Porter’s Pensées

Some crumbs of comfort for America. The horror of Trump seems to have galvanised the Left – certainly women (see last post but one) – which is all to the good. A few of his concrete policies might actually be beneficial, both to America and to the world; like détente with Russia, and the rolling back of neo-liberal globalisation to some extent. Hillary wouldn’t have done that. To be sure, most of his other policies don’t carry quite the same hopes: healthcare reform, that Wall, irresponsible foreign interventions, encouraging Israeli colonialism, anti-abortion, the green light given to global warming, and so on. The only tiny bit of progressive hope we can take from all these is that they might fail, and be seen to fail, disastrously. That would surely provoke a more general reaction against him and the Republicans (and especially among the Republicans), in much the same way as his victory represented, at bottom, a reaction against the Obama-Clinton Democratic élite. (American elections are so negative.) Then it might be Bernie’s turn again, if he’s not thought to be too old; or alternatively, Elizabeth Warren’s. (? I’m not that familiar with the American political scene.)

No crumbs for Britain, I’m afraid. We’ve really fucked up.

Tony Blair and David Cameron have this in common: that despite their many achievements (Blair’s, anyway), they will be mainly remembered in history for their two great catastrophic failures of judgment – the Iraq war, and the EU referendum. Other twentieth-century British prime ministers who share that burden are Anthony Eden (Suez) and Neville Chamberlain (appeasement; though I think he’s been unfairly traduced over that). Going further back, one might add Lord North (American independence) to this list; and – before the days of prime ministers – kings John ‘Lackland’, Richard III and Charles I. These are some of the most notorious unheroic ‘losers’ in British history. You can be a heroic loser, too: viz. King Harold, Joan of Arc, and even Adolf Hitler in the minds of some deluded people today. But what unites all those others is that they are seen, or will I believe be seen in the future, as pathetic losers. That’s a dreadful historical reputation to bear, and afterwards to carry to the next world.

In the cases of Blair and Cameron, this might be considered a shame, because neither of them is a noticeably bad man. But then the two things don’t always go together. Good men and women can have bad effects, and vice-versa; or, as I put it in one of my books (concerning the British empire), maleficence – bad things happening – doesn’t necessarily follow on from malevolence; or – conversely – beneficence from benevolence. A lot of the evils that came out of the British empire were the unwanted results of the best of intentions – ‘the road to hell’, and all that. It’s the same with Blair and Cameron: the first a holy fool, the second a smooth and privileged empty-head. Perhaps their only real sin was over-self confidence; the idea that they could do the job they were elected to do. Which is a shame, as we would like to blame them more – it’s this that lies behind all those ‘BLIAR’ taunts – because, in an old-fashioned, perhaps Christian way, it fits in with our view of the ‘wages’ of sin: that it’s evil-doers who will get their come-uppance, by a kind of moral symmetry. But that’s not how history works. It’s not a question of morality, or motive, or what the Romans called vertu; but of judgment. That is what will damn Blair and Cameron in History-land.

A clear majority of people in the USA is against Trump, and a clear majority in Britain finds Farage risible; and yet these two clowns appear just now to be the immoveable political winners in their respective countries. There are many complex reasons for this, some of which have been aired in this blog; but one of them is undoubtedly the lack of a unified and convincing movement against them. That ought to be socialism: equality, anti-austerity, Bernie, Jeremy. But socialism’s in the doldrums just now: trivially yet bitterly divided, incompetently led (I’m referring here not necessarily to Jeremy, but to the collective Labour leadership), monstered by the capitalist press, judged by its past failures, some real enough but many confected by the said capitalist press (e.g. that Brown’s government, not the bankers, was responsible for the recession), having to struggle against decades of vilification and even fear in the USA, and with an ‘old-fashioned’ image problem. So it really is difficult at this moment to see the traditional Left as the saviours of the present day. Maybe if it could link up with the Lib-Dems in Britain and the Democratic establishment in the US? But they are all too partisan for that.

The only effective public opposition just now comes from two quarters: the television and social media satirists, who would win any contest against their Right-wing equivalents hands-down – see https://bernardjporter.com/2017/03/05/satire-and-trump/ – but don’t seem to be able to translate this into real power; and, secondly: women. One thing that Trump and Farage and their leading followers have in common is their blatant and reactionary sexism, which has clearly riled millions of women; all those, that is, who don’t feel more comfortable in a world where they are petted and patronised. (Many clearly do.) Trump’s ‘locker-room talk’ in the summer, though it had less effect on the presidential election than many people (as I remember) predicted at the time, has lain there, just under the surface of politics, to galvanise millions of Americans, including many men, to lead the popular movement against him; with their ‘pussy’ hats and witty placards, in a way that the anti-capitalist movements have failed to do. They may be our main hope now.

Women’s liberation is a movement on the march – quite literally. Some of the post-Trump women’s demonstrations, both in America and in the UK, have been mightily impressive. Trump seems to have galvanised feminism; but it was already on the rise before then. That’s the difference between it, and socialism, which seems to be on the decline. The progress feminism has made even in my lifetime has been astonishing, with women now on an equal footing with men – and, because it follows from this, men on an equal footing with women – in many areas of life that they were effectively excluded from just thirty years ago. And – this is my impression – they don’t any longer need to become virtual men, like Thatcher, in order to do this. Of course they aren’t all the way there yet. There’s a lot still for them (and for us men, alongside them) to fight for: genuinely equal pay, parental rights, security against male violence, attitudinal changes, and so on; enough to justify their new British political party, Women’s Equality (http://www.womensequality.org.uk), which was founded recently to fight their cause. (I’ve joined.) OK, it could be considered a niche issue; but so too were the interests of working people when the Labour Party was founded in 1900; and look how that spread and infused all areas of British politics and life afterwards. Labour was our ‘progressive’ spearhead in the twentieth century. Maybe women could take on that role in the twenty-first.

Of course I get as irritated with many of the trivialities of present-day feminism as most other ballsy men: all that row over whether Emma Watson is justified in calling herself a ‘feminist’ if she chooses to show a nipple, for example; well, it may be an interesting debating point among the sisterhood, but is not that important, surely, in the broader scheme of things. And, highlighted as it is by the likes of the Daily Mail, this sort of thing puts folk off. I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve seen interviewed on TV claiming that they were turned into Trump or UKIP voters by the ‘political correctness’ of the Left. Even I get slightly irked, as a writer, by having to use contrived neologisms that ruin my stylistic flow in order to avoid ‘gendered’ terms. (I’m sorry, but I refuse to write about ‘herstory’, or ‘sheroes’; or to avoid the feminine pronoun when I’m writing about countries; although – in my own defence – I am careful to write ‘his or hers’ if that’s what I mean.) If feminists, like socialists, would discipline these excesses, I’m sure they would garner more support. Then they might lead us all out of this Trump- and Brexit-inspired darkness, into a more egalitarian and democratic light. Men: put away your prejudices against being ‘dominated’ by women – it’s not like that. Let the women take over now. You’ve had your chance. I’m behind them.

I have to say that I was inspired and emboldened to this conclusion by attending the ‘Vigil’ I posted about earlier outside the Law Courts –  https://bernardjporter.com/2017/02/16/alice-wheeldon/ last Friday, to mark the centenary of the (flawed) conviction of the pacifist and feminist Alice Wheeldon – a ‘shero’ if ever there was one. The purpose was to secure a posthumous pardon for her. Many of the demonstrators came in Edwardian dress, including old suffragette sashes. It was on BBC TV, though only for the East Midlands. Here’s an account from the BBC’s website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-39238029. About 60 turned up, some from Australia, where her descendants emigrated (I don’t blame them), and including one of Alice’s great- (I think) granddaughters, very ill with cancer. It was an inspiration from the past.

But maybe nature is righting the balance just now. Between us, Kajsa and I have eight grandchildren, seven of whom are girls. Only a small sample, I appreciate; but still…

My daughter Kate has just ventured into the entrepreneurial world (after her Oscar triumph) by putting on to the market this new skin cleansing balm:

https://www.harbourelements.com

(that’s her, in the second picture), which recently got this fantastic review in The Times: 

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/times2/five-of-the-best-cleansing-balms-jk7hjxb7m.

I’ve asked if it works for men too – it’s mainly, I think, for washing your face after makeup – and she says it’s worth a try. Go on! Order a jar! Only £22, and beautifully packaged.

If it’s any recommendation, everyone involved with it – the chemistry, manufacture, packaging, marketing – is a woman. Why is that no longer particularly surprising, except to an oldie like me? (I have to admit, when she said ‘chemist’ the picture that came into my mind was of a man.) – I’m thinking of posting a blog soon on what used to be called, in ‘my [historical] period’, ‘the woman question’. (Next.)

The Guardian this morning reports an ‘epidemic’ of sexual harassment cases in British universities. What defines an ‘epidemic’? More, surely, than the handful that are enumerated in its tables on page 7. To take the three British universities I have been most closely associated with, and just the ‘staff on student’ category: Cambridge (with a very large student body) reports six cases in five years; the University of Hull (medium-sized) two in the same period; and the University of Newcastle another two. I really don’t think these figures qualify as an ‘epidemic’. Of course there will be many cases that remain uncovered; but to set against these there will be at least a few trivial or false accusations. I was the target of one of those once.

In all my years of teaching in several universities, although sexually predatory lecturers were a staple theme of TV dramas (like The History Man), I never heard – officially or through rumour – of a single genuine case of sexual harassment; until the very end of my time at one of them, when I had to deal with it, as Head of the Department that both the teacher and his post-graduate student victim were members of. That turned out to be a subtle and complex case, which took up most of my time in my last year. (It was I who was put in the dock, to determine whether I had handled the case properly when alerted to it by the student. I had; but it was a trying time for all of us. It was one of the factors that  decided me to take early retirement shortly afterwards.) But that was unique, in my experience – of forty years.

I did know of a couple of young lecturers who developed romantic attachments to students, both of which culminated in marriage. Very early on I even had an affair with a student myself, who was – believe me (or not, if you like) – the one who ‘came on’ to me, and who threatened to kill herself when I tried to break it off. (I’m not proud of that.) That was considered to be OK then, so long as I didn’t teach her and wasn’t in any way responsible for her grades. Now it wouldn’t be tolerated, and I would studiously avoid it, on the grounds that the simple differences in our ages (I was just five years older than she) and our statuses made the relationship unequal, and so intrinsically abusive. But those were different times (this is the late 1960s), when we were more relaxed about these things. As an older and better man now, and much more aware of the enormous pressures on young women, and the difficulties they used to encounter in getting their charges taken seriously, I’ve come to totally accept the ‘unequal’ argument.

But I am worried about how widely the definition of ‘harassment’ can be taken these days. Sometimes, if a girl or woman has been ultra-helpful to me (generally in sorting out my i-phone problems), I ask if I can give her a kiss on the cheek as a token of my gratitude. (I should make it clear that I’m a wrinkled, grey-haired oldie, and so no possible physical danger to any young woman.) In England they seem to like that. I like it when they do it to me. But I tried it in a Swedish phone shop the other week – just the request – and she treated me as if I was a rapist. Then the same thing – the same reaction – in another shop a few days later. No wonder the Swedes are so stiff and formal (my friends excepted). The sex-police have taken all the innocent pleasure from their lives.

Then, of course, there’s the whole matter of entirely false accusations, many of them ‘historical’, perhaps to wreak revenge on men like me. It does happen. You never know, it could still happen to me. I wonder if I’ll be allowed to blog my innocence from a prison cell?

If the Devil has all the best tunes, it seems to be the losers who have all the best laughs. Trump’s victory has produced a treasure-house of wonderful anti-Trump jokes and mockery, on television, in the press and (especially) on the internet, beneath whose weight you would have thought any normal person would have crumbled. Of course I may be getting a skewed impression of the balance of satire in the USA, with mainly liberal Facebook friends, and those clever people at Facebook obviously choosing to feed me only with items I’m likely to respond to positively. I could be missing out. Are there any Right-wing jokers or impressionists to compare with, for example, John Oliver and Alec Baldwin? Does Fox do comedy? Or is it all beetle-eyed hatred and crazy conspiracy theories on that side of the fence? (See Trump’s latest tweets: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/03/04/trump-accuses-obama-of-nixonwatergate-plot-to-wire-tap-trump-tower/?utm_term=.a1145b44acd4.) For someone like me, over the pond, these are just as entertaining. (They may not be to Americans.) Both the jokes and the conspiracy theories serve to make more palatable to many of us what is happening in America. But, seriously: doesn’t the Right do satire these days? Or rather, satire that is intended as such?

Satire of course has a very long and distinguished history. It has often been banned by the authorities it is directed against, for fear of the harm it may do to them; and still is in some dictatorships. There’s no question of that in America, of course, with its noble free speech traditions – at least so far. So Oliver, Baldwin and Co are here to stay.

Whether they can actually damage Trump is questionable. Hurt him, certainly, with his trademark narcissism and thinnest of skins. They obviously annoy him, more than a grown-up man ought to be annoyed. He’ll be blaming it on the liberal intelligentsia – the ‘fake press’, and all that – which is one of his main political and personal targets, if not the main one. His problem is that to be really funny, you have to be bright, which rules out most of his followers, apart from the Machiavels. (Sorry; elitist.) But it’s difficult to see even the cleverest satire, in itself, seriously undermining his preening self-confidence or damaging his government, with Congress stacked up on his side (for the moment) as well. The greater danger is that it might so enrage him as to provoke him to do something even more outrageous than he already has. And it’s he, remember, who has his finger on the nuclear button. That’s not funny, or even satirical. It’s scary.

I’m resting my hopes, if conservative Republicans don’t turn against him, on the CIA and the FBI to subvert him clandestinely. I never thought I’d say that, after what I’ve written about the malevolent interventions of the secret services in both Britain’s and America’s political histories. But in this case, her spooks may be the last defence America has of the best of its values, as well as – as in the past – the worst. Maybe MI6 can lend them a hand. One of them, ex-agent Christopher Steele, has already contributed. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump–Russia_dossier.) If MI6 want to call me back after all these years (see https://bernardjporter.com/2017/03/02/my-james-bond-years/), I’ll be happy to chip in. Now that would be satirical.

‘A tunnel vision nationalism, which focuses only on independence at any cost, sells Scotland short.’ That was Theresa May at the Scottish Conservative Party Conference yesterday. I misheard it at first, assuming she was referring to Britain and Brexit. The same argument could be applied to the latter, surely. Or is this just a narrow debating point?

Like many others, and even though I voted to remain, I dismissed many of the Remainers’ arguments at the time of the Referendum as scare-mongering; just as I thoroughly suspected most of the Brexiters’ arguments for their brave new internationalist world. As things are turning out, however, I’m starting to think the Remainers had something. If only they hadn’t gone on about the perils of Brexit, and had made a more positive case for the EU itself – deeply flawed, certainly, but still more hopeful than the isolationist and nationalist path we’re about to tread – they might have stood a better chance.

God what a mess! And mostly Cameron’s fault: to bet our whole national future on a single throw of a dice! Not Corbyn’s fault, incidentally, as some are saying. He made a rational case for Remain, which however wasn’t widely reported. Other villains are Boris and Gove, who, despite the falsity of their reputations, in my view, as intellectual heavyweights, are bright enough (just) to have known better, and devious enough to be reasonably suspected of sordid political calculation in the choices they made.

Personally I don’t blame Farage. He’s a reactionary idiot, a throwback to more blimpish times, who is appearing even more idiotic as he puts his great triumph behind him. He’s doing himself no good by sucking up to Trump, though they are obviously soul-mates. Behind Trump, too, there are more blameworthy people: in particular the Republicans who allowed him to rise to the political surface, as Jonathan Freedland argues in the Guardian today: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/03/donald-trump-villain-republican-party-blame-russia. Well, that’s their problem; or rather, a problem that only they can solve.

Britain’s problem looks insoluble. We can’t apparently flout ‘the people’s will’. That’s despite the fact that the people’s will was sought at just one tiny moment in time, when the people themselves were hugely dissatisfied over other things, which they chose to blame on the EU, under the influence of grossly deceitful propaganda; and without any chance of reconsidering their verdict on the basis of the experiences we’re going through now, and cooler and more informed debate.

Bloody Cameron. Whatever – apart from the sense of natural superiority they inculcate in them at Eton – persuaded him that he had the wisdom to be a good  prime minister? By his enabling of ‘tunnel vision nationalism’ in Britain, he may well have ruined his own nation, and lit a fuse – first Trump, then Le Pen, then that Dutch bloke, then… – to scramble the whole world order; for what that was worth.

There’s an interesting report in today’s Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/02/mi6-returns-to-tapping-up-recruit-black-asian-officers-alex-younger-interview – that MI6 are reverting to their old policy of ‘tapping up’ likely recruits, in order to achieve greater ethnic diversity. In this case it’s in order to net more black and Asian agents. They did something like this in the 1960s; but at that time in order to widen their recruitment socially. I was one of their targets. I came clean on this in my LRB review (19 Nov 2009) of Christopher Andrew’s The Defence of the Realm, his authorized history of MI5. Here’s an extract from that.

[Before then], to preserve confidentiality and esprit de corps, MI5 only recruited on the basis of personal recommendation, and consequently from its own class and type. This applied even to the female registry clerks, who as a result were far more debby than clerks anywhere else. In the mid-1960s, when Labour MPs started complaining of this, the Secret Services made some effort to broaden their pattern of recruitment. I know, because I was targeted then. A grammar-school oik, with no imperial connections, but hopefully tamed and smoothed by my Cambridge experience, I was ‘talent-spotted’ by one of my college dons, and sent to be interviewed by a Rosa Kleb-like figure in a decaying Carlton House Terrace apartment. She asked me my politics; I said ‘Labour’. ‘Not a communist?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh well, that’s all right then.’ So I passed that interview, and was scheduled for a second sometime later; but then withdrew when my postgraduate research grant came through.

The extraordinary thing about this event, however, is that I had no idea at the time that I was being recruited for one of the Secret Services, until many years later: when I started working in this historical field; the don died and his Obituary for the first time publicly revealed his work for MI5 in the Second World War; and I raised my new suspicion with Christopher Andrew, who had just published his Secret Service (1985: a kind of prequel to this book). ‘Where was the interview?’ he asked. I told him. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘that was MI6’ (or IRD: I forget which). Apparently they would have told me this at the second interview. I could have been unusually naïve (I’m sure the Public School recruits were more worldly-wise), but I wasn’t alone. According to Andrew’s new book, several new recruits to MI5 still didn’t know whom they were working for until several weeks after they started. Now that’s what I call secrecy.

Of course, I might be lying here. It is, after all, what spies do. I could have merely pretended to withdraw, and agreed to work clandestinely for the secret services among all those dodgy radicals in academia. We know how left-wing they are:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/03/02/eight-ten-british-university-lecturers-left-wing-survey-finds/.The East German STASI, as it happens, did have a spy in the Economic History department at Hull, who was only unmasked when the wall fell. I obviously missed that one. So I could have been an incompetent spy. There were plenty of those. But you can never know for sure.

The LRB Blog has just posted another of my pieces on the Trump/Sweden affair: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/03/01/bernard-porter/sweden-who-would-believe-this-sweden/. Most of it has already appeared here, apart from the embedded links.

I visited Rinkeby today, a suburb of Stockholm 90% of whose inhabitants are of foreign origin, and where there was an incident the other night involving young men throwing stones at the police while they were in the process of arresting a suspected drug dealer. This came a couple of days after Donald Trump, in a speech, had referred to a non-existent incident in Sweden the night before, apparently involving immigrants, and which he mentioned in the same breath as recent Islamicist terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels and elsewhere. ‘Sweden!’ – spreading his arms out – ‘Who would believe it? Sweden!’ Exactly. No-one did believe it, and it was much mocked subsequently. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2017/02/19/swedish-trumpery/.)

But then came the Rinkeby incident, which, despite the inconvenient fact that it happened after his speech, was taken to justify it retrospectively. The Swedish far-Right took it up immediately, told the Americans about it, and two of them – prominent members of the nationalist Sverigedemokraterna party – even contributed an op-ed along these lines to the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-is-right-swedens-embrace-of-refugees-isnt-working-1487807010. A Swedish minister is due to respond within the next day or two.

Of course it’s pretty much nonsense. Crimes and mini-riots happen here in Sweden very occasionally, as everywhere, but no-where near as frequently or seriously as in the USA. It is difficult to connect them with higher immigration; their incidence has in fact declined since the Swedes started letting most of their refugees in. We don’t know the precise extent to which immigrants are involved, as the Swedish police keep no ethnic details, although of course it’s likely in Rinkeby: not only because it’s a largely immigrant community, but also because of the rate of unemployment there. I imagine that unemployed young Swedish blonds are just as likely to commit crimes or throw stones at the Polis as, say, brown-skinned Somali.

Nor can the incidence of rape in Sweden be tied to incoming foreigners, as is often claimed by the far-Rightists. (The argument is that the Moslems’ culture tolerates it more.) If Sweden has a higher number of reported rapes than other countries, that’s because of the very broad way ‘rape’ is defined here (as Julian Assange will find if he does ever consent to be extradited to Sweden), and the way rapes are reported. (For example, if a woman accuses her husband of raping her every night of the year, it’s counted as 365 crimes, rather than one, as elsewhere.) Again, statistics don’t confirm that this is an especially ‘foreign’ crime. Then again, politically- or religiously-motivated attacks – the ones Trump was referring to – are mainly the province of Swedish neo-Nazis, and directed against Islam. (I’ve witnessed one.) Trump was simply – but dangerously – wrong. Kajsa and I are very angry.

My visit to Rinkeby was quite pleasant. It’s a clean, modern and even fairly prosperous-looking suburb. There are no signs of the mayhem that happened a few nights ago. It has the same social amenities as everywhere else in this very socially-aware country. The State has put a great deal of work into looking after and integrating the refugees. Yes, everyone looks African or Middle Eastern; many of the women are in hijabs, niqabs and burkas; the young men are standing or sitting around in groups talking: but very happily, it appeared to me. They were friendly when I approached them. In fact happiness was my main impression of them, albeit a superficial one, I realise. (I wasn’t there long.) But of course why wouldn’t they be happy, after what so many of them had gone through before arriving?

I talked with one or two of them. They had no idea that their suburb had made such an impression internationally, and were surprised. Yes, the other night’s incident was bad, a couple of cars were damaged and some shop windows smashed, but no-one was seriously injured, and it was soon over. It seemed to be no big deal. Certainly not big enough to fuel Trump’s and the Right’s paranoid anti-immigrant agenda; nor to be worth taking up column-inches in the prestigious Wall Street Journal.