Porter’s Pensées

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.

The right-wing tabloid British press has two favourite scapegoats: immigrants, and social security scroungers. With Khalid Masood’s having been shown not to have been an immigrant after all – strictly speaking; although of course he was black – the Daily Star goes for Plan B: http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/599978/police-probe-london-terror-attacks-khalid-masood-serial-benefits-cheat. Either way, it panders to their prejudices.

So far it’s looking as though I was right to be sceptical of all that ‘terrorist’ hoo-ha: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39396101. Of course there’s still time.

As an Islamic terrorist, Khalid Masood was pretty pathetic. Not only because of his abject failure, as described in my last post, but also because he doesn’t appear to have done his jihadist homework. His background was criminal rather than religious, and overall seems very atypical of a genuine terrorist’s. He was too old, for a start. There’s no evidence at all that he was part of a ‘plot’; nor even that he was a devout Moslem. Isis have claimed him as one of their own, but they do that, don’t they? Aren’t proper jihadists meant to yell out ‘Allahu Akbar’, or something similar, as they rush towards their victims? I’ve not seen that reported. Masood could be a motiveless desperado, at the end of his tether, simply losing it as a dozen other crazy murderers have done; with the only thing linking him with political violence being the venue of his killing spree. To assume that he was part of the current Islamicist terrorist menace in any genuine way seems dodgy; and to publicise it as such, both in Britain and America, where such perverse and dangerous capital can be made of it by the likes of Farage, Katie Hopkins and the Trumpeters, is criminally irresponsible.

Of course we don’t yet know for sure. Police and MI5 enquiries might unearth more convincing evidence of religious motivation, or of jihadist connexions, in Birmingham, Kent, Sussex, Wales and all the other places he has lived (including three prisons), in his seemingly rootless life. Or from the wife/partner he is rumoured to have had. My scepticism may be ill-founded; even naive. But it’s not a bad approach to have, in such combustible circumstances. In any case we seem to have gone overboard on this, to the advantage only of the far Right, and of the Islamicists themselves. By exaggerating the terror, we are doing the terrorists’ work for them.

I’m hoping the intelligence services may be able to reassure us on this. Historically they have very often been suspected of exaggerating ‘threats to national security’ – communist, Irish, at one time moral (in the 1890s they tried to close down a magazine advocating ‘free love’) – and of dirty tricks on behalf, usually, of the political Right. They need to justify their salaries. But there have been times in the past when they (or rather the British ones, the only ones I really know about) have been more cool, impartial and objective. It’s a long way back, I realize; but they were crucially reassuring in the 1850s, when some very fiery revolutionaries flocked into Britain and to Jersey from the European Continent after the failure of their 1848 risings (Marx was one), and the government of the time, on the basis of some sober intelligence from its secret police branch, was able to persuade both its own people and panicky foreign monarchs, that they were pretty harmless really. I’m trusting today’s police and MI5 to adopt the same approach. Neither they nor the government, after all, have any interest in stoking up either terrorism or Islamophobia.

By the same token, however, if they do find Masood was part of a significant plot, I’ll cast my doubts aside.

The first thing to remark about yesterday’s attack on and near the Palace of Westminster – though it may appear callous to say so, in view of the four innocent lives lost and the unknown number of serious casualties, all of whom of course deserve our deep sympathy – is that it failed. That’s of course assuming it was a ‘terrorist’ attack, targeting the Houses of Parliament, and for the usual terrorist motives. For the moment – just a few hours afterwards – that looks the most likely scenario. The body of the assailant, shown on TV in early transmissions, but later with his face pixelated, was brown, and had a thick black beard without a moustache. Is it a sign of prejudice on my part to infer from this that he was probably a Muslim; and in view of his actions before he was killed, to go on from there to suspect that he might have been a jihadist? No-one will be more relieved than I if that turns out to be false.

The failure of his mission was twofold. Firstly, he never got into the Parliament building, which redounds to the credit of London’s police and the British intelligence services. We can conclude from this that we are safe as a nation, without requiring the kind of drastic measures that, for example, UKIP and Trump favour, like Muslim immigration restrictions and travel bans. There’s no way of preventing attacks by lone individuals (although, to be fair, MI5 still needs to determine whether or not he was ‘alone’, or had collaborators and sympathisers), driving ordinary cars, and wielding kitchen knives. They, of course, can come from any sector of society. The murderer of Jo Cox was not a jihadist.

Secondly (and this is where my expertise as a historian comes in): the literal and correct definition of ‘terrorism’ (dictionary.com) is ‘the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes’. The word itself, terrorisme, was first used during France’s ‘Reign of Terror’ to describe government intimidation, of whole populations. Thus, it’s wrong to use the word – as it often is loosely used – to describe any act of political violence: for example the assassination of a political figure simply to get rid of her or him. In this sense, yesterday’s attack abjectly failed too; just as the London bombings of July 2005 (‘7/7’) did. Londoners have not been intimidated or coerced. They have a proud history of this, dating back to the London ‘Blitz’ of 1940. And London’s immigrants seem to have acquired the same sang-froid. They will be back to work today, and Parliament will sit again.

So overall this was good news – except of course for the poor victims and their families; and a lesson to those who would wish to curtail our – or our prospective immigrants’ – freedoms further in the vain search for absolute security; which however would likely be counter-productive. It is, after all, what the Islamicists want. Learn from our example, Donald.

I’ve been invited to give a lecture at a ‘festival of history’ – ‘La Storia in Piazza’ – in the Sala del Consiglio Maggiore of the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa next month. The ‘festival’s theme is ‘Imperi’, and they want me to fill the slot on the British Empire. As well as lectures, there will be ‘exhibitions, games, music, songs, etc.’ ‘Audiences have averaged 25,000.’ Gosh! (I imagine that’s overall, not all packed into my lecture.) I’ll be speaking in English, but simultaneously translated into Italian. Of course I accepted – any excuse to revisit Italy! And I’ve never been to Genoa, birthplace of Christopher Columbus. Kajsa is coming with me.

The title they suggested was ‘L’impero britannico: costruito quasi per caso?’ which is fine, and I shall indeed be talking on that theme; but I’ve chosen to call it ‘Brexit and the British Empire’, to make it more topical. I’ve also learned (from Kajsa) how to use PowerPoint, and have found some fun pictures to go with it. If anyone knows of anyone else who’d like to hear it, preferably in an exotic location with all expenses paid, please get in touch.

The problem with this kind of paper is that I can’t be sure of the sort of audience I’ll be meeting. All I’ve been told is that they will be mainly Italians, and ‘non-specialists’. But how non-specialist? What do they know already – or think they know – of the British Empire, and of Brexit? Will they have heard of Cecil Rhodes? Or of Nigel Farage? Will the simultaneous translator be able to convey the subtleties of my text? Or the jokes? Do they understand cricket? Should I poke fun at Silvio Berlusconi? Or at Columbus, even? What will Italian non-specialists expect? I’ve bombed before with this kind of thing. (For example, my talk to those Swedish lawyers: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/12/15/different-worlds/.) Any decent lecture needs to be constructed not only with regard to its content, but also with the particular composition of its audience in view. It’s important to pitch it right. I finished writing a version yesterday. Now I need to re-jig it with my hazily-conceived Italian audience in mind.

I’ll let you know how it goes; and – if it hasn’t been too much of a disaster – post it on this site after the event.

A worry. – Most intelligent people, and those with expertise, have been ‘Remainers’ in the British EU debate, and anti-Trump in America. I’m not saying that sensible cases can’t be made for both Brexit and Trump; only that the weight of intellectual opinion has been presented and perceived as being on the other side. The Trumpists and Brexiteers have been widely pilloried for their falsification of facts, and their general stupidity. They themselves seem to have taken that as a compliment; or to have allowed the patronising sneers of the intelligentsia and of experts merely to strengthen them in their prejudices. That fits into a deep if hitherto submerged ‘anti-intellectual’ current in both countries. ‘We’ve had enough of experts’, as Michael Gove notoriously said during the EU referendum debate. (And he an ex-Education Minister!)

My fear is this. OK, so the anti-intellectuals will probably be proved wrong: although to the detriment of both our countries as both Brexit and Trumpism fail. That’s bad enough. But what if not? Suppose that in, say, three or four years’ time, both Brexit Britain and Trumpite America prove to be – or can be presented as being – roaring economic successes? What if, in spite of all us arrogant intellectual naysayers, America really does become ‘great’, and Britain proud and independent, again? What will that do for intelligence and expertise in the future generally, and for those of us who consider ourselves the guardians of truth and reason? Having been proved wrong in these two major instances, are people going to trust us, about anything, ever again?

And how will that leave the state of political discourse in the rest of the 21^st century? In the hands of irrationalists, the prejudiced, the emotional, the unreasoning haters, peddlars of ‘alternative’ truths, uneducated hoi polloi; with ‘intellectuals’, academics, researchers and all other thinking people – my sort – stranded on the edges of the debate, mocked, and never taken seriously again? There are precedents for this, with 1930s Germany the obvious – and much cited – one. That’s one of the broader things at stake in the present crisis of liberalism.

In fact it probably won’t be that bad. The end results of both Brexit and the Trump Presidency (if it lasts that long) will probably be too messy to be able to draw any definite conclusions from them. That’s the way these things usually work out in history. Which means there will still be room for rational debate afterwards, and for rational debaters, like me. – Still, it’s a worry.

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.