful and – probably – crucial time in our history. First there was the General Election, with the rise of Jeremy and the revolt of the Youth, and the Greek-tragic (hubris-nemesis) decline of the Maybot; then no fewer than three ‘terrorist’ attacks; and lastly the Grenfell Tower disaster, with all that can be inferred from this about the state of modern British society generally. I’m sure all this will provide them with dinner table conversation in Sweden for months. (They’re on their way back now.) ‘We were there…!’

I’ll get back to serious blogging soon. My foreign friends’ visit, on top of my operation – fully healed now, thanks – has rather held that up recently. Perhaps in a few days time…

In the meantime let me refer to Prince Harry’s recent claim, that none of the present Royals actually wants to be King or Queen, though they would, he says, take on the burden out of duty. It has been much criticised in the Press, but it has rather warmed me to him. I have little time for our Royal family (except Liz: she’s OK); but one of the few advantages of the hereditary principle, surely, is that it is likely to exclude ambitious people from the Head of State role, and in particular people who are solely motivated by personal ambition. They’re the dangerous ones. Look at the Maybot.

Just over a year ago, before our referendum, I wrote a piece on Swedish attitudes to the EU, suggesting that Sweden might be tempted to follow Britain out of it: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/22/brexit-swexit/.  In fact, post-referendum, it appears that Brexit has had the opposite effect there. A recent article in Dagens Nyheter (http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/svenskar-mer-positiva-till-eu-efter-brexit/, but behind a pay-wall, I think) argues that Swedes are ‘more positive towards the EU after Brexit’, with Britain’s departure being widely seen as a disaster all round, causing a re-think among the previously sceptical Swedes, 66% of whom are now in favour of continued membership. That must be because of the extraordinary difficulties that our Brexit is now facing, which were mostly unanticipated by the pre-referendum Little Englanders. If only we Brits could be permitted a similar re-think. But a democratic vote now, of course, would be undemocratic, on the grounds that a democratic decision has already been made. Holy Moses!

One of the great social scandals of the Victorian age was the existence of rich and poor ghettoes cheek by jowl in London, just like in Notting Hill today. Then the poor were hidden away in low slums, behind the mansions of the rich; now they’re put into high-rise tower blocks. I must say, having visited the posh part of Notting Hill often, I never noticed the towers, though I did sometimes wonder where all the proles who swept their lovely streets lived.

In the 19^th century it was cholera that forced governments to do something about living conditions in the slums, cholera not being class-specific, but in danger of spreading from poor areas to rich. With tower blocks there’s not that danger. The residents of Westbourne Park Avenue are not likely to be infected by disease wafting down from them, so there’s no pressing necessity for a local Tory council to look after their working-class (and often immigrant) neighbours in the same way. Indeed, in many of these prosperous inner suburbs the main task of their politicians was to save money by subcontracting their poorer areas out to private profiteering management companies, or – if they could – to ‘cleanse’ them in order for ‘developers’ to come in and replace them by ‘higher value’ residences. One rather extreme conspiracy theory floating around Kensington just now is that this was the hidden agenda behind the recent fire. Even short of this, however, there’s no doubt that the Grenfell Tower disaster was, indirectly, due to London’s extreme inequality, and therefore to the effects of late, uncontrolled capitalism. There’s a clip on the internet of David Cameron in 2012 announcing it as his ‘main task’ to do away with the ‘health and safety monster’, in order to liberate ‘business enterprise’. (See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-cameron-i-will-kill-off-safety-culture-6285238.html.)

The fire at Grenfell Tower is not, so far as I know, spreading directly to Westbourne Park Avenue, or even showering ashes there; but the sight of that horrible blackened stump so close on the horizon must have some effect on the rich people living around it; and on the reputation of recent Tory governments: the very people who cut fire, police and medical services, for example, in the interests of ‘austerity’. What will happen to it now we don’t know. It could be razed to the ground in order to provide space for upper-class villas, but surely not even the notoriously insensitive Theresa May (she even refused to meet the victims) could allow that now. Maybe it could be allowed to stand as it is – as soon as it has been stabilized – as a dreadful symbol and reminder over the next few years of the evil of late-stage capitalism. The surviving residents could be housed in some of the nearby dwellings that have been bought up by rich Arabs and left empty as ‘long-term investments’. One Labour politician has suggested this; only to be dismissed as a ‘Marxist’. So be it.

I sometimes suspect that most Brits assume that their press is normal, and that foreign newspapers must be much the same. Nothing could be further from the truth. I buy newspapers in most of the many countries I travel through; few of them have a ‘tabloid’ tradition like ours. Swedish tabloids – evening papers – can be sensational, and of course focus on celebrity, like ours; but none of them peddles lies or pornography, or acts so blatantly as propaganda vehicles for the political causes favoured by their rich owners. It must be for that reason that Britain features only 40th in the prestigious Reporters Without Borders’ World ‘Press Freedom Index’, which will surprise those who take pride – false pride, as it happens – in our ‘press liberty’ (see https://bernardjporter.com/2017/04/30/press-freedom/). Foreigners are genuinely shocked by our newspapers. This is one of the major factors contributing to Britain’s generally low reputation in the world.

The decline of the British press began in the 1890s, when Alfred Harmsworth founded the Daily Mail as a purely capitalist venture; that is, according to ‘market’ principles, in order simply to satisfy a demand. As I’ve written in my Britannia’s Burden:

If that demand was for sport, gossip and sensation, then that was what the Mail would provide. It would not preach to people, or try to stretch them, which would be elitist and arrogant. Everything in the paper had to be attractive, exciting and easy to swallow. “Do not forget,” Daily Mail journalists were told, “that you are writing for the meanest intelligence.” These were the main journalistic criteria, not ‘truth’, which came a very poor fourth. For Harmsworth himself the overriding criterion was profitability. Because the Mail’s editorial line [at this time] was usually imperialistic, some people saw him as having a political aim. In fact a “famous Englishman” (unnamed) was probably nearer the mark when he described him in 1901 as… “only a tradesman speculating in the reaction”. The “yellow press” in other words was a product not of the political but of the commercial morality of the day.

The Harmsworth (Northcliffe) family, of course, still owns the Daily Mail. You’ll already know about the more recent low points in its history, including its backing for Hitler in the 1930s. In this connection I recommend Andrew O’Hagan’s eviscerating demolition of the present editor, Paul Dacre, in a recent LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n11/andrew-ohagan/whos-the-real-cunt. The word ‘cunt’ there gives you a clue.

So it didn’t all start with Murdoch, though he managed to pull his share of the press much further down the road to hell. The Times is the most obvious of his casualties, not because it’s the worst in his stable (that’s the Sun), but because it’s the one that has fallen from the greatest height. It used to be Britain’s ‘newspaper of record’; it’s no longer trusted as such. I imagine it has been replaced in that role by the Guardian, which is far more often quoted abroad.

The Guardian, in fact, is our only national daily quality left wingish paper, and so is something for us Lefties to be grateful for. But just at the moment few of us are. That’s because it does not provide quite the weight on the other side of the scales that some of us would like, in order to balance things up. The Guardian of course started out as a Liberal Manchester paper, but as the Liberal Party declined (in the early 20^th century) it adopted a more generally Leftish slant. It was, and I imagine still is, the paper of choice for up-market Labourites. (The Mirror is the down-market equivalent.) But then we Lefties have no alternative among daily papers; which is what had most of us despairing of it before and during the recent General Election campaign. The dismissal by most of the Guardian’s columnists of Jeremy Corbyn was ignorant, as it turned out, and patronizing. It only U-turned and backed him at the very last moment: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2017/jun/02/the-guardian-view-on-our-vote-its-labour?CMP=share_btn_tw. As far as I was concerned, this was far too late. I feel angrier towards the Guardian, in fact, than I do towards the awful tabloids. At least one can understand sheer villainy. If the Independent had still been going as a newspaper – it’s on-line only now – I’d have switched over to it. (I need a broadsheet, rather than a laptop, to eat my breakfast off.)

Here’s a very good analysis of the Guardian’s backsliding, by an ex-Guardian journalist: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/the-guardian-elections-coverage-never-get-it-right-Jeremy-Corbyn-really-wrong-972873248. As a current Guardian journalist myself – well, reviewer – I’m hoping the paper catches up with the new reality soon. The true Left needs an organ.

Or does it, in the age of ‘social media’? Print newspaper circulations are declining. The Guardian is always appealing to its readers for donations. (I’ve contributed, despite my irritation with it. I need my table cloth.) Apparently the Tory press has met its match at last, not from a new Left-wing newspaper, but with Facebook, Twitter and the rest. The intelligent young read computer screens, not newspapers. Which, unwelcome as it may be to an old breakfaster like me, is great news if it means that the influence of the likes of Murdoch, Dacre, the Barclay Brothers and Desmond is shrivelling under the computer’s flickering glare.

Just sent to the Guardian:

Easy. Let Theresa May go on formally with her minority government, weak as it is. Domestic legislation should be initiated by any party, and then voted on in the Commons, which will represent a return to our historical tradition of Parliamentary democracy. For Brexit: set up a bi-partisan committee to sketch out some ‘soft’ Brexit ideas, probably accepting the customs union and free movement. Put the negotiations in the hands of a small number of competent ministers: i.e. including Keir Starmer but excluding Boris. Then see what happens.

This should satisfy everyone, both in Britain and in Europe, except for the Brexit-maniacs on the Tory Right. It’s also a very British (Parliamentary) way. It would allow proper democratic decisions to be taken on the separate elements of all the parties’ manifestos. And it would elevate the recent electoral fiasco into a glorious opportunity, to restore consensual democracy to the nation that one-party government, austerity and Brexit have so bitterly divided. Out of weakness would come strength. What is there to dislike?

Nearly all the commentators were wrong about this election, of course, except me; and even I was wrong to doubt how right I might be. That’s why I never allowed myself to hope, in spite of sensing the fundamental reaction across the Western world – and maybe beyond – against the effects of late-stage capitalism, which lie deep behind both the right-wing and the left-wing responses to what is currently called ‘globalisation’. Look back over my past posts here (here’s one: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/), and you will find both the American Presidential election and the British EU referendum explained in these general terms, with the belief expressed that the very same grievances that had provoked both Trumpists and Brexiters could be exploited, and for what to me would be a preferable end, by a more radical Left. Sanders tried to do that in America. Now Corbyn has done it here. Hence the apparent transfer of about a third of the collapsed UKIP votes to Labour, rather than to the Tories, as those who saw politics in conventional Right/Left terms had predicted. That didn’t surprise me. What we are seeing now, basically, is a ground-shift to a new political discourse, arising out of the latest crisis of neo-liberalism, which the mainstream commentariat has been too imprisoned in its own older discourse to detect.

This has left that commentariat floundering. It has been bleakly amusing to see and read their reactions in yesterday’s media. Some of them deny Corbyn’s success, on the grounds that he didn’t actually win the election, did he? – which for someone who lives in Britain, and is aware of the height of the mountain he had to climb, appears ungenerous to say the least, and foolish at best. The reality is that with one enormous bound we (on the Left) are not yet quite free, admittedly, but are far further along that path than anyone whose mindset is constricted by the public discourse of the Blair-Cameron years could have imagined. Hence all their talk of Corbyn’s having ‘defied conventional wisdom’; by which they mean the wisdom of yesterday.

Then there are those – mainly on Right of the Labour Party – who seem happy enough to concede that they were wrong about his ‘leadership’, but make the excuse that this was because Corbyn then was a different creature from the Corbyn they see now. How could they have been expected to know that the man would turn so suddenly into Superman, when all they had had before them was a dozy Clark Kent? This is Peter Mandelson’s explanation: that Corbyn had somehow undergone a metamorphosis, or ‘character change’, which is what turned him into the utterly different animal that emerged from the election. A modified version of this is that he has ‘grown into the role’. Others’ changes of heart seem to be more qualified: yes, they now admit, he is a successful campaigner, and popular with the young folk (bless them), but that doesn’t mean they were wrong in doubting his capabilities as a real leader: i.e. as a potential prime minister. They’ll never be satisfied, of course, unless or until he becomes PM. And probably not even then.

In fact one reason they were wrong is that they never took him seriously even as Labour leader, and never allowed him to be viewed directly, without the mediation of the hostile (tabloid) and cynical (broadsheet) press, until the actual election campaign, which forced them – the TV networks, at any rate – to present him as he is. Theresa May’s arrogant incompetence helped here, of course, in providing a foil to his directness and honesty, which usefully boosted his ‘image’ at the same time as it was fatally destroying hers.

But the main reason is that, stuck in their ‘Westminster bubble’, and in Blair-time, they simply weren’t aware of the earthquake that had been slowly rumbling right under their feet over the past five years or so, making old political assumptions redundant; until they all fell into the hole suddenly and blindly, to the wicked amusement of those of us who had felt the earth moving – in my case I think deriving from my experience as a broad-based historian – but had been too nervous to quite credit it, against the opinion of all the political experts.