Porter’s Pensées

Getting older, we forget things. I had either forgotten, or never knew, that Ged Martin, another British imperial historian (mainly of Canada), came from the same neck of the woods as I. In retirement, he has now turned to researching and writing the history of Havering (mainly Hornchurch and Romford, in what used to be Essex), despite not having lived there for more than 50 years, and now residing in southern Ireland (lucky man). He was also an almost exact contemporary of mine at Cambridge, where I knew him – though not well. His ‘Havering History Cameos’ are here: http://www.gedmartin.net/index.php/martinalia-mainmenu-3/235-havering-history-cameos. Getting older, we also become nostalgic. I’m hugely enjoying these pieces. I thought I’d get in touch with him, but I can’t find an email address. If he picks this up, through Google perhaps, he might drop me a line.

John Saville, the distinguished Labour historian, also came from Gidea Park. Both he and Ged, I think, went to the local Royal Liberty school. (I went to another one.) There may be others. David Irving was at my school, but I don’t know whether he was a Haveringite. (I hope not.) The editor of the Essex volumes of the Victoria County History, WR Powell, lived in Harold Wood. I wonder whether there were more? Did we all have anything in common that might have derived from the locality? If so, we might be grouped together as ‘the Havering School’. It could give the place some cachet. Maybe the Havering Tourist Bureau – if there is one, which I doubt – could organize visits to all our homes. Mum’s old house would get a blue plaque. She’d have liked that.

Learning this has all been a bit of a shock for me. I loathed and despised Hornchurch – my bit of Havering – and never thought anything good could come out of it. I even thought it devalued me. The outer London suburbs seemed the dullest places in the world, mainly because they had no local character or identity, like provincial towns, or rural villages, or even central London, could boast. They were in-between places, purgatories, neither one thing nor the other, which one simply had to endure before passing on to the more characterful Heaven or Hell. (In my case, Hull.) The accent was awful: neither proper Cockney, nor rural Essex. (Today it’s called ‘Estuary English’.) Once I escaped from Hornchurch, in 1960, I never went back, except occasionally to visit Mum before she moved up North. To my friends at Cambridge I used to pretend I came from somewhere else. ‘East London’ had more cachet, in an inverted-snobbish kind of way, and wasn’t too far from the truth. I’ve always hated ‘suburbia’, ever since.

Obviously this was a grotesquely unfair prejudice. People aren’t entirely moulded by their physical environments, and in any case Hornchurch may have been less dull than it seemed to a pretentious little twerp like me. Perhaps it was adolescence. Do young people often wish they lived elsewhere? I ought to go back – though not to live there, obviously (God no!); and perhaps join Ged in his efforts to colour in the place. From the vastness of the Empire to the parochiality of Hornchurch: it’s a curious academic journey, for both of us. But it could bring me down to earth.

It’s a sign of the times, I imagine; but apparently classic dystopian novels are selling like hot cakes just now – 1984, Brave New World, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which I’ve only just got round to reading. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long. I’m a great fan of cerebral Sci-Fi, and my favourite Sci-Fi writer is another woman, Ursula Le Guin – The Left Hand of Darkness (featuring gender-shifting humanoids), and The Dispossessed. A movie version of The Handmaid’s Tale is coming out in April. I mistook it for another film showing in Stockholm just now, The Handmaiden, which isn’t the one. Luckily I found that out before I bought the tickets. It’s an ‘erotic, psychological drama set in Japan’. At my age, I can give that a miss.

The Handmaid’s Tale is extraordinarily good at drawing the reader into Atwood’s frightening world of women cultivated merely as wombs, under a claustrophobically totalitarian regime run according to Mayflower Puritan – or Christian Taliban – rules. (This is Le Guin’s great virtue, too: her ability to convey complete empathy with totally alien societies. Is it a woman thing?) I found myself immersed, almost drowned, in Atwood’s world. And I’m a man.

In one way, however, I found it slightly dated politically – as if that matters. Religious tyranny might have seemed the most likely form of fascism in 1980s America, when the book came out; but it would seem to have little in common with our present nationalist, nativist, populist and anti-rational kind. I suppose the sexism in the book might ring a bell; and if you think that pussy-grabbing is an essential aspect of modern-day Trumpery, which I’m prepared to hear argued, you may find the book resonates. But any religious aspect to most of our modern American and European proto-fascisms – apart from the ‘pro-life’ thing in middle America – escapes me for the moment. Of course, it could come; and The Handmaid’s Tale may be looked back on in the future as just as prescient as 1984 seems today. In any case, it blew me away.

Americans have long had a problem with Sweden. Trump’s invention of an Islamicist terror attack there a couple of days ago is just the latest example. It wasn’t just a question of news distortion, though it seems clear that the television programme that gave him the idea – Fox News, of course – was grossly misleading and misinterpreted. (See https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/02/20/filmmaker-criticized-for-reporting-that-spurred-trump-s-sweden-c/21717885/.)

But there’s a history of this kind of thing. If it’s not crime, rape and atrocities caused by immigrants, then it’s gloom, alcoholism and high suicide rates, attributed to Sweden’s welfare state. In many Americans’ eyes, these national characteristics define the place. The following piece in today’s Guardian is good on this: https://www.theguardian.com/cmmentisfree/2017/feb/20/sweden-donald-trump-crime-muslim-immigrants. Living in the USA, as I once did, I came across this over and over again. I once read in a newspaper, for example, that the Stockholm murder rate was higher than Chicago’s. Most of these ‘facts’ were as grotesquely unreliable as that.

In recent years, ‘Nordic Noir’ may have been partly to blame. (An American friend of mine, a distinguished academic, once told me he was putting off a trip to Sweden after reading Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy. I’ve tried to keep him away from Midsomer Murders, lest he cross England off his list too.) Some Americans also appear to think that Sweden is cold and dark all the year round. Then of course there’s the misery-laden culture: August Strindberg, Ingmar Bergman and so on (see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/12/07/scandi-gloom/); and the Swedes’ reputation for taciturnity. Swedes don’t seem to have much fun, unless they’re drunk. All untrue, of course. (Well, mainly.)

But the chief reason for this common American image of Sweden must go deeper. It’s rooted in the Americans’ whole dominant national culture, which predisposes them to believe it. From this point of view, Sweden as it is – as I know it to be – must be, frankly, impossible. Its people are – generally – law-abiding, moral, hard working, happy and prosperous. Crime is low, and productivity high. Sweden can be generous to refugees, without more than the minimum of social disruption. – And yet: religious attendance in Sweden is probably the lowest in Europe; its penal policy liberal; its prisons sparsely populated; its welfare provision surely enough to deter all enterprise; its trade unions powerful; its working days short and legal annual holiday allowances hugely generous; no-one carries guns (except for hunting); children are looked after by the State from a very young age; health provision and higher education are free; classes and the sexes are roughly equal (for most of them); and taxes are pretty high, certainly by American standards.

By Americans’ economic, religious and penal criteria, all this should spell disaster for the country. Which is what makes it difficult for them to accept all the rosier pictures that occasionally come out of Sweden: the ‘Swedish model’, and all that. And which led Trump to conclude that, if Sweden was admitting all those Muslim refugees – this was what he was talking about – the country must be suffering for it. There ought to be a jihadist massacre there. In other words, the wish, or the theory, or the prejudice, is father to the thought. (Or to the ‘alternative fact’.)

Some Brexiteers seem to want to resurrect the old British ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ as a free-trading area to replace the EU. Here, for some perspective, is an essay on it I contributed many years ago to an online (Oxford) Encyclopaedia of British History. I think it still holds up. (Embedded links are to other entries in the same Encyclopaedia.)

Commonwealth of Nations. The husk of the old British empire, an accidental by-product of history. The only thing its member states apart from Britain have in common is that they were once her colonies, though Mozambique, not a former colony, was admitted in 1995 as a special case. Not all her ex-colonies are members: the future USA for example liberated themselves before the idea was thought of; some colonies, like Burma and British Somaliland, declined to join from the beginning; and the Irish Free State, South Africa, and Pakistan were once members but later (in 1949, 1961, and 1972 respectively) left. Nevertheless the present Commonwealth comprises Britain and most of her old empire: around 54 states, scattered over all the inhabited continents, with a population estimated (in 1994) at 1.4 billion.

The term ‘commonwealth’, in this context, dates from the turn of the century, and grew out of the realization that already several of Britain’s older-established colonies were self-governing in all essential respects. To call them ‘colonies’, or collectively an ‘empire’, appeared to undervalue their real independence, and the new word was felt by some to express better the form the empire would take: a union or federation of equal nation states, united for the common good of the whole. An important catalyst for this transformation was the First World War. This had the dual effect of reminding the dominions of their continued subjugation to Britain in some ways—when George V committed the whole empire to the war it was without formal consultation with them—while at the same time emphasizing their importance and sense of individual national identity. By the time the next world war came around, each dominion was allowed to decide for itself whether it would join in. (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were generous with their contributions; South Africa, many of whose whites felt more affinity with the Nazis, less so.) This development was not to everyone’s liking, however. Enthusiasts for the ‘commonwealth ideal’ had generally envisaged the dominions taking an equal share in the formulation of policies that would then be common to them all. Instead it took an entirely different turn, and came to mean that they would have equal rights to separate policies of their own.

This privilege was established in the early 1920s, after disputes within the Commonwealth over the Washington naval conference of 1921–2 and the Chanak affair in 1922. In 1923 Canada became the first dominion to conclude a treaty with a foreign power (the Halibut Fish treaty) without reference to Britain; and the pattern for the future—of independent partnership—was set. It was formalized by an important pronouncement of the 1926 imperial conference, defining dominion status; and by the 1931 statute of Westminster, which confirmed the dominions’ legislative autonomy. For the moment this only applied to colonies of European settlement (the full list at that time was Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand, Eire, and South Africa), and not to the ‘non-white’ colonies. That changed in 1947, when the newly independent nation of India was admitted to the Commonwealth. That established the character of the ‘multiracial’ Commonwealth as it exists today.

As decolonization progressed, the other ex-colonies followed. Most old imperialists regarded this process with pride. Some of them indeed saw the new Commonwealth as the culmination of the empire, the goal to which its evolution had been directed for a hundred years or more. In a way it was, for there had always been a strong tradition of what was called ‘trusteeship’ in British imperial thought. It was also widely hoped that the Commonwealth might prove to be a powerful political and economic force in the world, all the more powerful for being free, and so revive Britain’s flagging ‘great power’ status and role. Labour ministers were prone to this as well as Conservatives. For this reason the Commonwealth has been criticized for seducing Britain away from her continental neighbours, during the years when western Europe was evolving an alternative supranational structure of its own.

The idea that the Commonwealth could be a kind of empire-substitute, however, was soon shattered. The newest members regarded their hard-won national independence jealously, and were unwilling to co-operate together merely to give Britain a further lease of international life. There were sharp clashes between members, arising from past memories that were hard to eradicate, conflicting economic interests, and differences of principle, especially over the issue of apartheid, which forced South Africa to leave in 1961. (It rejoined in 1994.) Widely dispersed as they were, and differentiated in almost every possible way, it would have been remarkable if the member states had easily and naturally cohered. So the Commonwealth became much less than the united ‘third force’ in the world that the imperial optimists had envisaged; something quite different, though still worthy of respect.

As it stands now, it is totally unlike any other international organization of states that has existed before. It has a secretariat, and a secretary-general (set up in 1965), but little else in common. It has no power, no united policy, no common principles, and no shared institutions. There used to be a common citizenship, with Britain allowing unrestricted entry to all Commonwealth citizens, but her Immigration Act of 1962 put an end to that. Most member states are parliamentary democracies, but not all. Most have retained English legal forms, but not all. Most play cricket, but not all. The single constitutional feature common to all member states is that they acknowledge the British monarch as symbolic head of the Commonwealth, but fewer than half recognize her or him as the head of their own states. It was once thought of as an economic unit, a potential free (or preferential) trade area, but that was never convincing, and collapsed when Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973. Another blow was the raising of British college fees for overseas students in 1979. The interchange of bright young people had been a valuable way of fostering Commonwealth solidarity. That was no longer felt to be a priority, however, in the narrowly utilitarian climate which prevailed at that time.

Nevertheless the Commonwealth still serves a purpose, as a forum for informal discussion and co-operation between nations of widely disparate cultures and material conditions. That function is served by a host of specialist Commonwealth institutions (the Commonwealth Institute in London, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Association of Commonwealth Universities, the Commonwealth of Learning, and so on); and by biennial conferences of Commonwealth heads of government. The ideal it represents still flickers, albeit fitfully. Only time will tell whether the Commonwealth is a mere footnote to history, or the beginning of a new chapter.

For those of you who know that I live in Sweden much of the time, and who may have been alarmed by yesterday’s report – from the President of the United States, no less – that we’ve just had an Islamicist massacre here, I’d like to reassure you that I’m quite unscathed. – Here’s Trump, in Melbourne, Florida:

‘You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris. You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe it! Sweden.’

Well! Who would believe it, indeed. Obviously our liberal Swedish media is as adept at hiding these atrocities as the American.

As it happens we went into Stockholm city centre on the night in question, to see an operatic stageing of Lars-Erik Larsson’s Förklädd Gud (God in Disguise) at Folksoperan. We should have been nervous, I suppose, when we learned that a number of the performers were beggars, exiles and Roma taken from the streets, many of them undoubtedly Muslims. But none of them turned on us. The performance was set in the context of Sweden’s recent extraordinarily generous Middle Eastern refugee policy: a sign, the piece was saying, of that ‘disguised God’ in all of us. The music is glorious (there’s a good version of the original here, with Kurt Wallander [!] as the narrator: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkN2Gbe1aD8), and the whole occasion was very moving. It reminded me of why I like living here.

The Swedish papers have had great fun at the expense of Trump’s silly lie. Here’s one reaction, from the tabloid Aftonbladet: http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/Vn17J/in-english-this-happened-in-sweden-friday-night-mr-president.

I like the randy moose story. I don’t suppose he was a Moslem ‘in disguise’?

If one referendum is ‘democratic’, why should a second one be ‘undemocratic’? That’s what the Brexiteers are arguing; most recently the awful Iain Duncan Smith in response to Tony Blair’s call for a rethink of last year’s EU vote: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-38996179.

I can see the practical objections to repeating referenda over and over again until you get the ‘right’ result; but not any reasons of democratic principle. In this case I’d have thought the argument for trying to elicit a considered verdict on the question from the British people, freed from the extraneous considerations that marred the first vote (see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/), and in the light of the knowledge that’s now beginning to accumulate of the probable problems and disadvantages of Brexit, was pretty unanswerable. Otherwise we’re staking our whole national future, not on what the people necessarily want today, but on what they thought they wanted at one brief and fevered moment of time in the past.

Again: what is particularly democratic about this?

Alice Wheeldon was a pacifist and suffragette in World War I Britain. She irked the government of the time by sheltering draft-dodgers and helping them to escape abroad. In order to neutralise her she was ‘fitted up’ by police spies on a fake charge of plotting to assassinate Lloyd George, and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. (The episode is mentioned in my Plots and Paranoia.) Next month, to mark the centenary of her trial, a ‘Vigil’ is being arranged at the London Law Courts by the group that is trying to elicit a posthumous pardon for her. As this notice points out, the issue of police spies and agents provocateurs is still a topical and troubling one. (See below: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/25/police-spies/.) I hope I can make it to the Law Courts on the 10th.

Watching Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience on U-Tube reminds me that we shouldn’t take the Victorians too seriously – because they didn’t take themselves all that seriously. Patience mocks everyone, including the mockers themselves; not only aesthetes, its best-known targets, but also, for example, the military: the butt of much scorn, as well as admiration, in Victorian Britain generally. And there’s much more of this kind of thing in the other Savoy operas.

Elsewhere, for those who believe that Victorian Britain was defined by its empire, there was plenty of anti-imperial and anti-war mockery too. Take that famous ‘Jingo’ music-hall song of 1877/8:

We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do,

We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too!

We’ve fought the Bear before and while we’re Britons true

The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

This is supposed to mark the origin of the word ‘Jingo’ used in this context, and to be evidence of the ubiquity of British patriotism at the time. But what is often forgotten is that there was a contemporary mocking version of that song, which was also popular in the music halls:

I don’t want to fight, I’ll be slaughtered if I do,

I’ll change my togs, I’ll sell my kit, and sell my rifle too!

I don’t like this war, I ain’t a Briton true

And I’d let the Russians have Constantinople.

Indeed, the amount of anti-imperialism there was in 19^th-century Britain, both satirical and serious, is not I think properly credited by historians. One of the points I make in my last book (British Imperial, £16.59 from Amazon and worth every penny) is that it was the Brits who effectively invented anti-imperialism, and so should be given credit for that. (The American revolutionaries weren’t properly anti-imperialists. They just wanted to free themselves from Britain’s empire, in order to go around doing some imperializing of their own. See my Empire and Superempire: £18.99 from Amazon.) This was because Britain wasn’t ever a homogeneous society, with what is sometimes called a ‘dominant discourse’, or anything like it. And because we Brits have always joked about ourselves. In difficult times, it’s what makes life bearable for us, and makes us loveable (I hope) to foreigners.

America may be the same just now: viz the glorious torrent of anti-Trump satire currently flooding the internet. It must make their recent disaster more tolerable to liberal Americans. And it’s why I still love the country so much.

Apparently retirees are now better off than working people in Britain: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/feb/13/pensioners-now-20-a-week-better-off-than-working-households. I’m not surprised. Most of us have good occupational pensions, unlike the next generation. (I would have, if half of it were not going to my ex-wife.) We’ve paid off our mortgages. The children have fled and are (mainly) self-sustaining. We get free bus rides. We don’t need so much, at our age; and what we do need the good old NHS will provide. (Up to now.) And for ten years the Tory government has carefully sheltered us against rising ‘austerity’, in the belief that (a) we oldies are more likely to vote, and (b) we’re more likely to vote for them. So it’s not a bad life, in Theresa’s Britain; if you’re old enough to enjoy it.

Of course this is unfair on our children’s generation; but then we post-war oldies always have been the lucky ones. I count myself extraordinarily lucky, to the extent that I can’t really credit any of my achievements, such as they are, to my own efforts. I missed the War, and then missed – just by a few months – post-war military conscription. I was nurtured early on by free school milk and orange juice, and kept alive (literally, in my case) by the spanking-new NHS. My parents could afford to buy a house, while they were reasonably-priced; as was I, forty years later. Thereafter, already installed on the ladder, we merely profited, when house prices escalated. I got a good – privileged – secondary education, without having to pay for it; which fed me through to a prestigious university, which again I didn’t have to pay a penny towards. The State even contributed to my living expenses. There was full employment. Social democracy was firmly established, and improving year by year, even under Conservative governments. Above all, perhaps, we had hope. (See my piece here on 1956: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/28/1956/.)

Then of course it all came to shuddering halt, as the Conservatives re-discovered their old Victorian roots, and started eating away at the ‘molly-coddling’ – the ‘nanny state’ – that was supposed to be stifling our ‘get-up-and-go’. In fact I genuinely believe that I would never have got up and gone anywhere useful and productive, if it hadn’t been for the State. If, that is, what I’ve done in my life has been useful; or more so than if I had been forced to struggle in thankless jobs for money, or to march up and down in my ‘National Service’ years, or even to keep alive, without free health care, as a child.

And now, having had this extraordinarily fortunate life so far, the privilege is being extended into old age. It really is unfair. Seeing my children striving for what came effortlessly to my generation fills me with very real guilt. But then I suppose it could well be making them into better people than I’ve turned out to be. Per ardua…

Having been a skeptical student of ‘conspiracy theories’ for many years – arising out of my work on Britain’s secret services – I thought I could distinguish ‘true’ from ‘false’ news fairly easily. But it really is becoming more difficult nowadays. The problem arises with stories that you would like to believe, because of your political (or other) predilections, and which genuinely could be true in view of what else you know about the person or people targeted. Usually that will immediately rule out the craziest rumours swilling about – Hillary Clinton involved in child pornography, for example, or Obama’s Kenyan nationality; but then along comes a person who is crazy (in the loosest meaning of the term; I’m not claiming, yet, that Trump is certifiable), and the bounds of possibility immensely broaden out.

Take the following: a report that the Trump organization erected a fence around a cottage abutting on one of his Scottish golf courses (the owner refused to sell it to him), and then sent the owner the bill, à la Mexico: surely this can’t be true? It’s just the sort of thing a satirist might make up, in line with all those other glorious anti-Trump jokes circulating around the internet just now; and for those of us most distressed by the result of the American election, making Trump’s victory almost bearable – a bit like Low’s Hitler cartoons in the 1930s. It resembles one of those myths that expresses an even deeper truth than the literal truth: like Peter Mandelson being taken into a fish and chip shop and asking for ‘some of that lovely-looking guacamole, please’. (I.e., for non-Brits, really mushy peas.) But the ‘Scottish wall’ one is in the Torygraph, no less: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/8555683/Donald-Trump-angers-neighbour-after-erecting-new-boundary-fence-and-then-billing-him.html. And it was repeated on Swedish Radio this morning. (Thanks Kajsa.) So it might be true. How can we tell?

There’s much talk these days about the ‘post-truth society’, and ‘alternative facts’; not an exclusively modern trend, of course, but seemingly becoming more widely acknowledged now. I blame capitalism: capitalists don’t need to tell the truth, only what they think they can get away with, and what will ‘sell’. That’s Trump’s whole career, to a T. (See this superb account by Sidney Blumenthal in the latest LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n04/sidney-blumenthal/a-short-history-of-the-trump-family). I suspect that in intellectual circles the ‘relativist’ tendency in ‘post-modernism’ might also have had an influence, if only to undermine otherwise intelligent people’s resistance to ‘post-truth’. Whatever.

The difference today appears to be that it’s more widely accepted that politicians (and others) tell lies; not occasionally, but as their default position. That’s what true ‘conspiracy theorists’ used to believe, which is what turned so many of them into universal cynics. Trump’s lies, and the fact that so many people – almost a majority – voted for him in full knowledge of them, are turning more of us that way, which doesn’t bode well for America, for us in Britain (that deceptive Brexit campaign), or for democracy. For it is arguable that a stable society needs to be built on trust, even if that trust is naïve and wrong-headed. How can we carry on, now, if we can’t even be sure whether something is a joke or not? Or if we can’t even rely on the Daily Telegraph? (Irony.)

I stopped researching the secret services a few years ago when I found all this deception – on both sides: both the spies and the counter-spies – getting through to me. In this ‘wilderness of mirrors’, I had no firm ground to stand on. I started erecting all kind of ingenious conspiracies of my own. One was that Thatcher was a Soviet ‘mole’. (It fits! Here’s a novelistic version of it I posted a year ago on this blog: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/01/31/the-thatcher-conspiracy/.)  I first aired that in the conclusion to the second edition of my Plots and Paranoia, merely to illustrate the damage that this kind of history could do to one’s mind, and to explain why, therefore, I was returning to the more dependable field of imperialism. (Yes, of course, that involves deceit too. But it’s not quite so intrinsic to it.) One reviewer, obviously blind to irony, took me seriously.

One could write a whole history of Britain or America along these lines. I might try it myself, as my next project. I could incorporate the query jokes, and the query false facts. It would be an ‘alternative history’, of Britain and/or the USA. They’d love it in Trump-land, if I pitched it right. It would be fun to do, and maybe even useful, if I made its purpose plain. I’ll give it some thought.

(Actually, it’s already been done. Read any ‘patriotic’ American or British history. And look up ‘Carroll Quigley’ on Google. But my angle would be different. I haven’t decided on that yet. Any suggestions would be welcome.)