Porter’s Pensées

No-one does towns and cities like the Italians. It must be an instinct embedded in them over the centuries: fine palaces, churches, habitations, all designed with perfect proportions – which is in my view the main quality defining great architecture – but, more than this, standing cheek by jowl, with different periods and styles mixed together, but always in perfect relationship with one another. I hadn’t been to Genoa before; it never used to be on the normal tourist route, and was generally regarded as rather grubby and run down. Apparently all this changed with the quincentenary of the ‘discovery’ of America – Columbus came from Genoa – after which the city was smarted up for the Yanks. For an architecture buff like me, it was heaven. Of course the food, wine, sun and friendliness of the natives also helped. We shall come back.

I’m not sure about my lecture, on ‘Brexit and the British Empire’. It was in a forbidding venue – a huge highly decorated room in the palazzo ducale; and with not-quite-simultaneous translation (into Italian), which meant that people didn’t laugh at my jokes until they’d gone by. I’ll post a version of the text here later.

We were in Genoa when we first heard of Friday’s Stockholm killings. Reports from Kajsa’s friends and relatives talked of smoke coming from the store the truck crashed into, public transport closed down, people rushing around on foot, and the inevitable rumours of shots fired in other parts of the city, which were later discounted. So I suppose the event might count technically as a ‘terrorist’ one, as it did seem to frighten people, if only temporarily. It happened in perhaps the most public part of the city, where all of us could imagine our friends might have been. Hence the flurry of reassuring phone calls and texts.

Afterwards there were stories of bravery and charity from Stockholmers, a deluge of flowers marking the spot, ‘keep calm and carry on’ behaviour after only a few hours, peaceful demos against violence and in solidarity with peace-loving Muslims, and social democratic politicians (and the King, bless him) insisting that the atrocity would not be allowed to provoke any modification of Sweden’s culture of liberal openness and democracy: which of course is what the ‘terrorists’ want. ‘Is the terrorist threat any the less in more autocratic countries?’ asked the prime minister, rhetorically. The Right wing party, the Sweden Democrats, doesn’t of course go along with this. The incident simply serves as grist to its anti-immigration mill; as it will, doubtless, to Donald Trump’s. We’ll hear more of this.

Apparently the Uzhbeki driver of the stolen lorry had been denied residence in Sweden and ordered out of the country; but had gone into hiding, working in the ‘black’ economy, until he was sacked. This was his grievance. The implication of course is – pace the Sweden Democrats – that if he had been allowed to stay and work in Sweden he wouldn’t have troubled anyone. Police found some evidence of interest in jihadist causes on his computer, but no connection with them (and Isis have not, so far, claimed him as one of theirs); and an interest too in soft porn internet sites which doesn’t quite fit the image of an Islamicist zealot – unless he got them up to fuel his anger against the decadent West.

His State-appointed defence lawyer announced today that ‘he admits to a terrorist crime and accepts therefore that he will be detained’. But that of course was what he wanted all along. This must complicate the picture. He may have adopted the persona and behaviour of a ‘terrorist’ simply as a way of remaining in Sweden. Prison here must be more comfortable than sleeping in the streets, or in poverty in Uzbekistan. If so, it’s a pretty drastic means, to say the very least. His victims included an eleven year-old girl on her way home from school (smashed to pieces), and an elderly beggar from Romania who had survived the Nazi Holocaust (badly injured). Also, of course, an Englishman, a Belgian woman, and a dog.

To my mind this suggests, as in the case of the Westminster attacker, less an ideologue than a desperate psychopath, using ‘terrorism’ as a pretext for a more personal end. Which is why it shouldn’t really be included as part of the Europe- or world-wide Islamicist terrorist threat that really does exist, of course, but not in marginal copy-cat incidents like this. This is not to underestimate its horror and seriousness in other ways. But it’s an important political point to make; which I get the impression most Swedes – and in particular their government – have taken on board.

But of course we don’t know everything yet. It’s a good thing he wasn’t killed, like most of the others. It means we may learn.

will be resumed once I’ve got over my Italian trip. And if I can get wi-fi where we’re going now. I should really be reporting on the Stockholm ‘terrorist’ incident; but I was away at the time.

I find mildly interesting the number of times that, having posted a blog here, I find the same arguments repeated shortly afterwards in a national press article. Here’s the latest example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/04/my-generation-free-brexit-voting-betraying-young; with which compare https://bernardjporter.com/2017/03/29/brexit-unfair-to-the-young/. Polly Toynbee’s article is far better, and adduces many more facts and statistics to support her (our) case, but the basic theme is the same.

Noticing this kind of thing before, I’ve wondered whether I wasn’t (a) perhaps having some influence – I get over a thousand ‘views’ per month now, as against fewer than a hundred a year ago; or (b) being plagiarized. I wouldn’t mind the latter in the least, having no claim on or proprietorial interest in my ideas, and simply being pleased to see their being taken up. But there’s obviously a simpler – if less flattering – explanation; which is that, on the basis of the evidence all around us, my thoughts are pretty obvious, to anyone with similar thought processes. Polly Toynbee doesn’t need to have read my blog, and indeed almost certainly hasn’t. (A thousand a month is still pretty feeble – 35 a day?) But because of the immediate nature of a blog, I occasionally get to express these ideas soonest. I’m the first feather in a prevailing wind.

Off to Genoa tomorrow, which may interrupt blogging, but could also furnish me afterwards with material for more. My talk is on ‘Brexit and the British Empire.’ What do Italians think of Brexit? Or of the British Empire, come to that?

Writing as a feminist (am I allowed to?), we shouldn’t do the Victorians down. They had plenty of female role models, and not all of them nurses, mothers or the Queen – see Grace Darling. Researching children’s and young adults’ literature in the late 19^th century – looking for ‘imperialism’ – I came across the books of Bessie Marchant, writing (essentially) boys’ books for girls, with strong, adventurous and transgressive young female heroines (‘sheros’), wrestling with gorillas and all the rest. Then, last night, with Kajsa’s grandchildren staying with us, I saw the 2010 Walt Disney Alice in Wonderland for the first time. What a film! And what a difference computers have made to animation! Thinking back to the original Alice stories, however, made me realize that Victorian girls did have powerful and intelligent fictional role models. In Sweden, as I understand it, these started with Pippi Longstocking. But Alice was nearly a hundred years before her. And my God, what a strong, transgressive character she is!

But – there’s always a ‘but’, isn’t there – may this not simply be because they were girls? When Bessie Marchant’s heroines grew up into women, they dutifully married and settled down. We all know that the girls the Rev Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) liked to play with (no sniggering there!) were pre-pubescent. I’m not sure how old Grace Darling was.

I imagine literary scholars and theorists have gone into all this already. So I won’t add any more of my ignorant male musings.

This might be thought to undermine the claim I made earlier, that London is totally unfazed by the so-called ‘terrorist’ attack on Westminster last week.

Passing through Gatwick Airport security yesterday, I was stopped on suspicion of carrying a dangerous weapon. It was after going through that glass x-ray bubble they have there. (They always remind me of the instantaneous transporters you find in Science Fiction, which scramble your molecules and then unscramble them on the surface of the planet: thus saving you an awful lot of time in airport terminals, but carrying the danger – if there is something in the bubble with you – that you might emerge with your body and a fly’s head.) They asked me to take off my shirt, while they all stood around at a respectful distance. It turned out that my corset, which I wear in order to keep my hernia squeezed in while I wait for my ‘non-urgent’ operation to stitch it up, had been mistaken by the instantaneous transporter for a bomb belt. Relief for them, and some embarrassment for me – my navel sticks out like a ripe plum. They all sniggered. (I imagined.)

And now it looks as though I’ll have to wear the corset for longer, with the NHS reneging – it was announced today – on its original promise to perform all non-urgent ops within 18 weeks. I thought I only had four weeks to go. Of our two current domestic crises, terrorism and the NHS, I’d like them to fix the latter first. Where’s that £350 million a week promised by the Brexiteers on the side of their ‘battlebus’, when we need it?

OK, we’ve cast the die. We’re Brexiting. There’s no way back. Learn to live with it, you Remainers; or ‘Remoaners’, as the tabloid press is dubbing us.

Ever since they won the referendum, in fact, the Brexiters and their tabloid cheerleaders have been getting nastier towards the 48% who still don’t like what the country has done. You would have thought that they would have become more conciliatory, generous towards the vanquished, especially when the latter make up such a very large minority. And also in view of the acknowledged dishonesty of the Brexiters’ propaganda during the referendum debate: that ‘battlebus’, for a start. (‘£350 million more a week for the NHS.’) That could have accounted for the 2% difference. It will probably occupy a leading symbolic role when the history of the recent decline of British democracy comes to be written. But the Brexiters prevailed, however crookedly. So why are they so bitter?

Maybe it’s because they suspect that they might not prevail after all. All may still not be lost for us Europeans. Maybe there is a way back. There are at least two years of complex negotiations ahead of us; years in which some Brexiters, at least, might come to see the full import of what they’ve done. The EU may not have been perfect; but were its deficiencies really worth causing so much chaos and – probably – real harm on both sides, in order to correct them? Few of us, I think, were aware of the complications of unraveling ourselves from the 44-year complex of common laws and treaties that comprises the EU. Brexit’s leaders led their supporters to believe it would be easy, and painless. We’re seeing now that they lied on this, too.

Luckily the changes in our laws that will be necessary to effect the separation, or at least the most important of them, will need to be debated by Parliament, which could reject them. That would cock the whole process up. The government would fall, and a new general election serve as a second referendum on Brexit in effect. A friend of mine (Robin Ramsay) suggests that all the EU negotiators need to do is to make the terms of the uncoupling so disadvantageous to Britain as to provoke this scenario. ‘If it’s occurred to me,’ he writes, ‘it must have occurred to them.’ That’s his reason for thinking that Brexit won’t happen, whatever Mrs May tells us today. She may be in on the plot: purposely pressing for a ‘hard’ Brexit not simply to appease her Right-wingers, which is the common assumption, but also – as a committed European herself formerly: she campaigned for ‘Remain’ during the Referendum – in order to incite the Europeans into terms that the British can’t accept. It would be a cunning plan, indeed; but after all those years at the Home Office, directing the ultra-cunning intelligence services, I wouldn’t put it past her.

In any case, as one of my Facebook Friends comments, ‘much can happen in two years.’ That’s what I shall tell my sad and puzzled Swedish friends when I meet up with them again this evening. (I’m on my way there now.) Don’t give up on us yet.

(In the train to the airport I was surrounded by Daily Hatemails, their post-Brexit headlines still spewing out their triumphalist bile. There ought to be Daily Mail-free carriages.)

A recurring theme in British history over at least the past 200 years – if not quite a constant one – has been the idea of ‘progress’. Not merely the idea, but people’s belief in it, as one of the defining elements of their times, and of all their futures. This may be a characteristic of other countries too, but in the 19^th century it seems to me, as a historian, to have been far stronger in Britain. It was a mark of her peculiar identity, the thing that distinguished her from her Continental neighbours. ‘Progress’ took different forms in different periods, of course. In the early and mid-19^th century it was associated with the expansion of free trade, as the panacea to all Britain’s problems; later, as free trade began to disappoint, progress became identified with the growth of political democracy; and later still with the development of social democracy and equality, culminating in the welfare state. In the middle of this process, around the turn of the 20^th century, there was a short period when self-styled ‘progressives’ identified, perhaps perversely, with ‘imperialism’, as a means (many of them believed) of spreading political and social progress into the wider world; through what now became known as the ‘Commonwealth’ – softer to the ears, and more ‘liberal’, therefore, than the word ‘Empire’.

As a boy and a young adult in the 1950s and ’60s, I remember fully imbibing this belief in ‘progress’, which Conservatives shared as well as Liberals and Socialists, and usually genuinely embraced – Churchill and Macmillan, for example; although there were always some backwoodspeople who couldn’t reconcile themselves to it: the welfare state, Labour governments, decolonisation and the rest. ‘Country’s going to the dogs. Hrumph.’ They were almost universally derided: in Beyond the Fringe, Private Eye, the Goon Show, and the common ‘Colonel Blimp’ stereotype; right up to Monty Python’s Upper-class Twits. In this environment, few of us thought they posed any real danger to the ‘progressive’ status quo. So it wasn’t worth studying them. In school and university history courses they were marginalised, as history’s losers. (And most of them near death.) The ‘Social History’ department in my university, for example, only taught the progress of the working classes, as if other classes – uppers and middles – weren’t part of ‘society’ at all. There were dozens of histories of the Labour movement, but almost none of Conservatism, let alone the further Right. Even as one of those ‘progressives’ myself, I felt this wasn’t right. My decision to do research on the British Empire – a largely upper-class and reactionary entity – was a way of re-balancing things. In fact my work was always implicitly if discriminatingly anti-imperial; but because of the subject I had chosen, rather than (say) the growth of the Co-operative movement in Flintshire, or Chartism in Chelmsford, the Social Historians had me marked out as a reactionary from the start. When I became a member of the local Hull Labour Party some even suspected me of being a Tory mole. That’s how difficult it was to study the Right at that time.

One reason for my discomfort at this state of affairs was my rather broader knowledge of history than the Social historians’, and my realisation, deriving from that, that British history didn’t always ‘progress’, on a steady upward path. Even by the Progressives’ own reckoning there had been slip-ups in the past. I wasn’t confident that another wouldn’t appear soon. As indeed it did.

Over the last few months commentators have been remarking on the fundamentally reactionary nature of both of the great revolutions that have hit the Anglo-American world recently: Brexit and Trump. ‘Back to the ’60s’ is a common description: unravelling Obama’s health and climate-saving reforms, the retreat into nationalism, racism, Trump’s rampant sexism – that photograph of him signing an anti-abortion measure surrounded only by men – and so on. – This YouGov survey of voters’ opinions on social issues is telling; with 53% of Brexiters calling for the return of capital punishment as against 20% of Remainers, and 42% as against 14% favouring corporal punishment in schools: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156105125957818&set=a.10150645663127818.480194.503857817&type=3&theater; the ’60s – or even the ’50s – with a vengeance.

Yes, it certainly looks like that: a sudden Reaction against the progressive tide of the past. Except that it isn’t so sudden as today’s commentators appear to think. I’d push it back to the late 1970s; which is where in one of my (neglected) books, Britannia’s Burden (1994), I placed the beginning of what I called there ‘the Great Reaction’; symbolised – but not strictly caused – by Thatcher’s 1979 government, and her assault on two of the great engines of progress before then: the Trade Unions and the Welfare State. That’s when the reaction set in.

One reason why it wasn’t seen at the time for what it truly was, is that in many areas of social life ‘progressivism’ was still healthy, and running on apace. This is especially true with regard to gender issues: the place of women, equality for gays and transsexuals, and so on; their ‘liberation’ not fully completed yet, but the tide of history still seeming to go their way. The expansion of consumer choice also made a difference. People were becoming ‘free-er’ individually: or at least, insofar as they could as individuals. All this obscured the ‘Great’ reaction that was under way in the political, collective and economic spheres. And on which Brexit and Trump have suddenly cast such a blinding light.

What’s different now is that gender progress seems to be under threat from the Reaction too. Hence those great women’s marches. Trump and Farage really should keep off the women. They may be more resistant and resilient than we men. They give birth to babies, after all.

Perhaps votes should be weighted. Intelligent people’s votes should count more than idiots’. That would make my vote worth fifty times more than, say, Nigel Farage’s. Of course I can’t say anything so élitist; nor do I really believe it. The highly educated – and that’s the only practical way we have of measuring ‘intelligence’ – can be as wrong as the simpleton; wronger, if he or she is a post-modernist. (Joke.)

In the particular case of Britain’s EU referendum, however, there must be a case for saying that voters should have been weighted according to the number of years they could be expected to live under whatever form of government the result of the plebiscite established. Apparently a larger proportion of young people voted to ‘Remain’ than of those in my age-group. They’re used to living with people of different national origins, and as a result are far more relaxed about ‘immigration’ and ‘foreigners’. We oldies are still affected by prejudices from and fond myths about our monocultural and even imperial past, and so were over-represented among the Brexiteers. Yet we’ve only got a few years left to experience the consequences of the ‘people’s vote’ last June: five or so years in my case, if I’m lucky. The young have a whole lifetime of living in an isolationist, mean-minded Britain ahead of them; a Britain they didn’t vote for, by and large. Shouldn’t they have been given more say than us? In five or ten’ years’ time, after the rest of us have kicked the bucket, our children will be living in a country they don’t want. That’s our legacy to them.

On a personal note: I’ve had no response yet to my application for Swedish citizenship – sought in order to keep my European identity alive. But apparently there’s been a rush: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/27/depressed-by-brexit-come-to-sweden. I’m just one of 1100. I must take my place in the queue. (Yes, Swedes are good at queuing too. It’s one of the things that makes me feel at home there.)

In the meantime I have a trip to Genoa next week, to speak at a Conference (http://www.limesonline.com/a-genova-dal-6-al-9-aprile-la-storia-in-piazza/97847?refresh_ce). I’m looking forward to bonding with more of my fellow Europeans. And to the food. I’ll report back here.

Historians’ attitudes are often influenced by the history they study. I have to say that my distaste for covert domestic surveillance, secret policing and the like – except in extreme circumstances – has been coloured by the very honourable opposition to these methods I discovered amongst the 19^th and 20^th century British liberals and socialists I have spent so much of my professional life researching. It was in The Refugee Question, I think, and then in Plots and Paranoia, that I established what I called ‘spylessness’ as one of the major British moral and political principles of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries; one of the genuine ‘Victorian Values’ that Margaret Thatcher used to pay such lip service to. Unlike Thatcher, I’ve kept hold of these principles, broadly speaking, and have tended to judge Britain’s present-day activities in these areas by them. A couple of posts here will illustrate this: https://bernardjporter.com/2015/01/09/surveillance/; and https://bernardjporter.com/2016/03/01/the-snoopers-charter/. I have, in other words, remained a Victorian liberal in this respect, if not in certain others.

The dominant opinions of any age, however, are bound to be affected by that age’s material circumstances; and in this case there seems reason to think that the Victorians’ ‘spyless’ ethic no longer has much relevance today. This is not so much because the nature of the threats that face us, and our security services, is so much more serious than it was in the age of foreign revolutionary immigrants, Fenianism, violent anarchism, nihilism, communism, ‘free love’ and all the other perceived dangers that so exercised the British police and secret services in earlier times. Rather it’s because of the rapid growth of technologies that are making surveillance far easier than it used to be, and indeed scarcely avoidable, for anyone who uses bank machines or internet selling sites, for example, for any purpose whatever. I’m constantly shocked by the number of times my searching for a hotel on booking.com has been followed, rapidly, by Amazon’s recommending to me books on the very countries and places I was looking at; a minor annoyance, of course, but illustrative of the impossibility of avoiding one’s every action’s being noticed and broadcast. Unless, that is, I chose to live in a wood without phone or computer, eating berries, roots and stray deer. (Even there I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d found ways of disguising surveillance cameras as trees.)

All of which is bringing me to the conclusion that, whatever my personal feelings still are – I especially abhor the distrust that espionage gives rise to – I should abandon my historical and political distaste for ‘espionage’, and learn to accept it. Privacy was a 19^th century luxury. The internet has destroyed it, even as a fond ideal. Historically I need to acknowledge this – and to point out the contrast when I’m writing about Victorian times, simply as a contrast, and not necessarily as a fall from grace. Politically we need to find other ways of coping.