Porter’s Pensées

I voted – twice – for Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party, and am still loyal to his ideals and policies. I also think he’s done a good job in many ways, bearing in mind the hostility of the press to him, his lack of support – even ‘treachery’ – from his own side, and his own deficiencies in what are taken to be the necessary qualities of ‘leadership’ (the Führerprinzip) in this post-democratic age. By that is generally taken to be meant his lack of ‘charisma’, and his association with what is now regarded as an ‘old-fashioned’ type of socialism, going back to the 1960s. So far as ‘charisma’ is concerned, Attlee was pretty lacking in that too, and yet he was arguably the best and most successful British peacetime prime minister of the last century. We appreciated quality and ability then, over and above ‘show’. And secondly: ideas that were successful at one time shouldn’t be dismissed today simply because that time was fifty years ago. I’m thinking, of course, of social democracy. Good ideas are timeless. Thatcher was never dismissed as ‘old-fashioned’ simply because her policies were a hundred years old. But then she had plenty of the Führerin thing.

My preference for Corbyn as Leader was always predicated on the idea that, after he had shaken the Labour Party out of its grey Blairite suits, he might hand over to someone who had more of what the media recognizes as ‘leadership’ qualities in her or him (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/07/06/2710/). I couldn’t see any of those qualities, or many of the ones I would want to see in a Leader, in any of the candidates who led the contests against him over the past couple of years. Boring grey suits (or pleated skirts), every one of them. I remember thinking – though this may just be the old man in me – where are the great men and women of yesteryear: Bevan, Wilson, Crossman, Healey, Castle, Benn Mk 1…? Until someone of their quality emerged, I thought, best stick with the good Jeremy.

Recently I think I’ve spotted signs of this quality emerging in one or two Labour MPs (Clive Lewis? Yvette Cooper? Benn Mk 2?) – though I’d like to see more of all of them before I place any bets. It’s this that makes me not at all disturbed by the new rumour making the rounds – which may only be that – that Corbyn himself is thinking of voluntarily handing over quite soon (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jeremy-corbyn-to-quit-rumour-untrue-says-ian-lavery-gossip_uk_589aec47e4b0a1dcbd03f9ba?gkhp62ymvaomwmte29). If it could be done like that – a friendly succession rather than a coup, and to a higher-profile figure whom Jeremy and we on the Left trusted – it could be an ideal preparation for the next General Election campaign; once we’ve got through this Brexit mess. Blame the Right-wing press; but I’m afraid Labour needs someone who comes up (or down) to its notion of ‘leadership’.

The National Health Service is our greatest national achievement. It could also be our greatest national asset, if it weren’t currently being starved of funds. Horror stories – patients lying in corridors, delayed operations, elderly patients taking up beds because care in the community has also been decimated, and so on – appear in the papers every day. The Left suspects that the Tories are doing this deliberately, in order to make privatization – a long-time dream of theirs and their backers – more acceptable to the general public. The more obvious villain is simple ‘austerity’: the idea that we, as a nation, simply can’t afford anything more. Other contributory factors are the escalating costs of better medical treatment and technology; and the increasing demands of an ‘ageing population’ – ageing, and not dead, of course, because of the achievements of the NHS in the past.

That’s me. My body is collapsing bit by bit, and having to be patched together continuously. My latest problem is a hernia which needs to be operated on, but can’t be for 14 weeks, because of the waiting list. I need to get it done, or my guts will drop into my scrotum. (Here. My FB Friends will have seen this pic before.)

I don’t fancy pushing my bits around in a wheelbarrow. But I feel guilty at taking up our doctors’ hard-pressed time. I’m a burden.

The NHS used to be a source of great security to me. Tories, of course, don’t like the idea of security, unless it’s purchased at someone else’s profit, on the grounds that it takes away the need to strive. Of course that’s nonsense. A secure base to one’s life allows one to strive beyond that base. I couldn’t have written half my books without the NHS to sustain me at various times; and besides that, free education, through to university and beyond. Knowing that whatever goes wrong with me, I can have it put right without financial worries, and by hospitals and doctors that have time for me, has been a great comfort throughout my life. If I’d had to strive just to keep alive, I wouldn’t have accomplished so much. That’s why people of my class origins in the past generally didn’t accomplish more. I’m one of a greatly favoured generation, from free school milk via free education and free care, to the ease of getting jobs, all facilitated by the State. Today’s youngsters have it tough, by contrast. And i-phones don’t fully compensate.

Now hospitals are over-full, doctors over-worked, and treatment has to be limited. We’re being told to avoid ‘unnecessary’ visits to A&E, and to visit our GPs instead. But there aren’t enough GPs, so we’re then told to ask our pharmacists for advice. We’re made to feel a burden. I don’t believe I’ve ever been to a doctor unnecessarily, but now I feel guilty about going for anything. I’m waiting for the pain in my neck to be a sign of cancer, which would have been treatable if I had gone sooner, and risked being told I was wasting my doctor’s time.

Care for the infirm elderly is even more of a problem. It’s expensive for local councils, and hard to find of a reasonable standard. At my age you suddenly realise that you might soon come to need this, and so become even more of a burden to everyone. I’m determined not to burden any of my loved ones with my care, if it comes to that. I’ll strap on a bomb vest – or hide a grenade in my scrotum – and try to get near one of our modern villains. A Health Service privatizer, perhaps.

Of course the answer is higher taxes – or less spent on nuclear subs and bailing out banks. That’s how Sweden does it; but there they have a more enlightened view of taxation, and of the individual citizen’s obligations to society. I’m almost hoping that my hernia bursts before the fourteen weeks are up, and I have to be treated here, in Stockholm, as an emergency. That is, if we haven’t Brexited yet.

Of course the other way of getting traction from a ‘Reichstag Fire’ (see last post) is to pretend that it happened, but that the lying liberal press are covering it up:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/donald-trump-terror-attacks-are-not-being-reported-media_uk_5898db13e4b076856216ef0e?c8ublprf9ubpxecdi; and:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38890090.

Remember the ‘Bowling Green Massacre’?

On another related point: John Bercow’s announcement yesterday that if Trump accepted May’s invitation for a State visit later this year, he – as Speaker of the House – would not permit him to address the House of Commons (it’s in his gift) –

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/racist-sexist-donald-trump-john-bercow-westminster-hall-state-visit_uk_5898aafee4b076856216dee7 –

came as a surprise to everyone in Britain, and was welcomed, I think, by most of us, apart from the Right-wing press. The reasons Bercow gave were Trump’s racism and sexism, plus the ‘Muslim Ban’. Even more surprising to me – as your Sweden Correspondent – was that it made the top spot in last night’s STV News, with the Commons scene filmed and reported in full. That may do something to repair the British people’s reputation abroad. (Kajsa already thinks more of us.)

What President Trump could do with now, while his travel ban is suspended by the courts, is a Reichstag fire, and an immigrant close at hand to pin it on. He’s almost said as much: ‘if anything happens now it’s the judges’ fault’. It doesn’t have to be the Federal Capitol; it could be almost anywhere public (Trump Tower?), but it has to be blamed on a recently-arrived Muslim refugee. (Preferably one that is shot dead in the course of his arrest – the typical American way – so he can’t be questioned too closely.) I wouldn’t put it past either Trump’s people or the Islamic terrorists to arrange this; both sets of extremists, after all, want the same thing – to ratchet up the ‘war’. Let’s hope to God it doesn’t happen.

Of course this isn’t 1933, and Trump (it needs to be emphasized) isn’t Hitler. For those who scoff at that comparison, however, two points need to be made. Firstly, German Fascism didn’t begin with the death camps. Hitler’s first solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ was to boot them all out. This didn’t make him any less Fascist. Secondly, take a look at this poster, currently displayed in the US Holocaust Museum in Washington. I don’t know its provenance, but still. Trump ticks every one of these ‘early warning signs’.

So aren’t we right to be vigilant, even afraid?

Churchill once described democracy as ‘the worst form of Government except for all those others that have been tried from time to time’; and that’s probably the best that can be said for it. Nowhere has it ever produced the utopia that was confidently predicted for it in its early heady days, and some of its recent outcomes must cast doubt upon its capacity to do any good at all. OK, so Donald Trump didn’t win the popular democratic vote; but the fact that such a flawed candidate could come as close as he did to a majority would be a cause for concern, even if the less than democratic Electoral College had not delivered his victory to him. Likewise, the British European referendum result last summer was far from convincing as an expression of the ‘popular will’ on the particular vital issue it was supposed to rule on, as I’ve argued before. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/.)

Of course these judgments are made from a particular political point of view, by a self-styled liberal (me) who could be said simply not to like the results that Democracy is currently throwing up. In both these cases, it could be argued, Democracy – at long last allowed to express the genuine wishes of the people, rather than of ‘elitists’ like me – got it right. To think otherwise is to demean the intelligence of the ordinary mass of the population – the Demos – as ‘educated’ people often do. Yet the results – both of them – were very close, and yet also extreme in their effects; which must cast doubt on the capacity of our two forms of democracy to reflect any kind of popular consensus, at the very least.

Exactly. It’s the forms of our two democracies which are the problem. I certainly hope so, for in company with most other liberals I wouldn’t be happy with the idea that the masses are simply too fundamentally stupid to deserve to govern themselves. That way lies monarchism, authoritarianism, dictatorship, rule by Old Etonians, the ‘Führerprinzip’. As against this, however, it’s fair to point out that in both the American and the British cases, our means of expressing our respective ‘popular wills’ are beset with imperfections that must obviously skew the results of any election; ranging from gerrymandering (especially affecting the black vote in America), the way candidates are selected, lack of political education, the excessive roles played by money and propaganda, and our respective voting systems (like ‘first past the post’: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/); and then, arising out of all this, the feeling it gives to voters that their votes are not going to count much anyway. These problems will need to be addressed if people are going to repose enough confidence in their democratic rights and duties to use them responsibly. Then we might see whether or not Democracy ‘works’.

Beyond that, however, there’s another factor. Currently even the best-managed democracies seem relatively powerless in the face of great worldwide movements that are proving difficult for them to control, like global warming, mass religious zeal, population growth, and – in particular, I would say – the final stages of unregulated market capitalism, powered by its own internal imperative, and overriding all. ‘Globalism’, in the narrow economic sense in which the word is generally used today, is clearly (to my mind) at the root of most of the economic and social ills the people of the American rustbelt and the north of England are suffering now; which, however, those people’s ‘natural’ representatives – the Democrats in America and traditional Labour in Britain – have not yet properly addressed. They really were out of touch. That’s why voting for them seemed so pointless.

Those who did respond to this new overriding factor were the Trumpists and the Ukippers; which is why they won. In this sense the results of these two votes – however perverse they may have seemed to us liberals – did fairly reflect the common mood and the genuine and rational grievances of their respective electorates, far more closely than a Hilary or a Remain result would have done. The pity of the whole situation is that it was the political Right that put itself in the right place to profit from all this – just as Hitler did in the 1930s – rather than the Left, which could so easily have done. Bernie might have harnessed the American Rustbelt grievances to better effect, if he hadn’t been squeezed out by the Democratic Party machine. So might a more left-wing Labour Party in better touch with its natural constituency, somehow.

Then we would have been spared the current desperate situation, in which the USA has a government which, whatever it may or may not do for the Rustbelt in terms of putting ‘America First’ in the international jobs market, might – with its alarming foreign policy – bring the world to an end (the worst-case scenario, obviously); and in which Britain is left isolated, humiliatingly dependent for her trade on this monster over the pond, and so even less able to counter the late-capitalist/imperialist global behemoth which lies at the root of her people’s problems, than if she had stuck with Europe and worked along, in hope at least, with its burgeoning Left.

And if Brexit sparks a more general break-up of Europe, which both Trump and Putin clearly desire, there will be no chance at all of stopping the behemoth; which individual nations below the size of, say, America, Russia and China, can have little purchase against on their own.

Who or what is to blame for this? In my view the tragedy was at least facilitated by the systemic deficiencies of British and American ‘democracy’. That, rather than being the fault of Democracy, or of the Demos, themselves.

Now back in Stockholm – where the weather is unseasonably mild – to be confronted by a huge spread in today’s Dagens Nyheter about ‘Swedes with central roles in the American extreme Right’. It’s here, but behind a paywall, I think, and in Swedish: http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/svenskarna-med-centrala-roller-i-usas-extremhoger/.

I also had an email this morning from the author of the following book, drawing my attention to a more unusual aspect of Swedish neo-Nazism: https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Lions-North-Sounds-New-Nordic-Radical-Nationalism/0190212608/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486116478&sr=1-1&keywords=teitelbaum+lions. That’s due to be published in the UK next month. I shall certainly get it; and have asked a couple of papers whether they’d be interested in my reviewing it for them. If not I’ll post a review on this blog.

Can anyone recommend a book in English on the Nordic or Swedish extreme Right since 1945? I’d like to get up to speed on it.

We mustn’t confuse the present US regime with those of the recent past, and especially with the ‘Neo-Con’ one behind George W Bush. The following article in next month’s The Atlantic magazine by David Frum, a leading conservative commentator and speechwriter for GW, should point the difference. It’s a devastating analysis of the Trump phenomenon and the dangers it presents to American democracy, and all the more enlightening in view of its provenance. Highly recommended.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/

If Trump is toppled, it may be from this quarter, rather than by the Democrats.

Talk about ‘unintended consequences’! Who – apart from me (well, elliptically at any rate: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/08/31/two-cheers-for-the-eu/) – predicted that voting for Brexit would make Britain more reliant on the United States, and consequently less essentially ‘independent’, than if she had remained in the EU?

Now that unexpected chicken is coming home to roost. The effect of Brexit has been to prise push us back into the American no-liberal (or liberalish) sphere, in our desperation for a trade deal to replace the European common market; and away from the only organisation that might have saved us from it – though I have to admit that the EU hasn’t done a very good job of that so far. But it could. (And it did resist TTIP.) In other words, Brexit won’t enable us to reassert ‘control’ over our own affairs at all, which could only be achieved in co-operation with others. And if one of Brexit’s longer-term effects is to boost other nationalist and separatist movements in the remaining EU countries, aided by Trump’s and Putin’s clear ambitions to see an end to the Union, it could spell the end of all collaborative resistance to untamed global capitalism; or to what that great economic thinker JA Hobson – the subject, as it happens, of my PhD thesis long ago – called ‘capitalist imperialism’: imperialism, that is, which is neither pursued nor controlled by governments, but by the far more powerful internal logic of the system itself. That’s the stage of history we’re entering upon now.

It’s for this reason that I hugely regret that we in Britain can’t have a second bite at the Brexit cherry; that and the fact that the decision to hold the original referendum, the form it took, and the conditions in which people voted in it, were so inadequate, and so the result so essentially fortuitous, as to make it – ‘the will of the people’ – the flimsiest of pillars on which to re-build our country and even the world. A nation shouldn’t have to make great life-affecting decisions in this trivial and accidental way. I hope, then, that a good number of Labour MPs do defy their party whip, and vote against Article 50. The Daily Mail will give them hell, and of course they’ll lose. But the fact that they stuck with their principles could redound to their benefit later, when the wider repercussions of Brexit reveal themselves.

There is, I think, a historical precedent for this. It is roughly what happened to those Labour MPs who resisted the siren call of (national) imperialism before the First World War. The jingos traduced them too. (See my Critics of Empire, 1969.) But it paid dividends after the War, which turned many people against the imperialism that they believed to have been the cause of it, and so rehabilitated those who had seemed to be flouting the popular will before; to the extent that just a few years later one of them even became the first Labour Prime Minister. It may be wise today for Labour to establish itself firmly on the ‘Remain’ side (with the Libs), and then wait a while for the unintended consequences of Brexit to row back. Who can say what will happen then? Except that it will almost certainly be unintended, again.

Crude, I realise; but worth a thousand words. (I’m not sure of the source; I got it through Facebook.)

There’s little more I can add to the flood of commentary that is pouring out these days in criticism of America’s new President. His character flaws are obvious; my only contribution to this discussion is to suggest that they might be intrinsic to late-stage capitalism – the amorality, especially. Or perhaps to Ayn Rand: though I’ve never been able to get beyond the first couple of chapters of Atlas Shrugged, so I can’t be sure. His ignorance – arising from those character flaws: ‘I don’t need to read because I’m smart’ (narcissism) – is equally obvious. The dangers that these two characteristics pose not only to Americans but also to all the rest of us is being shouted around the world just now, especially after yesterday’s executive order banning people coming into America from certain Moslem countries – the seven Moslem countries, incidentally, from which the USA has never been attacked, and leaving out those, like Saudi Arabia, from which she has. It’s suggested that this is because Trump has financial interests in, or obligations towards, the latter. I wouldn’t know.

What is interesting is that this executive order seems to have united almost the whole world against Trump. As well as its inconsistency, and what many critics are calling its cruelty, people agree that the ‘Moslem travel ban’ is bound to be counterproductive. Islamicists will feel that their claim that America is fighting a ‘holy war’ against their religion has now been given added plausibility, so helping them to inspire and recruit even more jihadists. Nearly everyone is saying this. The whole world – apart from our Nigel and Govey – is against him. I can’t recall an American President in history who has been so universally ridiculed, scorned and feared as Trump now is. And, as we’ve seen from the huge demonstrations that have mustered against him in America over the last few days, the majority of his own compatriots – remember he only won a minority of the popular vote – share these feelings with us.

We’ve all been taken by surprise. Speaking for myself, my surprise was that an American President has such huge executive powers at his personal command, before they can be ‘checked and balanced’ by Congress or the courts. (That’s despite my having studied more American than British history at my university, and having lived and worked in the country for longish periods.) It’s difficult for most of us to credit that such a clown can last much longer in the White House; but then it was difficult for us to see him being elected in the first place. The question now is: how might he be curbed, or deposed, before his allotted (initial) four years is up?

There remain, of course, those famous ‘checks and balances’. Regarding the travel ban, there are already legal challenges to that, but they will probably take months or even years to work their way through the courts, and the final Federal Supreme Court can’t be relied upon if Trump succeeds in packing it with his own nominees. The problem with Congress – the other major ‘check’ to the Executive in the American constitution – is that both houses there are dominated by Republicans. Trump isn’t exactly beloved by his own party, so it may be that some of his measures can be shot down by a combination of Democrats and dissident GOP’ers. Let’s hope for that.

The only alternatives would seem to be impeachment, on the basis, perhaps, of his business chicanery or his alleged plotting with the Russkies, or his lies, or a sex scandal (the ‘golden rain’? I don’t believe that, do you?): there’s surely plenty of scope there; or the prediction I made at the end of last year (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/12/31/2017-prediction/), that he’ll be assassinated by his own secret service. Another possibility is that all this international opprobrium might ultimately get through to him, undermining his enormous self-regard, unless he can attribute that to a ‘lying press’. Theresa May might help here, by publicly jilting him, after their brief love affair. That might make him wince. But no – I forgot. She’s in thrall tradewise to the USA, due to Brexit – part of Britain’s ‘regaining control’ (!). – Or, finally, the wheels might simply fall off the coach, stranding Trump in the middle of a great depression or even a little war, say with Mexico (pray God not a big one), and causing most of his support to leak away.

The trouble with any of these scenarios, however, is that we’d then be left with President Pence: less clownish, perhaps, but no less reactionary by all accounts. Whichever way you look at it, things look pretty bleak. As the old Chinese curse has it: ‘May you live in interesting times’.

PS. A good debate in Parliament this afternoon resulted in a motion lambasting the ‘Moslem ban’ being passed unanimously. Strong anti-Trump speeches from all sides. It was proposed by my friend Ed (see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/12/13/bearing-up-in-hard-times/), and seconded by a Conservative businessman of Yemeni origin. Much criticism of May and Johnson for sucking up to Trump. Big pro-refugee demos in cities all over Britain this evening. Encouraging.